Deconstructing Romney's Energy "Plan" - And The Lobby Groups & Think Tanks That Wrote It

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Anyone who follows the energy press closely will instantly recognize that nearly all of the authors and cited sources are either part of the oil and gas industry, or represent its interests. It relies heavily on this year’s much-ballyhooed forecasts of a team at Citigroup headed by longtime oil bull Ed Morse, which I critiqued in detail in April, and of Leonardo Maugeri, an oil company executive and senior fellow at a BP-funded center at Harvard, which I critiqued in July. I found that neither forecast stood up to close scrutiny (separately, David Strahan discovered that Maugeri got his math wrong), and concluded that both were essentially political salvos, dressed up as authoritative studies, and launched on behalf of the oil and gas industry.

Likewise, the Romney plan’s pretensions to defending states’ rights are naught but a transparent effort to break down all remaining barriers to oil and gas exploration on federal lands. As Eric Lipton and Clifford Krauss put it in the New York Times, “Giving states control over the energy resources on millions of acres of federal lands would be a radical shift from decades of policies under both Democratic and Republican presidents, dating all the way to Theodore Roosevelt, who first set aside vast tracts of territory to preserve wildlife.” In short, as Loren Steffy quipped in the Houston Chronicle, the plan is “nothing more than a sloppy wet kiss to energy companies, who have a lot more sway over state regulators, especially in oil rich states, than they do with federal agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency.”

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Romney’s pitch also contains some whopper distortions of the data. For just one example, consider what Romney said at the unveiling of his plan. According to Philip Rucker in the Washington Post, Romney claimed the U.S. “produces about 15 million barrels of oil a day, about two-thirds of the country’s total demand.” In actuality, the U.S. is currently producing 6.2 million barrels of oil per day, importing a net 7.2 million barrels per day, and consuming 18.7 million barrels per day, according to official EIA data. Some might bring the production number up to around 10 million barrels per day by including corn ethanol, refinery gains, and natural gas liquids, but as I detailed in May, much of those additional liquids aren’t usable as vehicular fuel and aren’t equivalent to oil, and should not be counted as oil.

How Romney got to 15 million barrels, I have no idea, but as most of the country still has zero literacy in oil data, I’m sure he’ll get away with that statement. (In all the press I’ve seen about his plan, no one has critiqued that point. Even legendary oil man T. Boone Pickens decried the problem yesterday on a CBS News interview with Charlie Rose, saying, “They don’t know anything about energy in Washington.”) It’s a particularly strange claim to make since, in Romney’s own document, he cites a 2010 article saying that U.S. oil production was 5 million barrels per day. Does Romney really believe that U.S. oil production has tripled in two years, or does he even understand what he’s saying? In any case, his assertion that (after annexing Canada and Mexico) “by 2020, we’re able to produce somewhere between 23 million and 28 million barrels per day of oil” is utterly absurd. That would be more than the combined output of the world’s top two oil producers, Saudi Arabia and Russia.

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http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2012-08-31/romney%E2%80%99s-energy-plan-follows-money