(July 8, 2011 at 2:03 am)Epimethean Wrote: And what of the offshore drilling moratorium?
The historic rate at which offshore drilling has discovered new reserves has been but a small fraction of our rate of consumption. So even if we can immediately recover every barrel as soon as it is discovered, we would still run down our proven reserve in less than 5 years.
The current estimate of total undiscovered reserve around the US is quite large, some guesstimate it at 100 billion barrels, good for about 13 years at current rate of consumption of 700 million barrels a year. The problem is it can't be used until it's discovered, and the rate at which we've managed to discover these have fallen sharply, to much less than the rate of consumption. So even if we allow all drilling and exploration, our consumption would still overtake the aggregate results of discovery long before we've discovered all 100 billion barrels.
