Fear an Loathing in Energy Reporting

If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people – including me – would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism – Hunter S. Thompson

I apologize in advance to David Luhnow, who is only a staff writer at the Journal and just so happened to write the wrong article at the wrong time to really tick me off.  He is just an example and I bear no particular ill will towards him…

It's bad enough that this country is forced to endure Criminal Narrators Boosting Crude and their 24-hour sponsored pump-fest.   Bad enough that they choose to give a forum to oil extortionists and peak-oil fanatics while delighting in this plague of high prices that has cost the American people $240Bn a year in windfall profits. 

"The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason." – Hunter S. Thompson

Bad enough that Criminal Narrators Boosting Crude have driven this market into a speculative frenzy where 10 times more barrels of oil are bought and sold every month than can ever be delivered, but we thought we could at least look to the WSJ to provide "fair and balanced" information rather than more "fear and loathing."  My issue with the Journal today is yesterday's A1 article by the aforementioned Mr. Luhnow entitled "DYING GIANT Mexico Tries to Save A Big, Fading Oil Field."

Wow!  Breaking front-page news just when things were calming down in Iran and oil prices looked like they were about to ease off…

But is it news? 

The Cantarell oil field is producing 1.6Mbd and is predicted to go down to 1.4Mbd in 2008, down from a peak of 2.1Mbd, according to Mexico's Pemex, the company that has the drilling rights.  Is this is due to declining production or just doing their share of the overall OPEC cutback?  We don't know for sure but we do know that this decline was announced by Luis Corzo, the head of PEMEX on August 12th, 2004.

Perhaps that's why David Luhnow and the WSJ were able to scoop themselves by running effectively the same story on January 27th,  when oil needed a boost off $54 a barrel or on Feb 9th '06 when the price of oil was falling from $68 to $63, or July 20th '06 when the article was wheeled out again as oil was falling from $78 to $70.  Obviously they pull out the big guns at the Journal whenever oil needs a boost, the timing has as much likelihood of being coincidental as do well-timed stock option grants.

These 4 WSJ articles (or the same article published as "news" 4 times, we won't quibble) spawned 217 other articles using the WSJ as authoritative "proof" of a crisis.  While I'd love to track down each of thes articles and the motivations behind them, I will content myself to whisper from my dark corner of the parking lot "just follow the money."

"So much for Objective Journalism. Don't bother to look for it here — not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms". – Hunter S. Thompson (he may have been wrong about stock market tabulations!)

Production at Cantarell was "boosted" before that through a massive nitrogen injection project that Pemex used to ramp production up from the 1.1Mbd it was producing in its first 5 years of life all the way to a peak output of 2.1Mbd in 2003.  After pulling 2.6Bn barrels out of the field in 4 greedy years, it's no wonder Hubbert enthusiasts are able to point to this as "evidence" of peak oil.  Peak oil?  Certainly not!  Peak Greed, Peak Irresponsible Field Management, Peak Manufactured BS by Peak Oil Fanatics desperate to find something that looks like it proves their case – Absolutely!

The fact is that Cantarell's average production since 1976 has been 1.2Mbd and is currently drifting back down to 1.4Mbd – still an improvement!  Also, the part of Cantarell they are drilling is only 60 meters deep so they are running out of the "easy" oil over there.  Most of the 30-54Bn barrels of reserves (the new administration has lowered the estimates by 24Bn barrels – causing prices to spike) are in 1,500 meter Gulf deposits, hardly a challenge for modern equipment.  The other fact is that other Mexican fields: Ku, Maloob and Zaap – are ramping UP production from 500Kbd now to 800Kbd in 2009, more than offsetting the decline at Cantarell.  Funny how that's never a headline…

"History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullsh*t" – Hunter S. Thompson

Meanwhile natural gas production in the same Cantarell field has hit a record 5.85Bcf per day.  The gas is so plentiful there that Pemex is going to inject it into the fields to boost output instead of more expensive nitrogen that is usually used.

So why does the WSJ feel it necessary to roll out this very slanted article every time oil starts to dip and why do all the peak oil blogs run with it as if it's fresh news every time?  As PT Barnum famously said, "there's a sucker born every minute" and that means that, in just the two month period between the last two articles, 86,400 new suckers came into the market, ready to replace the existing oil roaches as the proverbial bag holders.

