by Sonia Shah
Hewetson jumps to the rig followed by two others. On his back he carries climbing equipment, drysuits, and food:We actually climbed up the anchor chain itself, which was quite scary because it was moving around. Each link is about two to three feet big, and we just free climbed it, basically. We tried to make our way up to the working platform, but the workers were stopping us, physically getting in the way, so we came back down.
On the way down, Hewetson spies a small metal balcony, “tucked up right inside where the chains were.” He squeezes his sleeping bag out of his pack and “made myself a home.” He stays there for a few days, one worker even surreptitiously handing him a hot cup of coffee. His presence stops the rig from working for a few days, bleeding precious summer working hours in the process.
Later, Hewetson’s group hatched a plan even more audacious. They would hoist a self-contained pod, a rigid, well-equipped, airtight camping tent, onto one of the rigs. This would provide for a much sturdier, more permanent occupation than an impromptu sleeping bag. If they could somehow attach the pod to an oil rig, they might be able to stymie oil production for days or even weeks.
An aeronautics engineer designed and built the pod from bright yellow Kevlar, a bullet-proof fabric made possible by oil’s bounty. One morning, Hewetson and the others set off to affix the yellow blister to the side of an unsuspecting rig. “We climbed up the oil rig and put a big pulley there. Then we took a rope from the boat through the pulley and down onto the pod, so when the boat went off, the pod went up and we roped it in.”
Hewetson and the others maneuvered themselves onto the tiny yellow pod, clinging to the side of the rig high above the seas. They shut the hatch and sat tight. If they hung on long enough, the calls for radio interviews would start streaming in on the satellite phone they had set up in the pod.
Suddenly, a powerful spray of water rained down on them. The workers were hosing the pod, like old cobwebs under the porch. They’d positioned a crane nearby, set to pull the pod off the rig, with a net underneath to catch the activists should they fall out.
Hewetson, realizing their plan, strapped on a rope and jumped out of the pod. “I tied the whole net in a big knot. It was just a useless bunch of rope then.” Later, the oil company took more aggressive action. They sent some people down on ropes to stand on the pod’s hatch, trapping Hewetson and the others inside. Then, with the activists trapped inside the pod, they craned the whole thing up onto the platform. They smashed open the hatch and grabbed the activists out. The police took over.
That was the last Hewetson saw of the Kevlar pod. Exhausted, out of fuel and batteries, the MV Greenpeace steamed home.
The oil industry said that the West’s giant, self-reinforcing edifice built of black grease brought prosperity, pointing to the strong link between GNP growth and oil consumption. The more oil countries consumed, the more their GNP would shoot up. The more fuel workers consumed, with bigger and more fuel-intensive machines, the more productive they were. The correlation had been well-documented for decades.31
Critics wondered whether a rising GNP indicated genuine growth or a mere “swelling.” Running up an $11 billion medical bill treating the childhood asthma epidemic triggered in part by trucks’ diesel fumes added to the growth of the GNP, after all.32 Such dilemmas were mostly brushed aside, most aggressively by those in the oil industry. According to Rex Tillerson, the swaggering Texan vice president of ExxonMobil, the world would descend into poverty and insecurity if the oil industry were not allowed to hunt, track, and plunge their drills into every last corner of the earth. “It is clear that the discovery and growing use of hydrocarbons over the last century has contributed greatly to people’s wellbeing,” Tillerson said in February 2003. “Access to affordable and reliable energy supply remains essential to the continued progress, prosperity, and well being of the world’s citizens.” Regulations based on “misplaced” environmental concerns would waste the “limited resources” of private oil companies, restricting their ability to “provide the greatest good to society.”33
Promoting variations on this argument, the U.S. government and the international lending institutions it dominates have ensured that the fossil-fuel economy doesn’t end at Western borders, by affixing thick, oil-soaked strings to its loans to indebted developing countries. Between 1992 and 2002, American export credit agencies handed out over $30 billion for fossil-fuel projects to developing countries; the World Bank almost $25 billion.34 By 2003, World Bank was spending fifteen times more on fossil fuel projects than on renewable energy projects, a ratio the Bank vowed to improve by 2009—to around five to one in favor of petro-projects.35
Ensuring that developing countries consume increasing quantities of oil is “crucial to the long-term growth of oil markets,” the U.S. Department of Energy opined.36 Carmakers and oil companies know that the next hot market for them is unlikely to be in the West, given that each licensed driver in the United States already owns a car. In 2000, automakers spent almost $10 billion advertising their cars outside the United States.37 China, in particular, “offers huge potential for future growth” BP’s annual report avowed.38
Today, congested, slum-ridden megacities such as Calcutta and Jakarta are rapidly vanquishing their well-trod footpaths and bike alleys for asphalt-paved roads for cars driven by the elite.39 The effects can be seen from miles above the planet.
