OIL - Delivering light to a world of darkness

Coal bestowed power in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but it came at a price. Coal's black smoke was so thick that it could be seen hovering over English cities from miles away in some cases blocking the sun's rays entirely. Londoners, squinting by their sooty windows, switched on their lamps to read the morning papers. Children toiled in the coal fired factories, and even worse, in the dank toxic coal mines themselves. '“For watching the doors, the smallest children are usually employed” noted economist Freidrich Engels '“who thus pass twelve hours daily, in the dark alone sitting usually in damp passages without even having work enough to save them from the stupefying brutalizing tedium of doing nothing“. Children dragged themselves homewards after their long shifts in the mines so tired that many were found, hours later, asleep on the road. Deprived of sunlight subject to poisoned air and explosions, they died in droves. Most of the poor in mid nineteenth century Manchester did not survive to see their eighteenth birthdays. Those who did, aged prematurely. Nevertheless London was affectionately dubbed the big smoke a smog-shrouded city that Lord Byron romantically described as a wilderness of steeples peeping on tip toe through their sea coal canopy. Painters such as James Abbott, McNeill Whistler, Joseph Mallard, William Turner and Claude Monet captured the city's foggy phantasmagoria, and Charles Dickens wrote of coal's soft, black drizzle. Jack the Ripper stalked his prey under cover of coal's thick brown haze.

Across the Atlantic a different story was unfolding. People found tons of black coal but they also found something else, a liquid fuel that would slowly gain in popularity until it overtook coal altogether. When set alight, oil's long chains of carbon split apart, releasing the energy stored in their powerful bonds. Afterwards, oil's hydrogens and carbons pair off with the oxygen in the air, forming carbon dioxide and water. The amount of energy stored in a gallon of oil is equal to the amount in almost five kilograms of the best coal, or more than ten kilograms of wood or more than fifty well fed human slaves toiling the day away. Oil contained so much energy that it could be used with abandon and still release much more energy than was required to get it out of the ground.

The men in Pennsylvania had a better idea than time consuming hand digging for this miraculous new liquid. They would drill an oil well. John Rockefeller, a stern pious entrepreneur from New York built his fortune on the market for kerosene. Rockefeller considered his task in almost spiritual terms, “Delivering light to a world of darkness“.

“Give the poor man his cheap light , Gentlemen,” he told his colleagues. Nonetheless it was big business and hugely lucrative. Rockefeller made it so with his merciless quest to expand his oil empire and dominate markets.

Britain had taken the plunge and converted its warships from coal to oil in 1912, even though the country itself had coal reserves but no known sources for oil. It was like switching to an all fruit diet while sailing the Arctic seas.

On the other side of the ocean Russians drilled the seeps whose eternal fires had so entranced the Persians. They shipped the oil from Baku in tankers - the first was called the Zoroaster, across the Caspian sea. Around Baku the smoke from the two hundred refineries that distilled the oil was so dense that the area was known as black town. Russia’s dirty oil started filling lamps across Asia along with oil extracted from dripping rocks in Indonesia by Royal Dutch Shell. Entrepreneurs with dollar signs dancing in their eyes braved the hostile lands, and people of Persia to drill along oil seeps there.


Over the first World War the allied forces did not lose faith in the internal combustion engine and its magic fuel. A faith that turned out to be worth the trouble. Britain and the United States unleashed the fury of their agile petroleum burning machines. About 163000 oil burning vehicles and 70000 airplanes vanquishing Germany’s bulky coal fired ones, black gold was crowned king. Ten days after Germany surrendered, in Nov 1918 British statesman Lord George Nathaniel Curzon declared the allied forces triumph as petroleum's 'the allied cause had floated to victory upon a wave of oil’ he said.

The United States with seemingly plentiful oil in Texas, Oklahoma, California and else where had little need at first to plunder foreign lands for its black gold. But many fields were rapidly exhausted as the second world war exerted its heavy demands on the industry. The technology that would allow the industry to sniff out deeper, more hidden oil reservoirs had yet to be developed. By the end of 1943 Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes was sure the united states stood on the brink of an oil famine. “If there should be a world war 3 it would have to be fought with someone else's petroleum because the United States would not have it”; he wrote warning that American crown symbolizing supremacy as the oil empire of the world is sliding down over one eye.

Ickes insisted that we should have available oil in different parts of the world and the time to get going is now. No matter how generous domestic oil reserves may have been controlling the giant foreign oil fields that other countries would have to rely on could only elevate the United States strategic power.

The railroads forged in the heat of the industrial revolution, ferrying coal, steel, and people, coupled with horse drawn carriages, defined transportation in the nineteenth century. Both required sizable inputs of energy to power their motion. The oil industry had partnered with automakers to lobby for a network of smooth black asphalt crisscrossing the country on which their war winning cars could ramble. In 1956 while the last coal fire was stubbed out in London their lobbying finally paid off. The US congress earmarked over 26 Billion used for the national interstate and defence highway system Act setting off a fit of road building that would profoundly alter the country.

