Posted by
Bob B on Tuesday, September 30, 2008 5:20:13 PM
Oil
Brian Schweizer (D), Governor of Montana,
"The US uses 25% of the worlds energy but has only 3% of the worlds reserves.”
Technically true but misleading.
The oil industry classifies reserves in categories including Proven, Probable and Unproven. Reserves don’t become Proven until wells have been drilled and daily production rates are available to extrapolate. There has been no drilling in ANWR so none of that oil is included as Proven reserves attributable to the US.
So we have the oil but it does not show up in the statistics. In fact, the U.S. has more petroleum in the ground than the entire world has consumed since it started burning gasoline in the 19th century.
Beware of politicians bearing statistics, by any Party
Speaking of Statistics
Did you know it has been shown that 86.7% of all statistics are just made up.
Speaking of oil
Did you know oil companies do not set the price of a barrel of oil, neither does OPEC. The commodity futures auction market price is the key of which all oil is traded. OPEC influences the price by varying supply. Oil companies like Exxon Mobil and Shell have little individual input to pricing as they are not members of a cartel like OPEC and do not vary production in order to influence price. They go flat out all the time for maximum personal benefit.