Tire Inflation, Basic Information Literacy Skills, and the Modern Conservative Mind

by: Mike Caulfield

Mon Aug 04, 2008 at 17:17:54 PM EDT

And they've all pulled out their calculators, hoping for their next Rathergate moment.

It's been a long time since they broke any stories, I can understand why they're excited. But reading how they go about calculating the effect of offshore drilling on daily production gives some insight into why our country is so screwed up. Here's the National Review Online:

I'm doing a back-of-the-envelope calculation of how many gallons of gasoline that would save, daily and annually. But one of the problems of trying to contrast that total with the amount of oil produced domestically is that because of bans on exploration, it's tough to get a solid number of how many gallons of gasoline could be produced, daily and annually, by additional drilling.

Really? I could have sworn the government had an office that put out just those kind of reports. Like this report, which tells you exactly how many barrels offshore drilling would produce.

Confused by the lack of information, he finally finds a report by private entity, then goes on to make a bunch of super-neat assumptions.

So we have one third of those commuters - 43 million - saving .153 gallons per day, or almost 6.58 million gallons.

...

That is a nice healthy amount, even if getting 100 percent tire inflation compliance in the country is an impossible dream.

But this 2006 report from the federal Minerals Management Service puts the recoverable oil from the Outer Continental Shelf at just under 86 billion barrels of oil; one barrel of crude oil yields approximately 19.6 gallons of finished motor gasoline.

So it would indeed be nice if Americans pumped up their tires sufficiently, and we started seeing some of that 4.9 million to 6.5 million gallons saved per day. But why it has to be an either/or in regards to the 1.6 trillion gallons of gasoline in the OCS (not even getting into ANWR), as Obama insists, is not clear.

OK, let's put aside the fact that this "either/or" choice is a straw man created by the writer. Can you explain why gallons saved per day is compared to total reserves of the OCS? That's not even an apples and oranges comparison. That's comparing daily apple consumption to the number of apples likely to be on trees in the U.S. for all time.

Here's my brilliant idea. Let's use the government projections for actual oil production (not oil reserves) of the OCS model vs. reference and compare it to oil consumption.

Get it? Production per day as offset by a change in consumption per day. A consumption to production ratio. Econ 101, dude.

Well, using my superpower called "reading a government report", I come to this projected figure from the Energy Information Administration:

For the lower 48 OCS, annual crude oil production in 2030 is projected to be 7 percent higher-2.4 million barrels per day in the OCS access case compared with 2.2 million barrels per day in the reference case (Figure 20).

So that's an increase of 0.2 million barrels a day in the OCS model.

So I multiply that figure (200,000) by gallons in a barrel (i'll take his word here and call it 19.6), and voila, I come up with this figure:

3.92 million gallons a day from OCS drilling

Compared to his number of gallons saved by tire inflation (which is probably equally bogus, but I can't fix everything):

4.9 million to 6.5 million gallons

Even on the low end of the estimate (which is suspect anyway because it tracks commuter miles in a really roundabout way), the NRO has to favor Obama's estimate.

I actually want to avoid the tire inflation debate in some ways -- the real key to driving efficiency  in a number of studies has been reducing aggressive acceleration, and the effects of that are far better than tire inflation. And of course, once we get into increasing CAFE standards, you're talking the equivalent of many OCS's coming online.

But to have any sort of discussion we have to start with a number of barrels the OCS will produce, and we have to understand that production does not equal reserves divided by years.

The National Review's frantic search for information, where it never occurs to them once that maybe the government commissions reports on such things so they can make better informed decisions -- this is to me the perfect example of  the modern conservative mind.

After all, why in the world would the government be producing nonpartisan reports to help with decision making? That would be treating government more than politics, and how could that be?