Energy Security
Let’s not export the facts from discussion about gasoline prices
The recent rise in gasoline prices has resulted in a rise of misplaced explanations about the reasons behind it. The latest of these came this week from Bill O’Reilly, who argued that oil companies are to blame because they’re purposefully taking gasoline and diesel out of the U.S. market and exporting them overseas to “make bigger profits.” While his rationale may make for an entertaining conspiracy theory, the facts just don’t support it. The U.S. actually has a surplus of gasoline, diesel and other petroleum products.
The facts about Keystone XL
Yesterday, President Obama announced that he had rejected the permit for the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. The decision came despite the State Department’s rigorous study showing that the Keystone XL pipeline would pose no undue risks to people or the environment – neither by the type of crude it would be carrying, nor by the safety of the pipeline itself.
Mandating the impossible: The EPA and cellulosic ethanol
Here’s a New Year’s resolution worth making: Let’s not mandate the impossible. Unfortunately, the Environmental Protection Agency did just that last week, setting new quotas for 2012 that will require the nation’s refiners to add 8.65 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol to America’s fuel supplies. The only catch: America doesn’t have the cellulosic ethanol to meet that standard.
Access to U.S. energy = U.S. investment
Last week, the oil and gas industry once again “walked the talk” about investing in U.S. energy supplies. On Wednesday, the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management held the first federal offshore lease sale since the Macondo well blowout in April 2010. The 20 companies participating in the sale ended up paying almost $340 million to the U.S. government for the right to explore leases in the western Gulf of Mexico offshore Texas.
How many gallons of gasoline would it take to charge an iPhone?
This may seem like a strange question to ask, considering iPhones obviously are charged with electricity, not gasoline. But the answer speaks to why gasoline and other liquid fuels will remain an important part of the energy mix in the future. In ExxonMobil’s recently released Outlook for Energy, we predict that by 2040, about 90 percent of the global transportation fleet will still be powered by liquid petroleum fuels – that is, gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel.
Pipeline politics hurt U.S. jobs
Washington, D.C., has once again decided to put the short-term jobs of politicians ahead of the long-term needs of U.S. workers. The latest bit of evidence comes from the State Department’s decision to stop progress on the Keystone XL pipeline – one of the most important updates to America’s energy infrastructure in decades.
