What has the pursuit of oil cost us? Who pays the highest cost? Who reaps the benefits? How far are we willing to go? And what is the upside of continuing to rely on carbon-based fuels--whether it's methane hydrate, shale gas, or tar sands oil--when we have alternatives? The only question we don't have to ask is whether we should transition to carbon-free energy.
The consequences of relying on oil are becoming impossible to ignore. And that makes it more difficult to justify the lengths we'll go to in order to get to it.
Yes, we’ve enjoyed the benefits of the recent uptick in oil production, courtesy of the tight oil reserves located in the Bakken region of North Dakota and Montana, along with Texas’ Eagle Ford formation. It’s been a wonderful display of technological prowess. But it hasn’t been without its costs.
Industry has been able to extract these fossil fuels because the high prices we’re paying is generating enough funding to enable companies to extract these harder-to-access, more expensive, less efficient sources. When the prices come down, less of our money goes into their pockets, and kiss those production efforts goodbye!
And why all of these impressive efforts to begin with? That part isn’t all that complicated: the cheap and easy conventional crude oil resources mankind has been tapping into for nearly two centuries is a finite resource. And so unless the Republican Party passes legislation to change the meaning of “finite” [perhaps we shouldn’t give them any ideas], the finite resources—depleting each and every day—are now harder to come by on their own.
So the fossil fuel industry has been resorting to the Plan B of hydraulic fracturing to get at resources previously unavailable, largely because the costs were prohibitive for too long. But higher prices change the dynamic, at least a little, and at least for a short while.
Accessing the resources in the Bakken and Eagle Ford is not easy. Not easy in the oil production world = not cheap. Just to add to the fun, the wells drilled in the shale formations from which the tight oil is found (wells which are already much more expensive than wells in conventional crude oil fields) have an annoying habit of depleting much more rapidly than conventional crude oil wells.
So we drill more expensive wells just to keep up the face, and we do so in areas where the supply is not quite so plentiful/accessible as they were in the initial fields. (We assume oil production efforts are not run by morons who first went after the hardest-to-find, most expensive stuff so they could save the cheap and easy supply for later.)
Not quite so plentiful/accessible = more expensive.
Appreciating the facts of oil exploration, supply, and production while discounting the context-free, cherry-picked-so-it-sounds-plausible-facts cheerleading offered up regularly will take us all a long way down the path of planning for and implementing the transitions away from fossil-fuel dependency. Notwithstanding our legitimately marvelous technological advances, that’s a task we’ll have to face sooner or later. The energy supply and climate change denial nonsense needs to come to an end.
If those who continue to use their public platforms to deny don’t understand the reality, then they need to either educate themselves first, or find another less harmful hobby. And if they do appreciate the facts but have chosen to bow down to the great fossil fuel god to the detriment of … well, everyone, then someone needs to steer them to the nearest integrity dispensary.
We’re not running out of oil, nor will we for who knows how many decades. But we’re not going to have as much, as efficient, as affordable, and as easily obtained as the last fifty-plus years might suggest. Finite resources remain finite resources, and when we are using up the good stuff faster and in more ways than ever before, what’s left just isn’t as good as the good stuff.
It’s not any simpler than that. The next question should be obvious: What should we do?
Unpleasant though it may be—and is—we need to start having adult conversations about our energy supply. We actually need to start having those conversations about ten years ago, so let’s not waste too much more time.
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