Billions of Barrels Could Mean Trillions of Government Dollars; Media AWOL
Billions of Barrels Could Mean Trillions of Government Dollars; Media AWOL
By Tom Blumer | bio
October 5, 2008 - 09:49 ET
Supporters of lifting the bans surely share much of the blame for only rarely citing it. Though they have frequently noted the hundreds of billions of dollars a years annually sent overseas to pay for oil that could have been extracted here, they have mostly missed a golden opportunity to tell the American people what over a quarter-century of drilling bans has cost the government and taxpayers. They also generally failed to tell us about the windfall that awaits if the end of the offshore and other bans finally leads to appropriately aggressive use of this country's God-given resources.
But if we had inquisitive financial reporters in the business press who were interested in information relevant to the "Drill Baby Drill" debate instead of merely repackaging the press releases they received from those on both sides (the sole exception I found was this Wall Street Journal editorial), many more Americans would have long ago learned about what follows.
Congressman John Peterson (R-PA) has assembled information about this. The numbers are stunning.
In a PDF available at the congressman’s home page (at “Charts and Other Useful Information”), he tells us that “the United States is the only industrialized nation in the world which prohibits offshore exploration and production of domestic energy.” In other words, everyone else is talking the talk, while we're the only ones walking the walk. Translation: We've been suckered by environmentalists and the "not in my back yard" crowd into doing something no one else in the rest of the world will do.
The government collects royalties on oil and natural gas when it is extracted. Peterson’s office obtained information from the Minerals Management Service and the Energy Information Agency showing that the average offshore royalty rate, which is based on market prices of the resources when extracted, is 15.17%.
Earlier this summer, the Congressman's office prepared this summary (available in HTML format here) of how much royalty money is just sitting there offshore:
Categories: Drill Now!, Journalism is Dead, Economics, Bailout, Energy, Liberal Bias in the MSM
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