President Obama’s Dishonest Clean Energy Campaign Ad

19 January 2012

Obama clean energy ad airing in Va.

A new ad from President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign that touts his energy and ethics record began airing in Virginia this week even as Republican blasted him over a decision to reject a permit for a proposed oil pipeline from Canada.

The 30-second spot (see below) makes a case that Obama’s policies have promoted clean energy jobs and reduced the nation’s dependence on foreign oil while enduring unfounded attacks funded by wealthy energy industry officials.

[...]

LINK

This campaign ad is nothing but a pack of lies.

Lie #1

Lie #1: “Secretive oil billionaires attacking President Obama”… The Koch brothers have been anything but secretive in their attacks on President Obama.

Lie #2

Lie #2: The ad implies that President Obama has created 2.7 million “clean energy industry” jobs.

The 2.7 million figure is purportedly cited from a Brookings report. The report said that there currently are 2.7 million jobs in America that “produce goods and services with an environmental benefit.”

The clean economy, which employs some 2.7 million workers, encompasses a signifi cant number of jobs in establishments spread across a diverse group of industries. (Page 4)

The report says that the “clean economy establishments added half a million jobs between 2003 and 2010.” So… Obama didn’t even “create” half a million “clean energy jobs.” He didn’t even create half a million clean economy jobs. The Brookings report refers to “clean economy” not “clean energy” jobs. The vast majority of the “clean economy” jobs are not in energy… And almost all of those jobs were created before Obama took office.

More than 82% of the “clean economy” jobs listed in the report have nothing to do with energy production…

Waste Management & Treatment … 386,116 … 14%
Public Mass Transit … 350,547 … 13%
Conservation … 314,983 … 12%
Energy Saving Building Materials … 161,896 … 6%
Regulation & Compliance … 141,890 … 5%
Professional Environmental Services … 141,046 … 5%
Organic Food & Farming … 129,956 … 5%
Recycling & Reuse … 129,252 … 5%
Green Consumer Products … 77,264 … 3%
Green Building Materials … 76,577 … 3%
HVAC … 73,600 … 3%
Sustainable Forestry Products … 61,054 … 2%
Recycled Content Products … 59,712 … 2%
Green Architecture … 56,190 … 2%
Air & Water Purification … 24,930 … 1%
Green Chemical Products … 22,622 … 1%
Total … 2,207,635 … 82%

Lie #3

Lie #3: The ad implies that President Obama somehow played a role in the increase in US domestic oil production over the last few years… That is beyond ridiculous! The plays and prospects from which the production growth was derived were worked up, leased, drilled and plumbed-up for production over the last decade or more. The effects of Obama’s disastrous anti-drilling policies won’t show up in production data for quite some time.

Obama’s anti-drilling policies began in 2009 and were ramped up in 2010. This is either the most amazingly arrogant lie to ever come out of this jackass’ mouth or an example of incredible ignorance of the oil & gas industry and energy in general.

The increase in US oil production has come from two main sources:

1) Shale plays like the Bakken.

The Bakken shale play has mostly been developed on private property. Very little of the shale plays have been developed on Federal lands – And the Obama administration has actively sought to further restrict development on Federal lands. Apart from the EPA, regulation and obstruction of these sorts of plays are mostly in the hands of State gov’ts.

2) Deepwater Gulf of Mexico discoveries.

The deepwater discoveries that have been brought on line over the last three years were discovered long before Obama took office… Many were discovered while Clinton was still in office. Construction and installation of the production facilities began long before Obama took office. On top of that, much of the increase in production was the result of the ongoing recovery from hurricanes Rita (2005), Katrina (2005) and Ike (2008).

Over the last two years, the Obama administration has almost paralyzed operations in the Gulf of Mexico with an unlawful permitorium and has aggressively tried to hamper the shale plays with fraudulent EPA attacks on fracking and unlawful efforts to make BLM lands unavailable…

This is all anyone ever needs to know about President Obama’s energy policy…

Addendum

The Institute for Energy Research has a good post on this subject… LINK

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This entry was posted on January 20, 2012 at 13:02 and is filed under Energy Science and Policy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “President Obama’s Dishonest Clean Energy Campaign Ad”

Russell C Says:
January 24, 2012 at 12:33 | Reply
Dave,

I just read Anthony Watt’s reproduction of this at his site. It particularly caught my eye because of the “Lie #1: “Secretive oil billionaires attacking….”

