Читать книгу: «Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells – Our Ride to the Renewable Future», страница 3

FINAL FRONTIER

Given the challenges that plague ultradeep drilling, it’s sobering to think that this frontier holds the oil industry’s best hope for finding new petroleum reserves. “The odds are incredibly low that we’re going to hit some fabulous new discovery on land,” Matthew Simmons, a leading investor and industry analyst, told me. “Everybody’s looking to the deep sea for big new finds.” To an outsider, it was at once impressive and baffling to watch engineers burrow 5 miles into the earth for oil. “It has all the audacity and technological complexity of launching a space shuttle,” as Simmons put it. I found the enterprise doggedly ambitious, but also seemingly desperate—like an addict forcing a syringe into the earth’s innermost veins.

Siegele himself admitted that “there’s no guarantee that the rewards in this field will outweigh the risks.” After my visit, in fact, an even greater snag than the one I’d witnessed occurred on the Tahiti field’s production platform: an incorrectly soldered mooring would cause a year-long setback that cost Chevron over a hundred million dollars, by a conservative estimate. But the sunken treasure was worth it: the company proceeded with repairs despite the high cost and began to pump oil from that platform by mid-2009.

One question persisted in my mind: if an energy company is going to throw a billion dollars into something untested and possibly doomed to failure, wouldn’t it make more sense to invest in the inexhaustible, greener technologies that will likely replace fossil fuels? None of the Chevron employees I spoke with seemed concerned that their industry may be fast approaching obsolescence. “Do you heat your home? Do you fly on planes? Do you drive a car?” Siegele challenged me. “What do you think makes that heat and moves those jets?”

Siegele was right. Even as innovators have been producing breakthroughs in clean cars, green buildings, and renewable energy and efficiency, the Department of Energy projects that American oil demand will hold steady—not decline—in the decades ahead. American oil demand on the whole has been holding steady in recent years, not declining. And even if America were to slash its oil consumption, industrial growth in China and India is pushing global petroleum demand ever higher. The New York Times has reported that the global demand for energy could triple by midcentury. “So long as people need oil,” Siegele told me, “we’ll find a way to supply it.” In other words, the oil industry will go to whatever lengths (literally and otherwise) it must to get oil so long as consumer demand persists and the oil is there for the taking.

But how much oil is there for the taking, and how long will supplies last? It depends on who you ask. The moment when the global economy reaches “peak oil” will be the most significant tipping point of the twenty-first century—the point in time when the world’s oil producers can no longer increase their supply, and the industry enters “terminal decline.” Though “peak oil” is a confusing term, it can be pictured simply as the peak or high point on a graph of production over time. It doesn’t mean that we’ve run out. It means that the world’s oil fields will be producing less and less each year. After this peak, the falling-off of oil supplies will in turn bear directly on the basic demand-supply curve of Economics 101: when supply declines and demand stays steady (or rises), prices will rise. A mere 4 percent shortfall in oil production, for instance, could lead to a 177 percent increase in the price of oil.

It’s true that oil could stay cheap if demand dropped faster than supply. We saw that happen recently, as the economy slumped in 2008. Industrial activity slowed, curbing the flow of fuel into commercial trucks, bulldozers, cargo trains, buses, airplanes, and ships. For this and other reasons, demand for oil plunged, causing crude prices to fall from an all-time high of $147 per barrel in July 2008 to $40 per barrel in November 2008. Over the long term, however, demand will inevitably outstrip supply as the global population continues to expand and industrial growth trends upward in the developing world.

Peak oil happened long ago within most industrialized countries, including the United States. Our domestic oil production peaked in 1970 after decades of meteoric growth. That’s why America—the world’s biggest oil producer for most of the twentieth century—now contributes less than 10 percent of the global supply, and imports roughly two thirds of its petroleum from overseas. The question remains: when will our suppliers hit their peaks?

No one can predict with total certainty the geological limits of the petroleum era. Just look at the range of opinions among top experts. One of the world’s leading oil industry analysts, Daniel Yergin, who was awarded a Pulitzer for his book The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power, told me that oil supplies “may reach a plateau…perhaps in two to three decades.” Meanwhile, former industry executives and geologists such as T. Boone Pickens and Kenneth Deffeyes insist the peak has already occurred, and supplies will only continue to decline from here on out. How can these savvy insiders disagree by thirty years? In part, because the data on global reserves are largely unknown: as much as 90 percent of the world’s oil is owned by government-run or privately held oil companies, and they tend to keep as closely guarded secrets information about the size of their reserves. Estimating the total volume of the world’s remaining oil involves a great deal of guesswork.

