As fuel and food prices skyrocket, Congress is backpedaling on the "Ethanol Will Save Us" idea. When you use corn for fuel the demand goes up along with the price. That means not only do Americans get hit at the gas pump, but anytime they buy anything with corn in it. Now I can't afford Frosted Flakes or the drive to the store to buy them! So the question is how do we reverse it?
The only thing that needs to be reversed is Congressional thinking. The evil empire to most people is "Big Oil." They have windfall profits and the little guy gets beat. Yet if we are to be fair, we must also take to task farmers. Yes, farmers! They are also raking in windfall profits as the price of corn shoots up. They have taken food and sold it to the highest bidder for fuel. Not that I blame them for doing so. However, they do this while still receiving federal farm subsidies. The Government pays them to make money. Nice deal!
This whole thing is insane. Do you realize that the USA has one of the largest supplies of oil in the world! In April 2008, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) released a report giving a new resource assessment of the Bakken Formation underlying portions of Montana and North Dakota. The USGS believes that with new horizontal drilling technology there is somewhere between 3.0 billion barrels to 4.5 billion barrels of recoverable oil. If accurate, this reassessment would make it the largest continuous oil formation ever discovered in the U.S.
The United States also has the largest known deposits of oil shale in the world, according to the Bureau of Land Management and holds an estimated 2,500 gigabarrels of potentially recoverable oil, enough to meet U.S. demand for oil at current rates for 110 years.
In 2006 the U.S. Energy Department announced the results of a land survey 1,000 feet beneath the surface of the Rocky Mountains. What they found was the largest untapped oil reserve in the world - more than 2 TRILLION barrels.
Here are the official estimates:
* 8-times as much oil as Saudi Arabia*
18-times as much oil as Iraq
* 21-times as much oil as Kuwait
* 22-times as much oil as Iran
* 500-times as much oil as Yemen
The U.S. Minerals Management Service (a branch of the Interior Department) estimates 102 billion barrels of oil and 635 trillion cubic feet of gas beneath federal lands and coastal waters. By way of comparison, the reserves lying beneath the North Sea, a major source of oil for Europe, are believed to contain a total of 18 billion barrels of oil.
Geologists estimate that another 300 trillion cubic feet of gas and 50 billion barrels of oil are waiting, yet to be discovered, off the "Lower 48" states. The American Petroleum Institute (API) notes that this is enough oil to replace current imports from the Persian Gulf for 59 years.
Yet almost 90 percent of the OCS acreage is off-limits to production - on essentially spurious environmental grounds. With a peak output of 6 million barrels of oil a day in 1999, North Sea production has not caused environmental degradation; there is no reason to believe that OCS production would be any more environmentally damaging.
The time has come for Congress to step up to the plate and permit the exploitation of these abundant deposits of oil and gas and revise the cumbersome federal permit process, which severely retards development of oil and gas. Our problem is not with corn or oil. It with our leaders in congress!
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