lamont
Contributor
Bill51:Conservative estimates put ANWR reserves at 10.4 billion barrels and the ability to ramp up fairly quickly to 1 MBPD and sustain that for 30 years, so if taking 1.5 MBPD out of production for 30 days can cause a 15% increase in oil prices, I dont see how anyone can claim that adding 1 MBPD for 30 years to the supply side of our oil production can do anything but stabilize prices. Oil traders didnt wait for Katrina to hit before running the prices up, and they wont wait until our new wells are online to bring the prices down.
Markets in the short term are a voting system and in the long term are a weighing system. You can't really pick apart the effects of Katrina and Rita from the fact that oil pulled back to its $50 200-DMA around June and the run up to $70 put it at the top of an upwards channel that had been established in 2001. The techncial analysis of the stock swing can explain all of the price motion over that period. Longer term the fact that WTIC broke through its 200-DMA and violated the uptrend recently probably is indicating that the market is finding the actual weight which includes all the political risk factors, hurricaine risk, current supply and demand, etc. You can't do the kind of analysis though which looks entirely at the 1.5Mbd that got knocked out short term with Katrina and Rita and assume that the 15% price swing which occurred then is an accurate estimate of the markets weight of that event.
I've also never read any estimates of ANWR coming online with 1 Mbd in much less than a decade, which is too little too late.