Saturday, March 05, 2011

Choosing to be dependent on foreign oil producers

Why? Why do we choose to be dependent on foreign oil producers? AWR Hawkins points out that if we "turned on the spigot in Montana, North Dakota and Alaska" alone, we would go a long way towards independence, and would provide thousands of jobs. Read the whole thing.

3 comments:

Jeffro said...

Not trying to be pedantic, but your link goes right to page two of the article.

"Turn on the spigot."

Sure sounds good, doesn't it? This statement supposes a pre-existing spigot in the first place for the crude, and the refineries and transport systems to handle the extra load. None of which exist.

My company is making steel crude tanks as quickly as possible to ship to the Bakken field, but there are only so many we are capable of producing and delivering. That area isn't the only oil boom territory, and we aren't the only tank manufacturer by any means. There are also only so many drilling rigs up there drilling - and they are all busy, I can tell you.

Just try to get a motel room west of Bismarck and north of I94. The oil boom has the whole area jumping. I see pipelines being installed all over the country - not just in that area, too. A few refineries are being built in spite of all the red tape and regulations that have hindered them and continue to do so.

It's called infrastructure, and we ain't got what we need just yet.

Bob's Blog said...

Jeffro,
The link is fixed. Sorry I got in a hurry. It is great to get the perspective of someone who actually knows what is going on. Thanks for your comments!

Terri Wagner said...

And the worst part is Jeffro Bush tried to address this very early on and had he been listened too, we'd have all that infrastructure in place. However, as the jedi creed says, here we are, let's decide how best to move forward or something like that.