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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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?

      BLACK GOLD RUSH

      A 60-foot-tall pink granite obelisk fringed by manicured grass and tubs of red geraniums rises up from the town square of Beaumont, Texas, population 110,000. Its inscription reads: “On this spot on the tenth day of the twentieth century, a new era in civilization began.” The day was January 10, 1901, and the spot—until then a scrubby knoll known as Spindletop—yielded a mammoth gusher that tripled U.S. oil production overnight. It was because of this one gusher, some historians have argued, that petroleum became the dominant fuel of the twentieth century.

      In reality, as I learned from the history books I scoured at my local library, oil prospecting had begun well before the find at Spindletop—in the mid-1800s, when the petroleum by-product kerosene was discovered as an illuminant that burned brighter, cleaner, longer, and more safely than whale oil, and was far cheaper to produce. “It is the light of the age,” read an advertisement written in 1860, just months after Edwin Drake tapped America’s first oil field in Titusville, Pennsylvania. “Its light is no moonshine, but something nearer to the clear, strong, brilliant light of day, to which darkness is no party.”

      Instantly, demand for the lantern fuel began to escalate. Droves of zealous prospectors began digging wells and sinking shafts throughout Pennsylvania—wells that came to be known as wildcat wells (and those who dug them as wildcatters) after a term for speculative СКАЧАТЬ