Houston, We Have Alternatives…to offshore drilling

All Americans, citizens and politicians alike, are in rare agreement that the tragedy unfolding in the Gulf is something we never want to see happen again.  But too many in the media, in Washington, or even along the Gulf Coast are jumping to the conclusion that we have to keep drilling in the Gulf and other offshore areas because we simply have no alternative. 

The truth is we do have options—more than most people think—that can move us much further and faster towards energy security.  I’m going to focus on two, one that you would expect to be touted by an environmental group, and one that might come as a surprise.

First, get the most mileage from every barrel

For all the recent gains, there is much more we can and should do to make our cars and trucks use less fuel, so that we need less oil.  The Gulf oil disaster underscores what we’ve known for decades.  Transforming our automobile industry is by far the most significant way to reduce our dependence on oil, cut foreign imports, and reduce pressures to drill offshore or onshore in environmentally sensitive areas.

The Obama administration’s recently announced greenhouse gas and fuel efficiency standards for new cars, SUVs, and other light-duty vehicles will save 2.6 million barrels per day (mbd) by 2030. Ramping up those standards to achieve 55 mpg from gasoline vehicles in 2030 would save another 2 mbd.  This is nearly three times the 1.6 million barrels of oil we get from the Gulf coast today.  A more comprehensive approach that also addresses fuel efficiency in heavy-duty vehicles, aviation, and oil-heated buildings and promotes smart growth, transit and sustainable, low carbon fuels will save even more oil and money.

Achieving these oil savings is a matter of political will and strong efficiency standards—there is no doubt that American engineers and autoworkers can get the job done.

Second, get the most barrels from existing oil fields

Though few people know it, there’s a huge amount of oil—55-75% of the original discovery—that remains stranded in our existing domestic oil fields after conventional production methods have been exhausted.  We can get more oil out through a process that uses CO2 to recover a significant portion of what is left behind.  In certain areas of the country, oil field operators have been doing this for 35 years, pumping CO2 into depleted oil fields, where it mixes with stranded oil, enabling the oil to be pumped to the surface.  The U.S. already produces more than 280,000 barrels per day this way, using mostly natural sources of CO2 tapped from underground wells.   Ironically, there is a shortage of CO2 for oil production even while our power plants and industrial facilities pump billions of tons of heat-trapping CO2 into the atmosphere each year.

Using CO2 to boost oil production onshore is far safer and faster than new offshore exploration and development.  Safer because we would be increasing oil production from existing oil fields that have already been explored, drilled, and fully developed.  And faster because we could start pumping right away, and not wait a decade or more to develop new areas offshore, while ensuring that CO2 is permanently sequestered. 

Operators of these oil fields have decades of experience and data, which also can make these geologic formations very good candidates for carbon sequestration.

Producing more oil with CO2 from onshore oil fields could yield ten times more oil than the American Petroleum Institute (API) projects is likely to come from new offshore exploration.  Gulf Coast states alone have more onshore potential with CO2-enhanced oil production than exploring in new areas of the Gulf.  API estimates that only 286,000 barrels of oil per day would be produced by 2030 from new offshore areas, 64,000 barrels of which would come from the Gulf of Mexico.  Assessments of the potential for CO2-enhanced oil recovery indicate that 3 million barrels per day could be produced by 2030, more than 10 times the potential of new offshore development and almost a third of what we import today.  Of that potential, 175,000 barrels per day could come from onshore fields in the Gulf Coast states of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, almost three times what API estimates from drilling new areas in the Gulf of Mexico.

What’s the catch?  Recovering this onshore oil is possible only with ample, affordable supplies of CO2.  And ample supplies of CO2 is only possible with comprehensive energy and climate legislation with incentives for capturing CO2 from power plants and industrial facilities and a cap on carbon emissions that makes low-carbon energy sources profitable.

Any form of oil production has risks, of course, and we should take every precaution to minimize those risks, but as we wean our country off of its dangerous dependence on oil, we should prioritize sources that pose the lowest possible risks to the environment and our economic and national security.

The solution to our dependence on unsafe sources of oil—whether it’s drilling offshore, ripping up forests in Canada for tar sands or importing oil from dangerous parts of the world—is getting much more mileage from the oil we do use and getting more oil from the oil fields we have already drilled.

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