ASK-A-GEOLOGIST by Jeff Wynn
Fracking — NOT running out of oil. Part 3.
Here are some interesting numbers that will predicate the rest of this discussion; they derive from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (www.eia.gov) and the International Energy Agency (IEA):
· Total world oil consumption (2013): 33 billion barrels/year.
· Total world oil consumption (2021): 35.5 billion barrels/year.
· Estimated world total hydrocarbon reserves 2015 (excluding coal):
1. World oil reserves: 1.65 trillion Barrels
2. World gas reserves: 6,973 TCF (1.2 trillion barrels of oil equivalent)
3. World heavy oil and tar sand reserves: 1.1 trillion barrels
4. World oil shale reserves: 5 trillion barrels
For reference:
· The U.S. proven oil reserves (pre-fracking): 19.1 billion barrels. Not much, at current consumption rates, is it?
· Venezuela’s proven oil reserves: 211 billion barrels. That’s more…
· Venezuela’s Orinoco Heavy Oil Belt: 513 billion barrels… the sludgy stuff that requires expensive steam-and-fire-flooding to extract. That’s even more.
There are several superficial conclusions that one might draw from these numbers. If you knew nothing else about it, at current consumption of world reserves of oil, the world can keep on truckin’ like it is right now for about 50 years before the oil’s all gone (assuming no EDGE sources — see following section — are found and exploited). If we could convert all our cars and trucks to natural gas, we could keep on truckin’ for yet an additional 36 years. Add in heavy crude and tar-sands as a resource and you get another 33 years of motive power. If you frack the entire world’s oil shale — maybe add on yet another 155 years. That’s 50 + 36 + 155 = 241 years!
Well, we don’t have to worry about running out of oil then, right?
RONG.
In the previous chapter I used the expression “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” — twice. Most adults understand that if someone says that something is “free” — well, they are listening to a self-dealing liar. Or at least listening to someone who is not an adult.
Remember the Macondo 242 Well/Deepwater Horizon debacle of the Spring and Summer of 2010? In that disaster, “only” 11 men died, and nearly five million barrels of oil made its way into the Gulf of Mexico. Some of this stuff was natural gas, plus other aromatics, and were dissolved away. Some of it was burned off the surface. Some of it ruined the Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida coastlines. Some of it biodegraded… but at least 38% of it drifted off into the so-called Gulf Loop Current…
…and no one really knows where it went.
There is a huge oil platform in the North Sea east of Scotland, named the Ensign. One of its wells drilled down to about 5,400 meters depth into a “high temperature-high pressure” gas reservoir. We are talking about pressures over 1,000 times normal atmospheric pressure, and temperatures in the 200+ degrees Celsius range (the bread-baking temperature in your oven). There was a shallower, less productive horizon that they were not particularly interested in, at around 4,000 meters depth — so they cased it off and cemented the casing in place.
“Cement and Forget” is a common expression in the oil industry, but in this case, there is apparently some active tectonic movement going on. That’s the long, roundabout way of saying *ACTIVE FAULT* in bright red letters. Workers on this platform in late 2012 heard the gas-warning siren, and remembering the Macondo disaster, they started evacuating within minutes. No one died on this rig. Engineers discovered that the gas was coming up through the annulus of the well, not from some crack on the seafloor.
This means that the casing and cement job had failed, and vast amounts of gas were on the way. If there is a spark, there will be an explosion.
How big? A small gas leak into your house, if ignited at the right time when the oxygen mix is optimum, could blow your entire house to matchsticks.
This leak is tens of thousands of times greater — maybe hundreds of thousands of times bigger. More methane is mixing with more atmospheric oxygen by several orders of magnitude. Some people have called this sort of an explosion the “Poor Man’s Atom Bomb” (the U.S. military has developed a fuel-air or “Thermobaric” bomb like this and has even used it in the mountains of Afghanistan). In other words, we’re talking about the potential for a humongous explosion. How do you deal with a gas-leak failure, out in the middle of the ocean, originating 4,000 meters below you in deep hot rock? You guessed it: with a lot of money. And very, very gingerly.
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The two platform wells and the single subsea well were plugged and abandoned in July 2019.
That won’t completely stop the gas, by the way. Nor the climate-changing methane escaping.
ALL THIS OIL IS FROM THE EDGE.
By that I mean all of this hard-to-get oil is fraught with problems. You know the old Reality Check Rule: if it sounds too good to be true, then it probably isn’t true. There may be 800 billion barrels of oil tied up in oil shale in the United States — but you’d have to tear down a quarter of the Rocky Mountains and large chunks of Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee to get at it.
Unless you frack it.
“There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” in this case means that a huge amount of energy, and vast amounts of water, are required to get at and process this oily rock. I won’t even begin to get into the environmental and climate change problems that mining this stuff will trigger. Denver is already a pretty dry place, getting most of its water from the west (the other) side of the Rockies. Imagine losing much or even most of that. The amount of earth-moving alone will not be cheap… in fact the real cost may be equivalent to what is gained — so it becomes a break-even or worse situation — a net economic “bust.” That’s the up-front way of saying that there may be a lot of oil there, but it may not be economically extractable.
