North And South America Poised To Become Important Players In The Oil Market

The Washington Post:

LOMA LA LATA, Argentina — In a desertlike stretch of scrub grass and red buttes, oil companies are punching holes in the ground in search of what might be one of the biggest recent discoveries in the Americas: enough gas and oil to make a country known for beef and the tango an important energy player.

Read the whole story at The Washington Post

Comments

[Michael Kittredge]

10:46 PM on 05/29/2012

And then electric cars became more affordable and with longer lasting batteries before needing a charge, and none of this mattered. Someday.

[frank1946]

07:51 PM on 05/28/2012

Why have we Bankrupted the USA on Oil Imports when we could have simply supplied
our own needs ?

Been this way for 40 years, why ?

[SwiftJonathan]

12:55 AM on 05/29/2012

Because we could NOT have supplied our own needs. And we still can't. And we won't be supplying them in the future, either. Yes, the answer is that simple.

[Michael Kittredge]

10:43 PM on 05/29/2012

I don't know where you get your strange nonsensical ideas from. The USA has not bankrupted itself importing oil. Distribution companies pay for the oil, which they sell to consumers. We don't have subsidized oil in this country, we the people pay for it. And pay more with state and federal taxes tacked on.

And we have not had the production capabilities to supply our entire demand - it takes time and tons of start up capital to explore, locate, estimate amount to see if there is enough in an area to make it worth it, set up the rigs, extract, refine. Our production has increased a lot this past decade. But it doesn't happen overnight, it's a slow gradual process.

[Iammadashell]

09:58 AM on 05/28/2012

Hey ! everybody what about the rollback of gas prices at the pumps on this holiday weekend, lets give President Obama some credit,right?

[wmnorton]

01:50 AM on 05/29/2012

No, lets point out that the Tepublicans were lying when they said Obama was responsible for the increase in the price of gasoline. So The Democrats will tell the truth and say it wasn't because of anything Obama did. He could have forced the price down by releasing some of the Strategic Petroleum Reseve but he didn't do that, he also could have brought on the anti- speculator regulations, but he didn't do that either. We can point out that even after 4 years that the price of gasoline is still cheaper than the peak price under GWB. Of course part of the problem when your in a polical contest is that the Tepublican are good at lying and Democrats usually are compelled by their morals to tell the truth.

[jcolvin325]

08:00 AM on 05/28/2012

Great news. Drill baby drill. Cheap energy is what drives the U.S.

[SwiftJonathan]

12:56 AM on 05/29/2012

Where is that cheap energy, again? For sure not from all the drilling activity in the US... or anywhere else. At best, the more we drill, the more money we will have to spend on drilling, i.e. the more expensive oil production will become, which will put an ever higher floor under the oil market.

[Roosevelt Democrat]

02:56 AM on 05/28/2012

2 points!

This is wonderful news for future generations!

Oil is such a wonderful chemical resource we should not burn it for transportation!

[RealistBC]

10:30 PM on 05/27/2012

The difficulty of getting these small deposits isn't uptimately going to be worth the cost. Better to convert now (like the Pentagon already is) rather than remain strung out on something we need to stop using.

[William Hunter Duncan]

12:53 PM on 05/27/2012

Does anyone at the Washington Post, or Huffpost remember the tech or housing bubble? Americans will apparently believe anything, as long as it is a promise of increased riches. The information about the mirage that was the housing bubble was there for anyone to find, as early as 2003-4. Read the Energy Bulletin or The Oil Drum, and you can find all the information you need, about the mirage of fracking technology. If you don't know what EROEI means, you don't know what you are talking about, when it comes to oil. And if you don't know the reality about oil, then you are setting yourself up for a very harsh fall.

www.offthegridmpls.blogspot.com

[SwiftJonathan]

04:33 PM on 05/27/2012

What's new about Americans setting themselves up for a very harsh fall? We've been playing that game, at least, since Vietnam... and it may not be a coincidence that that's also roughly the time frame that defines our complete failure to develop a viable energy policy.

[JPETERB]

01:01 PM on 05/28/2012

The USA is THE MAJOR FACTOR in the fossil fuel scam and particularly the petroleum cartel and it's global players. The USA has wasted the vast majority of the world's most toxic and limited resource on a inefficient national personal transportation system, the private owned but publicly subsidized automobile.

We keep oil commodity prices high by our fruitless 'ever growing demand' and unregulated capital manipulation of the supply of an ever diminishing and finite natural resource. The MBA business class and the average American driver seems willfully unaware of the math and history involved in this war to (instantaneously in historical terms) waste a complex and toxic resource. Along with the willful ignorance of the certainty of near term damage to the planet. Such that all humanity (99%) will loose more fundamental natural services and goods then the few (1%) could ever pay back with their non-convertible fossil derived capital.

[MSROADKILL612]

02:04 AM on 05/27/2012

this is a total shill for frackers - we r rushing headlong into something w/ untold possible consequences - to glut the market even more due to greed

[Scurvydog74]

01:37 AM on 05/27/2012

There are 3,000 drilling permits that have been authorized in the US that have not been touched. There is no shortage of oil or shortage of places to drill in the America. Big Oil has every one of you by the testicles and the harder they squeeze, the dimmer your brains go. They pay big bucks to their repudlican errand boys to sing the siren's song of supply shortage and environmentalist persecution. And you buy it hook, line and stinker. There is no industry in America making more money or getting a bigger hand-out from the taxpayers than Big Oil.

