You might know that slight feeling of panic if after driving a long distance, you look at the gas gauge only to see the needle hovering just above “E” while a glance forward reveals no gas station. “I should have stopped when I passed that last one,” you think. That’s the trouble with a finite gas tank. But, of course, you can no more drive around with an internal combustion engine attached by a hose to a refinery than you can attached by an extension cord to your electric car. Imagine untangling the latter after you run several errands.
Finite resources. Yeah! They’re a problem. Just when you think you can crest the hill, you realize you might not have sufficient energy for the task. If you could only make it to the top, you can coast the rest of the way.
Even on a flat landscape you can even encounter the problem of finite resources. That’s the way of the world. Sometime and somewhere you will—we all will—run out of resources. But not just yet. As a fourth-grader, I heard my teacher say that we will run out of coal, oil, and natural gas before the end of the twentieth century. I wish she were still around. I’d like to take her on a tour of the Marcellus Shale gas wells in Pennsylvania and Ohio or the oil wells in the Bakken Formation of North Dakota, where a large (over 30%) percentage of the natural gas was simply “flared” in the first and into the second decade of this century. The North Dakota Geological Survey estimates the Bakken reserves at more than 200 billion barrels, with a possible recovery as high as 50%. Even if the recovery is lower, say 10% or 20 billion barrels, that quantity is far larger than my fourth-grade teacher could have imagined.
Colonel Edwin L. Drake (He wasn’t a colonel) drilled the first oil well in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859. With the technology at hand, he hit oil at 69 feet. Lucky. Had he drilled a little distance from his find, he would have had to go deeper. The oil in the layer of rock he discovered was tapering beneath him. Within the time frame of the Civil War, Titusville and nearby Oil City looked like a city of wells, but with limited drilling technology, the recoverable reserves dwindled. Drake would probably be more amazed than my fourth-grade teacher if he could witness the current production.
Remember the time when you thought you were on empty only to find that you still had some gas in the tank, that your 18-gallon tank took only 16.5 gallons when you stopped to fill up? Sometimes, even geologists can underestimate the amount of gas in their tank. In Roadside Geology of Pennsylvania by Bradford B. Van Diver, you’ll find this sentence: “To be sure, much recoverable oil and gas still remain in the ground, but they will certainly run out in only a few tens of years, even with new and better recovery methods” (38).* Van Diver includes that sentence in the 2001 third printing of the original 1990 publication. In 2015 the Marcellus
Shale yielded 14.4 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day, and beneath Ohio lies another untapped source of natural gas and oil in the Utica Shale.**
You might not care, but the discovery of oil and natural gas resources is a lesson for us living our finite lives on a finite world: Your gauge isn’t always accurate when it points to “E.” I’ll make it a personal lesson. Short of taking one’s own life, very few know the moment when they will run up against their ultimate finiteness. I think of my own father, who lived to be 97. As he said, “I never thought I would live to be 97.”
Yes, he ran into his ultimate finite barrier as we all will at different ages. But none of us has to give up on the potential for reserves we can discover as he found on his way to age 97 and a marriage that lasted more than 75 years (they died the same year). Like him and the gas and oil companies that still search for additional reserves, you will surprise yourself with new energy resources and will probably discover that even when the energy tank seems to be empty, there’s often still something left.
And now the big one. Some group just announced that we are at two-minutes to midnight on the clock of annihilation. The so-called Doomsday Clock is supposed to be a warning, one much like that of my fourth-grade teacher’s. Physicist Lawrence Krauss of Arizona State University seems to be the current authority on our finiteness: “We present the clock not so much as doom and gloom, but as an opportunity to get government and public discussing the important issues.” He also says, “We’ve mad the clear statement that we feel the world is getting more dangerous.”***
Well, of course. I assume that had Krauss lived in 1348, he would write that we are already past midnight, what with the plague’s spreading like wildfire. Krauss’s group says the tension between the USA and N. Korea plus greenhouse gas emissions are the reason for the “two-minute warning.” I don’t know how old Krauss is, but those of us who listened to President Kennedy explain the Cuba Missile Crisis certainly thought we were only a minute away from doom.
There will always be a cause for panic, such as a gas gauge needle pointing to empty, a proclamation by those in-the-know that a limitation has been reached, or a threat from either near or far. Somehow and often, the empty tank gets us to the next gas station. Will there be a time when we are stranded short of our destination? Definitely, but like my dad, that time and place might be much farther along the road than we predict.
*Van Diver, Bradford B. Roadside Geology of Pennsylvania. Mountain Press Publishing Company, 1990, Third Printing January 2001. This is an excellent series of paperbacks that I recommend for travelers who are unfamiliar with the landscapes of the various states.
