The Democrats, scrambling to respond to suggestions that government interference (as opposed to oil company greed) is the real problem with high gas prices, are saying that we don’t need more domestic drilling in the United States because 80% of the land currently leased by the government to oil companies for exploration is not actively producing oil.

Now, that might make for a good sound bite, but the reality is that it doesn’t quite mean what the Democrats think it does.  Or, at least, what they would have voters think it does.

A company bids for and buys a lease because it believes there is a possibility that it may yield enough oil or natural gas to make the cost of the lease, and the costs of exploration and production, commercially viable. The U.S. government received $3.7 billion from company bids in a single lease sale in March 2008.

However, until the actual exploration is complete, a company does not know whether the lease will be productive. If, through exploration, it finds there is no oil or natural gas underneath a lease – or that there is not enough to justify the tremendous investment required to bring it to the surface – the company cuts its losses by moving on to more promising leases. Yet it continues to pay rent on the lease, atop a leasing bonus fee.

In addition, if the company does not develop the lease within a certain period of time, it must return it to the federal government, forfeiting all its costs. All during this active exploration and evaluation phase, however, the lease is listed as “nonproducing.”

Contrary to what liberals would have you believe, drilling for oil does not merely consist of putting a hole in the ground and waiting for oil to bubble up through it.  It is a complicated process that comes after the even more complicated process of determining whether or not a given piece of land is worth drilling for oil on in the first place.

Democrats are, essentially, trying to convince the public that because oil companies aren’t drilling where there is no oil (or, at least, where they do not know if there is oil) that they shouldn’t be allowed to droll where there is oil.  Big, verified supplies of oil.