CO-04 (Special Election)
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(R) Greg Lopez
(R) Trisha Calvarese
90%
10%
President (To Win Colorado)
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(D) Joe Biden*
(R) Donald Trump
80%
20%↓
CO-01 (Denver)
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(D) Diana DeGette*
90%
CO-02 (Boulder-ish)
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(D) Joe Neguse*
90%
CO-03 (West & Southern CO)
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(D) Adam Frisch
(R) Jeff Hurd
(R) Ron Hanks
40%
30%
20%
CO-04 (Northeast-ish Colorado)
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(R) Lauren Boebert
(R) Deborah Flora
(R) J. Sonnenberg
30%↑
15%↑
10%↓
CO-05 (Colorado Springs)
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(R) Dave Williams
(R) Jeff Crank
50%↓
50%↑
CO-06 (Aurora)
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(D) Jason Crow*
90%
CO-07 (Jefferson County)
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(D) Brittany Pettersen
85%↑
CO-08 (Northern Colo.)
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(D) Yadira Caraveo
(R) Gabe Evans
(R) Janak Joshi
60%↑
35%↓
30%↑
State Senate Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
80%
20%
State House Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
95%
5%
June 27, 2008 08:11 PM UTC
25 Comments
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Kudos to all 4 (yes, including Udall).
It will be the best thing Busth has evry done if he gets to veto this.
Glad you looove Big Oil so much!
congressional Dems are taking this step could guarantee that the pubic will know the truth behind the oil industry’s alleged dire need of new leases and alleged desire to produce more and therefore make us more energy independent and lower prices. As if.
I say could because it won’t do a thing if the mainstream media ignores the story. We need to contact networks, newspapers, etc to urge them to cover this and follow it extensively.
I see I left out a really important “L”
Even if this bill got out of the House it would never have made it through the Senate or past the President. But what if a Democrat becomes president?
Big Oil’s last hope to grab that 69,000,000th acre might depend on a Schaffer Senate.
(And I know Bob is from out of town, and can’t tell McKinley from Pike, so for his benefit I will point out that the entire State of Colorado is just over 66 mil. acres.)
So if you want to protect corporate welfare, vote for Big Oil Bob! He is the crude choice.
Double US production? Cut imports by one-third? That will never happen. Never. Ever. US production is in permanent decline. It peaked about 1970. Prudhoe Bay couldn’t reverse the decline. ANWR would not. The Bakken play will not. Ultra-deep-water Gulf of Mexico will not.
The U.S. produces about 40% of it’s oil. If it doubled it would jump to 80%. So that would reduce the 60% imported to 20%. In that case we would cut oil imports by 2/3s.
And as you said, doubling U.S. oil production is definitely a fantasy. But I wanted to point out than even in their fantasy land, they’re numbers are wrong.
… but not someone who makes drilling decisions, I can make a few comments.
It is not true that oil/gas companies lease only tracts where they believe oil and gas can be produced immediately. They will typically lease large areas that they believe to be prospective, then start evaluating those areas in detail. They will often find that some of the leased areas have potential, while others don’t. But, prospects can take years from initial identification before they are ready to drill, especially in deep water and other areas where drilling is expensive. Also, as their capital is limited (yes, really!), they prioritize some areas over others.
For example, I believe BP’s ThunderHorse project in the Gulf of Mexico took about 10 years and $2 billion from initial discovery before a single drop of oil was produced.
So, I don’t think oil companies are sitting on leases that would be prolific producers. Rather, they need an inventory of leased areas from which to choose where they are going to drill next. Drilling rig utilization rates are very high, so the companies can’t just drill every well they would like to drill.
I’m not just a cheerleader for the industry I work in. But, I think this type of legislation doesn’t address real issues. Companies simply can’t just wait until they have a rig ready and then lease the land. For multi-year capital expenditures, they need the land (or offshore blocks) in hand before they can even start the process.
There are by all accounts 10,000 outstanding well permits undrilled. If in the period from 1999 through 2007 we drilled 18,000 wells, then at the same rate it will take approximately 4 years before the current drilling permits are exhausted.
Now, that doesn’t take into account the various companies and their individual inventories, but the legislation doesn’t ban new leases – it only bans new leases for companies whose current leases aren’t explored and used. There are many many acres of proven reserves among these current leases, and many thousands of wells to be permitted and drilled on those acres.
