Tuesday, June 17, 2008
More drilling won't help
From the RoundTable blog
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Michael Abraham
Abraham is a businessman and writer who lives in Blacksburg.
In your series of commentaries collectively titled "Fueling the Fury," it's easy to get the impression that the escalating price of gasoline has filled the air with delusion dust (Horizon, June 8). Failing to understand the source of our predicament and perpetuating false myths impede the path to progress. Trevor Roe, in "Meddling is worse than fiddling," and Jessee Ring, in "Domestic production is the answer" do just that.
Before I rebut, what do we agree on?
Roe says, "Increasing demands and decreasing supplies are the problem." Ring says, "Gasoline, like everything else on the market, follows the law of supply and demand." Correct. Pricing is a momentary contract between a seller and a buyer to exchange a good or service for an amount of currency. A barrel of oil is worth what the market is willing to pay for it. Why would producers sell it for any less? They have us over a barrel, as it were.
The price of gasoline is escalating because of the dynamics on both sides of the equation.
Domestic demand has always been high, but economic powerhouses China and India are consuming increasing quantities to fuel their burgeoning economies.
The supply side is even more problematic, traceable to the concept of Peak Oil, mentioned in neither commentary. Succinctly, the extraction of any finite resource can only increase until roughly half has been consumed, whereupon its extraction peaks and enters terminal decline. Domestic extraction peaked in 1970 and, regardless of all the exploring, drilling, wishful thinking and face-contorting we might do, it will never reach 1970s level again because sufficient quantities of the resource simply no longer exist. That's fact. During the upswing, high prices stimulate new production, but not anymore, because there's not enough left.
Worse yet, there is widespread agreement among petro-geologists that worldwide production is soon to peak and may be doing so now, although peak can be known only in hindsight. The ramifications are horrific. Robert Hirsch, who wrote the definitive Peak Oil report for the Department of Energy, described the problem as being, "as massive as one can possibly imagine."
Roe excoriates Congress, Democrats and what he calls "Big Green."
Ring implores, "The solution is to get more oil and gas." And, we have "vast known reserves of oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge" and offshore. If Congress got out of the way, he implies, everything would be fine.
These insinuations need to be challenged on at least two fronts. First, "vast" is relative. These reserves pale in comparison with what we've already consumed and won't return the U.S. to pre-peak levels, much less meet contemporary consumption. Second, accelerating the consumption of this last domestic resource not only robs it from our progeny but also impedes our military's ability to defend us during future conflicts. Our Defense Department is the world's largest oil consumer, using 3.5 million gallons of oil per day for U.S. combat operations in the Middle East alone. These last reserves are, in a meaningful way, our strategic petroleum reserve. Consuming them apace is morally unjustifiable and egregiously shortsighted.
Roe suggests, "shouldn't we be maximizing the exploration and drilling of domestic fields until the Next Great Thing comes along?"
Consider for a moment this horrific notion: There may be no Next Great Thing. Petroleum is the densest, most transportable and formerly most abundant energy resource on the planet. There are good reasons cars don't run on coal or cow dung. No hydrogen resources below ground await extraction. Sure, many futuristic technologies like solar nano-technology, space-based solar arrays and thermal depolymerization may someday fuel our cars. But none is in use today, ensuring a long and painful transition. We should critically question the veracity of any claims made by those who advocate wishful thinking as part of a sound energy policy.
Each day, especially in rural areas, mobility is increasingly unavailable to large segments of our society and it is destined to get much worse. Within two years, look to pay $8 a gallon for gasoline and to wait in line for it. Our economy will be decimated.
Barring the emergence of a miracle fuel, solutions on the supply side are temporal and counterproductive. We need to begin thinking not how we will continue to fuel all the cars on more domestic gasoline or on alternative fuels, but how we will feed, clothe, house, educate and recreate ourselves with lots fewer of them.
Answer: Discourage automobile travel, rebuild railroad networks, and build transit, bicycling and pedestrian amenities to re-localize our communities.
