http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnal...?id=568526&p=1
He could lift that ban today, sending a powerful supply-and-demand signal to the market. He could unlock areas in the West where oil shale reserves are estimated to be triple the crude Saudi Arabia has underground.
He could support the Keystone pipeline project to deliver oil from Canada's tar sands to the U.S. market. That project would build a 1,661-mile pipeline from Alberta to refineries near Houston, create 13,000 "shovel-ready" jobs and provide 500,000 more barrels of oil per day. But the president who wants to reduce oil imports by a third wants to increase them from Brazil.
Instead, the president says oil companies aren't using the leases they have. But an oil lease is only a license to explore, not a guarantee of finding oil. If there were oil in these areas that could be profitably extracted, oil companies would do so.
They're not the ones who are driving up prices by restricting supply. It's an Obama administration that includes a secretary of energy, Steven Chu, who has said "we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe." He was talking about $8 a gallon or higher.
It's been a year since Deepwater Horizon. That should have been plenty of time to re-address safety concerns for deepwater drilling (though I myself am very reticent about such drilling after that event and can understand the hesitation). Is Brazi going to give us discount rates since our community organizer invested our monies there? I don't have that much faith.


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