Cheap, Profitable and Abundant

SUBHEAD: Trump's Energy Plan envisions cheap, profitable and abundant fossil fuel. It won't happen.

By bart Hawkins Krep on 1 February 2017 for An Outside Chance -
(http://anoutsidechance.com/2017/02/01/alternative-geologies-trumps-america-first-energy-plan/)


Image above: Composite of Donald Trump in a lake of oil spilled by the Lakeview Gusher, California, 1910 (click here for larger version). The Lakeview Gusher was the largest on-land oil spill in the US. It occurred in the Midway-Sunset oil field, which was discovered in 1894. In 2006 this field remained California’s largest producing field, though more than 80% of the estimated recoverable reserves had been extracted. Source: California Department of Conservation, 2009 Annual Report of the State Oil & Gas Supervisor. From original article.


Donald Trump’s official Energy Plan envisions cheap fossil fuel, profitable fossil fuel and abundant fossil fuel. The evidence shows that from now on, only two of those three goals can be met – briefly – at any one time.

While many of the Trump administration’s “alternative facts” have been roundly and rightly ridiculed, the myths in the America First Energy Plan are still widely accepted and promoted by mainstream media.
The dream of a great America which is energy independent, an America in which oil companies make money and pay taxes, and an America in which gas is still cheap, is fondly nurtured by the major business media and by many politicians of both parties.
The America First Energy Plan expresses this dream clearly:

The Trump Administration is committed to energy policies that lower costs for hardworking Americans and maximize the use of American resources, freeing us from dependence on foreign oil.

And further:

Sound energy policy begins with the recognition that we have vast untapped domestic energy reserves right here in America. The Trump Administration will embrace the shale oil and gas revolution to bring jobs and prosperity to millions of Americans. … We will use the revenues from energy production to rebuild our roads, schools, bridges and public infrastructure. Less expensive energy will be a big boost to American agriculture, as well.
– www.whitehouse.gov/america-first-energy

This dream harkens back to a time when fossil fuel energy was indeed plentiful and cheap, when profitable oil companies did pay taxes to fund public infrastructure, and the US was energy independent – that is, when Donald Trump was still a boy who had not yet managed a single company into bankruptcy.

To add to the “flashback to the ’50s” mood, Trump’s plan doesn’t mention renewable energy, solar power, and wind turbines – it’s all fossil fuel all the way.

Nostalgia for energy independence
Let’s look at the “energy independence” myth in context. It has been more than 50 years since the US produced as much oil as it consumed.

Here’s a graph of US oil consumption and production since 1966. (Figures are from the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, via ycharts.com.)



Gap between US oil consumption and production – from stats on ycharts.com

Even at the height of the fracking boom in 2014, according to BP’s figures Americans were burning 7  million barrels per day more oil than was being produced domestically. (Note: the US Energy Information Agency shows net oil imports at about 5 million barrels/day in 2014 – still a big chunk of consumption.)

OK, so the US hasn’t been “energy independent” in oil for generations, and is not close to that goal now.

But if Americans Drill, Baby, Drill, isn’t it possible that great new fields could be discovered?
Well … oil companies in the US and around the world ramped up their exploration programs dramatically during the past 40 years – and came up with very little new oil, and very expensive new oil.

It’s difficult to find estimates of actual new oil discoveries in the US – though it’s easy to find news of one imaginary discovery.

When I  google “new oil discoveries in US”, most of the top links go to articles with totally bogus headlines, in totally mainstream media, from November 2016. For example:

CNN: “Mammoth Texas oil discovery biggest ever in USA”
USA Today: “Largest oil deposit ever found in U.S. discovered in Texas”
The Guardian: “Huge deposit of untapped oil could be largest ever discovered in US”
Business Insider: “The largest oil deposit ever found in America was just discovered in Texas”

All these stories are based on a November 15, 2016 announcement by the United States Geological Survey – but the USGS claim was a far cry from the oil gushers conjured up in mass-media headlines.

