Oil Addiction: The World in Peril - 29
by Pierre Chomat (Universal Publishers, 2004)
translated from the French by Pamela Gilbert-Snyder
Part IV. Our Suicidal Quest for Energy
Chapter 29. Theater of the Ergamines
The scene is set in the year 2003.
Drum roll. The West enters its 21st century, the least certain of the Modern Era.
The Middle East, which began the 15th century of the Islamic Era with a certain amount of hope, has returned to the old, customary cycle of humiliation.
Eastern Europe has toppled its statues of Lenin and Stalin and is attempting to model itself after the free enterprise system. It has never really been democratic and finds listening to its people a challenge.
Africa is more or less at war with itself. The oil addicts' egosystems are penetrating it here and there, the better to exploit it, but these systems are not its own, culturally or economically.
South America is doing its best to imitate its Northern sister, but its heart is not in it. Its people still love to dance. Between coups.
Asia is contributing greatly to the effort to place the planet at the mercy of twelve billion human beings as soon as possible. It still needs its ancestral wisdom to maintain a degree of calm.
Oceania is still at sea.
Under the pressure of human egosystems, the Earth is warming; its glaciers are receding toward the mountain peaks, its polar icecaps are melting, and Northern birds and polar bears are looking for new habitats.
The world's universities are turning out fifty times more engineers than they did in 1950. Many of them are pondering the erudite question, "Is too much carbon dioxide too much?" Along with the navies of the Middle East and Asia, whales are attempting to decode the sonars of the American military. Homo sapiens is dumping non-biodegradable waste nearly everywhere.
Most Western countries have spread beyond their borders, as their tentacles reach far and wide to pump out the world's resources. The whole world is their marketplace. Continental Asia has recently joined the ranks of the exploited. The Earth is being transformed into one giant egosystem in the Western mold. The World Trade Center was its emblem.
Such is the backdrop against which the ergamines are working, in ever increasing numbers, at the beginning of the third millennium of the Christian Era.
The international energy market has not yet reached the boiling point. To prepare Californians for that event, a few "well meaning" corporations forced them to buy natural gas at several hundred times its base price during the summer of 2001. This indiscretion also provided a glimpse into the disparities that will greet us when the hydrocarbon shortage hits. In the Modern Era, as in the times to come, some parts ofthe world will have a harder time finding the energy needed for survival than others.
The table below classifies the various regions of the world according to their hydrocarbon reserves, oil and natural gas combined, estimated in billions of barrels of oil equivalent as of January 1 2002. {47}
Global Hydrocarbon Reserves and Consumption
(in billions of barrels of oil equivalent)
Middle East ................................... 1,050
Fed of Russia ................................... 350
Caspian Basin {a} ................................ 60
Total Reserves .................................1,460
Percentage of World Hydrocarbon Reserves ........ 73%
Percentage of World Hydrocarbon Consumption ..... 17%
Africa .......................................... 145
South America ................................... 140
Total Reserves .................................. 285
Percentage of World Hydrocarbon Reserves ........ 14%
Percentage of World Hydrocarbon Consumption ...... 8%
Asia & Oceania .................................. 145
North America ................................... 100
Europe ........................................... 50
Total Reserves .................................. 265
Percentage of World Hydrocarbon Reserves ........ 13%
Percentage of World Hydrocarbon Consumption ..... 75%
The first group is the hydrocarbon-rich nations. They possess 73% of the global reserves, and less than eight percent of the world's population. These countries constitute the primary ergamine market. The survival of the world's egosystems depends on them. Disagreement exists concerning the figure for the Caspian Basin. Some consider sixty billion barrels too low. In 2000, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) published glowing figures for the region's hydrocarbon potential, which, according to this agency, could be on the order of 300 billion barrels. This extraordinarily high figure must be viewed with skepticism; it is so unlikely that one should dismiss it entirely. It has perhaps, indeed, been introduced as a decoy.
The second group is Africa and South America. Very few countries on these two continents have reached the stage of inordinate development. Those that have ergamine reserves will, in all likelihood, be forced to yield them to the Northern oil addicts. What is happening in Nigeria today is a good example of the type of plunder that the Western oil companies have in store for them. A few hundred corrupt Nigerians are allowing supertankers to spirit away the nation's source of wealth to the United States and Europe, even though its citizens that live in the shadow of the oil wells subsist in abject poverty. The latter are "have-nots", perhaps even "have-nevers". Television viewers in the Northern hemisphere watch in total apathy as these people vent their anger in the oil fields.
