Has BP Ruined the Entire Atlantic Basin?

This video paints a dismaying picture:



Via Mother Jones, which says:

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) just released this horrifying animation of how ocean currents may carry all the oil in the Gulf of Mexico. According to their computer modeling of currents and the oil, the spill "might soon extend along thousands of miles of the Atlantic coast and open ocean as early as this summer."

"I've had a lot of people ask me, 'Will the oil reach Florida?'" says NCAR scientist Synte Peacock in a statement accompanying the animation, which he worked on. "Actually, our best knowledge says the scope of this environmental disaster is likely to reach far beyond Florida, with impacts that have yet to be understood."

The models show oil hitting Florida's Atlantic coast within a few weeks, then moving north as far as about Cape Hatteras, N.C., before heading east.

One question I haven't seen answered is: at what level of dispersion is the oil no longer harmful? I assume that if a hundred million gallons were distributed evenly throughout the world's oceans, it wouldn't even be noticeable, and would biodegrade in no time. But somewhere between that, and the actual conditions we have - giant plumes and enormous sheens concentrated in the northern Gulf of Mexico - is the threshhold beyond which dispersion takes care of the problem. I don't know what that threshhold is - whether, for instance, the quantities shown swirling about in the mid-Atlantic in this animation would still be dangerous to ecosystems. At the least, though, this looks bad for pretty much the entire coast of Florida.

Whither the Spill?

Thither, according to an oceanologist from the University of South Florida College of Marine Science Ocean Circulation Group, which has modeled the forecasted trajectory of the spill:



The narrator is expecting the slick to get caught up in the loop current, which feeds into the Gulf Stream, which runs up the East Coast of the US. Says he:

It's not looking good for the whole Gulf and for the East Coast, really... All these arrows are pushing it toward the loop current and once that happens, well, all bets are off... I hope that the people on the east coast are getting prepared for this, and Florida 'cause it looks like it's gonna come your way. It looks like it's not just a Gulf Coast deal.

At the end he gives two pieces of advice: to say our prayers, and to keep the pressure on BP to "spend every dime they have" on the clean-up. I humbly encourage my readers to put more energy into the latter.

Spill, Baby, Spill

Proving that you don't have to have centralized government control of your economy to wreak environmental havoc, that oil rig that blew up last week off the coast of Louisiana is causing problems:



So says Eric Berger:

Officials from Louisiana to Florida remain concerned about oil leaking from a Transocean rig that exploded last week in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11.

As crews attempt to stop the flow of an estimated 42,000 gallons a day escaping from a pipe about 5,000 feet below the surface, the oil slick has been slowly expanding across the Gulf.

Satellite images have helped officials track the slick as it swirls around the Gulf. Here's the best, most recent image captured by NASA's Aqua satellite.

That's a thousand barrels of oil a day, leaking up from the bottom of the Gulf where the rig's pipe snapped off (those are technical terms). And it looks increasingly likely that the only thing that will work to stem the leakage is to drill a relief well, but that'll take months. (Part of the problem is that the well is 5,000 feet down, which complicates any potential engineering solution, as you can imagine - but those are the sorts of problems you run into when you're scrounging under the earth's proverbial sofa for the every last drop of fossil fuel resources you can find.) The slick is already 80 miles by 36 miles across and likely to reach land within days. This thing could get very ugly for the Gulf Coast.

UPDATE: Now it's 100 x 45 miles.



From the Times-Picayune.

Mapping Peak Oil

David Strahan, the journalist and author of the peak oil tome The Last Oil Shock, has an interactive Oil Depletion Atlas:



You can roll over countries to get their peak oil output, their 2007 output, and their historical or (somewhat speculatively) projected year of peak production. For example, the United States peaked in 1970 with production of 11.5 million barrels/day; its 2007 production was 6.88 mb/d. According to Strahan:

There are currently 98 oil producing countries in the world, of which 64 are thought to have passed their geologically imposed production peak, and of those 60 are in terminal production decline. A few countries such as Iran, Libya, and Peru are anomalous in that although they are thought to have passed their production peak, their output is growing at the moment. However they are not expected to regain their previously-established highs. Other post-peak producers may also grow their production temporarily within a long-term downward trend. According to analysis by Energyfiles.com, another 14 countries could peak within the next decade. The numbers given here are a snapshot, and Energyfiles' forecasts are continuously updated in the light of emerging data.

