Oil—A Reason Not to Drill

Arewethereyet? Arewethereyet? Arewethereyet?

At peak oil, that is—that dread juncture at which the amount of oil being pumped worldwide finally stops increasing year-on-year and starts decreasing, as a result of mankind having already extracted half the planet’s supply of easily recoverable oil.

We might well be there; it’s been widely predicted for many years that we would reach peak oil at about this date, which allows us to speculate on the Saudi Government’s rebuff of President Bush’s recent plea for more oil production. At what business school did the Saudis learn that this was a good way to treat your best customer? Unless, of course, they had left themselves no choice, having reached the point at which they could no longer fudge the production figures from the supergiant Al Ghawar field; rather than admit to the world that the creaky old lady had finally succumbed to hardening of the arteries, the Saudis may have cloaked the truth by saying “won’t” rather than “can’t” to a request for increased output.

Why is the moment of peak oil’s arrival of such importance? It’s because, if you think oil prices have been rising steeply of late, then you should not want to be filling up your SUV when that moment arrives. ‘Stratospheric’ is a term that will do for now.

As members of the U.S. Congress take a month off from poking each other in the eye, the debate continues to rage everywhere else in the country about the value of increased drilling in home waters. There are many who believe that drilling harder at home will do nothing for prices either now or later, these prices being determined by global supplies, of which the U.S. controls no more than 3%. For that reason also, these sources argue, drilling here won’t affect where our oil actually comes from, for some ten years. No lesser expert than T. Boone Pickens, oil geologist, has said: “We can’t drill our way out.”

A moment’s digression into math: Suppose that tomorrow morning we were in full production, sucking black gold out of the seabed. Would our children thank us for doing the right thing? Unlikely. The total reserves in offshore areas under embargo is believed to be some 15.6 billion barrels; we currently import 12 million barrels per day. Ask your child to do the math and he’ll tell you that, at that rate, we would be done sucking in 3½ years, or about the beginning of Spring 2012. He won’t even be driving then.

In fairness, there are countervailing arguments, and not just from senators whose moment in the re-election spotlight is upon them. There is serious scientific debate now about the validity of the above estimates, and whether potential production might be significantly larger, given recent advances in survey techniques.

But pitching the public debate in these terms is missing the point. We should be taking a top-down, or long-term, approach, in which we start with the maximum level of fossil fuel that we can conceivably afford to consume (for reasons not of pocketbook impact but of sustainability of energy and habitability of the planet) and construct our strategy to hit at or below this ‘target figure’. Since it’s clear that no solution based on current levels of oil, gas and coal consumption is sustainable or healthy, and that ‘target figure’ needs to be well below what we extract domestically even today (about 5 million barrels per day), then we can conclude that increased short-term drilling does not contribute to the solution we really need. Anything that distracts us from the urgency of solving the carbon problem for even a moment betrays our trust with future generations and ignores the fundamental truth that we don’t bequeath the Earth to our children, we borrow it from them!

So even if what the pro-drilling lobby has been saying is true, what’s more true is that poking more holes in the Earth’s crust will neither reduce prices nor domesticize our oil supply in the short term, nor provide a lasting cure for our past excesses. And the same is true of natural gas, which has quintupled in price in six years. So where should we look for our future power supply, if not in the ground?

The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind. Not to mention streaming out of the sun and running in our rivers and oceans. According to recent studies:

• solar energy can provide 10% of our electricity needs by 2025 (Co-op America)/69% by 2050 (Scientific American);
• wind energy can provide 20% of our electricity needs by 2030 (Dept. of Energy)/50% by 2020/30 (Paul Gipe);
• wind resources in American waters and in midwestern states can eventually satisfy all our power needs;
• renewables like solar will reach ‘grid parity’—the point at which their cost per generated unit will have decreased to match that of conventional fuels—in the next 5-10 years;
• in many areas with poor solar or wind resources, marine renewables and geothermal energy may be able to make good much of the shortfall.

So with an aggregate of renewable sources, and assuming a determined national effort to capitalize on them, we can find reasons to ‘leave the oil in the soil’, as the Green Party puts it. For sure, there will be other expenses and infrastructural challenges to confront, e.g:

• a high-voltage DC transmission system to carry power generated in remote spots to population centers around the country;
• large-scale power storage systems to help match peak generation periods to peak demand times;
• incentivized energy efficiency schemes to optimize every kilowatt of power generated by renewable sources;
• widespread re-adoption of sensible, efficient transportation options such as passenger and freight railroads;
• a nationwide move to plug-in hybrid/electric vehicle fleets for road transport (which will in itself apply pressure to the total electricity needs of the nation, but will finally begin to free us from the tyranny of oil, imported or otherwise).

We can tell ourselves that this is all too difficult, too expensive, too inconvenient, too injurious to the lifestyle we consider our birthright, but if we do, then we are obliged to answer the question that follows: what’s the alternative? And before you consider that too deeply, here’s a clue: there isn’t one. For even if the world were not running out of oil and gas, we have an obligation to the planet to stop using it as fast as we can. So from the triple perspective of prices, supply, and stewardship of the globe, drilling in home waters would be a nugatory exercise.

Yes, we can do it anyway for the psychological impact—thank you, Senator McCain—and leave little for future generations but a warmer climate and rising oceans. Or we can champion wind, solar and other renewables NOW and actually have future generations.

Charles Kleekamp of Clean Power Now and Kenneth Locklin of Clean Energy Group contributed to this article.