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American civilization as we know it appeared to be in grave peril a quarter century ago. When Arab nations cut off oil shipments to the United States during the 1973 war in the Middle East, gasoline prices abruptly rose 40 percent and panic ensued. Motorists idled in long lines at gas stations, where creeping tensions led to fights and even occasional shootings. Automakers scrambled to retool their assembly lines to manufacture miserly compacts rather than gas-guzzling behemoths. Entrepreneurs poured millions into upstart solar-energy and wind-power companies. Politicians pontificated about the need for collective belt-tightening and offered income tax credits to homeowners for energy-saving insulation. Meanwhile, doomsday scenarios predicted ever-increasing shortages of fossil fuels and $100-a-barrel oil prices by the year 2000.
Surprise. Doomsday is nigh and oil has been selling at $10 to $15 a barrel, not $100. Adjusting for inflation, gasoline is cheaper today than it was before the Arab oil embargo. Indeed, the world seems to be awash in oil. This year, wells around the world—from the sands of Saudi Arabia to the deep continental trench off the coast of Brazil—will pump some 75 million barrels of oil each day to satisfy demand. That’s about 25 billion barrels a year, and the number is climbing at a rate between 2 and 3 percent a year. Barring a worldwide recession, the U.S. Energy Information Administration believes the world will be consuming around 110 million barrels a day by the year 2020. And it looks as though we won’t be running short by then either. “It’s hard for people who remember the seventies to accept this, but I believe we’ll never ‘run out’ of oil the way the pessimists used to think,” says Michael Lynch, a political scientist at MIT. “People think of the Earth as having a certain amount of oil the way you might have a certain amount of money in your bank account,” adds Daniel Yergin, chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, who wrote the The Prize, a history of oil, and The Commanding Heights, a study of market forces and the energy industry. “But in reality, the ultimate amount available to us is determined both by economics and technology.” So even though the United States has already spent more than half its domestic oil reserves on its energy-hungry economy, the gloom-and-doom predictions of the seventies were averted because of advances in oil technology and colossal new oil finds in West Africa, Colombia, and Russia. And Roger Anderson, director of the energy research center at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, expects the future will hold more of the same. “If you pay smart people enough money,” he says, “they’ll figure out all sorts of ways to get the oil you need.” These days a host of innovators is probing for new sources of oil underwater. Geologists have perfected seismic imaging of seafloor geology, with the hope of tapping into vast new oil fields like the one that lies beneath the Caspian Sea in Kazakhstan. That region could harbor a staggering 200 billion barrels—making it one of the largest oil basins ever discovered. And drilling companies can now venture well over a mile into the seafloor. Unmanned submarines make the descent, fitted with robotic arms that guide the drill into the seafloor. The Gulf of Mexico could produce a total of 15 billion barrels, the coast of Brazil 30 billion, and the coast of Angola and elsewhere along West Africa another 30 billion—totaling some 75 billion barrels. “This ultra-deepwater drilling moves into the realm of science fiction; it’s something no one ever believed would be possible,” says Lynch. By the year 2005, a fifth of the world’s oil could be recovered from such deepwater drilling.That prize has prompted oil companies to spread the risk of discovery among themselves. Chevron, working with a consortium of other oil companies, recently drilled an exploration well in the Gulf of Mexico in waters 7,718 feet deep, a distance five times the height of the Empire State Building. The 618-foot Glomar Explorer, a former CIA vessel built during the Nixon administration to recover a Soviet nuclear submarine that sank deep in the Pacific, was converted into a deepwater-drill ship. And instead of dropping anchor—which is impossible in such depths—the ship hovered over the spot with the help of the global positioning satellite system, which identified the latitude and longitude. First the crew lowered the pipe—21 inches wide and weighing a million pounds—into the water through a hole in the ship. Once the drill bit reached the seafloor, it bored another 10,000 feet until it had reached down 17,000 feet—more than three miles. But, after $20 million in work, the well is said to have come up dry. If so, that’s not unusual: about half of all prospective wells do. “But there’s lots of oil to be found at that depth,” predicts Anderson. “The big news is that it can be pulled out at a profit.” And crews should soon be able to drill in even deeper water. The Glomar Explorer can’t be used in water much deeper than 8,000 feet, because it doesn’t remain stable against the million-pound pipe. But new, larger ships are under construction, and they could lower pipe down to 10,000 feet, maybe more. THE ORIGIN OF OIL Unlike