John's Blog

ANWR, CAFE and national security

President Bush clearly believes that drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve is a good way to foster independence from foreign oil. According to FOX NEWS, the President recently said "We could recover more than 10 billion barrels of oil from a small corner of ANWR ... We can now reach all of ANWR's oil by drilling on just 2,000 acres. Developing a small section of ANWR would not only create new jobs but would reduce our dependence on foreign oil by up to a million barrels a day."

And you know what? He's absolutely right. A million barrels a day is certainly a lot of oil. But frankly, there has been so much spin on this issue between the Heritage Foundation and ANWR.com on one side and the Sierra Club and NRDC on the other, it's hard to know who to believe. So I did what any good scientist does: I went looking for data on ANWR.

In doing so, I discovered a few interesting things. First, from approval, it will be 7 to 12 years before the first oil is produced. And it then takes another 3 to 4 years for a field to hit peak production. This means that ANWR oil won't make make any difference for a long time.

Second, I learned that at peak production in 2025, ANWR would reduce foreign oil consumption between 3 and 6 percent. In the mean resource case, dependence on imported oil would be reduced "from 70 percent ... to 66 percent. The high and low oil resource cases project a 2025 oil import dependency of 64 percent and 67 percent, respectively."

Four Percent. For comparision, we got 20.3% of our imported oil from the Persian Gulf in 2003. Assuming 60% of our oil is imported, that means the Persian Gulf supplied a little over 12% of our total consumption in 2003.

Now consider that we could displace Persian Gulf imports entirely by increasing average fuel economy by 3.25 mpg. Of course, oil is fungible commodity, so we'd still buy oil from the mideast - we'd just buy much less. But from 1979 to 1985, a 3.25 mpg improvement was achieved every 32 months. From 1977-85, average fuel economy increased by 7.6 mpg. Even if the fleet average creeps up more slowly due to slow vehicle turnover, increasing CAFE standards would certainly make a very real different in oil consumption. And it certainly won't take until 2025 to make a difference.

But the car makers have already achieved all the easy gains in fuel economy, right? Realistically, no. The auto industry has made plenty of technological advances in the last 20 years - they've just chosen to put those advances exclusively into horsepower rather than fuel efficiency. In 1985, the Corvette jumped from 205 to 230 hp. But today, you can buy a 240hp Minivan.

Do we really need 240hp to get the kids to soccer practice? Certainly, the anemic underpowered cars Detroit made in the mid 80s are gladly forgotten, but surely there has to be a happy compromise. If the spacious 200hp Malibu Maxx can get 32 mpg on the highway, shouldn't Chevy be able to make a 150hp version that breaks 40 mpg? And this doesn't even consider ultraclean hybrids and turbodiesels running domestically produced biodiesel.

In fact, the only reason fuel economy hasn't continued to improve is because Congress hasn't directed the NHTSA to increase CAFE standards signicantly since 1985 when the passenger and truck standards were set at 27.5 and 20.2mpg respectively. Worse yet, the EPA says fuel economy is at a 20 year low, presumably because SUVs and trucks are exempt from the the gas guzzler tax. In 2003, Senators Bond and Levin introduced legislation instructing the NHTSA to increase CAFE standards but did not say by how much. Senator Durbin's amendment that would have raised the truck average to 27.5 and the passenger car average to 40 mpg by 2015 was voted down 32-65. Note that this vote occurred after 9/11 "changed everthing."

So the next time you hear someone talking about drilling in ANWR, ask them to ask their senator why they voted against increasing CAFE standards when it will reduce oil consumption at least 3 times as much as drilling in ANWR, and faster to boot.

Thus, the case against ANWR has nothing to do with the environment whatsoever. It's simply about the most practical way reduce dependance on foreign oil. Besides, money spent on Alaskan oil is still spent on oil, while money saved via fuel savings is money than can be invested or spent elsewhere in the economy.

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