by Sonia Shah
After the price of oil reached $50 in 2004, American consumers and the press that caters to them renewed their flagging interest in energy efficiency and renewable energy. President Bush’s Energy Policy Act of 2005, the first energy legislation to pass in over a decade, handed out tax credits to those who bought more efficient vehicles, appliances, and buildings. When the price of oil spiked after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the president himself gestured toward energy restraint by ordering the White House staff to nightly turn off their humming copiers and computers.73 But if the American energy appetite could indeed be suppressed, the Energy Policy Act was no plan to keep it that way for long. The two most sure-fire ways of cutting oil consumption—forcing automakers to increase the average fuel economy of their fleets and taxing gasoline—were conspicuously absent from the table. Indeed, the most far-reaching of the new laws aimed not to restrain consumption but rather to ratchet up the energy supply in the long-term.74
Over the coming years, state governments would find their authority to ban LNG plants and offshore drilling weakened. The oil and gas industry would find itself free from various environmental regulations that have hampered its exploration and drilling activities in the United States, and enjoy $1.7 billion in tax breaks plus $1.5 billion in subsidies for ultra-deep drilling. The coal industry would enjoy $3 billion in tax credits and $6 billion in new incentives, plus federal loans for at least 16 new coal-fired power plants. The nuclear industry would enjoy $6 billion in new subsidies.75
CONCLUSION
Death Throes
THE END OF oil’s story is still being written, but it is clear that the conclusion nears.
Much will depend on how a thousand other stories end. In Montreal in 2005, representatives from one hundred and fifty nations announce they will begin the messy business of negotiating mandatory cuts in their post-2012 carbon emissions. Will the talks finally throttle the tailpipe?1 Elsewhere, reluctant government regulators brood over the latest scientific findings that around a third of the species in three of the most biologically diverse places in the world may be condemned to climate-change-induced extinction within fifty years.2 Will these losses be enough to change their minds? In Colombia, some Indian tribes succeed in protecting their lands from industry’s oily explorations, but then the state-run oil company plans to continue. Will the tribes’ threat of mass suicide deter the drills again?3
The signs are ambiguous, to say the least. In 2006, the world’s biggest carmaker, General Motors, announces plans to shrink its capacity to build cars and BP’s solar division reports its first few years of profit. Meanwhile up north in Canada, officials giddily sign proclamations announcing their intentions to step up tar-sands production.4 In Beijing, a new law requires that 15 percent of the country’s energy be supplied by renewables by 2020,5 while across India, workers pour tar on 40,000 miles of new highway.6 In Iraq and Libya, Texan oilmen jostle in the queue to reenter old stomping grounds,7 while in Houston, aging oil executives are handed multi-billion dollar bills to upgrade their decrepit tankers and pipelines.8 In Alaska, oil-company trucks sink into the permafrost’s melting mud9 while in Washington, oil execs press for more access to protected lands. In London, people are penalized for driving their cars,10 while in Beijing and Shanghai, erstwhile bicyclists press up against the sparkling glass of GM and BMW’s new showrooms. Will they buy? Will the Chinese leadership allow the hordes of invading automakers in?11
Around the world, people resist the petrolife, practicing less consumptive ways of feeding, transporting, and sheltering themselves, the vast majority under the strictures of deprivation, others by choosing new ways and rediscovering old ones. The end of the story of oil will depend on them, too, and how they fare against Big Oil’s bulldozer, for there is still time before the ancient liquid vanishes for people to realize, as Kenneth Deffeyes put it, that “crude oil is much too valuable to be burned as a fuel.” Perhaps a new era of sporadic supply interruptions and volatile prices coupled with an influx of better technology to harness solar, wind, and other renewable energies will start to slowly persuade people not to opt for oil. Worries about climate change might restrain the quest for new oil and gas, with declining oil production easing the inequities it so frequently triggers. Perhaps there might be enough oil left, in other words, to mine aluminum and silicon for windmills and solar panels before the drills, shovels, and clouds of carbon dioxide render earth uninhabitable.
