Читать книгу Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells – Our Ride to the Renewable Future - Amanda Little - Страница 18

Against the softness of the interminable blue seas, the Cajun Express with its landscape of iron, steel, and cement was the unmistakable mark of human enterprise, appearing as improbable—as unnatural—as a rose garden in the Mojave Desert, a Hyatt Hotel in Antarctica, or a flag planted on the moon. Here, it seemed, was another wilderness conquered.

At the end of my visit, Paul Siegele took me, via a jury-rigged elevator (a coffin-sized plastic box attached to a forklift), to the crown of the rig, a harrowing widow’s walk suspended at the top of the drill’s 250-foot scaffolding. The body of the rig below looked like the loneliest place on earth—a tiny, solitary circuit board floating in a boundless blue sea. Then, out in the distance, I spotted fleets of trawlers the size of thumbnails setting off seismic guns in search of the next big deep-sea prospect. “A decade ago, I never even dreamed we’d get here,” marveled Siegele. “And a decade from now, this moonscape could be populated with rigs as far as the eye can see.”

Though the image to me was jarring, Siegele’s scenario does seem increasingly likely. Both opponents and proponents of domestic drilling in areas such as the Gulf of Mexico and ANWR share a common conviction that it is necessary to free the United States from dependence on foreign oil. Of the 85 million barrels of petroleum consumed daily in the world, America consumes 21 million—nearly a quarter. Our net imports of petroleum are about 12 million barrels a day. Even as we invent ever smarter, more efficient buildings, appliances, and cars, and even as we develop cleaner, renewable energy sources, the transition from this prodigious oil usage to a new energy landscape will be gradual.

By any measure, America is in no position to drill its way to energy independence. Our proven domestic reserves stand at 21 billion barrels—enough, at our current levels of consumption, to meet our needs for roughly 1,000 days if we stopped importing any oil. There are another 697 million barrels in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (an emergency fuel stockpile the Department of Energy maintains in underground caverns along the Gulf Coast, to be used in the event of a sudden shortage or spike in oil prices); but that would only give us another 34 days of supply. Allowing drilling in the long-protected areas of the outer continental shelf could potentially expand reserves by 18 billion barrels—giving us at best another 860 days of supply. ANWR has an estimated 7.7 billion barrels—another 372 days. In total (and ignoring the time needed to tap and test new wells, and our limited refining capabilities), these new frontiers would give us fewer than 2,500 days of supplies—less than seven years.

Today, America is still indulging energy-lavish habits that it formed more than eighty years ago, in the domestic oil boom following World War I. And now, as the nation’s homegrown oil supplies become ever harder to come by, we are faced with tremendous costs—not just of drilling for oil at the ends of the earth, but of protecting our access to cheap and abundant supplies from overseas, particularly from the Persian Gulf. How much do we taxpayers actually pay, I wondered, to conduct U.S. diplomacy in petroleum-rich nations? What are the moral, economic, and political costs of relying on foreign producers to feed America’s oil addiction? And what, on a more practical level, does it take to fuel the military charged with protecting these supplies?