Drill, baby, drill!

You would think a television channel like the History Channel would be one place where you could go to get balanced information. However, sadly, you can not. I was watching a program from the Universe series this week, that showed how life might have spontaneously begun on Earth. Now, I acknowledge that the theory of spontaneous genesis is one possibility, but it is not the only one. The question not asked was this: if elements spontaneously combined to produce the first living things, why is that not happening somewhere in the world today? There could be a number of plausible reasons, but asking the question would have brought out the fact that in truth science has no idea how life appeared on this planet, or why. Other programs often present the current efforts, so far fruitless, to find life somewhere else in the Universe. What one never hears is why science seems hell bent on finding something out there. I think I know why, however. If they discover at some point that there is life elsewhere, then they believe they will be proven correct, that we are not the special creation of a loving God, but just one of many happy accidents in the Universe.

In any case, I was watching another History International Channel piece called Prophets of Doom the other night on television. The "prophets" all seemed to be unlikely experts. One was an ex-detective who had bought into idea of "peak oil" and combined this with neo-malthusianism. Another was a journalist who had covered the petroleum industry for most of his career and had bought into, you guessed it, "peak oil." The most down to earth guy was actually the former hedge fund manager, but he too had been infected with the idea of "peak oil" and neo-malthusianism. Of course, just to really scare the pants off of you, they had an environmental activist telling us that we were running out of water too.  Now, just so we are clear, the theories of Malthus have been thoroughly debunked by Economist Julian Simon (RIP.)

Peak Oil is the idea that at some point, a country will be pumping the most oil it will ever pump, and after that, it is all down hill. Malthusianism is the philosophy that, just like other species, humans will reproduce up to the point where they run out of resources, and then catastrophically begin to die off. You can guess where this program was headed. Of course, nobody seemed to question either assumption. Because the United States had pumped the highest amount of oil to date back in the 1970s, that amount was assumed to be "peak oil" for the U.S. Nobody knows for sure, but it is believed that the Saudis have reached their "peak oil," as have most of the oil producing nations around the world. Combine that with the fact that the population is still rising and you have your doom and gloom.  It is certainly one theory, but it partakes of the typical Malthusian conceit, that we will just continue doing things the way we have always done them.

Notice that no engineers, or scientists, or oil industry experts were consulted in the making of Prophets of Doom If the had, we might have gotten something like The Only Way Out for the American Economy by Steve McCann at the American Thinker yesterday.  McCann points out that through improvements in technologies on a number of fronts, America sits on an estimated 300 years worth of oil and natural gas.

The Bakken Fields in North and South Dakota. New drilling and oil recovery technology is making the capture of this oil feasible and some development is now underway. It is estimated that there is at least 200 Billion barrels of oil in this region. At a price of $100 per barrel the value of this find is $20 Trillion.

The Outer Continental shelf. It is estimated that around 90 billion barrels of oil sit beneath the ocean bed 50 to 100 miles off the shore of the Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf coasts. The value: $9 Trillion.

The Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. About 10 billion barrels are locked up here with a current value of $1 Trillion.

Tar Sands: Around 75 Billion barrels of oil could come from these areas which are similar to the Canadian tar sand fields and which now produce about 2 million barrels per day. The value: $7.5 Trillion

Oil Shale. This is the most massive area of potential oil production in the world with an estimated 1.5 Trillion barrel potential. The technology necessary to extract this oil is now in place and being operated on a pilot project basis. The value of this resource: $150 Trillion

That is just the oil. If we also take advantage of natural gas and coal supplies we may buy ourselves perhaps 400 to 500 years to find an alternative to oil.  Note too that oil and natural gas do not need subsidies.  People readily buy oil products because they are the cheapest available, and they work.  Solar and wind on the other hand are not reliable, and expensive, even with subsidies. As an example, the market for a car like the Chevy Volt is extremely limited. Even if one never takes cross country trips by automobile, and never has more than a few small items to carry, many people drive more than twenty miles from their home on weekends for various reasons. The only reason a person might settle for a Volt is if they believed oil would not be available. But we know it is available, and that the shortage is being artificially created to make certain constituencies richer, at the expense of everyone else.  We need to stop pandering to the Gaia worshippers, and start drilling.

Update: Right on que, Francis Porretto at Eternity Road has put it in a nut shell, as usual.