China is Drilling for Oil in the GUlf Of Mexico !!!11!!SHIFTONE

B

Bonestorm

Thrillhouse
No, they aren't:

WASHINGTON — As Congress has debated energy policy over the past several days, an unusual argument keeps surfacing in support of drilling off the U.S. coastline and in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Why, ask some Republicans, should the United States be thwarted from drilling in its own territory when just 50 miles off the Florida coastline the Chinese government is drilling for oil under Cuban leases?

Yet no one can prove that the Chinese are drilling anywhere off Cuba's shoreline. The China-Cuba connection is "akin to urban legend," said Sen. Mel Martinez, a Republican from Florida who opposes drilling off the coast of his state but who backs exploration in ANWR.

"China is not drilling in Cuba's Gulf of Mexico waters, period," said Jorge Pinon, an energy fellow with the Center for Hemispheric Policy at the University of Miami and an expert in oil exploration in the Gulf of Mexico. Martinez cited Pinon's research when he took to the Senate floor Wednesday to set the record straight.

Even so, the Chinese-drilling-in-Cuba legend has gained momentum and has been swept up in Republican arguments to open up more U.S. territory to domestic production.
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http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/40776.html
 
you should watch cable news GED
China is the second biggest importer behind us and they are going around the world (AFrica) and buying up a huge chunk of the reserves driving up the price.
 
Cuba Plans Offshore Wells Banned in U.S. Waters
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By MICHAEL JANOFSKY
Published: May 9, 2006
WASHINGTON, May 8 — In 1977, the United States and Cuba signed a treaty that evenly divided the Florida Straits to preserve each country's economic rights. They included access to vast underwater oil and gas fields on both sides of the line.

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Map: Offshore Drilling Near Cuba Now, with energy costs soaring, plans are under way to drill this year — but all on the Cuban side.

With only modest energy needs and no ability of its own to drill, Cuba has negotiated lease agreements with China and other energy-hungry countries to extract resources for themselves and for Cuba.

Cuba's drilling plans have been in place for several years, but now that China, India and others are involved and fuel prices are unusually high, a growing number of lawmakers and business leaders in the United States are starting to complain. They argue that the United States' decades-old ban against drilling in coastal waters is driving up domestic energy costs and, in this case, is giving two of America's chief economic competitors access to energy at the United States' expense.

"This is the irony of ironies," Charles T. Drevna, executive vice president of the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association, said of Cuba's collaboration with China and India. "We have chosen to lock up our resources and stand by to be spectators while these two come in and benefit from things right in our own backyard."

The United States Geological Survey estimates that the energy field on Cuba's side alone may have 4.6 billion barrels of oil and 9.8 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. That much energy is equivalent to just a few months of the United States' total energy consumption.

The survey does not specify how much of an energy reserve is on the United States' side of the Florida Straits, just north of Cuba. But almost all of the country's Outer Continental Shelf, waters within 200 miles of shorelines, has been off limits to drilling since the early 1980's because of Congressional bans and executive orders.

President Bush, who renewed the 1977 treaty last December for two years, has cited China's growing demand for oil and international efforts to obtain it as prime reasons for high gasoline prices. The latest version of the administration's national security strategy, issued in March, warned that China's leaders were "acting as if they can somehow 'lock up' energy supplies around the world."

To Mr. Drevna and others who are lobbying Congress to end the prohibition, energy exploration in coastal waters represents a strong step toward energy independence and lower prices.

The Interior Department estimates that the Outer Continental Shelf has more than 115 billion barrels of oil and 633 trillion cubic feet of natural gas available for extraction. At current levels of consumption, that would satisfy the nation's oil needs for about 16 years and its natural gas needs for about 25 years.

Opponents of drilling in United States waters are equally passionate in their arguments, saying that drilling for oil off the coast poses environmental risks and that drilling for finite supplies undermines long-term conservation solutions. They also say modest supplies of additional oil would not necessarily lower gasoline prices in the United States because oil is traded on a world market.

But drilling proponents say the time has come to end the bans, especially with plans by China and India to capture oil and gas so close to the United States shoreline.

"My fear is for the future of America," said Representative John E. Peterson, Republican of Pennsylvania, who has collected more than 160 co-sponsors for a bipartisan bill that would open coastal waters for development of natural gas. "We have a natural gas crisis, and it's the biggest threat we have to the American economy."

Senator Larry E. Craig, Republican of Idaho, took narrow aim at the activities planned for the Florida Straits and recently complained on the Senate floor, "Red China should not be left to drill for oil within spitting distance of our shores without competition from U.S. industries."

Cuba has divided its side of the Florida Straits into 59 lease areas. As of the end of February, foreign countries had secured the rights or were negotiating the rights to 16 of them, according to Cuban government documents provided by the Cuban Interests Section in Washington.
 
it shows that a third world pissant like Cuba and a Giant like China can do what we won't in our own backyard. NIMBY doesn't apply to countries just libtards like blackpanther.
 
Topspin said:
it shows that a third world pissant like Cuba and a Giant like China can do what we won't in our own backyard. NIMBY doesn't apply to countries just libtards like blackpanther.
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You can't help yourself can you?

Just cannot control your inner-Cartman.
 
Well at least China is not full of isalmofascists bent on destroying us ;)

and we seem to have no problem buying oil from or selling real estate to those places now.
 
blackpanther I love shoving your socialist head up your ass.
Aparently dung likes doing it to himself.
 
From the article that I originally provided a link to and which post-dates the 2006 references you knuckleheads keep posting:

China's Sinopec oil company does have an agreement with the Cuban government, but it's to develop onshore resources west of Havana, Pinon said. The Chinese have done some seismic testing, he said, but no drilling, and nothing offshore.

Western diplomats in Havana tell McClatchy that to the best of their knowledge, there is no Chinese drilling in or around Cuba.

"I've never heard anything about this," said one diplomat from a country in the hemisphere.

The Western diplomats, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media about energy issues, said they believed there is no new drilling occurring off the coast of Cuba, just exploration.

Cuba's state oil company, Cupet, has issued exploration contracts to companies from India, Canada, Spain, Malaysia and Norway, according to diplomats.

But many oil companies from those countries have expressed reservations about how to turn potential crude oil into product. Cuba doesn't have the refinery capacity, and the Cuban embargo prohibits the oil from coming to U.S. refineries, Pinon said.

The most recent high-profile contract with Cuba went to Brazil's state oil company, Petrobras. Cuba inked a contract with Petrobras in January, allowing the Brazilian energy giant to search for oil in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico that are within Cuba's sovereign territory. Brazil's foreign minister, Celso Amorim, traveled to Cuba last month and talked up the oil business, along with a joint venture between Cuba and Petrobras to produce lubricants.

Most of Cuba's oil comes from Venezuela, with whom it shares an ideological bent and geographical proximity. Brazil's growing role in Cuba's energy sector is significant because Petrobras has been involved in some of the world's few discoveries of new and large oilfields.
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