Project: Operation Drillbit
Posted by Ted Bronson | Filed under Capitalism, Do It Yourself, Idiot Legislation
Folks, you know I’m all about doing it yourself. You also know that I think we should be drilling enough wells in the Gulf of Mexico to walk from Tampa to Galveston without getting our feet wet. I believe I may have even made my displeasure with our Senate hirelings plain on at least one occasion about the issue of drilling for more petroleum. Well, it seems that a local talk-radio guy who has plans to become a big-time talk-radio guy has come up with an idea. The following is directly from his website, and I quote it exactly and lifted the graphic only because he said on the radio that he didn’t care if others used it. (Point of fact, he said he really wants the exposure in any forum he can get; he’s practically begging for exposure, particularly online. However, even though I find this man personally repugnant, he has a good idea. The ratings he is trying to garner will surely be forthcoming, but I am willing to put aside my personal dislike of the man and hope you can as well.)
Operation Drill Bit
It’s time to reduce our dependency on foreign oil, and begin drilling our own resources… Now!
- That’s why we’re rolling out, “Operation Drill Bit”…
- Here’s what we need to do…
- Go to Lowe’s or Home Depot or whatever mom & pop hardware store you like, and buy a drill bit to send to your congressman or woman…
- In fact, buy at least 3…
- One for your Representative in the House
- And one for each of your two United States Senators.
- Tell them you are sick and tired of gas prices, and of watching this great country borrow money from the Chinese to buy oil from the Saudi’s
- Click here to find the address for your senators and congressman.
- Click around on their web pages until you find their Washington, D.C. office… Don’t send anything to a local or district office.
- Include the message: IT’S TIME TO DRILL OUR OWN OIL NOW!
- Let’s flood Washington with drill bits to let them know it’s time to drill ANWR, the Gulf of Mexico and other domestic resources.
- We’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore!!!
Click here to locate your Senators and Representatives using your zipcode
So, maybe you think this is a good idea and want to send a drill bit and a note to your senator or congressman. Maybe you even want to send a few to your State hirelings as well if your state has petroleum reserves that they are not exploiting. Perhaps you even want to post about this on your own blog and spread the word to a larger audience. Feel free. I for one will be hitting the post office tomorrow if no other reason than to tell Mel Martinez and Bill Nelson that they are both acting like a couple of tools.
Tags: capitalism is good, unpaid promotion
Help Support Simon-Jester.org!
May 29th, 2008
I don’t like the gas prices either and do think we should do more to tap our own resources, especially at $120 plus a barrel. But what do you think of the school of though that says we should hold ours in reserve until every one else begins to run low. I know that one of the risks of doing that is that we will be so weak at that point as to be unable to protect it. I would just like another opinion.
May 30th, 2008
I like that idea as being nicely Machiavellian (did I get that spelling even close?), but the flaw seems to be one of time scale. No one in the oil-rich part of the world is drilling new wells. Production is pretty much maxxed out right now, and the suppliers are too busy rolling around in piles of infidel money to think about changing that.
The estimate is that the currently exploited supply will last 50 years or so at this rate. We can’t go on like this for another 50 years. By that time, either we’ll be economically ruined, or we’ll have come up with something that is viable in comparison to overinflated oil prices, so our own reserves won’t mean anything. Or the third option: we actually do go to war for oil. I mean, our troops are right there.
I still say we can engineer a bacterium to consume waste organics and excrete octane.
May 30th, 2008
I once read that the breaking point for Americans is $5/gallon, which is what I’ve seen diesel hovering around right now. However, even if we start drilling today, we are still looking at 5 years before we start pulling enough crude out of the ground to really effect the price.
May 30th, 2008
But if we had started the drilling say, back when Clinton was president (the one who stopped the opening up of ANWR) we would be pumping our a million barrels a day. And the Dems are pissing and bitching about the 70k a day we put into the Strategic Reserve. Who knows what will be the case in five, ten, or fifteen years. And not just ANWR, but the Bokken field, the shale deposits, the nat gas and oil in the Gulf, and the single largest coal deposits on planet Earth. We may not be able to avoid five bucks a gallon, but we sure as hell can prevent ten. (Unless the cap/trade bullshit gets pushed through, in which case all bets are off.)
May 30th, 2008
Very true, I was just making sure everyone knows that we don’t have a fleet of mobile oil platforms standing by over various oil fields just waiting for the word go.
And the $5/gal breaking point is when Americans will start getting really pissy about the cost of fuel and start demanding real action (not just posturing or penalties to the oil companies, but stuff like stomping on hippies to get at local oil fields and pushing for alternative energy development)
May 30th, 2008
For all the moaning and gnashing of teeth, gasoline is still less expensive than bottled water and WAY cheaper than a visit to Starbuck’s. (Da Missus’ favorite beverage is a caramel latte, but with sugar-free caramel, because she’s a diabetic – $3.59 for appx. 20 ounces = $23/gallon, and that doesn’t include a tip.)
