Drill Baby Drill

What Ben said. I’m not sure what I think though - part of a sane energy plan, or annoyingly necessary bribe to shut up independents?

I am against energy independence, because that’s like half the State of the Union drinking game.

First the 10 billion barrel median estimate for ANWR is actually 1.5 years of current oil usage or 3 years imported fuel.
10 billion barrels of oil = 58 Quadtrillion BTUs of energy.

If you call 58 QuadBTU a dent. I am curious what dismissive adjective would use to describe, solar, wind, geothermal, biofuels?

I’ll help you out the DOE has a listing of source energy consumed in the US, here.

Lets take a look at how much energy was produced by them in 2008.
Units is QuadBTUs
Biofuel 1.413
Geothermal 0.358
Wind 0.514
Solar 0.091

So ANWR = 40 years of biofuel (i.e. ethanol), 160 years of geothermal, 112 years of wind, and more than 600 years of solar energy. In fact ANWR will give us an order of magnitude more energy than produced by every single PV panel, solar collector etc, put up anywhere in the world in the last 100 years.

I am all for investing in alternative energy (in fact I’ve even invested my own money in cleantech start ups) but we have to face reality none of these will be close to fossil fuel production for twenty years and probably longer.

In the meantime we need to get as much oil as possible from domestic/friendly source to prevent us from being dependent on foreign country, many of whom are run by pretty crappy governments who don’t
like us.

As an environmentalist tree-hugger hippy, I am really against all oil usage and drilling. But between destroying ANWR and having a few oil rigs, the latter is most definitely the lesser of two evils.

Corpses?

Must of the oil the US imports is from Canada…

I am fully aware of this, and I am sure you are aware that oil is basically a commodity and quite fungible.

The top 15 exporters includes only two governments that Canada, Norway (perhaps Iraq will get there eventually) that I think qualify as both good government and friendly to the US. Would you like make a case for Russia, Sauda Arabia, Nigeria etc?

There are only 10 billion barrels of accessible oil if we are willing to take native land and, I dunno, throw the natives into the ocean or something. Short of that, the USGS places the median estimate at 7.7 billion barrels. Bear in mind that that is a median figure, though. The estimate encompasses a range that spans from 4.3 billion barrels (95% chance) to 11.8 billion barrels (5% chance). So there is a good chance that there is that there is actually less than 7.7 billion barrels.

Again, I’m not necessarily saying that we shouldn’t exploit that resource. But we should be realistic about how much oil is there, and it’s not really that much.

It’s not much of a correlation with 5 blue states and 7 red states seeing drilling off their coasts.

Again, I’m not necessarily saying that we shouldn’t exploit that resource. But we should be realistic about how much oil is there, and it’s not really that much.

You know we’re using too much of something when someone says, “You know, there’s only 8 billion barrels there. That’s not very much”.

You know, oil is useful for more than just setting on fire to make something hot. I want to suck any oil we can find out of anywhere we can find it because I like the following things:

  1. The occasional piece of chewing gum

  2. My foam rubber stress ball

  3. Gladware

  4. The vacuum hose on my car

  5. Cellophane

  6. Cleaning supplies

  7. Elastomers in general, because they are just that cool

  8. Nylon straps

  9. Polyester leisure suits

  10. Superballs

Screw energy. I’d be in favor of taking every resource we have at our disposal out of everywhere that it is in a fashion that doesn’t completely demolish the landscape for shit like that.

It’s all relative. Saudi Arabia produces more than that in a year, every year. My personal feeling is that our money and resources would be better spent on other endeavors. Oil is yesterday’s fuel source–we need to focus on tomorrow’s.

All the more reason to avoid burning it.

Believe it or not, I agree in principle. I think that one of the greatest advantages to energy that isn’t made from carbon is ensuring the future of miniature Eric Cartman figures and bubble wrap. You can’t make any of that crap out of oceanic thermal difference or the sun.

Gum does not have to be made from petroleum. Traditionally, gum was made from a natural latex called chicle, which comes from trees. US manufacturers didn’t replace natural chicle with polyisobutylene because it makes better gum, but rather because it makes cheaper gum. Many manufacturers around the world still use chicle. Pretty much all of the gum made in Japan, for instance, if made from chicle.

  1. My foam rubber stress ball

Again, rubber can be made from things other than petroleum. In fact, real rubber (as opposed to petroleum-based synthetic rubber) comes from trees. Synthetic rubbers can be made from materials other than petroleum (see below)

  1. Gladware

…is made of low-density polyethylene. Guess what else can be used to make polyethylene? The version derived from ethanol is chemically and physically identical to polyethylene derived from petroleum.

  1. The vacuum hose on my car

Can easily be replaced with silicone rubber, which is actually a better material for that application, anyway (more durable, immune to ozone cracking, more resistant to temperature extremes).

  1. Cellophane

…is made from cellulose. Thus, the name.

  1. Cleaning supplies

Lots of cleaning supplies are based on non-petroleum derived chemicals.

  1. Elastomers in general, because they are just that cool

Elastomers can be derived from sources other than petroleum. Two (natural rubber and silicone rubber) have already been mentioned.

