We take water for granted. And why not? We turn a tap and out it comes. But that’s going to have to change…
— from ‘Why Water is the New Oil’, an interview with author Alex Prud’homme in Rolling Stone magazine, July 2011.
Numerous contemporary commentators have been assuring us, recently, that “Water is the New Oil”.
A statement like, “Water is the New Oil” suggests a few things.
- Like oil, water exists in a limited quantity.
- Due to growing demand, water is being transformed from something we ‘take for granted’ into a high-price commodity.
- Valuable commodities — like oil — sometimes come under the control of multi-national corporations, and the same thing will happen with water.
Let’s dig a little deeper into these assumptions. There are many oh-so-important ways in which water is not “the New Oil”, and I wish all the alarmists writing for the Lamestream Media would get that through their thick skulls.
Granted, water is something of a chameleon. Yes, it can be pumped from the ground, like oil. But it can also fall from the sky, something that oil usually does not do.
I could rest my case right there, but I won’t.
When I turn on the kitchen tap, water comes out to fill my tea kettle or coffee pot. Oil has never come out of my kitchen tap, nor do I expect it to, in the future. I really cannot imagine making coffee with petroleum; it usually tastes bad enough in the first place.
When the oil companies extract the oil from the ground, that’s pretty much it. The oil gets refined, sold, and burned up… never to be replaced. But whenever I turn on my water tap, most of the water goes into the sewage system, which then goes back into a river somewhere (slightly polluted) and then flows into the ocean, where it sits around getting salty. Then it evaporates into the atmosphere and makes clouds, which then cause rain and snow, and the water ends up, like magic, back in my water tap.
In other words, oil is here today and gone tomorrow. Water is forever… like true love. (Unless the true love is here today and gone tomorrow, which occasionally happens, unfortunately.)
We can easily find more differences between oil and water. According to various internet sources, the world had about 1.73 trillion barrels of crude oil remaining at the end of 2018. Each barrel equals about 42 gallons, so we have maybe 73 trillion gallons of oil left to squander needlessly. That probably seems like a lot, but don’t be fooled.
According to different internet sources, we have about 333 million cubic miles worth of water on the planet. That comes to about 367 quintillion gallons, which is about 50 million times as much water as we have oil. (You might have to check my math on that one.) And at the rate we’re using the oil, it will pretty much be gone in 50 years… while all 367 quintillion gallons of water will still be sloshing around.
(The word ‘sloshing’ came to mind because the washing machine is running at the moment, in the next room.)
As with certain other human activities — like for example tax collection — oil extraction begins with the “low hanging fruit”… the places where the oil is easiest to pump out of the ground. As these sweet spots get exhausted over time, producers need to tap harder-to-access reserves, which cost more to develop. American shale oil is a case in point. Thirty or forty years ago, few companies paid any attention to shale because they thought we had plenty of conventional oil. As the easy stuff started to run out, the oil companies turned their attention to shale… simply because she was the only gal left in the saloon. (See my little note, above, about true love.)
Deepwater exploration is another case in point. Offshore production has historically moved from shallow waters to ever-deeper deposits, as depletion takes its toll. Then the drilling platforms catch on fire, and we have another great script idea for a Hollywood disaster movie.
As the difficulty level for oil extraction increases, so do costs. When these rise to a point when a company cannot extract the oil at a profit, the deposit becomes “economically unrecoverable”. This is one good reason to take any global oil reserve “estimate” with a grain of salt. (There are many other reasons, but I’m not sure what they are.) No matter what oil reserves the world might have, technically speaking… much of the oil will eventually be too expensive to recover.
And when the the price of oil eventually goes shooting through the ceiling, I will simply turn on my tap and make another pot of coffee… and laugh… at the folks who thought Water would be the New Oil.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.