American families and industries used the smooth roads and their new automobiles to drive themselves away from the congested cities. Between 1950 and 1990 suburban sprawl had become so intense that some areas were gobbling up land four times faster than their populations grew.

As much as geologists knew about oil and its movements and the huge amounts of money involved, when they were wrong about their guesses, nine out of ten exploration wells drilled in the United States were dry holes. Just one in a hundred exploration wells discovered a usable oilfield. Military technology harnessed to hunt the enemy and under written by the public was transferred to the private hunt for oil which many described in openly warrior like terms. The mapping of the ocean floor for submarines, aerial surveys for picking out bomb targets and seismographs used to pin point enemy artillery all of these military technologies developed to wage war were put to service in the hunt for oil. The seismograph proved to be the most powerful new weapon of all as one historian put it translating the echoes of seismic waves pumped into the ground could reveal the deformations where they lay below unseen just as a bat's clicking could find its mosquito.

Over the course of the 1990s oil explorers found seventy six oil and gas fields of over 500 million barrels each more than half lay not under the familiar arid plains or even arctic tundra but deep under the oceans restless currents and the sea floors shifting sediments. The deeper waters off the Gulf of Mexico continental shelf for example had been virtually ignored by oil explorers for years.

Ironically, though, the vast majority of the 6 million metric tons of oil that enter the world’s oceans every year comes not from accidental spills but from chronic, routine, and deliberate ones. More than 40 percent drips off the car clogged roads and highways into rivers and streams sliding into the sea. Another 30 percent leaks in because oil tankers are so tipsy when emptied of oil. They fill up with sea water to stabilize themselves, then pump this oil contaminated ballast water overboard when the tanker refills with oil. The oil industry’s latest technique, FPSOS, will require even more tankers ferrying even more oil around the world’s oceans.

Underwater pipeline networks, although expensive and cumbersome for the oil industry to build, are much safer than transferring and conveying huge amounts of oil around on the surface of the water in tankers and other vessels, as FPSOS require, part of the reason why US regulators had banned FPSOS from the Gulf of the Mexico until 2002. In a single year, the hive of oil industry activity in the Gulf of Mexico emitted fully eight hundred spills of oil within ten miles of the Texas coast, over two thirds of these spills were not from the Gulf’s extensive network of underwater pipelines but from the vessels ferrying the oil to and from.

The end of oil’s story is still being written but it is clear that the conclusion nears. Much will depend on how a thousand other stories end. In Moscow, Russian officials debate whether to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, one that with the US’ and Australia’s refusals to ratify, now hangs in their hands. Will they or wont they? Elsewhere, reluctant government regulators brood over the latest scientific findings that around a third of the species in three of the most biologically diverse places in the world may be condemned to climate change induced extinction within fifty years. Will these losses be enough to change their minds? In Colombia, some Indian tribes succeed in protecting their lands from industry’s oily explorations but then the state run oil company plans to continue. Will the tribes’ threat of mass suicide deter the drills again?

The signs are ambiguous, to say the least. In Detroit, hundreds reclaim the former capital of the car, coating it with acres of productive green gardens while up north in Canada, officials giddily sign proclamations announcing their intentions to step up tar sands production. In Iraq and Libya, Texan oilmen jostle in the queue to re-enter old stomping grounds, while in Houston, aging oil executives are handed multi billion dollar bills to upgrade their decrepit tankers and pipelines. In Alaska, oil company trucks sink into the permafrost’s melting mud while in Washington, oil execs press for more access to protected lands. In London, people are penalized for driving their cars, while in Beijing and Shanghai, erstwhile bicyclists press up against the sparkling glass of GM and BMW’s new showrooms.

Around the world, people resist the petrolife, practicing less consumptive ways of feeding, transporting, and sheltering themselves, the vast majority under the strictures of deprivation, others by choosing new ways and rediscovering old ones. The end of the story of oil will depend on them , too, and how they fare against big oil’s bulldozer, for there is still time before the ancient liquid vanishes for people to realize, as Kenneth Deffeyes put it, that crude oil is much too valuable to be burned as a fuel. Perhaps a new era of sporadic supply interruptions and volatile prices coupled with an influx of better technology to harness solar, wind, and other renewable energies will start to slowly persuade people not to opt for oil. Worries about climate change might restrain the quest for new oil and gas, with declining oil production easing the inequities it so frequently triggers. Perhaps there might be enough oil left, in other words, to mine aluminium and silicon for windmills and solar panels before the drills, shovels, and clouds of carbon dioxide render earth uninhabitable.

In many ways, the path forward will depend on how we view the path behind us. With the dawning realization of crude’s finite bounty has come a flurry of ideas about how to sustain our energy intensive civilization with a bit less oil. More fuel efficient s u v s, a sprinkling of nuclear and coal burning power plants, hydrogen gas stations, all are touted as the next big thing, our saviour. Few nudge the basic assumptions of machines, roads, and sprawl, as 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 evening the face of oil’s decline, according to this view, to veer off in a new direction.

An alternate view hold just the opposite: that the petrolife is an anomaly, based on the improbable discovery of relatively rare, finite accumulations of energy 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 pre ordained 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.