Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
1,700 square miles in the southern part of the state, to contain more than 15 billion barrels of “tech-
nically recoverable” oil—twice the reserves reputed for North Dakota and Texas combined.
When geoscientist David Hughes, my colleague at Post Carbon Institute, examined drilling data
for California's Monterey formation in 2013, he found that initial production rates of wells are only
about one-half to one-quarter those assumed by the US Government's Energy Information Admin-
istration (EIA), and total lifetime oil production per well is likely to average one-third or less of the
EIA estimates. Further, the geology is far more complex and forbidding than in tight oil plays in
North Dakota and Texas. The EIA's estimate of 15 billion barrels of recoverable oil in the Monterey
was wildly overblown (indeed, the EIA drastically cut the Monterey forecast to six hundred million
barrels in 2014).
2
For the oil industry, big production estimates boost stock values; governments likewise thrive
on economic optimism. But drill down, and the evidence suggests the current fracking boom, in
California and elsewhere, is actually symptomatic of quickly diminishing returns throughout the oil
sector. As such, it may be the last, brief hurrah, not just for a few overly leveraged drilling compan-
ies but for our entire petroleum-fueled, globalized way of life.
So Can We Continue Globalization Some Other Way?
We are depleting the world's naturally occurring petroleum reservoirs over a period of roughly two
centuries—an eye blink in human history, but a relatively long interval in terms of most people's
subjective sense of time. There is still a lot of oil left to extract and in all likelihood the world supply
of transport fuel faces not a sudden shutoff but a decades-long tapering (though with ever-rising
costs). Most people assume we'll just gradually shift to different sources of energy to power trans-
port. But what's there to shift
to
that will give us the same level of mobility?
The petroleum industry proposes using natural gas more widely as a transport fuel, since shale
gas (produced, like tight oil, via fracking) is currently plentiful and cheap. However, shale gas re-
sources suffer from the same problems as tight oil—rapid per-well decline rates and limited num-
bers of profitable drilling sites. Touted as a bridge fuel, natural gas may in reality be a bridge to
nowhere.
Electricity can power some transport, and there are more electric cars on the road today than
ever before. But where will added electricity come from to keep electrified transport growing
through midcentury?
The global nuclear industry is moribund. High investment costs and revised post-Fukushima
risk assessments have led some nations to abandon nuclear altogether; others have scaled back plans
for expansion.
Some energy analysts favor the increased use of coal, using carbon capture and storage techno-
logy (CCS, often labeled “clean coal”). Yet everywhere it has been proposed, CCS is being rejected
as too costly. Without CCS, dealing with the climate crisis will require reducing global coal con-
sumption nearly to zero by midcentury. Even if the world refuses to take climate protection seri-
ously, there is good evidence that economically minable world coal reserves have been substantially
overestimated, so coal may not be able to keep the party going much longer anyway.
Wind and solar would help solve the climate crisis, and they're renewable (though the machines
used to capture energy from wind and sunlight are made from nonrenewable materials). But solar
and wind have energy characteristics different from those of fossil fuels: they are intermittent and
seasonal, a problem that can be solved only with major investment in energy storage or long-dis-
