Alaska offshore oil could add million barrels a day

IBD:

 ...

Each day, the U.S. goes through nearly 20 million barrels of crude. About half is imported. Just beneath the frozen Arctic Ocean on Alaska's north coast resides an oil field that could eventually produce 1 million barrels a day — roughly 10% of what we import and a bit more than 5% of our daily consumption.

Shell will begin exploratory drilling this summer with the blessings of the hostile-to-fossil fuels, no-drill president, who has blocked the Keystone XL pipeline and sat on illegal off-shore drilling moratoriums. Apparently even he can't bring himself to block what a New York Times writer, who has exhaustively reported on the Alaska drilling project, described in a recent blog:

"The plan," writes Clifford Krauss, "offers the promise of greater national energy security, the thinking goes, and economic benefits for Alaskans."

Just how fertile is this Alaskan field? Fortune magazine believes that "Come fall, the big news out of Barrow may well be America's largest offshore oil discovery in a generation."

An additional 1 million barrels a day out of Alaska won't make the U.S. fully energy independent. But with that much extra crude from a domestic source, we could cut our imports from volatile nations such as Venezuela or Nigeria, and trim the amount we import from Saudi Arabia to almost nothing.

Rather than having only a tiny slice of the world's oil, as Obama has claimed, the U.S. just might have the most oil on the globe.

 The Green River Formation in Utah, Colorado and Wyoming alone has enough crude to meet domestic consumption for more than two centuries. 

Add the brimming Bakken Formation that's fueling an economic renaissance in North Dakota, and the Eagle Ford deposits in Texas to the reserves that we've long known about in Texas, Alaska, California and Louisiana, and it's easy to see that America is awash in oil. 

Don't count on the new Alaska crude just yet, though. 

Shell can't sink its test drills until it's issued its final permits by the Interior Department. It has to wait on Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, the man who as a senator in 2008 said he would not approve new offshore drilling even if gasoline hit $10 a gallon....

We will have a better chance of achieving our energy potential if Obama is defeated this fall.  I don't trust him to not block future drilling after the election.  We know that he and Salazar are hostile to domestic energy production from fossil fuels.  With the election behind him if he wins he could block production on federal sites for another four years.