The Wall Street Journal is not unaware of the weight they carry in the marketplace.  In fact, they cultivate that image so by running one-sided "fear" articles such as this, they can be nothing less than willing tools and, given the timing, perhaps much worse.  Without a constant environment of fear and worry it would be very difficult indeed for their sponsors to keep selling oil for a $30 "terror premium"

"This blizzard of mind-warping war propaganda out of Washington is building up steam. Monday is Anthrax, Tuesday is Bankruptcy, Friday is Child-Rape, Thursday is Bomb-scares, etc., etc., etc… If we believed all the brutal, frat-boy threats coming out of the White House, we would be dead before Sunday. It is pure and savage terrorism reminiscent of Nazi Germany." – Hunter S. Thompson

The same WSJ article goes on to mention similar "depletion" scenarios in Saudi Arabia's Burgan oil field without bothering to present these facts:  Burgan Field in Kuwait was set on fire by Iraqi forces in 1991 and lost 3 gathering stations but still produces over 1.7Mbd in its 61st year of commercial production.  As I'm sure you know, they don't even have rigs in that feild as the oil literally seeps up through cracks in the ground and they just sort of vacuum it up.  Kuwait Oil Chairman, Al Zanki said, in 2005 that average production in Burgan will fall from historical 2Mbd to 1.7Mbd over the next 30 to 40 years – surely this is earth shaking proof that peak oil has finally arrived! 

The fact is that both Canterell and Burgan are examples of fields that seem to have formed from cracks in the Earth and support the abiotic view of oil production.  Far from peak oil, this field of study suggests that oil is not something we are likely to run out of – EVER – as it is constantly being formed through natural geological processes.  It is very possible that the Saudis do not refuse to disclose figures to mask the DEPLETION of their reserves but, rather the VASTNESS of what is truly available given today's increditble advances in drilling technology.

Rather than go out and solve our numerous supply problems, our government goes out and exacerbates the situation by hoarding oil, starting wars (using over 150Mb a year for the military) and pushing for "alternative fuels" ahead of the much simpler and more immediate approach of conservation and use of, wind, solar and tidal energy that could cut 1/2 of our imports in just a few years (at a cost of far less than the $240Bn per year "terror premium" we are paying now) and, just as importantly, would cut a significant percentage of our greenhouse gas emissions.

Unfortunately, cutting our consumption by 25% would not generate any additional campaign contributions because the $109Bn that conservation would save per year would go into the hands of the American people, not the energy companies or the farmers and, worst of all, it would be a disproportionate redistribution of wealth because a poor person uses just about as much gas as a rich one and the $1,000 saved by every American family would mean nothing to the Kennebunkport crowd.

"What the hell is going on here? How could this once-proud nation have changed so much, so drastically, in only a little more than two years. In what seems like the blink of an eye, this George Bush has brought us from a prosperous nation at peace to a broke nation at war." – Hunter S. Thompson 

We used to be nation of doers, of problem solvers but oil companies spent more money last year buying their own skyrocketing stock than they did investing in exploration and production.  If Kennedy had asked the big three oil companies to put a man on the moon in 1969, you can be damn sure that footage would have been faked! 

Only with the unquestioning cooperation of the mainstream media do we contine to find this situation acceptable.  As Orwell said in "1984"  "Don't you see that the whole aim of (their "Newspeak" media) is to narrow the range of thought?…  By the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a (rebellious) conversation as we are having now?…The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy (following the Party) means not thinking—not needing to think."

"We are turning into a nation of whimpering slaves to Fear — fear of war, fear of poverty, fear of random terrorism, fear of getting down-sized or fired because of the plunging economy, fear of getting evicted for bad debts, or suddenly getting locked up in a military detention camp on vague charges of being a Terrorist sympathizer." – Hunter S. Thompson

There was of course one man that tried to get us to start conserving energy, two men actually, and you must read this hilarious and tragic Republican Senate Policy Committee document tearing Clinton and Gore apart for trying to do something about global warming and energy consumption in 1997 because it would increase the price of gas by "13 cents per gallon of gasoline" in 2012.  Way back in 1977, Jimmy Carter declared US energy waste to be "the moral equivalent of war."  He went so far as to dim the lights at the White House and turn-off outside lighting on the District of Columbia monuments.  Republican nay-sayers raucously criticized Carter for his vulgar expression of defeatism.  While they laughed at his attempt to address the complex subject of energy usage, they squandered the time needed to bring the U.S. energy policy into the 21^st century.

US energy companies contributed over $100M in 2000 alone to make sure Al Gore didn't take a seat in the Oval Office.

"There was one exact moment, in fact, when I knew for sure that Al Gore would never be President of the United States, no matter what the experts were saying — and that was when the whole Bush family suddenly appeared on TV and openly scoffed at the idea of Gore winning Florida. It was Nonsense, said the Candidate, Utter nonsense. . . Anybody who believed Bush had lost Florida was a Fool. The Media, all of them, were Liars & Dunces or treacherous whores trying to sabotage his victory. . . Here was the whole bloody Family laughing & hooting & sneering at the dumbness of the whole world on National TV. The old man was the real tip-off. The leer on his face was almost frightening. It was like looking into the eyes of a tall hyena with a living sheep in its mouth. The sheep's fate was sealed, and so was Al Gore's." – Hunter S. Thompson 

And so was ours.