By F. William Engdahl, 14
September, 2007
The good news is that panic
scenarios about the world running out of oil anytime soon are wrong. The bad
news is that the price of oil is going to continue to rise. Peak Oil is not our
problem. Politics is. Big Oil wants to sustain high oil prices. Dick Cheney and
friends are all too willing to assist.
On a personal note, I’ve
researched questions of petroleum,
since the first oil shocks of the 1970’s. I was intrigued in 2003 with
something called Peak Oil theory. It seemed to explain the otherwise inexplicable
decision by Washington to risk all in a military move on Iraq.
Peak Oil advocates, led by former
BP geologist Colin Campbell, and Texas banker Matt Simmons, argued that the
world faced a new crisis, an end to cheap oil, or Absolute Peak Oil, perhaps by
2012, perhaps by 2007. Oil was supposedly on its last drops. They pointed to
our soaring gasoline and oil prices, to the declines in output of North Sea and
Alaska and other fields as proof they were right.
According to Campbell, the fact that
no new North Sea-size fields had been discovered since the North Sea in the
late 1960’s was proof. He reportedly managed to convince the International
Energy Agency and the Swedish government. That, however, does not prove him
correct.
Intellectual fossils?
The Peak Oil school rests its
theory on conventional Western geology textbooks, most by American or British
geologists, which claim oil is a ‘fossil fuel,’ a biological residue or
detritus of either fossilized dinosaur remains or perhaps algae, hence a
product in finite supply. Biological origin is central to Peak Oil theory, used
to explain why oil is only found in certain parts of the world where it was
geologically trapped millions of years ago. That would mean that, say, dead
dinosaur remains became compressed and over tens of millions of years
fossilized and trapped in underground reservoirs perhaps 4-6,000 feet below the
surface of the earth. In rare cases, so goes the theory, huge amounts of
biological matter should have been trapped in rock formations in the shallower
ocean offshore as in the Gulf of Mexico or North Sea or Gulf of Guinea. Geology
should be only about figuring out where these pockets in the layers of the
earth, called reservoirs, lie within certain sedimentary basins.
An entirely alternative theory of
oil formation has existed since the early 1950’s in Russia, almost unknown to
the West. It claims conventional American biological origins theory is an
unscientific absurdity that is un-provable. They point to the fact that western
geologists have repeatedly predicted finite oil over the past century, only to
then find more, lots more.
Not only has this alternative
explanation of the origins of oil and gas existed in theory. The emergence of
Russia and prior of the USSR as the world’s largest oil producer and natural
gas producer has been based on the application of the theory in practice. This
has geopolitical consequences of staggering magnitude.
In the 1950’s the Soviet Union
faced ‘Iron Curtain’ isolation from the West. The Cold War was in high gear. Russia
had little oil to fuel its economy. Finding sufficient oil indigenously was a
national security priority of the highest order.
Scientists at the Institute of the
Physics of the Earth of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Institute of
Geological Sciences of the Ukraine Academy of Sciences began a fundamental
inquiry in the late 1940’s: where does oil come from?
In 1956, Prof. Vladimir Porfir’yev
announced their conclusions: ‘Crude oil and natural petroleum gas have no
intrinsic connection with biological matter originating near the surface of the
earth. They are primordial materials which have been erupted from great depths.’
The Soviet geologists had turned Western orthodox geology on its head. They
called their theory of oil origin the ‘a-biotic’ theory—non-biological—to
distinguish from the Western biological theory of origins.
If they were right, oil supply on
earth would be limited only by the amount of hydrocarbon constituents present
deep in the earth at the time of the earth’s formation. Availability of oil
would depend only on technology to drill ultra-deep wells and explore into the
earth’s inner regions. They also realized old fields could be revived to
continue producing, so called self-replentishing fields. They argued that oil
is formed deep in the earth, formed in conditions of very high temperature and
very high pressure, like that required for diamonds to form. ‘Oil is a
primordial material of deep origin which is transported at high pressure via
‘cold’ eruptive processes into the crust of the earth,’ Porfir’yev stated. His
team dismissed the idea that oil is was biological residue of plant and animal
fossil remains as a hoax designed to perpetuate the myth of limited supply.
That radically different Russian
and Ukrainian scientific approach to the discovery of oil allowed the USSR to
develop huge gas and oil discoveries in regions previously judged unsuitable,
according to Western geological exploration theories, for presence of oil. The
new petroleum theory was used in the early 1990’s, well after the dissolution
of the USSR, to drill for oil and gas in a region believed for more than
forty-five years, to be geologically barren—the Dnieper-Donets Basin in the
region between Russia and Ukraine.
Following their a-biotic or
non-fossil theory of the deep origins of petroleum, the Russian and Ukrainian
petroleum geophysicists and chemists began with a detailed analysis of the
tectonic history and geological structure of the crystalline basement of the
Dnieper-Donets Basin. After a tectonic and deep structural analysis of the
area, they made geophysical and geochemical investigations.
A total of sixty one wells were
drilled, of which thirty seven were commercially productive, an extremely
impressive exploration success rate of almost sixty percent. The size of the
field discovered compared with the North Slope of Alaska. By contrast, US wildcat drilling was
considered successful with a ten percent success rate. Nine of ten wells are
typically “dry holes.”
