As reported by the International Herald Tribune – a Foreign edition of the New York Times. Tuesday May 9th, 2008
WASHINGTON:
In 1977, the United States and Cuba signed a treaty that evenly divided
the Florida Strait to preserve each country’s economic rights. They
included access to vast underwater oil and gas fields on both sides of
the line.
Now, with energy costs soaring, plans are under way to drill this year, but all on the Cuban side.
With
only modest energy needs and no ability of its own to drill, Cuba has
negotiated lease agreements with China and other energy-hungry
countries to extract resources for themselves and for Cuba.
Cuba’s
drilling plans have been in place for several years, but now that
China, India and others are involved and fuel prices are unusually high, a growing number of lawmakers and business leaders in the United States are starting to complain.
They
argue that the decades-old U.S. ban on drilling in coastal waters is
driving up domestic energy costs and, in this case, is giving two chief
economic competitors to the United States access to energy at its
expense.
“This is the irony of ironies,” Charles Drevna,
executive vice president of the National Petrochemical and Refiners
Association, said of Cuba’s collaborations with China and India.
“We
have chosen to lock up our resources and stand by to be spectators
while these two come in and benefit from things right in our own
backyard,” Drevna said.
The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that
the energy field on Cuba’s side alone may have 4.6 billion barrels of
oil and 9.8 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. That much energy is
equivalent to just a few months of the United States’ total energy
consumption.
The survey does not say how much of an energy
reserve is on the United States’ side of the Florida Strait just north
of Cuba. But almost all of the country’s Outer Continental Shelf,
waters within 200 miles, or 320 kilometers, of shorelines, has been
off-limits to drilling since the early 1980s because of congressional
bans and executive orders.
President George W. Bush, who renewed
the 1977 treaty last December for two years, has cited China’s growing
demand for oil and international efforts to obtain it as prime reasons
for high gasoline prices.
The latest version of the
administration’s national security strategy, issued in March, warned
that China’s leaders were “acting as if they can somehow ‘lock up’
energy supplies around the world.”
To Drevna and others who are
lobbying Congress to end the prohibitions, energy exploration in
coastal waters represents a strong step toward energy independence and
lower prices.
The Interior Department estimates that the Outer
Continental Shelf has more than 115 billion barrels of oil and 633
trillion cubic feet of natural gas available for extraction. At current
levels of consumption, that would satisfy U.S. oil needs for about 16
years and its natural gas needs for about 25 years.
Opponents of
drilling in U.S. waters are equally passionate in their arguments,
saying that drilling for oil off the coast poses environmental risks
and that drilling for finite supplies undermines long-term conservation
solutions.
They also say that modest supplies of additional oil
would not necessarily lower gasoline prices in the United States
because oil is traded on the world market.
But drilling
proponents say the time has come to end the bans, especially with plans
by China and India to capture oil and gas so close to the U.S.
shoreline.
“My fear is for the future of America,” said
Representative John Peterson, Republican of Pennsylvania, who has more
than 160 co-sponsors for a bipartisan bill that would open coastal
waters for natural gas development. “We have a natural gas crisis, and
it’s the biggest threat we have to the American economy.”
Senator
Larry Craig, Republican of Idaho, took narrow aim at the activities
planned for the Florida Strait and recently complained on the Senate
floor, “Red China should not be left to drill for oil within spitting
distance of our shores without competition from U.S. industries.”
Cuba
has divided its side of the Florida Strait into 59 lease areas. As of
the end of February, foreign countries had secured the rights or were
negotiating the rights to 16 of them, according to Cuban government
documents provided by the Cuban Interests Section in Washington.
Kirby
Jones, founder of the U.S. Cuba Trade Association, a group that
promotes U.S. business interests in Cuba, said Cuba had signed
agreements with companies from China, India, Spain and Canada.
At
a recent trade conference in Mexico City arranged by Jones, Cuban
officials invited U.S. oil companies to bid for the other leases on the
Cuban side of the Florida Strait even though drilling in Cuban waters
would violate the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba.
“The main purpose,” Jones said, “was to let the American oil executives know what is happening in Cuba.”
U.S.
oil companies would have a right to bid for Cuban leases under
legislation Craig is drafting. Dan Whiting, his spokesman, said the
measure would seek an exemption like the one created several years ago
for U.S. companies to sell food and medicine to Cuba.
But an
exemption for drilling seems uncertain, given the large number of
lawmakers opposed to any economic relationship with Cuba as long as
Fidel Castro is president.
Craig’s measure would be one of
several Senate bills aimed at drilling in waters off U.S. coastlines.
Two pending measures would approve operations in a small tract of the
Gulf of Mexico, one of the few coastal areas where the government
allows drilling. A separate measure introduced two weeks ago by Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida,
who opposes drilling within 150 miles of Florida’s coastline, would
block renewal of the 1977 treaty and then deny foreign companies access
to U.S. markets if they continued to drill in waters close to Cuba.
Blogger’s
Notes – Let’s see, It ain’t just China, there’s India and Canada that
are looking into Cuba. Tom McClintock lied – time to go put this in a
mailer as a reason why not to drill.
Even Democrat Senator Bill Nelson wrote a bill to address the problem of drilling off the coast of Cuba!
The
Article says that 16 leases have been sold by Cuba – McClintock must
have lied because they aren’t actually drilling yet, just getting ready
to. Of Course on the 68 million acres that have 77,000 holes on them –
we need to declare use it or lose it because 77,000 holes means Oil
companies aren’t drilling the leases they have…
I guess
Charlie Brown needs to do a John Kerry style nuanced differentiation
between the two – it is enough logical gyration to give someone a
headache.