The president made an oblique reference to some of the Republican presidential candidates:

“It’s easy to promise a quick fix when it comes to gas prices. There just isn’t one. Anyone who tells you otherwise – any career politician who promises some three-point plan for two-dollar gas – they’re not looking for a solution. They’re just looking for your vote.”

True. I discussed that in December.

“The answer isn’t just gonna be to drill more, because we’re already drilling more. Under my administration we’re producing more oil here at home than at any time in the last eight years.”

True, but little credit to him. As you can see from the top chart above, that’s true, if just barely. In 2011, the U.S. produced 5.67 million barrels a day (mbpd) of oil, versus 5.42 mbpd in 2004. But, our production is just about dead even with where it was nine years ago, at 5.68 mbpd. And as you can see from the second chart above, production from federal lands is slightly lower than where it was eight years ago. The credit for our increased oil production since President Obama took office owes mainly to renewed drilling in federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico, which resumed when President Bush dropped the longstanding moratorium against it near the end of his term in July 2008, right after oil prices hit a record $147 a barrel. A little over half a million barrels a day of that increased production owes to “tight oil” production from shale on private and state lands, primarily in the Bakken Shale in North Dakota.

“We’ve quadrupled the number of operating oil rigs to a record high.”

True, but nothing to brag about. As I discussed last month, the rig count is so high primarily because the productivity of shale oil wells is so low. You have to drill thousands of wells to come up with a mere half a million barrels per day. The high rig count says more about how poor the remaining prospects are than it does about a renewed vigor for domestic production.

“We’ve opened millions of acres of land, and offshore, to develop more of our domestic resources.”

True, but not pertinent. What the industry really wants is access to more of the federal waters of the Outer Continental Shelf, which I’ll discuss in a moment. Most of the onshore federal lands aren’t actually prospective. As Shell ex-CEO John Hoffmeister said on CNBC in July 2008: “The industry is pursuing the leases it has, but to be blunt, the prospective nature of many of those leases is very low. And you don’t go drill oil where you know it doesn’t exist.”

“We can’t just rely on drilling. Not when we use more than 20 percent of the world’s oil, but still only have just 2 percent of the world’s known oil reserves.”

Basically true. The president is referring here to conventional oil reserves. If one counts our unconventional resources (which are not “proved reserves”), as the oil industry likes to do, then we have significantly more than 2 percent of the world total. However, as I have discussed at length in this column, unconventional resources are not equivalent to conventional oil, and they come at much lower production rates, with significantly — perhaps intolerably — higher prices.

“If we don’t develop other sources of energy, and the technology to use less energy, we’ll continue to be dependent on foreign countries for our energy needs.”

True. The president went on to discuss his support for a transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, which I believe to be of vital importance, and his push for higher fuel economy standards. However, current federal policies aren’t moving nearly quickly enough in that direction, and are aiming far too low. For example, as I explained two weeks ago, we’ll never catch up with Asia in our quest for greater fuel economy. They’ll always be able to outbid us in a future of persistently expensive oil.

“Since I took office our dependence on foreign oil has gone down every single year. In 2010, for the first time in 13 years, less than half the oil we use came from foreign countries.”

True, but nothing to brag about. Our oil imports have declined because our consumption has declined, which is almost entirely a result of the recession, not greater efficiency, and not substantially greater domestic supply.

The fossil fuel industry’s rhetoric

To represent the fossil fuel industry’s rhetoric, I’ll use a new commentary from the Institute for Energy Research, a not-for-profit organization that bills itself as an impartial, unbiased champion of unfettered free markets, but which is funded primarily by the oil industry. Its staff has ties to the Republican Party and other right wing and libertarian organizations like the Koch Foundation, the Cato Institute, and the American Enterprise Institute. IER’s founder and CEO, Robert Bradley Jr., spent 16 years working for Enron, including seven as its director of public policy analysis, and wrote speeches for its CEO, Kenneth Lay. He is a longstanding and outspoken proponent of oil and gas, and an opponent of renewables.

IER made hay of a new report from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) which “was prepared in response to recent requests” from unnamed parties, and summarized our fossil fuel production on federal and Indian lands since 2003.

Fossil fuel (coal, oil, and natural gas) production on Federal and Indian lands is the lowest in the 9 years EIA reports data and is 6 percent less than in fiscal year 2010.

True, but not because of President Obama. Oil and gas production on federal and Indian lands has been in long-term decline — including throughout President Bush’s term in office — due to natural depletion. Coal production is just below where it was in 2003. As I detailed in January, Appalachian coal production has been declining since the early 1990s due to natural depletion, so the remaining coal is increasingly expensive to produce. Coal’s recent decline owes to a combination of the recession, increased requirements for emissions controls on coal-fired power plants, and being undercut by cheap natural gas.

The IER obscures these realities by aggregating all three fuels into a single line chart, and ignoring the issue of natural depletion.

 

To be continued