Ample North American Supplies of Oil & Gas Offer Choice

"It is not a question of do we want more oil and gas? It's where do we want to get it?," he [the API's Martin Durbin] said. _Platts

US oil & gas reserves continue to grow at a rapid rate, even while US oil & gas production has skyrocketed. New technologies of exploration, discovery, and production, have revolutionised North American production of oil & gas. It has become a question of which assets concentrate on first.

Despite the relatively rapid depletion rate of tight oil & gas, for example, the massive supplies of this resource should keep production rates growing for decades. And the huge undersea deposits of oil & gas in the Gulf of Mexico and off North America's East, West, and North coasts, have barely been explored -- much less tapped.

And silently, in the background, the massive potential for conversion of unconventional hydrocarbons into high quality liquid fuels and chemicals, is being perfected and slowly becoming more economical.

The final coup de grace to peak oil doom will be the development of scalable, factory-produced high temperature gas cooled nuclear reactors -- which will expedite the cheap production of liquid fuels, high value chemicals, fertilisers, polymers, and much more, from a wide range cheap and abundant feedstocks.

When asked if such increased access to oil and gas resources could lead to more American jobs, 90% of those polled agreed or somewhat agreed, and by affiliation that was 95% of Republicans agreeing, 91% of independents and 85% of Democrats. The telephone poll of 1,016 registered voters in the U.S. was taken August 9-12 by pollster Harris Interactive. (The poll results details are here.

....proved reserves in the US of crude oil and lease condensate were 25.2 billion barrels at the end of 2010, up 13%, or the largest annual increase since 1977, and reaching the highest total level since 1991, according to Energy Information Administration data. Wet natural gas proved reserves rose 11.9% year-on-year to 317.6 Tcf at the end of 2010. On August 14, the US Geological Survey released new estimates for potential additions to domestic oil and gas reserves from reserve growth in discovered, conventional accumulations, with a total of 32 billion barrels for crude, 291 Tcf for gas, and 10 billion barrels of natural gas liquids.

... there will be more production.... Take the total US production of crude oil and natural gas liquids. For 2010, it was 7.5 million b/d, and for 2020, it could be 9.6 million b/d (reference), 8.8 million b/d (low EUR), 10.3 million b/d (high EUR) or 11.6 million (high TRR). _Platts

Even the high predictions will likely prove too low, should Obama be defeated in November. The US private sector -- including the US energy industry -- has been held stagnant by a malignant uncertainty generated by the anti-business attitudes of Obama and virtually everyone in his administration.

In an atmosphere of greater clarity, with more straightforward and less corrupt rules of doing business, US business and energy are likely to revive in dramatic fashion.