BUT ITS ECONOMIC IMPACT AND THE EROSION OF USA MORAL AUTHORITY REMAINS TO HAUNT US
Yesterday, Mr. Obama notified us that the Bush war in Iraq was over and most of our troops will come home by December 31. Obama has been angling to “have his cake and eat it too” by keeping a substantial force in Iraq within our numerous military bases there (built at tremendous cost to our taxpayers) and still being able to state “our troops are leaving”! But he has been denied that political advantage. After a war in which (as President Bush promised) we bombed Iraq “back into the stone age”, at a cost of over four thousand American lives as well as the deaths, directly or indirectly of some 600,000 Iraqi civilians, and displaced or made homeless more than four million more Iraqis, it would be difficult to imagine that they would welcome us to stay on. (Even today, nine and one-half years after the invasion, and billions of US tax payer's dollars spent-- the level of electric service, availability of sewage treatment, and access to safe, fresh water sources remain below that of pre-invasion Saddam Hussein levels.) Recent polls clearly indicate that the vast majority of Iraqis are eager for us to depart. Furthermore, the present Maliki government would not sign a Status of Forces Agreement which would have guaranteed “immunity of our troops from prosecution under Iraqi law”. After the tragic Blackwater fiasco, and lack of judicial response to multiple cases of indiscriminate killings of innocent civilians by what some have described as "trigger-happy" American troops, it would be hard to see how they would agree to such a clause.
While on the home front, Americans, are ready to turn their attention to our own economic problems, as we suffer through the Great Recession of 2007. This change in direction of the nation's thinking is partly a reflection of the natural waning of September 11 anxieties after a decade of our leaders' fear-mongering. It is also a result of the realization that "something went radically wrong" in the last decade that needs change. (These feelings have been clearly manifested in two recent mass movements, the "Tea Party" uprising on the right and the "Occupy Wall Street" movement on the left.) For the more astute observers that "something" was to a large extent a result of President Bush's “unnecessary-wars-on-borrowed-money-policy”, coupled with his penchant for reducing taxes on the wealthy, and dangerous determination to expand banking deregulation.
Here in the USA, in these days of economic suffering we too are uniformly happy to see our troops withdraw and government reduce unnecessary expenditures abroad, and are ready to fore swear jingoism. Practicality seems to rule now. Few of us can see any advantage in the costly stationing of US troops in countries which pose no actual threat to us (except those of the right-wing radical fringe and the talking-head generals, who have a personal stake in these issues--and for that reason--rather than doting on their every word-- their judgement should be taken with a grain of salt). The sentiment for troop withdrawal is particularly acute for those who realize that these military costs are paid for by the US government borrowing forty cents on every dollar we spend. And recall that each pair of boots on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan costs us approximately one-million dollars each. Obama now claims that only a few hundred may remain to protect the massive “US Embassy” in Baghdad. That edifice, bigger than the Vatican City State, was built with no thought of cost or practical function, but with the idea that it would long-remain a "camouflaged" well-fortified outpost of US imperialism, and now with the withdrawl of December 2011 it seems, it will be remembered only as great monument to the stupidity and chicanery of Messrs Bush and Cheney--and the neocons and other Republicans and Democrats who facilitated their actions.
That the troops are coming home, we all "thank God for little mercies". But it is very sad that our President Obama, who spoke so eloquently against this war, failed to give this speech on the first day he took office. He would have saved many American lives and hundreds of billions of dollars, and perhaps we would find ourselves better positioned strategically than we are in presently.
And for those Bush revisionists and "die hards" who continue to try to claim that the “Iraq war was worth it”. One must only take a look around us at the current economic, political and foreign-policy landscape to appreciate what a disaster the last nine and one-half years have been. Our nation, first ravaged by the 9-11 tragedy, then the disastrous eight years of the Bush presidency, was served poorly by the new Obama administration, which failed to correct the nation's errant course and simply let its wagon wheels fall into the deep errant ruts of the past administration, making no effort to move off in the right direction. Mr. Obama failed to use the massive mandate of the 2008 election to expose and/or punish those who got us into this financial, foreign policy and economic mess. Unfortunately, Mr. Obama chose to continue many of the very same failed policies, attacks on civil liberties, expansion of war powers acts, illegal renditions and targeted-assinations, expansion of wasteful wars, and misguided economic policies that compounded our problems rather than solved them. Only now, perhaps too late, to save his presidency he has changed course when his is at the nadir of his power.
Thus, we see that the events of the last decade have culminated in a cluster of problems for us: our national debt and deficit, the costs of the “three trillion dollar war” in Iraq, the failure of the financial sector, our persistent high unemployment rate, the nation's anxiety and unrest, and the political stalemate in Congress. As a result, we have exited from the miasma of this Iraq war as a diminished nation. Our reputation as a great nation has been sullied on all fronts. Our economy has suffered, our bonds downgraded, our dollar falling to levels not seen before relative to the Chinese yuan, our military is weakened and forced to come to terms with its limits in its geographic reach, as well as the now too obvious bounds of military force as the means to achieve our strategic and long term national goals. Finally, and sadly, even our once vaunted moral authority has suffered what appears a fatal blow.
