Right Voices

The price of crude has dropped over $20 a barrel in less than two weeks.  The stock market has improved and the dollar has strengthened at the same time:

Overseas stock markets were higher and Wall Street index futures pointed to a solid open as the cost of oil retreated further and traders turned a bit more hopeful about the economy.

Light sweet crude oil for September delivery was down $2.17 at US$126.25 per barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, after dropping more than $3 in the previous session as Hurricane Dolly looked likely to avoid oil installations in the Gulf of Mexico.

Crude now is down by more than $20 a barrel from its July 11 peak above $147 – a surge that had raised worries that inflation would cripple the economy.

According to this Bureau of Land Management release yesterday:

The Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management today published proposed regulations to establish a commercial oil shale program that could result in the addition of up to 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil from lands in the western United States. :

In remarks last month calling on Congress to expand domestic energy production, President Bush noted the “extraordinary potential” of oil shale resources on public lands in the West. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the U.S. holds more than half of the world’s oil shale resources.

The largest known deposits of oil shale are located in a 16,000-square mile area in the Green River formation in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. Shale formations in that area hold the equivalent of up to 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil. Federal lands comprise 72 percent of the total surface of oil shale acreage in the Green River formation.

TMV had this to say on oil spill risks:

They go on to list some fairly remarkable numbers. There were a total of 125 reported incidents of oil spillage from rigs, platforms and pipelines. “Those spills did not occur due to loss of control of the producing wells.” The MMS defines a “major spill” as one where 2,381 or more barrels of oil are lost. None of the incidents qualifed as a “major spill” and in fact, a grand total of only 16,302 barrels were lost from those 125 spills. On top of that, the oil that was lost didn’t come from equipment failures in the rigs. As per the report, “Oil losses were mostly limited to the oil stored on platforms that were damaged or oil contained in individual segments of pipelines that were damaged.”

According to a report on “Oil in the Sea” from the National Academy of Sciences (1995), far more oil enters the ocean from natural, underwater seeps than from offshore production platforms. In fact, the seeps introduce about 1700 barrels of oil a day into U.S. marine waters, which is about 150 times the amount from oil and gas activities.

We need the oil until we have clean energy that is reliable and mass-produceable.