Did you ever think we'd get this far? And if you did, what the hell is wrong with you?

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March 10, 2022

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I'm just posting this because I'm almost done with the latest booklet.  At this moment, I just need to find one more news headline dated today and I'll finish editing the rest.  God willing, it'll be available on Kindle by the time I go to bed tonight.  In the meantime, here's the essay I put together today:

Ok, I think I've got the basics for oil production.  It's the Executive branch's fault.

First you have to bid for a lease to a given property just to see if there’s any oil there.  Leasing is massively expensive and takes a lot of time to find out if it has anything.  You pay for that lease even if there’s only dirt, or one drop of oil or if you find fifteen bajillion barrels worth and you don’t know what’s there before you pay for it.

Another expense is the manpower, tools and equipment required for all the years of exploration.  Tens or hundreds of millions spent and you haven’t made a profit yet.

IF you find oil, you’ll need to bid for a permit to drill.  The Departments of Energy, Interior and Labor all stick their nose in.  Biden’s already said “no” to any new permits but if he actually said “yes,” that’s more years of manpower, tools and engineering to pay for the drilling, not to mention all the pipelines needed to move the oil from where you found it to somewhere it can be processed.  All of this is required whether or not you operate the oil well on federal land.

Financing is also required.  Nobody has a billion dollars sitting around to spend on this, they have to deal with investors and banks, they have to pay taxes.  Obviously this is all part of planning for the long term, just to pay for all the leases you look into.

You got a lease ten years ago and started drilling five years ago, now it’s running out of oil.  You got another lease nine years ago and started drilling four years ago, it’s still producing now.  You got another lease eight years ago and started drilling three years ago but it’s already run dry.  You got another lease seven years ago and started drilling two years ago, now you have to deal with the Biden administration who turned you down for drilling the lease you got six years ago.  There’s no chance you’ll get approved for the leases you got five years ago, four years ago, etc., the ones you’ve paid for all this time.

This is just a simplistic example I invented, the real thing is far more complicated.  We haven’t even looked to who approves leases and permits, the Department of Energy or the Interior?  Maybe both, other offices are probably involved too, the Department of Labor?  The Federal Reserve and the Securities and Exchange Commission stick their noses in.  They’re technically not part of the Executive branch but they also don't get to tell the POTUS to piss off, they're going to do their own thing.

This doesn’t count all the rules and regulations dictated by any government office.  Then there’s the individual states.  The federal government might give them orders.  The federal government might say they can do their own thing but if the fed’s suggestions aren’t followed, the state won’t get millions of dollars to fund X, Y or Z.  The state may decide by itself that it doesn’t like oil and impose their own rules and regulation.

There used to be a lot more than 9,000 permits back when the fed approved of them.  They don’t like fracking or shaling either, which many of those permits are for, or just to neighbor sites and make sure no other companies can get involved. 

This is all very very expensive and you have no idea how much oil you’ll find, if any.  But that’s how the government wants it.  It’s more expensive to pump oil from the dust than from rocks, from the ocean rather than on land.  You have to work that out before you even get the lease and stick with it through the extraction.

You’d think the oil companies could work this out, it costs *this* much to produce and sell a barrel of oil to my local gas-station who charges me *that* much money to fill up my car.  What threw me was the comments about not being able to extract until the price reached a certain level.  Who does that?

The costs at McDonalds differ depending on location and product-availability.  A Big Mac costs more than a cheeseburger because it requires more ingredients so more government approval is needed for the individual ingredients.  But there’s no way they could say we can order a cheeseburger but they can’t serve a Big Mac until it costs $20.

Many, perhaps most, government contracts are paid for when the agreement is made.  Funding for a jet is established long before construction begins.  A jet that holds two people and goes mach 3 has a different formula than a jet that holds 120 people and two dozen pallets for several thousand miles.  The process is more complicated than my description but it’s all competitive bidding for a job to build something for government employees.  The process is fundamentally simpler, get the pieces and put them together.

If the jet fails to fly, it’s the company that got the bid’s fault, but they used consistent prices for parts, manpower, etc.  Oil leases/extraction don’t work like that.

But the oil companies have to set the price for the oil when they bid for leases and extractions.  They’re stuck with that price for years no matter what the government does to raise the cost.  It’s not literally deciding that a barrel of oil costs another dollar but it’s close.  Every office gets to add its own rules and regulations, federal and state, they can decide to wait six months before making a decision on permitting or denying a lease or permit, and THE TAXPAYER is the one who has to pay for it all at both ends!

If you have to make this bid and pay so much years in advance before you have any clue if you’ll even find oil, much less how much, much less all the other processing, much less all the government intrusion, well…

Only a liberal would think that was a good idea.  And it should be noted, this all gives a lot of incentive to bribe the government officials.  Funny how that works.

Biden Blames Bankers For His Failures: “There is an Impediment to Production in the United States and It’s Called the Bankers on Wall Street”
March 10, 2022

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