That Russian geophysics experience
in finding oil and gas was tightly wrapped in the usual Soviet veil of state
security during the Cold War era, and went largely unknown to Western
geophysicists, who continued to teach fossil origins and, hence, the severe
physical limits of petroleum. Slowly it began to dawn on some strategists in
and around the Pentagon well after the 2003 Iraq war, that the Russian
geophysicists might be on to something of profound strategic importance.
If Russia had the scientific
know-how and Western geology not, Russia possessed a strategic trump card of
staggering geopolitical import. It was not surprising that Washington would go
about erecting a “wall of steel”—a network of military bases and ballistic
anti-missile shields around Russia, to cut her pipeline and port links to
western Europe, China and the rest of Eurasia. Halford Mackinder’s worst
nightmare--a cooperative convergence of mutual interests of the major states of
Eurasia, born of necessity and need for oil to fuel economic growth--was
emerging. Ironically, it was the blatant US grab for the vast oil riches of
Iraq and, potentially, of Iran, that catalyzed closer cooperation between
traditional Eurasian foes, China and Russia, and a growing realization in
western Europe that their options too were narrowing.
The Peak King
Peak Oil theory is based on a 1956
paper done by the late Marion King Hubbert, a Texas geologist working for Shell
Oil. He argued that oil wells produced in a bell curve manner, and once their
“peak” was hit, inevitable decline followed. He predicted the United States oil
production would peak in 1970. A modest man, he named the production curve he
invented, Hubbert’s Curve, and the peak as Hubbert’s Peak. When US oil output
began to decline in around 1970 Hubbert gained a certain fame.
The only problem was, it peaked
not because of resource depletion in the US fields. It “peaked” because Shell,
Mobil, Texaco and the other partners of Saudi Aramco were flooding the US
market with dirt cheap Middle East imports, tariff free, at prices so low
California and many Texas domestic producers could not compete and were forced
to shut their wells in.
Vietnam success
While the American oil
multinationals were busy controlling the easily accessible large fields of
Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran and other areas of cheap, abundant oil during the
1960’s, the Russians were busy testing their alternative theory. They began
drilling in a supposedly barren region of Siberia. There they developed eleven
major oil fields and one Giant field based on their deep ‘a-biotic’ geological
estimates. They drilled into crystalline basement rock and hit black gold of a
scale comparable to the Alaska North Slope.
They then went to Vietnam in the
1980s and offered to finance drilling costs to show their new geological theory
worked. The Russian company Petrosov drilled in Vietnam’s White Tiger oilfield
offshore into basalt rock some 17,000 feet down and extracted 6,000 barrels a
day of oil to feed the energy-starved Vietnam economy. In the USSR,
a-biotic-trained Russian geologists perfected their knowledge and the USSR
emerged as the world’s largest oil producer by the mid-1980’s. Few in the West
understood why, or bothered to ask.
Dr. J. F. Kenney is one of the
only few Western geophysicists who has taught and worked in Russia, studying
under Vladilen Krayushkin, who developed the huge Dnieper-Donets Basin. Kenney
told me in a recent interview that “alone to have produced the amount of oil to
date that (Saudi Arabia’s) Ghawar field has produced would have required a cube
of fossilized dinosaur detritus, assuming 100% conversion efficiency, measuring
19 miles deep, wide and high.” In short, an absurdity.
Western geologists do not bother
to offer hard scientific proof of fossil origins. They merely assert as a holy
truth. The Russians have produced volumes of scientific papers, most in
Russian. The dominant Western journals have no interest in publishing such a
revolutionary view. Careers, entire academic professions are at stake after
all.
Closing the door
The 2003 arrest of Russian Mikhail
Khodorkovsky, of Yukos Oil, took place just before he could sell a dominant
stake in Yukos to ExxonMobil after a private meeting with Dick Cheney. Had
Exxon got the stake they would have control of the world’s largest resource of
geologists and engineers trained in the a-biotic techniques of deep drilling.
Since 2003 Russian scientific
sharing of their knowledge has markedly lessened. Offers in the early 1990’s to
share their knowledge with US and other oil geophysicists were met with cold
rejection according to American geophysicists involved.
Why then the high-risk war to
control Iraq? For a century US and allied Western oil giants have controlled
world oil via control of Saudi Arabia or Kuwait or Nigeria. Today, as many
giant fields are declining, the companies see the state-controlled oilfields of
Iraq and Iran as the largest remaining base of cheap, easy oil. With the huge
demand for oil from China and now India, it becomes a geopolitical imperative
for the United States to take direct, military control of those Middle East
reserves as fast as possible. Vice President Dick Cheney, came to the job from
Halliburton Corp., the world’s largest oil geophysical services company. The only
potential threat to that US control of oil just happens to lie inside Russia
and with the now-state-controlled Russian energy giants. Hmmmm.
According to Kenney the Russian
geophysicists used the theories of the brilliant German scientist Alfred Wegener
fully 30 years before the Western geologists “discovered” Wegener in the
1960’s. In 1915 Wegener published the seminal text, The Origin of Continents
and Oceans, which suggested an original unified landmass or “pangaea” more than
200 million years ago which separated into present Continents by what he called
Continental Drift.
Up to the 1960’s supposed US
scientists such as Dr Frank Press, White House science advisor referred to
Wegener as “lunatic.” Geologists at the end of the 1960’s were forced to eat
their words as Wegener offered the only interpretation that allowed them to
discover the vast oil resources of the North Sea. Perhaps in some decades
Western geologists will rethink their mythology of fossil origins and realize
what the Russians have known since the 1950’s. In the meantime Moscow holds a
massive energy trump card.