75 billion?

Little Chuckie Krauthammer, age 9, wants to get an "A" in mathematics:

At a time when U.S. crude oil production has fallen 40 percent in the past 25 years, 75 billion barrels of oil have been declared off-limits, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That would be enough to replace every barrel of non-North American imports (oil trade with Canada and Mexico is a net economic and national security plus) for 22 years.

[Emphasis mine]

ZOMG! The enviro-whackos have locked up a seemingly endless supply of oil! By the time we run out of that, we'll all be traveling around in flying cars that run on air!

[blink] [blink] Hmmmh. Hold on a sec...

Chuckie must have visited the EIA website, searched for "off-limits" and found the number 59 billion from the outer continental shelf and added that to the number 16 billion from ANWR. And decided that 75 billion barrels are "off-limits."

There are only two tiny problems with that calculation. The first is that the number 59 billion is the total unrecovered crude oil (available and unavailable):

The second teensie-weensie problem is that the number 16 billion from ANWR has a 5% shot at being correct. One might expect a respected opinion columnist to use the 95% estimate, just to be sure he doesn't mislead the public. If this respected opinion columnist would have used that estimate, he would have come up with a number just under 6 billion barrels (I'm rounding up in his favor).

So, adding up all the "currently unavailable" amounts, we should get 18 billion from the outer continental shelf plus 6 billion from ANWR for a grand total of somewhere close to 24 billion barrels that are currently "off-limits." At this point I would simply like to reiterate that there are 40 billion barrels that are currently not "off-limits."