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Don't Ask Obama On Oil, Ask Yourself
by Michael Abraham|The Roanoke Times (Virginia)|Thursday, March 08, 2012
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Terminal depletion. Why do so many people have problems grasping such a simple concept?
Suppose you found a room filled with jelly beans. It doesn't matter how large the room is. Perhaps it's a closet; perhaps it's a domed football stadium. Then people start removing beans and eating them. First a few hundred, then thousands, increasingly more each year. The power of compounding mathematics dictates that as thousands become millions and millions become billions, sooner or later, even seemingly unlimited supplies become limited after all.
This immutable reality is evidently beyond the reasoning capability of Jim Ludington ("Questions for Obama about oil," March 2 commentary), who opines that merely opening up America's taps will solve the problem of high oil prices. His byline says he is a historian (and executive director of Arise America Ministries), but he's astoundingly oblivious to history.
The commercial oil era began in a remote area of western Pennsylvania just before the Civil War. By 1950, our nation was producing half the world's oil. That dominance was short-lived, as production peaked in 1970 and has been in terminal decline ever since.
The oil beneath our soils has been relentlessly exploited, as we have pursued a policy sometimes whimsically called "Strength Through Exhaustion." It is impossible to determine how much commercially extractable oil is left, but a fair guess is that more than 70percent of the "jelly beans in the room" have been extracted and consumed.
Ludington writes, "What our government and news media are not telling us is that America has an abundance of oil." Wrong. The truth is that we had an abundance of oil. We consumed most of it. Period.
Ludington would have us believe that sticking a straw into the ground virtually anywhere will result in a gusher, but the truth is that oil is rare and scarce worldwide, found only in select places, mostly clustered in the Middle East. The list of formerly abundant deposits that are significantly depleted gets longer each year and is a horrifying reality:
Cantarell, Mexico's dominant supergiant field, is in terminal decline and production is described as "crashing."
The North Sea field, shared by Norway and Britain, peaked in 1999 and is in terminal decline. Britain is now a net importer.
Prudhoe Bay, the field that feeds the Alaska Pipeline, peaked at 2million barrels per day in 1998 and has fallen by two-thirds since. It has yielded approximately 80percent of its oil. Engineers fear that soon it won't be able to produce enough to keep the pipeline operational.
Three of the world's four largest oil fields are in decline, and Saudi Arabia's Ghawar, the largest ever discovered, is teetering on the brink.
Even with technologies that are exponentially superior for finding new fields to those we had in the 1960s, most petroleum geologists agree no more supergiant fields will be discovered. Historians centuries from now will conclude that the "oil age" was astonishingly short.
It is seductive and convenient to blame the president or those pesky environmentalists for rapidly rising prices, but it's a hollow endeavor. Most environmentalists I know merely want to pass to their children and grandchildren a world as verdant, healthy and livable as they found it. And the president can't put more oil in the ground or impact international economies.
The fluctuations in price in recent years are more about rapidly increasing worldwide demand, global political uncertainty and speculation than anything our government is doing. Our nation's depletion curve has continued for two generations, through Republican and Democratic administrations.
Oil consumption affects every aspect of our material lives, but since 90percent of transportation in our nation relies on it, terminal depletion is a frightfully serious matter. Economic growth for a century has been linked to oil consumption. Many experts conclude the era of terminal decline portends dramatic impacts on culture and technology and will be inestimably dire.
The fact is our nation's reserves are in terminal decline, and there is nothing we can do to reverse it. We could drill everywhere and nothing will change this.
What we need to change is the way we think about oil - not as a birthright, but as a precious, singular resource that will become increasingly scarce and expensive.
People can blame the president or condemn environmentalists if they wish, but it is pointless. The energies of those who think oil is too expensive would be better spent finding ways to use less of it.
One last thought: I'm incredulous that any ministry could possibly advocate exhausting the Earth's finite resources as rapidly as possible. Is there a verse I missed in the Bible that says, "Be fruitful, and multiply, and deplete the Earth"?
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