Last night I was watching one of the local news stations as they were reporting on Chevron’s discovery in Walker Ridge in the gulf.  Rather than just telling the facts, they felt the need to try to relate the story to their “average” viewer by posing the question “is this going to bring our gas(oline) prices down?”.  My first reaction is, “This is Houston, aren’t we smarter than that!!!”.   I would think that the average Houstonian would be sufficiently informed about oil and gas matters to have a sense that a new exploratory discovery of oil in 7000 feet of water, located at a TD of more than 28,000 feet, would not have any appreciable impact on our current gasoline price.  Yet, there the question was being posed….  

Worse yet, after a brief discussion by someone that was apparently a geologist or some other brainiac type, the reporter attempted to “dumb down” his response (which was obviously: No, it will take years to assess the find with further drilling and testing, designing and building facilities and pipelines, and bringing the whole thing online.) by explaining, and I’ll attempt to quote as much as I can recall, “Its going to take a long time to get the gas out from underneath the water and take it to shore by pipelines that haven’t even been built yet, before it gets to here…” at which point she waved her hand, in the manner of Vanna White, at the Shell station behind her… 

I need some advil.  

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