The dividing date in world history was January 10, 1901. It occurred in Beaumont, Texas (the town recently battered by Hurricane Rita), when a pure hunch by one-armed Pattillo Higgins paid off, big-time.
Pattillo early on had been a bad boy. At age 17, while harassing East Texas blacks, he killed in a gunfight their defender, a sheriff’s deputy, then, as a result, lost his bullet-shattered left arm to surgical amputation. Miraculously, the recuperating teenager convinced the jury that he had slain the lawman in self-defense. More miraculously, five years later a grown-up Pattillo abandoned his romance with thuggery, embraced a Christian life of decency, and opened a successful brick factory.
With little schooling, and certainly no formal knowledge of geology and engineering, Pattillo Higgins at age 23 nevertheless knew that curing his company’s bricks with gas or oil heat would be far more efficient (and profitable) than using coal transported from distant states. One day, out of the blue, he deduced that the salt dome four miles south of Beaumont, a 15-foot-high bump on the ground known as Spindletop Hill, was sitting on a pool of petroleum. Wiser townsfolk laughed at Pattillo’s foolishness.
Pattillo bellowed the last laugh, however, when on January 10, 1901, after years of having created nothing but dry holes, the latest well he drilled into the stubborn Texas earth began gushing oil. It was not 100 barrels a day, which in that era was considered a success, but almost 100,000 barrels a day.
The gush continued for nine days (hence, the name that is now standard for such a super-productive oil well, a "gusher"). When the hole finally could be capped, almost a million barrels of black gold lay on the ground, and the non-sweet sulfuric smell of success wafted over the rest of Texas.
As Professor Joe Pratt of the University of Houston later recorded, "The oil business in Texas provided the final push needed to convert the United States from a second-tier country at the turn of the century into the biggest superpower of the 20th century." (A 58-foot-tall pink granite obelisk erected at the Spindletop site in the 1940s bears the inscription: "On this spot on the 10th day of the twentieth century a new era in civilization began.")
Almost instantly, the world leaped from its harsh, backward, countless millennia of using animal horsepower, torches, candles, log fires and whale-oil lamps. Virtually every nation witnessed firsthand the radical transformation of every human life on Earth. Spindletop’s outflow of petroleum sparked incalculable changes, including internal-combustion engines, cars, planes, electric-power generation, more lethal wars, corporate industrial power, plastics, new clothing materials, insecticides, bountiful farms, instant communication, and even cheap globetrotting for Everyman. We also, some critics say, gained the relatively quick ability to foul fatally our planetary nest for all humanity, for all time.
A century since the eruption of the New World of Oil, people and nations have divided sharply into two opposing camps: 1) Promoters of petroleum (upbeat "Pollyannas"), and 2) Disparagers of petroleum (gloom-and-doom "Cassandras"). Leaders of the first group believe in freedom for individuals and nations and view oil-based energy as a facilitator of that independence. Leaders of the second group cherish tight restrictions on individuals and nations (so that the powerful class of ???? ©lites may govern and thus mold the masses) and portray oil as the guaranteed slick highway to global environmental hell.
With supreme irony, however, the actual leaders of these two groups (that is, the Captains of Big Oil and the Dictators of Environmental Supremacy) now loudly sing the same hit song, "The Gas Tank Is Nearly Empty (So Stop Smiling, My Love)." Responding to the odd duet that revels in ever higher prices for oil, motorists have no choice but to cough up the extra cash, sell their SUV’s at a cut-rate, buy a bicycle or putt-putt scooter, or totally ditch personal transport and succumb to government-built mass transit.
Why are such "natural enemies" joining forces to gang up on the people? Think about it:
If the gas tank is nearly empty, then Big Oil can raise the price and profits of fuel into the financial and economic stratosphere.
If the gas tank is nearly empty, then Environmental Supremacy can dictate how the whole world must live in its rapidly approaching Spartan future.
In fact, Big Oil has been wailing the oil-shortage blues for decades and passing out sheet music for others in order to create a harmonious, singalong chorus among journalists, politicians, scientists, preachers and other self-styled but influential do-gooders. For example:
• Just 32 years following the piddling 1857 discovery of oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania (10 to 25 barrels a day), Congress created in 1879 the U.S. Geological Survey-to study what? Oil shortages!
• The private-sector Institute of Mining Engineers soon thereafter, in 1882, looked at America’s 25-million-barrel annual oil production and estimated that the nation’s reserves would last at most another four years (19 years later, Spindletop alone, if uncapped, could spew enough petroleum to match 1882 U.S. annual production in just 30 days!).
• In 1919, Scientific American (whose editor possibly was teenager Ralph Nader) warned that U.S. oil reserves would disappear in 20 years and wagged its finger at Detroit’s auto industry: "The burden falls upon the engine. It must adapt itself to less volatile fuel, and it must be made to burn the fuel with less waste... Automotive engineers must turn their thoughts away from questions of speed and weight...and comfort and endurance to avert what...will turn out to be a calamity...."
• Meantime, as the number of cars soared (from three million in 1918 to 25 million by 1930) and began to transform the nation and its entire population, the "experts" were spouting figures all over the chart to announce how much oil remained in America’s ground:
Only 4.5 billion barrels are left, warned the federal Oil Conservation Board in 1926; only 10 billion barrels are left (more than twice as much), the same agency announced six years later, in 1932; only 20 billion barrels are left, said government’s Petroleum Administration for War, in 1944; only 100 billion barrels are left, said the American Petroleum Institute, in 1950; by 1980, 1993 and as recently as 2000, remaining proven oil reserves generally were agreed by the establishment to be respectively 648 billion, 999 billion and 1,016 billion (a trillion-plus) barrels.
