I have email! In my inbox yesterday, I had been forwarded an email by a friend purportedly telling about the exciting new discovery of the Bakken Formation in the Dakotas and Montana where, this email claimed, the United States had more oil than "the entire Middle East!" Further, it made the astonishing claim, allegedly backed up by the US Geological Survey, that this formation contains 500 billion barrels of oil, which would not only end U.S. dependence on foreign oil and give Americans their light sweet crude at "just $16 PER BARREL!" But wait, there's more! The deposit will fuel the economy "for 2041 years." Here I can only assume that the unknown author meant we would have enough until 2041.
Sounds good, doesn't it? Smells like snake oil to me.
The fact-checking website Snopes.com kicks this one to the curve. The Bakken Formation is, in fact, real, but the projections given are, naturally, vastly inflated. Given that, according to Snopes, the U.S. imports 10 million barrels of oil each and every day. Some quick calculations reveal that, as the USGS actually estimates Bakken at somewhere between 3-4 billion barrels of recoverable oil, this would only serve the U.S. for a single year. That much oil is nothing to dismiss entirely, but a little perspective is in order.
Of course, the actual link given in the email to the USGS does site the correct figure of 3-4 billion; apparently the author hoped that no one would check the link (most will not). This is a classic case of wishful thinking.
Here's the actual USGS article: http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=1911
U.S. oil production peaked several years after the rate of new discoveries leveled off in the 1970's and has been in decline ever since, in perfect agreement with the Hubbert curve. Just because we wish for more oil, and we want it here, doesn't mean that it will magically become reality.
We are unlikely to see any major new oil discoveries within the United States, and even if we were to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to "drill, baby drill!" we would not wean ourselves off foreign oil. Drilling is no silver bullet for our very real energy crisis. Nor is blaming environmentalists the answer, as the email goes on to do, asserting that "environmentalists and others have blocked all efforts to help America become independent of foreign oil!" And further, "Think OPEC is funding the environmentalists?"
Irrelevant ad hominem attacks, not only ignorant but baseless. At issue here is whether Bakken is what this person claims (it isn't, not by a long shot) or, the larger issue, whether America can drill its way out of the energy crisis (it can't; reference the Hubbert Curve). Domestic drilling won't fix our problems. Only by recognizing that U.S. oil resources have long gone past their peak do we begin to seek real solutions, solutions involving alternative energies like solar and wind, targets like efficiency in automobiles to tamp down on our use of foreign oil.
The modern equivalent of fairy tales, about oil this time rather than a princess or a dragon, are only a distraction.
Sounds good, doesn't it? Smells like snake oil to me.
The fact-checking website Snopes.com kicks this one to the curve. The Bakken Formation is, in fact, real, but the projections given are, naturally, vastly inflated. Given that, according to Snopes, the U.S. imports 10 million barrels of oil each and every day. Some quick calculations reveal that, as the USGS actually estimates Bakken at somewhere between 3-4 billion barrels of recoverable oil, this would only serve the U.S. for a single year. That much oil is nothing to dismiss entirely, but a little perspective is in order.
Of course, the actual link given in the email to the USGS does site the correct figure of 3-4 billion; apparently the author hoped that no one would check the link (most will not). This is a classic case of wishful thinking.
Here's the actual USGS article: http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=1911
U.S. oil production peaked several years after the rate of new discoveries leveled off in the 1970's and has been in decline ever since, in perfect agreement with the Hubbert curve. Just because we wish for more oil, and we want it here, doesn't mean that it will magically become reality.
We are unlikely to see any major new oil discoveries within the United States, and even if we were to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to "drill, baby drill!" we would not wean ourselves off foreign oil. Drilling is no silver bullet for our very real energy crisis. Nor is blaming environmentalists the answer, as the email goes on to do, asserting that "environmentalists and others have blocked all efforts to help America become independent of foreign oil!" And further, "Think OPEC is funding the environmentalists?"
Irrelevant ad hominem attacks, not only ignorant but baseless. At issue here is whether Bakken is what this person claims (it isn't, not by a long shot) or, the larger issue, whether America can drill its way out of the energy crisis (it can't; reference the Hubbert Curve). Domestic drilling won't fix our problems. Only by recognizing that U.S. oil resources have long gone past their peak do we begin to seek real solutions, solutions involving alternative energies like solar and wind, targets like efficiency in automobiles to tamp down on our use of foreign oil.
The modern equivalent of fairy tales, about oil this time rather than a princess or a dragon, are only a distraction.
Right on, Brady...and good work at snooping into the bogus numbers. One has to wonder where these numbers get started...I doubt it was your correspondent. It is also useful to remember that these are projections...not proven reserves.
ReplyDeleteThe Hubble curve has been updated to cover the world...and it is a grim prediction ahead. While not impossible, there is little chance of any more very large discoveries of the scale of the giant fields in Saudi Arabia, certainly not on land or in shallow, easy-to-drill marine locations. This means an ever increasing price of oil, which will, of course, impact the poor far quicker and more severely than the rich. Ah well. Nothing new in that, eh?