Some may ask who cares about moral authority? Why should the nation be concerned with what the French or Germans or those third world nations think of us? The answer is that it does count, particularly in an unruly world, where, as has been so well demonstrated to us in Iraq and Afghanistan, that the aerial bomb, the foot-soldier, and the muzzle of a gun have only limited effectiveness. We must lead by example and gentle coercion of the majority. Our moral authority is the primary element of our leadership tool kit. For more than fifty years after WWII the US led the world as a model of justice and adherence to the rule of law, a model which should be emulated. Our efforts were successful in the post war world. Much of our culture of national morality was a direct outgrowth of the outstanding early model set for us by our founding fathers: Franklin, Jefferson, Adams and Monroe, and the documents they authored--our Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights. Our model of justice, humanity, and law set us apart from other nations. In this regard we are truly exceptional. And those nations who emulated us have come to see great rewards for their efforts. In a globalized world our adherence to these laudable cultural tenets permit us to lead and modify world opinion. That was a time when our word counted. Our efforts permitted us to direct ourselves and others toward in ways which would eventually lead to a better, more just, more humane post-WWII world. But today we find ourselves on a precipice where one more step in the wrong direction would be fatal.
One example of how far we have fallen on this score came to public attention yesterday October 22, 2011 in the Washington Post when it became clear that our once unchallenged moral authority has fallen apace with our military set backs, and economic woes.
When the UK-based firm Hermitage Management Capital became embroiled in a charge of tax fraud and evasion in Russia, they hired Russian attorney Sergie Magnitzky to represent them. During Magnitsky's investigation he uncovered evidence that absolved the UK firm from guilt of tax evasion, and revealed, in fact, that Hermitage MC was the victim of fraud perpetrated by powerful Russian financial institutions. During the long litigation period Magnitsky was himself charged with colluding with Hermitage and arrested on trumped up charges. He was incarcerated in the infamous Butyrka prison in Moscow where he appears to have been pressured to abandon and recant the case he had developed. He refused. During his incarceration, he fell ill. Medical attention was limited, and as he continued to resist recanting his positions, he was moved to increasingly harsh confinement conditions where his affliction worsened and eventually died of his ailment. A Russian court ruled his death the result of purposeful negligence and the doctors who treated him and prison official were tried and punished with prison terms. The UK based Economist magazine reporting on this story called his case an example of torture. Other exposes followed and "the Magnitsky case" soon became a cause celebre in the UK and on the Continent.
After Magnitsky’s death the case received further wide publicity in the UK and Europe, where eventually the EU Parliament voted for the banning of entry into the EU of sixty Russian officials who were deemed responsible for the brave attorney’s death. The Canadian Parliament followed suit, resolving to deny visas and to freeze Canadian assets of this group of Russian individuals. Here in the US, Senator John McCain co-sponsored the Justice for Sergei Magnitsky Act in October 2010, which would forbid entry into the US of the sixty individuals named in court documents. Recently, it was revealed (see October 22, Washington Post) that the Obama Administration put into effect the legislation and added these sixty people to our “banned for entry” list.
The Russian response remained muted as the statutes voted on in both the European and Canadian parliaments went into effect, but when the US chimed in, they attacked us viciously. The Russian foreign minister Alexander Lukashevich lashed out in what the Washington Post called “ unusually strong terms: stating: “Such (US) moralizing-calls appear especially cynical against the background of the practical legalization of torture in the US, special prisons, kidnapping, and mistreatment of terrorism suspects, the indefinite detention of prisoners in Guantanamo, and uninvestigated murders of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
And so is this is the world-view of the USA, after the GW Bush-Obama administrations? Is this what is said sotto voce and behind our backs? I fear it is how we are perceived around the world today. When we speak out on moral issues that need and deserve our support, will we be ignored in the future? Such an outcome is both sad, unsettling, and unfortunate for us, as a sign of our decline, and a loss of moral leadership for the world as a whole.
Note: From Wash Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/russia-retaliates-against-united-states/2011/10/22/gIQAxKac6L_story.html)
Get the picture?
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Friday, October 21, 2011
DIRTY OIL- THE ATHABASCA TAR SANDS
Years ago as a boy summering in rural Smithtown, I recall pleasantly our country road, which was then just a natural glacial, yellowish, Long Island sand. My friends and I happily walked barefoot all summer long on the sandy byways we called “dirt roads”. But when I was about ten or eleven, the Town of Smithtown began “oiling" the roads. One day they arrived at our isolated place with with big trucks and a smelly tar-spreader to end our barefoot ways. They raked over the ridged and wash-board-rumpled sand and when smooth and level, they simply sprayed a thick layer of black oil over the dry sand. The oil soaked in and coated the grains. A thin layer of more sand was spread on top. The result was a smelly, tarry mess for a good week. But soon the volatiles in the oil dispersed into the air and the tarry surfaces hardened.
