We Want You to Drill for Oil – So That We Don’t Have to!
There was a great piece in today's Wall Street Journal on how Rex Tillerson of ExxonMobil calls out the U.S. government for hypocrisy on oil drilling. As you have probably read, the President of the United States is currently in the Middle East and, among other things, is pushing countries in the region to substantially increase their oil production so as to do something strongly against their own economic interest (namely lower oil prices). Several of the Presidential candidates have gone further, clearly stating that they would take a tough line against OPEC in order to effectively force them to increase production. The clear message is: “we demand that you explore more, drill more and produce more in order to make it easier for Americans to pay the price at the pump.”
The only small problem is that we have significant oil and gas resources here in the United States that we have put off limits to development. In addition to ANWR, we have very large offshore resources that could be accessed cleanly and with limited impact to the environment. The United States could, by itself, easily and significantly increase world oil production and lower prices. But why do that when we can try and force other people to do our dirty work?
The bottom line is that when it comes to energy policy, we have to look ourselves in the mirror as a country and decide how much control we want to exercise over our own destiny. There will never be such a thing as ‘energy independence” but we can move much more forcefully to “energy security” if we develop greater domestic resources, increase efficiency, greatly expand nuclear power, invest in technology and commercialize the use of alternative and renewable fuels. Trying to beat OPEC into solving our problems for us is simply a road to further dependence and energy policy failure.
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