By all means, continue debunking claims made by enviro-activists about alleged climate effects and other errors like you have here, but when presented with the claim that skeptic climate scientists are in a conspiracy with big oil to confuse the public, please know that it also is something that is literally unsupportable – not simply an omnipresent accusation, but one that was apparently fabricated by a small group of enviro-activists back in the early- mid-’90s. I had my own guest post at WUWT last June on this specific topic, “The End is Near for Faith in AGW” http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/25/the-end-is-near-for-faith-in-agw/ and my most recent piece was a guest post at Steve Milloy’s JunkScience, Monumental fault in manmade global warming notion hiding in plain sight” http://junkscience.com/2011/12/24/monumental-fault-in-manmade-global-warming-notion-hiding-in-plain-sight/

One of the larger unreported problems with AGW is the manner in which promoters of the issue had to thwart criticisms of skeptic scientists from the start, and their only means of defending AGW was to say its critics were corrupted by the fossil fuel industry. When that accusation is exposed for the fabrication it is, the public will wonder why the mainstream media couldn’t bring itself to dig deeper into all its obvious problems years ago. If they had done their jobs back then, skeptic scientists would have been hailed as whistleblowers on the IPCC and we wouldn’t even be talking about this now!
David Middleton Says:
January 25, 2012 at 09:45 | Reply
Rob Dekker says:
January 25, 2012 at 1:22 am
Larry said I hope this turns out to be that there is even more recoverable oil in Monterrey than EIA thinks (which is the case with the Bakken field, or so it seems). But of course, Barack the Usurper will indeed try to prevent folks from drilling there.

Larry, with all due respect, but the Monterrey (and Bakken) “recoverable oil” you are talking about is in fact at this point in time not “recoverable” at all. It’s embedded in rock, and oil companies simply have not found any thechnological way to extract it in any economically “recoverable” way. Not to mention that in the case of Monterrey, this rock is also situated under water, which makes it even harder. None of that has anything to do with American energy policy, not anything with Obama as president.

The Monterey Shale is primarily onshore and it is a well-established play…

“Almost all the oil in California has been sourced by the Monterey,” said AAPG member Marc Kamerling, senior geologist at Denver-based Venoco Inc. “Only a small percentage has come from other source rocks.”

To put this in perspective, the Monterey has sourced producing giants such as the Kern River, Elk Hills and Midway-Sunset fields, to name a few.

It’s the source rock for about 37 to 38 billion barrels in conventional traps such as sandstones, according to Kamerling. All told, it’s estimated to contain more than 500 billion barrels of oil in place.

Along with the copious amounts of Monterey oil being produced from conventional reservoirs, there’s also production from the shale itself. In fact, the rock produced in the Santa Maria Basin as far back as 1900.

AAPG Explorer, Nov. 2010

The only new thing is the application of horizontal completions and multi-stage fracking. The new technologies have vastly increased the recoverability of the oil in shale formations like the Bakken and Monterey.

Rob Dekker says:
January 25, 2012 at 1:22 am

It appears that Obama became the victim of simple ad hominems here on WUWT, without sort of reason of any sort of common sense about reality.

When you find an economical way to extract oil from oil shale rock, you let us know, OK ?

We’ve been economically extracting oil from shale* for over 100 years. The Bakken, Monterey and Eagle Ford oil shales have become much more economically attractive because of the new drilling and completion technologies. (*Technically speaking, most shale plays are comprised of a combintation of shale, fine-grained sandstone, siltstone and marl.)

Even the Green River oil shale could be economically developed, if the gov’t would get out of the way. The Green River formation oil shale has more than 1 trillion barrels of recoverable oil just in the Piceance Basin of Colorado.

There are at least 1.8 trillion barrels of undiscovered technically recoverable oil in just the Green River formation… DOE

Oil shale deposits like the Green River formation (technically a marl) are currently economic at sustained oil prices of $54/bbl, possibly as low as $35/bbl… DOE

Shell estimates that they could be producing 500,000 barrels per day from the Picenance Basin with a very small footprint using an in-situ recovery process, summarized by Rand here…

Technical Viability and Commercial Readiness (pp 18-24)

Shell has tested its in-situ process at a very small scale on Shell’s private holdings in the Piceance Basin. The energy yield of the extracted liquid and gas is equal to that predicted by the standardized assay test.13 The heating energy required for this process equals about one-sixth the energy value of the extracted product. These tests have indicated that the process may be technically and economically viable.

