Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells – Our Ride to the Renewable Future. Amanda Little

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СКАЧАТЬ the last century, the federal government leased tens of millions of acres of public lands for oil drilling, upholding a philosophy that affordable, free-flowing energy was a matter of public well-being—a resource that functioned as a public service as much as it did a private commodity. For close to a hundred years, this resource has also been seen as the linchpin of America’s national security.

      America’s relationship to petroleum was irrevocably altered in 1970 when the country hit peak oil. From that point forward the U.S. could no longer hope to provide this public service entirely for itself, but had to buy ever-increasing amounts from outside its borders—putting our national security increasingly into the hands of political allies and enemies alike. In the 1970s America went from being the world’s premier source of oil to being a net importer of oil. The shock of the Arab oil embargo in 1973 exposed this vulnerability for the first time to the American public. The embargo—along with rising concern in the 1970s over pollution caused by drilling and burning crude—sparked widespread public criticism of the marriage of oil and politics in America.

      The industry has adapted. Today the American Petroleum Institute is one of the most powerful business lobbies in U.S. politics, representing a membership of more than four hundred companies and investing between $3 million and $5 million annually in recent years on lobbying efforts. Most notably, the API has led the fight to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and the Outer Continental Shelf to oil drilling, opposed federal requirements for greenhouse gas reduction, and fought to secure and prolong industry-specific tax breaks.

      In 2001, President George W. Bush selected as his chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality a former API lobbyist, Philip A. Cooney. Cooney, who had been the climate team leader at API, came under fire in 2005 when the New York Times reported that he had been altering government reports to raise doubts about the effects of greenhouse gas emissions on global warming. Days after the Times published its report, Cooney resigned. He went on to work at ExxonMobil.

      No administration has been so overt in its ties to the petroleum industry as the George W. Bush administration, which employed more than fifty Oval Office staff members who had previously worked for oil companies, named the CEOs of the nation’s biggest oil companies to the task force that shaped the administration’s energy and war policies, and opened up a record amount of public land to development, including vast areas of the Gulf of Mexico, home to Chevron’s Cajun Express. Though I was a critic of Bush’s energy policies, after my study of history I began to see that the administration’s collaborations with Big Oil was a fairly predictable (which is not to say optimal) extension of political patterns that had been in place throughout the entire twentieth century.

      For all that has shifted in America’s relationship to oil over the last century, what is most surprising is how much of the basic dynamics of petroleum policy and prospecting have stayed the same. At the core, the industry has been fueled by an abiding optimism: “Oil drilling isn’t for the pessimist,” Michel Halbouty said, “or even for the realist. You’ve got to be an optimist. You’ve got to believe no matter how many dry holes you drill, the next one is going to hit.”

      In one of my favorite scenes from the TV show Dallas, J.R. Ewing describes his passion for oil to his disenchanted wife Sue Ellen:

      J.R.: There’s nothing realer than oil, that’s for sure.

      Sue Ellen: Not to you darlin’, except perhaps money.

      J.R.: Same thing, honey, same thing.

      Today, America’s obsession with drilling well after deeper well has eclipsed our ability to scale back demand by developing more enduring energy sources that could take the place of oil. This obsession has, in essence, taken us back to the roots of our domestic oil production. As technology evolved over the decades between the 1920s and 1950s, drillers continued to grind down to ever greater and more pressurized depths—from 1,000 feet to 2,500 feet and then 8,000 feet—unleashing deeper pockets of reserves. In recent decades, prospectors have begun double-dipping in already exploited wells—even in some surrounding Spindletop. They are now venturing as low as 40,000 feet in the hope of opening up still deeper treasures.

      INDEPENDENCE DAY

      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?

      My men can eat their waist belts, but my tanks need gas.

      —General George S. Patton

       2 War and Grease HOW OIL BUILT AND SUSTAINS A MILITARY SUPERPOWER СКАЧАТЬ