Fear mongering over fuel

George Will:

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In 1914, the Bureau of Mines said U.S. oil reserves would be exhausted by 1924. In 1939, the Interior Department said the world had 13 years worth of petroleum reserves. Then a global war was fought and the postwar boom was fueled, and in 1951 Interior reported that the world had ... 13 years of reserves. In 1970, the world's proven oil reserves were an estimated 612 billion barrels. By 2006, more than 767 billion barrels had been pumped and proven reserves were 1.2 trillion barrels. In 1977, Scold in Chief Jimmy Carter predicted that mankind “could use up all the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade.” Since then the world has consumed three times more oil than was then in the world's proven reserves.

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Today, wind and solar power combined are just one-sixth of 1 percent of American energy consumption. Nuclear? The United States and other rich nations endorse reducing world carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050. But Oliver Morton, a science writer, says that if nuclear is to supply even just 10 percent of the necessary carbon-free energy, the world must build more than 50 large nuclear power plants a year. Currently five a year are being built. Rattie says that as part of “a worldwide building boom in coal-fired power plants,” about 30 under construction in America “will burn about 70 million tons of coal a year.”

Edward L. Morse, an energy official in Carter's State Department, writes in Foreign Affairs that the world's deep-water reserves are significantly larger than was thought just a decade ago, and high prices have spurred development of technologies — a drilling vessel can cost $1 billion — for extracting them. The costs of developing oil sands — Canada may contain more oil than Saudi Arabia has — are declining, so projects that last year were not economic with the price of oil under $90 a barrel are now viable with oil at $79 a barrel. Morse says new technologies are also speeding development of natural gas trapped in U.S. shale rock. The Marcellus Shale, which stretches from West Virginia through Pennsylvania and into New York, “may contain as much natural gas as the North Field in Qatar, the largest field ever discovered.”

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API has asked me to attend a seminar on Shale oil production that will show aspects of the process that has developed the Barnett Shale field near Fort Worth. It is currently the largest such field, although the process will be used to develop the Marcellus hale as well as other such fields around the world.

These techniques have the potential of developing natural gas that will provide us energy beyond most current lifetimes. The main impediment to the development of these resources are Democrats who want to use carbon phobia to grab control of the energy supply and strangle traditional energy production in hopes that magic energy will become available.