Editorial Comment: I usually would not consider this a technical talk but rather more political, and I have just about finished reviewing the potential for growth of the reserves in North America. In that context, as I delved into Governor Perry's recently announced Energy Plan, I realized that it followed fairly closely the recommendations of the American Petroleum Institute and other Energy Alliances. That it might be therefore be considered the "best shot" of the oil and gas industry to predict how to increase oil and gas production in the United States, I will treat it as such a plan, and have removed my own comments on this post, though I may make some in a following post. I am also using his numbers rather than other values that might be available.

One of the relevant (to this site) facets of the current Republican debates at the start of this presidential race has been the Energy Plan that Governor Perry put forward the other day. Because it actually gets specific about where some of the projected 1.2 million jobs he anticipates adding to the American economy will come from, but given that detail has not got a lot of publicity, I plan to briefly review it here, together with some of the source documents that were used to generate it. Please note that this is not an endorsement, but rather an illustration of one of the suggested plans. Here is the summary illustration.

I have tried in the last two OGPSS posts to show some of the problems that are developing in the flow of oil from Alaska to the rest of the United States. Based on a falling volume of oil produced from the existing fields in the North Slope, the delivery pipeline from Deadhorse to Valdez is approaching levels of flow which will make it more difficult to deliver that oil. There are fields in the region that are still being developed. Alaska_geo has pointed to several developments that are likely to take place over the next year, mainly in exploration but including the development of the Umiat field. One of the mechanisms that the Alaskan Governor has proposed to help encourage industry was to provide a road up to Umiat. The oil reserve for the Umiat field is estimated at 250 mb, but the road may take another five years to finish.

As with the subjects of the last couple of posts not everyone knows where the different places are in Alaska, so since one of the intents with this post is to look at off-shore deposits, let me put up a new map.

The original Prudhoe is a small village with a medieval castle on the south bank of the Tyne, in the northeast of England. It lies in a coal-mining region within five miles of Prudhoe Colliery, where there were, over time, an additional 157 mines and pits and five working seams of coal in the 1860s. Not in itself out of the ordinary, but by 1828 Prudhoe had given its name to a region in Alaska. The naming recognized Admiral Algernon Percy, the first (and only) Baron Prudhoe (after the castle), who later became the fourth Duke of Northumberland. (His dad, the second Duke, led the British retreat from Lexington after the initial battle).

As with the region of Southern Alaska I mentioned last week, Prudhoe Bay would have faded into the obscurity of the original, were it not that oil seeps had been reported there by the Inupiat Eskimo. After the area had been prospected and surveyed between 1901 and 1919, President Warren G. Harding established the Naval Petroleum Reserve No. 4, a region now called the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPR-A) in an adjacent area of the North Slope of Alaska, that region that lies north of the Brooks Range. This led on to further exploration, and on March 13, 1968, the Prudhoe Bay discovery well was announced.

I am going to forgo a discussion of the development of the fields that were then discovered in Prudhoe Bay and its adjacent fields until next time, because the oil reserve in Alaska is only a reserve if it can economically be accessed. Otherwise, it is only a resource and the transition from one to the other, in Alaska, came about with the development of the Alaskan pipeline.

The Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS) is the conduit that makes it possible for oil to flow from Prudhoe Bay some 800.302 miles down to the ice-free port at Valdez. From Valdez it can be shipped by tanker (about 25 a month) to customer refineries further south.

To steal a phrase “It is the best of times, it is the worst of times,” although the rest of the opening to A Tale of Two Cities (“It was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair,”) may also be appropriate. It is also interesting, and will become more so as the new Administration seeks to find a way forward out of the compounding problems that now face it. The WSJ has noted the statements by President-elect Obama earlier:

On the campaign trail, Mr. Obama argued that spending $150 billion over the next decade to boost energy efficiency would help create five million jobs. The jobs would include insulation installers, to make houses more energy-efficient, wind-turbine builders, to displace coal-fired electricity, and construction workers, to build greener buildings and upgrade the electrical grid.

It goes on to note that if renewable energy is only brought on-line to displace conventional coal power, then the net job losses from existing industries may well offset the gains in wind power. That topic brought a discussion in comments a couple of days ago. It is, however, perhaps worth pursuing in a little more detail.