My love affair with Nancy Pelosi continues unabated. She never, ever let’s me down.
Is she calling 241 years of economic theory “a hoax”? She is saying that “it takes a long time” and that energy companies “don’t have the equipment to do it”? Either way, she’s wrong as could be. The economic theory, of course, is the law of supply and demand,
The phrase “supply and demand” was first used by James Denham-Steuart in his Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy, published in 1767. Adam Smith used the phrase in his 1776 book The Wealth of Nations
And the notion that we don’t have the technology available is brutally uninformed. America is home to the greatest drilling technology in the world. One example, Nancy, is Transocean,
HOUSTON, May 21, 2008 (PRIME NEWSWIRE) — Transocean Inc. (NYSE:RIG) today announced that the Transocean jackup GSF Rig 127 set a world record for the longest extended-reach well ever drilled at 40,320 feet (12,289 meters) MD (measured depth) with a 35,770-foot (10,902-meter) horizontal section…
…The new record of 7.6 miles is also the first well in the history of offshore drilling that exceeds 40,000 feet (12,191 meters). The well surpasses by approximately 2,000 feet the prior extended-reach record of 38,322 feet (11,680 meters) MD set by another drilling contractor with a land rig drilling at Sakhalin Island earlier this year.
Of course, this well was not drilled along our coast, because it’s “protected“.
The well was drilled offshore Qatar in 36 days and incident-free.
The average American consumes 25 barrels of oil per year. The average Chinese is 2 barrels and the average Indian is less than 1 barrel. We have a supply challenge to meet this rising demand for decades to come. So what if we won’t see any oil years? We’ll need it when we can get it.
And on the subject of how long it will take, the Democrats have been throwing around “ten years”. Energy expert Eric Bolling, knew that was wrong, so he checked for himself,
A Congressman followed my segment and suggested that drilling wouldn’t help for 10 years or more. I know this is absolutely untrue, so I called Transocean, the biggest driller in the world. An officer of the company told me that depending on the location of the drilling, oil could be realized in as little as a year.
Ultra-deepwater fields might produce in 3-5 years. For the most remote locations, without any prior infrastructure support, that barrel may require a 4-6 year window. I suggested 8 years and he said that he could not envision a situation where it would require more than 6 years to bring a barrel out of the ocean floor.
Nancy Pelosi is ignoring the law of supply and demand, and she is ignorant of what today’s leading deepwater drillers, American drillers, are capable of. Meanwhile, places like Qatar and Brazil are exploiting their natural resources while America is stuck with no new supplies, increasing reliance on imported oil and higher gas prices for as far as the eye can see. More than 40 congressional hearings later and the only thing we have learned is that Congress is the biggest impediment to energy independence.
Disclosure: I own a few shares of Transocean in an IRA.