"The President has been traveling on Campaign Tourapalooza 2012 this month and seeking to explain rising oil and gas prices. One of his favorite tag lines has been to say that you “can’t just drill your way to lower gas prices.” (And he’s partly correct there, but more on that later.) But he’s also tossing out another figure when he makes these remarks.
“With only 2% of the world’s oil reserves, we can’t just drill our way to lower gas prices,” he said. “Not when we consume 20% of the world’s oil.”
The U.S. has 22.3 billion barrels of proved reserves, a little less than 2% of the entire world’s proved reserves, according to the Energy Information Administration. But as the EIA explains, proved reserves “are a small subset of recoverable resources,” because they only count oil that companies are currently drilling for in existing fields.
The main problem is that most of these resources are roped off. Just knowing the oil is there comes as little comfort if there are never going to be any leases issued by the government for energy companies to explore. And our ability to access the shale oil – while technically well withing our capability today – will be significantly hamstrung as long as activists continue to fight fracking and horizontal drilling." [Hot Air]
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