An excellent MSN piece today reports on some of the exaggeration and wild speculation going on amongst oil companies regarding the amounts of reserves of oil shale. As the article itself is entitled, "We're Sitting on 10 Billion Barrels of Oil! OK, Two!"
Of course we shouldn't be surprised. This sort of exaggeration accompanies every boom, especially in fields where it's easy to make claims, and not so easy to disprove them with cold, hard facts. And the motivation is clear: pump up stock prices of course, but also, influence legislation and rip the governmental fetters off our poor, downtrodden (and by the way, heavily subsidized) oil companies. Since oil is no longer scarce, let's export it! And let's keep burning it with abandon!
But we might choose to be disappointed, that humankind (or corporatekind - in the eyes of the Supremes, they're the same thing!) can't learn from past history. The speculation about reserves seems to me to lead entirely in the wrong direction, at least until we have a better fix on actual reserves, and on their future exploitation. But even if the wildest estimates are correct, they do nothing to address the issue that overhangs all the rest: What about air quality? It does us very little good to have reserves to last us the next 500 years if we're not going to be around to burn them.
Even greater unanswered questions remain too, for example, the effects of fracking on the earth's crust. Are we certain that the process doesn't destabilize our fragile environment in ways we don't even understand yet? We are not.
The new-found ability to exploit oil shale is definitely a boon in some ways; it lowers the cost of domestic oil (or could); it may help economies around the world rebound from recession; it takes the pressure off us in the race to find and develop alternative energies. That is its promise. And its threat.
Several good takes on the situation. Right you are, this does mesh well with my latest post. It's pretty easy, it seems, to cast concerns for the environment aside when big profits are there for the grabbing.
Posted by: Dick Klade | October 13, 2014 at 10:09 AM
I read recently that testing has shown there isn't nearly as much oil to drill for in ANWR as has been claimed, but that hasn't stopped the oil companies from screaming for the right and need to drill all over the Alaskan wilderness, as well as off shore. And the fracking fight is huge in Colorado. One town passed a law to prohibit fracking within its city limits and the energy company sued the town. We had two fracking measures on our ballot, which I was just dying to vote NO on, and the governor brokered some compromise that took them off the ballot. Yet I've had two different pro-fracking pollsters come to my door to ask my opinion about it. You'd better believe I told them!
Posted by: PiedType | October 14, 2014 at 11:18 AM