[SwiftJonathan]

04:38 PM on 05/27/2012

Just because there is a place to drill, does not mean that is has economically viable oil or natural gas resources under it. I could give oil companies a permission to drill in my back yard today... but I can guarantee you that absolutely nobody will take me up on it... my back yard doesn't sit above a geological formation with any chance for containing oil or gas.

They have been drilling in North Dakota for decades... and hardly made a dime. It took oil prices above $60 per barrel to make North Dakota a literal gold mine.

[jhuffington]

09:08 PM on 05/26/2012

All I can say is I'm glad they are going to drill in Patagonia. I was afraid we weren't going to be able to destroy every pristine ecosystem in the world. Hopefully when it's done it can look like Midland.

[MSROADKILL612]

02:05 AM on 05/27/2012

loser - how did u not figure that out

[notdarkyet]

06:16 PM on 05/26/2012

Nationalize our oil. People screamed "drill baby drill" and now that we are drilling more than ever, gas is higher than ever because it is sold on the open market. Smart countries own their resources, they don't give them for peanuts to foreign companies and multi billion dollar corporations.

[June25]

07:27 PM on 05/26/2012

It wasn't the countries with nationalized oil industries that developed new drilling methods.Those countries have falling production because their industries are run by political cronies.

[SwiftJonathan]

10:51 PM on 05/26/2012

KSA uses the latest technology to exploit their oil fields, and, yet, they haven't managed to boost production. And that country amounts for about 10% of the world's oil supply, alone...

Sometime reality is a really nasty person.

[Rickyrab]

12:50 AM on 05/27/2012

maybe that's a good reason FOR nationalizing our oil industry... the less we sell, the more we keep in the ground. The more we keep in the ground, the more we have for later on.

[john yunker]

06:08 PM on 05/26/2012

Yea we could call it APIC..American Petroleum Import countries like we do any way..We have oil in Alaska that we sell to Japan, why not bring it home to the lower 48..Because then they would be accused of pillaging OUR countrys' national resourses by selling our own oil to us at such a large profit and getting rich from it. So they sell it somewhere else and let another company that company has stock in sell it to us instead.. Big Racket

[June25]

07:31 PM on 05/26/2012

Because Japan is closer then the oil refineries in the gulf.Nobody thinks twice about putting gas in your car but try to put a refinery in the Northwest and you will have a riot of protest.

[SwiftJonathan]

10:49 PM on 05/26/2012

So you don't mind that KSA is selling most of their oil to you, instead of keeping it for themselves... however, when the US sells a couple of barrels here and there to another country, all hell breaks loose.

:-)

[john yunker]

09:58 AM on 05/27/2012

No I just mind that our own resources are being used to make just a few very wealthy. Those resoures should be  either given mostly back to the american public or taxed so they do not line just a few pockets with gold.The rich do not own the Americas yet they  take the wealth from our soil and do nothing but try to avoid paying their FAIR share to keep our Military, who is mostly manned by the poor and middle classes, strong,yet they will use their lives as meaningless assets to keep themselves free as well.they also use the poor as mindless slaves who they treat like fodder, to enrich themselves as well. Yet when one is disabled in some way they want to disgard that life to a worthless existance. No one said life is fair, yet our founding fathers, The rich also, felt that all men are created equal. Those peasant farmers fought their asses of to make this country free from tyranny, yet the rich and powerful of today seee themselves as ABOVE IT ALL..

[Erdgeist]

05:17 PM on 05/26/2012

My late cousin, a lawyer who worked for a number of oil companies; who was also a geologist, told me, essentially, based on seismographic testing, there is more oil in the North Slope of Alaska than in Saudi Arabia.

[June25]

07:38 PM on 05/26/2012

When President Carter first approved the Alaskan Pipeline the plan was to drill a area for 20 years and to keep moving on for the next 100 years.We're still stuck drilling the same fields we were drilling back in 1980.Part of the reason for the last pipeline oil spill was because all the additional water rusted the inside of the pipe.

[SwiftJonathan]

10:47 PM on 05/26/2012

If we put all the untapped oil together that people have heard about from relatives (especially those that are lawyer-geologists... how likely a career is that?), it would make for a Mars size planet.

Sadly, not everything you hear from relatives is actually true...

:-)

[satyrday]

10:00 AM on 05/27/2012

My cousin agrees.

[SwiftJonathan]

05:16 PM on 05/26/2012

These smallish oil fields hardly make up for the loss of the world's largest oil producing fields and the fact that major oil producers like Saudi Arabia are using ever more of their own oil domestically and have ever less left to export.

World oil production has been essentially flat for the last eight years and much of that has been expensive oil from tar sands replacing cheap conventional oil. Together with the large increase of demand in China and other developing countries, the price of oil can only go one way: up.

[sco8d]

03:39 PM on 05/26/2012

The combination of increased efficiency in our cars and appliances, wind,solar and fracking is the only way to become energy independent and we are finally doing that. Imagine if we had started this 10 years ago instead of heading off to the middle east for war? How much money and lives would have been saved? A new mega windmill is going up every week in the north country of N.Y. where I live and electrical contractors a specializing in solar and advertising on T.V. It's got to be an all of the above approach and it's working and creating good jobs here.