Oil: The Real Green Fuel (It's counter-intuitive, but oil is greener than “green” fuels)

It’s counterintuitive, but oil is greener than “green” fuels, and the oil spill doesn’t change that fact.

A rolling “dead zone” off the Gulf of Mexico is killing sea life and destroying livelihoods. Recent estimates put the blob at nearly the size of New Jersey.

Alas, I’m not talking about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. As terrible as that catastrophe is, such accidents have occurred in U.S. waters only about once every 40 years (and globally about once every 20 years). I’m talking about the dead zone largely caused by fertilizer runoff from American farms along the Mississippi and Atchafalaya river basins. Such pollutants cause huge algae plumes that result in oxygen starvation in the Gulf’s richest waters, near the delta.

Because the dead zone is an annual occurrence, there’s no media feeding frenzy over it, even though the average annual size of these hypoxic zones has been about 6,600 square miles over the last five years, and they are driven by bipartisan federal agriculture, trade, and energy policies.

Indeed, as Steven Hayward notes in the current Weekly Standard, if policymakers continue to pursue biofuels in response to the current anti-fossil-fuel craze, these dead zones will get a lot bigger every year. A 2008 study by the National Academy of Sciences found that adhering to corn-based ethanol targets will increase the size of the dead zone by as much as 34 percent.

Of course, that’s just one of the headaches “independence” from oil and coal would bring. If we stop drilling offshore, we could lose up to $1 trillion in economic benefits, according to economist Peter Passell. And, absent the utopian dream of oil-free living, every barrel we don’t produce at home, we buy overseas. That sends dollars to bad regimes (though more to Canada and Mexico). It may also increase the chances of disaster, because tanker accidents are more common than rig accidents.

But wait a minute — isn’t that precisely why we’re investing in “renewables,” to free ourselves from this vicious petro-cycle? Don’t the Billy Sundays of the Church of Green promise that they are the path to salvation?

This is infuriating and dangerous nonsense, as Matt Ridley demonstrates in his mesmerizing new book, The Rational Optimist. Let’s start with biofuels. Ethanol production steals precious land to produce inefficient fuel inefficiently (making food more scarce and expensive for the poor). If all of our transport fuel came from biofuel, we would need 30 percent more land than all of the existing food-growing farmland we have today.

In Brazil and Malaysia, biofuels are more economically viable (thanks in part to really cheap labor), but at the insane price of losing rainforest while failing to reduce the CO2 emissions that allegedly justify ethanol in the first place. According to Ridley, the Nature Conservancy’s Joseph Fargione estimates rainforest clear-cutting for biofuels releases 17 to 420 times more CO2 than it offsets by displacing petroleum or coal.

As for wind and solar, even if such technologies were wildly more successful than they have been, so what? You could quintuple and then quintuple again the output of wind and solar and it wouldn’t reduce our dependence on oil. Why? Because we use oil for transportation, not for electricity. We would offset coal, but again at an enormous price. If we tried to meet the average amount of energy typically used in America, we would need wind farms the size of Kazakhstan or solar panels the size of Spain.

If you remove the argument over climate change from the equation (as even European governments are starting to do), one thing becomes incandescently clear: Fossil fuels have been one of the great boons both to humanity and the environment, allowing forests to regrow (now that we don’t use wood for heating fuel or grow fuel for horses anymore) and liberating billions from backbreaking toil. The great and permanent shortage is usable surface land and fresh water. The more land we use to produce energy, the less we have for vulnerable species, watersheds, agriculture, recreation, etc.

“If you like wilderness, as I do,” Ridley writes, “the last thing you want is to go back to the medieval habit of using the landscape surrounding us to make power.”

The calamity in the Gulf is heartrending and tragic. A thorough review of government oversight and industry safety procedures is more than warranted. But as counterintuitive as it may be to say so, oil is a green fuel, while “green” fuels aren’t. And this spill doesn’t change that fact.

— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute

Nobody should believe it - ‘Peak oil’ is a myth. It’s just not happening. In fact proven, viable reserves of Oil are growing year by year.

While many major fields - notably Mexico’s colossal Cantarell field - are hitting the limits of secondary production (the stage where water or gas is used to extract the 11 to 25% of the oil field that could not be reached by primary ‘gusher’ type production) there are enormous new finds every year.

