Oct
25
The Blessing of Fossil Fuels, part 2: Resource Creation
“I would transition from the oil industry, yes.” — presidential candidate Joe Biden
In the last presidential debate, Joe Biden not only said he was in favor of banning fracking on federal lands (though insists he would not institute an overall ban) but that he wants to shut down the oil industry because it “pollutes significantly” and needs to be “replaced by renewable energy over time.” As I have been reading and sharing with you, however, this is not currently (or in the near future) a good idea. Not if we want to avoid unnecessarily disrupting our economy and putting people’s lives at risk.
With that in mind, I thought I would share with you another passage from Alex Epstein’s book, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels
“The history of oil is a history of resource creation. For example, crude oil, through a process of boiling (distilling), could be refined into 50 or 60 percent kerosene, used for lighting. But then the rest of the crude oil wasn’t a resource — it was often pure waste, dumped in a lake — until human ingenuity made it so. In the nineteenth century, John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil progressively figured out how to create value out of every ‘fraction’ of a barrel — a barrel containing numerous types of hydrocarbons of different shapes, sizes, and masses. They created wax out of one part of the barrel, lubricants (over three hundred varieties) out of another, and asphalt out of another.
In the twentieth century, modern chemistry made oil not only the most important fuel, but also the most important raw material in civilization. Chemists can ‘crack’ — break down — the molecules in a barrel of oil into small parts, and then reassemble them into an unbelievable variety of polymers, including modern plastics. While you think of oil in your car as in the gas tank, in fact there is more oil in the materials in the car than in the gas tank. The rubber tires are made of oil, the paint and waterproofing are made of oil, the plastic, dent-resistant bumper is made of oil, the stuffing inside the seats is made of oil, and in most cars, the entire interior is one form of oil fabric or synthetic material or another — because oil is such a cheap and effective way to make things. [Note: See graphic below for more oil-based products.]
When a policeman has his life saved by a bulletproof vest, when a firefighter has his life saved by a fireproof jacket, that is oil — that is something that was once a useless raw material, now made into a resource.
What is true of oil is true of essentially every other resource. They need to be created by transforming potential into actual. Coal was not an electricity resource or a source of motive power until the coal-fired steam engine. Natural gas was actually a deadly force, something that exploded when you drilled for oil, until safe drilling and storage technologies could harness it. Aluminum, one of the most abundant elements in the Earth’s crust, was completely useless a few hundred years ago.
Ultimately, an ‘energy resource’ is just matter and energy transformed to meet human needs. Well, the planet we live on is 100 percent matter and energy — 100 percent potential resource. To say we’ve only scratched the surface is to significantly understate how little of this planet’s potential we’ve unlocked. We already know that we have enough of a combination of fossil fuels and nuclear power to last thousands and thousands of years. For us today, that’s morally enough — it’s time to focus on the 7 billion of us, here and now, who will live better with more energy and live worse or not at all with less.
What energy resources should we use now and in the future? We have a brilliant system for deciding this: the price system of supply and demand. All things being equal, if it takes fewer resources, including human time, to produce something, the price goes down; if it takes more resources, the price goes up.
Thus prices reflect how efficient a use of existing resources it is to create a new resource for a given purpose. When the cost of computers comes down, that means that all the components and their composition can be created more cheaply than before. Similarly, the form of energy we use will be the one that, based on the best technology available (which is always evolving), can do the best job for the lowest price.”
Good stuff, there. (Not that the anti-fossil fuel, eco-activists will listen….)
