About a decade ago, Alex Farrell, a professor in the UC Berkeley Energy and Resources Department, Alex Farrell, had a series of papers unpopular with environmentalists. They showed that, essentially, there was no peak oil. In fact, at prevailing prices of the time, one could profitably extract a supply of petroleum to last hundreds of years at current rates. The supply would come not just from traditional sources, but from Canadian bitumen and coal-to-liquids conversion. He also pointed out that this is a bad thing, because those alternative sources of petroleum products have ridiculously high carbon intensities. That is, they’d be much, much dirtier than regular oil.
Sadly, Professor Farrell did not live to see the story of peak oil fade from most environmentalists’ consciousness nor to see the price of oil has drop so dramatically. And, in fact, at today’s prevailing prices, influenced by fracking and cheap natural gas (which is not a short term substitute for oil but could be a long-term one), we just don’t need oil from the Canadian tar sands. There’s not really a strong economic case for it, and the environmental case is, well, awful. I guess there is still a story to be told about “continental oil independence,” but, well, that’s only physical independence. Unless we plan on declaring a state of emergency and militarily controlling oil transfer, oil is still a worldwide commodity, and if there were some kind of oil crunch, we’d take the economic gut punch all the same.
I think Obama made the correct decision today, to nix the Keystone Pipeline.
Score one for common sense.
It seems as though he also wanted the political credit for nixing the pipeline, since a lower level of executive review (e.g., State) could also have killed it. But probably the GOP won’t get much mileage (nyuk nyuk) out of it, since energy is just not expensive right now.
Yes, he wanted to the credit. But why did he draw the decision out so long? For after Tuesday’s elections? I have no head for politics.