QUOTE(YASNY @ Sep 17, 2005 -> 02:13 AM)
Well, just call it a guess, but I believe we'll be needing some oil in a decade. But I could be wrong. And for the oil companies wanting to drill in other areas, wtf is wrong with that? We need oil, they are in business to supply it to us. When 25% of our domestic oil comes from one geographic area, and it gets hammered with a natural disater, it seems diversity in location just might be a good idea.
First of all...in about a decade, yeah that oil will be useful, but it will be simply a small drop in the bucket compared to the 2 dominant effects we are going to see in the oil market:
1. Oil demand is rising at an unsustainable rate
2. Oil supply has very nearly peaked, or is at least growing at a crawl.
By the time that oil comes on line...we're already going to be well past the tipping point where the world wants to consume more oil than it can produce. It will be at least 10 years before the first oil comes out of there, and it will be 20 years before the oil from that field reaches peak production. By that point, we'll be talking about deficits of supply on the order of 10 million + barrels per day, and the most that we'll ever pull out of that field is about 600,000 barrels per day.
There's a reason 25%of our domestic oil comes from the Delta...that's the only place in the U.S. where there is a lot of cheap, accessible oil. This nation has less than 4% of the world's oil reserves. No matter how much you want to produce elsewhere, production simply cannot keep up with the demand for oil in this country. It is actually impossible. The only solution is to work to reduce demand.