Energy, Society, and Climate Change :: Preservation Wildlife Essays

Energy, Society, and Climate Change The topic of my presentation was the proposal to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. This controversial proposal has come into the forefront of U.S. energy policy in the past year with the Bush administration advocating its approval to open the previously undisturbed habitat of the Refuge to oil exploration. In my presentation, I gave a basic overview of U.S. oil usage, a brief history of drilling on the North Slope, the formation of ANWR, the potential pros and cons of drilling in the Refuge, and concluded by citing other means of oil management that would by far offset any temporary gains by ANWR drilling. I began my presentation by giving some statistics on the annual consumption rate of oil in the United States. In 2001, the United States consumed over 19 billion barrels of oil per day, which comes out to 7 billion barrels of oil annually. (http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/ipsr/t24.txt) This 7 billion barrel annual consumption rate makes up over 25% of the yearly world consumption rate of 24 billion barrels. The United States produces domestically about half of the oil it consumes, with the other half being imported, with half of the imports coming from OPEC countries. Stated simply, 25% of the oil the United States consumes annually is imported from OPEC countries, the other 25% of oil imported comes from non-OPEC countries such as Canada, with the United States using its own reserves for the remaining 50% of consumption. For an example of the cost of having such a reliance on imported oil, in midsummer 2001, with oil prices at $24 per barrel, the U.S. was spending $210 million per day on imported oil, which would add to nearly $80 billion per year if the price per barrel consistently stayed at $24. This reliance on foreign oil constitutes over 1/3 the annual U.S. trade deficit. (Energy and Society, Schobert, Pgs 505-506) Besides having relatively few oil fields compared to other nations, other problems hinder the ability of the U.S. to not rely on imported oil. The U.S. has exploited its oil reserves longer than any other nation, resulting in the cost of producing a barrel of oil in the existing U.S. reserves being more than anywhere else. This exploitation of U.S. reserves will cause domestic oil production to fall dramatically over the next decade as existing fields are exhausted and relatively few new reserves are discovered.