[Christ]

Originally Posted by rmay635703

I guess the thing I find most laughable at ANWR or even gulf drilling is that there are billions of barrells of proven crude in capped small oil wells throughout the US's heartland. Kansas through Nebraska up into the dakotas, even pensylvania.

My great uncle worked on a farm in Kansas that also had an oil well, the well on that farm along with many others were forcibly closed during the Nixon through Reagon eras when whole deeds were nullified during the many land deed changes made in the 70's and early 80's. My uncle could never understand why they were closing oil wells during the middle of a fuel shortage. Another odditity was that before the well was closed they were having trouble finding someone to pickup and store their oil, getting the "all the tanks are full" How could they be full during a shortage?

These wells although small and usually family owned were proven and functional and had to be capped because the mineral rights were removed from the deed. Many times these deeds ran in families almost 100yrs and they were taken away & nullfied. Afterall you only own the right to be on the surface of the land, not whats underneith.

Add to this the number of small capped wells that were purchased outright by oil companies for the purpose of removing competition and you get the picture.

If we really WANTED to produce our own oil we do have a rather large amount easily accessible in small pockets throughout the US, the wells individually would produce much less than a large well but together would produce much more than ANWR ever could. And at that for many more years.

Also uncapping a formerly productive well is much simpler than drilling new I should hope?

Then we have the natural gas issue, no-one has ever refuted the findings of massive frozen deposites of natural gas in the gulf of mexico, its on the surface of the ocean floor so it would be easy to remove (no drilling) and all estimates place it at a larger size than the whole of the middle east (it afterall regenerates when removed from the oil underneith), sadly we also don't mention that one either except once on PBS then never again.

Nice how that works?

http://ecomodder.com/forum/163982-post36.html

That's my conspiracy theory, no matter who believes it.