The USGS wasn’t talking about a new oil field, but about one that has been drilled and tapped for decades. It merely estimated that there might be 20 billion more barrels of tight oil (oil trapped in shale) remaining in the field. The USGS announcement further specified that this estimated oil “consists of undiscovered, technically recoverable resources”. (Emphasis in USGS statement). In other words, if and when it is discovered, it will likely be technically possible to extract it, if the cost of extraction is no object.

The dwindling pace of oil discovery
We’ll come back to the issues of “technically recoverable” and “cost of extraction” later. First let’s take a realistic look at the pace of new oil discoveries.

Bloomberg sums it up in an article and graph from August, 2016:


Image above: Graph from Bloomberg.com

This chart is restricted to “conventional oil” – that is, the oil that can be pumped straight out of the ground, or which comes streaming out under its own pressure once the well is drilled. That’s the kind of oil that fueled the 20th century – but the glory days of discovery ended by the early 1970s.

While it is difficult to find good estimates of ongoing oil exploration expenditures, we do have estimates of “upstream capital spending”. This larger category includes not only the cost of exploration, but the capital outlays needed in developing new discoveries through to production.

Exploration and development costs must be funded by oil companies or by lenders, and the more companies rely on expensive wells such as deep off-shore wells or fracked wells, the less money is available for new exploration.

Over the past 20 years companies have been increasingly reliant on a) fracked oil and gas wells which suck up huge amounts of capital, and 2) exploration in ever-more-difficult environments such as deep sea, the arctic, and countries with volatile social situations.

As Julie Wilson of Wood Mackenzie forecast in Sept 2016, “Over the next three years or more, exploration will be smaller, leaner, more efficient and generally lower-risk. The biggest issue exploration has faced recently is the difficulty in commercializing discoveries—turning resources into reserves.”

Do oil companies choose to explore in more difficult environments just because they love a costly challenge? Or is it because their highly skilled geologists believe most of the oil deposits in easier environments have already been tapped?

The following chart from Barclays Global Survey shows the steeply rising trend in upstream capital spending over the past 20 years.

Image above: Graph from Energy Fuse Chart of the Week, Sept 30, 2016

Between the two charts above – “Oil Discoveries Lowest Since 1947”, and “Global Upstream Capital Spending” – there is overlap for the years 1985 to 2014. I took the numbers from these charts, averaged them into five-year running averages to smooth out year-to-year volatility, and plotted them together along with global oil production for the same years.




Image above: Graph based on Mackenzie Wood figures for new oil discoveries, Barclays Global Survey figures for upstream capital expenditures, and world oil production figures from US Energy Information Administration

This chart highlights the predicament faced by societies reliant on petroleum. It has been decades since we found as much new conventional oil in a year as we burned – so the supplies of cheap oil are being rapidly depleted.

The trend has not been changed by the fracking boom in the US – which has involved oil resources that had been known for decades, resources which are costly to extract, and which has only amounted to about 5% of world production at the high point of the boom.

Yet while our natural capital in the form of conventional oil reserves is dwindling, the financial capital at play has risen steeply. In the 10 year period from 2005, upstream capital spending nearly tripled from $200 billion to almost $600 billion, while oil production climbed only about 15% and new conventional oil discoveries averaged out to no significant growth at all.

Is doubling down on this bet a sound business plan for a country? Will prosperity be assured by investing exponentially greater financial capital into the reliance on ever more expensive oil reserves, because the industry simply can’t find significant quantities of cheaper reserves?

That fool’s bargain is a good summary of Trump’s all-fossil-fuel “energy independence” plan.

(The Canadian government’s implicit national energy plan is not significantly different, as the Trudeau government continues the previous Harper government’s promotion of tar sands extraction as an essential engine of “growth” in the Canadian economy.)

To jump back from global trends to a specific example, we can consider the previously mentioned “discovery” of 20 billion barrels of unconventional oil in the Permian basin of west Texas.