In our days, that tarry stuff is most likely man-made, the waste product of the distialation process, but it also occurs naturally, as tar-seeps such as the famous La Brea Tarp Pits in California. But perhaps one of the earliest exploited tar pits in the western world, are pits found on the western Greek island of Zante, (aka Zakynthos). The pits are located on the south end of Zakynthos near the little village of Keri. It is about ten miles from the port city of Zakynthos. I visted the Keri tar pits with my archeo-geology students in the late 1990s. We all hired motor skooters for the trip over winding country roads to a spot near the sea where tar seeped out of the ground. We collected a few samples and gathered there to retell the tales of how the ancient Athenians exploited this very seep to calk the bottoms of their ships...the ships that eventually saved the western world from being over-run by the Persians, when they helped defeat the the Persian navy under King Xerxes at the battle of Salamis in 480 BC. The Keri tar is fluid enough to flow readily in the spring temperatures on Zante. But other deposits of petroleum which remain buried close to the surface or exposed to heat underground (perhaps from intrusive igneous deposits) may loose their volatile components and turn into a black, viscous, natural tar, like that on our roads. Like asphalt roads, they too are mixed with coarse sand. These oiled-sands are essentially the same as what we find occuring naturally in the now famous exposures of the Canadian and Venesuelan tar sands. The tar sands deposits, similar in appearance to the stuff that first covered our early Long Island dirt roads, is now being considered--after the more-easily recovered and cleaner burning "sweet crude" has been exploited--as a source of difficult to extract but avaialable oil to meet the world's unquenchable thirst for petroleum.
Though the historians and archaeologists may not agree with us, we can campartmentalize human history into periods or "ages" based on the predominant fuel or source of energy. Today, since the middle of the last century (and the close of the “Coal Age”) we live in what we may call the “Petroleum Age”. Whether we are always aware of it or not, petroleum surrounds us, it colors our walls, fires our home furnaces, fuels our transportation vehicles and, as well, perhaps most importatantly, petroleum-derived fertilizers nourish our crops and aid in food production. Each morning we dress ourselves in synthetic fabrics produced from petroleum, then (almost) all of us drive to work in autos powered by gasoline an oil derivitive. Our vehicles roll along on sysnthetic rubber tires made from petroleum, on roads surfaced with a bitumen which is the end, waste-product of the fractional distillation which produces the gasoline, diesel oil, motor oils and many other of our industrial products. The thick gooey stuff we call “tar” that ends up in the bottom of the of the oil distillery after the gasoline, heating oil and diesel are vaporized off is used to coat roofs, spread on asphalt driveways, and used too as a general sealant. The vast majority of the tarry black stuff is what is mixed with sand and gravel and spread down on our roads to provide the smooth surface upon which we find driving so pleasant. But lets return to what is happening today in western Canada where large deposits of a similar substance (to our modern day road surface) is found just beneath the soggy soil and muskeg in the northern spruce and hemlock forest zone.
The dark bituminous substance that occurs in western Alberta in Canada was well-known to the Cree and Athabascan native-Americans of that region in prehistory. The Cree, like the Athenians, used the black sticky substance to waterproof their birch-bark canoes.
In the late 19th century, Canadian geologists mapped the extensive tar sand beds in western Alberta just below the surface of an area the size of Lake Superior or the US State of South Carolina (or about 30,000 square miles)in areas of forest, river valleys and muskeg terraine. The Economist (http://www.economist.com/node/17959688) reports that in that large zone there may be up to 173 billion barrels of recoverable hydrocarbon oil-equivalent. If that amount is verified it may have a value of some $16trillion dollars at modern day prices. And may support the US seemingly unquenchable thirst for oil (at 19 million bbls per day or 7 billion barrels a year) for some (173/7 = 24) twenty four years.
Late in the 20th century, about 1967 these deposits, which are easy to find with a simple earth probe, so there is no expensive and unpredictable drilling necessary, began to be exploited for their oil content. Several Canadian companies bought up virgin forest land, and by means of massive earth-moving equipment removed ten or fifty feet of muck, clay, and sand overburden, pumped out the ground and surface waters which seeped back into the excavation into a near-by large lake and removed the underlying layer of sand, rich in bitumen or tar. These operators transported the tarry sands to a near-by facility where the petroleum component was separated from the sand using lighter hydrocarbons (such as gasoline or kerosene) and large volumes of fresh water taken from the near-by pristine rivers. One serious problem is with the fresh water used to separate and extract the oil substance. It is estimated that the extraction and separation process requires between two (2) to five (5)barrels of water for each barrel of “oil” produced. At the present time with only a small percent of the massive resource exploited, existing operations use as much fresh water from the Athabasca River as does the entire city of Calgary, Alberta, which uses the river as it fresh water supply.
The mixture of water, tar-sands, and solvent is agitated to dissolve the “bitumen” into the solvent. The frothy mix is then separated from the sand and other solids which are dumped into the waste pond and the now dissolved bitumen is barreled and moved off site to an conversion plant where it was treated like a heavy oil. In more recent times, the diluted bitumen is mixed with liquefied natural gas to produce a more fluid, less viscous mix, termed “dilbit” which can be piped to refineries. The disadvantage is that this substance is particularly noxious were it to spill .
