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America sits on wealth of oil reserves

Wednesday, May 21, 2008 1:38 PM PDT

Editor: Lindsey Williams served as chaplain on the Trans Alaska pipeline project in the '70s and wrote the book “The Energy Non-Crisis.” Through his effectiveness as chaplain, he was allowed into the executive committee that oversaw the Prudhoe Bay project and rubbed elbows with the head honchos within the oil industry.

In his book he describes the oil field that was discovered at Gull Island while the pipeline was being built. The Gull Island reservoir was described as being “larger than the oil field in Saudi Arabia.”

The only problem was that the day the find was going to be announced, the DoD flew in and classified the Gull Island reservoir. With presidents coming and going every 4-8 years, supposedly from different parties, one has to wonder who has the authority to order the Department of Defense to classify an oil discovery that would have eliminated America's dependence on foreign oil?

Another huge oil field was the Eugene Island discovery off the coast of Louisiana. The brief announcement in the late '90s read: “A group of Cornell University scientists led by Chevron tapped into a pool 270 miles south of New Orleans containing at least 15 billion barrels of oil.” Similar massive reservoirs of oil have been discovered off the coast of Florida and at the Covenant oil fields in Central Utah. Only last week, there was the brief announcement of another discovery in the Swanson River area north of Anchorage that test results indicate has five times the oil of Prudhoe Bay.

The fact is, that the world is awash in oil and one of the myths that needs to be dispelled is that petroleum is a fossil fuel. This idea was put forth over a hundred years ago and was put to rest when the Russians began deep drilling in the 1950s.

The Soviets' Kola SG-3 well drilled in the early 1970s went down 40,230 feet, discovering massive amounts of oil. A Russian oil scientist's comment at the time: “Petroleum is absolutely not a fossil fuel, it did not come from decayed dinosaurs and fern branches; it is a chemical process in the heart of the earth whereby the oil is recreating itself.” It is seeping up into the oil fields of the world and most of the oil fields of the world are replenishing themselves.

In hearing of discovery at the Swanson River oil field, Lindsey Williams touched base with some of his former members of the executive committee at the Prudhoe Bay project. He relates: “Retired Atlantic Richfield executive Jim Waller told me last week: “There's only one thing wrong with your book, Lindsey; after you left Prudhoe Bay, we found a number of other huge oil fields, not as big as Gull Island, but very large.”

Ken Fromm, retired senior executive with Atlantic Richfield, related: “We will never release the oil from the Gull Island field until we have the price of crude oil where we want it.” Another contact of Williams related; ‘We want oil to go to $150 a barrel and then we will release the oil fields that we have in Utah and possibly even the one we have in Gull Island.'”

I suppose what interests me most in these statements is the use of the word “we,” which dispels the myth of free enterprise - even though there are different corporate names associated with different oil fields. It should be also noted that Exxon had the highest profits last year of any corporation in the history of the world.

Unfortunately, the energy sector is just the tip of the iceberg in a world that appears to be run by megalomaniacs hell bent on engineered dysfunction and stupidity that stems from insatiable greed and need to control. For the rest of us, we find ourselves in a predicament voiced by George Carlin; “It's a big club, and you ain't in it.”

Gary Jacobucci

Wells

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