Siegele and his engineers are hardly worried about the long-term threat of oil supply shortages. Technological breakthroughs have, decade after decade, revived the perpetually doomed oil industry: petroleum reserves often seemed too remote or too expensive to exploit over the last century, yet engineers invariably managed to come up with better, cheaper drilling tools. “Predicting peak oil,” Siegele told me, “is almost like predicting peak technology”—an exercise that to him seems inherently small-minded, even absurd.

Siegele’s comment reminded me of something the fictional oil baron J.R. Ewing said on the TV show Dallas. (I confess I watched six seasons of the series back-to-back, justifying a guilty pleasure as “research” during the reporting of this book.) When J.R.’s younger brother Bobby announced plans to start a solar energy company to prepare for a world without oil—this was in the late 1970s, when America was still reeling from the Arab oil embargo—J.R. scoffed: “We’ve been running out of oil since the day we first drilled it.” His clear implication: peak oil is simply a mirage.

In fact, the timing of peak oil may soon become irrelevant. Political and environmental forces could end our oil addiction long before supplies run dry. “The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone,” as Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, a former oil minister to Saudi Arabia, famously said, “and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil.”

The drilling technology itself may become too costly, for one thing. As the supergiant oil fields dwindle, we are getting our supplies from an ever greater number of smaller fields. “We’ve had to drill more and more wells to keep production steady,” Matthew Simmons told me. Much of the current stock of drilling equipment is aging and in need of replacement.

There are, furthermore, external costs to America’s oil dependence that could hobble the industry well before oil reserves vanish. The military costs of defending our petroleum interests abroad are tremendous—and growing. Just to keep U.S. forces on the ground worldwide to protect the country’s energy supplies costs U.S. taxpayers some $100 billion a year, according to the National Priorities Project, a nonprofit organization that analyzes federal data.

Likewise, the climate impacts of burning fossil fuels are becoming increasingly costly. In the state of California alone, “$2.5 trillion of real estate assets are at risk from extreme weather events, sea level rise and wildfires expected to result from climate change over the course of a century,” according to a recent report from the University of California, Berkeley. Add to that the growing impact of warming trends on the state’s and the nation’s water supplies, road and transportation networks, tourism industries, agriculture, and public health.

In the coming decades, the double whammy of climate change and military spending could sufficiently drive up the price of petroleum to make green alternatives such as electric cars and wind power look increasingly attractive and affordable—pushing petroleum out of the market long before supplies run out.

Siegele brushed aside such concerns, stating matter-of-factly that the game of oil diplomacy has been running for the better part of a century, and the United States has gotten out of military predicaments far thornier than those it faces today. As for global warming, he believes technology will triumph here, too: we’ll find a way to scrub carbon from the atmosphere, making fossil fuels climate-friendly.

Just as we can’t be certain how much oil is left, it’s also too early to predict what new technology breakthroughs will win out in the long run. We can be certain about some things, though. Looking back at history, it is clear that the U.S. oil industry is in a drastically different place today than when it was born just a century ago, when great pools of petroleum bubbled up unbidden from Pennsylvania streams, Oklahoma prairies, and Texas’s Golden Triangle. When lucky prospectors could just about pop a straw in the ground and release a gusher. I knew about this golden era only from the mythic heroes it spawned—like Jed Clampett of The Beverly Hillbillies, sitcom’s fluky Appalachian mountaineer who struck oil with a stray hunting bullet and made instant millions; Jett Rink, James Dean’s character in the movie Giant, the down-and-out ranch hand who stepped on a patch of soft Texas soil, saw glistening black fluid pool in his footprint, and became a prodigal oil tycoon; and Daniel Plainview, the character played by Daniel Day-Lewis in 2008’s There Will Be Blood, who built a petroleum empire from a ramshackle California ranch he’d bought for pocket change.

