Gasoline dipped below $2 per gallon after Christmas in Salt Lake City, Denver and other cities, and I’ve heard rumors of $1.75. Gas is selling for $1.70 in Laramie, Wyo. Most of us like this immensely. Not so the stock market, which was jarred by oil dipping below $50 per barrel. Cheap oil has also gummed up a variety of political arguments.
Keystone XL is at the top of the news today, as it was last fall when many political candidates, from statehouse to Congress, ran on platforms seeking “energy security.” This sounds suspiciously like code for giving drilling companies and pipeline transport companies just about everything they want.
The argument on behalf of Keystone XL is that it will, with the help of our pals the Canadians, deliver us from the capriciousness of “people who don’t like us,” as T. Boone Pickens likes to say. Simply by approving this pipeline extension across Nebraska, South Dakota, and Montana, we can bathe in bitumen and hoist the finger at Caracas, Tehran, or whatever other regime impetuously challenges our supply chain.
This might be useful in case of a major international fissure, something akin to World War III. In more normal times, oil remains a global commodity, energy dense and easily transported. Whether the Canadians build pipelines across the United States or their own country makes little difference except, of course, in case of spills.
We’ve been doing nicely in oil production without the Keystone, thanks to successful exploitation of shale formations in Texas, North Dakota, with a big surge even in Colorado, which in 2013 broke the record set in 1956 for oil production.
Senate Republicans, including Wyoming’s John Barrasso and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, trumpet the tired argument about job creation. In 2012, in a week long journey, I followed the Keystone route from the Niobrara River in Nebraska south to Steele City, where the Keystone XL would join the existing Keystone pipeline across Kansas. In Kansas, local government officials told me that the pipeline crews from Texas were nice guys, but they didn’t stick around long.
But fact-checking Barrasso’s recent claim on Meet the Press of “42,000 new jobs,” The Washington Post parsed the numbers and found little evidence for such a claim.
“For some workers, it would be a good but brief payday. In the context of the U.S. economy, the impact is barely a ripple,” said the Post.
Again, why does Nebraska need the pipeline?
President Barack Obama has also had to pivot his messaging to accord with the boom in oil production. As The Washington Post has pointed out, Obama’s website emphasized energy conservation but not energy production when he ran in 2008. But in a speech last October, Obama suggested a federal role in the dramatic surge that two years ago put the United States ahead of Saudi Arabia.
“So right off the bat, as soon as I came into office, we upped our investments in American energy to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and strengthen our own energy security,” he said in a speech in Illinois. His goal of cutting oil imports in half, he added, was being achieved six years ahead of schedule. Mark Green on the website Energy Tomorrow said it was “a lot like the sports fan sitting in the stands with his popcorn, taking credit for what’s happening on the field.”
Obama critics have complained that he has shut off access to public lands for drilling. Quite a lot of access is already available. With gas at $2, do we have an emergency that justifies unfettered access? It’s another old argument upended by cheap oil.
Those of us influenced by the concept of peak oil have also had our comeuppance. The Moses to this movement was M. King Hubbert, a geologist for Shell, who, in 1956, predicted a peak production of U.S. petroleum between 1965 and 1970. It was 1970. He then predicted a peak in global oil production around the turn of the century, provided then-current trends continued. A decade ago, my bookshelf started to groan with the weight of “The End of Oil” and other books that built on Hubbert’s ideas.
Daniel Yergin, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power, has foretold a different trajectory. He sees a more distant peak production in perhaps 2030 or later. Several years ago, after oil had nosed above $140 per barrel, peak oil adherents in Denver challenged Yergin to a wager. The last I heard, he had not responded.
In a way, I wagered on peak oil. In 2009, after running over a dead deer onin a highway one evening, I bought a used electric hybrid, expecting that once the recession ended I would soon be seeing $5 or even $6 gas when making trips across the wide expanses of Wyoming.
But the recession is over, and gas is $2 per gallon, not $6. I don’t regret investing in energy efficiency, but my economic argument for doing so looks frail, at least temporarily looks frail. John Barrasso, Barack Obama and I have something in common.