Whatever happens, when the oil is gone, in one hundred or two hundred years, it will be gone forever. Today’s humans won’t wait for 100 million years for more crude. But whether society shifts to an energy-constrained way of living, finds some astounding new source of energy, or crashes after baking the planet to an unlivable crisp, one thing is for certain. Underfoot, the powerful black liquid will accumulate again. The shallow seas will rain down their sediments and the shifting plates will trap them in their rocky pores, perhaps more than once before the sun burns out in 7 billion years.
Twisting and turning in its tunnels underground, will it call out, once again, to the imperfect beings traversing the surface, whoever they may be? What will they do? Will they be our descendants? Will they remember?
TABLE ONE
Where is the World’s Oil and How Much is Left?
TABLE TWO
Who Owns Rights to the World’s Oil?
OIL RESERVES4 (billions of barrels)
Saudi Arabia 259
Iraq 115
Kuwait 96
Iran 90
Abu Dhabi 87
Venezuela 77
Libya 36
Nigeria 24
Lukoil 19
Mexico 17
Qatar 15
Yukos 14
ExxonMobil 12
China 11
Royal Dutch Shell 10
ChevronTexaco 9
BP 8
TotalFinaElf 7
Malaysia 3
4 From Hoover’s Company Capsule Database: World Companies, 2004. Royal Dutch Shell reserves from Hoover’s Company Capsule Database: World Companies, 2003. Iraq, Libya, Qatar, and Nigeria reserves from Energy Information Administration, Country Analysis Briefs. ExxonMobil reserves from ExxonMobil Web site at http://www.exxonmobil.com/corporate/files/corporate/ARfinancial2003.pdf . ChevronTexaco reserves from ChevronTexaco Web site, at http://www.chevrontexaco.com/investor/annual/2003/financials/operating. asp , BP reserves from BP Web site, at http://www.bp.com/investor_centre/info/intro.asp . TotalFinalElf reserves from Total Web site at http://www.totalfinaelf.com/ho/en/profile/keyfigur/index.htm .
TABLE THREE
Who Earns the Most Money from Selling the World’s Oil?
2004 INCOME5 (billions of dollars)
BP 285
Royal Dutch Shell 265
ExxonMobil 263
Chevron 143
Total 166
Saudi Arabia 116
Venezuela6 42
Mexico 70
China 41
Kuwait7 28
Malaysia8 26
Abu Dhabi9 17
Iran10 16
Lukoil11 34
Yukos12 11
Qatar N /A
Libya N /A
Nigeria N /A
5 From Hoover’s Company Records In-depth Records, January 3, 2006, unless otherwise noted.
6 Data from 2002.
7 Data from 2001.
8 From 2006 Nelson’s Public Company Profiles, Petronas Dagangan Berhad.
9 Data from 2001.
10 Data from 2002.
11 From Lukoil Analyst DataBook, 2005, available at http://www.lukoil.com/materials/doc/DataBook/DBP/LUK_DataBook%202005_E_ConsolAccounts&FinRatios.pdf
12 Data from 2002.
TABLE FOUR
Who Consumes the World’s Oil?
TABLE FIVE
Top Oil Consumers, 2004
TOP OIL CONSUMERS, 200414 (thousands of barrels/day)
United States 20,517
China 6,684
Japan 5,2
88
Germany 2,625
India 2,555
South Korea 2,280
Canada 2,206
France 1,975
Mexico 1,896
Italy 1,871
Brazil 1,830
United Kingdom 1,756
Spain 1,593
Netherlands 1,003
Thailand 909
Taiwan 877
Australia 858
Belgium & Luxembourg 779
Singapore 748
Turkey 688
14 BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2004. Excludes major exporters.
TABLE SIX
Top Oil Consumers, 2025 projected
TOP OIL CONSUMERS, 2025 PROJECTED8 (thousands of barrels/day)
United States 28,300
China 12,800
former Soviet Union 6,400
Japan 5,800
India 5,300
Brazil 3,800
Mexico 3,500
Germany 3,300
South Korea 2,900
Canada 2,800
France 2,200
Italy 2,200
United Kingdom 2,200
Eastern Europe 2,100
Australia/New Zealand 1,700
Turkey 1,100
Netherlands 1,000
8 Energy Information Administration, International Energy Outlook 2004, Table A 4 : World oil consumption by region, reference case, 1990-2025.