Ram Ramanathan, an atmospheric scientist, gazed out his airplane window, heading south from Mumbai, India. The thick brown city haze, from hundreds of millions of wood fires and flaming cow-dung patties, sped past the plane’s oval windows as it climbed over the Indian Ocean. But almost a thousand miles later, as the plane glided over the open sea, the brown pall still hadn’t lifted. “This is something big,” he thought to himself.
Dust, ash, and smoke from Asia’s poorly regulated industries have congealed into a giant dark cloud of smog, blocking out as much as 10 percent of India’s sunlight. Ramanathan had flown through the two-mile-thick “Asian brown cloud,” a permanent fixture now stretching thousands of miles over the skies of Asia.40
By 2020, the developing countries, led by China and India, are expected to consume almost 90 percent as much oil as the industrialized countries.41 The growth in their demand for oil could outstrip oil demand growth in the West by almost two to one. It is only natural, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Growing populations and burgeoning industrial economies in China, India, and the rest led to “rapidly rising consumer demand for transportation via cars and trucks powered with internal combustion engines.”42
CHAPTER FIVE
Refining the Hunt
BY THE MID - 1980S, reports that oil output in Britain’s North Sea had peaked started to appear in the newspapers. Like all oilfields, they had spurted their oil out into strategically drilled wells for a while, under their own pressure, but then started to lazily dribble; eventually, the trickle would come to a stop altogether. When a porous, oil-filled rock is first pierced, releasing the tons of pressure on the buried layers, the oil inside will rush from pore to pore towards the well. But once this initial natural pressure spends itself out, in order to keep the oil flowing, drillers must start what is known as “secondary recovery.” Their methods, using pumps and shooting chemicals, gas, or soda water down the hole to keep the pressure going, can stave off the inevitable decline in output, but eventually it arrives, generally when about half of the oil in the reservoir has come out of the ground. After that acme or peak of oil production, the daily volume of oil flowing of the well starts to fall, never to climb back up again.
The UK government, desperate to keep the industry afloat, incrementally reduced their tax on oil developments, sending their tax revenues from their stormy oilfields falling by 87 percent between 1984 and 1994, according to researchers at the University of Sheffield.1
In late 2002, plans were afoot to abolish all royalty taxes on North Sea oilfields approved before 1982.2 Thus liberated from fiscal responsibilities to the peo
ple on whose waters they drilled, companies could scrape the seabed for ever-smaller fields and still turn a profit. But it is extremely unlikely they’d find anything big there now. “It would be a very big surprise to discover another Brent or Forties field now,” said a Shell explorer. “It’s like breaking a pane of glass: you pick up the big pieces first and then you get out the dustpan and brush and sweep up the shards.”3
Big oil companies such as BP aren’t interested in minimum-wage cleanup jobs. Their Forties field had peaked in 1979. They pumped whatever they could and then sold it in January 2003.4
By the late 1980s, the better part of Prudhoe Bay’s oil had been drained as well. From a production peak in 1988, each well’s output declined by 20 percent every year, despite a spate of drilling and the injection of gas and other chemicals to encourage more oil to ooze out.5
Meanwhile the beating heart of the world’s oil endowment lay in the Middle East, much of it barely touched. By 1996, for instance, only about one-fifth of the most promising structures that geologists had pinpointed in Iraq—let alone any potential stratigraphic traps—had ever been drilled at all.6 But Western oil companies remained anathema to many OPEC countries; the public resisted them and some countries’ constitutions outlawed their involvement.7 Under increasing pressure to privatize, national oil companies had started, by 2002, to “act in a more aggressive, commercial manner,” as Petroleum Intelligence Weekly noted, but it didn’t help the biggest Western oil companies much.8 Still, only the tiniest trickle of Middle Eastern oil leaks into ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco’s coffers, making up less than 6 percent of those companies’ total output in 2003.9 “Having so much oil already there” in the Middle East, admitted one petroleum geologist, “it does seem somewhat wasteful to have to go and immediately look for more.” Yet that is exactly what industry geologists would have to do.10