Strahan's map shows that oil production in about 28 countries had yet to peak as of 2007. But a recent post at The Oil Drum inventoried the world's oil producers and found that, of 54 oil producing countries, production was growing in only 14 of them: Saudi Arabia, Canada, Algeria, Equatorial Guinea, China, United Arab Emirates, Brazil, Angola, Kazakhstan, Qatar, Azerbaijan, Sudan, Thailand, and Turkmenistan. Those countries represent less than 40% of global oil production.

Meanwhile, Gail the Actuary (best superhero name ever, by the way) has a post up today at TOD that gives a nice overview of the global oil production situation, complete with nice charts. Her take is that we've already passed the global peak in oil production, and she gives these main reasons:

1) World oil production is down in 2009.
2) The big run-up in oil prices from 2003-2008 was not matched by a rise in oil production.
3) An analysis of scheduled oil development projects, plus decline in older oil fields, points to an overall decline in production over the coming years.
4) OPEC wells are aging and are likely to decline soon. And
5) The Former Soviet Union seems unable to compensate for declining production elsewhere.

It's a very interesting analysis, and well worth the read. I am not personally sold on the notion that world oil production has peaked however (and you should remember that, as the president of the International Energy Agency, I am an expert on the matter). The problem is that there's just a huge amount of uncertainty about oil reserves in OPEC countries and their production capacity, both present and future. This is especially true of Saudi Arabia, the lynchpin of global oil production, which, given their role as chief donor of life-blood for the global economy, has been able to get away with being shockingly opaque about their reserves situation. Nonetheless, they clearly have some production capacity they're not currently using, as they significantly ramped down production when the economy went parasailing with a concrete board last fall. The question is how much extra capacity they have, and how likely is near-term decline in production from aging and gargantuan fields like Ghawar, and I don't think anyone who doesn't have the title of Prince or Chief Geologist for ARAMCO knows the answer to that question.

Still, the most worrisome element in Gail's analysis is that nettlesome #2. Oil prices soared for five straight years, far outside any price range that could be anticipated sans a severe OPEC cutback like those orchestrated in the 1970s. And in those same years production was simply flat, despite surging demand in China and India. I just don't see any way to account for this unless the flat production was due to constraints on global production capacity. And if there have been such constraints over the past half-decade or so, then if we haven't yet reached peak oil, we're certainly not far from it.

Oiligarchy

This game is way better than Lemonade Stand.



Click on the image to go to the game, in which you can "trash the environment, bribe the politicians and squish the little peoples. Don't feel rich enough? Then Drill, Baby, Drill!"

Via The Oil Drum.

Gas Prices in the US

Gas Buddy has an interactive map of gasoline prices for every county in the 48 most important states in the US.



You can also zoom in to see even more fine-grain data, like this. Handy! You can know just what neighborhood, and even what specific gas station in town to go to to get the cheapest gas. At the broader scale, you can clearly see the effect state-level policies have on the price of gas - something that not a few New York drivers who live close to the New Jersey state line are keenly aware of. As usual, the West Coast leads the way on priciness, thanks mostly to higher taxes in those states (though those of you in Europe will chortle at $2.20/gallon being considered "pricey" - it generally costs several times as much in England, for instance).

And, while prices are barely half of what they were last summer, before the global economy (and therefore global demand) did it's coyote-over-the-cliff impersonation, they're starting to creep up again. Weirdly, though, this is despite the fact that oil prices continue to fall. What gives? This, evidently:

The benchmark for crude oil prices is West Texas Intermediate, drilled exactly where you would imagine. That's the price, set at the New York Mercantile Exchange, that you see quoted on business channels and in the morning paper.

Right now, in an unusual market trend, West Texas crude is selling for much less than inferior grades of crude from other places around the world. A severe economic downturn has left U.S. storage facilities brimming with it, sending prices for the premium crude to five-year lows.

But it is the overseas crude that goes into most of the gas made in the United States. So prices at the pump will probably keep going up no matter what happens to the benchmark price of crude oil.

Even oil drilled in North Dakota and Canada is going for about $10 more per barrel than the stuff from Texas, which accounts for the higher prices in the northern Great Plains.

Of course, the prices paid at the pump are only the direct costs of gasoline. There are also the indirect costs of a massive military apparatus which is necessary to maintain access to oil supplies in the middle east; the cost to human development of oil-funded rights-suppressing governments from Africa to Asia; and the long-term and incalculable costs of the global warming processes that are being furthered every time we fill up our tanks. Those costs don't mount on a spinny little dial right before our eyes, so we tend not to count them, of course. But they are very real, and growing with every passing year.

