Leftists support regime's cancelation next two rounds of oil leasing by claiming "companies don't need more leases"

Article from May 4th, 2020 (just two years ago!):  

“The average price of regular gasoline in the U.S. increased almost 2 cents from the previous week to $1.79 per gallon, but that was $1.11 *lower* than a year earlier.”  On the Gulf coast the price dropped 2 cents to $1.49 per gallon."

 Remind me again: who was president in May of 2020?

"The average diesel fuel price in the U.S. decreased more than 4 cents to $2.40 per gallon, 77 cents *lower* than a  year earlier."

Remind me again...

August 29, 2019, headline: U.S. oil and gas regulatory rollbacks under President Trump.

"The rollbacks come amid surging oil and gas production that put the United States output ahead of historical leaders’ Saudi Arabia and Russia. In May (2019), the United States pumped a record 12.4 million barrels of oil per day." 

Wait...what are "regulatory rollbacks"?  Democrats and their leaders think punitive regulations have no effect on production of *anything.*  Same with refusing to allow companies to bid to win oil leases in federal waters--at least according to Democrats.  An' duh *proof*--according to the leftist media, is that oil companies have lotsa leases dat dey not drillin' right now!  

To Democrats that absolutely *proves* that oil companies don't need any more leases, "cuz dey ain't usin' duh ones dey gots now."

Dear Democrats:  With one or two exceptions, you know absolutely nothing about oil exploration.  So let me try to put you some knowledge.

Imagine you inherited 10 acres of land, and you have reason to believe that somewhere under that land is a chest of gold coins, worth ten million bucks.  The chest measures three feet on a side, and you are confident it's no more than 500 feet below the surface.  You propose to drill a few 500-foot holes on your ten acres, hoping one of those holes will hit the chest.

So what are the odds any given hole will find the chest?

Well, an acre is 43,560 square feet, and your target could be anywhere in 10 acres.  The chest has a plan area of nine square feet.  So the probability of hitting it are 0.00002, or about one in 50,000.

Fortunately you've found a guy with an unused rig who'll drill as many 500-foot test wells as you like for just $10,000 apiece.

Any of you Democrats think this is a promising investment?

Now to bring this to the real world:  instead of drilling in a pasture, you're drilling in water deeper than the former NY World Trade Center, and having to drill another two MILES below the ocean bottom to find your target--which may not even contain oil.

In drilling a hole in your small pasture a truck-mounted rig would do, but to drill two miles under the ocean floor, in water over a thousand feet deep, requires a drilling setup costing $350,000 per DAY.

As a result, major oil companies don't just punch random holes, but first spend millions "shooting seismic" over hundreds of square miles of ocean, looking for a geologic "structure" that might possibly contain oil.  Processing the results of seismic can cost another million and take two more years.

If a company finds what appears to be a structure it will submit a sealed bid to lease the mineral rights.  Winning bids can top $100 million. Then a company that wins the bid usually tries to put together a partnership with other major companies to bring the cost down to a manageable amount.  

This can take another couple of years.  And at any point the biden regime can (and has) revoked leases already issued, meaning all the money a company has already spent is totally wasted.

Think that might have an effect on a company's willingness to risk millions of dollars?  If not let's keep going:

Only the largest companies can take on the entire cost of a couple of offshore exploratory wells, since those usually don't produce commercial quantities of oil or gas.  But if a smaller company can assemble enough partners, it's time to ask for permission to drill a "prospect" you've already spent millions to assemble.  

But even after a permit is issued, it can be canceled.  Indeed, the biden regime has already canceled drilling permits that had already been issued when Trump was president, just as biden canceled the Keystone-XL pipeline when it was already partly completed.  

Think that might have an effect on a company's willingness to risk millions of dollars?

In any case:  because it typically takes companies over five years from shooting seismic to winning a bid on a prospect they like, to getting a permit, to drilling, they usually have several prospects in various stages of development--which explains why they're not drilling *today* on most of their leases.

Interestingly, the leftist morons who wail about "oil companies shouldn't be able to get more leases cuz they're not drilling on the ones they already have" either know what I've just explained, or could easily find out.  But of course they'd rather just kill the offshore oil business.  

"Cuz we need to stop using fossil fuels!  Cuz dat deadly poison CO2 is fatally warming the planet!  Wait...did we say "warming"?  Sorry, we meant "climate change."

Of course no one has ever proposed a mechanism by which CO2 could possibly *cool* the planet.  The only hypothetical effect of CO2 is warming the climate.  But the watermelons dropped "global warming" after a series of strikingly cold winters started making people think the Leftists were wrong about "warming."

And like magic, the Left junked "warming" for "climate change," since that would let them claim to be right regardless of what actually happened.  And the Mainstream Media didn't skip a beat.