Posted by
Steve on Monday, September 15, 2008 5:00:22 PM
Hurricane Ivan roared into Texas and up into the middle of the country leaving wreckage in its wake. It damaged a few drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico and the refineries will be closed for a few more days. This highlights the problem we have in this country with drilling and with refining.
First with drilling, having a few drilling rigs out of commission for a while will cause severe problems in producing enough oil for the country. If we had oil being produced on the east coast, the west coast and in the Gulf of Mexico, we would not have a problem with a few drilling rigs being out of commission for a while. The Democrats are talking up their drilling plan as the plan to end our dependence on foreign oil. The only problem with their plan is it leaves out the areas where we know the biggest oil reserves are. That is like knowing that there is a thick vein of gold in mountain A, but you leave it out of your plans to dig for gold. You may still find gold, but you could find more gold and find it quicker if you included mountain A in your plans. That is the problem with the Democrat plan. They leave out the areas around Florida and California. Both areas are known to have extremely large amounts of oil. Leaving them out is not good planning. Hopefully, the Republicans in Congress will be able to put some language into any drilling bill that would authorize drilling where there are known oil reserves.
Second, refining capacity is severely cramped in this country. The refining capacity has barely kept up with demand. The biggest reason for this is the fact that there has not been a new refinery built in the US in over 30 years. They have enlarged the capacity and efficiency of the refineries we do have, but no new ones. The other problem with the refining in this country is that the refining is all done in one region of the country. That means when we have a Hurricane like Ike, we have a problem with refining capacity. The refineries will be offline for about a week to ten days. That is much too long when the refineries barely keep up with demand as it is. This will put them behind the proverbial eight ball for the near future. We need to increase our refining capacity in more areas than the Gulf Coast area of Texas and Louisiana. Smaller refineries spread around the country would be a wonderful addition to our use of petroleum.
The other problem the Gulf Coast people now have is a loss of electricity. The Gulf Coast areas use primarily oil fueled electric power plants. If we had nuclear power plants spread around the country, the power grid would able to withstand a dip from one sector. Right now, if all power lines to the Gulf Coast region were restored there would not be enough power. We need to increase our output of electricity. The most environmentally friendly way to do that is to build nuclear power plants. They produce cheap clean electricity. We do not have enough of these. We have plenty of the coal and oil power plants; we need clean, nuclear plants.
One other thing that has not been noted during this natural disaster along the Gulf Coast is the lack of oil spills. Even though some oil drilling platforms were damaged, no oil leaked from any platform in the entire Gulf of Mexico. That says something for the technology that we use today. If any oil had leaked from any of the platforms, you can bet that the news media would have had a field day. Since they did not report anything about the oil platforms, other than that some were damaged, we can assume that the current platforms worked well.
Unfortunately for the country, the message will have completely passed the Democrats by. They will completely miss the message that Ike left with us. The other thing to note is that there is no big problem like there was in New Orleans and Louisiana when Katrina hit. There are Republican Governors in Texas and Louisiana now. They handled the situation quickly and efficiently. There are bound to have been problems, there were people involved. But, overall things worked very well. It tells the country if you want to be prepared for problems ahead, do not elect a Democrat.