Oil, Alternative Energy, and War in the Middle East

There is oil all over the the world. Venezuela, Alaska, Texas, the Gulf of Mexico, the North Sea, the San Joaquin Valley, Siberia, Nigeria, to name a few. In most of these places, oil companies bring in geologists to find the oil and tell them where to drill, and sometimes it's hit or miss. In the Middle East, oil producers don't really need the geologists to find the oil. They need the drillers to put a hole in the ground so they can get the oil. It's everywhere, more hit than miss. Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, Iran – they're all floating on a buried sea of light sweet crude.

Let's talk for a minute about where crude oil comes from. Oil, better known as petroleum, is what remains of biogenic material deposited in biologically productive marine basins and thermally decomposed. Ninety percent of the world's oil reserves were produced between the Silurian and the end of the Oligocene time periods (440 to 24 million years ago). Half of that was produced between the upper Jurassic and the middle of the Cretaceous (160 to 99 million years ago), which is also when the dinosaurs were running the show around here.

Petroleum slowly leaches out of the rock in which it is produced and migrates with deep groundwater into oil traps where it collects. These oil traps exist in locations where a non-permeable layer of strata overlies a permeable layer and tectonic deformation has created an anticline, often associated with a fault. Imagine a ham sandwich with swiss cheese, bent in the middle so it domes up. That's an anticline. Now cut it with a knife and you have just added a fault. Non-permeable layers might include shales or salt formations. This is the bread. Permeable layers might include fractured bedrock or clastic rocks such as sandstones, represented by the ham and cheese.

Because petroleum floats on water (in the environmental industry, we call this an LNAPL – Lighter-than-water Non-Aqueous Phase Liquid), it rises to the top of the permeable layer. As the groundwater flows over the crest of the anticline in the permeable layer, the floating oil accumulates at the crest of the anticline and gets lodged against the non-permeable layer while the denser water keeps moving. For those of you thinking in terms of fluid mechanics, the accumulation is offset in the down-gradient direction from the actual top of the anticline due to forces imparted by the fluid flow, but it is found near the top of the oil trap.

So, like I said earlier, oil is pretty abundant in the Middle East. Until the world started to care about oil, no one was really interested in the despotic governments that dominated that area of the world. But as soon as we figured out what a great and cheap source of energy oil is, and that it can be used to make almost anything, the demand for it skyrocketed. Suddenly, the Middle East was worth something to the rest of the world, aside from being the birthplace of western religions. Everybody wanted in. Problem is, it's pretty hard to enforce an oil lease in an area governed by what amounts to tribal rule. The easiest way to control a region is to install a totalitarian regime, and that's what happened. This worked for a while, but certain regimes became too powerful, Saddam Hussein's for example, and kicked the American oil companies out.

Fast-forward to today. Saddam Hussein's regime is out, but it's not PC to install a totalitarian government, so instead, we are trying to seed a democracy. But what if that democracy decides they would rather go back to their despotic roots? What if they don't want to sell their oil leases to ExxonMobil and BP? What if they would rather sell the world's fourth largest oil reserve themselves? The world oil market currently trades in US dollars. Before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, OPEC considered switching to the Euro, encouraged by Iraq. If Iraq decides to handle their own oil, that could become a reality, and the balance of power in the oil trade will shift decidedly away from the United States, thus devastating our economy. Our military is in Iraq to stay. If the Iraqi people embrace democracy, we're still not going anywhere. We still will not have won the war.

Al Qaeda in Iraq, as it is now known here in the United States, does not exist, at least not as the organized terrorist group that we have declared as our enemy in Iraq. Couldn't viably sell a war to the American people without a tangible enemy. The Bush Administration called them Al Qaeda in Iraq because Al Qaeda is associated with Osama Bin Laden, who claims to have been responsible for the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Maybe he was. The name Al Qaeda in Iraq is propaganda to engender support for the “War On Terror.” We are fighting disorganized extremist groups that aren't interested in democracy, foreign policy, or anything else that we might care about. To them, this democratic government we are trying to impose is just another totalitarian dictatorship under another name with softer edges. And it's not going to do them any good.

The war in Iraq has nothing to do with terrorism. It has nothing to do with democracy. It has nothing to do with freedom. It has everything to do with saving our petroleum-based economy from itself. And we bet the whole farm on it. The United States will win the war in Iraq when a solution to our energy needs is secured. Victory is not a democratic Middle East. Victory is energy independence. That's why we're there now, and that's how we will end this war. To win, we need to abandon this benevolent sham of trying to seed democracy in the Middle East and install a totalitarian regime. We know that works, at least for a while. But since putting dictators in power is no longer the in thing to do, the other option is to find our energy elsewhere.

Oil will dry up. Some say fifty years, some say one hundred, but either way, it will dry up. Mother Nature is not brewing up a new batch in any sort of time frame useful to our civilization. We need to find different sources of energy. We need to work on it now, and find it before we run out of oil. The ideas are there, nuclear, solar, wind, to name a few, but they all have their problems that still need to be addressed. We need to keep working on it, but we need to keep pumping oil out of those Jurassic deposits and keep that engine running until we find something better to run it on. We need to lift the ban on offshore oil exploration and recovery. We need to drill in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. Sure, doing so isn't going to make gas cheaper for you or me tomorrow or even next year. But if we can start being self-sufficient in the energy department, we could conceivably get out of Iraq. A couple polar bears and caribou can take a walk half a mile down the road and continue to prosper even if there's drilling going on. To think that letting oil fall by the wayside would encourage development of alternative energy sources is shortsighted and naive. To do so would be irresponsible. When Jerry Brown was governor of California in the late 1970s and early 1980s, he and his CalTrans director Adriana Gianturco tried something similar by cutting funding for highway maintenance to encourage people to carpool and use public transit. California's roads have yet to recover thirty years later. If we run out of recoverable oil while we are still completely dependent on it, where do think our civilization will end up? Same place as the Roman Empire, that's where.

References:

H.D. Klemme and G.F. Ulmishek, Effective Petroleum Source Rocks of the World: Stratigraphic Distribution and Controlling Depositional Factors (Condensed from their article published in the AAPG Bulletin, v. 75, 1991, p. 1809-1851; reprinted in part and adapted for online presentation.) - http://www.searchanddiscovery.net/documents/Animator/klemme2.htm

How World Oil Markets Work - http://fuelfocus.nrcan.gc.ca/fact_sheets/oilmarket_e.cfm

The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics – OPEC - http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/OPEC.html

Holland, H.D. And U. Petersen, Living Dangerously: The Earth, Its Resources, and the Environment. Princeton University Press, 1995.

Dolgoff, A., Physical Geology. Houghton Mifflin, 1998.

Geological Society of America, 1999 Geologic Time Scale. http://www.geosociety.org/science/timescale/timescl.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPEC