• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 964 0

we’re always just one borehole away from a huge new oil discovery. But realistically speaking, despite great leaps forward in geophysical exploration technology, we stopped finding those about fifty years ago. All of the world’s supergiant fields still producing significantly today were discovered in the late 1960s. World production is still rising, but to achieve it we are expending many times the effort to find fewer and smaller pockets of oil. To make matters worse, not only do these smaller fields hold less to begin with, they also decline more precipitously than big fields after they’ve peaked.112 According to Simmons’ research in Twilight in the Desert, a far more likely scenario than a big find is a big crash in the Middle East—home to two-thirds of the world’s conventional oil supply—brought on by years of overstatement about the size of Saudi reserves.

Also more likely than a giant new find are supply problems with the reserves we have already. There are plenty of geopolitical problems with oil besides the nationalization trend described earlier. All oil-importing countries worry incessantly about supply disruptions and vulnerabilities. Oil infrastructure is under constant threat from oil spills and terrorism, for example, at Saudi Arabia’s Abqaia facility, where Saudi forces thwarted an Al Qaeda attack in 2007.113 More than two-thirds of all the oil shipped in the world passes through the heavily militarized bottlenecks of the Strait of Hormuz or the Strait of Malacca. When prices hit one hundred dollars a barrel, the United States sends roughly a half-trillion dollars per year to oil-producing countries—including political foes like Venezuela—just to secure its transportation fuel. Few would dispute that securing stable access to oil supplies is a driving force behind U.S.-led military actions in the Middle East.

In light of all this, world leaders, financial markets, and even oil companies have already decided that it’s time to add other options to the energy basket. They know the world is entering a time of unprecedented energy demand just as our great oil fields are aging and new ones are harder to find and more expensive to tap. Future production will increasingly come from new discoveries that are smaller, deeper, and riskier; the remnants of depleted giants; and unconventional sources like tar sands. It seems probable that the world will eventually begin regulating carbon emissions one way or another, at least by a token amount. For all of these reasons the cost of using oil—regardless of geological supply—is expected to rise.

Obviously, energy conservation measures are the cheapest and most immediate way to soften this blow, and will comprise a key part of its solution. But however we end up feeding our vehicles in 2050, it won’t be the same as how we did it back in 2010. We are moving from a narrow fossil-fuel economy to something much more diverse—and likely safer and more resilient—than what we have today. We will explore this exciting range of possible energy futures next.

“You got five minutes?”

It was two o’clock in the afternoon and my weight-lifting neighbor, whose hobby is driving racing cars, was standing at my front door. He was grinning fiendishly.

Moments later, my happy excitement had curdled to pure adrenaline and fear and the feeling that I was about to die. My neighbor tapped the accelerator and there again was that terrifying sensation of heart and lungs being pressed against the back of my chest cavity. My body sank into the open-air cockpit, inches above the mountain curves of Mulholland Drive, as the Tesla Roadster screamed silently around them at ninety miles an hour. Flower-fragrant Southern California air pushed up my nose. Smells like a funeral, I thought weakly, and gripped the windshield frame harder. Someone was howling, probably me. I was trapped in the fastest roller coaster of my life and there were no rails pinning it to the ground.

It felt like an hour, but true to his word, my maniac neighbor had me back home safely in five minutes. He was on his way to Universal