Energy News: Prudhoe Bay Pipe Mess Raises World Oil Prices

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Americans use more oil today than even three years ago. Since China is using more and more, too, we rushed to the Hubbert Oil Peak faster than formerly expected. America has done virtually nothing to prepare for this world event and now as we teeter on the edge, we better start talking about removing our troops from oil pumping nations and spend the money on retrofitting our culture to live with renewable technology.

On top of a significant percentage of Gulf wells still out of order thanks to hurricanes, now a pipeling closing!

By MARY PEMBERTON, Associated Press Writer 2 minutes ago
ANCHORAGE, Alaska - BP PLC said Monday it will replace 73 percent of the pipelines from the nation's largest oil field and that it could be closed for weeks or months, crimping the nation's oil supplies at a time of peak demand.

BP, the world's second-largest oil company, began shutting down the pipelines on Monday and said it would replace 16 miles of the 22 miles of transit pipeline in the Prudhoe Bay field following a leak discovered Sunday.

After the hurricanes, Europe and the US government tapped their reserves because Bush flipped out as he watched his popularity collapse. The minute he managed to stabilize prices, he went back to pretending there is no crisis and Americans were lied to about all this by the media that pretends to this very day, there is no crisis, no one has to change anything. The lack of urgency is notable. Bush was so emboldened, he and his Israeli buddies immediately went back to trying to provoke the Persian kitty cat into a tet a tet economic war and the plan was to bomb the kitty and then seize the Peacock throne and voila!

Endless oil for Israel and America! Whoopee! And the Shi'ites will be defeated and put into chains and forced to obey the colonial powers and all would be wine and roses! This stupid fantasy still is held by a significant number of powerful people who also believed that we would suck up the oil of Iraq and no one would dispute us there, either.

Here is a website that has a lot of history concerning all the issues of the North Slope and Prudhoe Bay.

National Geographic: Pinched between the Brooks Range and the Beaufort Sea, the plain within the refuge stretches west from the Yukon border more than a hundred miles, a flat expanse of tundra laced with tussock wetlands and braided rivers. In 1980, when the Alaska lands act expanded the refuge to embrace an area the size of South Carolina—and designated 8 million acres of it statutory wilderness—1.5 million acres (607,000 hectares) of the coastal plain was set aside under Section 1002 for study of its environmental value and petroleum potential. Hence the name: the 1002 Area.

Of all major publications, the National Geographic is probably one of the very first to start talking about the Hubbert Oil Peak. They are on the front lines of discussing the permutations involved with the dynamics of this geological event. Level headed and concise, this is one of the best sources of information on this topic.

Here is the PBS special on Prudhoe Bay.

The pipeline built to bring that oil to market was one of the greatest engineering feats of the 20th century. For more than three years, workers battled brutal Arctic weather to construct an eight hundred mile pipeline that traversed three mountain ranges, thirty-four rivers, and eight hundred streams, and that withstood earthquakes and sub-zero temperatures. The men, machines and money the pipeline brought to Alaska would forever transform what had long been regarded as America's last great wilderness. The pipeline's construction pitted America's need for energy against its desire to protect land and wildlife, sparking one of the most passionate conservation battles in American history.

People fear we can't live with our own planet's limitations. If we want to exceed it, we must move outwards to other sources elsewhere. But oil? This is strictly on this planet, period. And it is an accident of nature, it is severely limited in quantity and location. Once we accept this hard fact, we can move to deal with the consequences. Of course, the side issue of pollution including the most important, invisible pollution, CO2, will dissappear when the oil is gone. But we depend on oil and coal for nearly everything, it is the warp and woof of our civilization from top to bottom. Changing this will take a lot of expense, effort and sacrifices, none of which most humans are inclined to commit.

As I have pointed out, the political need to get Saudi Arabia to hyper-pump oil to hide the effects of the Iraq oil collapse due to our war, the Ghawar oil fields are now on the verge of literal collapse.

Rense: At the ASPO conference a well-connected industry insider who wishes not to be directly quoted told me that his own sources inside Saudi Arabia insist that production from Ghawar is now down to less than three million barrels per day, and that the Saudis are maintaining total production at only slowly dwindling levels by producing other fields at maximum rates. This, if true, would be a bombshell: most estimates give production from Ghawar at 5.5 Mb/d.

The three million barrels are riding on triple that in seawater. And just like the great oil fields in the Gulf of Mexico are causing subsidence, so it is in Saudi Arabia. Water isn't the same viscosity as oil. It is a much simpler structure, it being H2O and not a complex of carbon atoms. So when oil is pumped out and water injected, this gradually destabilizes the geology of a region depending on how stable it is. The Arabian Peninsula is being hammered by the huge continent of Africa. Like Iran, it has earthquakes due to this.

It is rather interesting to me that many of the regions we depend on for oil today are geologically dangerous. Or in dangerous weather situations. The early years of oil happened in relatively quiet, easy to handle locactions. So on top of faltering oil pumping we have a rather active earth and even more active weather system, makes it all very fragile, very responsive to events.

And the chief events are still human-generated. Bush wants war with Iran. Israel wants Iran destroyed or under their boot heels. So the price of oil will only go up and up and up. I see no reason for it to go down. The oil lords don't care. They get filthy rich went things go bad. The Hubbert Oil Peak will make the the richest people on earth, bar none. The only way we can stop them is to stop using oil for everything.

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