There are many problems with this enterprise. The extractive process is another form of open pit mining similar to what is used to extract coal from coal beds in Virginia, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. The overburden is removed and dumped as spoil, in our eastern USA the coal seams are extracted and the land pushed back in a generally vain attempt to reconstruct the original natural surface. But in Alberta the soil is a mud and the land is marshy and wet. Water, soaks the deposit and dissolves the toxic substances which are a part of the bitumen fraction and is carried away into the near-by river system. These waste waters are pumped into “tailings ponds”, the waters of which become toxic to all forms of life---particularly migratory wildfowl which in their annual passage attempt to alight in these waters and must be constantly driven off. (recent reports document thousands of migratory wildfowl dying in these ponds) Other dissolved materials enter the river Athabasca River system and pollute it locally and downstream from the mine area. Air pollution is a consequence of the separation process as the solvents used are volatile and can and do pollute the atmosphere. There is no evidence that the disturbed landscape can be returned to function either as farmland (which it was not suited for prior to mining) or to forestry or functioning wildlife habitat. Secondly, this is just another way (but a more messy way) to exploit buried carbon and add it (and the sulfur and other minerals it contains) into the atmosphere as pollutants and greenhouse gases. Furthermore, since it takes a great deal of energy to separate the bitumen from the sand and then dissolve the “thick petroleum” fraction into a solvent to create a liquid form---both the mining and extractive process uses up a great deal more energy than lighter “sweet crude” oils which are extracted by drilling. It is estimated that the extraction, processing and burning of tar-sands-derived-oil generates somewhere between 10% and 45%more greenhouse gases than normal oil drilled from wells (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coming-to-america-tar-sands-from-canada).
The advantages from the oil developer point of view is that the resource is in a “safe” country, not likely to be attacked by insurgents or to be nationalized by a new and unfriendly government, and too it is close to the US market and refining facilities.
Some have referred to it as the only “free” world oil outside of the 70% of the world’s oil reserves of the OPEC nations.
Finally, one major problem is that Canada is planning to build a pipe line to its southern boundary the Keystone XL pipeline to carry “dilbit” to specialized plants in the USA. It represents another dangerous and potentially messy operation which like the Gulf oil spill can create a toxic, disaster over the areas it traverses. We have cause to worry.
In our days, that tarry stuff is most likely man-made, the waste product of the distialation process, but it also occurs naturally, as tar-seeps such as the famous La Brea Tarp Pits in California. But perhaps one of the earliest exploited tar pits in the western world, are pits found on the western Greek island of Zante, (aka Zakynthos). The pits are located on the south end of Zakynthos near the little village of Keri. It is about ten miles from the port city of Zakynthos. I visted the Keri tar pits with my archeo-geology students in the late 1990s. We all hired motor skooters for the trip over winding country roads to a spot near the sea where tar seeped out of the ground. We collected a few samples and gathered there to retell the tales of how the ancient Athenians exploited this very seep to calk the bottoms of their ships...the ships that eventually saved the western world from being over-run by the Persians, when they helped defeat the the Persian navy under King Xerxes at the battle of Salamis in 480 BC. The Keri tar is fluid enough to flow readily in the spring temperatures on Zante. But other deposits of petroleum which remain buried close to the surface or exposed to heat underground (perhaps from intrusive igneous deposits) may loose their volatile components and turn into a black, viscous, natural tar, like that on our roads. Like asphalt roads, they too are mixed with coarse sand. These oiled-sands are essentially the same as what we find occuring naturally in the now famous exposures of the Canadian and Venesuelan tar sands. The tar sands deposits, similar in appearance to the stuff that first covered our early Long Island dirt roads, is now being considered--after the more-easily recovered and cleaner burning "sweet crude" has been exploited--as a source of difficult to extract but avaialable oil to meet the world's unquenchable thirst for petroleum.
Though the historians and archaeologists may not agree with us, we can campartmentalize human history into periods or "ages" based on the predominant fuel or source of energy. Today, since the middle of the last century (and the close of the “Coal Age”) we live in what we may call the “Petroleum Age”. Whether we are always aware of it or not, petroleum surrounds us, it colors our walls, fires our home furnaces, fuels our transportation vehicles and, as well, perhaps most importatantly, petroleum-derived fertilizers nourish our crops and aid in food production. Each morning we dress ourselves in synthetic fabrics produced from petroleum, then (almost) all of us drive to work in autos powered by gasoline an oil derivitive. Our vehicles roll along on sysnthetic rubber tires made from petroleum, on roads surfaced with a bitumen which is the end, waste-product of the fractional distillation which produces the gasoline, diesel oil, motor oils and many other of our industrial products. The thick gooey stuff we call “tar” that ends up in the bottom of the of the oil distillery after the gasoline, heating oil and diesel are vaporized off is used to coat roofs, spread on asphalt driveways, and used too as a general sealant. The vast majority of the tarry black stuff is what is mixed with sand and gravel and spread down on our roads to provide the smooth surface upon which we find driving so pleasant. But lets return to what is happening today in western Canada where large deposits of a similar substance (to our modern day road surface) is found just beneath the soggy soil and muskeg in the northern spruce and hemlock forest zone.