I think this legislation is reasonable considering the limited number of rigs and high outstanding lease acreage.
where the oil and gas companies do control vast acreages in productive areas that they have yet to put into production. Take the Piceance, for instance, 90% or so of the BLM lands are leased in the area, most of the private land is owned or controlled by the industry, and drilling has just begun (relatively speaking). Williams–for instance–has acknowledged that it has a decades worth of drilling sites already.
Sounds like Williams has a development plan for their acreage. If we use the pipeline metaphor here (appropriate I think), a large company will want to have projects at all stages in the pipeline. They’ll have some wildcat prospects, some fields in development, some mature and declining fields, and some that are played out and ready to be shut in. So the fact that a company may be buying up new leases while still developing others is not necessarily an indication of poor stewardship. It probably means they have set things up to try to level out production over time so that the fields pay for themselves. To me, that doesn’t mean that they should be able to buy up more leases; as a company, they have to keep that pipeline primed.
In fact, in some areas, going in to drill up every potential well site and produce as fast as you can would be extremely poor stewardship. Producing a reservoir too quickly or too intensively can seriously damage the long-term recovery of hydrocarbons. In other words, you can turn a 100 million barrel field into a 50 million barrel field if you don’t manage it well.
I was leaning the other direction but you’ve offered some good points. Always good to get some comments from someone who actually knows the issues.
You’re bringing facts and logic to a forum designed to whip up a good auto de fe at the expense of “Big Oil.”
You actually think development plans and the economic facts of life can trump conspiracy theories–and in an election year at that?
Have you no shame, Sir?
would not halt leasing, Bob, only ensure that companies are developing leases and reserves that they already have or making a diligent effort to do so before acquiring more public resources. Once they begin developing those leases they are able to lease additional lands, plan for their economic futures, etc.
I think you’re a bit full of yourself here.
Talk about an election year gimmick–what about:the GOP’s “Gas Price Reduction Act of 2008” which would open the Arctic Refuge (bringing some new reserves onto the GLOBAL market in 8-10 years), and speed up oil shale (again, a decade down the road–if ever).
How is that reducing prices in 2008? Great name though, that alone should garner a few votes, all facts aside.
As I noted in a post above, regarding onshore (and from what I have gathered via research, many of the off-shore leases as well) many of the existing leases are in fact in proven reserves. That is most certainly the case for Colorado, where some 70% of federal leases have yet to be put into production. I understand that companies (setting aside if its best for the public–for whom the publicly-owned minerals and lands are to be manged in trust) need some certainly and need reserves in their portfolio for a variety of reasons, including attracting investors, but for oil companies and their GOP allies to insist that not allowing them to lease and lease and lease some more, determined primarily by what they want on their terms, will drive prices up, and that letting them have their way will bring them down is neither accurate nor fair.
Remember, there is no problem that can’t be explained by a conspiracy theory or solved by finding scapegoats.
When does it stop being a theory, that’s the point I am confused on.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/25/washington/25epa.html?ref=science
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/20/opinion/20krugman.html?em&ex=1214107200&en=d3e1ddf46c503944&ei=5087
etc. etc. etc.
I think its the NY Times, but I’m sure your paper is up to par.
If they required that X% of the leases was at each stage of the process? I think that would speak to your points and at the same time make sure they’re not just building up a 100 year backlog.
So the bill will clear the house and die on the senate doorstep. It’s totally irrelevant. Besides, Rahall is no friend of the environment, he strongly has supported mountain removal coal mining which has destroyed his West Virginia district.
He did for some press in an election year, knowing it can never pass.
We don’t make progress by only attempting what we’re sure will succeed. We don’t make it even if we include those things that will probably succeed. We make progress by trying those things that fail and trying again and again. Edison had hundreds of attempts before he came up with a working light bulb.
In the 1970s we developed domestic resources as the price climbed. OPEC turned up it’s spigot a little and the price fell below our production
costs. Small Oil, it’s hub, Denver, began floundering as cheap oil entered the US. The final blow was Windfall Profits. Oil company offices emptied and filled in a few years with lawyers and collection agencies. Foreclosures were marketed by catalog. To prevent a repeat of this, we need, not another punishing tax on the risk-takers, but a tariff on imports formulated to keep OPEC oil above domestic production costs.