The skinny on drilling in ANWR

There's some good information at Northwest Republican today about drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. Of note is the size of the refuge vs. the size of the actual drilling area.

Dare!PDX notes that ANWR is 19 million acres, which he says is about one-third the size of Oregon. More specifically, check out this map of Oregon's counties, and include every county west of the Cascades, plus Hood River and Wasco counties, and you have the equivalent of ANWR.

Now, narrow the focus to the Coastal Plain of ANWR, which is where the drilling would occur. This is 2,300 square miles, or less than 1.5 million acres. This is the equivalent of Clackamas and Multnomah Counties.

Portland International Airport is 458 acres, which Dare!PDX claims is more than the size of the "low footprint oil rig" that would be built. That's three one-hundredths of one percent of the size of the coastal plain! (I've seen other sources that say a drilling operation would use closer to 2,000 acres, but that's still only one-tenth of one percent.)

So why all the fuss about an operation the size of PDX in an area the size of Western Oregon? Oh, that's right, it would "only" produce somewhere between 4 and 12 billion barrels of oil (I've seen bigger numbers, but we'll stick with those for argument's sake). At our current consumption, that's well under a decade of oil use.

So what? If it helps us use less Saudi and Venezuelan oil, and gives us a window to explore other energy sources, why the debate? Because some oil company might make some money? God forbid.