The dark bituminous substance that occurs in western Alberta in Canada was well-known to the Cree and Athabascan native-Americans of that region in prehistory. The Cree, like the Athenians, used the black sticky substance to waterproof their birch-bark canoes.
In the late 19th century, Canadian geologists mapped the extensive tar sand beds in western Alberta just below the surface of an area the size of Lake Superior or the US State of South Carolina (or about 30,000 square miles)in areas of forest, river valleys and muskeg terraine. The Economist (http://www.economist.com/node/17959688) reports that in that large zone there may be up to 173 billion barrels of recoverable hydrocarbon oil-equivalent. If that amount is verified it may have a value of some $16trillion dollars at modern day prices. And may support the US seemingly unquenchable thirst for oil (at 19 million bbls per day or 7 billion barrels a year) for some (173/7 = 24) twenty four years.
Late in the 20th century, about 1967 these deposits, which are easy to find with a simple earth probe, so there is no expensive and unpredictable drilling necessary, began to be exploited for their oil content. Several Canadian companies bought up virgin forest land, and by means of massive earth-moving equipment removed ten or fifty feet of muck, clay, and sand overburden, pumped out the ground and surface waters which seeped back into the excavation into a near-by large lake and removed the underlying layer of sand, rich in bitumen or tar. These operators transported the tarry sands to a near-by facility where the petroleum component was separated from the sand using lighter hydrocarbons (such as gasoline or kerosene) and large volumes of fresh water taken from the near-by pristine rivers. One serious problem is with the fresh water used to separate and extract the oil substance. It is estimated that the extraction and separation process requires between two (2) to five (5)barrels of water for each barrel of “oil” produced. At the present time with only a small percent of the massive resource exploited, existing operations use as much fresh water from the Athabasca River as does the entire city of Calgary, Alberta, which uses the river as it fresh water supply.
The mixture of water, tar-sands, and solvent is agitated to dissolve the “bitumen” into the solvent. The frothy mix is then separated from the sand and other solids which are dumped into the waste pond and the now dissolved bitumen is barreled and moved off site to an conversion plant where it was treated like a heavy oil. In more recent times, the diluted bitumen is mixed with liquefied natural gas to produce a more fluid, less viscous mix, termed “dilbit” which can be piped to refineries. The disadvantage is that this substance is particularly noxious were it to spill .
There are many problems with this enterprise. The extractive process is another form of open pit mining similar to what is used to extract coal from coal beds in Virginia, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. The overburden is removed and dumped as spoil, in our eastern USA the coal seams are extracted and the land pushed back in a generally vain attempt to reconstruct the original natural surface. But in Alberta the soil is a mud and the land is marshy and wet. Water, soaks the deposit and dissolves the toxic substances which are a part of the bitumen fraction and is carried away into the near-by river system. These waste waters are pumped into “tailings ponds”, the waters of which become toxic to all forms of life---particularly migratory wildfowl which in their annual passage attempt to alight in these waters and must be constantly driven off. (recent reports document thousands of migratory wildfowl dying in these ponds) Other dissolved materials enter the river Athabasca River system and pollute it locally and downstream from the mine area. Air pollution is a consequence of the separation process as the solvents used are volatile and can and do pollute the atmosphere. There is no evidence that the disturbed landscape can be returned to function either as farmland (which it was not suited for prior to mining) or to forestry or functioning wildlife habitat. Secondly, this is just another way (but a more messy way) to exploit buried carbon and add it (and the sulfur and other minerals it contains) into the atmosphere as pollutants and greenhouse gases. Furthermore, since it takes a great deal of energy to separate the bitumen from the sand and then dissolve the “thick petroleum” fraction into a solvent to create a liquid form---both the mining and extractive process uses up a great deal more energy than lighter “sweet crude” oils which are extracted by drilling. It is estimated that the extraction, processing and burning of tar-sands-derived-oil generates somewhere between 10% and 45%more greenhouse gases than normal oil drilled from wells (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coming-to-america-tar-sands-from-canada).
The advantages from the oil developer point of view is that the resource is in a “safe” country, not likely to be attacked by insurgents or to be nationalized by a new and unfriendly government, and too it is close to the US market and refining facilities.
Some have referred to it as the only “free” world oil outside of the 70% of the world’s oil reserves of the OPEC nations.
Finally, one major problem is that Canada is planning to build a pipe line to its southern boundary the Keystone XL pipeline to carry “dilbit” to specialized plants in the USA. It represents another dangerous and potentially messy operation which like the Gulf oil spill can create a toxic, disaster over the areas it traverses. We have cause to worry.
