March 8, 2006
A cartoon man looks through his binoculars at a mist-covered mountaintop in the distance, but the peak is obscured by clouds. “Peak oil?” intones the caption. “Contrary to the theory, oil production shows no sign of a peak.”
Good news from ExxonMobil, as featured in this prominent ad in the New York Times last week. “According to the U.S. Geological Survey,” the ad reads, “the Earth was endowed with over 3.3 trillion barrels of conventional, recoverable oil…Since the dawn of human history, we have used a total of one trillion barrels of oil.” That is to say, worried friends, “there is a lot of oil yet to be tapped,” and “abundant oil resources” are “still available” and will be for “decades to come.”
Phew! And here I was worrying.
Only…isn’t the U.S. Geological Survey the same outfit that said, in a 32,000 page report released in 2000 that there was 47 billion barrels of oil still to be found in…Greenland?
That number was calculated by figuring there was a 95 percent chance of 1 barrel of oil lurking under the hitherto-neglected continent—a fair assessment given the conventional wisdom—as well as a 5 percent chance of finding some 112 billion barrels of oil. Add the two together, divide by two and presto, the government geologists had conjured up an oil reserve half the size of Iran’s. Truly.
I like how ExxonMobil couched our oil consumption to date using the calming phrase, “since the dawn of human history.” It makes it sound as if homo habilis was driving around in a Lexus or something. In fact, we hardly used any oil whatsoever during the overwhelming majority of human history. We evolved from apes say about half a million years ago or so? The first oil well was drilled not even 150 years ago. And we didn’t start consuming much oil until after the second World War, since before then we had trolleys and bicycles and used crude primarily for lighting. So maybe 99 percent of those 1 trillion barrels were consumed in the last .0001 percent of human history.
So what’s with the rosy picture, Exxon? Peak oil has entered the public lexicon, and people are snapping up hybrid cars (fat lot of good that will do, but it’s the symbolism of the thing). Meanwhile, the world’s biggest oil company, which in 2004 posted the highest one-year operating profit of any company ever in all of U.S. history is busy investing its bulging treasure chest not in hydrogen, ethanol, or any of the touted alternatives to crude but in…more oil. The company’s single largest investment in a new project ever was launched this year: a $7 billion project to turn natural gas into diesel. Don’t worry. Be Happy. Drive Diesel.
