What If We Never Run Out of Oil? - Charles C. Mann - The Atlantic
Churchill fired the starting gun, but all of the Western powers joined
the race to control Middle Eastern oil. Britain clawed past France,
Germany, and the Netherlands, only to be overtaken by the United States,
which secured oil concessions in Turkey, Iraq, Bahrain, Kuwait, and
Saudi Arabia. The struggle created a long-lasting intercontinental snarl
of need and resentment. Even as oil-consuming nations intervened in the
affairs of oil-producing nations, they seethed at their powerlessness;
oil producers exacted huge sums from oil consumers but chafed at having
to submit to them. Decades of turmoil—oil shocks in 1973 and 1979,
failed programs for “energy independence,” two wars in Iraq—have left
unchanged this fundamental, Churchillian dynamic, a toxic mash of anger
and dependence that often seems as basic to global relations as the
rotation of the sun.
All of this was called into question by the voyage of the Chikyu
(“Earth”), a $540 million Japanese deep-sea drilling vessel that looks
like a billionaire’s yacht with a 30-story oil derrick screwed into its
back. The Chikyu, a floating barrage of superlatives, is the
biggest, glitziest, most sophisticated research vessel ever constructed,
and surely the only one with a landing pad for a 30-person helicopter.
The central derrick houses an enormous floating drill with a six-mile
“string” that has let the Chikyu delve deeper beneath the ocean floor than any other ship.
The Chikyu, which first set out in 2005, was initially intended
to probe earthquake-generating zones in the planet’s mantle, a subject
of obvious interest to seismically unstable Japan. Its present
undertaking was, if possible, of even greater importance: trying to
develop an energy source that could free not just Japan but much of the
world from the dependence on Middle Eastern oil that has bedeviled
politicians since Churchill’s day.
In the 1970s, geologists discovered crystalline natural gas—methane
hydrate, in the jargon—beneath the seafloor. Stored mostly in broad,
shallow layers on continental margins, methane hydrate exists in immense
quantities; by some estimates, it is twice as abundant as all other
fossil fuels combined. Despite its plenitude, gas hydrate was long
subject to petroleum-industry skepticism. These deposits—water molecules
laced into frigid cages that trap “guest molecules” of natural gas—are
strikingly unlike conventional energy reserves. Ice you can set on fire!
Who could take it seriously? But as petroleum prices soared,
undersea-drilling technology improved, and geological surveys
accumulated, interest rose around the world. The U.S. Department of
Energy has been funding a methane-hydrate research program since 1982.
Nowhere has the interest been more serious than Japan. Unlike Britain
and the United States, the Japanese failed to become “the owners, or at
any rate, the controllers” of any significant amount of oil. (Not that
Tokyo didn’t try: it bombed Pearl Harbor mainly to prevent the U.S. from
blocking its attempted conquest of the oil-rich Dutch East Indies.)
Today, Churchill’s nightmare has come true for Japan: it is a military
and industrial power almost wholly dependent on foreign energy. It is
the world’s third-biggest net importer of crude oil, the second-biggest
importer of coal, and the biggest importer of liquefied natural gas. Not
once has a Japanese politician expressed happiness at this state of
affairs.
Japan’s methane-hydrate program began in 1995. Its scientists quickly
focused on the Nankai Trough, about 200 miles southwest of Tokyo, an
undersea earthquake zone where two pieces of the Earth’s crust jostle
each other. Step by step, y
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