Notes
Introduction
1 Jon P. Davidson et al., Exploring Earth: An Introduction to Physical Geology, 2nd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2002), pp. 4-5.
2 Ibid., pp. 190-191.
3 Ibid., p. 9.
4 Charles F. Conaway, The Petroleum Industry: A Nontechnical Guide (Tulsa, OK: PennWell, 1999), p. 7.
5 M. Grant Gross, Oceanography: A View of Earth, 6th ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1993), p. 329.
6 Ibid., pp. 310-311, 325.
7 Ibid., pp. 314-315.
8 Davidson et al., Exploring Earth, p. 389.
9 Gross, Oceanography, p. 314.
10 Davidson et al., Exploring Earth, p. 389.
11 NASA Earth Observatory, “The Carbon Cycle,” http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Library/CarbonCycle/.
12 A gigaton equals 1 billion tons.
13 Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia 2002, s.v. “Carbon Cycle (ecology).”
14 NASA Earth Observatory, “The Carbon Cycle.”
15 Ibid.
16 Jeremy Leggett, The Carbon War: Global Warming and the End of the Oil Era (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 45-46.
17 Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia 2002, s.v. “Carbon Cycle (ecology).”
18 NASA Earth Observatory, “The Carbon Cycle.”
19 Kenneth S. Deffeyes, Hubbert’s Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 18.
20 Ibid., p. 36.
21 Ibid., p. 16.
22 Robert Stoneley, An Introduction to Petroleum Exploration for Non-Geologists (Oxford, U K : Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 31.
23 Deffeyes, Hubbert’s Peak, pp. 17-21.
24 Conaway, The Petroleum Industry, pp. 24-25.
25 Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia 2002, s.v. “Carbon Cycle (ecology).”
26 A barrel of oil contains forty-two gallons.
27 NASA Earth Observatory, “The Carbon Cycle.”
28 Deffeyes, Hubbert’s Peak, p. 169.
29 Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), p. 716.
30 Deffeyes, Hubbert’s Peak, pp. 169-170. Also, Kenneth S. Deffeyes, interview by the author, December 28, 2002.
31 Greenpeace Australia Pacific, “Shale Oil: A Risky Business,” http://www.greenpeace.org.au/climate/shale_oil/risky.html.
32 Stoneley, An Introduction to Petroleum Exploration for Non-Geologists, p. 37.
33 Conaway, The Petroleum Industry, pp. 31, 33.
34 Ibid., pp. 26-27.
35 Stoneley, An Introduction to Petroleum Exploration for Non-Geologists, pp. 37-43.
36 Conaway, The Petroleum Industry, p. 33.
37 Davidson et al., Exploring Earth, pp. 496-497.
38 Deffeyes, Hubbert’s Peak, p. 167.
39 Kenneth S. Deffeyes, interview by the author, December 28, 2002.
40 Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia 2002, s.v. “Tethys (mythology).”
41 Gross, Oceanography, p. 179.
42 Michael Benton, “Dinosaur Summer,” in Stephen Jay Gould, ed., The Book of Life (London: Ebury Hutchinson, 1993), pp. 127-128, 140-141.
43 Davidson et al., Exploring Earth, p. 494.
44 Gross, Oceanography, pp. 64-65.
45 Davidson et al., Exploring Earth, p. 494.
46 Stoneley, An Introduction to Petroleum Exploration for Non-Geologists, pp. 29-30.
47 G. W. O’Brien, “Influence of Hydrocarbon Migration and Seepage on Benthic Communities in the Timor Sea, Australia,” APPEA Journal 42 (2002), pp. 1-12.
48 Peter Andrews and Christopher Singer, “The Primates’ Progress,” in The Book of Life (see note 42), p. 232.
49 R. J. Forbes, “Chemical, Culinary, and Cosmetic Arts,” in C. Singer et al., eds., A History of Technology, Volume I: From Early Times to the Fall of Ancient Empires (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), pp. 250-253.
