Development of America’s energy resources is essential to ensure ample supplies.
The Gulf Coast region includes some 4,000 offshore platforms plus sub-sea production and pipeline systems in federal waters. The area also hosts dozens of refineries and natural gas processing plants, and hundreds of transportation and marketing facilities. One of the reasons there are so many oil and natural gas facilities in this area is that the nation’s energy policy limits exploration and production to the Central and Western areas of the Gulf of Mexico where people have welcomed energy development.
These operations are safe and environmentally responsible. They are regulated by rigorous standards that ensure their safe operation. Two seasons of devastating hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico have demonstrated the oil and natural gas industry’s ability to develop the nation’s energy resources and, at the same time, protect the environment.
In 2005, just before Hurricanes Katrina and Rita roared through the Gulf, all offshore production platforms and drilling rigs were evacuated to protect workers and production was shut down. As a result, there were no lives lost and no significant offshore spills.
The brutal effects of those back-to-back storms had a significant and historic impact nationwide. They temporarily shut down oil and natural gas production when supplies were already stretched thin by an extraordinarily tight global supply and demand balance. And they devastated the communities that were home to thousands of men and women in the energy industry, many of whom ignored their own hardships and worked around the clock to restore production.
America has abundant energy supplies in other locations as well. Federal lands designated for multiple uses and federal waters in the Eastern Gulf and along our east and west coasts—comprising almost one-third of total U.S. land area and most of the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS)—contain the bulk of America’s undiscovered oil and natural gas.
According to the latest published estimates, the Outer Continental Shelf holds approximately 86 billion barrels of oil and more than 420 trillion cubic feet (TCF) of natural gas. That’s enough oil and natural gas to heat 133 million homes for 50 years. The OCS resources off the lower 48 states alone are enough to provide gasoline for 134 million cars and heating oil for 6.3 million homes for 15 years, plus enough natural gas to maintain current OCS production levels for over 115 years.
The total recoverable resources, using today's technology, are equivalent to the oil resources of Canada and Mexico combined and nearly three times their natural gas resources.