The oil industry forks out hundreds of billions of dollars every year searching for new streams of oil to fill its emptying pipelines and rickety tankers. In 2003, the industry spent $136 billion looking for new oil, approximately the gross national income of Saudi Arabia that year. In 2006, the industry would spend $238 billion.11
Oil companies exploit the most high-tech tools money can buy and ever-more-sophisticated geological insights to conduct their search for crude. Their latest weapon, one that has improved the industry’s rate of successful discovery by an order of magnitude according to some enthusiasts, is the three-dimensional seismic survey. Whereas before the industry made do with muffled echoes to determine what lay underfoot, with three-dimensional seismic technology they could carve a clear glass window into the crust of the earth and take a look.12
Throughout the 1990s, giant ships prowled the world’s oceans, towing behind them up to a dozen six-kilometer-long kerosene-filled cables studded with tens of thousands of microphones collecting seismic data. On land, surveyors cut a maze of seismic tracks through oil-prospective regions, in a few months collecting enough information to fill twenty-five thousand CDs. Sending the data by satellite to supercomputers onshore, or by fitting their ships with massive computers, the data can, in a few months, be processed into a shimmering, three-dimensional image of the underworld.
Different colors indicate different kinds of echoes, and the whole image can be projected onto large-scale 180-degree interactive screens for oil execs and geologists to wander about in. The three-dimensional movie domes have kitschy names like “VisionDome,” “Reality Centre,” and “Decisionarium.”13
Ian Vann is a true believer in three-dimensional seismic technology. The vice president and technical director at BP, Vann is a forceful, white-bearded geologist with a thick Scottish brogue. He proudly broadcasts his movie of seismic images to his colleagues. Wavy colored lines on a flat dark screen slowly descend to reveal something entirely unexpected: a tall, wildly jagged, three-dimensional structure. It’s the oil- and gas-rich rock, hiding virtually invisible under the flat strata atop it. The effect is eerie. Vann booms to the crowd, in case anyone is not suitably impressed, that his movie requires “the largest parallel processing power available industrially!”
In fact, three-dimensional seismic is even better than that, he bellows. It “represents the evolution of technology within the last two years equivalent to the changes brought about by the launch of the Hubble space telescope!” It certainly makes Vann’s passion for unmasking the geological secrets of the earth much more interesting. Members of the hushed audience nod their heads.14
Between 1994 and 2004, oil explorers found 426 oil and gas fields of over 100 million barrels of oil equivalent each. Since 1998, over 40 percent lay not under the familiar arid plains or even arctic tundra but deep under the ocean’s restless currents and the sea floor’s shifting sediments.15 A software package eagerly touted by one of the world’s biggest energy consulting firms summed it up in its title: it was called “DEEPE$T.”16
The deeper waters off the Gulf of Mexico’s continental shelf, for example, had been virtually ignored by oil explorers for years, even as they exploited the oil reserves in the shallow waters nearby. “The first and real killer was the stratigraphy,” explains Chevron’s former chief geophysicist, Lee C. Lawyer.17 Conventional wisdom dictated that there couldn’t be any oil in deep water. Only shallow seas, washing over the shelves of the continental plates that slipped under water, could have deposited the oil-rich shales and reservoir sands that turn into oilfields. How could any of that stuff wash all the way into the depths of the ocean? And even if some source rocks had formed in the deeps, the idea went, there wouldn’t be any reservoir rocks down there to soak it up.
