Age of oil

For two months now, oil has been gushing out of a damaged oil pipe one mile under water at the Gulf of Mexico. This has produced the biggest oil spill ever, threatening the rich fishing grounds of the American south, putting wildlife in peril and posing the danger of irreparable economic damage.

A number of strategies have been hastily devised to plug the leak. All of them have failed.

Until a way is found to cap the leaking well, oil will continue to gush out and poison the waters. Billions of dollars will be spent by oil company BP to contain the damage. Billions more will be spent by the US government to repair the environmental fallout.

The calamity has engrossed Washington since it began. President Obama has had to forego several foreign trips to personally attend to the disaster response effort. It now seems the oil spill is the single item on the agenda of government.

There is no light at the end of the tunnel. No means has yet been devised to ensure a well, one mile down in the ocean and whose natural gas pressure is tremendous could be permanently plugged.

Beneath that man-made hole on the ocean floor are millions of barrels of crude oil and billions of cubic meters of natural gas waiting to gush out. We do not know yet the final scale of this tragedy.

What we do know is that while the oil companies have highly developed technologies for drilling, they have not invested enough in safety. It is evident they do not know what to do should an oil well blow up. What was once unthinkable has now happened: we are staring at a busted oil well poisoning the ocean.

The scene at the spill is the negative utopia of the Age of Oil. It is the chilling symbol of how dependence on fossil fuels could be civilization’s unmaking.

For over a century, human civilization has been built on burning fossil fuels. We have pumped oil from the ground, consumed it by burning which throws up carbons into the atmosphere. We have built sprawling metropolises that would cease to be viable economies once oil runs out. We have forged lifestyles around a source of energy we know to be finite — and dangerous.

As land-based wells begin to exhaust their deposits, we will be looking at new deposits that are either deep into the arctic or well under the oceans. Exploiting those new deposits will be both expensive and hazardous.

The first major oil spill we experienced, involving the Exxon Valdez supertanker, was caused by oil being transported from Alaska to refineries in southern US. In response to that hazard, a pipeline was completed to transport oil more safely from Alaska to the south.

In the last US presidential elections, off-shore drilling became a major issue. People like losing vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin advocated repealing limits on offshore drilling. She should now be made to labor at cleaning up oil blobs in the marshlands of the southern US.

By 2018, all known oil deposits today will be unable to supply rising oil demand. Anticipating the large trends, China has bought all of Kazakhstan’s oil deposits and constructed a pipeline to deliver that captured oil to its industrial centers. The rest of the world will have to deal with the oil shortage by one means or another.

The coming oil shortage will put great pressure on drilling in hazardous conditions. That, in turn, will increase the probabilities for tragedies such as we now see in the Gulf of Mexico. We either lose our oil or, it seems, lose our oceans.

In our own case, all the possible oil sources we could possibly have are offshore. The Malampaya oil field is off Palawan, one of our most pristine and most ecologically diverse islands.

In the light of the BP oil spill, we should now review safety standards observed in the offshore drilling currently happening at a fast pace at Malampaya. If they do not have the technology to deal with a busted well at the Gulf of Mexico, they surely do not have the means to deal with a similar calamity off the Palawan coast.

It is always fashionable to talk about shifting to renewable energy sources. But the fact remains that all the newfangled technologies using wind or solar energy sources can only supply a fraction of our energy needs — and at very high costs.

The windmills of Ilocos Norte, for instance, deliver only a tiny fraction of their rated capacities. If these windmills were a purely commercial operation, they would be bankrupt by now.

We cannot maintain a secure baseload power generating capacity without using oil- or coal-fired plants. The only other feasible source of baseload capacity is nuclear power.

Given the horizon of coming oil shortages, deploying nuclear power is an important decision. Given the long-gestation period to get a nuclear plant running, we have to make a decision in this very soon — notwithstanding the prevailing political orthodoxy regarding nuclear power.

At this moment, our diesel-powered plants cannot reliably deliver the energy we need to power the economy. Proof of that are the rotating brownouts we experienced through the length of the dry season, when our hydroelectric assets simply failed.

Some very hard decisions will have to be made very soon about our energy situation. True, we need to diversify and look beyond the Age of Oil. But all the options require huge outlays and include tough political choices that need to be made. If the hard decisions are postponed because they are politically inconvenient, our economy will be doomed. –Alex Magno (The Philippine Star)