Mainstream media articles exclaimed that this oil was worth $900 billion. As geologist Art Berman points out, that valuation is simply 20 billion barrels times the market price last November of about $45/barrel.

But he adds that based on today’s extraction costs for unconventional oil in that field, it would cost $1.4 trillion to get this oil out of the ground. At today’s prices, in other words, each barrel of that oil would represent a $20 loss by the time it got to the surface.

Two out of three
To close, let’s look again at the three goals of Trump’s America First Energy Plan:

• Abundant fossil fuel
• Profitable fossil fuel
• Cheap fossil fuel

With remaining resources increasingly represented by unconventional oil such as that in the Permian basin of Texas, there is indeed abundant fossil fuel – but it’s very expensive to get.

Therefore if oil companies are to remain profitable, oil has to be more expensive – that is, there can be abundant fossil fuel and profitable fossil fuel, but then the fuel cannot be cheap (and the economy will hit the skids).

Or there can be abundant fossil fuel at low prices, but oil companies will lose money hand-over-fist (a situation which cannot last long).

It’s a bit harder to imagine, but there can also be fossil fuel which is both profitable to extract and cheap enough for economies to afford – it just won’t be abundant.

That would require scaling back production/consumption to the remaining easy-to-extract conventional fossil fuels, and a reduction in overall demand so that those limited supplies aren’t immediately bid out of a comfortable price range.

For that reduction in demand to occur, there would have to be some combination of dramatic reduction in energy use per capita and a rapid increase in deployment of renewable energies.

A rapid decrease in demand for oil is anathema to Trumpian fossil-fuel cheerleaders, but it is far more realistic than their own dream of cheap, profitable, abundant fossil fuel forever.


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An Afternoon in early Autumn

SUBHEAD: If the Earth's lifetime was measured as one year, then all human history would be half a minute.

By John Michael Greer on 12 October 2016 for the Archdruid Report -
(http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2016/10/an-afternoon-in-early-autumn.html)


Image above: The artist's concept depicts Kepler-186f , the first validated Earth-size planet to orbit a distant star in the habitable zone. From NASA Ames/SETI Institute/JPL-Caltech (http://www.nasa.gov/ames/kepler/nasas-kepler-discovers-first-earth-size-planet-in-the-habitable-zone-of-another-star).

I think it was the late science writer Stephen Jay Gould who coined the term “deep time” for the vast panorama opened up to human eyes by the last three hundred years or so of discoveries in geology and astronomy. It’s a useful label for an even more useful concept.

In our lives, we deal with time in days, seasons, years, decades at most; decades, centuries and millennia provide the yardsticks by which the life cycles of human societies—that is to say, history, in the usual sense of that word—are traced.

Both these, the time frame of individual lives and the time frame of societies, are anthropocentric, as indeed they should be; lives and societies are human things and require a human measure.

When that old bamboozler Protagoras insisted that “man is the measure of all things,” though, he uttered a subtle truth wrapped in a bald-faced lie.*

The subtle truth is that since we are what we are—that is to say, social primates whow have learned a few interesting tricks—our capacity to understand the cosmos is strictly limited by the perceptions that human nervous systems are capable of processing and the notions that human minds are capable of thinking.

The bald-faced lie is the claim that everything in the cosmos must fit inside the perceptions human beings can process and the notions they can think.

(*No, none of this has to do with gender politics. The Greek language, unlike modern English, had a common gender-nonspecific noun for “human being,” anthropos, which was distinct from andros, “man,” and gyne, “woman.” The word Protagoras used was anthropos.)

It took the birth of modern geology to tear through the veil of human time and reveal the stunningly inhuman scale of time that measures the great cycles of the planet on which we live.

Last week’s post The Myth of the Anthropocene sketched out part of the process by which people in Europe and the European diaspora, once they got around to noticing that the Book of Genesis is about the Rock of Ages rather than the age of rocks, struggled to come to terms with the immensities that geological strata revealed.

