The oil sands hold 171.3 billion barrels of oil in reserve.
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That is especially true if, as posited by Matthew Simmons in his compelling new book, Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy, much of the world's putative reserve oil in Saudi Arabia is not actually there .
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The government bought this oil, which it calls the Northeast Heating Oil Reserve, in late August by trading in 2.8 million barrels of valuable crude and taking the hit for a nasty refining markup.
Which reminds me, what about the roughly one trillion dollars worth of oil we have in reserve?
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Back when the U.S. government ran the giant Elk Hills oil fields in California as a national petroleum reserve, the funding for individual oil wells had to be approved by Congress.
The "get Bush" crowd advocates releasing oil from the strategic petroleum reserve in order to bring market prices back down.
He also wants the Energy Department to release the 2 million barrel petroleum stockpile in the Northeast Home Heating Oil Reserve.
But oil and gas reserve numbers only make sense in the context of a particular set of technologies and pricing levels.
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"Considering the rapid depletion of the world's oil reserve, the heightened global interest in addressing greenhouse gas emissions and the geopolitical complications of global oil supply and demand, " a report by the U.S. Department of Energy concluded.
But the true perpetrator of higher oil prices, the Federal Reserve, stands right in front of us, the smoking gun its easy money policies.
Among the sticking points: a proposal to lift a 1981 ban on offshore oil drilling and open the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve in Alaska for exploration.
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In 1978 an explosion at the Hackberry, La. complex that holds oil for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve killed one worker and burned for days with a fireball that billowed dozens of feet in the air.
Not only is Palin pro-life, she favors drilling for oil and natural gas in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Reserve--something McCain opposes.
Not to be confused with either the Strategic Petroleum Reserve or the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), the desolate 23 million acre NPRA region was first established as an oil reserve for the U.S. Navy in 1923.
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The Strategic Petroleum Reserve was authorized in 1975 and began receiving crude oil in 1977.
Rather a drastic departure from the original economic purpose of the reserve to fill actual or imminent supply gaps in oil markets.
Monday's decline in oil prices follows the release of a transcript of the Federal Reserve's December meeting showing that policymakers disagreed over how long to keep a bond-purchase program in place.
But if American energy producers are able to tap into even a fraction of this supply, our domestic energy production could well outstrip that of Saudi Arabia, which is currently the largest oil producer and exporter of total petroleum liquids in the world with a reserve base estimated around 260 billion barrels.
The state is in a boom, thanks to a major oil find called the Bakken reserve.
After peaking in 2001, production in the North Sea, Europe's largest reserve of oil and gas, plunged.
Another important thing to look at is reserve life index, or how many years of oil remain in proven reserves, at current production rates.
Just yesterday Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said oil prices will make inflation an issue in the coming months.
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The reserve is supposed to kick in when bad weather disrupts the delivery of oil, which in New England travels by barge and truck instead of pipelines.
The worst non-war time inflation in hundreds of years occurred in the decade after the U.S. left the gold standard in 1971 as the Federal Reserve was more biased to promoting growth than containing an oil-shock (sound familiar?).
Indeed, without the recent fall in oil and commodity prices, America's inflation rate would have risen, forcing the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates.
So there were legislations put in place, hard fought legislations, to, for example, reserve some of the oil revenues for future generations, a future generations fund.
Just such an event seems to have occurred in May, with the passage of a bill to halt deliveries of crude oil to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
"I have said and, in fact, supported a congressional resolution that said we should suspend putting more oil into the strategic oil reserve, but the strategic oil reserve I think has to be reserved for a genuine emergency, " he said on July 7.
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