Time to do Something About Oil Prices
Time to do Something About Oil Prices
There are many critical issues facing our country today and one is at the forefront for anyone with a car - surging gas prices. We've all felt an added squeeze to our wallets at the pump, not just in the wake of the summer driving season and Hurricane Katrina, but for more than a year. It's obvious that working families and the American economy cannot endure a trend of continually rising gas prices.
There are two ways of combating the problems of high gas prices and a dependence on foreign oil: increasing U.S. production of petroleum and searching for alternative fuels. Let's discuss increasing U.S. production first.
Facts are stubborn things and these are the facts: the U.S. has not built a new refinery in three decades yet oil use has increased exponentially since the 1970s. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina?s devastation along the Gulf Coast, the case is even stronger for new refineries. The Gulf Coast was responsible for shipping 4.5 million barrels of oil per day to other parts of the U.S. in 2004 and production of more than 3.9 million of those barrels has been affected due to the hurricane.
In accordance with logical economics, prices have risen as demand sky-rocketed and the result is oil hovering above $60 a barrel and some Wall Street analysts believe oil could reach as high as $105 a barrel. All this while foreign supplies account for 62 percent of oil used in the U.S. and that number is expected to rise to 75 percent by 2010.
With working families bearing the brunt of the burden from high gas prices, the time is now to stop playing politics and allow for drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). This proposal, which may finally be passed this year, has been held up in the Senate for four years.
Besides preventing thousands of good jobs from being created and the federal government from taking in an additional $2.7 billion from oil leases, those refusing to allow drilling in ANWR bar 1 million barrels of oil a day from coming to market. We are talking about the largest single source of untapped oil in the U.S. We are talking about as much as 16 billion barrels of recoverable crude oil. And we are talking about drilling on only 2,000 of 19.6 million acres in the refuge. That's equivalent to drilling on a plot of land smaller than Jacksonville International Airport while ANWR as a whole is about the same size as the state of South Carolina.
The second part of the two-pronged approach to solving our energy woes and lowering gas prices is increased use of alternative fuels. Fortunately, the recently-passed Energy Policy Act of 2005 calls for widespread alternative efforts, including an ambitious state-of-the-art program to get hydrogen fuel cell vehicles on the road by 2020. Hydrogen can be produced from almost any energy source and is essentially emission free.
The Energy Policy Act of 2005, which gives the U.S. its first national energy policy in decades, also includes nearly $3 billion for fossil energy research to ensure more efficient development and exploration of oil, gas and coal. The president's Fiscal Year 2006 budget even includes a $4,000 tax credit for anyone that purchases a hybrid vehicle. Increased use of diesel fuel also needs to be explored. Currently, only 1 percent of all cars on the road use diesel fuel. According to the Department of Energy, if that figure rose to 20 percent in 15 years, we'd save 350,000 barrels of oil a day, or 25 percent of what we import from Venezuela, a country controlled by an anti-American dictator.
Gas prices impact us in many ways in our daily lives from the products we use at home and work to our travel plans. For example, it takes seven gallons of oil to produce one tire. High gas prices amount to a needless tax on consumers and will choke economic growth. Our economy has been resilient in the face of record highs at the pump. Now is the time to ensure that resilience translates to a long-term trend of economic success rather than a sustained period of squandering money at the local gas station. Fortunately, the solutions to the dilemma are well within reach.
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