Checking into the veracity of this notion was virtually impossible, in any case. Anything that deeply submerged under water became invisible to traditional seismic methods. A highly mobile layer of salt hid all of the underlying geology.
Then, confounding conventional wisdom, Brazil’s state-owned oil company discovered an oilfield under the ocean’s depths in the mid-1980s. An entire realm of the planet, the deep oceans, hitherto written off as oil-barren wastelands, might be loaded with crude. Eyes opened, the industry whisked around to take another look in their own backyards. Armed with three-dimensional seismic technology, explorers set off into the deep water of the Gulf of Mexico to find their missing gold.18
In 1999, they found it. BP uncovered a billion-barrel oilfield under no less than six thousand feet of water, reverentially dubbing the field “Crazy Horse.” This nominal homage was stymied when the Lakota raised an outcry over the despoiling of their ancestral warrior’s name,19 but an awestruck BP still aimed to spend $15 billion to develop oil under the Gulf’s depths.20 The now-renamed Thunder Horse would be tamed with what BP claimed would be the largest floating oil and gas structure in the world.
None of it would have been found without three-dimensional seismic, Vann declared. The seismic technology is twenty times better in 2003 than it was just three years before, allowing petroleum geologists to “see” the Gulf’s deep water oil when before they were blind to it, he said. It still isn’t easy. “Without 3D we wouldn’t have a chance,” agreed Lawyer. “With 3D, it is still a difficult problem. . . . Trying to sort out data that has been recorded after passing through a salt body is very difficult and often very misleading. . . . Mistakes are very costly,” he pointed out. “Who could make money when the exploratory well cost more than $20 million?”21
With TotalFinaElf’s 1996 discovery of a multi-billion-barrel oilfield off the coast of Angola, the hunt for oil in the deep water off the west coast of Africa had commenced along the coasts of Angola, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Ivory Coast, and Namibia. As the Society of Exploration Geophysicists put it, “West Africa—where oil-filled, undrilled, amplitude delineated, treasures await. Let’s go!”22
In late 2001, a three-dimensional seismic survey company, Petroleum Geo-Service, had released seismic data indicating potential oil off the coast of tiny São Tomé, setting off a storm of deals in that 150,000-stro
ng 1000 square-kilometer island nation, with PGS, ExxonMobil and others.23 Advisors pushed the White House to set up a military installation on the tiny impoverished island, as a home port for oil tankers and the warships that would protect their precious cargo.
According to a State Department official:African oil is less sticky than the stuff you get in the Middle East, and much of it is in deep water far offshore, so the natives don’t notice it being taken, whereas in the Middle East it’s pumped out of the ground under the noses of Wahhabi fundamentalists. Then you have São Tomé, which is basically the only stable democracy in West Africa. It’s perfect.24
The West African governments aren’t driving a particularly hard bargain: “Fiscal terms for deep-water licenses are usually negotiable, work obligations are not excessive, license periods are long, and block sizes are generally large,” enthused Petroleum Economist. The waters are relatively calm and warm, the waves rarely topping five meters. The only problem is, well, these countries are dirt poor. “The infrastructure for oil operations is generally poor, and facilities for constructing and maintaining high-tech structures and equipment are either not available or, at best, unreliable,” Petroleum Economist moaned. Everything would have to be shipped in.25
The industry invested precious little of its own enormous income on the risky, long-term research needed to make technological breakthroughs, proportionally speaking. The computer and pharmaceutical industries, for instance, spend between 13 and 20 percent of their sales income on research and development, the oil and gas industry devotes a mere 3 percent. According to a 2002 study, big oil and gas companies reduced their investments in R&D by over 40 percent over the 1990s, spending between $2 and $3 billion a year on “nearterm proprietary needs” rather than the risky, collaborative, long-term research that they’d need to continue exploiting diminishing resources in the future.26
