Among the Democrats most often-used talking points on our current gasoline prices is that even if we found oil tomorrow, it would take five to seven years to get it out of the ground and ten years to get it to market and we can’t even do that because there aren’t any oil rigs available anywhere in the world.

Neither point is true. In fact, we have recent news stories that prove otherwise.

More importantly, what we find in those stories mean that we could very well stop buying oil from some of our most detestable business partners in about a year.

Sweden’s Lundin Oil Company found a deposit of oil and gas it describes as a “world class oil discovery” in the Caspian Sea, not far from some other deposits. The particular block in which they made this find is estimated to have some 800 million barrels of oil, though the company thinks that their find is going to be smaller than the estimates. Still, it’s a pretty big deal.

Now, if you believe the Democrats, Lundin won’t be drilling there until sometime in 2013, at the earliest. But that’s not the plan. The company looks to start drilling on the find in late September of this year.

Five to seven years? No oil rigs available? Apparently that can’t-do attitude doesn’t live in Sweden.

Meanwhile, back in the US of A, it’s entirely possible that we won’t have to do a minute of exploration before we start getting oil from some of the places the left wants to remain strictly off-limits. According to a study quoted in this Wall Street Journal article, we could have crude oil out of the ground from the coast of California “within a year”. We know where the oil is, the water there is shallow, and we’ve actually had the platforms in place since before the ban went into place. There is an estimated 10 billion (yes, billion with a big, fat “B”) barrels of oil off the coast of California. Even if a tenth of that is in those places, that’s enough oil to supply America for seven weeks. I don’t think that ten percent is an unreasonable estimate, either.

In other words, within one year of Congress lifting its ridiculous ban, we stand a very good chance of supplying almost 13.5% of our total oil use every single year.

Let’s look at what that means in terms of oil we won’t have to buy from other countries. According to the Energy Information Administration, we import 2,587,000 barrels of crude oil a day from Saudi
Arabia, Libya, Kuwait, Venezuela, and Russia. I’m fairly sure that we can all agree that not buying oil from these countries is a good thing for us, yes? We want to be energy independent? Well, dig this.

Using the ten percent assumption from earlier, we could produce 2,739,706 barrels of oil every day all by ourselves starting next year, if Congress would only let us. We wouldn’t need to buy a drop from any of those countries, plus we’d be 152,706 barrels to the good every single day. By the end of the year, we’d be completely free of the need to buy oil from the Middle East, Hugo Chavez, and a rapidly dictatorial Russia, and we’d have an extra 55.7 million barrels of oil to boot!

What do you think is going to happen to gas prices when that happens? Oil dropped 9 dollars a barrel just on the news that the President intended to rescind the Executive Order banning drilling off of most of our shore. His speech produced not a single drop of American oil and lifting the EO didn’t open up a single millimeter of ground. Congress still has to act. How far do you think oil will fall if they lift the moratorium? Wouldn’t you like to find out?

Extracting even a small amount of the oil we have available to us is enough to buy us a lot of independence. You have the numbers in front of you. You can see it for yourself. So why are Democrats preventing us from achieving oil independence from tyrants and terrorist-supporters again?

UPDATE: I realize that I’m suggesting that we could pump a billion barrels a year from those fields in California. That’s an awful lot and you could make a serious argument that it’s impossible, considering that our expected 2008 output is a bit over 5 million barrels a day. On the other hand, you could just as easily say that we’re pumping what we can from the places we can and that if we opened up more, we could pump a whole heck of a lot more. I think that’s a fair thing to say at this point. You only work as hard as you have to work. It’s worth noting that Saudi Arabia, in the early 80s, was pumping ten billion barrels a year, so we know it can be done. Our equipment and drilling techniques have improved since then. I don’t think it’s out of the question at all.