Author: David Bradley

Are we running out of oil? It’s a question that has vexed drivers the world over since the first major oil crisis three decades ago. Oil experts have been telling us for years that supplies are dwindling and that within another few decades the petrochemical legacy left by ancient life will have all but gone.

But, Eric Cheney economic geologist at the University of Washington thinks this notion is nonsense. “The most common question I get is, ‘When are we going to run out of oil,’ he says, “The correct response is, ‘Never!'” He says that there might come a point when we are paying $100 a gallon, that’s gallon, not barrel, but, he says, changing economics, technological advances and efforts such as recycling and substitution make the world’s mineral resources virtually infinite.

Is that a reasonable assumption? Recycling isn’t going to save us, it costs energy, and unless we have some kind of renewable power to drive the recycling “machines” that is almost always going to fall short of 100% efficiency and leave us with a net loss.

However, he does have a point about untapped oil deposits. Forty years ago, the technology did not exist to extract oil from tar sands, for instance, and organic matter or coal is now worth manufacturing. Of course, processing costs will rise, but that’s the price we will pay to drive our vehicles and power our industries.

“Mineral resources are vitally important to our industrial and service economy,” Cheney says, but speaking at the Geological Society of America annual meeting this weekend in collaboration with Andrew Buddington of Spokane Community College he will point out that gas prices today, adjusted for inflation, are about what they were in the early 20th century. Today’s prices seem inordinately high, he said, because crude oil was at an extremely low price, $10 a barrel, just eight years ago and now fetches around $58 a barrel and has been as high as $78.

As major economies, such as those in China and India, develop and are on the verge of greater demand for mineral resources because of increasing road use, he said, it is an opportune time for universities to train a new crop of resource geologists who can understand the challenges and help find solutions. He believes that popular but misguided notions about mineral resources might be hampering students from entering the field.

So that’s alright then. We can carry on pumping out exhaust gases to the contentment of our cars and concreting the countryside as long as we teach our students how to reach the unreachable.

A press release arrived yesterday from the American Chemical Society that said, “Japanese scientists have reported the discovery of an additive that can speed up the formation of methane hydrates, literally ice that burns.”

Literally ice that burns?

I know what they mean, but it’s not literally ice that burns is it? That would be a mythical substance composed of flammable frozen water, surely?

Anyway, these not-literally-ice-that-burns materials have some interesting properties not least because they could act as a potential new energy resource to boulster apparently dwindling fossil fuel supplies. Methane hydrates are found in vast natural deposits beneath the seafloor in coastal areas of the United States and certain other parts of the world. Estimates suggest that known hydrate deposits contain enough natural gas to meet demand for centuries. Of course, the carbon-containing component of methane hydrates is one of the most potent greenhouse gases we know, and climatologists have serious concerns about the release of vast quantities into the atmosphere as frozen stores begin to melt as global temperatures rise.

So, an additive to speed up their formation might be useful in helping us sequester enormous volumes of greenhouse gases.

But, how does this sit with the idea of using the stored methane in natural reserves as an alternative to other natural gas sources? Burning this aqueous methane will release its carbon content just as readily as burning methane without the aq. We’ll be able to propel our vehicles and heating our homes, of course, but we’ll be adding just as much carbon to the atmosphere as we would otherwise do with fossil fuel sources. With the added problem of having to build energy-intensive manufacturing plants to synthesise the “additive” to help is produce methane hydrates for burial at sea.

It just doesn’t add up. Faced with a putatively worsening greenhouse trend and dwindling fuel supplies, shouldn’t we be looking for sustainable energy resources that neither add to our carbon emissions nor require us to find complex routes to lock them down?

I guess the methane hydrate factory could be powered by wind turbines and solar cells, but that’s not the point is it?