Reed: Drilling to Economic Salvation? It Just Won't Work.

Imagine this scenario if you can. It's a Friday afternoon in Tallahassee, and six hundred miles away a town is bracing for a dangerous hurricane. You've decided to take off work early because, after all, it's Friday, and there's a football game tomorrow. You need to get home and get ready for the big weekend, but first you have to stop for gas. You reach one station, and the line at the pumps is reaching back into the road. You ease by that one, only to be greeted by a repeat of the same at the next station. Two miles up the road, a clerk is changing the price on the sign from $3.79 to $5.49 per gallon. The last station between work and home has strung yellow police tape around its pumps - no gas.

Actually, you don't have to imagine it. It's exactly what happened Friday, September 12, 2008. And it is a telling reminder that, in spite of what self-serving politicians and oil company executives may be preaching, America cannot drill her way to energy independence.

Hurricane Ike was a telling reminder that Tallahassee, and indeed our entire nation, is, as President Bush said in his 2006 State of the Union message, "addicted to oil." The President went on to say that the addiction could only be broken by pledging to invest in alternative fuel sources and reducing oil imports by 70% by the year 2025.

President Bush was right then. He is wrong today when he suggests, as does Senator John McCain and other politicos on both sides of the aisle, that we must boost production through more drilling for oil at home.

According to Randy Bly, spokesperson for AAA Auto Club South, Tallahassee could see gas prices at $6.00 a gallon and spotty availability later this month, if Ike-related damage to refineries in Houston were severe. "We're in for a bumpy ride, quite frankly, over the next couple of weeks," Bly told Nic Corbett of the Tallahassee Democrat (Sunday, September 14.)

And that, my friends, is the number one issue. Let's for a moment ignore the environmental impact that offshore drilling, and drilling in sensitive areas such as the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, might produce. Let's set aside the notion that our "addiction to oil" is fueling a climate crisis of unimaginable consequences. Let's even skip over the recent revelation that employees of the agency in charge of collecting the money for the oil leases owned by the United States government were engaged in a "sex, drugs and light sweet crude" debauchery with representatives of the very industry they are supposed to be regulating.

Let's instead concentrate on the means through which we turn the oil we purchase on the world market into the gasoline we so desperately demand - refining. According to news reports, one Houston refinery that shut down in anticipation of Ike refines almost one in every four gallons of gasoline sold in the United States. Think about it - in less than a week, our ability to produce gasoline was reduced by almost 25%.

Why? Because we are refining all the oil we can possibly refine right now. Currently America has 151 operating oil refineries, at least twenty-five in Texas alone, and each one has been operating at peak or near-peak capacity. Regardless of the fact that it would take many years to produce a single additional barrel of oil if restrictions on drilling were lifted today, increasing our domestic output simply means we would be sitting on that surplus oil for months - because we don't have the ability to refine it. Thus, gas prices, the raison d'etre for the "drill here, drill now, pay less" crowd, cannot and will not be affected by increasing crude supplies from domestic sources.

And the refining capability of our nation is not likely to change, in the short or long-term. An issue of "Alexander's Gas and Oil Connection", an industry publication, said in July of 2001 that the U.S. "appears to have built its last refinery" (volume 6, issue #13, July 17 2001). The article noted that no new refinery had been constructed in the U.S. since the mid-seventies, and "petroleum industry experts say anyone would be crazy to launch such an effort." Several reasons were given for this outlook:

• Refineries are not particularly profitable.
• Environmentalists fight the process from beginning to end.
• Government red tape makes the process all but impossible.

Let's just skip over the last two and concentrate on reason number one - "not particularly profitable." We must remember that all the oil produced today in the United States doesn't just appear in American refineries and wind up in American's tanks. Because the oil is "owned" by the oil companies, it goes on the world market and is snapped up by the highest bidder. Our refineries are not profitable because they are simply seen as a "cost of doing business" by the oil companies. This will not change until and unless America nationalizes its oil reserves.

And this will not happen. Capitalism, or consumerism as we practice in America, relies not on nations but on markets. And today's market does not reflect a short supply of available crude oil. OPEC's recent decision to reduce output by over 500,000 barrels a day (see www.sltrib.com/business) to maintain the price of oil at or above $100.00 per barrel indicates that countries such as Iran, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia can easily dictate the price of oil regardless of supply surpluses or deficits.

If America were to allow more lands such as ANWR to be open to more drilling, best case scenarios say we could be pumping oil in five to ten years, according to the Spero Forum, a pro-drilling publication (http://www.speroforum.com/). OPEC at that point would merely reduce output further, thus continuing to control prices in spite of our efforts to control supply.

So it is clear - America cannot drill her way to energy independence, because America is but one of many players on the world market. China and India will be a much larger force as their demand grows. So, as President Bush said, we must defeat our "addiction to oil" by increasing our use of biofuels, harnessing solar and wind power to heat and cool our homes and light our streets, and allow American ingenuity to trump the power of the oil companies and their political cronies to control our destiny. This will take dedication, perseverance, money and hard work. But I believe we are up to the challenge.

We must be. The future of our nation and, indeed, our planet, demands no less.