Climate Change For Dummies. Elizabeth May
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according to British Petroleum reports. Proved oil reserves are estimated volumes of oil with an 80 to 90 percent certainty, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). The argument about when, exactly, the world will run out of fossil fuels (particularly oil) has been going on for decades. When the Club of Rome released its famous Limits to Growth report in 1970, it said with certainty that the planet was running out of oil. The 1990s once again saw the rise of the argument that the planet would soon be out of oil. This time, the alarm was raised by geologist M. King Hubbert’s concept of peak oil. Hubbert’s peak referred to the point at which people would begin depleting known reserves, or when oil consumption is higher than oil production. Today’s peakers, as they’re known, are finding a lot of evidence that this point has passed. They argue not that Earth is running out of oil but that Earth has already run out of cheap oil.
The IEA estimates that the world economy needs to find an additional 3.2 million barrels of oil a day. Every single day, the world’s petroleum geologists, and oil and gas companies, must find new sources of oil — new oil fields and new bitumen deposits equal to 3.2 million barrels of oil — just to keep the current supply steady.
The July 18, 2007, report that the U.S. National Petroleum Council (NPC) sent to the U.S. Secretary of Energy states that 80 percent of today’s oil production must be replaced with new sources of oil or other energy sources within the next 25 years. Peakers argue that when the crunch hits, it will really hurt, causing recessions. People won’t be able to afford the gas to fuel their cars, and suburbs will suffer. But people can see it coming and can start investing in energy efficiency and smarter ways of using the oil that’s available. And using more renewable fuels could help cushion the blow of more expensive, dwindling fossil fuels. Climate change activists know that the atmosphere is running out of space for the wastes from burning fossil fuels, no matter how much longer supplies last.
Virtually everyone agrees: The age of cheap oil is over.
When you think of oil, you probably imagine it shooting up out of the ground like a fountain. But those Beverly Hillbillies days of “black gold, Texas tea” are long over. Humanity has already used up most of those easy-to-tap reserves.
Sometimes companies need large amounts of water to push the oil out. Look at the Athabasca oil sands in Alberta, Canada, for example. The oil industry used to consider separating the oil from this thick, gooey mixture of clay, sand, water, and oil too expensive. But when the price of oil is high, the industry pursues a very expensive process to produce a very low value product. The process of physically pressing the oil out of the sand is very water-intensive and the energy returned on energy invested (EROEI) is a very low number. (Check out the sidebar “Athabasca tar sands: A sticky situation,” in this chapter, for an in-depth look at this process.)
Offshore reserves have long been a source of oil — they’re still under the ground, but also under the water. You can find these reserves off the east coast of Canada, in the Gulf of Mexico, and, in declining amounts, off the coast of Norway. Now, however, the search for new offshore oil fields is heading for more remote and fragile areas, such as the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas. These two diverse ocean ecosystems host thriving wildlife, on which the local indigenous peoples depend.
On the ground, there has been oil industry pressure for decades to drill in protected areas such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or near the Okavango Delta in Namibia. Companies are also proposing projects in the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador, another fragile ecosystem that’s also a vital part of the planet’s carbon cycle (refer to Chapter 2 for more information).
No one would have considered these sources of oil a decade or so ago. But dwindling oil supplies and rising prices have changed all that. High prices, up to higher than $120 a barrel, collapsed in the last decade back down to as low as when oil hit $30 a barrel in the 1970s. In 2020, the price of oil dropped so low due to multiple factors including COVID that the price of oil actually went negative. As the world economies are recovering from COVID, the price of oil is rising again.
Natural gas
Natural gas is mostly methane, which makes it a little different than the other fossil fuels (check out Chapter 2 for more about methane). The cleanest of all fossil fuels, natural gas gives off only carbon dioxide and water when it burns. Rotting trees and plant matter release methane if the conditions are wet and airless. Natural gas can usually be found around coal beds or oil fields. Recently, gas has taken over coal in many U.S. utilities because of the dirty process of fracking, (which is a term that refers to hydraulic fracturing). This kind of gas can hardly be called anymore. (We discuss fracking more in Chapter 2.)
ATHABASCA TAR SANDS: A STICKY SITUATION
No matter what the name suggests, the tar sands (also called oil sands) aren’t a tarry version of the Sahara Desert. They’re boreal forests (coniferous forests, found between 50 and 60 degrees North latitude, across northern Canada, Russia, Alaska, and Asia, as well as Scandinavian Europe) and muskeg (a type of wetland found in boreal and arctic areas) that cover a sandy soil that’s 10-percent bitumen, a viscous material that resembles tarry molasses. To get the oil, you have to squeeze this bitumen out of the sands.
The Athabasca tar sands hold 165 billion barrels of proven retrievable oil. These reserves make it the second-largest oil patch in the world, after Saudi Arabia. Reaching the bitumen involves stripping away the muskeg and boreal forest — a single mine may need more than 6,500 hectares (16,000 acres) of forest cleared, which also has bad consequence by removing more potential carbon sinks from the landscape.
After removing the muskeg and forest, oil companies dig the bitumen out of open-pit mines that are 245 feet (75 meters) deep. To extract the bitumen that lies even deeper, they have to pump huge amounts of water and steam into the ground to loosen it up and bring it to the surface. This process called in-situ mining uses between 2.5 and 4 barrels of water for every barrel of oil extracted, depending on how deep the bitumen lies. In-situ mining produces even more GHG than the open pit mines. This process creates a lot of wastewater, full of toxic waste, that they store behind enormous dikes. The tailings ponds of contaminated water cover 85 square miles (222 square kilometers).
The Alberta government permits the oil sands operation to use more than 1,177 cubic feet (359 million cubic meters) of water annually — twice as much as the city of Calgary, which has a population of more than a million people, uses in the same period. A 2006 report by the Canadian National Energy Board (now called the Canadian Energy Regulator) questioned whether the project’s massive water use was sustainable. Many towns and communities, such as Fort McMurray,