50 “No precise recipe for making it exists, but the main ingredients were sulphur, pich, nitre, and petroleum, which were boiled together.” C. Messenger, “Weapons and Armour,” in I. McNeil, ed., An Encyclopaedia of the History of Technology (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 971.
51 A. R. Hall, “A Note on Military Pyrotechnics,” in C. Singer et al., eds., A History of Technology Volume II: The Mediterranean Civilizations and the Middle Ages c 700 B C toc AD1500 (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), pp. 374-377.
52 Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia 2002, s.v. “Zoroastrianism.”
53 David Price, “Energy and Human Evolution,” Population and Environment, March 1995, pp. 301-319.
Chapter One
1 Barbara Freese, Coal: A Human History (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, 2003), pp. 27-57.
2 Charles A. S. Hall, Cutler J. Cleveland, and Robert Kaufmann, Energy and Resource Quality: The Ecology of the Economic Process (New York: Wiley, 1986).
3 Freese, Coal, p. 60, citing Robert Galloway, Annals of Coal Mining and the Coal Trade (Devon, UK: David and Charles, 1971), p. 80.
4 Frederick Engels, Conditions of the Working Class in England (London: Panther, 1969).
5 Freese, Coal, pp. 51-67, 78, 82, 98, 233-234.
6 Lilian Pizzichini, “The Big Smoke: London’s Killer Fogs Inspired Artists and Provided Novelists with the Perfect Emblem of a Sinful City,” New Statesman, December 9, 2002, p. 36.
7 Marshall Brain, “How Gasoline Works,” HowStuff Works, http://science.howstuffworks.com/gasoline.htm.
8 Anthracite coal releases 7,200-8,300 kilocalories/kilogram. Humans are 20 percent efficient at turning food energy into work energy; an average diet would be 3,000 kilocalories, rendering 600 kilocalories of work energy per human per day. Hall et al., Energy and Resource Quality, pp. 106, 229.
9 Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), pp. 20, 27, 30-33, 42, 52, 55, 58-59, 72-73, 84-85, 135-140.
10 Craig C. Freudenrich, “How Oil Refining Works,” HowStuffWorks, http://science.howstuffworks.com/oil-refining.htm.
11 Yergin, The Prize, pp. 22-23.
12 R. J. Forbes, “Petroleum,” in C. Singer et al., eds., A History of Technology Volume III: The Late Nineteenth Century c1850 to c1900 (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 113.
13 Yergin, The Prize, p. 55.
14 Ibid., p. 97.
15 Robert Silverberg, Light for the World: Edison and the Power Industry (Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, 1967), pp. 1-6.
16 Yergin, The Prize, pp. 39, 79.
17 Hall et al., Energy and Resource Qualit
y, p. 23.
18 Jean-Pierre Bardou, Jean-Jacques Chanaron, Patrick Fridenson, and James M. Laux, The Automobile Revolution: The Impact of an Industry, trans. James M. Laux (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), pp. 5-6.
19 Ibid.
20 Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 158.
21 Hall et al., Energy and Resource Quality, pp. 23, 103.
22 Bardou et al., The Automobile Revolution, p. 13.
23 Yergin, The Prize, pp. 84-85.
24 Bardou et al., The Automobile Revolution, p. 13.
25 Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, p. 160.
26 Gale E. Christianson, Greenhouse: The Two-Hundred-Year Story of Global Warming (New York: Penguin, 1999), p. 135.
27 Yergin, The Prize, p. 110.
28 Ibid., pp. 155-156.
29 Michael Klare, Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict (New York: Henry Holt, 2001), pp. 30-31.
30 Lee Mertz, “Origins of the Interstate,” Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration, http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/origin.htm.
31 Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia 2002; Stephen B. Goddard, Getting There: The Epic Struggle Between Road and Rail in the American Century (New York: Basic Books, 1994), excerpted at http://stephongoddard.com/.
32 Yergin, The Prize, p. 183.
33 Jim Klein and Martha Olson, “Taken for a Ride,” PBS documentary transcript, August 1996.
34 David James St. Clair, The Motorization of American Cities (New York: Praeger, 1986), p. 16.
35 Peter H. Spitz, Petrochemicals: The Rise of an Industry (New York: Wiley, 1988), p. 235.
