Obama, Prince of Denmark: To drill or not to drill

I’ve been meaning to post on this for a while now: amid the posturing and the squabbling over offshore drilling, there was an interesting contradiction in Barack Obama’s acceptance speech a few weeks ago that few people have caught but that’s worth pointing out. I suspect the reason so few people have caught it is that it takes someone in the energy business, like The Thinklings‘ Bill Roberts, to see it:

Tonight, Obama said that drilling is a “stopgap measure”, not a solution. Right after that he said he’s going to promote clean-burning Natural Gas.Which is great, because the company I work for explores for and produces natural gas.But that’s where it gets weird: to get to natural gas you have to drill for it. And there are trillions of cubic feet of it in the outer continental shelf (OCS) that we’ve all been arguing about all this time.It gets even more complicated: It’s extremely common to get BOTH natural gas and oil out of the same wellbore.Sometimes natural gas is on top of the oil, kind of like a “cap” (and water is often under the oil—oil floats on water). So many wells produce all three products—water, gas, and oil. Sometimes the gas is dissolved in the produced oil and is separated when it gets to the surface.But, bottom line—it makes no sense to say no to drilling while simultaneously touting natural gas.I realize this is probably boring to many of you, but because I work with people who do the work to find the darn stuff, I found that to be a pretty interesting comment.

What this shows is that, like most of us (including Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the leadership in Congress), Sen. Obama doesn’t really know much about energy production and the issues related to it. That’s hardly surprising, but it does mean that at a time when energy prices are a major concern in our economy—and when, as John McCain and Sarah Palin have both pointed out more than once, oil and gas imports are a major foreign-policy concern—the Democratic presidential candidate is offering policy prescriptions in this critical area that are based not on actual knowledge of that area but rather on ideology and political convenience. Thus we see him doing things like “saying no to drilling while simultaneously touting natural gas,” just because he doesn’t know enough to know that he’s contradicted himself.This is one of the things which makes Sen. McCain’s choice of Gov. Palin so striking. She’s taken flak from both sides of the aisle for not being broadly and deeply versed in foreign policy and matters of national security, and he’s taken flak for choosing a nominee who lacks that kind of understanding; and there’s no question that she has a lot to learn in that area, and that the wisdom of choosing her as the VP nominee will depend to a considerable extent on her ability to do so quickly. That said, however, what she does have that’s far harder to find is a broad and deep understanding, both at the political level and at the down-and-dirty practical level, of the energy industry, energy policy, and all its manifold ramifications. She knows how to address these issues, and she’s managed to do so without ending up in Big Oil’s pocket, which is probably almost as valuable. At a time when energy policy is critically important both domestically and internationally, when the GOP nominee for President is already more than qualified to handle national-security issues but is not conversant with energy issues, I think Gov. Palin’s expertise in this area is a powerful qualification—and a pointed contrast to the ignorance on the Democratic ticket.