Legislation Needed Now to Allow More Drilling

Skyrocketing gas prices seem to be dominating news headlines alongside discussions about the propriety of increasing oil and natural gas exploration efforts in the United States. Raised in the oil patch of rural Oklahoma, I’m understandably drawn — like a moth to a flame, I am — to those headlines and discussions. So here’s my take on why we need to pass legislation that allows us to increase our nation’s exploration efforts and do it now.

First, some background.

Growing up in Oklahoma during the ’60s and ’70s, my family’s cars could have sported “OIL FEEDS MY FAMILY and PAYS MY TAXES!” bumper stickers like the one shown above, but didn’t. You see, my dad was an independent petroleum geologist who wasn’t the type to wear his political beliefs on his sleeve — or on his back bumper. Instead, he focused upon two objectives:

(1) Generating income to support his family (i.e., a wife and six kids); and

(2) Not wasting any of the income he had generated.

To satisfy the generating-income objective, he found places for oil companies to explore for oil and natural gas. That involved the use of several talents:

First, he used his education — undergraduate and graduate degrees in geology earned using the G.I. Bill at the University of Missouri — to find places beneath the surface of the earth from which he believed one could reasonably expect to be able to extract crude oil and natural gas;

Second, he used library and court house research skills not unlike those he used to complete papers while at Mizzou; and

Third, he used self-taught salesmanship skills to convince others (i.e., land owners and oil company executives) that there was money to be made by drilling on certain tracts of land. Successful salesmanship would result in him negotiating a small fraction of one percent of any revenue that might result from success in the drilling endeavor being pitched.

Decades before it was chic or eco-sensitive, Dad worked out of a home office as a way to minimize expenses related to being self-employed. Mind you, he wasn’t a telecommuter, since home computers, the internet, e-mail and fax machines had not been invented yet.

His office was full of hundreds of maps, each of which contained details of subsurface rock formations. By studying those maps for days at a time and gleaning information about previously-drilled wells from data cards stored in a pre-computer age database (a.k.a., “a massive filing cabinet”) kept in our garage, he was somehow able to determine where an outfit with the right tools could reasonably expect to be able to strike oil or gas. Of course, there was no guarantee.

At best, drilling efforts might yield productive wells once in every four attempts. At worst, 100 attempts between successes was not uncommon drilling techniques used, rock formations involved and other factors influenced outcomes.

Before any drilling took place, however, my dad had to sell his hunch that oil and/or natural gas could be found at a particular site (a.k.a., “the prospect”) to at least two parties: an oil company and a land owner. That task required my dad to make a lot of phone calls, visit plenty of court houses to research land ownership records and take road trips all across the state of Oklahoma.

So where am I going with this? To the simple fact that exploring for oil is not, as some outspoken opponents of fossil fuels might have you believe, as simple as erecting a drilling rig. It sometimes takes years between the time a prospect turns into an active drilling site.

Much like it was when my dad was involved in it, the petroleum exploration business requires a lot of research, coordination and negotiation before any wells are drilled. In short, it requires time.

For the United States to continue the decades-old ban on drilling inside the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (a.k.a., “ANWaR”) and in several off-shore fields is irresponsible and will do nothing to reduce our nation’s dependence upon foreign oil. And time’s a wastin’.

See also: Blogger Calls for Americans to ‘Drill Congress!’

-- Bob McCarty Writes