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Published in The Japan Times. 15
August 2005
By David Howell
World Energy Myths and Illusions
LONDON and OSLO – People like to discuss whether the world is running out of oil
and gas, and the big oil companies round the world have now joined in with
warnings about energy shortages and the need to re-tool our economies on a more
energy efficient basis. And to emphasise their dire warnings, they are currently
predicting huge and immediate rises in the price of gas and oil in Europe.
But the whole debate between the pessimists – yes we are drinking oil faster
than we can find it – versus the optimists – no, there is plenty more to be
found and extracted – is really irrelevant. Energy resources themselves are not
the problem. The problem is the management of the world’s vast energy resources,
and all the complex political and economic decisions and choices and events
which surround that management task.
Energy sources available to the human race are unlimited, however much we use.
Nuclear energy is all about politics. But it can provide enough electricity to
warm and light the whole planet forever, and even to colonize space as well.
Fusion, now being explored, seeks in effect to encase in a bottle the entire
energy equivalent of the sun. Even traditional energy resources, like coal and
oil and gas, exist in quantities so vast that it would take centuries for the
world to run out , if ever, despite the repeated claims if some scientists that
we have ‘reached the peak’ , or are about to reach it.
To take only oil itself, ‘black gold’ as it is called, every four or five years
experts come up with new estimates both of proven reserves in the ground and
,more vaguely, of likely but unexplored reserves, as indicated by certain
geological markers and pointers.
Until recently the figure for ‘unexplored’ oil reserves was about 900 billion
barrels. The analysts have added that to the 1.7 trillion barrels of proven
reserves (mostly in the Middle East) and divided the total by the amount the
world consumes each day, about 85 million barrels. The answer comes out at about
fifty years, although if oil consumption goes on up at present rates it would be
more like thirty years.
But now in turns out that up in the Arctic areas of the Barent Sea, the High
North as the Norwegians call it, there could be an other 25 percent of
unexplored reserves, pushing that 900 billion figure to something nearer 1.2
trillion.
Hitherto the problem has been how to get it out from under the ice. Giant
platforms on the ice would be much too dangerous. But along, as always, comes
new technology. Drills can now burrow sideways for miles under the ice and suck
out oil from far distant reservoirs, pumping it back to land bases.
Together with the Russians, the Norwegians now think they are on top of this
challenge and in a few years the edge of Europe will have oil and gas
availability that easily matches the Middle East. In fact, gas is already being
extracted, frozen and shipped to the ever-thirsty USA. And it is oil and gas not
from the turbulent and unstable Gulf region, where anything could happen any day
politically, but from the most reliable ,stable and democratic region on earth.
This changes the face of world oil politics, invalidates all those assertions
about having to depend more and more on the unstable Middle East and makes
nonsense, yet again of gloomy views about the oil running out. Leading Asian
oil-consuming economies like Japan can give a sigh of relief that growing Middle
East oil and gas dependence is not, as we have constantly been told ,
‘inevitable’.
If one adds to this vista of oil plenty the progress of technology which makes
more and more efficient use of oil – for instance via the hybrid car now soaring
in world popularity –a picture emerges in which oil and gas, far from running
out , become the gradual gateway to a cleaner and greener future , rather than
standing in the way of it. The same can be said for ‘clean’ coal – that is, coal
being burnt with the carbon dioxide emissions diverted and minimized.
So the real problems of energy supply lie not in the sources, or in global
warming effects, but in the terrifying political dangers in certain oil
producing regions, in the prospect of terrorist attacks on complex
installations, in the vulnerability of long pipelines, in lack of timely
infrastructure investment (usually due to wrong economic and price forecasts)
and in misguided decisions by governments and politicians. These are the points
where wise energy planners should be concentrating and planning to find a way
round . That is their duty and what their peoples have a right to expect.
The present strong oil price is entirely due to a mixture of these factors on
the supplying side, plus very heavy demand from fast-growing China, and from
India, coming on top of America’s ever-rising demand for oil imports. It
probably will not last. Growth will slow, new refineries (a key bottleneck at
present) will come on stream , cleaner and greener alternatives will provide
their share, although very slowly.
Feelings of shortage and energy crisis will doubtless persist as governments
panic, taxes are piled on to energy sales, political earthquakes occur in
sensitive regions. But the one certainty is that there is no shortage of oil or
gas in the ground and no longer-term shortage of energy at all. It is just a
question of surviving the difficult, and man-made, present.
Ends
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