  1. Nylon straps

Straps can’t be made out of anything other than nylon?

  1. Polyester leisure suits

Now you’re just messing with me.

  1. Superballs

Are made from polybutadiene, which has properties that are almost identical to those of natural rubber. There is no reason why superballs couldn’t be made from natural rubber.

Congratulations on finding much more expensive, complicated, energy-intensive, and generally difficult ways to do some - not all - of those things. In particular, I wouldn’t want to try and make foam rubber out of natural rubber. As for cellophane, I apologize - I meant polyethylene film. I also like plastic bottles. And Legos. And any number of other material products, but let’s not turn this into a Tom T. Hall song.

You do not want to go this direction, dude. It is not a foolish proposition to exploit the resources you have access to in a responsible manner, and turning petroleum into durable goods without going out of your way to bulldoze the caribou habitat or the gumbo limbo strands or whatever it is you think must necessarily always be one hundred percent totally destroyed all the time whenever you take it out of the ground seems like a pretty responsible proposition to me. I’m pretty sure we can totally have both things.

It’s too soon to say for sure, but the early GOP responses I’ve seen have boiled down to “This doesn’t go far enough - MOAR DRILLING BABY!!1!” or “Will Obama really fight the pro-environmental left to make this happen or is he just blowing smoke?” The latter is actually a fair question: the environmental groups are already up in arms about this; no Republican is going to risk the political fallout from the right for siding with Obama unless they’re 100% convinced he’s sincere about this.

Plus there’s the fact Cheney’s a total dickbag who put our energy policy together in SECRET MEETINGS WITH BIG OIL!!1!

But it is short-sighted not to look for replacements based on renewable resources to all those petroleum-based products you mentioned. I’m fine with upping domestic oil production, but eventually the oil tank will run dry, even if we somehow ween ourselves from burning fossil fuels entirely.

People don’t mind fucking up oceanic and coastal ecosystems as much as they do land based ecosystems.

Some light reading:

http://cseserv.engr.scu.edu/StudentWebPages/MDonatoni/ResearchPaper.htm

Not most, by my count. On a similar note though, congratulations on composing a list that is at least half made up of trivial and nonessential items. What will we do without our stress balls and chewing gum? Truly, it would be the downfall of Western society.

In particular, I wouldn’t want to try and make foam rubber out of natural rubber. As for cellophane, I apologize - I meant polyethylene film.

…which can be made from sugarcane. And while I’d agree that the energy savings doesn’t add up when it comes to using ethanol for biofuels, the same is not necessarily true of plastics. Ethanol-derived polyethylene, in fact, is manufactured using the exact same equipment used to make regular polyethylene, so the energy equation involved in its manufacture changes very little, if at all. There is a significant carbon benefit, though. The estimates that I’ve seen is that polyethylene production using ethanol has about 15% of the carbon footprint of polyethylene production using petroleum (thanks to a significant amount of carbon being sequestered in the plastic), and that’s including the carbon cost of growing and transporting the sugarcane.

I also like plastic bottles.

…Made from, once again, polyethylene.

And Legos.

Fun trivia fact: Legos were originally made from cellulose acetate. Today they are made out of ABS–which is, to be fair, a stronger and more durable material. But the suggestion that there would be no Legos without petroleum-based plastics is incorrect.

You do not want to go this direction, dude.

Oh, crap. Is it on? It’s on, isn’t it?

It is not a foolish proposition to exploit the resources you have access to in a responsible manner, and turning petroleum into durable goods without going out of your way to bulldoze the caribou habitat or the gumbo limbo strands or whatever it is you think must necessarily always be one hundred percent totally destroyed all the time whenever you take it out of the ground seems like a pretty responsible proposition to me.

You make a lot of incorrect assumptions about my position, which is odd considering that I have stated several times in this thread that…

So whatever imaginary hippie stereotype you have draped over your mental image of me, I can assure you that it’s not accurate. And I’m not opposed to the rational use of resources that we truly need. That said, I’m not convinced that petroleum-based plastics are as irreplaceable as you seem to think. Some likely are, for certain specific applications. But I’d wager that the vast majority could be easily replaced by alternative materials.

Your insistence that they are easily replaceable is, unfortunately, empirically denied by the universe. If they were so easily replaceable, THEY ALREADY WOULD HAVE BEEN. From where I sit, it seems to me that you’re dramatically oversimplifying the situation. Trying to make any or all of these things out of biological agents, while possible in some cases, is clearly not economically advantageous. Hell - where, precisely, do you think you’re going to get all of the sugar cane and corn to replace our current utilization of petrochemicals? You’re using “need” here as a weasel word - attempting to imply that we don’t need the things that we already buy and use. I agree; we don’t need these things. We don’t need tires made out of butyl rubber or medical equipment made out of properly treated polypropylene and polyethylene. We can get by without them, at much greater expense. I currently work in the industry - I’m curious what your qualifications are for evaluating these proposed alternatives that you’re so eager to adopt and from whence you have derived your expertise. Certainly, if you’ve got a better biological alternative to our current petrochemical industry, I’d be eager to get in on the ground floor all Graduate style.