Behind the Curve
The New York Times has an interesting piece of copy out on its Freakonomics blog this week.
In it, author Stephen J. Dubner points out, quite accurately, I believe, how slow the media is to pick up on obvious trends in the energy industry.
In the process, investors, consumers and energy industry followers don’t get the straight scoop, and any decisions they make on oil and energy based on what they’re reading, hearing or watching in the traditional media is giving them a false picture of what’s actually going on in the industry. On the other side of the coin, in actuality, the oil industry is carrying the world’s energy needs on its back, and is carrying forward some revolutionary energy-efficient extraction methods that have yet to grace the evening newscasts or make the cover of Time magazine.
Says Dubner: “It is always interesting to watch what happens when the media latches onto a given issue and then, as the reality on the ground evolves — sometimes radically — the media fails to catch up to, or even monitor, the changes. This means the public is stuck with an outdated version of conventional wisdom which, even if it were true in the first place, is no longer so.”
His point is that, during last year’s run-up in prices for a barrel of oil, the media went out of this way to paint a picture of financial Armageddon due to high oil prices (which, to be fair, did reach $150 per barrel at its highest point).
The media concocted a fairy tale where the CEO’s of Exxon, Shell, and British Petroleum, to name a few, could manipulate their giant oil-price machines to push the price of a barrel of oil to as high as they wanted to.
As ensuing events have proved, that contrived theme couldn’t withstand reality; as much a fable as the Easter Bunny and the ability of leprechauns to locate gold.
Now, oil prices are 60%-70% off of those highs and, all of a sudden, nobody is talking about “peak oil” any longer. And we in the oil industry are back, more committed than ever, to find as much oil we can, as efficiently as we can, while keeping prices reasonable for cash-strapped consumers. But these efforts are either invisible to the media or, worse, too visible for a media cheerleading campaign geared to demonizing oil while championing salon favorites like wind and solar, which have yet to prove they work.
In a separate article, this one by Guy Chazan from The Wall Street Journal, called “Squeeze That Sponge”, Chazon writes how far ahead the oil industry is in front of the mainstream media when it comes to new efforts to solve the world’s energy problems.
Says Chazon, “Despite the engineering advances of the past century, nearly two-thirds of crude still gets left in the ground. So oil companies are raising the ante, investing billions of dollars in cutting-edge technology to increase the amount of crude they can tap. The potential rewards are huge: Raising the average recovery rate world-wide to 50 percent from 35 percent would boost the world’s recoverable oil by about 1.2 trillion barrels — equal to the whole of today’s proven reserves, the International Energy Agency says.”
The Journal article also details new techniques engineered by oil companies that, quite creatively, use carbon dioxide (by pumping into reservoirs) to get more oil. Other strategies including switching to saline, instead of salt-water, for oil flooding strategies (it increases recovery rates), and deploying microbes to reduce the viscosity of heavy oil.
These techniques are effective, environmentally friendly, and way ahead of their time. But they aren’t being mentioned in the media, either.
Thankfully, the media continues to behind the curve and, judging by the plummeting readership revenues of major newspapers and declining audiences for broadcast news, consumers are beginning to understand that.
As the real story gets out, people will begin to understand the commitment and dedication that oil companies are bringing to the energy markets – even if they continue to go unreported by the media.
