DRILL BABYDRILL
WHY IT WON’TWORK FORLONG-TERMENERGYSUSTAINABILITYDAVID HUGHES
This publication is an excerpted chapter rom
The Energy Reader: Overdevelopment and the Delusion of Endless Growth
, Tom Butler, Daniel Lerch, and George Wuerthner,eds. (Healdsburg, CA: Watershed Media, 2012).
The Energy Reader
is copyright© 2012 by the Foundation or Deep Ecology, and published in collaboration withWatershed Media and Post Carbon Institute.For other excerpts, permission to reprint, and purchasing visit energy-reality.org or contact Post Carbon Institute.Photo: EcoFlight
about the author
David Hughes
is a geoscientist who has studied the energy resources o Canada or nearly our decades, includingthirty-two years with the Geological Survey o Canada as a scientist and research manager. Over the past decadehe has researched, published, and lectured widely on global energy and sustainability issues in North America andinternationally. He is a board member o the Association or the Study o Peak Oil and Gas–Canada and is a ellowo the Post Carbon Institute.
Post Carbon Institute | 613 4th Street, Suite 208 | Santa Rosa, California 95404 USA
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D
rill Baby Drill” was amously uttered by RepublicanSarah Palin during a 2008 vice-presidential debateas a response to America’s addiction to imported oil.
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Inmid-2011, Republican presidential candidate MichelleBachmann claimed to be able to—i elected—reduce theprice o gasoline to less than $2 per gallon rom its then-current price o nearly $4.
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These politicians, despitetheir naiveté on matters geological, understand thecorrelation between energy consumption and theAmerican Dream aspired to by the electorate. Giventhat ossil uels provide the lion’s share o the world’senergy at present, and that oil—the largest source o energy in the world—has been at historically high pricelevels recently, what is the outlook or a supply-sidesolution to America’s energy dilemma?
The Consumption Spiral
Fossil uels represent an incredibly dense and con-venient orm o energy—the legacy o hundreds o millions o years o ossilized sunshine preserved bygenerally very inecient processes. Oil, or example,accumulated over a period o 500 million years. I weassume that 3 trillion barrels o oil will eventually berecovered and burned (the most common estimate),this means roughly ourteen and a hal thousand years’worth o preserved ossilized sunshine is consumed
eachday
at the current global consumption rate o 87 millionbarrels per day (mbd).Prior to 1850 more than 80 percent o energy con-sumption was provided by renewable orms o energy,mostly biomass, with the balance provided by coal.Today, 84 percent o the average world citizen’s energyis provided by ossil uels, with most o the balanceprovided by nuclear and large hydropower. Fossil uelshave allowed the per capita consumption o the aver-age world citizen to increase nearly nineold since 1850.Increased energy availability or the production o oodand other commodities has also allowed global popu-lation to increase nearly sixold over this period. As aresult, the world is consuming 49 times as much energyas in 1850, 89 percent o which is nonrenewable (oil,gas, coal, and uranium).The pace and scale o this growth are astounding.Fully 90 percent o all ossil uels have been consumedsince 1937.
Half
have been consumed since 1985.Conventional wisdom is that coal has been replaced toa large degree by oil and natural gas. This is not true:The average world citizen consumes the same amounto coal per capita today as in 1910, and 90 percent o allcoal ever consumed has been burned since 1911. Theconsumption o oil merely added to per capita energyconsumption, as opposed to displacing coal. Naturalgas and nuclear energy added still urther to energythroughput. Ninety percent o all oil consumed byhumankind has been burned since 1961, and 90 percento all natural gas since 1966. The rate o consumption
Global fossil fuel consumption has accelerated rapidlyover the last few decades, requiring an enormousstream of resources to meet even current demand.Claims that future demand can be met simply by openingnew areas to exploration and increasing productionof relatively new resources like deepwater oil, tar sands,shale oil, oil shale, and shale gas ignore both thescale of global fossil fuel consumption and the technicalchallenges of producing such resources at a sufficient rate.
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