Crude Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  PREFACE

  Introduction

  CHAPTER ONE - The Eclipse of Coal

  CHAPTER TWO - Exile from Tethys

  CHAPTER THREE - Into the Cold

  CHAPTER FOUR - Rockefeller’s Ghost

  CHAPTER FIVE - Refining the Hunt

  CHAPTER SIX - Aftershocks

  CHAPTER SEVEN - The Curse of Crude

  CHAPTER EIGHT - Carbon Perils

  CHAPTER NINE - Running on Empty

  CHAPTER TEN - Challengers, Old and New

  CONCLUSION

  Notes

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  PREFACE

  For the Love of Oil

  Oil creates the illusion of a completely changed life, life without work, life for free. . . . The concept of oil expresses perfectly the eternal human dream of wealth achieved through lucky accident. . . . In this sense, oil is a fairy tale and like every fairy tale a bit of a lie.

  —Ryszard Kapuscinski1

  OUR SPECIES HAS basked in the strange and wonderful properties of crude oil for millennia. But it was only over the last century that we built whole ways of living upon its power, harnessing crude to make cars run, planes fly, houses warm and lit, hospitals sterile, and supermarkets stocked with fresh fruits and vegetables.

  Today, one-sixth of the entire global economy is dedicated to the staggering effort of harvesting oil from its uneven accumulations within the earth’s crust. From birth to death our mobility, health, and sustenance all depend, in various ways, upon crude oil and its progeny. Newborn babies slide from their mothers into gloved hands, are swaddled in petro-polyester blankets, and hurried off to be warmed by oil-burning heaters. Later, strapped into steely, oil-fed motors, their soft breakable bodies gloriously extend their reach and power.

  So long as the pipelines course with crude, our reliance on oil isn’t a fact we think about very often. But every so often, we are struck with a paralyzing anxiety. How much is there? How long will it last? What will come next?

  There are many reasons why we might worry about our reliance on crude. After all, we use the stuff 100,000 times faster than it can accumulate underground. And we’ve already depleted the easiest and safest sources of oil.

  But our apprehensions are generally sparked by a more mundane trigger: rising oil prices. In the wake of the oil embargo and Iranian revolution in the 1970s, the price of oil more than tripled, forcing Americans to take their first baby-steps toward moderating oil consumption. But then, in the 1980s, despite the ongoing depletion of oil, the price of a barrel of oil plummeted, and the zest for conservation faded.

  And so it hit even harder when, in the middle of the first decade of the new millennium, the price of oil shocked us once again. This time, a confluence of factors threw the delicate balance between supply and demand into pandemonium. China consumed more oil than expected, while a series of hurricanes crippled oil facilities in the Gulf of Mexico. As the price of oil rose, so did the anxiety. Hollywood movies spun elaborate conspiracy theories about the oil supply. Editorialists speculated darkly on the end of oil, and web-masters warned of “Petrocalypse Now!” Talk shows discussed the possibility of an ever-growing China depriving Americans of their oily birthrights. The term “peak oil” entered the public lexicon.

  The fundamental facts are not hard to understand. Every year, the world demands about 2 percent more oil than it did the year before, while the flow of oil from known oilfields declines by 3-5 percent. Since the 1960s, oil explorers’ finds of new oil have been ever smaller, and since the 1980s, they’ve been finding those smaller accumulations less frequently. And so the oil industry slakes growing desires for crude by slurping faster on the reserves of oil discovered decades earlier. At some point, that endowment of oil will be spent, and the flow of crude will start to inexorably decline.

  Some analysts say if we invest sufficient effort and money we can stave off the peak by a few decades. Others, more pessimistic, say the beginning of the end is a matter of years, or even months.

  The oil industry has, indeed, been pronounced dead before. In 1909, Standard Oil was beheaded, and the oil industry was predicted to fade into oblivion. In 1960 the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) was formed, depriving Western oil companies of access to the most plentiful oilfields in the world. In the 1980s the rate of discovery of new oil started to decline. In 1997 the Kyoto Protocol was forged. And yet, the industry has survived, and thrived.

