In place of a comprehensive energy plan, Barack Obama blames the oil companies for rising prices, alleging that they have the means to increase our supply of oil if only they would drill on the federal lands they’ve already leased.
“I want you to think about this,” Barack Obama said in Las Vegas last week. “The oil companies have already been given 68 million acres of federal land, both onshore and offshore, to drill. They’re allowed to drill it, and yet they haven’t touched it — 68 million acres that have the potential to nearly double America’s total oil production.”
Today the Wall Street Journal takes on the allegation:
[Obama’s claim] assume[s] that every acre of every lease holds the same amount of oil and gas. [T]he existence of a lease does not guarantee that the geology holds recoverable resources. Brian Kennedy of the Institute for Energy Research quips that, using the same extrapolation, the 9.4 billion acres of the currently nonproducing moon should yield 654 million barrels of oil per day.