To my mind, that was the single most important discovery our civilization has made—a discovery with which we’re still trying to come to terms, with limited success so far, and one that I hope we can somehow manage to hand down to our descendants in the far future.

The thing that makes deep time difficult for many people to cope with is that it makes self-evident nonsense out of any claim that human beings have any uniquely important place in the history of the cosmos. That wouldn’t be a difficulty at all, except that the religious beliefs most commonly held in Europe and the European diaspora make exactly that claim.

That last point deserves some expansion here, not least because a minority among the current crop of “angry atheists” have made a great deal of rhetorical hay by insisting that all religions, across the board, point for point, are identical to whichever specific religion they themselves hate the most—usually, though not always, whatever Christian denomination they rebelled against in their adolescent years.

That insistence is a fertile source of nonsense, and never so much as when it turns to the religious implications of time.

The conflict between science and religion over the age of the Earth is a purely Western phenomenon. Had the great geological discoveries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries taken place in Japan, say, or India, the local religious authorities wouldn’t have turned a hair.

On the one hand, most Asian religious traditions juggle million-year intervals as effortlessly as any modern cosmologist; on the other, Asian religious traditions have by and large avoided the dubious conviction, enshrined in most (though not all) versions of Christianity, that the Earth and everything upon it exists solely as a stage on which the drama of humanity’s fall and redemption plays out over a human-scaled interval of time.

The expansive Hindu cosmos with its vast ever-repeating cycles of time, the Shinto concept of Great Nature as a continuum within which every category of being has its rightful place, and other non-Western worldviews offer plenty of room for modern geology to find a home.

Ironically, though, the ongoing decline of mainstream Christianity as a cultural influence in the Western world hasn’t done much to lessen the difficulty most people in the industrial world feel when faced with the abysses of deep time.

The reason here is simply that the ersatz religion that’s taken the place of Christianity in the Western imagination also tries to impose a rigid ideological scheme not only on the ebb and flow of human history, but on the great cycles of the nonhuman cosmos as well.

Yes, that would be the religion of progress—the faith-based conviction that human history is, or at least ought to be, a straight line extending onward and upward from the caves to the stars.

You might think, dear reader, that a belief system whose followers like to wallow in self-praise for their rejection of the seven-day creation scheme of the Book of Genesis and their embrace of deep time in the past would have a bit of a hard time evading its implications for the future. Let me assure you that this seems to give most of them no trouble at all.

From Ray Kurzweil’s pop-culture mythology of the Singularity—a straightforward rewrite of Christian faith in the Second Coming dolled up in science-fiction drag—straight through to the earnest space-travel advocates who insist that we’ve got to be ready to abandon the solar system when the sun turns into a red giant four billion years from now, a near-total aversion to thinking about the realities deep time ahead of us is astonishingly prevalent among those who think they’ve grasped the vastness of Earth’s history.

I’ve come to think that one of the things that feeds this curious quirk of collective thinking is a bit of trivia to be found in a great many books on geology and the like—the metaphor that turns the Earth’s entire history into a single year, starting on January 1 with the planet’s formation out of clouds of interstellar dust and ending at midnight on December 31, which is always right now.

That metaphor has been rehashed more often than the average sitcom plot. A quick check of the books in the study where I’m writing this essay finds three different versions, one written in the 1960s, one in the 1980s, and one a little more than a decade ago.

The dates of various events dance around the calendar a bit as new discoveries rewrite this or that detail of the planet’s history, to be sure; when I was a dinosaur-crazed seven-year-old, the Earth was only three and a half billion years old and the dinosaurs died out seventy million years ago, while the latest research I know of revises those dates to 4.6 billion years and 65 million years respectively, moving the date of the end-Cretaceous extinction from December 24 to December 26—in either case, a wretched Christmas present for small boys. Such details aside, the basic metaphor remains all but unchanged.

