Today (Sept. 11), terrorists have forced on us a war by coming into our home and killing friends and neighbors. This is the time for analyzing US energy policy or, say the lack of it, that forces this nation to depend so heavily on crude from the very rogue nations the president was speaking about; some of those also finance and house many such terrorists.
While US citizens in general love cheap oil and gas, many of our oil and gas companies were forced to go overseas to explore for such "cheap energy sources." Then the US Congress passed the AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax) laws that killed the entrepreneurial independents at home. Basically, our politicians killed the domestic energy industry.
Let's look forward to lessen our dependence on foreign oil by doing these:
- Encourage serious exploration on 8-10 million basin-acres of unexplored and underexplored areas within the United States that might contain 40 billion bbl of oil and large volumes of gas.
- Allow the acquisition of geological and geophysical data to be expensed.
- Introduce a price benchmarking system for domestically produced oil and gas so that OPEC price control does not cause havoc to the US energy picture and to R&D investment.
- Let the FTC apply a very severe test for M&A that serves only Wall Street and a greedy top few managers.
- Educate citizens about the energy industry and the nation's vulnerability to blackmail or embargoellipseand citizens' role in conservation and priority of domestic E&P.
- More aggressive roles by professional institutions such as AAPG, AIPN, SEG, IPAA, HGS, and others-except API, which is run by majors and has a different agenda.
- Educate politicians in Washington DC and state capitals as well as bankers and the rest of the financial world about the energy industry-about sustaining supply through exploration and production.
We geologists face dangers every day while traveling worldwide in search of cheap energy, and today's terror should tell the nation to wake up and think on how to reduce imports of Middle Eastern crude. Terrorists use petrodollars to kill and maim our citizens.
Let's pray for those victims and their families today and work harder to produce more energy at home.
S.K. Bhattacharjee
Houston
