Oil Exploration, Oklahoma Style. Deep Fork Wildlife Refuge, OK. Credit FreeWine/flickr

By Michael Hodgkin:

Yes, the official global oil predictions are rubbish; we all knew that, even the new predictions are most likely rubbish too!

Our current oil reserves have been vastly overstated for decades. It began with the OPEC restrictions which meant that countries could only sell a certain percentage of the oil they had left. Of course unscrupulous countries artificially inflated their reserves so they could sell more each year.

Even when that practice was phased out, countries and companies continued to overstate their reserves and the size of new fields because their calculations were wrong.  Basically a bunch of assumptions were made about the size and production capacity of an oil field, predominantly based on nearby fields

Our reserves are far smaller than we have been told, and as we adopt better methods for measuring the size of our reserves and better predictions methods, there will probably be more bad news to come. We will see sudden revisions down and correlating price hikes. It’s a grim outlook, so why don’t I sound scared?

We are not going to suddenly run out of oil.

Do you remember what happened when oil hit unprecedented prices last year? Demand dropped suddenly.

We are so wasteful and excessive in our use that a massive decrease in use can be absorbed by our society with relatively little impact on our economy; people will car pool or catch public transport to work, they will walk or ride where they used to drive, they will buy smaller cars and drive their big cars less.

This situation is mirrored across all industries, if the price gets high enough all kinds of new efficiencies become feasible and demand for oil drops. This however, is not the only reason that I am not worried about an imminent global oil shortage; there are still factors in play that are yet to be considered.

We have oil left that no one is talking about.

There are vast untapped oil reserves that aren’t taken into account in predictions because the areas they are in have not been officially released for exploration. So if these areas haven’t been released for exploration, how do we know there is oil there? To explain that, I will have to teach you a little bit about oil exploration.

What do you know about oil formation?

We all have some vague idea, we kind of know that old plants and animals get turned into oil, that it is “made out of dinosaurs” as it were, but as you might expect it is a little more complicated than that. There is a very specific set of circumstances which lead to the formation of oil, and while we may not have done detailed bathymetry measurements of the entire ocean floor, or the drills and tests to specifically look for oil, we have do have rough seismic maps of the entire planet, we can look beneath the layers of earth and see general shapes and outlines of the landscapes of the past.

To make oil you need an entire valley full of organic matter, and that valley has to have had a river running through it, and there has to have been a mountain near by to erode and cover the valley, then the entire valley needs to be sealed over very tightly (any leak and the oil will leak out), then you need to bury the whole lot under a couple of kilometres of rock under pressures of around 80,000+psi, then you need to apply a really high temperature and leave it all to sit for a few tens of millions of years.

Only if all those requirements are met will you end up with oil.  So, while you have to do specific tests to see whether you have oil or gas, and how much you have, we can make some pretty good guesses about where the oil is, just by looking at the lay of the land.

Of course, our official predictions are not based on vague guesstimates; they only take into account the land we have released for detailed exploration and production. This means there are potentially large oil reserves that we aren’t taking into account.

Why you ask? Why would we exclude such an important factor from our considerations? Isn’t this rather an important omission? The answer is that we have released and studied the vast majority of the most likely and easiest places, the only places that are left are either too hard to get to, not likely to produce much, or (and this is the key to my entire point) they are in areas we do not want to exploit, areas that are too environmentally sensitive.

The most commonly known examples of this are the Canadian and Venezuelan tar sands. Despite the high economic and environmental cost of tar sands, they have recently been included in our reserve estimates, boosting the numbers. There is also Shale Oil, which is environmentally horrible and costly to pull out, but if prices go high enough and supply of light crude sinks far enough, we’ll end up using that too. Then there are the places we have tried to keep pure, like the Great Barrier Reef. Yes, our national icon, that wonder of the world, the world’s largest reef, sits upon a geological formation that meets all the criteria to suggest oil. Indeed that oil and the organisms that feed off of it may well be the reason the reef is there. These untapped reserves, as heartbreaking as it will be to consume them, will stave off the inevitable shortages just a little longer.

Great Barrier Reef, Cairns, Australia. Credit: The Lightworks/ flickr

Our society at present is so entirely dependant on oil that when push comes to shove, we will destroy the pristine wildernesses of the world rather than face an oil shortage. In all likelihood Antarctica, the Amazon, the Arctic and even our very own Great Barrier Reef, we will be drilled into despite the risks. There will be spills, and we will destroy places of immeasurable worth, but really… we do that now.

Every day rainforests are destroyed and oceans are ruined to protect our life styles, why would these places be any different?

Oh yes, there will be public outcry, and they will give us the most solemn of assurances that no harm will be done. We will drill in sideways; we will establish protective zones and animal sanctuaries if we have to. However, when it comes down to it, we do not have enough time left to swap over to an alternative fuel before we start running into oil shortages, and when we do, those who will suffer will be the same who always suffer, those who can’t defend themselves. That means the poor who can’t afford to run their cars on expensive fuel, the creatures that live near resources we want, and the environments that we have thus far saved from destruction, like a savoured morsel, until last.

The most ridiculous thing is that all this environmental destruction won’t even buy us that much time. We haven’t fully explored these areas, so we don’t know exactly how much there is, but even gigantic reserves won’t tide us over for long, our consumption has become too great. To give you some idea of the scale of the problem, the world currently consumes 85 million barrels of oil a day. Australia’s largest oil field only has 500 million barrels in it.

That means that even if we “found” a new field under the Great Barrier Reef, and we found that it had one billion barrels in it, bigger than any find we have ever had here, it would still only satiate world demand for two weeks. Yet, when our food trucks stop running, when our industry grinds to a halt, when we are trapped in the suburbs, miles from our offices, we will want that two weeks bad enough to go there. Like the junky we have become, we will chase our fix unto the ends of the earth, we will destroy all that we love in the quest for just one more hit of that sickly black liquid, and only then, when the last paradise has been raped, once the denial induced by our cognitive dissonance fades, will we all turn and weep for the damage we have wrought.

By Michael Hodgkin: Interested in writing on this or another category for theangle.org? Contact us via our online form.

“Possum” Michael Hodgkin works as an intermediary between scientists and the general public; he has worked for the Australian Department of Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts, Land and Water Australia, The Attorney General’s Department, the Australian Taxation Office and various multinational corporations. He currently works for the Petroleum and Marine Division at Geoscience Australia. Possum would like to make it perfectly clear that the views expressed here are his own and in no way reflect the views of any of the organisations and departments he has worked for, especially his current employer.

Tags: environmental degradation, independent news, Michael Hodgkin, oil exploration, peak oil, science news, science opinion, Sustainability, tar sands