All the oil we need – at a price!

Business Week magazine, July 11 2004 edition, contains a piece on oil availability which gave me pause for thought. It said, in effect, that oil is now so expensive – at $60 a barrel and rising – that vast numbers of previously abandoned wells are now worth re-visiting because new extraction technologies, though more costly than merely pumping, are now cost effective. In short, if we are prepared to pay enough, and ignore the environmental consequences (and what red blooded American cares about the environment), we don’t have the oil supply problem we thought we had.

We can, so to speak, squeeze more out of this Earth of ours… …assuming the consumer can pay, of course.

So all is well with the world, I thought, and went back to listening to Moby while reclining in my hammock while drinking Old Fashioneds through a straw.

It is actually quite hard to drink anything – let alone an Old Fashioned - when one’s head is back in a hammock. The problem has to do with angles, gravity and so on – but the solution, which not many people know – is a bent straw.

Through such ingenuity, civilization advances.

Still, my modest contribution to civilization did not stop me thinking. Could it really be good for the Earth, I wondered, to inject millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the ground merely to get oil out. After all, carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas whose excess production is generally considered to be a major cause of global warming.

True, the oil companies argue that all that injected carbon dioxide will make oil viscous and otherwise bond with the terrain and stay underground, but I will admit to a certain skepticism, and the volumes required to push all the CO2 front, central and upwards are huge – we are talking tens of millions of tons here.

Surely, some would escape and make the global warming situation even worse. All in all, the increased use of vast quantities of carbon dioxide had to a dubious proposition.

Nonsense! said a Republican voice in my ear. This is all Liberal propaganda. Global warming does not really exist. All that CNN stuff about polar bears losing their habitat, and the Snows of Kilimanjaro melting, and glaciers turning into ice cubes, and New Orleans gently sinking beneath the waves, is the kind of smear and distortion Karl Rove would come up with – if he was a Liberal; or paid to be a Liberal; or understood science; or if Dubya got religion.

Just then a platoon of pigs flew by my window.