One thing I worry about in the aftermath of the ongoing BP oil spill (the top-kill method of trying to stop the leak apparently failed) is how restricted we in America could wind up being insofar as prospecting for our own oil and other fossil fuels is concerned. More than half of our oil is already imported, much of it from countries that are decidedly unfriendly to America – and this is, I am convinced, a major vulnerability that we have. After all, the “green” technologies that are widely promoted are, from what I have seen, not exactly economically viable.
2 Responses
It’s important to bear in mind, something that is rarely done when such matters are discussed publicly, that maintaining our current level of industrial activity is inherently a losing proposition. Laws of nature decree that imported oil will be decreasingly available in the future, as will domestic oil. In fact, US lower-48 oil production peaked in 1970 and the most we can do now is put some bumps on the downslope. The catch is that every effort to _slow_ the decline today – by bringing on a new field or utilizing more advanced technology – will also _accelerate_ the decline tomorrow. Here are a few real world examples:
(1) The interval between peak discoveries in the North Sea and peak production (~1970, 1999) was shorter than, say, the interval between peak discoveries and peak production in the U.S. lower-48 (1930, 1970), reflecting more advanced technologies utilized in exploiting the former, and the inherent costs of offshore production, which tends to breed faster drawdown of the resource so that investors can recoup these large costs more quickly. North Sea oil production is now down more than 40 percent from its 1999 peak.
(2) Expensive Alaskan oil – notably the Prudhoe Bay field, the largest oilfield ever discovered in North America north of Mexico – which also featured the aggressive use of cutting-edge technology, went into terminal rapid decline, at a rate of about 10 percent per year only ten or eleven years after its first production.
(3) Mexico’s offshore Cantarell field achieved the second highest rate of daily production of any field in the world, after Pemex, in cooperation with Bechtel, built the worlds largest atmospheric nitrogen separation plant. The nitrogen was injected into the wells to boost production of this relatively heavy oil. The higher rates were maintained for barely 3 or 4 years, before the field went into rapid collapse – at a rate of 20 percent a year or more per year. Meanwhile Pemex is straddled with a large debt burden related to its investment in the nitrogen plant.
The Deepwater Horizon disaster will certainly dent the push for offshore drilling, including both “deepwater” oil and the efforts to open up currently restricted areas of the continental shelves. But it’s important to bear in mind that the _most productive_ deepwater fields, e.g. BP’s Thunder Horse field, produce at only about a tenth the rate of Cantarell at peak and then decline rapidly. And it seems, based on drilling work that has been done in the past, that the prospects for finding major quantities of oil or natural gas on the West Coast north of southern California and the eastern seaboard south of Maine are not all that great. The west coast of Florida, for example, has some gas, but little or no oil. Offshore Maine probably has some oil, but as Canada’s Atlantic fields show, this will be short lived. So even in the absence of repercussions from the disaster in the Gulf, the outcome you worry about – winding up being restricted in our ability to obtain domestic oil – is something that must be faced. The restriction is simply imposed by nature.
As for the “green” alternatives, I think your intuitions are reasonable. What seems difficult for most people to do, however, is to face BOTH sets of facts squarely – which again implies that our current living arrangement will not be sustained. The Heinberg report linked below is I think helpful on this score.
We have to do something- green technologies will look a lot better when gas is 14 dollars a gallon!