ARE WE REALLY RUNNING OUT OF OIL?

By IPS Correspondents and - - Reprint | | Print |

This column is available for visitors to the IPS website only for reading. Reproduction in print or electronic media is prohibited. Media interested in republishing may contact romacol@ips.org.

OAKLAND, Jan 12 2008 (IPS) - Are we running short of oil? Far from it, writes Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero, a fellow at the Oakland Institute, a Puerto Rican author, investigative reporter, and environmental educator. In this article, Marrero writes that new extraction technologies now make it possible to obtain oil from increasingly remote places and geological formations that were previously impenetrable. High gasoline and electricity prices have nothing to do with an alleged scarcity of crude. Rather, the \’\’peak oil\’\’ thesis has caused many citizens and consumers to accept high energy prices without protesting. We cannot afford to sit around and wait for a \’\’peak oil\’\’ crisis that will not come. Only activism and political action can save the planet from global warming.

The idea that we’re about to run short of the black gold goes back to 1956, when Shell geologist M. King Hubbert declared that we had enough oil for only about fifty more years. This thesis, popularly known as ”peak oil” or ”Hubbert’s peak”, is based on his estimates of petroleum reserves and the ever increasing energy demand.

Were Hubbert right, the productivity of oil wells should be plummeting just about now. In fact, my next trip in my Toyota Echo could be my last car ride ever.

So are we running short of oil? Far from it. As of 2007, exploitable reserves of oil were well over one trillion barrels. Current world demand, according to the US-based Energy Information Administration is 31,39 billion barrels per year

Since Hubbert’s day, technologies for oil exploration have improved at breakneck speed, leading to the discovery of deposits in places nobody imagined decades ago. And new extraction technologies make it now possible to obtain oil from increasingly remote places and geological formations that were previously impenetrable.

Therefore, high gasoline and electricity prices have nothing to do with this alleged scarcity of crude. Rather, the ”peak oil” thesis has caused many citizens and consumers to accept high energy prices without protesting. But don’t blame Chavez or the Arabs. When oil prices go up the ultimate winners are the oil company stockholders.

But energy demand keeps increasing. The US government forecasts that energy consumption worldwide will increase by 71 percent between 2003 and 2030. So, is the end of oil only a little bit further off than Hubbert predicted?

Not quite. Canada’s tar sands contain the world’s biggest petroleum reserves after Saudi Arabia. Some colleagues argue that these will never be tapped because it is too costly to extract the oil from the problematic mix of bitumen, sand, clay, and water that hold it. But as the price of oil hovers around and surpasses the USD 100 a barrel mark, which it hit early this month, extracting oil from places where it previously was not a worthwhile investment will become profitable. British Petroleum is already in the Canadian province of Alberta, exploiting a 54,000-square-mile tar sand deposit. This is only the vanguard of a new petroleum rush, this time in the boreal latitudes.

Separating oil from tar sands produces four times as much CO2 as conventional oil drilling. Exploiting these deposits can release as much as 100 million tons of CO2 to the atmosphere, dashing any hopes of tackling climate change.

This surely explains the Canadian government’s stubborn and obstructionist stance at the UN Conference on Climate Change in Bali last December. Canada, along with the US and Japan, refused to the accept the emissions cuts of 25-40 percent originally proposed by European countries.

And if the tar sands run out, we have enough coal to burn for centuries. The race is on to develop an economically feasible way to turn it into liquid fuel for vehicles. South Africa’s Sasol company is carrying out studies to that end in the US, India and China.

In other words, we have plenty of fossil fuels. They will not run out in our lifetime, as many environmentalists hope. The planet will have been cooked several times over before there is a real scarcity of coal or oil.

We cannot afford to sit around and wait for a ”peak oil” crisis that will not come. Only activism and political action can save the planet from global warming. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)