So much for drill, drill, drill:
NY Times story that reviews the oil and gas drilling situation in the USA West, and finds that oil is very much secondary to drilling for natural gas. The reason is simple; that’s what is more plentiful. And the oil production in the USA is dropping because things are getting pumped out.
Dusty Horwitt, a senior analyst for public lands at the Environmental Working Group, said that opening more lands to drilling would not bring down the price of natural gas. “We’ve turned our Western lands into a pincushion and gasoline is $4 a gallon and the price of natural gas has gone through the roof,” he said. “What these data show is that conservation and renewable energy are likely to be the solution to our energy woes.”
Mr. Horwitt added, “On the oil side, the data show that there’s just not that much oil out there in the West.”
Also, Pete Stark, of the energy analysis firm IHS, said: “It takes an increasing number of wells to be drilled each year to replace lost production. The industry is running very hard just to stay in place.”
But for all this activity, the Wilderness Society says, in a state like Colorado, where 4.9 million acres are leased out, just 1.4 million acres are under production. And of 7,124 drilling permits approved on public lands in fiscal year 2007, only 5,343 wells were drilled. Whether the cause of the lag time between leasing federal lands and producing oil and natural gas is due to environmental restrictions or strategy by energy companies, the delays mean that “opening protected areas of the coasts or public lands to new leasing is not going to lower the price of gasoline,” said David Alberswerth, a senior policy adviser at the Wilderness Society.