Oil group: Offshore drilling no quick fix

WASHINGTON — Opening America's coastal waters to oil drilling, as Sen. John McCain urged in an address Tuesday, is unlikely to provide Americans with more oil for at least seven to 10 years.

That's the estimate from the American Petroleum Institute, the oil-industry trade group. Major environmental groups think the increased supply would be at least that distant before arrival, and say it mostly would benefit Big Oil.

"It would take a decade to bring new leases into production, and then they would only line the coffers of the oil industry," said Carl Pope, the Sierra Club's executive director.

Deron Lovaas, senior energy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, noted that even if billions of barrels of oil are available offshore, the United States still will control only a fraction of the world's supply, so energy independence isn't within reach.

"We are just not blessed in this country with enough resources for this to make a big difference," Lovaas said.

McCain, speaking Tuesday in Houston, disagreed.

"We have enormous energy reserves of our own," he said, "and we are gaining the means to use these resources in cleaner, more responsible ways."

In his address he also called for the continued protection of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and a rejection of a windfall-profits tax on oil companies.

The presumed Republican presidential nominee sought to carve some political space between his policy and that of his Democratic rival, Barack Obama, who has backed a windfall tax and called for a greater commitment to alternative fuels.

But McCain also was trying to appeal to environmentalists and some independents by distancing himself from the Bush administration, which has called for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The Arizona Republican argues that increased offshore drilling would help lessen dependence on foreign oil. U.S. oil imports have doubled since 1973, and petroleum products make up about 40 percent of the U.S. trade deficit.

The Interior Department offered a wide range of estimates of how much oil might be within reach of U.S. offshore drilling in a 2006 report. It estimated that the Outer Continental Shelf could hold 115.4 billion barrels. However, it also estimated that recoverable reserves off U.S. coasts in areas now banned from production probably hold only about 19 billion barrels.

The figures differ widely because the higher number is a broader measure that includes "cumulative production, proved and unproved reserves."

The world consumes about 86 million barrels a day. The U.S. share of that is about 20.6 million barrels, 60 percent of them from foreign sources.

One thousand million barrels equals 1 billion, so if there are 19 billion barrels in the areas McCain would open to drilling, that's enough to provide about 920 days, or about 2.5 years, of current U.S. consumption.

Information from the Los Angeles Times is included in this report.

Bush to urge end of coastal drilling ban

WASHINGTON — President Bush, reversing a long-standing position, will call on Congress today to end a federal ban on offshore oil drilling, according to White House officials who say Bush now wants to work with states to determine where drilling should take place.

The move underscores how $4-a-gallon gas has become a major issue in the 2008 presidential campaign, and it comes as a growing number of Republicans are lining up in opposition to the federal ban.

The New York Times