The announcement this week that a huge new oil field had been discovered beneath the Gulf of Mexico sure seems like good news. The experts say this find may rank as the largest crude discovery since Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay and could boost United States oil reserves by 50 percent.
But it will be anything but positive if it turns into one more excuse for Americans to continue a way of life that creates environmentally damaging greenhouse gases and funnels enormous wealth to some of our worst enemies in the world.
Even if the discovery were to materialize on the high end of estimates and yield 15 billion barrels, that would be diluted by steadily increasing demand in the United States, China and India. The U.S. alone consumes about 5.7 billion gallons of crude a year and has about 29 billion gallons in reserve. In contrast, Saudi Arabia’s proven reserves exceed 250 billion barrels.
Not to be grudging about it, but let’s keep in mind that it’s not even clear at this point how viable the new oil field will be. Three companies – Chevron, Devon Energy and Statoil ASA – announced Tuesday that they had successfully drilled 30,000 feet beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. The field is 175 miles offshore and is among rock formations that are hundreds of feet thick.
“This is frontier stuff,” Daniel Yergin, president of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, told The New York Times.
If it pans out, it will take up to five years for the oil to hit world markets. In the meantime, the find could lend momentum to efforts to open a vast swath of the Gulf of Mexico to further oil exploration. Drilling in the area, heretofore off-limits, concerns environmentalists because of its proximity to the coast. The U.S. Senate passed a bill in August allowing drilling in 8.3 million acres. The House version would open a broader area, closer to shore. The bills will have to be reconciled before becoming law, and negotiations are expected to begin this month. Lawmakers must carefully contemplate the environmental impacts from such efforts and not be driven forward by an oil industry press release.
Most important, while newly discovered oil reserves are very welcome, the United States needs to accelerate its efforts to reduce oil consumption. New domestic production cannot deter us from pursuing policies requiring higher automobile fuel economy and encouraging renewable energy and biofuels. If it does, today’s good news becomes tomorrow’s troubling legacy.
