Deep in the Gulf of Mexico, an end to the 47-year US trade embargo against Cuba may be lying untapped, buried under layers of rock and bitter relations.
Oil, up to 20 billion barrels of it, sits off Cuba's north-west coast in its territorial waters, says the Cuban Government - enough to turn the island into the Qatar of the Caribbean. At a minimum, estimates by the US Geological Survey place Cuba's potential deepwater reserves at 4.6 billion barrels of oil and 160 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, stores that would rank the island among the region's top producers...
That, of course, also gives a perfect way for the oil companies to expand into drilling off the coast of Florida. That's something even the paleocons of the Sunshine state have opposed. They've spent billions on keeping those white sands.
Qatar in the Gulf. Saudi Arabia to the frozen North.
...Canada has the second-largest petroleum deposits after Saudi Arabia and the biggest in the Western hemisphere. Its oil sands produce 1.3 million barrels of oil a day, up from 600,000 a day in 2000. As a result, Canada has become the biggest foreign oil supplier to the United States, accounting for 19 percent of imports in 2008...
...Environmentalists would like President Obama to set strict limits on some of the dirtiest fuels, including heavy oil from Canada. They urge the administration to resist calls by the Canadian government to exempt oil sands from greenhouse regulations now being considered in the United States...
Why, blocking such an exemption wouldn't be the diplomatic action of a Company President seeking a dialog, now would it?
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