The USA actually has more energy resources than any other nation in the world

THE TRUTH ABOUT CARBON BASED FUELS:

From confused "peak oil" theorists to confused Congressmen, it's all but impossible to hear a discussion of US energy policy without hearing the left's tired refrain: "The United States currently uses 25% of the world oil production but has only 2% of world reserves." The left uses this misinformation to argue against domestic oil drilling, claiming that with only two percent of the world's reserves, we can't possibly have enough oil in the ground to matter.

It's a line which reminds me of Mark Twain's wisdom (which he attributed to Benjamin Disraeli) that "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics." Twain would be proud of these haters of fossil fuels whose "statistics" fall apart upon examination of a couple of definitions and a few pieces of data.

First, the word "reserves." As the Congressional Research Service notes, there are several different types of reserves, classified based on their official discovery, as well as "concentration, quality, and accessibility." The top of the "resource pyramid" is made of "proved" reserves, namely reserves of oil, natural gas, coal, or other fuel "which geological and engineering data demonstrate with reasonable certainty to be recoverable in future years from known reservoirs under existing economic and operating conditions."

This is the most limiting definition of reserves, and of course it is the one which the left relies on when saying that we have "only two percent of the world's oil reserves." Specifically, the U.S. has 20.7 billion barrels of proved crude oil reserves as of the end 2009. (That's actually up from 2008 numbers which by itself should be a clue how meaningless the left's two-percent argument is.)

The problem with the use of the "proved reserves" statistic is that it ignores the many more billions of barrels of oil which we know exist and are likely to be recoverable on American land and just off our coasts. Since our government prevents exploration, there are massive deposits of oil (and other fuels) which are prevented from being measured adequately to be defined as "proved." But that doesn't make them less real.

A broader measure of fossil fuel deposits is UTRR, undiscovered technically recoverable resources. Marcus Koblitz, energy analyst at the American Petroleum Institute, sent me this "short" definition of the term: "UTRR are estimated by USGS and/or BOEMRE using advanced modeling techniques that apply knowledge of geologic formations and technical access capabilities to currently unexplored formations that are similar to producing formations in order to determine the amount of oil and natural gas in a specific area or basin."

The UTRR numbers are remarkably high for the United States; indeed they demolish the left's anti-drilling pseudo-logic. Or they would if the media's talking heads would stop just accepting the 2% lie-statistic.

In particular, the United States' UTRR for onshore oil is currently about 38 billion barrels, with the offshore technically recoverable resources coming in at a stunning 86 billion barrels. (Of this, just over half is in the Gulf of Mexico, a third in Alaska, and the rest off our Pacific and Atlantic coasts.) Our real but not "proved" resource of oil is thus about 125 billion barrels. Furthermore, the offshore numbers are based on a report that used data from 2003, at which time oil discovery and drilling technology were far behind what they are today, the BP disaster notwithstanding. It is likely that a new survey would conclude with a substantially higher UTRR number.

Even with the outdated offshore figures, the U.S.'s total technically recoverable oil, including current proved reserves and 10 billion barrels of natural gas liquids, is estimated by our government at 163 billion barrels, eight times the number thrown around by the left.

Yes, our total recoverable oil reserves (including proved) are at least eight times our proved reserves alone. It's just that government keeps us from proving them. And if that's not enough, our UTRR for natural gas is five times our proven reserves of that resource.

Using only the proved oil reserve number of 20.8 billion barrels, the U.S. ranks 12th in the world in that category. However, America's UTRR of oil and natural gas combined is likely the largest in the world.

(Read the whole thing!)

THE LEFTIST LIES ABOUT SO-CALLED FOSSIL FUELS, CO2, AND THE SAFETY OF EXPLOITING GAS AND OIL ARE DESTROYING OUR ECONOMY. AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY. AND RETARDING PROSPERITY OF THE THIRD WORLD.

AND NOT CHANGING GLOBAL CLIMATE ONE TEN-THOUSANDTH OF A DEGREE.

THE MAN-MADE CO2 MYTH - "CLIMATO-ANTHROPOGENICISM" - IS A LIE WHICH IS AS HARMFUL TO HUMANITY AS WAS MARXISM AND IS ISLAMISM.

WE MUST DO WHATEVER WE CAN TO CRUMPLE THIS HIDEOUS POLITICAL CREED INTO A BALL AND TOSS IT ONTO THE DUSTBIN OF HISTORY