Venezuela, Brazil, Egypt, Libya, and Algeria have better informed populaces and better organized political systems. They may be able to defend their already well-tapped reserves with greater social consciousness. South Africa will enjoy the halcyon era of its coal reserves.
Finally, the third group is the large hydrocarbon consumers, the oil-addicted giants. Although their current resources account for only thirteen percent of the global reserves, their ferocious appetites only continue to grow. Together, they soak up 75% of the world's hydrocarbons: Asia 25%, North America 30%, and Europe 20%.
The Asia-Oceania region contains sixty percent of the world's population and is adding one billion new individuals to it every fifteen years. In demographic terms, this constitutes an explosion. Its industry is exploding, too, and the region's energy appetite is growing even faster than its population, at a rate of two to three percent per year. By around 2010, when its population reaches approximately four billion, its industry will begin to lose momentum.
When the ergamine market begins to dry up, the Asian oil-addicted giant will probably have to go on a forced diet. Western egosystems may try to continue to take advantage of its underpaid masses, but the citizens of the West are not likely to reduce their own ergamine consumption in order to help develop the Asian economies.
Of the two remaining oil-addicted giants, Europe is in the best position geographically in relation to the ergamine market. Its tentacles do not have to reach far to find oil, and Europeans are not quite as voracious as Americans. Russia's natural gas pipelines are already supplying customers as far away as Spain. If Turkey joins the European Union, the latter will have the Middle East, the Caspian Basin, and the Black Sea practically in its back yard; the Black Sea might even become a European lake. This could mean the "good life" for dear Old Europe, if there were not trembling in the White House at that very thought - and even more trembling in the corporate boardrooms of the major US oil companies.
From now on, US energy independence will shrink dramatically. In 1970, American crude oil production was second to none, rivaling even that of Saudi Arabia until as late as 1980. Since then it has been on a downhill slide. The graph below {not included here} shows that in 1980 the 8.6 million barrels per day it produced domestically supplied more than fifty percent of US energy needs. However, by the year 2000 internal production met only 35% of American demand. By 2010, this figure will have dropped further to approximately 25%, unless crude oil prices rise significantly and cause people to reduce their use of energy. The United States is in a very precarious position, especially since, given the clout of the corpocrat lobby, no political figure has dared to prepare the country for the fact that it must restrict its need for fossil fuels. Public transit is still considered a substandard mode of transportation; individual vehicles are the only way to travel.
American energy policy is based largely on the understanding that the United States' future depends on the Middle East's energy reserves. It is accepted as an undisputed fact that only this region, along with the Caspian Basin, contains enough hydrocarbons to meet its needs. For this reason, the United States plans to demand an additional five million barrels a day from the Middle East between now and 2020 in order to bridge the widening gap between demand and supply. At the same time, of course, it will try to maintain imports from other sources at their current levels, but this may soon become more difficult. After all, why should Mexico and Canada, for example, wait for the switchover from a buyer's market to a seller's market before deciding that it is best to hold on to their energy for their own considerable needs? Especially since, as we have seen, this energy is not being sold at a fair rate but rather at the bargain-basement prices imposed by the "Empire of the Oil Addicts". Therefore, it is likely that the Middle East / Caspian region will be pressed to provide the "Master of the Empire" with not five but perhaps an additional eight million barrels a day in order to make up for delinquent suppliers.
But the United States is not the only one getting its hydrocarbons from the Middle East. If we add in the needs of the other oil addicts, the number of barrels required of the oil-producing nations in this part of the world will amount to forty million a day, well beyond the 25 million that they are already supplying. The demand will be outrageous and failure to meet it will be downright perilous! Will the oil-producers be able to meet it? Will they be willing to? Will they be in any position to refuse? The answers to these questions will determine the future of the oil-addicted giants born of the Industrial Revolution, those who know only one way of moving forward through time: growth.
The graph below {not included here} shows the annual global consumption of fossil fuels from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to the present and the projected consumption curve for future years, as well as can be anticipated. Oil, gas, and coal combined are expressed in billions of barrels of oil equivalent.
