To listen to some of their ads you wouldn’t know that the promises lobbyists for oil, coal and natural gas are making about being energy independent are based on wishful thinking , deluding the American public that stalls our need to convert to clean renewable energy now.
Does this lovely lady look familiar? She should. You may have seen her warm and smiling countenance on a previous post of mine here. It is more likely however that you have seen her more recently as the face of the pro-fossil fuel website, EnergyTomorrow.org, on TV ads sponsored by their lobbyist, the American Petroleum Institute(API). These ads promote misleading information giving the public a half-baked view about the abundant energy below our surfaces to make America energy independent again. Something we haven’t been since the 1950’s
Her name is Brooke Alexander, a former soap opera star, beauty queen and a former FOX correspondent. Her new gig encourages viewers to “learn more” about how “we can secure our energy future” Supposedly we have enough untapped oil & gas resources “to power 60 million cars and heat 160 million households for 60 years” Ms Alexander assures us in her ad here.
But learning more at the EnergyTomorrow website is like getting the news from FOX. It’s all heavily slanted with circumspective data and substantial omissions. And it doesn’t hurt when a smart, pretty woman is making the pitch for the likes of Exxon-Mobil, Conoco and Chevron.
Technically Ms. Alexander’s comments are correct but here’s what’s missing in her message:
In the oil & gas industry, resource means the amount of gas or oil that remains underground, and reserve means what could be produced from the resource.
Only a portion of the resources could be recovered technically.
Only a portion of the technically recoverable resources could be produced economically.
Only a portion of the economically producible resources could be produced into supply. That is called reserve. SOURCE
Much of the oil resources in North America touted in these ads are expected to come from the tar sand pits out of Canada. The oil from these tar sands takes enormous amounts of energy to convert into liquid gas adding that much more CO2 into the atmosphere, warming the planet even further. The ads also conceal the fact that any oil or gas we bring up from below the surface is not ours entirely. All oil and gas are part of a global market. Nor will its close proximity to us, like in Canada, mean cheaper gas. The price of oil is set on world markets.
Within the United States, foreign companies are acquiring stakes in oil resources that can now be extracted with fracking, but regardless of where the oil is produced and who produces it, the price of oil is set on the global market. Such globalization means that widespread drilling and fracking for oil in the United States will do nothing for American consumers who are paying the high price of oil. SOURCE
So what “portion” of that oil and gas is actually capable of being converted into real sources of energy for consumers? Well, according to Bill Powers, author of the upcoming book, “Cold, Hungry and in the Dark: Exploding the Natural Gas Supply Myth”, there may be only 5-7 years of shale gas resources after the realities of extraction and production confront the industry.
My thesis is that the importance of shale gas has been grossly overstated; the U.S. has nowhere close to a 100-year supply. This myth has been perpetuated by self-interested industry, media and politicians. Their mantra is that exploiting shale gas resources will promote untold economic growth, new jobs and lead us toward energy independence.
In the book, I take a very hard look at the facts. And I conclude that the U.S. has between a five- to seven-year supply of shale gas, and not 100 years. That is far lower than the rosy estimates put out by the U.S. Energy Information Administration and others. In the real world, many companies are taking write-downs of their reserves. SOURCE
Powers is the editor of Powers Energy Investor and according to his website has “devoted the last 15 years to studying and analyzing various aspects of the energy sector”.
Another expert in the field is Arthur Berman. Berman is a petroleum geologist, Associate Editor of the American Association of Petroleum Geolgists Bulletin and Director of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil. He maintains the blog Petroleum Truth Report. Berman tells us that the declining rates of shale gas validates Powers’ assessment about severely limited supplies.