Having said that, gas in the US is still extraordinarily cheap. Consider:



Refined gasoline costs less than bottled water. (UPDATE: see comments for a different take on this point) Prices have a lot of room to grow. And with a commodity as inherently valuable as oil, the chances are near to certain that, in the long run, they will.

Oil!

More cartograms! This one shows oil reserves - the bigger the country the more of the black goo they have underground.



And this one shows energy consumption - not just oil, but you can bet this map tracks pretty well with regular old oil consumption, too.



When it comes to oil, it's pretty obvious that it's the Saudi's world; we all just live in it. And if you throw in the other 11 members of OPEC - Algeria, Angola, Ecuador, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, and Venezuela - you're talking about an enormous proportion of the world's reserves of oil. It raises (but does not beg) the question: is energy independence - getting off our addiction to foreign (especially OPEC) oil - a reasonable goal?

I can think of two ways to answer this: first, US oil production has been declining for 35 years, and no matter what the drillbabydrillers say, no amount of extra drilling, in Alaska or thte continental shelf or anywhere else, is going to reverse that long-term trend. Meanwhile, the population of the US continues to grow, there are still hundreds of millions of cars on the roads, and oil continues to literally be the lubricant that allows the economy to run (or, at least, to do whatever it's doing these days). Of course, the dependence is every bit as great for Europe (outside the exporting nations of Norway and Russia) and the big economies of Asia. Conservation can help, marginally, but short of a drastic and long-term reorganization of the world's energy infrastructure, the status quo will remain, and the Saudis, et al. will continue to have their fist around the IV that is the economic lifeline of the world.

There's another possibility, though, if the Export Land Model is correct. The ELM (put together by geologist Jeffrey Brown and others (see The Oil Drum for more)) argues that as a country reaches peak production, the combination of rising domestic oil consumption and declining production can cause net oil exports to, essentially, fall off a cliff, and even major exporters will reach zero net exports in just a few years. So the question is, are the major exporters anywhere near peak oil production? Because if so, that export spigot may be far closer to shutting off than most people realize. And so we might be far closer to "energy independence" than it seems, in the sense that we'd no longer be using much in the way of foreign oil - though energy independence, in such a scenario, would be a far grimmer outcome than any of us would want.

The Great Arctic Game

The competition over the Arctic even extends to mapping itself. This New York Times video discusses the race between nations to map their continental shelves so as to be able to claim the fossil fuels therein.

Global Warming Melts the Arctic; Nations Lick Their Chops at Potential Oil Bonanza

Via Andrew Sullivan, this map animation from the Economist depicts the shrinking of the Arctic ice, and the brewing competition between the Arctic nations over the region's resources.



The six countries involved - Russia, Canada, the US, Norway, Iceland, and Denmark - are, apparently without irony, determined to lay claim to the oil and natural gas that is becoming increasingly accessible as a warming climate continues to erode the Arctic sea ice.

One of the horrors of addiction is that, as the addictive substance becomes less and less satisfying, and its negative effects mount over time, it becomes even more necessary to consume more of the substance to provide escape from the greater and greater suffering the substance is causing.

Mapping Our Oil Addiction

The Rocky Mountain Institute has produced an oil map webtool that lets you see how oil imports to the US have evolved since 1973.



You can also track the amounts spent on oil imports over time, and the dollar amounts of oil being imported from individual countries.

One thing this tool makes abundantly clear is how different the last few years' run-up in oil prices was. Prices spiked during the first and second oil crises - ca. 1973 and 1979, respectively. But in both cases, the price surge was a direct result of a decrease in supply. The last few years, however, saw prices spike higher than they'd ever been, even though supply remained roughly constant. How could this be?

Some blame speculation in the oil markets. But if this was the case, supplier countries ought to have responded to the surging prices by increasing exports - something they failed to do until prices got really astronomical last summer.

I think a more likely explanation is that the past few years have seen global demand butting up against the geological limitations on global supply. This is more commonly known as the phenomenon of peak oil. Supply limitations are the only way to countenance flat exports in the face of soaring prices.

Of course, prices collapsed last year after two things happened: OPEC finally increased production a smidge, and (more importantly) the global economy took a long walk on a short pier, causing demand to crash. So the pressure on global oil supplies has eased - for now. We'll have to see what happens when the economic picture gets rosier again. If oil prices again quickly begin to spike, we'll have a good indication that the era of peak oil has arrived.