After my trip to the Cajun Express, I felt the need for more than a fictional knowledge of the glory days of American oil. I would never fully understand the work of Paul Siegele and his fellow petroleum hunters—or the magnitude of the challenges they face—without exploring the roots of their industry and the combination of luck, gumption, and sheer geological abundance that created it. How, I wanted to know, did it come to this—to scenarios as remote and arduous as ultradeep drilling? How did a resource that is now so hard to come by in America become the basis of our economic survival?

BLACK GOLD RUSH

A 60-foot-tall pink granite obelisk fringed by manicured grass and tubs of red geraniums rises up from the town square of Beaumont, Texas, population 110,000. Its inscription reads: “On this spot on the tenth day of the twentieth century, a new era in civilization began.” The day was January 10, 1901, and the spot—until then a scrubby knoll known as Spindletop—yielded a mammoth gusher that tripled U.S. oil production overnight. It was because of this one gusher, some historians have argued, that petroleum became the dominant fuel of the twentieth century.

In reality, as I learned from the history books I scoured at my local library, oil prospecting had begun well before the find at Spindletop—in the mid-1800s, when the petroleum by-product kerosene was discovered as an illuminant that burned brighter, cleaner, longer, and more safely than whale oil, and was far cheaper to produce. “It is the light of the age,” read an advertisement written in 1860, just months after Edwin Drake tapped America’s first oil field in Titusville, Pennsylvania. “Its light is no moonshine, but something nearer to the clear, strong, brilliant light of day, to which darkness is no party.”

Instantly, demand for the lantern fuel began to escalate. Droves of zealous prospectors began digging wells and sinking shafts throughout Pennsylvania—wells that came to be known as wildcat wells (and those who dug them as wildcatters) after a term for speculative ventures that originated in the early 1800s. The moniker was particularly apt in this case because of the bobcats and mountain lions that roared around prospectors at night in the dense Pennsylvania woods. It stuck as shorthand for any exploratory well in previously untapped terrain as prospectors expanded their efforts into West Virginia, Ohio, and New York. Public demand for the new lantern fuel soared—not just in the United States but throughout Europe, Russia, and Asia. One man, John D. Rockefeller, presided over those ballooning markets. His mission, as author Daniel Yergin described it, was to deliver “the gift of ‘new light’ to the world of darkness”—a gift that, for the moment, was supplied exclusively by oil wells in the American Northeast.

But the oil game changed radically in 1901. For years, leading geologists had insisted that no petroleum could be found at Spindletop. Two rogue wildcatters disagreed—Anthony Lucas, a salt miner from Louisiana, and Pattillo Higgins, a local mechanic and amateur geologist. Higgins was the willful son of a gunsmith; at the age of seventeen he lost his left arm in a shootout with a sheriff. A self-starter, Higgins tried running logging and brickmaking businesses before he taught himself petroleum geology from secondhand textbooks and fell in love with oil. Lucas was a Croatian immigrant with a degree in mechanical engineering. Handsome and stout, with a square jaw and deep-set eyes, he mined gold and salt in Colorado and Louisiana, where he developed a theory that salt deposits could be indicators of big oil fields lying deep below.

As early as the eighteenth century, scientists had theorized that petroleum and other fossil fuels (including coal and natural gas) originated, as Russian scientist Mikhail Lomonosov wrote in the mid-1700s, from “tiny bodies of animals buried in the sediments which, under the influence of increased temperature and pressure acting during an unimaginably long period of time, transform.” These “tiny bodies” were predominantly of marine plankton: both Lucas and Higgins were ahead of the curve in connecting salt deposits with the contours of former seas and the precious buried residue of marine life.

The idea to drill at Spindletop first came to Higgins when he took his Baptist Sunday school class on a picnic to Spindletop Hill—a bleak plateau thick with rock salt on the edge of the sleepy rice mill town of Beaumont. It was a strange spot for lunch: pools of foul-smelling water and sulfurous gases oozed from the land, and wild bulls were known to wander the hills. But Higgins knew the place from his geology studies and had a trick up his sleeve: he jabbed his cane into the ground, and as the sulfurous vapor escaped he struck a match, creating an instantaneous bloom of fire that dazzled the kids.