Monday, October 17, 2011
DRILL BABY DRILL--A RESPONSE
A constant refrain repeated by some presidential candidates is to drill for oil in the USA to "generate jobs" and make us "energy independent". I’m paraphrasing here, but this is the essence of the politician's blather: “We have plenty of oil down there! Just get the EPA off our backs and we can be energy independent--and create jobs as well.”
My take on this is that the effort would not be worth the few additional years of wasteful oil consumption we would generate and the jobs produced would be mostly related to the massive environmental clean-up we would need after such an extensive program of national exploitation.
The truth is we once did have plenty of oil down there, but we have used much of it up. One of our problems is the way we use this scarce resource. Our oil consumption is the highest in the world. We got used to the idea that oil was cheap and fell in to wasteful practices. We waste oil driving oversized cars and living in McMansion-style houses. Wastefulness and a steady increase in consumption ate into those reserves which were slowly depleted. US production of domestic oil peaked in 1970 at about 10 million barrels per day (MBD) a rate at about what Russia, today’s top producer is pumping now. About that time (1970s) our wasteful, profligate usage first outstripped our domestic production and we had to begin importing oil. But importing oil did not change the way we used this commodity. At the present time we import more than half of the oil we produce.
According to the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Agency (EIA) today the US consumes 18.8 million barrels of oil a day (18.8 MBD). That is a staggering figure. To get an impression of how much oil that represents, we might imagine aligning that number of oil drums end-to-end (the drums are a standard 35” or 89 cm high) over the Earth’s surface. Were we to begin at the North Pole, the barrels would form a continuous line @10,400 miles long, stretching from the Pole to a point beyond the very tip of South America at Tierra del Fuego! [After the recent BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill which spewed a massive 460,000 barrels of oil into Gulf waters to become the nation’s worst environmental disaster after the Great Dust Bowl of the 1930s my readers should have a good image of what great volumes of oil looks like. But it is worth mentioning that the total spill-volume of that disaster, even now continuing to show up all over the Gulf, was only a bit more than 2% of what we use each day! To carry on my illustration from above, the Gulf oil spill represented by lined up barrels would stretch only over a measly 254 miles.]
One reason we use and waste so much oil here in the US is that it continues to remain relatively cheap. Yes! It is hard to believe, but by world standards our oil prices are much lower than other industrialized nations. For example, gasoline prices in the UK (at more than $8 dollars a gallon) are more than double what we pay here. One reason for the lower price is that the USA still remains one of the major producers with about 5-6 MBD of actual crude oil pumped each day. In comparison Russia pumps the most oil (9.9 MBD) and Saudi Arabia is second (@ 9.7 MBD). (You may note that some reports show that the US is producing about 9.1 MBD but that difference, from what I quote here, is the result of adding in liquefied natural gas to the totals. Since we are concerned here with only crude oil, I have used only figures, which represent that commodity.) Since the US is a significant producer of oil, our prices can remain lower and our UK friends and relatives who must pay more. But even with our domestic production (of either 6MBD or 9.1MBD) we have a daily shortfall of some 9-12(or more) MBD which must be made up by importing many, many barrels of expensive oil that accrues to our national debt, compounds our deficit, and adds to our unbalanced balance of payments.
As noted above, using nearly 19 MBD we are the world's greatest consumer of oil and as such we use more than the next three “highest usage” nations combined. Our main top competitors for this questionable accolade are China, (which consumes less than half of what we use or 8 MBD), Japan, (uses 4 MBD), and India, (3MBD). As is plain from these figures, there must be something amiss with our consumption practices when we as a nation of 314 million inhabitants use more oil than the three next greatest consumer-nations with a total population of more than 2.6 billion (for this I estimate China at 1.3 billion, India at 1.2 billion and Japan at 127 million). Our excessive consumption is plainly a function of wasteful practices. Since we produce only about 6 MBD of crude, we have a shortfall to the tune of more than 12MBD which is made up by importing from foreign producers. Thus a probable first answer for those who suggest we attempt to meet our oil needs by "drill baby drill" should be: "Hold on! Perhaps we should first become a bit more efficient in our use of this increasingly scarce and expensive commodity before we begin exploiting our last reserves."
But what about the politician's claims suggesting we can actually find enough oil right here at home (and their statements always imply that these new underground resources would be sustainable over a long time), only if we were to simply get the EPA off the oil companies' backs and let them drill anywhere in the USA?
Let’s evaluate that claim.
Best estimates of how much oil remains underground are just that, “estimates” but geologists have available a great deal of oil-well yield-data from intensively studied places such as parts of Texas and California. With these they can generate reasonable figures of how much oil might be recovered from similar underground reservoirs in other places.
The US Department of the Interior (USDI) estimates the total volume of undiscovered and technically recoverable oil (our proven reserves) in the United States at about 21 billion barrels of oil. That may seem like a great deal until you compare it to our usage of nearly 19 million bbl per day. In one year the USA consumes (19MBD x 364.25 days = 6,921 million barrels a year) or 6.9 billion barrels per year) nearly seven (7) billion barrels per year (7 BBY). Thus, were we to extract all of our proven reserves, it would net us only (21/7=3) or about three (3) years of consumption at our present rate of use.
