There's No Oil Shortage

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT Let me dig out that story here and then go back to the phonecalls. It's in The Economist, which is a British publication, magazine, pretty high repute, and the title of the story, "A Bottomless Beer Mug: Why the World is not Running Out of Oil." Let me just read to you an excerpt.

"Peter O'Dell of Rotterdam's Erasmus University points out that since 1971, over 1500 billion barrels of oil have been added to our worldwide reserves. Over the same 35-year period, under 800 billion barrels were consumed. One can argue for a world which has been running into oil rather than running out of it. What makes the estimates go up continuously is a combination of economics and innovation." Let me give you a word for that. It's called capitalism. "The IEA explains the process this way. Reserves are constantly revised in line with new discoveries, changes in prices, and technological advances. These revisions invariably add to the reserve base. A few decades ago the average oil recovery rate from reservoirs was 20%. Thanks to remarkable advances in technology this has risen to about 35% today." Let me give you another word for "advances in technology." It's called "capitalism." Capitalism is out there finding all this oil. He also says this under the section called The New Age of Discovery. "But there is a more practical fallacy embedded in the gloomy forecast, too. 'I challenge the idea that the era of discovery is over in oil,' says one expert. Thanks to the Cold War and other political constraints on western investment, much of the world has yet to be explored with the aid of the latest technologies. Most of the oil still undiscovered thanks to the Cold War and other political constraints on western investment, called environmentalism. New word for political constraints on western investment, environmentalism. Already, the industry, (the oil industry), is exploring underwater at depths that were unimaginable a decade or two ago. In the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere, oil rigs now float atop 3,000 meters, or 10,000 feet of water. These marvels of engineering [capitalism] are stuffed with the latest in robotics, electronic sensors, and satellite equipment using fancy multilateral wells that twist and turn in all directions, they can hit giant underwater oil pockets miles away from the rigs."

There's more oil being discovered out there. It's just a question of profitability and getting it, and eliminating the political constraints of western investment, i.e., environmentalism. Because that's what's holding us back. There's so much oil out there that we have enough that we could go get on our own, that we wouldn't need to be nearly as dependent on the Saudis and other foreign sources as we are. But it is my contention, folks, that the people on the left in this country who are bemoaning our dependence on foreign oil actually wish to encourage it. They want us held hostage, particularly when a Republican is in the White House.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Mark in Midland, Texas, it's your turn. Welcome to the program, sir.

CALLER: We just wanted to let you know, not only are they drilling offshore now in deeper depths, but I'm actually in the oil industry, and here in Midland, Texas, which is the only place that you're more popular than George W. Bush, I think he's the only man that is as popular as you are out here, but we are drilling in areas out here horizontally that are thought to have been drained years and years ago. So there's an awful lot of technology moving forward because the price will dictate it now.

RUSH: But how much opposition do you face? How many hoops and hurdles do you have to jump through to get your process restarted?

CALLER: Well, there's quite a bit of government opposition even with the current administration. We do a lot of drilling on federal lands and it just takes forever to get permits to get things drilled, but overall things have been better since Bush has been in, but it's obviously still just a matter of time.

RUSH: Well, it's a matter of time. It's a matter of necessity. But it's interesting to note the obstacles in your way generally come from liberals in government. You know, there's all kinds of liberals that are in permanent positions in these bureaucracies like the EPA.

RUSH: The EPA is probably the primary bureaucracy you deal with in trying to bring this oil out. And believe me, it's just like the state department, they've got people in there, career people been there a long time that openly despise the president's policies, openly despise the president for not signing Kyoto and this sort of thing, all over the place. But it's a sign also that all these discoveries are taking place, and that we are going to get the oil eventually. It's a sign of triumph over all of these environmentalist wackos, despite their best efforts. The way to explain this is this guy is in business. He's in Midland, Texas. He's in the business. It's a tough business. Domestic oil is a tough business. They've done their best to shut it down, cap wells back in the seventies when the price skyrocketed, and there was no way that domestic oil could compete on the world market given the production costs and so forth. But what's happening is, what you need to consider is, that conservation, while laudable, and while conservation is of course makes sense, it's not the answer to fuel an ever-growing economy. You have to have new discoveries and if an economy is going to grow, all aspects of it must grow, and especially that aspect that provides the fuel. Whether people want to admit it or not, fuel and oil are the -- well, oil is the fuel of democracy. You take oil out of our equation, like fossil fuels out of our equation, out of our economy, and you tell me the number of businesses that are going to survive as they currently are. You talk about staggering, and yet there are people out there that are attempting to get this done over time, not overnight, but over time, and that's not the answer to our problems. And of course all of this business of conservation and hybrid cars, it's all based on the fact that, "We don't have much oil left, we're going to have to do something fast." It's just the opposite. There's all kinds of oil out there so then the environmentalists say, "Well, it's polluting, it's dirty, it's like filthy," blah, blah, blah, "it's exploitative," all of that, and yet it is what our society is built on, and the world's as well. As long as there's plentiful supply we continue to make progress in cleaning up our messes. We're now able to drill in places that actually provide interesting cohabit.

Anybody ever read that book by Thomas Gold, theorizing that oil is a by-product of microbial activity and is therefore a renewable resource? Excerpt of interview below:

INTERVIEWER: Your most controversial idea is the non-biological origin of natural gas and oil. You put forth the position that dinosaurs and plants and the fossils from those living beings are not the origin of oil and natural gas. Your theory was first publicly referenced in a book by your colleague, the late Fred Hoyle, one of the world’s leading physicists and astronomers, in which Hoyle had a chapter entitled “Gold’s Ore Theory,” the ore referring to the porous spaces in the Earth. What first prompted you to suggest that oil and natural gas is generated from a chemical substance in the crust of the Earth?