The graph is based on the following ultimately recoverable global amounts of ergamines:
* Oil: 2,200 billion barrels using the extraction techniques commonly used today, plus an additional 1,100 barrels using techniques that have yet to be developed. About 900 billion of the total have already been consumed.
* Gas: 1,700 barrels of oil equivalent, 500 billion of which have already been consumed.
* Coal: 5,300 barrels of oil equivalent, 1,100 billion of which have already been consumed.
The graph also tracks the per-barrel price of crude oil in dollars until 2004. A post-2004 zone is sketched in to indicate how high the price might eventually rise.
What this very matter-of-fact graph does not show is the tremendous upheaval that awaits us. As we have seen so far, the industrialized nations' rise in power has not been accompanied by a great outpouring of humanitarian spirit, however much we Westerners continue to brandish these principles for our own peace of mind. The truth is that we have not shared very much. We have even gone so far as to declare war simply to get our hands on the Earth's riches, particularly black gold, at times when we still possessed abundant resources of our own. Now we are approaching a period of adversity due to the scarcity of the very energy on which we have built so much. Chances are that during this period of unrest our foreign policies will suffer from an even greater lack of humanism. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 by the American-British coalition does not lead us to believe otherwise.
The period between 2010 and 2020, during which many of us will be forced onto an energy diet, will be a critical time for humanity. We must prepare ourselves for disorder on a planetary scale. This period will mark the decline of the "Empire of the Oil Addicts" as we know it.
No matter what happens, we must do everything we can to convince our leaders to reduce our nations' energy dependence and to reject replacement energies, such as methane hydrate, which would be extremely dangerous for our planet and our species.
If we, Homo sapiens, want to survive, we will have to relearn how to live more simply, within the means that the Earth is able to provide us over the long-term - assuming we want a long-term for our children! As a species we have not yet clearly demonstrated that desire.
The free enterprise system, which is motivated essentially by greed, will never take us to this goal. If it remains our organizing principle, it will not be long before we lose control over our own destinies.
Notes
{47} International Petroleum Encyclopedia, 216-217. Values derived from the tables "Worldwide Oil Reserves and Production".
{a} The main hydrocarbon-producing countries considered as part of the Caspian Basin are Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.
Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/
translated from the French by Pamela Gilbert-Snyder
Part IV. Our Suicidal Quest for Energy
Chapter 29. Theater of the Ergamines
The scene is set in the year 2003.
Drum roll. The West enters its 21st century, the least certain of the Modern Era.
The Middle East, which began the 15th century of the Islamic Era with a certain amount of hope, has returned to the old, customary cycle of humiliation.
Eastern Europe has toppled its statues of Lenin and Stalin and is attempting to model itself after the free enterprise system. It has never really been democratic and finds listening to its people a challenge.
Africa is more or less at war with itself. The oil addicts' egosystems are penetrating it here and there, the better to exploit it, but these systems are not its own, culturally or economically.
South America is doing its best to imitate its Northern sister, but its heart is not in it. Its people still love to dance. Between coups.
Asia is contributing greatly to the effort to place the planet at the mercy of twelve billion human beings as soon as possible. It still needs its ancestral wisdom to maintain a degree of calm.
Oceania is still at sea.
Under the pressure of human egosystems, the Earth is warming; its glaciers are receding toward the mountain peaks, its polar icecaps are melting, and Northern birds and polar bears are looking for new habitats.
The world's universities are turning out fifty times more engineers than they did in 1950. Many of them are pondering the erudite question, "Is too much carbon dioxide too much?" Along with the navies of the Middle East and Asia, whales are attempting to decode the sonars of the American military. Homo sapiens is dumping non-biodegradable waste nearly everywhere.
Most Western countries have spread beyond their borders, as their tentacles reach far and wide to pump out the world's resources. The whole world is their marketplace. Continental Asia has recently joined the ranks of the exploited. The Earth is being transformed into one giant egosystem in the Western mold. The World Trade Center was its emblem.
Such is the backdrop against which the ergamines are working, in ever increasing numbers, at the beginning of the third millennium of the Christian Era.
The international energy market has not yet reached the boiling point. To prepare Californians for that event, a few "well meaning" corporations forced them to buy natural gas at several hundred times its base price during the summer of 2001. This indiscretion also provided a glimpse into the disparities that will greet us when the hydrocarbon shortage hits. In the Modern Era, as in the times to come, some parts ofthe world will have a harder time finding the energy needed for survival than others.