  That’s not to say there’s been no fallout from these near-death experiences. In the beginning, oil drillers did little more than dig holes in their own backyards to produce oil. Today, oil companies must enlist the best minds of scholars and the blood of soldiers to fortify their sprawling tangle of arteries pumping oil to the world’s machines. But the accumulated scar tissue would hardly be revealed through the simple pulse-read that is the price of oil. Despite the increasing difficulty of keeping the pipelines full, oil has not always become more expensive. In part, that’s because it isn’t consumers but distant ecosystems and future generations that suffer the lengthier pipelines, longer drills, stepped-up security, and environmental disruption that costlier oil requires.

  In the coming years, the oil industry may be able to continue to keep the pipelines full with heavier oils, distant oils, and oil-like substitutes. But if the higher costs are pushed onto people and places separated from consumers by time and space, judging by the price of oil we may never know it.

  If so, we may not experience oil’s death throes as a prolonged period of painfully high prices for ever-scarcer oil, but rather as other kinds of seemingly disconnected disruptions. Up in the air, the century’s explosion of carbon from the planet’s crust hangs over us, ominously. The malignant spawn of petro-states send us cryptic messages of Armageddon. The most powerful nations on earth vie for the last forests, fresh waters, and farmlands to feed their oil-hungry economies. These—not the price of oil—may be our canaries in the coal mine.

  If that is so, one could reasonably take a look around and surmise that the question isn’t when the end of oil will come. We’re in it already.

  What next after crude? Again, there are roughly two camps. According to conventional wisdom, the West’s high-tech, hydrocarbon-based society lies at the pinnacle of a natural, inevitable development path. There is no need even in the face of oil’s decline, according to this view, to veer off in a new direction. We can continue using as much energy as we have over the last century of oil. We’ll just get the stuff from other sources, whether coal, natural gas, nuclear power, or biomass.

  An alternate view holds just the opposite: that the petro-life is an anomaly, based on the improbable discovery of relatively rare, finite accumulations of energy lurking under the ground during an era of unusually stable climatic conditions, a development as unlikely as winning the lottery. According to this view, the discovery of oil, the harnessing of its power, the rapid development of a society nourished and sustained by its short-term riches, despite its long-term and far-away costs—none of this was preordained or inevitable. If the very basis for this aberrant way of life is receding, there is no reason left to cling to its pathways. It is time, then, to adjust to radically new ones.

  Whether we decide to maintain our oil-drenched society or chart a new energy future at least partly depends on how we understand the circuitous path behind us. It depends upon our story of oil, from its birth hundreds of millions of years ago to its abrupt exhumation over the last century and a half, a story told, in part, in the pages that follow.

  INTRODUCTION

  Oil Is Born

  THE STORY OF oil is written on a time scale that humans can
scarcely grasp, but it starts with something innocuous and seemingly peripheral: the slimy dregs at the bottom of the sea.

  The outer crust encasing the earth is just 100 to 200 kilometers thick, a mere fraction of the way to the center. It is like a cracked eggshell, fragmented into about eight large plates and many smaller ones. Along with the burning star that is our sun, the Earth is primarily energized by its own interior, a hot core left over from the planet’s creation more than 4 billion years ago. The fury of that heat becomes apparent when volcanoes erupt, vomiting up the innards of the planet. That heat drives the plates into constant slow motion—as much as ten centimeters a year.1

  Throughout Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history, these moving plates press against each other, forming mountains; tear apart, leaving huge depressions; slip under and slide past each other. Their rocky surfaces bear the scars of their journeys. Ice scrapes on rocks in the middle of the burning Sahara Desert and tropical rainforest plants buried in the middle of North America allow geological detectives to unravel the mobile plates’ ancient pathways.2

