Prodromus

As presumed Presidential nominee Barrack Obama taught us this week, it is vitally important for everyone to inflate their tires this weekend, and on a regular basis as well.  In addition, if you can also schedule a tune-up, that would be swell.  As Obama pointed out, “There are things you can do individually, though, to save energy.  Making sure your tires are properly inflated – simple thing.  But we could save all the oil that they’re talking about getting off drilling – if everybody was just inflating their tires?  And getting regular tune-ups? You’d actually save just as much!”

Now I am not sure exactly what his definition is of “all the oil that they’re talking about getting off drilling”, but that sure sounds like a lot.   The Energy Information Administration estimates that we could extract approximately 10 billion barrels of oil from ANWR alone, about 600 million barrels a year.  This is equal to just less than 10% of our total oil use in the US on a yearly basis. 

The federal government estimates the nation’s outer continental shelf might hold 85.9 billion barrels of crude, including 10.13 billion barrels off California.    Let’s call that another 600 million barrels a year just to make our numbers easy, it could be 4 or 5 times that number.

Just from those two sources, we could decrease our reliance on foreign oil by 15-20%.  If making sure your tires are inflated is equal to that amount, between the Republican solution (drilling), and the Democrat solution (inflating tires), we could lower our dependence on foreign oil by 30%-40% in 5-10 years.  That is great progress!  Way to go political leaders!