You Decide

…offshore drilling has nothing to do with the long-term goal of energy independence?

Despite the attention given to Brazil’s offshore drilling, the country’s independence from foreign oil has to do with ethanol and frugal use of petroleum.

Per year, Brazil produces about 4.1 barrels of oil per person and consumes only 4.2 barrels per person. They bridge the gap between production and consumption with alternative fuels — 90 percent of new cars sold in Brazil today can run on any combination of gasoline and ethanol.

The United States, in contrast, gobbles up about a quarter of the world’s daily petroleum output. Each year we produce approximately 10 barrels of oil per person — but we consume about 25 barrels of oil per person, approximately six times as much as the average Brazilian. And to fill the gap between what we produce and what we consume, the United States relies on imports of foreign crude instead of using alternative fuels.

Because we thought oil would come cheap forever, for more than 30 years the United States neglected to hold our cars to higher fuel-economy standards. While Brazil was throwing billions at its ethanol program, we drove SUVs and diverted public dollars away from energy research and development, including the development of renewable fuels. Last year Congress passed an act to promote the use of ethanol and other alternative fuels — but imagine where we might have been had we adopted a national alternative fuels program decades earlier.

Even putting aside the Brazilian model, U.S. government figures indicate that conservation is more effective at lowering oil and gasoline prices. In the summer of 2008, the U.S. Energy Information Administration looked back at the year’s rise in oil prices — the cost of a barrel of oil surpassed $140 — and calculated that Americans cut their oil consumption by 800,000 barrels per day, or about 4 percent. And guess what? Oil prices went down.

But that’s just the tip of the barrel. Experts say that if Americans drove a mere five miles less per day, they would reduce the nation’s gasoline demand by 15 percent. Fuel economy standards for cars, originally enacted in 1975, have been credited with reducing oil imports 14 percent, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. In contrast, areas in the OCS now subject to the moratorium would provide only 200,000 barrels of oil a day — a measly 1 percent of our petroleum demand.

Oil is an increasingly finite resource, and quick-fix supply-side solutions distract the United States from what it really needs to be doing: investing heavily in clean fuels. After all, what are we going to do when the small amount of offshore oil runs out?

…that other nations have profited from offshore drilling for oil and become energy independent?

In an industry in which existing oil wells produce less each year, the United States will have to find new oil and produce it at home just to keep imports of foreign crude from rising. So if we don’t tap additional oil reservoirs offshore, we would likely have to replace millions of oil barrels each day with more imports from nations such as Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Nigeria. Why let these nations profit and become more powerful from our misguided reluctance?

Let’s take a look at Brazil, a country that has managed to simultaneously leverage offshore drilling in its backyard and aggressively develop alternative fuels.

Thanks to offshore drilling, Brazil increased its oil production by more than 830 percent between 1980 and 2007 and became a net exporter of crude. In 2007, the country announced a major find of 5 billion to 7 billion barrels of oil in the offshore Tupi Field, which immediately boosted the country’s oil reserves by about 40 percent. The discovery was billed as the world’s biggest since 2000.

In terms of crude oil reserves, Brazil is now positioned to join the ranks of the top five oil exporters to the United States, and talk is circulating that the country might become a member of the G8 group of nations. On land, Brazil also invested heavily in alternative fuels — 90 percent of its cars today can run on almost any combination of gasoline and ethanol — yet they haven’t stopped exploring and drilling for crude in new areas. Brazil is playing the global energy game while we sit on the sidelines.

Although we can’t follow the Brazilian model exactly — it’s not likely we’ll achieve energy independence solely from offshore drilling, nor is it economic to convert our transportation sector entirely to ethanol — there’s no reason we can’t have our oil and invest in green energy too.

Expanding oil production in offshore areas should be a major piece of an energy policy that also includes investments in flex-fuel vehicles and even in plug-in hybrid electric cars. Plug-ins, of course, need electricity, but instead of building dirty coal generators or nuclear reactors that take a decade or more to construct, we could fire power plants with the vast amounts of relatively clean-burning natural gas also available from protected areas of the OCS. The oil we do tap there would then act as a transition to an economy not so dependent on fossil fuels. But for now, oil and natural gas are typically found in the same place, and one never knows how much oil or natural gas each reservoir will contain. There’s only one way to find out: drill.