**Geology.com online at https://geology.com/articles/marcellus-shale.shtml
***Science as Fact Staff, January 28, 2018, Keepers of the Doomsday Clock Say We’re Now Only 2 Minutes to Midnight, Science Alert online at https://www.sciencealert.com/keepers-of-doomsday-clock-put-closest-mark-midnight-since-cold-war-2-minutes
Finite resources. Yeah! They’re a problem. Just when you think you can crest the hill, you realize you might not have sufficient energy for the task. If you could only make it to the top, you can coast the rest of the way.
Even on a flat landscape you can even encounter the problem of finite resources. That’s the way of the world. Sometime and somewhere you will—we all will—run out of resources. But not just yet. As a fourth-grader, I heard my teacher say that we will run out of coal, oil, and natural gas before the end of the twentieth century. I wish she were still around. I’d like to take her on a tour of the Marcellus Shale gas wells in Pennsylvania and Ohio or the oil wells in the Bakken Formation of North Dakota, where a large (over 30%) percentage of the natural gas was simply “flared” in the first and into the second decade of this century. The North Dakota Geological Survey estimates the Bakken reserves at more than 200 billion barrels, with a possible recovery as high as 50%. Even if the recovery is lower, say 10% or 20 billion barrels, that quantity is far larger than my fourth-grade teacher could have imagined.
Colonel Edwin L. Drake (He wasn’t a colonel) drilled the first oil well in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859. With the technology at hand, he hit oil at 69 feet. Lucky. Had he drilled a little distance from his find, he would have had to go deeper. The oil in the layer of rock he discovered was tapering beneath him. Within the time frame of the Civil War, Titusville and nearby Oil City looked like a city of wells, but with limited drilling technology, the recoverable reserves dwindled. Drake would probably be more amazed than my fourth-grade teacher if he could witness the current production.
Remember the time when you thought you were on empty only to find that you still had some gas in the tank, that your 18-gallon tank took only 16.5 gallons when you stopped to fill up? Sometimes, even geologists can underestimate the amount of gas in their tank. In Roadside Geology of Pennsylvania by Bradford B. Van Diver, you’ll find this sentence: “To be sure, much recoverable oil and gas still remain in the ground, but they will certainly run out in only a few tens of years, even with new and better recovery methods” (38).* Van Diver includes that sentence in the 2001 third printing of the original 1990 publication. In 2015 the Marcellus
Shale yielded 14.4 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day, and beneath Ohio lies another untapped source of natural gas and oil in the Utica Shale.**
You might not care, but the discovery of oil and natural gas resources is a lesson for us living our finite lives on a finite world: Your gauge isn’t always accurate when it points to “E.” I’ll make it a personal lesson. Short of taking one’s own life, very few know the moment when they will run up against their ultimate finiteness. I think of my own father, who lived to be 97. As he said, “I never thought I would live to be 97.”
Yes, he ran into his ultimate finite barrier as we all will at different ages. But none of us has to give up on the potential for reserves we can discover as he found on his way to age 97 and a marriage that lasted more than 75 years (they died the same year). Like him and the gas and oil companies that still search for additional reserves, you will surprise yourself with new energy resources and will probably discover that even when the energy tank seems to be empty, there’s often still something left.
And now the big one. Some group just announced that we are at two-minutes to midnight on the clock of annihilation. The so-called Doomsday Clock is supposed to be a warning, one much like that of my fourth-grade teacher’s. Physicist Lawrence Krauss of Arizona State University seems to be the current authority on our finiteness: “We present the clock not so much as doom and gloom, but as an opportunity to get government and public discussing the important issues.” He also says, “We’ve mad the clear statement that we feel the world is getting more dangerous.”***
Well, of course. I assume that had Krauss lived in 1348, he would write that we are already past midnight, what with the plague’s spreading like wildfire. Krauss’s group says the tension between the USA and N. Korea plus greenhouse gas emissions are the reason for the “two-minute warning.” I don’t know how old Krauss is, but those of us who listened to President Kennedy explain the Cuba Missile Crisis certainly thought we were only a minute away from doom.
There will always be a cause for panic, such as a gas gauge needle pointing to empty, a proclamation by those in-the-know that a limitation has been reached, or a threat from either near or far. Somehow and often, the empty tank gets us to the next gas station. Will there be a time when we are stranded short of our destination? Definitely, but like my dad, that time and place might be much farther along the road than we predict.
*Van Diver, Bradford B. Roadside Geology of Pennsylvania. Mountain Press Publishing Company, 1990, Third Printing January 2001. This is an excellent series of paperbacks that I recommend for travelers who are unfamiliar with the landscapes of the various states.
**Geology.com online at https://geology.com/articles/marcellus-shale.shtml
***Science as Fact Staff, January 28, 2018, Keepers of the Doomsday Clock Say We’re Now Only 2 Minutes to Midnight, Science Alert online at https://www.sciencealert.com/keepers-of-doomsday-clock-put-closest-mark-midnight-since-cold-war-2-minutes
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