Can Offshore Drilling Really Make the U.S. Oil Independent?

John McCain says he plans to shake up Washington and to bring systemic change to the political system. And yet it’s hard to see how this can come about through perpetuating the blatant disregard for factual accuracy that has characterized the past eight years. I’m not talking about the McCain’s campaign of distortion and lying about Obama, or about the way in which they’ve misrepresented Sarah Palin’s record, but McCain’s absurd energy policy of “drill here, drill now.” While it’s reasonable to produce more oil domestically, it’s not reasonable to suggest that that measure would make a substantial difference to the US’s dependence on foreign oil.

This from Scientific American:

Kaufman [expert on world oil markets and director of Boston University's Center for Energy and Environmental Studies] dismisses as “nonsense” any promises that offshore drilling could make the U.S. “oil independent.” Even if it could somehow insulate itself from the ups and downs of the global oil market, he notes, the U.S. would have to make a huge leap in domestic oil production to replace what it buys from overseas.

“At its peak in production, which occurred in 1970s, the U.S. produced about 10 million [barrels of oil] a day,” Kaufman says. “Now, after 30 years of fairly steady decline, we produce about five million barrels a day,” whereas we consume 20 million barrels daily. “Whoever talks about oil independence has to tell a story about how we close a 15-million-barrel gap.”

The McCain campaign did not return repeated calls seeking comment.

(Can Offshore Drilling Really Make the U.S. Oil Independent?: Scientific American)

Odd that they didn’t comment, especially since Sarah Palin, who has been touted by McCain as follows, “She knows more about energy than probably anyone else in the United States of America,” should easily be able to trump Kaufmann’s expertise. Maybe she was too busy field-dressing a moose to answer the phone.

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