Heavy oil

Having written extensively on occultism and the esoteric, and himself an adept in ritual magic, John Michael Greer is an eager student of the unexplained. Yet he's also a sharp observer of the unexamined assumptions that people make about the physical world around them, and how these assumptions have helped land the world in its present crisis. One common presupposition is that nature is independent of the world of human economics, and thus can be treated as a disposable resource. An environmentalist and a devout follower of the druid path, Greer knows better, and he’s written several books seeking to dispel this mistaken dismissal of nature.

Big Oil's campaign for energy complacency is picking up steam. They say tar sands and fracking are bringing a new era of plenty. But whatever happened to peak oil?

As soon as former premier Peter Lougheed notified the country that he thought the controversial Keystone XL pipeline was a bad deal for Alberta, the experts got all flustered and expressed their usual shock and dismay. Yet Lougheed's declaration was elegantly simple. "We should be refining the bitumen in Alberta and we should make it public policy in the province," he told the CBC.

“Imagining a world without oil” describes in stark detail what might happen if one day the world decided to decommission all its oil tankers, rigs, pipelines and strategic reserves. The authors, environmental scientist Steve Hallett and journalist John Wright, expect that we’d initially see sky-high prices and long lines at pumps. After a few weeks, fuel wouldn’t be had at any price and even first-world citizens would struggle to stay fed and out of the elements. This is no Hollywood doomsday scenario—it’s a levelheaded extrapolation from current trends in the fast deteriorating world energy situation. [An essay prefiguring the book originally appeared in The Washington Post.]

User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization shows how our major crises share the same root causes and thus can be solved only by taking into account their complex interactions. Ahmed acknowledges that in this age of specialization it's understandable for issues like climate change and oil depletion to be studied and discussed separately—indeed, he observes that this mode of inquiry into the causes of specific phenomena has enabled many of our greatest scientific advances. But it’s also, he argues, beginning to seem like an increasingly antiquated method, preventing experts from seeing the whole picture and the public from receiving consistent information.

This past week was supposedly the week of the game changer in the world of oil. Leaked U.S. diplomatic cables from Saudi Arabia called into question the ability of the globe's largest oil exporter to raise production to satisfy a world increasingly thirsty for petroleum. In the United States a technique called hydraulic fracturing--which has seemingly unlocked vast natural gas resources--will now be applied to oil trapped in shale deposits. Are these two developments really the so-called game changers they are claimed to be?

Kurt Cobb has just released a page-turner of a first novel titled Prelude, which uses a Grisham-esque tale of suspense and intrigue to educate the public about peak oil. Prelude’s main character is a young energy analyst who discovers a top-secret report shedding light on the true, precarious state of the world’s oil reserves....Allegorically named Cassie, she stands for all of the real-life Cassandras within the peak oil movement, who, like the Cassandra of Greek myth, are able to foresee disaster but so far seem cursed never to be believed.

Economist Paul Krugman almost addressed the Limits to Growth in his recent article "The Finite World", but pulled back before reaching the brink of suggesting there may be physical limits to economic growth. A Nobel Prize may await whomever finds a workable model to prosper human welfare under conditions of depleting resources. Will economists solve this problem, or ordinary people who are learning to live better in The Finite World?

In The Maltese Falcon a character tells detective Sam Spade, "By Gad, sir, you're a character, that you are! Yes, sir, there's never any telling what you'll do or say next, except that it's bound to be something astonishing.”* I'm telling Bob Hirsch the same thing. There’s no denying the man's considerable credentials within the energy industry, nor his contribution to peak oil scholarship as principal author of the first major U.S. government report to take the issue seriously. But neither is there any predicting what outlandish thing he’ll propose next in his efforts to spread the message.

As an oil producer, Saskatchewan seems to have it all. The Bakken light oil trend is a play of frenzied activity. So is Cenovus Energy’s carbon injection oil operation at Weyburn (the world’s largest carbon capture and storage facility). But the province’s meat and potatoes – conventional heavy oil production in the Lloydminster and Kindersley areas – are hidden behind these high-profile developments. The province’s first 2010 land sale tells the story, but it’s only clear if you dig deeply into the numbers.

Oil supply optimists often say that the application of enhanced oil recovery techniques to existing and future wells will vastly expand oil reserves and oil production. The trouble is these techniques aren't new, and they are already being widely applied. That means current oil reserves and production already reflect any effect they have had.

"as mankind proceeded to get bigger and bigger we silently crossed a threshold"

The Saudis are exploring the opportunity to sell their oil on more transparent exchanges in which they feel they have some logical control over production levels and pricing in relation to world demand, and also be paid in currencies outside the anemic US dollar. Such a mover would be a great influence on all of OPEC. This has crucial implications for the US as it could take oil trading from US exchanges and eventually outside the dollar as the currency of trade.

Evolution demands short-term thinking focused on individual survival. Most attempts to overcome our evolutionarily hardwired absorption with self are selected against. The Overman is dead, killed by a high-fat diet and unwillingness to exercise. Reflexively, we follow him into the grave.