Every time the mavens (or manipulators) forecasted a smaller pie, a bigger one created by silent but innovative bakers emerged from the oven.
Good old Spindletop illustrates this cycle of bust and boom. In 1909, eight years after Pattillo Higgins triggered its first gush, Spindletop stopped flowing and was assumed to be exhausted. Fourteen years later, drillers using new technology resuscitated the well to spit out another 60 million barrels. In 1950, half a century after it first blew its Spindletop, the Beaumont beauty was revived again as a black golden goose, this time by wildcatter Michel Halbouty, who became a multimillionaire by drilling to a different depth in a different pool within Spindletop’s original shadow.
The record of failing (or refusing) to assess accurately the potential supply of oil creates all sorts of global instability in economics, politics, and the lives of everyday folk. That instability, in turn, is what causes people to turn to the "experts" for more guidance and governance. By mentioning only proven reserves, the conjoined evil twins of Big Oil and Environmental Supremacy engage in a seemingly omniscient, but purely deceitful, fallacy-also known as "spin."
Together, they and their sycophantic parrots in the opinion-molding business ignore the existence of virtual oceans of unconventional oil that can run the world as we know it perhaps for many additional centuries at affordable prices, even with commonsense environmental practices in force. The three major types of such oil (and very likely a fourth, dramatically surprising option) are these:
Heavy Oil: pumped and refined exactly like the more desirable "light, sweet" oil, but with extra sulfur and metal contaminants that must be removed, which adds slightly to its cost. The massive, serpentine oil field that stretches from Trinidad in the southeast corner of the Caribbean Sea, west to Venezuela on the northern coast of South America, then south along the east side of the Andes Mountains and probably southeast again, into Argentina and the South Atlantic trench off the Falkland Islands, is believed to contain at least 1.2 trillion barrels of "heavy." Refined into gasoline, it would add less than 50 cents to a driver’s cost per gallon of gas.
Tar Sands: especially abundant in Canada’s Alberta province. Such geologic areas hold an estimated 1.8 trillion barrels of oil and for years quietly have served as a major source for gasoline used mostly in the American Midwest. Since Canada has been able to cut production costs in half, tar-sands oil no longer can be considered a fringe petroleum solution to global energy needs.
Oil Shale: essentially oil-soaked rocks that are costly to process and require huge amounts of water. Nevertheless, shale holds more oil than all conventional sources combined, and it exists not only in the U.S. but in energy-hungry emerging giants India and Brazil, plus Malagasy and many other smaller countries.
Perpetual Petroleum: a vital gift from God or Mother Nature, depending upon your gender-influenced spiritual outlook-virtually inexhaustible, self-renewing oil that oozes up constantly from inside the earth! Nothing less than a miracle, this amazing method of eternal, internal production is the essential finding by the late Dr. Thomas Gold, described in the Washington Post’s 2004 obituary for him as "one of the great celestial thinkers of the last century." I interviewed Dr. Gold for a full hour in the late 1980s on my weekly South Florida radio program, and he explained to my huge audience in great, riveting detail his thesis, which also was reported that same year extensively in The Atlantic Monthly, one of America’s most distinguished periodicals ever since its founding, in 1857.
Dr. Gold was the author of 280 scientific papers, director of the Cornell University Center for Radiophysics and Space Research, chairman of the Cornell Astronomy Department (the man who hired Carl Sagan to the faculty), taught physics at Cambridge and astronomy at Harvard, was assistant to the Astronomer Royal at England’s Greenwich Observatory, and given the highest award for excellence by the Royal Astronomical Society. For fun he walked on a tightrope in his back yard.
Dr. Gold offered not only well-formed scholarly opinion but scientific evidence of his assertion: Deep primordial hydrocarbons (not the ballyhooed biological, organic goo of decomposed dinosaurs and ancient flora) are constantly being injected by huge pressure into existing or undiscovered oil fields, primarily through fissures in the earth’s mantle. Antlike humans on the surface of our Third Rock From The Sun for all practical purposes, he added, cannot conceivably exhaust the reliable fuel supply from the innards of such a huge planet.
To prove his thesis, Dr. Gold raised the millions of dollars needed to drill beneath a meteor-created lake in Sweden to search for oil and gas that may have flowed upward in the ground fractured by the meteor. Dr. Gold’s team penetrated the target area and retrieved traces of oil, where petroleum experts had stated that no oil possibly could be found. His critics-the usual ultranegative suspects-screamed that the oil was there only because Dr. Gold had not cleaned his drill properly, and that the residue was actually just oily contamination. To which Dr. Gold responded by quoting Tolstoy:
"Most men...can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it obliges them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven thread by thread into the fabric of their lives."
Thomas Gold’s revolutionary pronouncement on the origin and virtual inexhaustibility of oil, I believe, is something that wily Pattillo Higgins would prove pragmatically if he were still alive and kicking, in addition to waving his lone arm to celebrate the good news.
Meantime, we do not need a reincarnated Texan to turn the insightful genius of Professor Gold into black gold. Instead, we have at this very moment the great news that a group of distinguished scientists have begun to confirm Gold’s postulation, his theory of perpetual fuel-creation in Deep Earth. Researchers from the Carnegie Institution’s Geophysical Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, Harvard University and Indiana University joined forces several months ago and have discovered repeatedly in laboratory simulations that, indeed, the hydrocarbon methane does form when iron oxide, calcite and water are subjected to mighty pressure and heat, the kind that exists 100 miles beneath the Earth’s crust, exactly where Dr. Gold predicted the mind-boggling chemistry was occurring naturally.
Says Indiana’s Henry Scott, lead author of the recently released initial report on the group’s research, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: "I expected nothing to happen. But sure enough it formed methane. It was a bit of shock."
A bit of shock may be the ultimate understatement of the ages.
