Unused Oil Drilling Licenses??? (Congress, companies, dollars, rating)

[trzlucky]

I was listening to CNBC this morning and they had Senate Majority Leader Steny Hoyer on. He claimed that a large reason that Congress won't authorize drilling in new areas is that there are already large numbers of areas that have received licensing for drilling, but where no drilling has occured. Essentially he is blaming the oil companies for not going after oil that they already have access to.

I've searched for info to support his claims, but haven't been able to find anything. I'm sure he isn't straight-up lying, but I am sure there is more to the story. Does having the licensing mean that there aren't other hurdles that the companies have to go through to do the drilling? Are these areas too expensive to drill?

Anybody have any real insight to this?

[pghquest]

Not sure the answer to your question, but if true, I'm sure whats happening is there are limited number of licenses and those that can drill, buy up the licenses to lock out the competition, but just because they have licenses in hand, this does not mean they have locations where they can drill.

[pghquest]

Interesting to note Oil Drilling & Completion Offshore Magazine: Covering horizontal directional drilling, core drilling, deepwater advances, intelligent completion & more (http://www.offshore-mag.com/drillingandcompletion/?startrow=19&maxrows=36 - broken link)

Shows we are discovering new sources of gas and oil all around the world daily.. well everywhere except the USA

[texdav]

Itrhnik you have to remember that even after the licenses are givenm that it can take years before the drilling starts. ANWR would probaly come on line tenn years after the start of plannig.The leases in the deep gulf of meixcao will not come on line for years and then the price to make it worth while is est to be 100 dollars a barrel.It is much different drilling in these locations than say on land in Texas and Oklahoma.Many of the drilling companies are actually in places like Brizil where the governmnet encourages drilling. Oil companies actually are international companies operating all over the world.These are not the oil comanies of your grandfather or father. If you visit the gulf area were off shore rigs are built and rebuilt;you would see many rigs being worked for use in foreign waters.

[LLLL98]

I saw sort of the same thing on CSpan last night, they were questioning various people on access to oil and other resources, one of them was from the Sierra Club, he said that there is lots of land that does hold access to oil, the licenses have been issued, but there has not been any drilling taking place.
I haven't done any further research today, and I had to switch the station so I didn't see the entire hearing, but I found it very curious.