Monday, April 19, 2010

Offshore Drilling and Arithmetic

Ok, I'm playing catch-up.  I've been otherwise occupied with other interests and psychotic computers.  But the recent plan by the Obama administration to open new areas to offshore oil drilling is provocative on several levels.

Oil wells are inherently messy and potentially damaging to the environment.  Nothing much can eat the oil, and oil makes life tough for creatures that encounter it.  Might have something to do with why petroleum has stayed stabile over geologic time scales.  There are some bacteria living at the bottom of Lake Baikal that seem to eat oil.  Since Baikal is the deepest lake in the world the bacteria probably can't be too choosy down there.  Correction--Reading about the Gulf oil spill indicates lots of bacteria in the ocean seen to eat oil.  It's painfully apparent that by no means all the oil gets eaten, however.

Unfortunately, we aren't going to do too well in the short term without oil to burn.  Over on my companion website, I'm trying to document the shortfall.  It's hard too see how we can cushion the decline in oil production from the good established fields that are declining around the world without some new production.

That's said, let's be realistic about what can be obtained by the new areas being opened up.  The New York Times article about the plan reports the Interior Department claims there could be "as much as a three-year supply" of oil in the area being opened to exploration.  The only actual figures quoted are "as much as 3.5 billion barrels of oil in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, "the richest single tract".  Assuming we could achieve the maximun practical recovery from a field of 70% of the oil, that's 2.45 billion barrels recoverable.  At the current U.S. consumption rate of about 20 million barrels per day, that's a 122.5 day supply, which isn't quite 3 years.  In another article in Bnet report the areas around Alaska could amount to 19 billion barrels, which sounds more substantial.  Applying our arithmetic, that works out 665 days for a total of 787.5 days, which is a bit over 2 years.  And that's assuming we keep it for ourselves...