Читать книгу Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells – Our Ride to the Renewable Future - Amanda Little - Страница 11

Given the challenges that plague ultradeep drilling, it’s sobering to think that this frontier holds the oil industry’s best hope for finding new petroleum reserves. “The odds are incredibly low that we’re going to hit some fabulous new discovery on land,” Matthew Simmons, a leading investor and industry analyst, told me. “Everybody’s looking to the deep sea for big new finds.” To an outsider, it was at once impressive and baffling to watch engineers burrow 5 miles into the earth for oil. “It has all the audacity and technological complexity of launching a space shuttle,” as Simmons put it. I found the enterprise doggedly ambitious, but also seemingly desperate—like an addict forcing a syringe into the earth’s innermost veins.

Siegele himself admitted that “there’s no guarantee that the rewards in this field will outweigh the risks.” After my visit, in fact, an even greater snag than the one I’d witnessed occurred on the Tahiti field’s production platform: an incorrectly soldered mooring would cause a year-long setback that cost Chevron over a hundred million dollars, by a conservative estimate. But the sunken treasure was worth it: the company proceeded with repairs despite the high cost and began to pump oil from that platform by mid-2009.

One question persisted in my mind: if an energy company is going to throw a billion dollars into something untested and possibly doomed to failure, wouldn’t it make more sense to invest in the inexhaustible, greener technologies that will likely replace fossil fuels? None of the Chevron employees I spoke with seemed concerned that their industry may be fast approaching obsolescence. “Do you heat your home? Do you fly on planes? Do you drive a car?” Siegele challenged me. “What do you think makes that heat and moves those jets?”

Siegele was right. Even as innovators have been producing breakthroughs in clean cars, green buildings, and renewable energy and efficiency, the Department of Energy projects that American oil demand will hold steady—not decline—in the decades ahead. American oil demand on the whole has been holding steady in recent years, not declining. And even if America were to slash its oil consumption, industrial growth in China and India is pushing global petroleum demand ever higher. The New York Times has reported that the global demand for energy could triple by midcentury. “So long as people need oil,” Siegele told me, “we’ll find a way to supply it.” In other words, the oil industry will go to whatever lengths (literally and otherwise) it must to get oil so long as consumer demand persists and the oil is there for the taking.

But how much oil is there for the taking, and how long will supplies last? It depends on who you ask. The moment when the global economy reaches “peak oil” will be the most significant tipping point of the twenty-first century—the point in time when the world’s oil producers can no longer increase their supply, and the industry enters “terminal decline.” Though “peak oil” is a confusing term, it can be pictured simply as the peak or high point on a graph of production over time. It doesn’t mean that we’ve run out. It means that the world’s oil fields will be producing less and less each year. After this peak, the falling-off of oil supplies will in turn bear directly on the basic demand-supply curve of Economics 101: when supply declines and demand stays steady (or rises), prices will rise. A mere 4 percent shortfall in oil production, for instance, could lead to a 177 percent increase in the price of oil.

It’s true that oil could stay cheap if demand dropped faster than supply. We saw that happen recently, as the economy slumped in 2008. Industrial activity slowed, curbing the flow of fuel into commercial trucks, bulldozers, cargo trains, buses, airplanes, and ships. For this and other reasons, demand for oil plunged, causing crude prices to fall from an all-time high of $147 per barrel in July 2008 to $40 per barrel in November 2008. Over the long term, however, demand will inevitably outstrip supply as the global population continues to expand and industrial growth trends upward in the developing world.

Peak oil happened long ago within most industrialized countries, including the United States. Our domestic oil production peaked in 1970 after decades of meteoric growth. That’s why America—the world’s biggest oil producer for most of the twentieth century—now contributes less than 10 percent of the global supply, and imports roughly two thirds of its petroleum from overseas. The question remains: when will our suppliers hit their peaks?

No one can predict with total certainty the geological limits of the petroleum era. Just look at the range of opinions among top experts. One of the world’s leading oil industry analysts, Daniel Yergin, who was awarded a Pulitzer for his book The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power, told me that oil supplies “may reach a plateau…perhaps in two to three decades.” Meanwhile, former industry executives and geologists such as T. Boone Pickens and Kenneth Deffeyes insist the peak has already occurred, and supplies will only continue to decline from here on out. How can these savvy insiders disagree by thirty years? In part, because the data on global reserves are largely unknown: as much as 90 percent of the world’s oil is owned by government-run or privately held oil companies, and they tend to keep as closely guarded secrets information about the size of their reserves. Estimating the total volume of the world’s remaining oil involves a great deal of guesswork.

