Monday, March 19, 2012

Obama Visit

President Obama will become the first President ever to visit Carlsbad, New Mexico.  He will visit oil producing lands in the area.  There are an abundance of BLM and State Trust Lands in the Permian basin of southeastern New Mexico and activity there is high, if not over hyped.

Here are a few things he should stress while in Eddy County.  This is from the Wilderness Society.


More oil and gas drilling occurs in America every year than anywhere else in the world.
Since 1950, 2.6 million oil and natural gas wells have been drilled in the U.S.
1. By the end of 2009 there were a combined total of 824,847 producing oil and gas wells in the United States.


2. As of the first week in February 2011, there were 1,739 rotary drilling rigs operating in U.S. lands and waters, more than in any other country in the world.


3. America ranks #1 in natural gas production, and #3 in oil production.


4. We are the largest producer of natural gas in the world. and the third-largest producer of oil.


5. Yet, we have only 3.8% of the world’s natural gas reserves, and less than 2% of proven oil reserves.


6. Tens of thousands of wells are drilled every year in the U.S.


At the beginning of the decade 27,000 oil and gas wells were drilled in the U.S. in one year. But last year over 40,000 wells were drilled on American lands and waters.


7. The West’s public lands are already extensively drilled. There are tens of thousands of oil and natural gas wells on public lands, with thousands more currently approved for drilling and tens of thousands more planned for the future.


8. Such intense, localized development makes other uses of the land—hunting, fishing, recreating— difficult if not impossible. Tens of millions of acres of onshore and offshore federal lands are already under lease to oil and gas companies much of it unused. According to Bureau of Land Management (BLM) data, as of FY 2010, 41,000,000 acres of federal public lands were leased for oil and gas development, an area the size of the state of Tennessee.


9. However, 29,000,000 acres of these leases are sitting idle. In addition, over 34 million acres of offshore federal lands are under lease in the Gulf of Mexico alone, where roughly 4,000 platforms produce oil and/or gas.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The Obama campaign has only raised $300 million and something so far and is worried about being outspent by super packs, according to NPR this morning. If he can get his picture in the news standing in front of an oil well it will be worth millions in free publicity.

Will the governor be there to greet him? Maybe after his experience with Jan Brewer in AZ pointing her finger at him he will try to avoid female Republican governors.

Maybe he will stop at one of Carlsbad's non union supermarkets and see how those folks are getting by and ask them if their pay and benefits have been reduced lately. How many of you are underwater on your mortgages? How many are working two jobs? Three?

Here, by the way, is a web page at the United Food and Commercial Workers Union web site where you can see which New Mexico supermarkets are union.

http://nm.aflcio.org/nmfl/index.cfm?action=article&articleID=26ffc262-4a93-4a91-92e4-7cbd090b09c4


Albuquerque and Santa Fe both have some. I don't see any for Carlsbad.