May 30th, 2008
True, gas is cheaper than coffee
Of course, I’m not drinking coffee by the gallon every day
May 30th, 2008
We have to look at power sources by the standard of “amount of power” divided by “cost of production/distribution”, and be consistent, whether you look at it in ergs per penny or kilowatts per megabuck.
The only power source more productive (under that standard) than crude/refined oil is nuclear. Wind, solar, biomass, geothermal, glass tower, none of it…
Check out some of the archives at USS Clueless, such as this one or this one or this page on energy alternatives or this one about alternative energy sources.
Just some reasons why oil isn’t going to be going away any time soon.
May 30th, 2008
No offensive DW, but those articles, while accurate and correct, are also 5 years behind the technology curve. I’m not saying he is wrong about anything, only that certain technologies have advanced rather substantially (such as solar, hydrogen, and bio-fuels), others are now getting a more politically friendly environment (nuclear and wind; hrmm, I wonder if hippies can be used as nuclear fuel, or maybe waste depositories; and now that ol’ Teddy is on the decline, maybe we can start looking at offshore windfarms, where the winds are a lot more constant), and others are on the verge of becoming practical (fusion).
It will easily be decades before we are weaned off of Fossil Fuels, so I harbor no dreams of darting around in Jetson cars before the kids are out of school, but every time we can add something else to the overall power system, we can reduce our dependance on Fossil Fuels and thereby extend the length of time we will have them at hand, because let’s face it, the stuff is really very handy to have, and not just to make the Grocery Getter Go.
BTW I do try to keep on all the latest advances in alternative energy and blog about them over on my blog.
May 30th, 2008
I know, MRS, I check out your blog every few days just to keep my geek creds up to date, but the point Steven raises is still valid. Unless and until we can come up with a source of energy that provides more Oomph for the Ka-ching than oil/natural gas, then we’re gonna be needing oil. Unless and until we start allowing companies and individual consumers to drill here in the US, we’re going to need to come up with the oil from overseas or lose our standard of living (which is intimately tied to the amount of energy available per capita, no matter which country you are discussing).
Hydrogen is a fuel, not an energy source, and the cost of extracting, distributing and storing it for individual consumption is still prohibitively high.
Solar power? Not efficient enough, not to mention intermittent and cyclical, with problems involving long-term storage for inclement weather.
And are you seriously arguing that biofuels are going to be cheaper per mega-erg? If it weren’t for the government subsidy (which is also causing a food shortage, but that’s a rant for another day), it would be much more expensive than any sort of oil-based fuels…
I saw this little mini biofuel production plant on TV that only takes 14 pounds of sugar to produce a gallon of biofuel that the owner can put in their gas tank. The machine can handle 35 gallons per week! (Which only takes about 500 pounds of sugar and several hundred gallons of water.)
YMMV
May 31st, 2008
No single alternative energy technology is going to replace oil/coal any time soon, however, applying all of them wherever appropriate is one way to help reduce the load on the system.
For instance, engineers have figured out a way to create solar cells backed with thin steel and durable coatings. Such a solar cell is much cheaper than modern glass backed or thin film cells and can be used instead of roofing shingles. Newer solar cells work best under direct sunlight, but will still generate power in indirect light and on cloudy days. Initial cost is higher per home, but they can potentially last as long as regular roofing shingles and provide additional power to a home during peak usage hours. Homes can also be outfitted with modern batteries that would provide a certain level of capacitence to the system and anything extra can be sold back to the grid.
The trick is to start to move away from relying exclusively on centralized base power and move toward a decentralized system with base power making up the slack. It is also important to find a way to either give the system some efficient storage capability so off peak power can be stored for peak usage, or set the infrastructure up so that additional generation capacity can be brought on line in short order (co-gen plants).
As for Biofuels, we need to move away from the idea of using crops and arable land for bio-fuels, and focus more on microbes that can be grown in the arrid parts of the world (the US SouthWest for instance) or at sea, and using bio-reactors to reduce garbage and generate methane for power generation.
Regarding Hydrogen, storage issues are the greatest hurdle, and every week I read about a new way to store hydrogen without pressurized tanks. Once we can efficiently store and extract hydrogen from one of these mediums, we’ll be able to use H2 as a fuel, and people could potentially create fuel at home, or buy it from filling stations.
None of these are a single fix, no one solution will do the trick until we all have Mr. Cold Fusion Units in our houses and on our cars, but until then each one of these technologies can help to relieve the strain on the system.
So yes, to date, oil & coal are the power sources with the greatest bang for the buck, both in cost and portability, with fission being the only one to out strip them (and they’ve found a fungus that eats nuclear waste like candy, gotta love nature!). That only means we need to be more creative on how we extract and use energy from other sources, not that we go “Eh, those are crap, why bother?”.
I am working on a big post highlighting some of the latest wind/solar/hydro tech, hopefully I’ll have it done this weekend.
PS The eFuel system can use any sugar, not just food grade sugar. 14 lbs of industrial grade sugar is a whole lot cheaper than food grade. Granted, I’m not one that will be spending money and time to dump a qaurter ton of sugar and a butt ton of water just to get two tanks of low power ethanol, but I would spend the time to turn waste veggie oil into bio-diesel if I had a diesel vehicle.