Pensacola

You might have heard this in the news this morning. Oil from the BP Deepwater Horizon spill washed up on Pensacola’s beach overnight, and the results are both devastating and heartbreaking.

What angers me most is that this isn’t all BP’s fault.

Oh, I don’t mean that BP didn’t screw up. Or that they didn’t rack up over 700 safety violations in the last three years, while Exxon only had one. Or that they didn’t spend hundreds of millions of dollars in fines to avoid prosecution for them (even though apparently BP’s safety record is on par with that of other deepwater drillers, like Chevron). Or that BP and Transocean didn’t take stupid, catastrophic shortcuts in an effort to save time and money.

And I don’t mean to say that all the blame goes to the government, either. Even though – granted – the federal MMS agency (the guys who oversee regulation of the drilling companies) were a bit busy with their industry-funded, cocaine-fueled sex orgies to bother much with doing their jobs. That just goes without saying.

What angers me is that we’re looking for someone to blame, when the true culprit is economics. In short: the enemy is us.

You want to know why BP and every other deepwater driller is running their shit on the cheap? Why wave after wave of black, frothy goodness is this morning turning the beaches of the Florida Panhandle into a broad shelf of toxic sludge? And why – almost certainly – this is going to happen again? And again? And probably AGAIN? Because the answer is agonizingly simple.

Because we do love ourselves some cheap oil. And the cheap stuff is gone.

For most of the last sixty, seventy years, the bulk of oil production around the world came from really gigantic oil fields (called superfields) that seemed to give up endless gushing plumes of the good stuff, and all we had to do was put a well into the ground and pick it up. Cheap, plentiful. It was just there. And then, fueled by what amounted to millions of years of stored solar energy, we built a civilization – and a population – that utterly depended on us continuing to pull a certain amount of cheap oil from the ground every year.

And it went like that for a long time, until the 1970s. The United States oil fields weren’t putting out the pressure that they used to. The oil, it didn’t gush anymore – more and more, we had to go and get it. We had to pump water into wells to get it out. We had to work harder for it. It cost more to produce. Ultimately, our fields went into what is called “terminal decline”: the aging fields could no longer produce as quickly or as cheaply as foreign fields. And we ceased to be a net oil exporting nation. Meanwhile, our oil consumption continued to rise.

And what the hell. Big fields existed in the Middle East and Mexico. They were gushing enough for everyone.

That is, until about ten years ago. See, those big oil fields are now going into decline themselves. Kuwait’s Burgan field went into decline in 2005 and is steadily dropping production. Canterell field in Mexico is not only declining, but in fact crashing, dropping production far faster than predicted (at a great economic price to the Mexican government and nation). The last of the great, great fields – Ghawar in Saudi Arabia – is likely either nearing its decline age or has already passed it (we don’t really know, because such things are carefully held Saudi government secrets). The upshot is that, since about 2005, global oil production itself has been in decline. The basic facts of geology is forcing a long term global supply contraction of oil.

Meanwhile, we have a civilization that needs the cheap stuff coming, fast and furious. Or else prices shoot up and our economy collapses. Banks fail. Unemployment skyrockets. Politics destabilize. Nations go bankrupt. Panic ensues. All the fun stuff that you’d expect from a forced economic contraction that can’t really be turned around.

This is why BP and all these other drillers are running things on the cheap. To keep production levels even remotely up, we’re now resorting to looking for oil in the most remote places on earth – in this case, about 25000 feet below sea level and under about 5000 feet of extremely cold water. And we expect to get it as cheaply and easily as the oil that was gushing out of the ground thirty years ago. (A side note: one of the reasons this BP oil spill has been so hard to contain is because the water is so cold. Oil and gas flow, pumped in low water temperature and high pressure, creates crystalline deposits called “hydrates” along the inner surfaces of the well pipeline, constricting the effective flow.)

Super-cheap Gulf drilling isn’t going to happen; it’s not physically possible. What is going to happen is that oil companies will be economically forced to go after that oil as absolutely cheaply as humanly possible, while regulatory agencies will be economically forced to look the other way while they take tragic shortcuts. Because we all can’t live without our three-car households and $2.50/gallon gas.

But what about alternative fuels?

Electric cars? How do you plan to generate the electricity? Right now it’s almost entirely happening from natural gas and coal, both fossil fuels that carry their own environmentally hazardous burden (from extraction, burning or both). And using more gas and coal for transportation means using less for everyday energy needs, such as winter heating.

Ethanol? Net energy loser. It’s not nearly as energy-rich as oil, and the energy required to grow and process it exceeds the energy that it produces. Economically a nonstarter. It’s a nice dream on an environmentally friendly level, but the math just isn’t there.

Sugar cane ethanol? Brazil seems to be making a go of that. Too bad they’re having to resort to essentially slave labor to keep it economically viable.

Nuclear? Damned expensive, creates highly toxic byproducts and is politically a nonstarter. No one wants a nuke site in their backyard.

Fusion? Solar? Wind? Hydro? Magic beans?

The truth is that if any of those options were truly a serious energy replacement for oil, we would have gotten off oil decades ago. But they’re not. Which leaves us with the endless struggle to acquire cheap oil any way we can, at any price we think we can get away with, until we finally tap out. Or until people finally come to conclusion that dousing the coastline in toxic sludge is an unacceptable price to pay for not wanting to walk.

Until that time comes, oil spills like that are on everyone’s head. Yours, mine, everyone’s.