Gas Prices

Why aren't we doing something useful to reduce prices?

Comparing the Democratic plan to the Republican one. (Made by Republicans, but even if you reduce the savings in half, it is still significant) [Link]

Retail gasoline prices are the result of literally hundreds of factors including crude oil supply, global demand, refinery capacity, regulation, taxes, weather, the value of the dollar, etc. Therefore it is impossible to say with certainty what one individual action will do to the overall price. However, based on what we know about the impact of crude oil supply and prices it is possible to develop some potential ranges of impact on gasoline prices for certain policy changes. For example, using the methodology employed by Speaker Pelosi and House Democrats that suspending shipments into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (between 40-77,000 barrels of oil a day) would reduce gas prices by at least 5 cents, bringing ANWR online (at least one million barrels of oil a day) could impact gasoline prices by between 70 cents and $1.60.

Why won't we drill? [Link]

Brazil discovered only yesterday (November) that billions of barrels of oil sit in difficult water beneath a swath of the Santos Basin, 180 miles offshore from Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. The U.S. has known for decades that at least 8.5 billion proven barrels of oil sit off its Pacific, Atlantic and Gulf coasts, with the Interior Department estimating 86 billion barrels of undiscovered oil resources.

When Brazil made this find last November, did its legislature announce that, for fear of oil spills hitting Rio's beaches or altering the climate, it would forgo exploiting these fields?

Of course it didn't. Guilherme Estrella, director of exploration and production for the Brazilian oil company Petrobras, said, "It's an extraordinary position for Brazil to be in." Indeed it is.

At this point in time, is there another country on the face of the earth that would possess the oil and gas reserves held by the United States and refuse to exploit them? Only technical incompetence, as in Mexico, would hold anyone back.

But not us. We won't drill.

At the same time, we need to be expanding into other sources, like nuclear, solar, and wind. Like the Queen of England. [Link]

The Crown Estate of England knows which way the wind blows and has decided to acquire the prototype of the world's biggest wind turbine, Clipper’s 7.5 megawatt MBE turbine, also known as the Britannia (pictured above is Clipper's Liberty model, which produces 2.5 megawatt).

The previous record was held by the Enercon E-126 wind turbine which is rated at 6 megawatt (pictured below), but can produce around 7 in real world conditions. While the Enercon is land-based, the Britannia will be located in deep waters near the UK. This makes sense because the marine interests of The Crown Estate include almost the entire UK territorial seabed out to 12 nautical miles , about 55% of the UK’s coastal foreshore, and rights to lease seabed for the generation of renewable energy on the continental shelf within the Renewable Energy Zone which extends out to approximately 200 nautical miles..