De BOREN van SchNEWS VOOR de WAARHEID IN de PIEKTHEORIE van de OLIE
SchNEWS | Van de workshops van de Stad van de Overgang aan stadsslickers in de Financial Times (aan te opgewonden stukken in ziek-onderzochte dagboeken zoals SchNEWS), is er more and more rente in PiekOlie `' geweest. Misschien heeft het iets met de prijs van een vat te doen dat $140+ bereikt (onderaan aan een zuivere $115ish bij mo), en merkbaarder voor de meesten, is de benzine bij de pompen bij verslaghoog. Om niet Britse machtsbedrijven te vermelden die de last op punters met maximaal 35% duwen stijgt de prijs.
Is zo, de werkelijkheid van schaarse energie die werkelijk huis begint te raken? Uit nu loopt de olie?
Het basisgebouw is wat Piek van Hubbert genoemd geworden is. De olie, eindige goederen met de ooit uitbreidende vraag, zal ergens zijn half punt in vroege 2000s (nu) en van dan onherroepelijk zal dalen bereiken. Hubbert ontwikkelde zijn theorie in de jaren '50 toen hij voorspelde dat de binnenlandse olie van Amerika door het midden van de jaren '70 een hoogtepunt zou bereiken. In de medio-jaren '80 die zij hij juist was hebben gerealiseerd. Sindsdien hebben anderen zijn voorspellingen genomen en hen uitgebreid om de gehele bol te passen, waar de consensus voor een piek in het eerste decennium van de 21ste eeuw is geweest.
Eng materiaal, en niet alleen voor gas dat bestuurders SUV guzzling maar voor wij allemaal; het is olie die het materiaal van brandstof voorziet dat zaait en onze gewassen (en maakt de pesticiden om ons met smet-vrije eenvormige opbrengst langzaam te doden) en olie oogst die de vrachtwagens van brandstof voorziet die het voedsel aan onze winkels drijven. Voeg aan deze plastieken, meststoffen, en al andere toe langs - producten het gemakkelijk wordt om apocalyps te voorspellen als de pompen ooit droog in werking stellen (zie SchNEWS 499).
Iets in die aard gebeurden eigenlijk niet zo lang geleden, terug in de jaren '90 `, in zoverre dat wacky dictatuur Noord-Korea riep. De geïndustrialiseerdes en olie afhankelijke natie vond zich zonder aardolie na zijn enige leverancier - de Doen ineenstorten Sowjetunie -. Het resultaat was dat, verre van westelijke ogen, over miljoen mensen stierf aangezien de infrastructuur instortte. En, zodat waarschuwt Piekdoomsayers van de Olie, kon dit op globale schaal gebeuren.
GOED GOED GOED
Elk van dit heeft sommige anarcho-primitivists die met vreugde bij het perspectief op de dreigende instorting van aarde-verkrachtende de industriële kapitalistische maatschappij springen. But, before you stock up on tinned goods, shotgun cartridges and bottled water, here’s a few things to consider:
Firstly, there’s no oil shortage. This may come as a bit of a surprise to all those who’ve been watching the prices rise and rise. As the Saudis recently pointed out to outgoing President Bush - pumping more oil won’t lower the price. Actually, there’s a glut of oil in the supply markets. The Iranians (one of the oil nations pumping under their maximum capacity) have tankers full of the stuff that they just can’t shift because no one wants it. What’s lacking is refining capacity.
While oil use in the US has increased 35% in the last 30 years, no new refineries have been built to keep up with demand. The ability to turn oil into petrol, diesel, aviation fuel etc is massively underdeveloped by the oil corporations, who generally like to keep refining to ‘safe’ (i.e. Western and friendly) countries. By artificially creating a bottleneck in the amount of usable oil, the price just goes up and up, leading to massive profits for the oil business as this nice little scam can keep functioning. Exxon Mobil made profits of $11.8 bn in the last quarter alone, and the other big five oil companies are making similarly obscene dosh. The scam has worked pretty well so far.
The predictions of world oil reserves are based on proven, reachable oil. This is a tricky concept because, as it turns out, there’s a whole lot of ‘unproven’ marginal oil that’s already making its way on to world markets. The most known about of these are the tar sands of Alberta, Canada. Until very recently (when the technology became economical on a large scale) these were considered ‘unproven,’ yet a lot of these are now making their way to the US (and world) oil markets.
The tars sands, also known as bitumen, are a very dirty form of oil, one that’s very expensive, polluting and energy hungry to exploit and process. It takes the equivalent of one barrel of oil to extract six barrels of oil from the tar sands. They also happen to be located in an area of unspoilt natural wilderness, but hey, what profitable minerals aren’t these days? Canada’s tar sands contain an amount of oil in excess of that under Saudi Arabia’s sands. And exploiting them is fast becoming its most profitable activity.
Venezuela has similar deposits of bitumen in Orinoco, and significantly larger than Canada’s. They’re estimated at around 260 million barrels (i.e. another Saudi Arabia) on top of the 80 million or so of ordinary oil. They’re easier to exploit than Canada’s and are barely touched. It’s no wonder that the US has got such a keen interest in the actions of Venezuelan President, Hugo the Chavmeister. Industry experts had been saying that these areas will become among the world’s future energy heartlands, but that until oil was worth over $40 per barrel it was too expensive to develop. Oil’s now worth over $100 and will be so for some time to come, so go figure.
