Energy security for the world, especially for the industrial rich, the major consumers of the world, is a matter of prime concern now at the highest level. The recent G-8 ministerial moot, with Russia the 2nd largest oil producer in the world in chair, looked once again at the issue closely. Underlying the importance of the issue, it would be one of the major subjects on the G-8 summit agenda next month. Energy to the world has to be ensured, one way or the other, indeed.
An increasing number of people, with considerable weight, however, do not seem to be pessimistic at all about the global energy outlook. Mat Simmons & Co, who must be making a wonderful living out of this fear mongering, yet there are people in considerable number now, who strongly feel to the contrary.
If one goes by the doomsday pundits, the world has run out of oil several times in the near-recorded history. In 1874, Pennsylvania’s state geologist fretted that America had only a 4-year supply of oil left. He was definitely wrong. In 1914, Washington claimed we had only a 10-year supply. That also turned out to be wrong. In 1940, the US government announced that reserves would be depleted within 15 years. Wrong this time too! In 1977, President Jimmy Carter lamented that within a decade, we wouldn’t be able to import enough oil, “from any country, at any acceptable price,” to meet our needs. Hardly shocking, the peanut farmer from Plains, was proven wrong too. Contrary to all the above estimates, the world’s estimated oil reserves grew from 60 billion barrels in 1920 to 600 billion by 1950, 2,000 billion by 1990, and 3,000 billion by the year 2000. And in the next few years, they’ll keep rising; many now are arguing. According to Daniel Yergin of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, from 2004 through 2010, global production capacity is likely to grow from 85 million to 101 million barrels per day — a 20 percent increase. This forecast was based primarily on projects, already under development.
New exploration and human ingenuity both seem to be contributing to this sigh of relief — if one could use that word. A quarter of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas resources lie in the Arctic, according to the United States Geological Survey. Some scientists involved in projects in Arctic say the huge amounts of organic material from dead algae and plants embedded in the ancient sedimentary layers suggest that the center of the Arctic Ocean could hold vast oil deposits. Henk Brinkhuis of the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, is of the opinion, “the entire Arctic rim is already one big exploration machine.”
If the oil exists, it would probably take decades to develop techniques for exploiting such midocean deposits, yet huge deposits could very much there, these scientists strongly felt — much to the relief of the confused energy fraternity. Further on, the sludge in the Orinoco Belt of Venezuela, roughly a 54 square mile area, also appears to be very promising. Hugo Chavez says it contains up to 235 billion barrels of recoverable oil. Chevron has spent $1 billion as yet to help transform a swath of scrub grass into a great frontier for oil production in Orinoco belt. On the other hand, Caspian Sea also has known largely untapped reserves. Then the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, if explored, could also add a million barrels a day to US production.
And Saudi Arabia is already claiming that it would soon be able to add another 200 billion barrels in its recoverable reserve estimates soon.
While the unconventional sources appear to be still in plenty, the US Geological Survey suggests that out of 3 billion barrel of conventional oil in the ground only 1 billion barrel has been produced. But that may not be all. There are also now questions about oil being a “finite substance.”
What if oil isn’t a scarce fossil fuel derived from dead dinosaurs, but a plentiful resource from inorganic material embedded in the Earth’s crust: basically a liquid rock? Joseph Stalin’s scientists thought so, and by employing this “abiotic” theory of oil formation, the old Soviet Union found numerous oil fields where Western scientists said little or no oil could exist. Their theory has received greater attention in the West in recent years, most notably from the late Cornell astrophysicist Thomas Gold, and if true, would mean that the world is literally floating on a sea of oil deep somewhere in the Earth’s core. There might even be oil in space!
The world may already be floating in oil. To bet on an energy starved world just round the corner does not seem to be making better sense — at this stage.
