standards here: http://blog.john-hayes.com/?postid=90
Thought you guys might be interested. I strongly recommend reading the
blog version since it has lots of embedded links but the plain text is
below.
jh
President Bush clearly believes that drilling in the Arctic National
Wildlife Reserve is a good way to foster independence from foreign oil.
According to FOX NEWS, the President recently said "We could recover
more than 10 billion barrels of oil from a small corner of ANWR ... We
can now reach all of ANWR's oil by drilling on just 2,000 acres.
Developing a small section of ANWR would not only create new jobs but
would reduce our dependence on foreign oil by up to a million barrels a
day."
And you know what? He's absolutely right. A million barrels a day is
certainly a lot of oil. But frankly, there has been so much spin on this
issue between the Heritage Foundation and ANWR.com on one side and the
Sierra Club and NRDC on the other, it's hard to know who to believe. So
I did what any good scientist does: I went looking for data on ANWR.
In doing so, I discovered a few interesting things. First, from
approval, it will be 7 to 12 years before the first oil is produced. And
it then takes another 3 to 4 years for a field to hit peak production.
This means that ANWR oil won't make make any difference for a long time.
Second, I learned that at peak production in 2025, ANWR would reduce
foreign oil consumption between 3 and 6 percent. In the mean resource
case, dependence on imported oil would be reduced "from 70 percent ...
to 66 percent in the mean resource case. The high and low oil resource
cases project a 2025 oil import dependency of 64 percent and 67 percent,
respectively."
Four Percent. For comparision, we got 20.3% of our imported oil from the
Persian Gulf in 2003. Assuming 60% of our oil is imported, that means
the Persian Gulf supplied a little over 12% of our total consumption in
2003.
Now consider that we could displace Persian Gulf imports entirely by
increasing average fuel economy by 3.25 mpg. Of course, oil is fungible
commodity, so we'd still buy oil from the mideast - we'd just buy much
less. But from 1979 to 1985, a 3.25 mpg improvement was achieved every
32 months. From 1977-85, average fuel economy increased by 7.6 mpg. Even
if the fleet average creeps up more slowly due to slow vehicle turnover,
increasing CAFE standards would certainly make a very real different in
oil consumption. And it certainly won't take until 2025 to make a
difference.
But the car makers have already achieved all the easy gains in fuel
economy, right? Realistically, no. The auto industry has made plenty of
technological advances in the last 20 years - they've just chosen to put
those advances exclusively into horsepower rather than fuel efficiency.
In 1985, the Corvette jumped from 205 to 230 hp. But today, you can buy
a 240hp Minivan.
Do we really need 240hp to get the kids to soccer practice? Certainly,
the anemic underpowered cars Detroit made in the mid 80s are gladly
forgotten, but surely there has to be a happy compromise. If the
spacious 200hp Malibu Maxx can get 32 mpg on the highway, shouldn't
Chevy be able to make a 150hp version that breaks 40 mpg? And this
doesn't even consider ultraclean hybrids and turbodiesels running
domestically produced biodiesel.
In fact, the only reason fuel economy hasn't continued to improve is
because Congress hasn't directed the NHTSA to increase CAFE standards
signicantly since 1985 when the passenger and truck standards were set
at 27.5 and 20.2mpg respectively. Worse yet, the EPA says fuel economy
is at a 20 year low, presumably because SUVs and trucks are exempt from
the the gas guzzler tax. In 2003, Senators Bond and Levin introduced
legislation instructing the NHTSA to increase CAFE standards but did not
say by how much. Senator Durbin's amendment that would have raised the
truck average to 27.5 and the passenger car average to 40 mpg by 2015
was voted down 32-65. Note that this vote occurred after 9/11 "changed
everthing."
So the next time you hear someone talking about drilling in ANWR, ask
them to ask their senator why they voted again increasing CAFE standards
when it will reduce oil consumption 3 times as much and sooner to boot.
Thus, the case against ANWR has nothing to do with the enivronment
whatsoever. It's simply about the most practical way reduce dependance
on foreign oil. Besides, money spent on Alaskan oil is still spent on
oil, while money saved via fuel savings is money than can be invested or
spent elsewhere.
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