Oil And Gas In The Us

Political words, machinations and policies galore cannot disguise US dependence on foreign petroleum and natural gas to keep the country moving. The ever-changing geopolitical scene complicates the pictures as does US willingness to use military force to keep the spigots open. This new book presents and analyses the current issues in this big-money, big-risk and non-trivial field.

This book addresses energy research from four distinct International Political Economy perspectives: energy security, governance, legal and developmental areas. Energy is too important to be neglected by political scientists. Yet, within the mainstream of the discipline energy research still remains a peripheral area of academic enquiry seeking to plug into the discipline’s theoretical debates. The purpose of this book is to assess how existing perspectives fit with our understanding of social science energy research by focusing on the oil and gas dimension.

Contents: (1) Intro. and Background; (2) Legislative Issues; (3) U.S. Oil and Gas Supply and Demand: U.S. Oil, and Natural Gas Markets; Econ. Effects; Greater OCS Access and Supply; (4) Oil and Gas Reserves and Resources in the OCS; Resource Est. and Technological Change; OCS Resource Est.; Resource Est. by Planning Area, and by Water Depth; (5) OCS Leasing Process and Program; (6) OCS Revenues: Revenue Sharing or Not?; Royalty Revenue Est.; Environ. Concerns Assoc. with Offshore Exploration and Develop.; Offshore Areas Currently Protected; General Environ. Regulations and Requirements for Offshore Exploration and Production; (7) Environ. Impact Statements: Oil Spills and Leaks; Seismic Surveys and Industrial Noise. Illus.

The authors of this book assess the prospects for production of oil and gas from U.S. domestic reserves and resources to the year 2000, using different scenarios with varying assumptions about numbers of new discoveries, size of fields, and rates of recovery. Oil production, claim the authors, will decline by at least 17 percent by the end of the c