There’s only one problem with it, but it’s a whopper. Ask yourself this: what has gotten left out of that otherwise helpful metaphor? The answer, of course, is the future.

Let’s imagine, by contrast, a metaphor that maps the entire history of life on earth, from the first living thing on this planet to the last, onto a single year.

We don’t know exactly when life will go extinct on this planet, but then we don’t know exactly when it emerged, either; the most recent estimate I know of puts the origin of terrestrial life somewhere a little more than 3.7 billion years ago, and the point at which the sun’s increasing heat will finally sterilize the planet somewhere a little more than 1.2 billion years from now.

Adding in a bit of rounding error, we can set the lifespan of our planetary biosphere at a nice round five billion years.

On that scale, a month of thirty days is 411 million years, a single day is 13.7 million years, an hour is around 571,000 years, a minute is around 9514 years, and a second is 158 years and change.

Our genus, Homo,* evolved maybe two hours ago, and all of recorded human history so far has taken up a little less than 32 seconds.

(*Another gender-nonspecific word for “human being,” this one comes from Latin, and is equally distinct from vir, “man,” and femina, “woman.” English really does need to get its act together.)

That all corresponds closely to the standard metaphor. The difference comes in when you glance at the calendar and find out that the present moment in time falls not on December 31 or any other similarly momentous date, but on an ordinary, undistinguished day—by my back-of-the-envelope calculation, it would be September 26.

I like to imagine our time, along these lines, as an instant during an early autumn afternoon in the great year of Earth’s biosphere. Like many another late September day, it’s becoming uncomfortably hot, and billowing dark clouds stand on the horizon, heralds of an oncoming storm.

We human mayflies, with a lifespan averaging maybe half a second, dart here and there, busy with our momentary occupations; a few of us now and then lift our gaze from our own affairs and try to imagine the cold bare fields of early spring, the sultry air of summer evenings, or the rigors of a late autumn none of us will ever see.

With that in mind, let’s put some other dates onto the calendar. While life began on January 1, multi-cellular life didn’t get started until sometime in the middle of August—for almost two-thirds of the history of life, Earth was a planet of bacteria and blue-green algae, and in terms of total biomass, it arguably still is.

The first primitive plants and invertebrate animals ventured onto the land around August 25; the terrible end-Permian extinction crisis, the worst the planet has yet experienced, hit on September 8; the dinosaurs perished in the small hours of September 22, and the last ice age ended just over a minute ago, having taken place over some twelve and a half minutes.

Now let’s turn and look in the other direction. The last ice age was part of a glacial era that began a little less than two hours ago and can be expected to continue through the morning of the 27th—on our time scale, they happen every two and a half weeks or so, and the intervals between them are warm periods when the Earth is a jungle planet and glaciers don’t exist.

Our current idiotic habit of treating the atmosphere as a gaseous sewer will disrupt that cycle for only a very short time; our ability to dump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere will end in less than a second as readily accessible fossil fuel reserves are exhausted, and it will take rather less than a minute thereafter for natural processes to scrub the excess CO2 from the atmosphere and return the planet’s climate to its normal instability.

Certain other consequences of our brief moment of absurd extravagance will last longer.

On our timescale, the process of radioactive decay will take around half an hour (that is to say, a quarter million years or so) to reduce high-level nuclear waste all the way to harmlessness.

It will take an interval of something like the same order of magnitude before all the dead satellites in high orbits have succumbed to the complex processes that will send them to a fiery fate in Earth’s atmosphere, and quite possibly longer for the constant rain of small meteorites onto the lunar surface to pound the Apollo landers and other space junk there to unrecognizable fragments.

Given a few hours of the biosphere’s great year, though, everything we are and everything we’ve done will be long gone.

