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Edited on Fri Sep-26-03 06:18 PM by JohnyCanuck
IS THE EMPIRE ABOUT OIL? - A Response to the Naysayers By Geologist Dale Alan Pfeifer Normally, I would not waste time and effort arguing about the motives behind the War on Terrorism -- what is most important is that we fight against this War on Terrorism. However, there is a lot more at stake here than simply greedy imperialism. The U.S. empire and modern civilization are all made possible by oil. Without it our technology would never have grown beyond coal-based industrialism. Furthermore, there are no alternative energy sources, which, considered separately or in total, can replace oil and natural gas.
As oil and natural gas production decline, so will the economy and our technological civilization. Without oil and natural gas modern agriculture will fail, and people will starve. Without oil and natural gas, industry will grind to a halt, transportation will be grounded, and people in northern climes will freeze in the winter.
Scientist Richard Duncan has created a model that has so far gone unrefuted. His model states that technological civilization cannot outlast its resource base, particularly its energy resource base. Once this resource base is exhausted, technological civilization will be forever beyond the grasp of life on a particular planet. Duncan makes his model readily available to anyone who wishes to test it in the hope that someone will be able to successfully refute the model. To date, no one has done so. (See "The Peak of World Oil Production and the Road to Olduvai Gorge" http://dieoff.com/page224.htm)
You see, there is a lot more at stake here than just a continuation of the Cold War or U.S. imperialistic greed. There is enough energy remaining in the world right now for us -- the people -- to take control and ease ourselves into a democratic, egalitarian, stable-state society. Or there is enough energy for the elite to build a feudalistic, fascist, police state with themselves at the top. This is the choice facing us right now, and this is what is truly at stake.Colin Campbell on Oil - An interview with Colin Campbell, PhD retired geologist and oil company executive. FTW: Will Central Asian-Caspian pipelines have an impact on the crisis? How long will it take them to come on line?
Campbell: There was talk of the place holding over 200 Gb (I think emanating from the USGS ), but the results after 10 years of work have been disappointing. The West came in with high hopes. The Soviets found Tengiz onshore in 1979 with about 6 Gb of very deep, high sulfur oil in a reef. Chevron took over and is now producing it with difficulty. But offshore they found a huge prospect called Kashagan in a similar geological setting to Tengiz. If it had been full, it could have contained 200 Gb, but they have now drilled three deep wells at huge cost, finding that instead of being a single reservoir it, like Tengiz, is made up of reefs. Reserves are now quoted at between 9 Gb and 13 Gb. BP-Statoil has pulled out. Caspian production won't make any material difference to world supply. There is however a lot of gas in the vicinity.
To put it in perspective this would supply the world for a little over a year, but it is broadly the same as U.S. potential
It is quite possible that the Afghan war was about securing a strong point in this area. But interest in it has now dwindled along with Caspian prospects as the U.S. turns to Iraq, which does have some oil. It is curious that these two U.S. military exercises had different pretexts
A) Afghanistan was to find the supposed architect of Sept. 11 -- in which it failed; and
B) Iraq is about a sudden and unexplained fear that it might develop some objectionable weapons that might pose a threat to someone in the future. North Korea, which already has nuclear weapons and long range missiles -- and isn't exactly a friendly place -- is not deemed a threat. The cynic can be forgiven for thinking there is some other motive for these military moves: could it be oil? The optimists believe that we have 30 to 40 years until peak, however that estimate is based on oil reserves as reported in USGS reports compiled from figures supplied by governments of various oil producing countries. However, there is reason to believe that for economic reasons these countries might have been intentionally exagerating the quantities of their own reserves. http://www.hubbertpeak.com/summary.htmNow comes the interesting part. Many estimates been have made of the world Ultimate for oil, a recent example being the 1995 USGS global survey. The value they published was 2275 Billion Barrels (or Giga - barrels, Gb). These studies are always based on estimates of reserves taken directly from producing countries themselves. Therein lies the problem. Many OPEC countries have been announcing reserve numbers which are frankly very strange. Either their reported reserves remain the same year after year - suggesting that new discoveries exactly match production, or they have suddenly increased their reported reserves by unfeasibly large amounts. This is clearly shown in the following table:
<snip>
These data are less odd when one realises that OPEC takes into account a country’s reserves when fixing production quotas: the more oil you say you have, the more you’re allowed to sell. Additionally, oil reserves can be used as collateral for loans - an example of this is the $50 Billion loan from the USA to Mexico: in December 1994, the Mexican Peso fell by around 35%. As a result, the Mexican Central Bank's international reserves fell from $29 billion to $5 billion. To stave off a collapse of the Mexican economy, President Clinton signed a $50 billion "Emergency Stabilization Package" loan to the Mexican government on 31 January 1995. The collateral for the loan was Mexico's pledge of revenues from its future petroleum exports.
Another problem with surveys like that of the USGS (from which the US government takes its figures) is that they use very flexible definitions of the different types of oil involved when predicting the amount of oil remaining to be discovered. Briefly, these break down as follows:
Conventional Oil (95% of all oil so far produced is conventional)
Unconventional Oil
Tar Sands
Oil Shales
Oil not recoverable with today's technology
This distinction is important, because the global economy is based on cheap pumpable petroleum which comes exclusively from conventional oil: there may well be sources of unconventional oil waiting to be found (ie Canada, Antarctica) but not at today’s prices, and not today, either. This counters the argument, often put forward by oil companies, that improvements in technology will prolong the lifetime of our oil resources: the cost of oil produced by these as yet uninvented technologies is likely to be astronomical by today’s standards. It is therefore misleading not to consider these resources as separate from conventional oil.
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