I'm fed up on media mouths not doing their homework. Both sides are viewing the issue and its solution options. I've been in the industry. I was working in it during the gas crises of the 70's and the 80's.

First of all, I am not anti-oil. Their priority is to make a profit. That's how the CEO's keep their desk at headquarters. From their point of view they have 2 options for managing their profits: capital projects or paper investments. When I was working in refineries, there was only one criteria for evaluating a project. "Did it return the threshhold ROI (return on investment)?" The acceptable ROI was the number of points above what the company could receive in the investment sector. Yes, there was some speculative investing. That money was given to the company-owned research labs. However even these labs had departments which were immediately revenue producing. No research for research sake, in Oil Land.

Second: The quoted price of a barrel of oil is for sweet light crude. There are cheeper crude on the market, but SLC is liquid gold for refiners. Because of its chemical properties, it produces the most gasoline and diesel. (Gasoline and diesel / home heating oil are the workhorses of the oil companies' income.)

Light sweet crude is easy to refine. Its chains of carbon molecules are easy to re-configure into gasoline or diesel. That's all refining is: rearranging the long strings or rings of the carbon molecules found in crude oile into the molecules we call gasoline and diesel oil. The chemical reactions are done by either heat or by using catalysists, pressure and hydrogen. Catalytic transformations are expensive to do. Light sweet crude is very easy to refine. It has lots of good molecules!

Alaska crude oil is really crappy stuff. It is classified as heavy sour crude. Sour crude contains significant amount of sulfur molecules tacked onto the carbon molecules.. Sulfur eats up refinery equipment. It loves to nibble on the metal pipes and vessels. It gets in the way of refining processes that use catalysts because it tends to plug up the "holes" that the catalyst has so that the chemistry can take place. Refineries that are designed to refine this high sulfur crude must put the crude oil through additional stages of processing. These processes literally collect up the sulfur molecules and produce elemental sulfur, which has no commercial value and is often practactly goven away or companies are paid to haul it away.

Alaska crude oil is also "heavy." This means that its carbon molecules are tightly bound together. So tightly bound together that after processing, about 25% end up as a synthetic coal that is all carbon. The carbon has very few industrial uses - carbon insulator for the electric components and for steelmaking. It need too high of a temperature to burn. Again, this product is usually given away or the refinery pays to have it hauled off.

So any crude oil from Alaska while it is American crude oil and heavy sour cheaper to buy, it cost more to process and you get 25-30% less product out. Not to mention the energy needed to get the sulfur out and hauling away the refining by-product that can't be sold. Certainly not worth getting out of the ground and making an impact on our gasoline supply.

Lastly, there is a little realized benefit of Jimmy Carter's energy policy. Through increased taxation, monies were channeled into the Department of Energy for grants to develop processes to use America's coal and shale rock as sources for petroleum products. During the war years, Germany developed a process to "liquify" coal for use as diesel oil. South Africa had several of these facilities. Carter's grants to the DOE was making it possible to use US coal as a synthetic natural gas. Another grant that I worked on was to take shale rock and process it to produce a synthetic crude which could then be refined using existing refineries. The project I worked on was a 25% scale production facility outside the fence of a refinery in Utah.

The technology worked! And it could be refined in an existing refinery. Then Reagan was elected. The grants were cut. My project was abandoned and eventually dismantled. The technology design was packed away in boxes and sent to "dead storage." All that work ended up as shredded paper.

Oil Companies won't spend money on new technology. That's not there business objective.  Alternative energy technology is a national security issue and it is a emerging sector which needs government seed money.


One last point: A barrel of crude oil is only 42 gallons of liquid