76-15-A4
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Oil II
TranscriptOn my last broadcast I cited the ominous and repeated warnings we heard in 1914, 1920, 1939 and yes, here in 1977 about how soon we were going to run out of oil. I was also pretty critical of the present energy proposals with their emphasis on conservation and their lack of emphasis, or apparently no interest at all, in developing new energy sources. But it's occurred to me that maybe I came off sounding as if I disapproved of conservation and that is hardly accurate. As a matter of fact, not only do I believe in it in general, but particularly with regard to petroleum. But I'm not talking about conservation as a temporary energy crises expedient. Oil is so important to something called the petrochemical industry, we shouldn't be burning it in furnaces at all. It is true that petroleum originally was seen only as a fuel and lubricant. But, today, we have an even greater use for it as the basis for plastics, drugs, medicines and a host of other extremely useful products. Burning it to heat a boiler is as foolish as coming upon a cabin in the frozen wilderness and setting it on fire for temporary warmth, instead of using it for lasting shelter. Granted we can't discontinue present uses of oil over night, but we can do more than we are doing to develop alternative sources of energy. Nuclear power and the breeder reactor are the most likely substitutes, and government is the greatest obstacle to their immediate use. A combine of regulations makes it take almost three times as long to build a nuclear power plant in America than it does elsewhere in the world. At the same time, government controls have reduced our production of petroleum and interfered with exploration leading to development of new producing oil fields. On the previous broadcast I called attention to how many times our government in the past two-thirds of a century has told us we were running out of oil. And how many times new fields were discovered so that the predicted doomsdays never happened. During those years of discovery, government had a policy of encouraging exploration including the much maligned oil depletion tax allowance. In these latter days, however, a punitive attitude toward the oil industry has prevailed. The incentives are gone and a network of regulations makes wildcatting so high risk, few are tempted. About 80 percent of the finding of new oil has been done, not by giant oil companies, but by independents and they have been the hardest hit by government's punitive policies. The new energy proposals do little, or nothing, to reverse the recent course. Certainly they don't take into consideration the lag time in finding new oil. We are all aware that today's biggest source of oil is the OPEC combine of Arab states, but do we remember the search in the sands of Araby went on for eight years before a producing well was found? It took almost as long on Alaska's North Slope. Only recently was the North Sea discovered to be the source of new oil. Most of the world remains to be explored, and will be, if government will only remember how we did it a few years ago. This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening. |
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