Well if you have a set of nuts and you’ve ever heard a muscle car rip down the road, you probably think oil is pretty fucking badass. I mean, it kind of is: it’s easy to store, you can transport it almost anywhere, it’s relatively stable, and there is a vast network of gas stations and oil refineries all over the globe. However, there is one big fucking problem you humans seem to ignore… you are addicted to a dwindling supply.
As I have stated before, humans didn’t really find oil in abundance until the 20th century. That means your great great great great grandparents started pumping this toxic shit out of the ground more than 125 years ago. Sorry to break it to you, but this party is just about over. You are a sixth-generation oil consumer. What did you think, that there was an endless supply?
Oil is non-renewable, meaning that there is a finite amount. Unfortunately, boomers have already burned through the stuff that was easy to suck out of the ground. Now your species is drilling wells that are nearly 10 miles deep into the earth. Some of these wells are underneath 2 miles of ocean water and Arctic tundra. So in reality, it is easier for your monkey-like species to do a number of things rather than conduct Arctic and deep-sea oil well operations.
Each and every day, humans around the world extract nearly 100 million barrels of oil from the earth’s crust and then you guys burn it into the atmosphere. Primarily the oil is refined into petroleum and used for transportation, but there are many other products that are derived from oil. Everything from plastics and pharmaceuticals to cosmetics and pesticides. It is estimated that more than 1.5 trillion barrels (63 trillion gallons) of oil have already been harvested and consumed into the abyss of human needs.
To truly understand what happens with oil when it is combusted/burned, you need to know a little bit more about chemistry. Interestingly enough, it is another tale of a French aristocrat that lost his head in a guillotine during the French Revolution. His name was Antonie Lavoisier and he was an attorney turned chemist that came from a privileged family. He just so happened to land a cush position as a tax collector for the king.
Unfortunately, he was accused of taking advantage of his post, like many of the appointed aristocratic bureaucrats. Ultimately he was convicted of tax fraud and he joined the ranks of the nearly twenty thousand other executions during France’s Reign of Terror. As for his scientific discoveries, they live on forever. In an effort to summarize the events, a famous French-Italian mathematician put it this way: “It took them only an instant to cut off that head, and a hundred years may not produce another like it.”
Earlier in his life, Lavoisier created an experiment that involved sealing a diamond into a glass chamber, weighing it, burning the diamond with an extremely powerful magnifying glass, and weighing it again. The result was that the diamond vanished (turned into an invisible gas known as carbon dioxide) and the glass chamber still weighed the same. But how could that be?
This observation became known as the scientific law of conservation of mass. Lavoisier had proven that matter is not created or destroyed, but rather it is converted into other forms of matter. In this case he used energy in the form of concentrated sunlight to ignite a diamond which is composed of pure carbon. You read that right, diamonds are just pure carbon but so is graphite, aka pencil lead. In chemistry, we call this phenomenon an allotrope, an element that is able to form different structural bonds.
When carbon or other combustible material is combined with oxygen, it can ignite and initiate an exothermic reaction. So the diamond was converted from a solid into a gas and energy was released in the form of heat. All of the atoms can be accounted for with a cool mathematical concept called stoichiometry.
And no, these particles don’t just float off into outer space. Why? Because earth’s gravitational pull keeps everything relatively close to earth. Cocktail fact: Helium is pretty much the only element light enough to escape earth’s gravity. However, this is because it is considered inert due to it being a noble gas, which means it is non-reactive. Hydrogen can also theoretically make its way out of the earth’s gravitational pull, but it is also very reactive which can hinder its escape.
Oil is what is known as a hydrocarbon, meaning it is composed of hydrogen and carbon atoms. There are other elements that exist in these pools of decaying organic matter, but for simplicity we will stick to carbon and hydrogen. Basically they are long chains of carbon atoms surrounded with hydrogen atoms. When these hydrocarbons are combusted they release a good amount of energy in the form of heat and the atoms are rearranged into gases and water.
Just about every item in your life was transported to your greasy little paws via fossil fuels. Oil is the drug that you never knew you were addicted to. It’s something you can’t live without and the oil producers of the world know that you are hooked. The unfortunate part is that it’s non-renewable and the world is running out of it. Of course wealthy folks simply don’t give a fuck, but the cost of oil affects everything. This includes the pricing of basic goods, food, and transportation.
