Ok, so this is energy, part 2. Offshore drilling is such a big topic that it gets its own section. : )
Offshore drilling involves drilling into deepsea and/or continental shelf wells of oil reserves to extract and refine the oil for the consumer. Some people seem to think it's going to be a magic and quick fix to the oil problem. It's not. Here's the deal with offshore drilling:
1. It's incredibly expensive to remove the oil. The deeper it is, the more difficult (and hence more expensive) it is to get at. Even offshore drilling on the continental shelf is significantly more expensive than land drilling. Because it costs more to find it, produce and put in place the technology to remove it, remove it, and get it refined and to the consumer, the net energy is drastically reduced, and therefore becomes an incredibly inefficient way to produce energy.
2. It will take a while to get the oil out, and even when we do, it may not go into the American market. Just because it's "domestic" drilling (technically anything further than 12 miles offshore is international) doesn't mean that it's going to go directly into our market. The independent companies are going to sell the oil to the highest bidder - and that is most likely going to be China. We have some of the cheapest gas in the world right now (Europe pays between 6 and 9 dollars a gallon in many places, Canada about 5, and China about 6), and the government subsidies are growing because of the rapidly increasing demand and decreasing supply. Other countries are paying much higher prices than we are, and the gas will go to them first.
Now, there is a valid point that adding oil to the market, regardless of where it goes, will increase the overall supply and therefore lower prices, but the amount of oil we are going to get from our shores (and even our land), compared to the amount the world produces, is not going to lower the prices by much, esepcially with government subsidies.
3. Only about 35-70% of available oil is actually removed from the drilling site. This leaves us with open wells and unprofitable drilling riggs offshore. Often, the projected costs and net energy are calculated using the highest of these rates (anywhere from 60 - 100% extraction), and when less is removed, prices skyrocket, and net energy plummets.
4. Fish don't particularly like to swim around drilling rigs. The environmental impacts, the costs to restore lost fish populations, coral structures, and other damages match or often exceed the amount of profit made from offshore drilling rigs. And the impact can be deadly for some species. The highly concentrated human activity, particularly when setting up a rig, interferes with the natural cycle of fish reproduction, and since tropical fish and coral reefs are already sensitive to change, the damages outweigh the benefits. The risk of spillage, seepage, and other environmental damages have drastic and irrevocable consequences.
5. The net energy of oil from offshore drilling is much lower than that of other resources. The cost of setting up a rig, drilling into the continental shelf, protecting against environmental damages (which is often overlooked to increase profits), transporting the crude oil to a refinery, refining the oil into usable petrolium, transporting the petrolium around the country to be either put into cars and released, or further refined into other products such as plastics and rubbers, then, when the life of that product is up, appropriately disassembling it for degration, is enormous. Often, what we find is that the environmental protection and proper disassembling factors are largely ignored to increase profit.
Ultimately, it's a short term fix for a long term problem (which nobody can really deny), and we are eventually going to have to move on. Why should we waste resources and time and precious environmental land to fix soemthing that we wouldn't be fixing? See a problem yet?