The table below classifies the various regions of the world according to their hydrocarbon reserves, oil and natural gas combined, estimated in billions of barrels of oil equivalent as of January 1 2002. {47}
Global Hydrocarbon Reserves and Consumption
(in billions of barrels of oil equivalent)
Middle East ................................... 1,050
Fed of Russia ................................... 350
Caspian Basin {a} ................................ 60
Total Reserves .................................1,460
Percentage of World Hydrocarbon Reserves ........ 73%
Percentage of World Hydrocarbon Consumption ..... 17%
Africa .......................................... 145
South America ................................... 140
Total Reserves .................................. 285
Percentage of World Hydrocarbon Reserves ........ 14%
Percentage of World Hydrocarbon Consumption ...... 8%
Asia & Oceania .................................. 145
North America ................................... 100
Europe ........................................... 50
Total Reserves .................................. 265
Percentage of World Hydrocarbon Reserves ........ 13%
Percentage of World Hydrocarbon Consumption ..... 75%
The first group is the hydrocarbon-rich nations. They possess 73% of the global reserves, and less than eight percent of the world's population. These countries constitute the primary ergamine market. The survival of the world's egosystems depends on them. Disagreement exists concerning the figure for the Caspian Basin. Some consider sixty billion barrels too low. In 2000, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) published glowing figures for the region's hydrocarbon potential, which, according to this agency, could be on the order of 300 billion barrels. This extraordinarily high figure must be viewed with skepticism; it is so unlikely that one should dismiss it entirely. It has perhaps, indeed, been introduced as a decoy.
The second group is Africa and South America. Very few countries on these two continents have reached the stage of inordinate development. Those that have ergamine reserves will, in all likelihood, be forced to yield them to the Northern oil addicts. What is happening in Nigeria today is a good example of the type of plunder that the Western oil companies have in store for them. A few hundred corrupt Nigerians are allowing supertankers to spirit away the nation's source of wealth to the United States and Europe, even though its citizens that live in the shadow of the oil wells subsist in abject poverty. The latter are "have-nots", perhaps even "have-nevers". Television viewers in the Northern hemisphere watch in total apathy as these people vent their anger in the oil fields.
Venezuela, Brazil, Egypt, Libya, and Algeria have better informed populaces and better organized political systems. They may be able to defend their already well-tapped reserves with greater social consciousness. South Africa will enjoy the halcyon era of its coal reserves.
Finally, the third group is the large hydrocarbon consumers, the oil-addicted giants. Although their current resources account for only thirteen percent of the global reserves, their ferocious appetites only continue to grow. Together, they soak up 75% of the world's hydrocarbons: Asia 25%, North America 30%, and Europe 20%.
The Asia-Oceania region contains sixty percent of the world's population and is adding one billion new individuals to it every fifteen years. In demographic terms, this constitutes an explosion. Its industry is exploding, too, and the region's energy appetite is growing even faster than its population, at a rate of two to three percent per year. By around 2010, when its population reaches approximately four billion, its industry will begin to lose momentum.
When the ergamine market begins to dry up, the Asian oil-addicted giant will probably have to go on a forced diet. Western egosystems may try to continue to take advantage of its underpaid masses, but the citizens of the West are not likely to reduce their own ergamine consumption in order to help develop the Asian economies.
Of the two remaining oil-addicted giants, Europe is in the best position geographically in relation to the ergamine market. Its tentacles do not have to reach far to find oil, and Europeans are not quite as voracious as Americans. Russia's natural gas pipelines are already supplying customers as far away as Spain. If Turkey joins the European Union, the latter will have the Middle East, the Caspian Basin, and the Black Sea practically in its back yard; the Black Sea might even become a European lake. This could mean the "good life" for dear Old Europe, if there were not trembling in the White House at that very thought - and even more trembling in the corporate boardrooms of the major US oil companies.
