The concept of “peak oil” is near and dear to the hearts of the doomsayer schools of environmentalism. Here’s another perspective on the issue that seems to be based on something more than a case of enviromentalist “vapors”.
The good news is that panic scenarios about the world running out of oil any time soon are wrong. The bad news is that the price of oil is going to continue to rise. “Peak Oil” is not our problem. Politics is. Big Oil wants to sustain high oil prices. US Vice President Dick Cheney and friends are all too willing to assist.
What is the “peak oil” theory?
The Peak Oil school rests its theory on conventional Western geology textbooks, most by American or British geologists, which claim oil is a “fossil fuel”, a biological residue or detritus of either fossilized dinosaur remains or perhaps algae, hence a product in finite supply. Biological origin is central to Peak Oil theory, used to explain why oil is only found in certain parts of the world where it was geologically trapped millions of years ago.
That would mean that dinosaur remains became compressed and over tens of millions of years fossilized and were trapped in underground reservoirs perhaps 1,200-2,000 meters below the surface of the Earth. In rare cases, so goes the theory, huge amounts of biological matter should have been trapped in rock formations in the shallower ocean regions such as in the Gulf of Mexico or North Sea or Gulf of Guinea. Geology should be only about figuring out where these pockets in the layers of the earth, called reservoirs, lie within certain sedimentary basins.
On the other hand…
An entirely alternative theory of oil formation has existed since the early 1950s in Russia, almost unknown to the West. It claims that the conventional US biological-origins theory is an unscientific absurdity that is unprovable. They point to the fact that Western geologists have repeatedly predicted finite oil over the past century, only then to find more, lots more.
Not only has this alternative explanation of the origins of oil and gas existed in theory, the emergence of Russia as the world’s largest oil and natural-gas producer has been based on the application of the theory in practice.(Emphasis added.)
Note here: they put their money where their mouth is, and lo and behold…it worked!
This has geopolitical consequences of staggering magnitude.
THAT is a profound understatement! Read the rest of this and THEN look at the price on the corner gas station, and scratch your head along with the Chief.
How could US geology be so far behind the 8-ball on this? Hey! We’ve had long practice at trailing the rest of the world in geological theory:
Russian geophysicists used the theories of brilliant German scientist Alfred Wegener fully 30 years before Western geologists “discovered” Wegener in the 1960s. In 1915, Wegener published the seminal text The Origin of Continents and Oceans, which suggested an original unified landmass or Pangaea more than 200 million years ago that separated into present continents by what he called continental drift.
Up to the 1960s, supposed US scientists such as Dr Frank Press, the White House science adviser, referred to Wegener as “lunatic”. Geologists at the end of the 1960s were forced to eat their words as Wegener offered the only interpretation that allowed them to discover the vast oil resources of the North Sea.
Perhaps in some decades Western geologists will rethink their mythology of fossil origins and realize what the Russians have known since the 1950s. In the meantime, Moscow holds a massive energy trump card.