  A watery shroud swathes the cracked crust of our gigantic ball of heat, sloughing off the outer layers and sending them into motion. The water enveloping the planet in clouds, oceans, lakes, rivers, groundwater, and glaciers constantly circulates, melts, rains, freezes, and evaporates. The frenzy of water’s activity along the surface of the earth shapes its face, eroding mountains, cutting grand canyons, slowly slipping ever downward through the tiny spaces between the crumbs of soil into the rocks below.3 When the weather turns cold, the water inside the rock freezes, expanding and shattering the rock. All of these processes slowly but surely break the mountains down.4

  The products of that weathering and erosion, sediments, slip down the land, settling in puddles, washing into streams, and finally slipping into the sea. Rivers swirling with sands and sediments rush toward the ocean. As they approach the sea, the rivers’ flow slows, and the suspended sediments start to sink. On the floor of the sea, the layers of sediment slowly build up. The bottom ones get buried under progressively more and more weight and eventually turn hard and compressed. They become rock.

  The ocean teems with tiny crustaceans, worms, and algae, microscopic life on which the entire food chain hangs. The seas are cloudy with them. But among the three kinds of sea creatures—the ones fixed on the bottom, like corals; the ones swimming around, like fish; and the tiny creatures that simply float with the currents and tides; the tiniest are by far the most prolific, producing up to 80 percent of the total organic matter in the ocean.5

  Those hordes of miniscule marine creatures are called plankton. The term “plankton” refers less to a specific kind of organism than just a strategy: those creatures that are too small or weak to swim well and who thus choose to float along the currents and tides, hoping for the best. Phytoplankton, microscopic one-celled photosynthesizing organisms, are the engines of the sea. They form the basis of the food chain under the water by feeding on sun and carbon dioxide, and then raining down to sustain the creatures below, swallowed in bits by other plankton or in great mouthfuls by those that swim.

  The goal in life for plankton is not to sink. They must stay within the layer of the water that gives them enough light and warmth, and this struggle tends to keep them quite minute. In order to avoid predators, they hide by making themselves transparent or schooling together in great clouds or by simply becoming smaller and smaller. Particles of food suspended in the surrounding water nourish them.6

  Especially prolific are the diatoms, half-plant half-animal creatures that reproduce by division, and which can lurk for years, undead, waiting for the right opportunity to come alive again. The longest ones measure eighty micrometers. After they die, their glasslike shells sink to the bottom, joining the discarded fish bones and teeth littering the seabed, infused along the coasts with incoming sediments from rivers.7 The tiny shells of these and other single-celled creatures fall to the bottom and mix with the mud to turn into what geologists call carbonate “ooze.”8

  Plankton remains and other sediments can blanket the sea floor with about .1 millimeter of organic rubble a year. Over 10 million years, that adds up to an entire kilometer. Indeed, the accumulated remains of coccoliths, tiny shelly spheres about ten micrometers in diameter,9 formed most of the towering white cliffs that loom over both sides of the English Channel.10

  Most of the organic material that starts sinking to the bottom never reaches the seafloor. It gets eaten by fish or demolished by burrowing bacteria. But in fits and bursts at specific times and locations, organic sediments are preserved unrecycled and are buried untouched. If conditions are precisely right for those silty layers to accumulate, they may, in time, turn into oil.

  The slime in question, this preancestor to oil, is packed with carbon.

  Carbon is the building block of life, the stuff plants turn into food and that we breathe out as carbon dioxide. It is the black sooty stuff that makes up coal and graphite along with the hardest material on earth, glittering diamonds, as well as countless other substances when partnered with other elements. An entire branch of scientific inquiry, organic chemistry, is devoted to studying carbon.

