i was a tad bored whilst using micrsoft excel today (no! really?) and idly set up a spreadsheet to estimate just how much power america will get in return for destroying one of the last places of beauty on the planet.
with an estimated 16 billion barrels of oil in the ground, i gave dubya the benefit of the doubt (not that i'm implying he might be cooking the figures to make the oil companies' case look better, or anything) and assumed that all 16 billion are there.
with the best will in the world, they're unlikely to actually recover more than 80% of that; but according to Exxon, they will soon have the technology to access up to 92% of the oil in a given field (in my humble opinion, that's crap, but benefit of the doubt and all that - and oh, by the way, one of the new recovery techniques is 'high pressure' drilling - you don't want to know what that does to water-tables and the like).
anyways - 92% of that 16 billion barrels equates to 14.72 billion. the US is currently using a little over 19 million barrels a day - 6.935 billion a year. but it's usage is increasing at between 2.5% and 4.5% annually.
again, giving dubya the benefit of the numbers, i assumed the US would *only* increase oil consumption by 2.5% annually. this means (and every day the drilling gets delayed, the consumption rises), even if they started producing at full capacity today, the alaskan field would only last 2 years and 34 days.
of course, it won't work like that - the alaskan field will provide maybe 25% of the US's oil for 8 years, rather than 100% for 2.
but let's be honest here. it's still crime against all that's sacred.
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