The World in 2050_ Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future - Laurence C. Smith [98]
Russia in particular will continue to aggressively develop her Siberian gas fields. When I cornered Alexei Varlomov, deputy minister for the government agency overseeing all natural resources of the Russian Federation, he told me, “The most important factor is the needs of industry,” and that absolutely nothing should get in the way of energy exploration.411 His view is understandable, given the prominence of his country as a world energy supplier. Russia produced 3.6 billion barrels of oil in 2008, second only to Saudi Arabia.412 It produced 603 billion cubic meters of natural gas—and held 43.3 trillion more in proved reserves, both second to none in the world.
Two out of every three barrels of this oil and 85% of this gas comes from West Siberia. However, as is the case with all oil provinces, the size distribution of its petroleum fields is log-normal and the region’s oil production has entered decline.413 Russian production peaked in 1987-88. Samotlar, one of the largest oil fields in the world, peaked at 3.4 million barrels per day in 1980. It has since dropped over 90%, producing just 300,000 barrels per day from its approximately five thousand wells.414 The region’s three major gas fields have also peaked, and their production is expected to fall 75% by 2030.415 There will always be more pockets to be found, but as discussed in Chapter 3, like any other hydrocarbon province on Earth they are growing exponentially smaller and thus less economical to develop.
West Siberian exploration is therefore shifting away from the middle reaches of the Ob’ River—where most of the basin’s crude oil is found—to the immense concentrations of natural gas found farther north. The largest known natural gas reserves on Earth are found in approximately sixty to one hundred fields in this area. Just offshore is the South Kara Sea, now thought to hold perhaps 1,400 trillion cubic feet more. The Yamal Peninsula, stuffed with natural gas, condensate, and oil, lies at the heart of this bonanza and will doubtless be developed.
While less glamorous than the prospect of proliferating offshore platforms in the Arctic Ocean, 2050 will likely see a great degassing of the Yamal Peninsula, feeding thousands of miles of pipeline heading west to Europe and east to China. It is unclear whether a port can be built on its shallow west coast, or that environmental damages will be avoided, but pipelines will spread across the Yamal. Already, at least two are planned and the first one has just broken ground.416
Pay Dirt
Even from several miles away, through the fogged window of the little airplane and a dreary splatter of rain, I could see the heavy curtain of smoke and glowing spots of orange flame. It was Tolkien’s Mordor brought to life, the soil ripped away to expose pitted blackness beneath. Giant trucks dug away at the spoils like orcs. Near the fuming smokestacks were yellow mountains of pressed sulfur blocks, waste excrement from the transformation of low-grade bitumen into synthetic, crude oil. It was a depressing and evil-looking landscape, at least to anyone who finds boreal wetlands and green pine forest attractive.
It was northern Alberta, not Noril’sk. Beneath me sprawled the open sores of the Athabasca Tar Sands, economic engine of Fort McMurray and almost one-half of the Canadian oil industry. Though they are more commonly called “oil sands,” what they hold is nothing like conventional oil. The pure, light, sweet crude pumped with ease from Saudi oil fields is a dream compared to this stuff. It is tarlike