Furthermore, were we to attempt to extract oil from every possible underground nook and cranny in the nation, (places that would include many environmentally, culturally, and aesthetically sensitive areas such as the nation's outer continental shelves, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWAR) and the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska) we might be able to produce as much as 134 billion barrels of additional petroleum. Thus, were we actually able to glean 134 billion barrels of oil, how long would it last us? Dividing that number by our annual use of seven billion barrels (134/7=19.1) we see that we would have only about nineteen (19) years of consumption at present rates of use...if we were actually able to realize that goal and mop up the last remaining drop of oil on our home continent. It is worth emphasizing that these sources are not "proven" and we might drill many dry holes. Furthermore, the extraction and transportation costs of such an effort (particularly in the Arctic) would be monstrous and the environmental impact staggering. Imagine many tragic events like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, multiplied many times over. A calculation of the cost-to-benefit analysis of such a proposition indicates only modest returns for gargantuan effort. Were we to actually unearth that volume of oil, it would provide us with less than two decades of present-style use. So after perhaps a twenty-three year period of present level use, we would have arrived at a point of total dependency on foreign resources. The costs of extraction would have been considerable, we would have depleted our means of modulating the domestic price of oil, and we would be left with a nation of despoiled and devalued shorelines, scarified landscapes, disturbed natural areas, and nature reserves bereft of life. Drill baby drill would have made some of us very rich, and permitted the rest of us to continue to drive over sized vehicles, but perhaps where would we want to go?
On the other hand were we to preserve these resources and use them wisely over the coming decades they would continue to serve us well. Perhaps in the face of some future existential threat to the USA they would be there for our nation's essential needs. But to drill them dry today for no good reason is a mistake. Those oil reserves should remain in the ground for some future, wise and careful use. So the answer to “drill baby drill” should be: NO! The oil remaining in those difficult to access, ecologically sensitive and far away places should be kept as a reserve. To exploit them now is not a sensible or well thought use of a scarce resource, particularly given our present consumption rate. Let’s keep those Alaskan, Continental shelf, and ANWAR reserves underground until we really need them. Instead of mindless exploitation, let us focus on wise conservation of oil, we can do much more with the resources we have--extending the use out many decades, were we to institute only modest conservation practices now. Perhaps our motto for this endeavor should be: "Conserve baby conserve"!
In another blog I will discuss the proposed extraction of oil from tar sands and so-called oil-shale which are even more fraught with peril. Both extraction processes use great quantities of heat and fresh water to extract the oil the contain.
Get the picture!
My take on this is that the effort would not be worth the few additional years of wasteful oil consumption we would generate and the jobs produced would be mostly related to the massive environmental clean-up we would need after such an extensive program of national exploitation.
The truth is we once did have plenty of oil down there, but we have used much of it up. One of our problems is the way we use this scarce resource. Our oil consumption is the highest in the world. We got used to the idea that oil was cheap and fell in to wasteful practices. We waste oil driving oversized cars and living in McMansion-style houses. Wastefulness and a steady increase in consumption ate into those reserves which were slowly depleted. US production of domestic oil peaked in 1970 at about 10 million barrels per day (MBD) a rate at about what Russia, today’s top producer is pumping now. About that time (1970s) our wasteful, profligate usage first outstripped our domestic production and we had to begin importing oil. But importing oil did not change the way we used this commodity. At the present time we import more than half of the oil we produce.
According to the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Agency (EIA) today the US consumes 18.8 million barrels of oil a day (18.8 MBD). That is a staggering figure. To get an impression of how much oil that represents, we might imagine aligning that number of oil drums end-to-end (the drums are a standard 35” or 89 cm high) over the Earth’s surface. Were we to begin at the North Pole, the barrels would form a continuous line @10,400 miles long, stretching from the Pole to a point beyond the very tip of South America at Tierra del Fuego! [After the recent BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill which spewed a massive 460,000 barrels of oil into Gulf waters to become the nation’s worst environmental disaster after the Great Dust Bowl of the 1930s my readers should have a good image of what great volumes of oil looks like. But it is worth mentioning that the total spill-volume of that disaster, even now continuing to show up all over the Gulf, was only a bit more than 2% of what we use each day! To carry on my illustration from above, the Gulf oil spill represented by lined up barrels would stretch only over a measly 254 miles.]
One reason we use and waste so much oil here in the US is that it continues to remain relatively cheap. Yes! It is hard to believe, but by world standards our oil prices are much lower than other industrialized nations. For example, gasoline prices in the UK (at more than $8 dollars a gallon) are more than double what we pay here. One reason for the lower price is that the USA still remains one of the major producers with about 5-6 MBD of actual crude oil pumped each day. In comparison Russia pumps the most oil (9.9 MBD) and Saudi Arabia is second (@ 9.7 MBD). (You may note that some reports show that the US is producing about 9.1 MBD but that difference, from what I quote here, is the result of adding in liquefied natural gas to the totals. Since we are concerned here with only crude oil, I have used only figures, which represent that commodity.) Since the US is a significant producer of oil, our prices can remain lower and our UK friends and relatives who must pay more. But even with our domestic production (of either 6MBD or 9.1MBD) we have a daily shortfall of some 9-12(or more) MBD which must be made up by importing many, many barrels of expensive oil that accrues to our national debt, compounds our deficit, and adds to our unbalanced balance of payments.