Siegele and his engineers are hardly worried about the long-term threat of oil supply shortages. Technological breakthroughs have, decade after decade, revived the perpetually doomed oil industry: petroleum reserves often seemed too remote or too expensive to exploit over the last century, yet engineers invariably managed to come up with better, cheaper drilling tools. “Predicting peak oil,” Siegele told me, “is almost like predicting peak technology”—an exercise that to him seems inherently small-minded, even absurd.

Siegele’s comment reminded me of something the fictional oil baron J.R. Ewing said on the TV show Dallas. (I confess I watched six seasons of the series back-to-back, justifying a guilty pleasure as “research” during the reporting of this book.) When J.R.’s younger brother Bobby announced plans to start a solar energy company to prepare for a world without oil—this was in the late 1970s, when America was still reeling from the Arab oil embargo—J.R. scoffed: “We’ve been running out of oil since the day we first drilled it.” His clear implication: peak oil is simply a mirage.

In fact, the timing of peak oil may soon become irrelevant. Political and environmental forces could end our oil addiction long before supplies run dry. “The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone,” as Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, a former oil minister to Saudi Arabia, famously said, “and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil.”

The drilling technology itself may become too costly, for one thing. As the supergiant oil fields dwindle, we are getting our supplies from an ever greater number of smaller fields. “We’ve had to drill more and more wells to keep production steady,” Matthew Simmons told me. Much of the current stock of drilling equipment is aging and in need of replacement.

There are, furthermore, external costs to America’s oil dependence that could hobble the industry well before oil reserves vanish. The military costs of defending our petroleum interests abroad are tremendous—and growing. Just to keep U.S. forces on the ground worldwide to protect the country’s energy supplies costs U.S. taxpayers some $100 billion a year, according to the National Priorities Project, a nonprofit organization that analyzes federal data.

Likewise, the climate impacts of burning fossil fuels are becoming increasingly costly. In the state of California alone, “$2.5 trillion of real estate assets are at risk from extreme weather events, sea level rise and wildfires expected to result from climate change over the course of a century,” according to a recent report from the University of California, Berkeley. Add to that the growing impact of warming trends on the state’s and the nation’s water supplies, road and transportation networks, tourism industries, agriculture, and public health.

In the coming decades, the double whammy of climate change and military spending could sufficiently drive up the price of petroleum to make green alternatives such as electric cars and wind power look increasingly attractive and affordable—pushing petroleum out of the market long before supplies run out.

Siegele brushed aside such concerns, stating matter-of-factly that the game of oil diplomacy has been running for the better part of a century, and the United States has gotten out of military predicaments far thornier than those it faces today. As for global warming, he believes technology will triumph here, too: we’ll find a way to scrub carbon from the atmosphere, making fossil fuels climate-friendly.

Just as we can’t be certain how much oil is left, it’s also too early to predict what new technology breakthroughs will win out in the long run. We can be certain about some things, though. Looking back at history, it is clear that the U.S. oil industry is in a drastically different place today than when it was born just a century ago, when great pools of petroleum bubbled up unbidden from Pennsylvania streams, Oklahoma prairies, and Texas’s Golden Triangle. When lucky prospectors could just about pop a straw in the ground and release a gusher. I knew about this golden era only from the mythic heroes it spawned—like Jed Clampett of The Beverly Hillbillies, sitcom’s fluky Appalachian mountaineer who struck oil with a stray hunting bullet and made instant millions; Jett Rink, James Dean’s character in the movie Giant, the down-and-out ranch hand who stepped on a patch of soft Texas soil, saw glistening black fluid pool in his footprint, and became a prodigal oil tycoon; and Daniel Plainview, the character played by Daniel Day-Lewis in 2008’s There Will Be Blood, who built a petroleum empire from a ramshackle California ranch he’d bought for pocket change.

After my trip to the Cajun Express, I felt the need for more than a fictional knowledge of the glory days of American oil. I would never fully understand the work of Paul Siegele and his fellow petroleum hunters—or the magnitude of the challenges they face—without exploring the roots of their industry and the combination of luck, gumption, and sheer geological abundance that created it. How, I wanted to know, did it come to this—to scenarios as remote and arduous as ultradeep drilling? How did a resource that is now so hard to come by in America become the basis of our economic survival?