Convinced that oil lay beneath the gas seep, Higgins subsequently tried to sink the first exploratory well himself in 1896 but quickly ran out of funds. He ran an ad in the local newspaper seeking investors, and Lucas answered, curious about the location’s rock salt terrain. The men formed a partnership and over the following year drilled multiple test wells with no luck, again draining their coffers. Higgins bowed out but Lucas persisted, obtaining funds from Pennsylvania-based oil investors and contributing his own limited savings—at one point even selling all his furniture to keep the project alive.

Lucas commissioned the Hamill brothers, jovial do-it-yourself engineers from Corsicana, Texas, to construct a more powerful drill. Following his guidelines, they jury-rigged the Spindletop derrick from hand-cut lumber and powered it with a boiler fed by firewood. Lucas kept the drilling operation going for nearly a year, grinding down into the earth with this primitive drill 500 feet, then 700, then 1,300. Suddenly he struck the payload.

At 10:30 a.m. on January 10, 1901, the dry earth began to shudder. Mud gurgled up to the mouth of the well, giving way to a thunderous blast of gas that launched hundreds of feet of thick steel pipe and hunks of bedrock into the air. Rocks the size of cannonballs rained down. The oil bed had been penetrated, and pressure from its rocks and surrounding gases had triggered the explosion. The debris was followed by oil—shooting up over the top of the derrick in a stream 150 feet high. As a crowd gathered to watch, the geyser coated the onlookers with a mist of inky, pungent liquid the consistency of corn syrup: black gold.

The following day, the Dallas Morning News reported that the “people of Beaumont, of every sort and condition, are in a feverish state of excitement…The throng on the streets appears to be childishly happy and grown men are going about smiling and bowing to each other like school girls.” The news quickly spread to the national media. “There is wild excitement throughout Southeast Texas over the oil strike,” the New York Times proclaimed on the front page of its January 13, 1901, edition. “The well has a flow of over 18,000 barrels every twenty-four hours. It is said to be the greatest oil strike in the history of that industry.”

The pressure within the field’s oil-bearing rocks was so intense that the well could not be capped for days, and no tools could be found to quell the current. By January 14, a headline in the Dallas Morning News read, “Want It Stopped: Reward Offered to Any One Who Will Control the Flow.” Reporters estimated that more than 60,000 barrels of oil had gone to waste, despite the fact that every vehicle in town had been mobilized to ferry buckets of crude to holding tanks. Fear spread that the petroleum-drenched soil would catch fire.

After many sleepless nights, the Hamill brothers—the same engineers whom Lucas had originally hired to drill the well—managed to clamp an iron T-joint and pressure valve to the top of the derrick. The “weary and oil-saturated Hamills still had enough strength and sense of humor left to line up and bow to their audience,” wrote Beaumont historian and oil prospector Michel Halbouty.

Halbouty was himself a prime example of the swashbuckling breed of wildcatter that came to be uniquely associated with Texas. A lifelong oil entrepreneur who died in 2004 at the age of ninety-five, Halbouty told me at a 2003 energy conference that the day of Spindletop’s discovery “was the day the United States became a world power.” At the time, I looked sideways at Halbouty’s claim—he was a Beaumont native, after all, and struck me as someone who might exaggerate the impact of his hometown. An exuberant man with snow-white hair and a silver handlebar mustache, Halbouty was the son of a grocer who began his oil career as a boy carting ice water to workers at Spindletop. He went on to discover dozens of oil and gas fields from Texas to Alaska, building a fortune of millions—one of thousands of Americans whose lives were changed by the Beaumont gusher.

Soon after Spindletop was uncorked, investors, wildcatters, and thrill seekers rushed to the Texas fields from places as far away as California, Illinois, and New York. Within months, Beaumont’s population had leapt from 9,000 to 50,000, and land prices had surged by a factor of thousands. The town itself had become a forest of wooden derricks shaped like church steeples; iron drill pumps continually lifted and bowed their heads like religious supplicants. The first well drilled (known as the Lucas well) could alone produce half the total U.S. output at the time—as much oil as 37,000 eastern wells, and twice the production of Pennsylvania, the leading oil state.

The discovery had global implications. “Within a year,” wrote one awed geologist, “Texas oil was burning in Germany, England, Cuba, Mexico, New York and Philadelphia.” By January 1902, 440 gushers had been tapped in the area.