Peak Oil is You
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Page added on April 3, 2007
Crude: Barrels of fun to crack you up
In 1949, the movie It Happens Every Spring chronicled the professional baseball exploits of a bookish US Midwestern science professor, played by Ray Milland, who discovers a chemical coating for baseballs that will make them impossible to hit. However, if somebody was making a movie called It Happens Every Spring in 2007, the subject would not be baseball, but the now annual spring reaming that oil consumers are once again undergoing at the hands of the world’s oil interests.
Since the seizure of 15 British sailors in the Shatt-al-Arab
waterway by Iranian revolutionary guards on March 23, the price of a barrel of crude oil on the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) has risen over US$5 a barrel, to just under $67. The American media delight in conflating these separate incidences into one causation; besides the nightly parade of red-in-tooth-and-claw neo-conservatives diverting attention from their disastrous misadventure in Iraq by baying for Iranian blood on US cable TV, a Google search with “Iran”, “seizure” and “crude oil” as parameters is now returning over 150,000 articles.
For the world’s oil interests, this is delightful. Just like the guy doing card tricks at the traveling carnival, your vision gets distracted by kinetic irrelevancies he does with one hand while the real action goes on unnoticed right under your nose with his other.
Nations fight and young soldiers die over access to crude oil, but, for something universally esteemed as the most valuable commodity in the world, a barrel of crude oil, 42 US gallons or 159 liters, is surprisingly useless. You can’t put it in your gas tank, and it won’t heat your home. Crude oil must be processed, or refined, to make it into usable products such as gasoline, jet fuel, heating oil or diesel. The world’s popular media focus far too much attention on where oil is produced, like the area around where the British marines were seized, and far too little on where it is refined, where the real action is.
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