About Our Oil Pool

About Our Oil Pool


I am confident that the President of the United States is an honest and good man. Fox News and Bill O’Reilly tell me so. He has invaded a sovereign country, Iraq, in order to protect and secure the life and liberty of American Citizens while conferring the principles of democracy onto the grateful Iraqi people. Let’s say, just for arguments sake that this is not true, and that he has occupied the country of Iraq because, as an oil man, he is covetous of their proven oil reserves and wants to have a military staging area should the Saudi oil reserves, conveniently located next door, be threatened by Al Qaeda, the Russians or anyone else he does not like. Just what is it that we are fighting for? How big is the Oil Pool? Where does it come from? Is it running dry? Is it worth fighting for?

According to oil industry sources, the commonly accepted proven reserves are 1.226 trillion barrels of oil. Just how much is this? Using established standards for volume we can convert barrels of oil into cubic miles. The number that I calculate is about 48 cubic miles of oil. Given that the volume of the earth is much, much larger (many billions of cubic miles), then this is really not that much. Maybe it is a good idea this occupation. Is oil really so scarce that the freedom of the western world depends upon trampling a few small countries who really do not know freedom and have no history of anything other than brutal dictatorship, for which our democracy will be a refreshing and welcomed change?

If we consider that the world is consuming a lot of oil, and that the consumption grows each and every year the key question becomes how long until we run out? I calculate this to be about 49 years at current consumption rates. These could actually be too low and we could be burning it faster than that.

The flaw in this argument is that every year we have more proven reserves at the end of the year than we did at the beginning, thanks to vigorous exploration and improved extraction technologies. This has been the consistent theme for as long as oil reserves have been calculated. There has never been a time that the oil industry has had less proven reserves at the beginning of the year than at the end, even with the intervening 365 days of consumption being factored in. Odd circumstances indeed for a scarce resource!

The natural production theory of oil says that crude oil results from the trapped decay products of living organisms which get trapped under the Earth and then percolate for millions of years at elevated temperature and pressure resulting in crude oil. This theory is so well accepted that the Oil Industry does not even fund the research into alternative theories, even though this one goes back to the 19th century. This always struck me as a bizarre and unlikely series of events, that deserts, fields and forests will get plowed under the earth and after millions of years become oil?

What about a larger scale source phenomena like Solar System formation? It is well known that there are copious amounts of methane in this Solar System. The gas giant planets of Jupiter and Saturn are proof of this. Methane is the most reduced form of a hydrocarbon possible and thus yields the highest energy content under oxidation (burning). Under the conventional theory oil forms as vegetable material becomes coal, which becomes petroleum, and finally natural gas as oxygen is removed and the molecules become more and more reduced.

According to Thomas Gold, this theory is wrong and he has some impressive figures with which to back up his ideas. Let’s do some calculations with his theory. If the outer 100 miles of the earth’s crust are biologically active as Gold suggests and the activity is uniformly distributed then there is a lot of potential oil to be found. If oil is just .001% of the volume of the outer 100 miles of crust, then we would have an additional 5,077,713,481,834,820 barrels of oil, or about 4000 times as much as the current proved reserves. If the oil zone goes deeper then we obviously have more. If the oil is being replenished from below via primordial reserves left over from solar system formation then a steady state might be expected in which extraction and replenishment would balance for a long time to come.

Perhaps this explains why we never seem to run out and some large oil fields continue to produce regardless of extraction rates? Some oil pools actually seem to be filling from below, which supports the deep hot biosphere theory of Thomas Gold.

Why then would the oil industry cry shortage in such a period of abundance? There is nothing like a perceived crisis to suspend rational thought and behavior. This happened during the seventies when stagflation ruled the day and we were running out of oil (again), in spite of the proven reserve facts. Since the 1960’s we have had four oil men as President and Vice-President (Johnson, Bush I, Bush II, and Cheney). What an odd coincidence? Is there any other industry as well represented at the top of the political heap?

If we are not running out of oil, just what are we doing in the Middle East? We are currently spending about $150 billion dollars per year defending about 350 billion barrels of oil of which we purchase about $12 billion dollars worth for imports. This is clearly a bad bargain. We could withdraw the troops and let the price of oil quadruple and still save money and lives, theirs and ours. Clearly no one is performing cost benefit analysis on this fiasco.

Back forgot my original thesis, it’s not about cost, it’s about freedom and no price is too great to pay to secure freedom for strangers who are unwilling to procure it on their own, especially when you are using other people’s money to procure it, which is, ultimately, what all tax dollars are.

Oil industry profits are an unrelated byproduct of this effort, as is the preponderance of oil industry executives as our leaders just a happy coincidence. However, if Thomas Gold is right, and as a physicist he has a good track record of being right, then this has all been a cruel sham and an expensive façade propping up a low profit margin commodity business through a sequence of artificial shortages and market interventions by government agencies. Current “expert” consumption rates indicate the pool will run dry this century, but if history is any guide at the end of this century there will be more proven reserves than at the beginning of the century (which was the case with the last one).