  Billions of years ago, carbon-containing meteorites and other small, solid celestial bodies bombarded the earth, steadily increasing the amount of carbon on the newborn planet.11 There are about 49,000 metric gigatons12 of carbon on Earth today,13 making it the fourth most plentiful element in the universe after hydrogen, helium, and oxygen.14

  Carbon circulates around our planet, sinking into the earth, spewing out in volcanoes and wafting up into the atmosphere. Seven hundred and fifty gigatons of carbon hang in the atmosphere, accounting for less than 1 percent of the world’s carbon. At those lofty heights, carbon envelops the planet in a warming shell, letting heat in but not out.15

  The vast majority of the world’s carbon—more than 30,000 gigatons—resides in the world’s oceans. (About 10,000 gigatons are locked in methane hydrates, a crystallized form of methane that forms under cold deep seas.)16 The ocean and the airs above it conduct a gentle, give-and-take conversation with carbon, whispering the element back and forth depending on which side’s concentration is greater.17 Carbon dioxide dissolves in seas and ocean currents carry the carbon-laden waters down into the dark depths. Phytoplankton also turn the carbon from the air into food, storing it in their watery tissues. Other hungry creatures take with their bite of phytoplankton all of its stores of carbon, passing the carbon along the food chain.18

  A similar process occurs on land as plants transform carbon into food and living tissue by photosynthesis. Animals eat the carbon-rich plants, growing their bodies and exhaling the byproducts, carbon dioxide, into the air—where plants can once again breathe it in. In total, forests and the rest of terrestrial life hungrily eat, breathe, and exhale another 3 percent of the world’s carbon.

  When fused with hydrogen, carbon repels water, which is why oil won’t mix with water. Oil, along with natural gas and coal, is a hydrocarbon, so named because it consists of hydrogen and carbon. The simplest oil molecules are long chains of carbon atoms with hydrogen atoms hitched along the sides and ends of the molecules. A single carbon atom with a few hydrogens attached to it is methane, a light gas. A chain of three carbons is propane; four carbons is butane. A chain of eight carbons is octane. As the chains and rings of carbon get longer and longer, they stick to each other better. The hydrocarbon gets thicker. Thirty-carbon chains are waxy; refiners string even longer chains together to make plastics.19

  For creatures like plankton that are composed mostly of water and live in water, a barrier of water-repelling material is crucial. It is what separates them from the sea that surrounds them, the thin barrier between the animate water inside and the inanimate water outside. Not surprisingly, a key component of planktonic cell membranes is made of chains of hydrocarbon molecules. If you zoomed in on the cell membranes of marine algae you’d see it: a chain of fifteen or seventeen carbo
n atoms strung together, holding the incoming waters at bay.20

  Hydrocarbon-rich plankton corpses pile up in the sediments at the bottom of the sea. As more and more rich organic sediments collect on top, each layer is buried deeper under the subsiding seabed. When the sediments have sunk several kilometers underground, their compaction expels much of the water. Because much of the organic material comes from plankton, and minus water, plankton contains water-repelling hydrocarbons, the layers become rich in hydrocarbon. Over millions of years, the sunken, hydrocarbon-enriched layers harden, turning into thin sheets of dark chocolate brown or black rock.21 If you took a chunk of it and put it under a microscope, you might see bits of shell, pollen, and even whole microorganisms fossilized there in the hardened rock.22

  Once buried deeply, at least seventy-five hundred feet down, these sedimentary layers will turn into a hydrocarbon-impregnated shale or mudstone. Under increasing pressures as they get closer to the center of the earth, the organic-rich layers are gently heated at temperatures of around 180 degrees Fahrenheit, as warm as a hot cup of tea. Cooked over millions of years, the hydrocarbons in the rock mature. The heat splits the large molecules into progressively smaller ones and the hydrocarbons in the rock become lighter, less viscous, and much more volatile. The water-repelling cell membranes of single-celled marine creatures get squished and simmered into oil, which now infuses the shale, or “source rock” as petroleum geologists call it, in drops and blobs.23

  If the rocky layer continues to descend into the earth’s crust, going deeper than eighteen thousand feet, the pressure becomes too great, the layers too sunken, and the heat too intense. The oil “cracks” into the smallest and lightest molecules of all—methane, or natural gas.24