[Vision2020] Palin wrongly suggests Congress bans oil exports

[No Weatherman]

Ms. Lund:

Respectfully, do you even have a modicum of knowledge about any one of
the subjects you post on?

Do you even have a clue?


On Sat, Oct 25, 2008 at 3:26 PM, Saundra Lund <sslund_2007 at verizon.net> wrote:
> Palin wrongly suggests Congress bans oil exports
> By H. JOSEF HEBERT
> Associated Press Writer
> Published: Saturday, Oct. 25, 2008
>
> WASHINGTON -- Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, touted by GOP presidential candidate
> John McCain as his expert on energy, seemed to have problems Thursday
> explaining whether the government bans oil exports - especially from her
> state's North Slope fields.
>
> A questioner at a town hall-style meeting in Wisconsin said he had heard
> that at least 75 percent of the oil drilled in Alaska was being sold to
> China and said, if true, he would like to know why.
>
> "No. It's not 75 percent of our oil being exported," Palin said, suggesting
> some of Alaska's oil, in fact, may be going abroad but not that much.
>
> "In fact," she added, "Congress is pretty strict on, um, export bans of oil
> and gas especially."
>
> No Alaska oil has been exported since 2004, and little if any since 2000,
> according to the Energy Information Administration and the Congressional
> Research Service.
>
> And Congress has never imposed outright bans on oil exports. Congress
> prohibited exports of Alaska oil in 1973 when the Alaska oil pipeline was
> built. But that ban was lifted in 1996 when there were large volumes of
> Alaska oil coming down from the North Slope and U.S. demand was soft.
>
> The Alaska ban has never been reinstated.
>
> "It's been discussed recently as part of talk about drilling on the Outer
> Continental Shelf," said Bill Wicker, a spokesman for the Senate Energy and
> Natural Resources Committee. But he said there's been no active legislation
> that would reinstate the Alaska ban or any thought on Capitol Hill of
> banning other U.S. oil or natural gas exports.
>
> Natural gas exports must be approved by the Energy Department under a 1938
> law, although such authorization for gas shipments to Mexico, Canada and
> Japan have been granted for many years. The Energy Department recently
> indicated it is ready to renew authorization for shipping Alaska liquefied
> natural gas, or LNG, to Japan.
>
> There are no such restrictions when it comes to oil.
>
> Between 1996 and 2004, about 95 million barrels of North Slope oil, roughly
> 2.7 percent of Alaska's production, was exported to South Korea, Japan,
> China and Taiwan, according to the Energy Information Administration.
>
> There have been little or no oil exports since 2000, according to the
> Congressional Research Service. The EIA said there have been no Alaska oil
> exports since 2004.
>
> The United States exports a relatively small amount of oil and petroleum
> production as Palin acknowledged as part of her answer, which largely
> focused on the need for more domestic drilling.
>
> "It's not a huge portion of any domestic supply being exported," Palin said
> toward the end of her response, and seemed to contradict her earlier view
> that Congress bans exports.
>
> Last year, the United States exported 523 million barrels of petroleum
> products, of which only a small amount was crude oil. That year it imported
> more than 4.7 billion barrels of oil and oil products.
>
> The United States exported 822 billion cubic feet of natural gas, almost all
> by pipeline to Canada and Mexico, and a small amount of liquefied natural
> gas, or LNG, to Japan and Mexico in 2007, according to the EIA.
>
> http://www.sacbee.com/839/story/1302427.html
>
>
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