coal, which is widely distributed throughout the world, petroleum is more difficult to find and extract. Coal forms wherever plants were buried in sediments in ancient swamps, but several conditions must exist for petroleum—which includes oil and natural gas—to form. The first is an accumulation of algae and other microorganisms in shallow seas, like those that periodically formed as the continents drifted apart and moved together again over hundreds of millions of years. Second, these microorganisms must get trapped in silt, which can happen wherever giant rivers emptied into shallow seas. “There wouldn’t be much oxygen, so they were preserved instead of rotting away,” says Roger Anderson, a researcher at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. Finally, these pools of dead microorganisms must be subjected to the right conditions—say, a temperature of about 150 degrees, under pressure for a few million years. That prolonged pressure-cooking causes chemical reactions that convert proteins, carbohydrates, and other compounds in the material into crude oil. If the temperature rises to about 200 degrees, the result will be natural gas. No matter where oil is found, it is always a sign that the area once lay at the bottom of a stagnant sea. And in places like the Salt Lake in Utah and the Black Sea, oil continues to be formed today. In the Gulf of California, near the Colorado River delta, researchers pulled up a mud sample and found it laced with petroleum—a sure indication that, somewhere down below, oil is now being formed. That may prove to be an oil-rich province someday, but don’t rush just yet to bid for exploration rights, says Anderson. “It’ll take about 10 million years before its ready.” —Curtis Rist Even the most inhospitable locations are being made drill-friendly. A decade ago, oil was discovered in just over 200 feet of water off the coast of Newfoundland. Because icebergs flow through the area, no ordinary oil platform would work. Then engineers hired by a group of oil companies designed an iceberg-proof goliath. Its base is a huge 16-pointed star made of 650,000 tons of concrete and steel. (The points, which are supposed to deflect and break up icebergs, have not yet actually collided with one.) The price: $4 billion. The platform, called the Hibernia, is expected to recover 615 million barrels of oil over 15 to 20 years. That’s not much compared with, say, the 200 billion barrels that Saudi Arabia holds in its oil fields. But it’s a good example of how oil companies are branching out and squeezing oil from improbable places.KNOW YOUR HYDROCARBONS Fossil fuels—the hydrocarbons known as peat, coal, oil, and natural gas—are formed from the constituents of deeply buried and preserved organic matter. They make good fuels because the energy stored in the bonds between carbon and hydrogen is abundant and easy to release in combustion with oxygen. Some hydrocarbons are simpler than others. Coal, for example, is mostly carbon, while petroleum—which includes oil and natural gas—is mostly carbon and hydrogen. Still, crude oil is anything but simple. It’s made up of carbon molecules of many different sizes. The lightest—those with the shortest carbon chains—make good motor fuels because they are easily vaporized in engines. The heaviest hydrocarbons form viscous oil, paraffin, and asphalt. But even the longer carbon chains can be broken up chemically—in a process called cracking—to create fuels made of lighter molecules. Here are some better known hydrocarbons found in crude oil: Methane CH4 (gas) Ethane C2H6 (gas) Propane C3H8 (gas) Butane C4H10 (gas) Pentane C5H12 (liquid, found in gasoline) Hexane C6H14 (liquid, found in gasoline) Heptane C7H16 (liquid, found in gasoline) Octane C8H18 (liquid, found in gasoline) Pentadecane C15H32 (liquid, found in kerosene and jet fuel) Tetracosane C24H50 (liquid, found in lubricating oil) “People think of the oil industry as this backward, nineteenth-century industry with people randomly drilling holes,” says Yergin. “But in fact, next to the military, it’s emerged as probably the biggest consumer of computer technology in the world.” Because of the way oil is distributed throughout cracks and pores in the Earth, as much as 70 percent of the oil from a typical well used to remain trapped in the ground. So anything that increases a single well’s yield can have a huge impact on production. All the big oil companies are beginning to tap hard-to-reach deposits by using 3-D seismic imaging and computer-controlled sensors to detect where pockets of oil are located in a well. Once the well is bored, drill bits can be steered sideways through the ground in search of oil. “There’s no specific technology, no silver bullet to extend the oil supplies,” says Lynch. “But there are sure an awful lot of copper bullets lying around.” He most promising copper bullet is new technology for turning natural gas into fuels like gasoline and diesel. For years, natural gas has been used mostly for generating electricity and fueling kitchen stoves and some home furnaces. In the Alaskan oil fields it’s pumped back into the ground to maintain pressure in the oil wells. In Nigeria and the Middle East, it’s simply flared. But such waste is soon to become a thing of the past. |
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