Obama's Energy Starvation Agenda: Still Killing Jobs

... the most activist Department of the Interior in our nation's history is trying to change the rules and seize from Exxon Mobil one of the largest oil finds ever in the Gulf of Mexico. I thought that we were a better country than that. The Department of the Interior under the Obama administration has cost this country hundreds of thousands of jobs with their regulatory overreach. Not only has their ban on offshore drilling cost us thousands of jobs, it now appears that they are trying to take back leases from Exxon Mobil on a never before used technicality that will steal billions of dollars of profits from this US corporation that has acted in good faith. _FXStreet

Mr. Obama's agenda of national energy starvation continues to generate an economic recession without end. The Obama regime's relentless attacks against coal, oil sands, shale gas and oil, offshore oil, nuclear, oil shale kerogens, and every conceivable form of energy which is reliable and affordable are helping to destroy the US economy, bit by bit.

The ongoing battle between the Obama - Salazar US Department of the Interior, and Exxon Mobile, over billions of barrels of oil in the Gulf of Mexico Julia field, is a prime example:

ExxonMobil, and its Norwegian partner Statoil made the biggest discovery of all — a field worth a billion barrels of oil — 7,000 feet below sea level in its "Julia" field in 2007.

Exxon tried to keep its discovery secret to keep marauders away. Sadly, the pirates in this instance are U.S. regulators — and their aim is to stop them.

That's right: Instead of marvel at the continuing treasures of the New World, or hail the human ingenuity that made retrieval of so much oil possible, or simply quantify how this discovery will boost U.S. energy security, Interior Department bureaucrats moved instead to snatch Exxon's permits and shut the whole thing down.

...in the Obama era, which demonizes oil production in American waters by American companies, the bureaucrats came up with this permit technicality to effectively expropriate the entire operation.

Exxon is now fighting the permit action in a federal court in Lake Charles, La., calling it "arbitrary," "capricious" and "an abuse of law." It's also a textbook case of the anti-business climate fostered by the Obama administration which should be bending over backward to help Exxon create jobs and profits. _IBD

Obama should be helping Exxon to create new, lucrative US jobs, to help boost the depressed Gulf of Mexico and national economies. Instead, the regime is pursuing -- energy starvation.

Exxon has been keeping this huge oil find a secret, and is only coming out in the open due to the need to sue the Obama regime in court, in order to maintain its right to develop the Julia field.

... the fact that Exxon had made perhaps the largest discovery ever in the Gulf, and one of the largest in the company’s century-long history, wasn’t revealed until it sued the Interior Department in a Lake Charles, La., federal court last week over leases for the oil.

The find was made in 2007, and Exxon and Statoil did disclose it in January 2008, calling it significant. But the possibility of one billion barrels wasn’t spelled out.

... Exxon had kept mum on two 2009 and 2010 discoveries in the Hadrian prospect until it could resume drilling in the area after the end of a months-long exploration moratorium. Last June, after it found a third prospect that confirmed the area contained 700 million barrels of recoverable oil and gas, it announced the finds with great fanfare.

But Exxon’s reluctance to talk openly about the huge 2007 find, known as the Julia field, was also a result of circumstances. The oilthat Exxon found there is in a deeply buried layer of rock known as the Lower Tertiary, which is far from shore and requires large investments in pipelines and remote platforms. So Exxon may not have known for a while how much oil it could get out of the ground, or whether it had the technology to do so, say analysts who have talked with the company _GCaptain

The Julia field likely holds the potential to produce far more than 1 billion barrels, due to the conservative nature of oil geologists when quantifying reserves, and due to the "long tail" phenomenon of oil field production over time.

There are undoubtedly many more "billion barrel fields" sitting around, waiting to be found by competent, ambitious, and "hungry" oil explorers and prospectors. Some of them will be far offshore, such as Julia. Others will be in shallower waters or on land, but perhaps lying deeper beneath the surface.

Over the next 20 years, proven global oil reserves are likely to continue growing. Most of this growth in proved reserves will come from improved drilling and recovery technologies, in previously discovered fields. But as oil exploration technologies continue to develop and improve, expect large new oil field discovery to ramp up once again.