As noted above, using nearly 19 MBD we are the world's greatest consumer of oil and as such we use more than the next three “highest usage” nations combined. Our main top competitors for this questionable accolade are China, (which consumes less than half of what we use or 8 MBD), Japan, (uses 4 MBD), and India, (3MBD). As is plain from these figures, there must be something amiss with our consumption practices when we as a nation of 314 million inhabitants use more oil than the three next greatest consumer-nations with a total population of more than 2.6 billion (for this I estimate China at 1.3 billion, India at 1.2 billion and Japan at 127 million). Our excessive consumption is plainly a function of wasteful practices. Since we produce only about 6 MBD of crude, we have a shortfall to the tune of more than 12MBD which is made up by importing from foreign producers. Thus a probable first answer for those who suggest we attempt to meet our oil needs by "drill baby drill" should be: "Hold on! Perhaps we should first become a bit more efficient in our use of this increasingly scarce and expensive commodity before we begin exploiting our last reserves."
But what about the politician's claims suggesting we can actually find enough oil right here at home (and their statements always imply that these new underground resources would be sustainable over a long time), only if we were to simply get the EPA off the oil companies' backs and let them drill anywhere in the USA?
Let’s evaluate that claim.
Best estimates of how much oil remains underground are just that, “estimates” but geologists have available a great deal of oil-well yield-data from intensively studied places such as parts of Texas and California. With these they can generate reasonable figures of how much oil might be recovered from similar underground reservoirs in other places.
The US Department of the Interior (USDI) estimates the total volume of undiscovered and technically recoverable oil (our proven reserves) in the United States at about 21 billion barrels of oil. That may seem like a great deal until you compare it to our usage of nearly 19 million bbl per day. In one year the USA consumes (19MBD x 364.25 days = 6,921 million barrels a year) or 6.9 billion barrels per year) nearly seven (7) billion barrels per year (7 BBY). Thus, were we to extract all of our proven reserves, it would net us only (21/7=3) or about three (3) years of consumption at our present rate of use.
Furthermore, were we to attempt to extract oil from every possible underground nook and cranny in the nation, (places that would include many environmentally, culturally, and aesthetically sensitive areas such as the nation's outer continental shelves, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWAR) and the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska) we might be able to produce as much as 134 billion barrels of additional petroleum. Thus, were we actually able to glean 134 billion barrels of oil, how long would it last us? Dividing that number by our annual use of seven billion barrels (134/7=19.1) we see that we would have only about nineteen (19) years of consumption at present rates of use...if we were actually able to realize that goal and mop up the last remaining drop of oil on our home continent. It is worth emphasizing that these sources are not "proven" and we might drill many dry holes. Furthermore, the extraction and transportation costs of such an effort (particularly in the Arctic) would be monstrous and the environmental impact staggering. Imagine many tragic events like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, multiplied many times over. A calculation of the cost-to-benefit analysis of such a proposition indicates only modest returns for gargantuan effort. Were we to actually unearth that volume of oil, it would provide us with less than two decades of present-style use. So after perhaps a twenty-three year period of present level use, we would have arrived at a point of total dependency on foreign resources. The costs of extraction would have been considerable, we would have depleted our means of modulating the domestic price of oil, and we would be left with a nation of despoiled and devalued shorelines, scarified landscapes, disturbed natural areas, and nature reserves bereft of life. Drill baby drill would have made some of us very rich, and permitted the rest of us to continue to drive over sized vehicles, but perhaps where would we want to go?
On the other hand were we to preserve these resources and use them wisely over the coming decades they would continue to serve us well. Perhaps in the face of some future existential threat to the USA they would be there for our nation's essential needs. But to drill them dry today for no good reason is a mistake. Those oil reserves should remain in the ground for some future, wise and careful use. So the answer to “drill baby drill” should be: NO! The oil remaining in those difficult to access, ecologically sensitive and far away places should be kept as a reserve. To exploit them now is not a sensible or well thought use of a scarce resource, particularly given our present consumption rate. Let’s keep those Alaskan, Continental shelf, and ANWAR reserves underground until we really need them. Instead of mindless exploitation, let us focus on wise conservation of oil, we can do much more with the resources we have--extending the use out many decades, were we to institute only modest conservation practices now. Perhaps our motto for this endeavor should be: "Conserve baby conserve"!
In another blog I will discuss the proposed extraction of oil from tar sands and so-called oil-shale which are even more fraught with peril. Both extraction processes use great quantities of heat and fresh water to extract the oil the contain.
Get the picture!
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