Politics

President Barack Obama is Lying about American Oil Reserves

If you believe what the President Barack Obama is saying, drilling for more oil won’t affect the price of gasoline, and there aren’t enough oil reserves in the United States to satisfy or growing energy needs.

I’m not opposed to securing all the foreign oil reserves we can. The sooner the Islamic nations are out of oil the sooner we will see the end of the Islamic goal of a worldwide caliphate. So let’s keep buying up Arab oil.

But while we’re draining the oil reserves out of the Middle East, we should be developing our own domestic supply. But to hear President Barack Obama’s take on American oil reserves, we don’t have much of it. Here’s what he said when he was running for president:

“Even if you opened up every square inch of our land and our coasts to drilling, America still has only 3% of the world’s oil reserves.”

How can anyone know this? “All reserve estimates involve uncertainty, depending on the amount of reliable geologic and engineering data available and the interpretation of those data.”

There is a long history of claims that we are running out of oil. Consider the following from the Manhattan Institute for Public Policy:

“Almost since the first discoveries of oil in the U.S. in 1859, people have been saying we’re running out. In 1874, the state geologist of the nation’s leading oil producer, Pennsylvania, warned the U.S. had enough oil to last just four years. In 1914, the federal government said we had a ten-year supply. The government announced in 1940 that reserves would be depleted within a decade and a half. The Club of Rome made similar claims in the 1970s.”

In an April 18, 1977 speech, President Carter said that “Within ten years we would not be able to import enough oil — from any country, at any acceptable price.”1

President Obama wants to go back to the malaise years of the Carter administration and turn America into a nation dependent on foreign interests. In reality, the United States has more than 22 billion barrels of proved reserves. “Proved reserves” are what companies are currently extracting. This does not count untapped supplies. Consider the following from Investor’s Business Daily:

  • At least 86 billion barrels of oil in the Outer Continental Shelf yet to be discovered, according to the government’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.
  • About 24 billion barrels in shale deposits in the lower 48 states, according to EIA.
  • Up to 2 billion barrels of oil in shale deposits in Alaska’s North Slope, says the U.S. Geological Survey.
  • Up to 12 billion barrels in ANWR, according to the USGS.
  • As much as 19 billion barrels in the Utah tar sands, according to the Bureau of Land Management.
  • Then, there’s the massive Green River Formation in Wyoming, which according to the USGS contains a stunning 1.4 trillion barrels of oil shale — a type of oil released from sedimentary rock after it’s heated.

Obama, who’s said to be our nation’s “smartest president,” certainly knows all of this. So why isn’t he telling the American people the oil that’s available to us? Why is he lying to us? Does he want to make America vulnerable to a foreign takeover?

  1. Jimmy Carter, “The President’s Proposed Energy Policy,” 18 April 1977. Vital Speeches of the Day, Vol. XXXXIII, No. 14, May 1, 1977, 418–420. []
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