For instance:

Brazilian state oil company Petrobras recently made what may be the world’s largest single proven oil discovery in 30 years. A deep-water exploration area is believed to contain as much as 33 billion barrels of oil, an amount that would nearly triple Brazil’s reserves and make the offshore find the world’s third-largest known oil reserve.

Chevron Corp has tapped a petroleum pool deep beneath the Gulf of Mexico that could boost U.S. reserves by more than 50 percent. A test well indicates it could be the biggest new domestic oil discovery since Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay a generation ago. Chevron estimated the 300-square-mile region where its test well sits could hold up to 15 billion barrels of oil and natural gas

Shell is currently analyzing and evaluating the well data of their own recent find in the Gulf of Mexico. This find is rumored to be capable of producing 100 billion barrels from ultra-deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico. If proven it will eclipse the Petrobas find.

In Iraq, excavators have struck three oil fields with reserves estimated at about 2 billion barrels. I’m glad to say I myself had shares in Addax, one of the companies involved - who have now been taken over by Chinese company Sinopec.

Iraq is officially credited with about 115 billion barrels of proven reserves along the Zagros mountains, which are the second-largest reserves in the world. As remarkable as that sounds, that analysis is almost 10 years old and based on 30-year-old data. Recent review of that data by consultants for the new Iraqi government indicates another 45 billion to 100 billion barrels exist under the western and southern deserts.

Iran has discovered an oil field within its southwest Jofeir oilfield that is expected to boost Jofeir’s oil output to 33,000 barrels per day. Iran’s new discovery is estimated to have reserves of 750 million barrels.
The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge has an estimated 10 billion barrels of recoverable oil.

In western North Dakota there is a formation known as the Bakken Shale. The formation extends into Montana and Canada. Geologists have estimated the area holds hundreds of billions of barrels of oil. With todays technology, about 4 billion barrels of oil can be pumped from the Bakken formation.

The United States also holds significant oil shale resources underlying a total area of 16,000 square miles. This represents the largest known concentration of oil shale in the world and holds an estimated 1.5 trillion barrels of oil with 800 billion recoverable barrels – enough to meet U.S. demand for oil at current levels for 110 years. For many years the high cost of extracting oil from shale exceeded the benefit. But the extraction costs get cheaper all the time.

And not forgetting Canadian tar sands. The fraction of proven Canadian tar sands that are easily minable come to 2.1 billion barrels, which is only about the same as the total reserves of Argentina. The rest has to be pumped out - and bitumen is not easy to pump. You need to use natural gas to steam it out.

But with asphalt waste gasification the gas costs of this process plummet - and you begin to economically unlock the tremendous bulk of the tar sand reserves - at least 150 billion barrels, and very possibly twice this.

The story here is that state and private oil companies are constantly finding and proving new oil finds, or extracting larger fractions of known finds with better technology.

Furthermore: mature fields that have produced minimal oil for years are now - with the arrival of new technology - moving into tertiary production.

Oil recovery comes in three stages: primary, secondary, and tertiary. The early part of oil production flows under the natural pressure of the field – the iconic ‘gusher’. Oil escapes into the oil well, where it can be pumped to the surface. That’s easy work, but primary production will only get about 10% of the oil in the field to the surface.

Eventually, oil extraction exhausts the natural pressure of the oil field. Then the engineers begin to replace the natural pressure by pumping water or natural gas into the field. That allows the companies to recover 20% to 40% of the oil in the field. This is called secondary recovery.

After secondary recovery, some 60% to 80% of the oil remains trapped underground in so-called “depleted” fields. Tertiary recovery or enhanced oil recovery (EOR) employs more sophisticated techniques* to recover another 25% of the original oil in place.

This EOR market has barely been scratched, but in principle there are billions of barrels of oil available from left-for-dead fields the world over. Everyone knows where this oil is, it has just not been either economically nor technologically viable before. Flagship projects in Illinois will show the state of EOR technology as early as next year.

* I’m referring here to the alkali surfactant polymer technique (ASP). ASP injects an alkali which combines with natural acids in the rock to create a surfactant in the oil field itself. So when water is pumped into the field, it mixes better with the oil. As a result, the water pushes out more oil than it could do without the surfactant.

Hope this was helpful.

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