Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Reserve is an area originally set up to maintain a reserve supply for its
navy, while the Arctic National Wilderness Refuge is, as its name suggests,
a wilderness reserve.
Moreover, at the insistence of several environmentally- conscious
coastal states, there has been basically no drilling off either the US east or
west coast, nor in the eastern part of the Gulf of Mexico along the Florida
coastline. If all these restrictions were lifted, it is probable that the US
could, at least briefly, reverse the post-1970 peak in its oil output. After the
massive BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, the lifting of restrictions
elsewhere seems unlikely.
But as Anthony Cordesman, an energy and defence expert with CSIS in
Washington, points out: “it is not clear that you would solve any strategic
problem by depleting US resources first [ahead of foreign producers]”.
The Obama administration wants to lower the import share of oil and oil
products to below 60 percent (from 65 percent today), but Cordesman
does not believe it will ever go below the 50 percent mark.
Changing oil suppliers?
There is no good oil or bad oil - just oil. Both George W. Bush and Barack
Obama have implied that they would like the US to switch suppliers in
calling for the US to cut imports by an amount equivalent to its oil pur-
chases from the Middle East. In fact the US buys relatively little directly
from the Middle East. The top five oil suppliers to the US are, in descend-
ing order, Canada, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Nigeria.
But switching suppliers would not help, says Jim Woolsey, a former
director of the Central Intelligence Agency who believes passionately
in the potential of electric cars to break the US oil habit. “One changes
nothing by changing the pattern of oil purchases - if the US were to buy
only from Norway it would affect nothing because the US would still be
buying in a world oil market that is subject to the influence of OPEC and
the Saudis,” Woolsey maintains.
Moreover, all America's trading partners and allies in Europe and Asia
would still be in that world oil market. The only real energy independence
would be zero oil imports from anywhere.
 
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