From now on, US energy independence will shrink dramatically. In 1970, American crude oil production was second to none, rivaling even that of Saudi Arabia until as late as 1980. Since then it has been on a downhill slide. The graph below {not included here} shows that in 1980 the 8.6 million barrels per day it produced domestically supplied more than fifty percent of US energy needs. However, by the year 2000 internal production met only 35% of American demand. By 2010, this figure will have dropped further to approximately 25%, unless crude oil prices rise significantly and cause people to reduce their use of energy. The United States is in a very precarious position, especially since, given the clout of the corpocrat lobby, no political figure has dared to prepare the country for the fact that it must restrict its need for fossil fuels. Public transit is still considered a substandard mode of transportation; individual vehicles are the only way to travel.
American energy policy is based largely on the understanding that the United States' future depends on the Middle East's energy reserves. It is accepted as an undisputed fact that only this region, along with the Caspian Basin, contains enough hydrocarbons to meet its needs. For this reason, the United States plans to demand an additional five million barrels a day from the Middle East between now and 2020 in order to bridge the widening gap between demand and supply. At the same time, of course, it will try to maintain imports from other sources at their current levels, but this may soon become more difficult. After all, why should Mexico and Canada, for example, wait for the switchover from a buyer's market to a seller's market before deciding that it is best to hold on to their energy for their own considerable needs? Especially since, as we have seen, this energy is not being sold at a fair rate but rather at the bargain-basement prices imposed by the "Empire of the Oil Addicts". Therefore, it is likely that the Middle East / Caspian region will be pressed to provide the "Master of the Empire" with not five but perhaps an additional eight million barrels a day in order to make up for delinquent suppliers.
But the United States is not the only one getting its hydrocarbons from the Middle East. If we add in the needs of the other oil addicts, the number of barrels required of the oil-producing nations in this part of the world will amount to forty million a day, well beyond the 25 million that they are already supplying. The demand will be outrageous and failure to meet it will be downright perilous! Will the oil-producers be able to meet it? Will they be willing to? Will they be in any position to refuse? The answers to these questions will determine the future of the oil-addicted giants born of the Industrial Revolution, those who know only one way of moving forward through time: growth.
The graph below {not included here} shows the annual global consumption of fossil fuels from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to the present and the projected consumption curve for future years, as well as can be anticipated. Oil, gas, and coal combined are expressed in billions of barrels of oil equivalent.
The graph is based on the following ultimately recoverable global amounts of ergamines:
* Oil: 2,200 billion barrels using the extraction techniques commonly used today, plus an additional 1,100 barrels using techniques that have yet to be developed. About 900 billion of the total have already been consumed.
* Gas: 1,700 barrels of oil equivalent, 500 billion of which have already been consumed.
* Coal: 5,300 barrels of oil equivalent, 1,100 billion of which have already been consumed.
The graph also tracks the per-barrel price of crude oil in dollars until 2004. A post-2004 zone is sketched in to indicate how high the price might eventually rise.
What this very matter-of-fact graph does not show is the tremendous upheaval that awaits us. As we have seen so far, the industrialized nations' rise in power has not been accompanied by a great outpouring of humanitarian spirit, however much we Westerners continue to brandish these principles for our own peace of mind. The truth is that we have not shared very much. We have even gone so far as to declare war simply to get our hands on the Earth's riches, particularly black gold, at times when we still possessed abundant resources of our own. Now we are approaching a period of adversity due to the scarcity of the very energy on which we have built so much. Chances are that during this period of unrest our foreign policies will suffer from an even greater lack of humanism. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 by the American-British coalition does not lead us to believe otherwise.
The period between 2010 and 2020, during which many of us will be forced onto an energy diet, will be a critical time for humanity. We must prepare ourselves for disorder on a planetary scale. This period will mark the decline of the "Empire of the Oil Addicts" as we know it.
No matter what happens, we must do everything we can to convince our leaders to reduce our nations' energy dependence and to reject replacement energies, such as methane hydrate, which would be extremely dangerous for our planet and our species.
If we, Homo sapiens, want to survive, we will have to relearn how to live more simply, within the means that the Earth is able to provide us over the long-term - assuming we want a long-term for our children! As a species we have not yet clearly demonstrated that desire.
The free enterprise system, which is motivated essentially by greed, will never take us to this goal. If it remains our organizing principle, it will not be long before we lose control over our own destinies.
Notes
{47} International Petroleum Encyclopedia, 216-217. Values derived from the tables "Worldwide Oil Reserves and Production".
{a} The main hydrocarbon-producing countries considered as part of the Caspian Basin are Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.
Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/
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