An important argument of the opponents of climate change legislation that would regulate greenhouse gas emissions is the belief it would increase the cost of doing business, especially for agriculture.

Agriculture is heavily dependent on fossil fuels, which is a main contributor of greenhouse gas emissions. Agricultural opponets say the attempt to regulate greenhouse emissions would increase the cost of the fuel they use to run their equipment.

Nearly 60 percent of the oil used and consumed in the United States is imported from other countries.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the top five exporting countries accounted for 65 percent of United States crude oil imports in October 2009 while the top ten sources accounted for approximately 85 percent of all U.S. crude oil imports. The top five sources of US crude oil imports for October were Canada (1.858 million barrels per day), Mexico (1.015 million barrels per day), Saudi Arabia (0.938 million barrels per day), Venezuela (0.879 million barrels per day), and Nigeria (0.853 million barrels per day).

One of the U.S. major oil partners is Venezuela. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, an estimated 513 billion barrels of technically recoverable heavy oil are in Venezuela’s Orinoco Oil Belt.

This area, according to USGS, contains one of the world’s largest recoverable oil accumulations.

Worldwide consumption of petroleum was 85.4 million barrels per day in 2008. The three largest consuming countries were United States with 19.5 million barrels per day, China with 7.9 million barrels per day, and Japan with 4.8 million barrels per day.

“Knowing the potential for extractable resources from this tremendous oil accumulation, and others like it, is critical to our understanding of the global petroleum potential and informing policy and decision makers,” said USGS Energy Resources Program Coordinator Brenda Pierce. “Accumulations like this one were previously very difficult to produce, but advances in technology and new understandings in geology allow us to assess how much is now technically recoverable.”

“Heavy oil is a type of oil that is very thick and therefore does not flow very easily,” said USGS scientist Christopher Schenk. “As a result, specialized production and refining processes are needed to generate petroleum products, but it is still oil and can generate many of the same products as other types of oil.”

This is the largest accumulation ever assessed by the USGS. The estimated petroleum resources in the Orinoco Oil Belt range from 380 to 652 billion barrels of oil (at a 95 and 5 percent chance of occurrence, respectively). The Orinoco Oil Belt is located in the East Venezuela Basin Province.