and because mammalian species like us don’t usually survive for that long, for all intents and purposes, oil is finite on any time scale that matters to humans. Once oil is gone, it’s gone . So how much is there? And are we running out? Because it is nonrenewable, technically we have been “running out” ever since that first oil well was drilled (or, as it were, dug) in Pennsylvania in 1859. 164 On a time scale of centuries or millennia, human oil consumption will look like the chart above. Currently, we are somewhere between the blue and red stars in the pulse graphic. Recognizing that our world revolves around continuous availability of plenty of oil, the above chart should shock and alarm even the most adamant cornucopian. Oil use will be but a blip in time. But now it all gets complicated. On the one hand, vast amounts of oil, coal and natural gas remain untapped under the Earth’s surface. On the other hand, the chance that all or even a majority of it will ever be tapped is pretty much nil. Most of these potential resources are too deep, too expensive or of too-low quality: too diffuse or too energy-intensive to extract. Just as the trace amounts of uranium in seawater will never be extracted because it would take more energy to do so than the uranium so obtained could provide, so too, a large portion of the oil that’s left in the ground will never be extracted because it would be energetically impossible to do so. There are stories in popular media of the United States becoming the “Saudi Arabia of the future” with enormous oil production capacity, particularly the oil shale in the Green River Basin purportedly representing hundreds of years of oil production. This “oil shale” isn’t really oil at all, but shale rock that contains kerogen-- uncooked, immature oil — that would require huge quantities of heat and water in order to become oil. Irrespective of the oil price in the future, getting something like oil out of kerogen-rock will be difficult, expensive, and damaging to the environment. Oil in the ground is classified as either a resource or a reserve . A resource is oil that has been proven to exist and is technically recoverable, but that may not be economically or physically feasible to extract. A “reserve” is oil that is assumed economically profitable to recover at current oil prices. Clearly, if oil is $200 a barrel (making it prohibitively expensive to society), oil companies would have incentive to drill for oil even if it is costly in both money and energy terms, and they would immediately report higher reserves based on that price. But if oil then falls back to $20 a barrel again (making it wonderfully cheap to society), the oil companies would curtail their expensive and energy-wasting operations, and the so- called “reserves”
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