SeriousBull

The Hidden Cost of Drilling for Oil & Gas–earthquakes and tsunamis

Tags: ANWR + Exxon + Gasoline + globlal warming + offshore drilling + Oil & Gas

America needs oil and independence from OPEC. $4.00 per gallon  gasoline has made this clear and change is underway. Demand is changing America’s behavior. Alternative fuels are being developed as are renewable biotech alternatives to replace oil-based industrial products with the resurgence of chemurgy . All this is good, but is doesn’t retard inflationary pressures at least in the short term.

But the fuse has been lit. Congress is now considering bi-partisan legislation to allow offshore drilling on the east and west costs as well as off the eastern Gulf of Mexico. For now the Bush-Cheney promise of opening up ANWR is still off the table but big oil want’s it badly and their guys are leaving office in a handful of months.

One huge, unfactored costs of drilling for oil & gas, not just offshore but anywhere, is the inevitable risk of infrasture disaster and loss of life caused by ensuing earthquakes and tsunamis when the earth plates shift or fall when the underlying support from pressurized oil and gas is removed. Take the Indonesia tsunami that occurred in December of 2004 in conjunction with a 9.0 earthquake originating in Aech Indonesia that was responsible for some 280,000 deaths, the epicenter turned out to be in Aech Indonesia nearby the massive Exxon-Mobil/Pertamina-Indonesia joint venture ,60 billion cubic foot per day liquified natural gas facility. Turns out that scientist have linked the extraction of oil and gas to earthquakes and have been cataloging the correlations of oil combustion with earthquakes going back 100 years.

Big oil counter-argues that they replace the extracted oil with water injected back into the earth’s crust as part of the process but physical scientists say heat is also lost causing contraction of the earths crust and give the example of how quickly releasing pressurized gas from a tank causes ice to form around the outlet and the tank to cool. They also liken it to deflating a football the loss of pressure and change in temperature cause the deflated football to change shape and collapse.

So in addition to global warming we are cooling the earths crust causing it to contract and weaken so that along stress lines (fractures) something gives and occasionally, and more frequently the result is a loss of property and life–the hidden cost of drilling for oil & gas. Imagine drilling off the San Francisco coastline with the San Andreas fault line the stress point. Congress needs to consider the complete cost of the energy problem and realize that the subsidy we are making is a factor considerably greater than the tax breaks we afford big oil. Seem to SB that this is not information to ignore. Just one more reason we need diversity in Congress–ie fewer lawyers!

PS. One might wonder if the cooling of the earth’s crust is an offset to global warming? Probably not, though let’s leave this quesition to science. The point is that the earth is a planet out is space. The world needs answers to these serious questions as the consequences could indeed be dire.

July 10, 2008 - Economy, Markets, Politics