National Institute of Standards and Technology.
The Savannah Morning News and the AP report this morning that offshore oil drilling is unlikely for Georgia. It's been tried before in the 1970s during the various fuel crises then, and it was abandoned in 1980:
When coastal geologist Jim Henry hears debates about drilling for oil off the coast of Georgia, he has to chuckle a little.
Henry, who's semi-retired, was involved in Georgia's oil explorations in the late 1970s, before moratoriums were imposed on that activity. The state hired him to look for geologic hazards in the event oil was discovered.
It wasn't.
"The oil companies have done a lot of surveying and even drilled several test wells," he said. "They just kind of gave up on finding any quantitative results."
In fact, four oil companies - Exxon USA, Tenneco Oil Co., Transco Cos. Inc. and Getty Oil Co. - spent more than $150 million in inflation-adjusted dollars to drill a total of six test wells in an area known as the Southeast Georgia Embayment. They abandoned the effort in 1980.
Most of the offshore oil is not on the Atlantic coast, but on the Gulf Coast instead. There's nothing much deeper than the exploratory wells of the late 70s found, which wasn't much.
On the political stage in Georgia, everyone in Congress seems to favor drilling as it's apparent that there wouldn't be much, if any, drilling on the state's relatively small chunk of the Atlantic coast.
Georgia's center-right Democrats, out of political necessity, (John Barrow, representing east Georgia from Augusta to Savannah; Sanford Bishop, representing southwest Georgia's "Black Belt"; and Jim Marshall, former Macon mayor, representing central and southeast Georgia, and who is the most conservative Democrat from the state) have come out in favor of the plan; all of Georgia's Republican delegation is in favor.
There's also the argument that coastal communities should just buck up and accept it for the good of the national interest:
"People all too often want to say ... 'Not in my backyard.' But as a nation in a fuel crisis, we simply cannot afford to take any option off the table," said Rep. Phil Gingrey, R-Marietta.
The man, who thankfully has shaved off his porno-moustache, btw, represents a landlocked area in northwest Georgia in Newtgingrichbobbarr-land.
On both sides of the aisle, those representing the coastal districts are all in favor. I'm not sure how long this will last if drilling plans for the Georgia coast get serious for folks near Tybee and Brunswick stary pitching a bitch about it, unless the drilling is far, far offshore.
This is all a temporary solution to a permanent problem. Even if we started now, both offshore and in ANWR, the first oil wouldn't come online for several years. And demand will continue to outstrip supply as long as emerging economies demand oil (China, India, etc.).
The only thing that will cause any drop in oil prices is a major worldwide recession, where America's problems contaminate the entire global economy -- pushing demand way, way down. This, however, would require Americans to stop buying shit they don't need -- a mental meme I don't see going away.
The upside of all of this is that energy costs are getting high enough that importing cheap crap from China and Vietnam is getting to the point where the fuel costs eat up any savings -- giving a boost to American manufacturing.
1 comments:
Oh they'll cut off their noses to spite their own faces and build a few anyway. Just to thumb their noses at the two environmentalists left in Georgia. Because they can!
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