Unless you frack it.
What about the Athabasca Oil Sands in Alberta, Canada? Estimates suggest that there may be about 170 billion barrels of recoverable oil there — but you’ll have to strip mine about a quarter of that prairie province to get at it, and here fracking is not an option (it’s sand, not shale). All the tailings from the strip-mining become giant piles of toxic waste, polluting rivers and groundwater in the region forever afterwards. Canadian companies have already proven that this vast resource, at least, is economic… but there is an open question about whether the real long-term costs have been factored in yet. We’re talking about polluted water, cancer, and huge dust-bowl conditions down the line. The damage will translate into real money eventually… long after all the profits are taken and the oil companies have gotten out of Dodge.
In both these cases — oil shale and tar sands — an incredible amount of water is needed to process the deposits. There goes all the water in that region that humans might need for agriculture… and drinking. The Athabascan Tar Sands also have startlingly high amounts of nickel and vanadium in that dark sludge, which are toxic at the levels that would be released, so they have to be captured and sequestered.
Yet more money.
Do you wonder then, looking at the numbers at the beginning of the chapter above, why we are still importing significant amounts of Middle Eastern sweet crude? We do so for the simple reason that it costs less — and we only have to deal with the carbon footprint after-effects. We also may think that we don’t have to care about the Middle East being polluted or losing its remaining, irreplaceable fossil water — did I mention those items?
In his book “The Race For What’s Left”, author Michael Klare (2012) says “I’m less concerned about the absolute disappearance of fossil fuels than about the environmental consequences of pursuing what’s left.” His one-liner: There will be oil, but it will be expensive, dirty, and dangerous.
The Environmental Protection Agency published a report not long ago, describing all the alternative energy possibilities that we may have for the future. These include nuclear power (does anyone remember names like “Three-Mile Island” or “Chernobyl” or “Fukushima Dai-Ichi”?). There is also hydro and wind power, but these tend to be feast-or-famine things that either don’t produce the power when you need it — or they produce so much that the wind turbines have to be tethered to keep them from damaging the electric grid.
There was one surprising item that the report listed as by far the cheapest alternative: Conservation. It’s the only alternative energy source without a terrible and costly side effect. Think about it this way: if your car’s mileage doubles, that’s the same as cutting your cost of gas in half.
Well, duhhh.
I’m not advocating only conservation, and I also don’t believe we can switch off Middle Eastern or Venezuelan oil overnight (though the Venezuelan government, by its astonishing corruption and ineptitude, is doing that as I write this). However, we must go into this with our eyes open or we will pay a very dear price. All the EDGE sources of hydrocarbons come at multiplicative costs in terms of energy just to get it in the first place. You’ve also probably noticed that down-range environmental costs are not something that the oil companies providing these energy sources talk a lot about.
That’s because their managers/directors don’t live there.
If something goes wrong with one of these difficult sources, it tends to go very badly wrong, and the Ensign platform and the Macondo well are just two of the freshest examples… not the first and not the last. The energy companies employ brilliant engineers. By drilling in ultra-deep environments in the Gulf of Mexico or the Atlantic Abyssal Plain, and by fracking and chasing unconventional sources of fossil fuels on land, there has been a net change in reserves in the past few years. For the first time since the 1950’s the United States is actually — really — energy independent, at least for a while.
But we will have to drill and frack like hungry chickens to stay there.
So… that means the price of oil will go down, right? It would if only the United States occupied this planet. But India and China have well over a billion citizens each, and each country’s economy is advancing at 3% — 8% per year. That translates into a huge, and probably permanently growing demand for fossil fuels. China’s “patriotic” hunger for Taiwan and the South China Sea has an underlying, coldly rational driver: hydrocarbons.
The people we used to see in pictures riding bicycles now instead want to drive cars and get chubby like Americans. Increasing demand requires ever-increasing resources for the prices to stay low. If the resources can’t keep up, or the oil comes from an EDGE source, then the cost will climb and climb. The price of oil recently was “down” to $54/barrel… or “up” from $29/barrel, depending on your point of reference (https://markets.businessinsider.com/commodities/oil-price?type=wti ).
The idea of American energy security is fine in a narrow sense — but it doesn’t have much meaning in a global economy.
No, we are not running out of oil. It just seems like it, and it’s the perfect grist for a self-renewing population of prophets of doom. Like most everything else, it’s always much more complicated than a simple-sounding solution, a TV sound-bite, or a presidential lie can explain. And I haven’t even broached the subject of us all drowning in carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, or the world’s oceans inundating all our coastal cities as all the world’s ice sheets melt.
If someone says they have a simple solution… treat them like the ads saying there is a free lunch somewhere.
More to come in Part 4: There is yet another, non-geologic reason why gas prices keep climbing.
