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Permalink Reply by Krkyoldhag on September 30, 2012 at 10:46

Follow the money.  But remember when you say "no more foreign oil"  you have to figure in that a lot of the oil drilled for and refined here in usa is foreign owned oil.  So do you mean "no more imported oil" or "no more foreign owned oil"?

Would you advocate actions that would drive the price of resources so high here that consumers who are already stretched to the max could not fuel their cars or warm their houses?

Its complicated.

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Permalink Reply by Paul Patel on October 1, 2012 at 5:37

I mean no more imported oil.

How is that Brazil has cut off its dependence on imported oil.  20% of their fuel is from oil drilled in Brazil (including off shore) and 80% is from a sugar cane source (ethanol).  Brazil does not let OPEC dictate the price per oil.

Couldn't we do the same.  In addition we have an abundant amount of natural gas.  So I feel that can cost can be about the same if not lower.

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Permalink Reply by Max on October 1, 2012 at 8:00

Brazil is not the US, we use 10X the oil.  They also have more oil than we do. 

Oil

Brazil is the world's 15th largest oil producer. Up to 1997, the oil monopoly belonged to Petróleo Brasileiro S.A. (Petrobras). As of today, more than 50 oil companies are engaged in oil exploration.^[1] The only global oil producer is Petrobras, with output of more than 2 million barrels (320,000 m³) of oil equivalent per day. It is also a major distributor of oil products, and owns oil refineries and oil tankers.^[5]

In 2006, Brazil had 11.2 billion barrels (1.78×10⁹ m³) the second-largest proven oil reserves in South America after Venezuela. The vast majority of proven reserves are located at Campos and Santos offshore basins on the southeast coast of Brazil.^[5] In November 2007, Petrobras announced that it believes the offshore Tupi oil field has between 5 and 8 billion barrels (1.3×10⁹ m³) of recoverable light oil and neighbouring fields may even contain more, which all in all could result in Brazil becoming one of the largest producers of oil in the world.^[6]

Brazil is a net exporter of oil since 2011.^[7] However, the country still imports some light oil from the Middle East, because several refineries, built in the 1960s and 1970s under the military government, are not suited to process the heavy oil in Brazilian reserves, discovered decades later.

Transpetro, a wholly owned subsidiary of Petrobras, operates a cru

 

Oil consumption;

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/...

 

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Permalink Reply by Hopeful About Natural Gas on October 1, 2012 at 8:35

It won't happen. too many powerful interests want us to keep importing oil, mostly from Canada, but also the Middle East.

I used to hope that we could end our dependence on OPEC oil, but we do not have the political will to do it.

It's both a problem of the left and the right. We in the center are getting run over.

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Permalink Reply by P.G. on October 1, 2012 at 12:55

Yep...all about the money....they won't even stop using grain for ethanol even though there is going to be a severe shortage due to a poor crop...heaven knows what that is going to do to food prices....they just don't care....common sense is dead..

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Permalink Reply by Krkyoldhag on October 2, 2012 at 2:15

I made the Ragbrai Bike ride across Iowa  West to East from river to river...and all along the way it was "corn on the right Beans on the left", hundreds and hundreds of miles of corn.  And I learned that the big part of it is for Ethanol not food.

Think about it..all those huge agri corporations holding those contracts for that corn for fuel ..and what would happen to their business if the government subsidies and the sales of that corn for fuel stopped? 

This might be a key to why Iowa is such a "battleground" for votes...those agri guys know that if Republicans win then drilling will open up and (I hope) Ethanol will be history. I have not heard that mentioned anywhere.

Follow the money. And there is real money in those corn crops.

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Permalink Reply by Max on October 2, 2012 at 4:12

Krkyoldhag, I can't help to believe that if we were sitting on an ocean of oil like some of the other countries, drilling would not have declined along with our oil reserves, Republican or Democrat.

Ethanol subsidies sounded like a good thing when gas was headed to $5 gal.  

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