CRUDE THOUGHTS
A real danger of Peak Oil, or rather, the fear of peak oil, is that it risks handing states and corporations even more planet-wrecking power. If people believe the oil is running out, then pressure from consumers and businesses alike is to find more at any cost. This is already being written into the US election strategy of the republicans, where John McCain is promoting drilling in the Arctic Circle as a way out of the energy ‘crisis’.
This could lead to a seriously deadly irony: The warnings of Peak Oil by environmentalists could lead to the erosion of the public’s psychological barriers protecting the few remaining areas of wilderness left. There’s oil in unknown (but quite possibly huge) quantities in Greenland, as well as plenty in Alaska, where the Bush junta has already green-lighted the destructive process of exploring and exploiting. The Russians have laid their claim to their chunk of the Arctic Circle too, with an eye to expansion for more oil.
And, in a genuinely insane piece of economic logic, as global warming melts the Arctic’s frozen seas, the previously unreachable oil reserves that lay under the ice become more exploitable, and, as they are burned, yet more undersea oil becomes available. Or if that runs out there’s always the Antarctic…
And if these reserves still don’t prove to be quite enough to satisfy demand, there’s always ole king coal. China, main producers of the world’s plastic consumer tat, is rich in coal but virtually empty of large oil deposits.
To keep their economy expanding at its current pace they are building two coal fired power stations a week. However, they need oil as well for their cars and trucks (and tanks). As oil’s expensive and foreign suppliers can be notoriously unreliable (they haven’t as yet turned to Amercian-style invasion of oil producers) what they really crave is a domestic source of oil, which they don’t have.
Or at least didn’t, until they turned to the combined wisdom of the Nazis and the apartheid-era South Africans. Both the Nazis during the war and the South Africans during sanctions found it hard to import oil. Luckily for them a German scientist found a way to turn coal into synthetic oil, known as the Fischer-Tropsch Synthesis. It’s a very energy hungry process (of course) and needless to say massively polluting (obviously) but it does mean that, even if oil is tricky to get hold of, you can just magic some out of coal - kind of like a very dirty alchemy that’s bad for the planet.
China has already constructed its first huge synthetic oil refinery in Chinese Mongolia.
PRICE OF SUCCESS?
The current cost of oil, often mistaken as a indicator of its scarcity, is actually driven by far more complex forces.
As a commodity like any other, it’s traded on the international markets via brokers. In recent years the power of the cartel that set the price of oil, OPEC, has been significantly reduced, and now it’s the speculators that call the shots on its price (more or less - OPEC still caries a lot of weight, but it’s a player now rather than the whole game). That means that, as long as the price of oil is rising, speculators will push the price even higher.
It’s estimated that as much as 60% of the price of today’s oil is pure speculation. To give an example of the logic of nonsense capitalism: Today oil is worth, say $125 a barrel. As the price is going up, you, a speculator, figure that if you buy some at that price today, you can sell it in a week or two for $135. Because you’re buying oil, other speculators have more confidence the price will continue upwards, so they’re happy to pay $130 after you.
This continues until no one who actually needs to use oil for their cars, homes or businesses etc. can even afford to refill their zippo lighters, at which point the entire economy crashes, taking the price of oil with it.
In fact, herein lies one of the central flaws in the theory of peak oil - supply and demand: that fundamental essential of capitalism. If the price of oil goes up as its demand goes up (and its availability goes down) then at some point it will be too expensive for oil based industrial capitalism to afford. At that point we enter a new depression/recession. Businesses collapse, people can’t afford to run their cars, factories grind to a halt and so on. The effect of a depression means that, with the entire economy in free fall, the demand for oil drops. As the demand drops so does its price, until at some point people can afford to buy it again, and, hurrah, capitalism reasserts itself (albeit in a leaner, less carbon-heavy form).
DRILLER KILLER
The truth is that the oil has already peaked for Western multinationals. In the 70s, major Western oil giants controlled over half the world’s oil, they now only own 13%. As Arjun Murti, an energy analyst at Goldman Sachs puts it: “What we have now is geopolitical peak oil.”
There’s plenty of oil left, but it’s all in either politically unstable / US-unfriendly states (Iraq, Iran, Russia) or difficult and expensive to get at (the Arctic, Canadian tar sands). These alternative sources of fossil fuels could keep us going well into the future, past our lifetimes and maybe even that of our grandchildren. The problem is: exactly that. The effect of burning a trillion tons of coal and perhaps a trillion barrels of oil is that the planet will burn up faster than a petrol-soaked moth near a candle. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the world’s leading authority) predict a global temperature rise of at least 3°C by 2050, with further predictions that CO² and climate temperatures will rise and rise.
Mother nature has been steadily locking away excess carbon under the ground for the last three billion years in order to maintain a steady, liveable temperature for all of us life-forms. Suddenly, us wayward children have begun reversing the process, sticking it back in the air. In the process we’re experimenting with the atmosphere on an unprecedented scale, causing massive changes to the climate and biosphere, driving many species to extinction on a par with the extinction of the dinosaurs.
The real problem isn’t that we’re going to run out of fossil fuels. The problem is what happens when we don’t…
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