Is this guy completely crazy?

brideymcbriderson

Paul Ryan is a Republican Congressman from a Wisconsin district neighboring mine. He has these commercials on TV proclaiming that the U.S. has more oil than the entire Middle East. So I checked his website, and sure enough, there it is. http://www.ryanforcongress.com/Energy.aspx

In the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the Outer Continental Shelf, and the Intermountain West, we have more oil under our ground than all Middle East countries combined.

Now, I've been watching those T. Boone Pickens commercials, and I'm pretty sure that if we had that much oil, ol' T. Boone would have already gone after it. According to this New York Times story, the U.S. has only 3 percent of the world's known oil reserves, and the Persian Gulf produces 18 percent of the world's oil.

Am I missing something? I feel like if we really did have more oil than the entire Middle East, that would have been mentioned between chants of "Drill, baby, drill," but I haven't heard this coming from anywhere else. Is this guy as crazy as I think he is?

yeah4me

He's talking about something called Oil Shale, which is primarily found in the Rocky Mountain basin. ?Some large portion of it is on government-owned land.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/21/business/21shale.html

The problem is that no one has figured out a cost effective and environmentally-sound way to use it yet. ?Which is not to say that it can't be done.

brideymcbriderson

Thanks. I just skimmed that article, but I'm going to read the whole thing later. This guy's TV commercial makes it sounds like we have regular ol' oil in abundance under our own soil but that the government won't allow us to drill for it. On his website, he doesn't once mention Oil Shale. I knew that just didn't sound right.