Newt writes about a campaign promise President Obama has already broken pertaining to openness in government vis-à-vis President Bush’s Administration. Newt zeros in on the difficulty of getting American citizen’s opinion about alternate avenues of oil production being used within the USA nation.
America’s dependence on foreign oil is ridiculous! Does the public realize the North American Continent has the means of producing oil that is potentially a higher quality than the oil that is drilled underground then extracted for the refinery?
One method is Oil Sands:
Oil sands are a mixture of sand/clays, bitumen and water. Each grain of oil sand has three layers: a layer of water surrounding the grain of sand, with bitumen surrounding the water to form the outer layer. The bitumen is much heavier than other crude oils. Oil sands are often referred to as tar sands or bituminous sands – all these terms are equivalent.
Oil sands exploration incorporates both mining ("conventional" methods) and in-situ (“non-conventional”) production methods. Mining of the oil sands involves excavation of the bitumen-rich sand using open pit mining methods. This is the most efficient method of extraction when there are large deposits of bitumen with little overburden. In-situ methods involve processing the oil sand deposit so that the bitumen is removed while the sand remains in place. These methods are used for oil sands that are too deep to support surface mining operations to an economical degree. (oilsands.infomine.com)
According to Janet Levy America receives 45% of its oil from Middle Eastern nations. Did you read that? That is nearly 50%!
Also According to Janet Levy America receives 21% of its imported oil from Canada. On a per-nation basis Canada is the single largest supplier of oil to the USA. Again Janet Levy claims this percentage more than doubles the second largest supplying nation in Saudi Arabia. (Levy does not write from who in the Middle East we receive oil from to make up the rest of the 45%.)
Check this out: A significant portion of that Canadian oil is developed from Oil Sands.
HELLO! America has both Oil Sands (Canada – North America) and Oil Shale (USA – North America) to effectively NOT depend on one barrel of foreign oil.
Wow! According to Rep Young of Alaska, during the 1973 Arab oil embargo we imported 39% of our oil from foreign sources. That embargo inspired the building of the Alaska oil pipeline. That was completed in 1976. Today in 2008 we important nearly 70% of our oil from foreign sources. There has been no energy legislation since 1973! What's Up!
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