High energy prices got you down?

To hear liberals and the media tell it, you'd think that oil company executives are taking their record profits and spending them frivolously on mansions, yachts, and fancy cars. OK...maybe they are, but as oil and natural gas supplies get tighter and prices rise, companies are also investing beaucoups of their own money on exploration and production in harder-to-reach areas, as the AP reported today:

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Petroleum operators announced 10 new deepwater discoveries in the Gulf of Mexico in 2005 and the number of drilling rigs exploring in deep water has increased sevenfold in a year, [the federal Minerals Management Service] reported.

[More info: see the Minerals Management Service press releases here and here.]

There's nothing surprising about this. It's the way markets work: they create incentives to produce and to meet the demands of consumers. The great thing about it is that energy companies don't need government subsidies to go off and look for new supplies. They are more than willing to do it on their own, if the government will just let them.