Blame It On Rio: The President Goes Petro Hunting In Brazil



April 6, 2011
by John Myers

A good President might try to correct three of America’s biggest problems: intractable unemployment, America’s increasing dependency on foreign oil and a monstrous trade deficit. Yet none not one of these issues concerned President Barack Obama as he traveled throughout Latin America and launched another war upon a Middle Eastern nation.

Libya is ground zero for American air and sea power. Libya has more than 40 billion barrels of crude oil reserves and before its civil war was producing 1.7 million barrels of oil per day, roughly 2 percent of the world’s daily oil output.

No longer can other oil exporters replace shrinking Libyan production. That makes the crisis in Libya not just a potential military one but an economic one as well.

Barack’s Brazilian Solution
Apparently President Barack Obama does not think American roughnecks can be trusted. Boring at vast oil veins under the Gulf of Mexico has been suspended by the President. Now he has made his case for offshore oil development much further south, off the coast of Brazil.

Obama made his proposal while meeting with Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. The Tupi oil field alone, which lies off Rio de Janeiro in the Santos Basin, has a potential deepwater reserve of 100 billion barrels.

Of course, the Gulf of Mexico has vast reserves, too. But like a good Democrat, Obama has added a middleman, and a foreign one at that.

The prospect of drilling for oil off the coast of Brazil rather than the coastal waters of the Gulf of Mexico seemed to have Obama tickled pink.

“By some estimates, the oil you recently discovered off the shores of Brazil could amount to twice the reserves we have in the United States,â€