"When Big Oil already has tens of millions of acres available to them right now, it's cynical of them to come to Congress and ask for more drilling territory," Markey said recently.
One new line of attack from Democrats is that the oil industry already has huge chunks of land open to drilling, but hasn't touched them.
Two years ago, Congress voted to open 8.3 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico to new drilling, with the Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act of 2006.
Parts of that have been leased for drilling, but so far no wells have been drilled there.
Democrats complain that the story is the same in other already-leased areas of the Gulf, the oil companies have simply not tried to drill for oil in certain areas, one reason Big Oil's critics don't want to open more land for exploration.
Then there is the National Petroleum Reserve Alaska, which is just to the west of Prudhoe Bay (the area known as ANWR is just to the east of Prudhoe.)
A report from the US Geological Survey in 2002 says, "A new USGS assessment concludes that NPRA holds signicantly greater petroleum resources than previously estimated....between 5.9 and 13.2 billion barrels,
ANWR is estimated to hold between 5.7 and 16 billion barrels of oil.
The difference is that the NPRA is open for drilling, but little or no activity is going on there now. I found a BLM report that says one exploratory well was drilled there this year.
Meanwhile, last November, a Canadian company shuttered its oil drilling efforts in the NPRA, complaining about high costs of doing business along the North Slope of Alaska.
Back then, the price of oil was still below $100/barrel. It's up near $140/barrel now.
Armed with enough statistics like that, I doubt that Democratic leaders are thinking at all about compromise on oil and gas issues. Instead, they want to argue that $4/gallon gas is the fault of two oilmen in the White House named Bush and Cheney.
Whether that works, we'll see in November.
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