“I’ve looked at this”, he tells James Staffiord with OilPrice.com. “In the Eagleford shale, which is supposed to be the mother of all shale oil plays, the annual decline rate is higher than 42%”. They’re going to have to drill hundreds, almost 1000 wells in the Eagleford shale, every year, to keep production flat. Just for one play, we’re talking about $10 or $12 billion a year just to replace supply.” SOURCE
It appears then that if you take the industry’s perception of North American reserves and fill in the blanks they are leaving out with Berman and Power’s assessments, then the reality is not all that rosy about securing America’s energy future. I heard essentially the same talking points at a recent Planning and Zoning Council meeting here in Denton. Out of about 50 attendees to this meeting most were citizens and students who were there to oppose considerations by the city for drilling new wells within city limits, citing the unresolved hazards of leaks and water contamination from fracking fluids. Two young and attractive ladies however were there to state the case for the gas well drillers.
These two women gave only their names and addresses, indicating that they were nothing more than mere residents who saw positive contributions for drilling more wells. But clearly they were there to promote the industry’s talking points about “energy security and independence” and “job creation”. One read directly from written notes in a monotone voice without looking up while the other ad-libbed essentially the same comments but with little conviction about what she was saying, unlike those who gave testimonials in opposition to inner city gas well drilling.
America will never be energy independent because no matter how much we produce we will still consume more at current rates than we can produce. Friendly tar sands oil from Canada won’t change that picture either.
[There is] the distorted viewpoint that the U.S. will soon become energy independent and will no longer need to import foreign oil. The U.S. has used more oil than it produces since records were kept in 1920 but became a true net oil importing country after World War II. SOURCE
The Fossil Fuels Job Myth
The notion too that oil and gas production creates thousands of jobs is somewhat dubious. For instance, one report shows that direct hiring specifically related to oil extraction and production is a far cry from the claims of 1 million jobs being touted by the industry. The 1 million figure relies on the multiplier effect where the true figure of 36,000 oil related jobs created will be expected to impact other businesses in their community and this only occurs after about seven years according to one report.
While job estimates, using a so-called multiplier effect of spending, are common in economic impact calculations, the “direct hiring” by the oil industry is far more modest [than other industries].
The 36,000 jobs specifically created to drill for oil and natural gas, refine petroleum or coal products, or for pipeline operation or in gas stations, came in well below “direct hiring” in other industries, which don’t enjoy the same tax breaks the Obama administration has been fighting to end for Big Oil.
The construction industry is prime among them — adding 69,000 jobs in 2011.
Roll into this the fact that these jobs also will continue to contribute to air and water pollution along with increasing green house gases that threaten our ecosystem and the image of an earned income becomes diminished with increased health care costs. This information also ignores that job creation in renewable energy fields will easily supplant and even surpass job creation in the fossil fuel industry, absorbing a lot of the fossil fuel industry workers into the more green technologies.
… a 2009 report published by the University of Massachusetts found that net job creation is substantially higher with clean energy investments than fossil fuels at different educational levels. The paper determined that, when compared to fossil fuel energy, clean energy investments create 2.6 times more college degree jobs; 3.0 times more ‘some-college’ jobs; and 3.6 times more ‘high school or less’ jobs. While average wages are higher in fossil fuel, there are more types of all jobs in cleaner energy.
The Massachusetts researchers also found that a shift from fossil fuels to clean energy investments will yield a net increase in U.S. employment of 1.7 million jobs—i.e. an increase in 2.5 million jobs through clean-energy investments and a corresponding decline of about 790,000 jobs in fossil fuels. This assumes that there is available unemployed labor (there would be no change in employment if people had to be moved from one job to another). SOURCE
These are jobs that reduce potential health and safety hazards for workers and the people in the communities they are positioned near. Healthier workers and their families are more productive and able to keep more of their earned income for other things outside doctor and hospital bills, such as college tuition and retirement savings. But such positive outcomes are not something shared with you in ads aimed at continuing more of the same practices of extracting finite resources that are destined to expire in a lot less time than we are being led to believe.
Just Another Case of Corporate Profits Over Human and Social Needs