This approach requires no subsurface mining and thus may be capable of achieving high resource recovery in the deepest and thickest portions of the U.S. oil shale resource. Most important, the Shell in-situ process can be implemented without the massive disturbance to land that would be caused by the only other method capable of high energy/resource recovery—namely, deep surface mining combined with surface retorting. The footprint of this approach is exceptionally small. When applied to the thickest oil shale deposits of the Piceance Basin, drilling in about 150 acres per year could support sustained production of a half-million barrels of oil per day and 500 billion cubic feet per year of natural gas.

[…]

Once oil shale development reaches the production growth stage, how fast and how large the industry grows will depend on the economic competitiveness of shale derived oil with other liquid fuels and on how the issues raised in Chapter Five are ultimately resolved. If long lead-time activities are started in the prior stage, the first follow-on commercial operations could begin production within four years. Counting from the start of the production growth stage and assuming that 200,000 barrels per day of increased production capacity can be added each year, total production would reach 1 million barrels per day in seven years, 2 million barrels per day in 12 years, and 3 million barrels in 17 years.

Assuming a 12-yr lead time to reach the production growth stage, it will take ~30 years to reach 3 million barrels per day. If production continued to grow at a rate of 1 million BOPD every 5 year, oil shale production from just the Piceance Basin could reach 15 million BOPD by the end of this century.

The hydrocarbon characteristics of the the oil shales of the Green River formation in the Piceance Basin are superior to those of the Athabasca oil sands. The hydrocarbon areal density is about 13 times that of the Athabasca deposits. The Green River hydrocarbons are not technically “oil;” it’s a form of kerogen. But, for or refining purposes, it’s oil. It will be booked as oil, just like the Athabasca tar sand oil is. It’s a high-grade refinery feedstock…

“Kerogen can be converted to superior quality jet fuel, #2 diesel, and other high value by-products.”

Canada is currently producing ~ 1 million barrels of oil per day from Athabasca oil sand deposits. They expect to increase that to 2 million barrels per day over the next decade. The Green River oil shale deposits in the Piceance basin could easily outperform Athabasca within a decade and with a much smaller environmental footprint.

Athabasca oil sands are currently economically competitive with the OPEC basket. Green River formation oil shales are superior, by a wide margin, to Athabasca oil sands. The Green River oil shales would yield 100,000 bbl of 38° API sweet refinery feed per 160,000 tons of ore & overburden. Athabasca oil sands yield 100,000 bbl of 34° sweet refinery feed per 430,000 tons of ore & overburden. The unconventional oil is actually very light and very sweet; the OPEC Basket is actually heavier (32.7° API).

Athabasca is economically competitive now. Green River could be economically competitive now. Peak oil my @$$!

The only obstacles to US energy security are environmental ~~terrorists~~ activist and the US government.

See this publications for further reading on oil & gas shale plays:
Review of Emerging Resources: U.S. Shale Gas and Shale Oil Plays
David Middleton Says:
January 25, 2012 at 16:23 | Reply
Jim G says:
January 25, 2012 at 12:39 pm
[...]

I believe that the oligopoly in the oil industry also allows price fixing without any need for illegal communications to establish the price.

Abject nonsense.

The “oil industry” has zero direct control over oil & gas prices. We can only affect supply. When prices are high, we make more money and we spend more money trying to increase our production. When prices are low, we make less money and are forces to curtail spending.

Prolonged low natural gas and high oil prices have caused Chesapeake Energy to redirect CapEx from dry gas plays to oil or liquid-rich gas plays…

Chesapeake cuts operated dry gas drilling rig count

01/23/2012
By Paula Dittrick
OGJ Senior Staff Writer

Chesapeake Energy Corp. announced plans to cut its operated dry gas drilling rig count to 24 rigs, a decline of 50 rigs from its 2011 average operated dry gas rig count, citing “the lowest natural gas prices in the past 10 years.” The drilling reductions will be made in US unconventional gas plays.

The company intends to redirect capital savings to its liquids-rich plays. Under the plan announced Jan. 23, Chesapeake will reduce its gross operated gas production by up to 1 bcfd. The company said it is deferring new dry gas well completions and pipeline connections where possible.

[...]

Oil & Gas Journal

This is text book supply and demand.

Jim G says:
Even when the price of crude goes down gasoline and heating fuel does not.

More abject nonesense.

The prices may not go up and down on the same day; but they are highly correlated.

Jim G says:
There is always an excuse for why supply and demand is not working. There are plenty of liars in the corporate world to go along with those in government. I have seen it at the board room level and know it for a fact.

Even more abject nonsense.

I’ve been in the oil industry for 31 years, the last 5 as a VP, and I’ve never seen anything to indicate that unethical, dishonest, illegal or corrupt business practices were the norm.

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