Beyond that, the great timekeeper of Earth’s biosphere is the Sun. Stars increase in their output of heat over most of their life cycle, and the Sun is no exception. The single-celled chemosynthetic organisms that crept out of undersea hot springs in February or March of the great year encountered a frozen world, lit by a pale white Sun whose rays gave far less heat than today; the oldest currently known ice age, the Cryogenian glaciation of the late Precambrian period, was apparently cold enough to freeze the oceans solid and wrap most of the planet in ice.

By contrast, toward the middle of November in the distant Neozoic Era, the Sun will be warmer and yellower than it is today, and glacial eras will likely involve little more than the appearance of snow on a few high mountains normally covered in jungle.

Thus the Earth will gradually warm through October and November. Temperatures will cycle up and down with the normal cycles of planetary climate, but each warm period will tend to be a little warmer than the last, and each cold period a little less frigid.

Come December, most of a billion years from now, as the heat climbs past one threshold after another, more and more of the Earth’s water will evaporate and, as dissociated oxygen and hydrogen atoms, boil off into space; the Earth will become a desert world, with life clinging to existence at the poles and in fissures deep underground, until finally the last salt-crusted seas run dry and the last living things die out.

And humanity? The average large vertebrate genus lasts something like ten million years—in our scale, something over seventeen hours. As already noted, our genus has only been around for about two hours so far, so it’s statistically likely that we still have a good long run ahead of us.

I’ve discussed in these essays several times already the hard physical facts that argue that we aren’t going to go to the stars, or even settle other planets in this solar system, but that’s nothing we have to worry about.

Even if we have an improbably long period of human existence ahead of us—say, the fifty million years that bats of the modern type have been around, some three and a half days in our scale, or ten thousand times the length of all recorded human history to date—the Earth will be burgeoning with living things, and perfectly capable of supporting not only intelligent life but rich, complex, unimaginably diverse civilizations, long after we’ve all settled down to our new careers as fossils.

This does not mean, of course, that the Earth will be capable of supporting the kind of civilization we have today. It’s arguably not capable of supporting that kind of civilization now.

Certainly the direct and indirect consequences of trying to maintain the civilization we’ve got, even for the short time we’ve made that attempt so far, are setting off chains of consequences that don’t seem likely to leave much of it standing for long.

That doesn’t mean we’re headed back to the caves, or for that matter, back to the Middle Ages—these being the two bogeymen that believers in progress like to use when they’re trying to insist that we have no alternative but to keep on stumbling blindly ahead on our current trajectory, no matter what.

What it means, instead, is that we’re headed toward something that’s different—genuinely, thoroughly, drastically different. It won’t just be different from what we have now; it’ll also be different from the rigidly straight-line extrapolations and deus ex machina fauxpocalypses that people in industrial society like to use to keep from thinking about the future we’re making for ourselves.

Off beyond the dreary Star Trek fantasy of metastasizing across the galaxy, and the equally hackneyed Mad Max fantasy of pseudomedieval savagery, lies the astonishing diversity of the future before us: a future potentially many orders of magnitude longer than all of recorded history to date, in which human beings will live their lives and understand the world in ways we can’t even imagine today.

It’s tolerably common, when points like the one I’ve tried to make here get raised at all, for people to insist that paying attention to the ultimate fate of the Earth and of our species is a recipe for suicidal depression or the like. With all due respect, that claim seems silly to me.

Each one of us, as we get out of bed in the morning, realizes at some level that the day just beginning will bring us one step closer to old age and death, and yet most of us deal with that reality without too much angst.

In the same way, I’d like to suggest that it’s past time for the inmates of modern industrial civilization to grow up, sprout some gonads—either kind, take your pick—and deal with the simple, necessary, and healthy realization that our species is not going to be around forever.

Just as maturity in the individual arrives when it sinks in that human life is finite, collective maturity may just wait for a similar realization concerning the life of the species.

That kind of maturity would be a valuable asset just now, not least because it might help us grasp some of the extraordinary possibilities that will open up as industrial civilization finishes its one-way trip down the chute marked “decline and fall” and the deindustrial future ahead of us begins to take shape.

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