The ambiguous blessing of new oil

The good news is that British Petroleum just found a massive new oil field in the Gulf of Mexico.

That’s also the bad news.
That BP had to go to such extreme lengths to find new oil shows how difficult it is to replace fields being sucked dry. Outside analysts say that it will be years before the field will start producing and that the recovery rate is likely to be low. As the science magazine Nature put it: “The term ‘giant’ indicates merely that the find is greater than 500 million barrels of oil. The world runs through about a billion barrels of oil every two weeks.”

Still, every little bit helps – but not if we use these exciting discoveries to avoid conservation and transitioning to alternative sources of energy. At present, nothing comes close to replacing oil – and the International Energy Agency reported last year that the world will have to discover fields as big as six Saudi Arabias every year by 2030 to meet demand. Besides, burning all that crude exacerbates the climate-change problem.

Dallas News