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Argument: There is not enough US offshore oil to make a difference

Issue Report: US offshore oil drilling

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“New offshore drilling not a quick fix, analysts say”. Boston.com. 20 June 2008 – there is not likely to be enough new American oil to make much of a difference, Kaufmann and others said. About 86 billion barrels of additional oil may lie offshore, according to the US government’s Energy Information Administration. Of that amount, about 18 billion barrels are subject to the moratorium. Much of the rest lies in areas that are too expensive to exploit or that oil companies have not yet tapped for technical reasons, fueling the industry’s desire for fresh territory.

“We’re picking over bones,” said Cathy Landry, a spokeswoman for the American Petroleum Institute. “If we had new acres, we could hypothetically make a big find. We need oil and natural gas in the future.”

But in the best-case scenario, Kaufmann said, the United States could only produce an additional two to four million barrels of offshore oil a day – not enough to shift the global supply-demand balance in a world market that now consumes about 86 million barrels a day and is growing fast. About a quarter of that consumption now occurs in the United States.