Things are going very, very, very well for my secret source, Mr. Big Oil. At our liquid lunch recently, he explained to me how offshore drilling in Virginia is a side show at best.
No one knows how much oil is really out there. Existing estimates show that if all the oil off the East Coast were tapped, it would last the U.S. maybe six months.
What will Virginia really get out of it? Who knows, despite the pandering of prominent state Republicans and President Bush’s call to end a drilling moratorium that has lasted nearly three decades.
Mr. Big Oil points out that Virginia will actually get little from any projects because of the way royalties and littoral boundaries are set up. One wonders anyway why there hasn’t been a significant oil project in the state since the 1950s. And if anything actually goes today, it won’t start operations until maybe 2020. Who knows what the energy demand picture will look like then?
The point, Mr. Big Oil says, is to get something, anything, off the East Coast to drive a spike through the heart of the moratorium so Big Oil can concentrate where they really want — namely Alaska, California and the Gulf of Mexico. For the real skinny, read my column in Bacon’s Rebellion.
Peter Galuszka