Fred Business News - Oil companies and many lawmakers are pressing to open up more U.S. land for drilling. But the industry is drilling on just a fraction of offshore areas it already has access to.
Of the 90 million offshore acres the industry has leases to, it is estimated that upwards of 70 million are not producing oil, according to both Democrats and oil-industry sources.
If all these areas were being drilled, U.S. oil production could be boosted by nearly 5 million barrels a day, up from about 8 million barrels a day currently.
That compares to an increase of maybe 2 million barrels a day experts say opening up other coastal areas and the Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge might yield.
The presumptive Republican candidate John McCain has come out in favor of lifting bans on oil-drilling off most of the East and West coasts of the United States. Added supply, the thinking goes, would ultimately bring down the price of oil. The bans were enacted in the 1970s following several coastal oil spills.
Critics say lifting the bans would do little to ease the nation's energy crisis in part because it would take years to produce meaningful amounts of oil, noting how much is currently going untapped.
"Big Oil is more interested in pumping up prices and pumping up their own profits rather than pumping more oil," said Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass), who has co-sponsored a bill to charge oil companies a fee for land they hold that's not producing oil. "We should not even begin discussing handing over more public land to the oil companies until they first use [the land] they already hold."
The oil industry says it pays millions of dollars for these leases, and not producing oil on them is something they would not intentionally do.
Source: Cnn.com
About Fred: Fred is president of The I Team Organization. With a back ground in agriculture Fred has lead many successful business ventures.
