Oil's twilight

August 6, 2006

Forget about the price of gas for a moment. Think instead of all the oil sitting deep below the earth's crust, waiting millions of years to be pumped to the surface, refined and used in all the ways that drive modern civilization.

That resource, scarcely touched before the dawning of the automobile age, is destined to decline. It's a natural resource. It's not the sun or the wind, inexhaustible and eternal for our purposes. And whether you believe the Jeremiahs or the most conservative analysts, the day is coming--faster than you may think.

Last Sunday, Tribune correspondent Paul Salopek took readers on an extraordinary journey. In "A tank of gas, a world of trouble," he traced tanks of gas pumped at a suburban Marathon station to sources around the world, from the coast of Nigeria to the fields of Venezuela.

And he delivered a powerful message, one that many Americans seem unprepared to absorb: "Our nation's energy-intensive joy ride, powered by 150 years of cheap petroleum, may finally be coming to an end. This could be as good as it gets." As good as it gets. That's a haunting phrase for those who wince at $3-plus gas at the pump. You mean, it could be higher?

Yes. Much.

Even the rosiest estimates show oil production peaking by midcentury and then diving. The next decades portend higher prices, more competition. This is not, as one analyst says, a temporary Arab oil embargo, as in the 1970s. It will not be "your father's energy crisis."

Some may dismiss this as fear mongering. Some will imagine that new technology or new oil discoveries will save America from an apocalyptic post-petroleum world. Maybe they're right. But if there ever was a time to be aggressively exploring alternative energy sources, if there ever was a time for Americans to reconsider their gas-guzzling autos, if there ever was a time to prepare for a world where $3-a-gallon gas will, in retrospect, seem cheap, this is it.

In a single lifetime, from 1940 until today, the United States has gone from producing 63 percent of the world's oil--being the Saudi Arabia of the world, as Salopek writes--to pumping 8 percent. Now an increasing amount of America's oil comes from Africa, from places, for instance, in Nigeria where thugs and militias "flourish in the lawless squalor" of the oil patch. Corruption, pollution, poverty, violence, all threaten Africa--and those fields.

The solution isn't only about increasing auto mileage standards, drilling for oil in heretofore pristine wilderness or funding research into promising new technologies. That won't be nearly enough. This is about 300 million Americans making decisions every day about how they use energy--and changing behaviors ingrained for decades.

Here's a theoretic figure that is hard to ignore: $8 a gallon. That is the hidden cost of imported oil, according to Milton Copulos, a respected analyst with the National Defense Council Foundation in Washington. Copulos examined such factors as oil-related defense spending in the Middle East and calculated U.S. jobs and investments lost to steep crude prices, Salopek reported. When he isolated the hidden costs of Middle Eastern crude in particular, the price jumped to $11.

Next time you're at the pump, shaking your head about $3 gas, start multiplying.