The world’s oil reserves were formed millions of years ago beneath the earth’s surface from decaying carbon-based life forms. Basically stuff that was formerly alive (such as plants and animals) was buried and trapped beneath geological formations here on earth. Over time, it became pressurized and was exposed to extreme heat and then, voila, it turned into oil.
Oil men have been waiting decades for capitalist scumbags to take over Washington D.C. and fire up the American oil industry. Just go ask your local petroleum engineer, what did your daddy and granddaddy do for work? No shit, they were oil engineers too! Get the fuck out of here. A little-known fact is that the U.S. has been a top oil producer since it discovered oil in abundance around the year 1900 and now these third and fourth generation oil men are about to go nuts.
The financial reality is that the American oil industry is not profitable at less than $100 per barrel. So no, Captain Stupid will not be able to lower the prices at the pump like he promised during his campaign. This is a basic rule of economics. Supply and demand doesn’t give a fuck about who can afford what. Whoever has the money laughs down the road.
It is almost like the political leaders of America want to keep this shit a secret, but here we are, so onward with my awareness revolution! They like to avoid talking about the fact that the U.S. is home to only 5% of the world’s population while consuming nearly 25% of the world’s oil. A problem at the gas pump would dramatically affect Americans more so than any other country in the world. The scary thing is…this happened once before and you guys didn’t learn your lesson.
Just over 50 years ago, in 1973, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) created an oil embargo as a response to the Arab-Israeli War. This was a result of America deciding to back Israel. The OPEC countries cut oil production and banned exports to countries that supported Israel. The price at the pump in the U.S. nearly doubled in less than a month and gas stations began to run out of fuel.
So what happened after the 1973 oil crisis? Let’s just say that oil became an issue of national security and countries in the Middle East were forced to discover freedom via a Western installed democracy. Soon thereafter, American oil companies helped these countries harvest their oil with the help from the U.S. military.
You have to wonder, was this a 50 year plan to leave American oil in the ground for future harvesting so that Americans could maintain their expectations of affordable transportation fuel? Or did these jabronis just want to tap out the Middle East and then fire back up the American oil industry and sell the stuff at a premium price? I guess you are about to find out.
Lucky for you humans, a little ol’ oil extraction company based out of Oklahoma named Halliburton invented a process known as hydraulic fracturing back in 1949. Long story short, the process involves using lots of water, sand, and slurries of chemicals that are turned into a flubber-like substance and pumped down wells deep in the earth’s crust.
This results in creating a tremendous amount of pressure that fractures the ground and thus releasing oil and natural gas that was once locked into the earth’s crust. This is what is known as a tertiary extraction method, meaning primary and secondary extraction methods have already been exhausted.
To truly understand the implications of this issue, you need to try and digest two major concepts used in chemistry, hydrophilic vs. hydrophobic. The words break down into hydro meaning water, philic meaning loving, and phobic meaning afraid. So in chemistry if you have a hydrophilic substance, it will mix into water very easily and be nearly impossible to get it all back out, hence, water loving. If it is hydrophobic it will not mix with water very easily.
Here is the kicker: a good portion of those chemicals that they pump down well are called biocides. Bio in Greek means life, and cide is derived from the Latin word caedre, to kill. Good, great, grand…except for the tremendous amount of groundwater that is now contaminated all over the U.S. with toxic chemicals that are designed to end life.
The most unsettling part is that the chemical makeup of these man-made biocide earth injections are protected under U.S. industry trade secret laws. So they don’t have to disclose the exact chemical makeup of the compounds that now reside in much of the U.S. water aquifers. Just keep in mind this has been going on for more than 75 years.
So what is the solution? I will give you a hint, and it’s not electric cars. Either way, to solve a problem, you first need to understand the problem. Forget about the environmental impacts that result from burning oil for now, and just try and fathom the possibility of another oil shortage. Yes, the U.S. still has a lot of oil in the ground, but ask yourself, is it worth destroying your precious environment to power you down the road in a 2,000 pound vehicle by yourself?
Perhaps there is a solution lurking on the horizon, but the oil overlords are not going to let humans out of their grasp willingly. Now is the time to empower yourself with knowledge about the impending energy crisis, and collectively discuss the possibility of a better future fueled by intelligent energy solutions. 2025 will forever be known as the year that Nord’s Nerd Army declared war on scientific ignorance…welcome to the jungle, baby!