The price of gas is a major contention for the struggling American consumer. The overwhelming majority of oil we use comes from the Middle East. The major oil companies purchase millions of barrels of oil from Arab nations to fill our growing dependence on oil. The possibility that gas will rise is there, especially of the tax breaks given to oil companies are eliminated.
The reality is that we don’t need to depend on foreign oil. The US Geological Survey has informed the US government that we have more reserves of oil in the US that we aren’t tapping into, mostly due to environmental activists. According to the Energy Information Administration, there is an oil reserve that could yield close to 503 billion barrels of oil in South Dakota, North Dakota and Montana, referred to as the Bakken.
This site was initially discovered in 1995, but the technology to extract the oil didn’t exist at the time. However, we now have the technology to tap into this massive reserve, which could save the American people great deal of money.
The tax subsidies given to major oil companies might be justifiable if they were working towards tapping the reserves we have here in the states, which one author of the study estimates is more than all the oil in the Middle East. The tax break given to major oil companies are meant to help them develop ways to provide the American people with their energy needs and that includes finding domestic oil.
The oil companies and their tax attorneys fight to keep their subsidies. Their record profits, gained from the increase in gas prices have made them the scapegoats of peoples anger over gas prices, providing the American people with oil extracted from our own soil could improve their the image as an industry. The oil industry along with their tax lawyers feels as though they are being singled out as an industry in respect to tax breaks.
