U.S. Contains Enough Reserves to Fuel Country for Decades, Petroleum Institute Says

U.S. Contains Enough Reserves to Fuel Country for Decades, Petroleum Institute Says.Jack Gerard, president and CEO of the American Petroleum Institute, said that if the Obama administration and Congress would allow the industry access to domestic oil and natural gas reserves, the United States would get the energy it needs, create hundreds of thousands of jobs, and the government would add more than $1.7 trillion to its coffers.“The state of American energy must be strong in order for the American economy to thrive,” said Gerard in a speech at the Newseum on Tuesday. “How then do we strengthen the state of American energy?”“For starters, there are vast reserves of domestic resources that are currently off-limits to exploration and production: billions of barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas ... onshore and off,” Gerard said. “And those estimates are most likely conservative given our past experience and new advanced technologies.”It is estimated that the United States has enough natural gas to fuel 100 percent of current domestic demand for at least 90 years. In addition, the United States produces about 2 billion barrels of crude oil per year, according to the API.“Accessing these U.S. resources could improve our energy security by making us less reliant on others, generate an additional $1.7 trillion in government revenue over the life of the resources and create hundreds of thousands of new jobs,” Gerard said.On the other hand, “Raising taxes on the industry with no increase in access could reduce domestic production by 700,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day (in 2020), sacrifice as many as 170,000 jobs (in 2014), and reduce revenue to the government by billions of dollars annually,” stated the release.The API report, State of American Energy, estimates that the offshore drilling regions in the Gulf of Mexico and off the Atlantic coast could hold as much as $7.6 billion barrels of oil and 58.5 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.On a related note, North Dakota is one of the fastest growing oil producing regions in the United States, where 80 million barrels were produced in 2009, the report states. Also, North Dakota’s unemployment rate is less than four percent, according to Gerard.Hmmmm....If he wanted to destroy America would he do anything different?Read the full story here.