GOLD: The astronomers have been able to find that hydrocarbons, as oil, gas and coal are called, occur on many other planetary bodies. They are a common substance in the universe. You find it in the kind of gas clouds that made systems like our solar system. You find large quantities of hydrocarbons in them. Is it reasonable to think that our little Earth, one of the planets, contains oil and gas for reasons that are all its own and that these other bodies have it because it was built into them when they were born?

INTERVIEWER: That question makes a lot of sense. After all, they didn’t have dinosaurs and ferns on Jupiter to produce oil and gas?

GOLD: That’s right. Yet, for some reason my theory was not heard. The old theory that it was all made from fossils had become so firmly established that when the astronomers had perfectly definitive evidence on most of the other planets, it was just ignored, especially by the petroleum geologists who had, by then, called these things “fossil fuels.” So once they had a name, then every body believed it.

INTERVIEWER: The oil geologists have carved a niche for themselves and they are perceived now to “know more” about how oil was supposedly formed from dinosaur bones than anybody. However, you have taken your theory (which argues against the traditional theory) and have gone one step further by saying that there is a biosphere; that living entities (fungi, microbes, etc.) are not necessarily just the ones we see on the surface of the Earth but that living creatures are deep in the Earth which could have given rise to creatures on the surface.

GOLD: I will tell you why this had to be so and why I became convinced. In the whole petroleum and coal story, there is this extraordinary paradox that all of these substances contain some biological material. But the chemistry in detail fits it better, as many chemists have said, with the theory of a primordial hydrocarbon mixture (say an oil or gas mixture) to which biological products have been added. That was one aspect that has been quite firmly noted by many Nobel laureate chemists and others.

INTERVIEWER: So every time they find oil deep in the ground and they analyze it chemically, they are effectively supporting your theory?

GOLD: Absolutely. That has been known, also, for quite a large number of years since the mid-1950s.

INTERVIEWER: Human skull fossils have been found in anthracite coal in Pennsylvania. The official theory of the development of coal will not accept that reality, since human beings were not around when anthracite coal was formed.

GOLD: That’s right. Coal was formed millions of years ago.

INTERVIEWER: However, you cannot mistake the fact that these are human fossils. Nonetheless, your theory explains how this could come about.

GOLD: The La Breatarpits in Los Angeles have saber toothed tigers and all kinds of things in them. But the only thing which, at the present time, you can see anything that would make coal of the kind that we mine (usually at a very shallow level) are the big tar pits and tar lakes, such as the one at La Brea and ones in Trinidad.

The coal we dig is hard, brittle stuff. It was once a liquid, because we find embedded in the middle of a six-foot seam of coal such things as a delicate wing of some animal or a leaf of a plant. They are undestroyed, absolutely preserved, with every cell in that fossil filled with exactly the same coal as all the coal on the outside. A hard, brittle coal is not going to get into each cell of a delicate leaf without destroying it. So obviously that stuff was a thin liquid at one time which gradually hardened.

The only thing we find now on the Earth that would do that is petroleum, which gradually becomes stiffer and harder. That is the only logical explanation for the origin of coal. So the fact that coal contains fossils does not prove that it is a fossil fuel; it proves exactly the opposite. Those fossils you find in coal prove that coal is not made from those fossils. How could you take a forest and mulch it all up so that it is a completely featureless big black substance and then find one leaf in it that is perfectly preserved? That is absolute nonsense.

INTERVIEWER: Where then does the carbon base come from that produces all of this?

GOLD: Petroleum and coal were made from materials in which heavy hydrocarbons were common components. We know that because the meteorites are the sort of debris left over from the formations of the planets and those contain carbon in unoxidized form as hydrocarbons as oil and coal-like particles. We find that in one large class of meteorites and we find that equally on many of the other planetary bodies in the solar system. So it’s pretty clear that when the Earth formed it contained a lot of carbon material built into it.

INTERVIEWER: Your book points out that there are all sorts of life forms within the Earth.

GOLD: It was an unthinkable thing, when this discovery was made, that there were life forms that did not depend on life on the surface, such as the process called photosynthesis where we find chemical energies created from the sunlight. That had been thought to be the only way life was to be supported. And here we find gasses and liquids coming up from cracks in the ocean floor which feed enormously intense forms of life, which includes quite large creatures. It is only because we found and saw some of these large creatures that this was discovered. However, the principal things that are living there are microbial, which feed the large creatures.

INTERVIEWER: To verify your theories, you participated in the drilling of an unusual oil well in Sweden. Please tell us about that.

GOLD: I was responsible for initiating the drilling of two quite deep wells in a huge meteorite crater in central Sweden. The reason I was interested in that was be cause it was in pure granitic rock with not a stitch of any sediment—nothing biological, just hard brittle rock.

To the average oil geologist that kind of area would be a wasteland.

They thought I was absolutely crazy to get the Swedes to drill there.

We were not able to produce commercial quantities of oil, because of the bacteriological content which clogged up the wells, but the bacteria which were living there were on the oil that was coming up. The bacteria that were captured at the various levels were just exactly those that would only reproduce at the elevated temperatures that, of course, occur at the various levels. There was no question that these were microbes from down there that were living, in fact, on the oil and gas as their principal food source and that this was their supply of energy.

Let me tell you why I was convinced. We first pulled up 80 barrels of oil, so this was not just trace amounts. Yet, I had been told by I don’t know how many traditionalists that this was an absolutely mad place to look for oil.

Meanwhile, based on the Swedish results, the Russians have drilled 300 deep holes in granitic rock of this type in Russia and found oil in most of them. The White Tiger field off the coast of Vietnam is producing at a very good rate now from granitic-based rock, so we know that this whole story is correct.

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