It is called black gold; this dark, viscous, slimy-looking substance which comes gushing out of the bowels of the earth, showering down on the happy faces of the children of enterprise. It is similar to the experience of those intrepid seafarers, who discovered the New World. Oh, the land was always there and the people who lived in it thought it was their home. The oil was always there too and there it would have remained but for the meeting of capital and enterprise – capital to pay for equipment, workers and technology, enterprise to dare.
It was the coming together again of capital and enterprise that led to the invention of the internal combustion engine to make transportation on wheels a boon to all humankind. You could say that oil and the engine to convert it into work/energy is the foundation of the economies of all First World nations.
They call it black gold. We think of gold as that bright shiny metal that artisans convert into sacred vessels like monstrances, chalices and ciboriums, or jewellers into rings, bracelets and necklaces, or the treasury into gold coins for collectors to stow away in iron safes. The coiner of that name knew what he was talking about, for that dark muck out of earth’s belly is the stuff from which great wealth and power is derived, to the joy of OPEC, the oil companies and the shareholders thereof.
Because of its uses as fuel for engines and, the wonderful things that are made from petrochemicals, the demand for oil has been insatiable, which is very nice if you are a producer or shareholder.
There is not enough oil to satisfy the needs of mushrooming populations. So. The oil companies are drilling more and more holes on land and in the sea, in a desperate search for more supplies. So desperate are they that they venture into deeper and deeper waters, not always with a high regard for the safety of people or the environment. The recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a case in point.
Most of the oil for consumption by the rest of the world is produced by countries which have come together in a conglomerate called, OPEC. Without the flow of oil in sufficient quantities to meet the requirements of the non-producing countries, the economies of the latter world be paralyzed. Conscious of this danger, America, whose world position rests on energy independence, has as one of its primary objectives to ensure that there are adequate supplies of energy available outside OPEC. America has also decided to put more emphasis on the development of technology to produce energy from alternate sources like sun and wind. Those who have a stake in oil and its derivatives, especially plastics, cannot take kindly to this shift in national policy.
The reason why technology in producing energy from the other sources is lagging in America is that the oil lobby, which is very wealthy and powerful, oppose it. They know that the supply of oil is exhaustible and that the carbon emission from motor vehicles is harmful to people and the environment but are prepared to wait until there is no more fossil fuel. Another example of people who are blinded by the prospect of profits and pure greed is the drilling of 27,000 oil wells on the sea floor of the Gulf of Mexico and the failure of British Petroleum and Massey Coal Company to adhere to standards of safety. Capital and Enterprise is such a wonderful combination to improve the quality of living of the human race but, when greed enters the picture, the result is “Capitalism gone mad,” as the Mighty Sparrow declares. I mention this last only in passing.
I am happy to see that the united citizenry of Belize is persuading our Prime Minister to declare a moratorium on drilling for oil in the sea inside the Barrier Reef. The citizenry didn’t limit their objection to drilling for oil on the seabed to areas within the reef and, the Prime Minister has not yet declared a moratorium as requested but, he is a consensus politician and it seems that the objectors have the numbers. Come to think of it, if there were a spill from an oil well outside the reef, it would come ashore eventually, so perhaps, the moratorium advocates will include outside the reef drilling as well. I am strongly opposed to the idea of drilling multiple wells in the hope of increasing the probability of striking oil. If we ever decide to drill in the sea, let the oil companies satisfy us that they are not behaving like prospectors for gold. Also they should be limited to drilling in depths where men can descend to correct any mistakes.
I seem to recall that there was a national policy that foreign investment ventures exploiting our natural resources had to have a Belizean component. It was called joint ventures. Shouldn’t that apply to our oil resources? Just a thought.
Finally, has any thought been given to what happens to the earth, after all the reserves of oil in caverns deep down in land and sea has been withdrawn? There is a physical law which says, “Nature abhors a vacuum.” I take this to mean that nature will react to the making of holes by filling them with something. Those astronomical quantities of oil which have been siphoned out of the earth from so many wells since oil was first discovered, must have made some very large holes in the substrata. They must have had, are having, and will continue to have an effect on the earth’s surface. What nature will use to fill these voids is a subject for you to discuss with a geologist of your acquaintance. Unfortunately I know of only one geologist in the Department of Geology and Petroleum, which begs the question. Why is it that a country which reportedly has such vast quantities of oil, has so many attorneys and only one geologist? Who is to be blamed for this? Is it the Church or the State?