It is common knowledge now that America’s energy-dependent economy is facing radical change. We are in the midst of economic, geopolitical, and environmental turmoil—a triple threat that is deeply rooted in our use of fossil fuels. Many countries face these issues, but Americans stand to lose more than the people of any other nation given our formidable appetite for energy. Last year, we used roughly 25 barrels of oil per person; Europeans, by comparison, used 17, and the citizens of Japan used just 14.
Nevertheless, we are reminded as frequently by ExxonMobil commercials as we are by White House officials and eco-activists that our nation has begun the shift away from ancient energy sources toward cleaner, homegrown sources of power and fuel. We regularly hear menacing threats and utopian promises—on the one hand, global warming is well on its way to producing irreversible coastal floods and mega-drought, and we are in the throes of an “energy crisis”; on the other, we are in “an era of change,” heading toward a “green revolution.” We are told that the global recession we’ve faced in recent years is an opportunity to reengineer our industries and infrastructure with green technology. “We will rebuild, we will recover,” President Obama has said, “and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before.” He has vowed to “lay a new foundation for economic growth by beginning a new era of energy exploration in America.” We are promised a future in which solar panels will glitter across rooftops, wind turbines will whirl across prairies, super-efficient cars will glide silently along our roads, and new clean industries will provide millions of jobs to a “green-collar” workforce that will repair our aging infrastructure and revive our struggling economy.
For most of us, however, America’s energy landscape still feels like distant and impersonal terrain. We wonder how those grand threats and promises will translate into action. Very little reporting tells America’s energy story in human terms. Very little paints America’s love affair with energy in broad strokes—portraying our roles as a global energy consumer, polluter and innovator. Books on energy tend to be dense and technical; they often examine the economic, scientific, and political aspects of energy, but they rarely explain what these changes mean in our lives in the most practical, personal sense. They complain about the mess we’re in, but few explain how we got ourselves here and, in simple terms, how we can climb our way out.
The father of a friend of mine, who is now a successful businessman, defined his approach to problem solving in terms he learned through a painful experience as a boy growing up on a farm in Ohio. When a cow gets stuck in a ditch, first you have to get the cow out of the ditch. Second, you have to figure out how the cow got into the ditch. Third, you have to figure out how to stop the cow from getting into the ditch in the future.
I want, like a majority of citizens of the industrialized world, to get myself out of the ditch of fossil fuel dependence. But to do it right, I—and we—need to understand the roots of the problem, to understand how, during the twentieth century, fossil fuels became so thoroughly woven into the fabric of our lives. We need to recognize what our options are going forward—how America as a whole could build an actual, factual “green” future, free from fossil fuels, changing the way people live not only at home, but worldwide.
This book searches America’s past for clues to understand our global future. It tracks the meteoric growth of our superpower thanks to fossil fuels. It describes how cheap fuel and electricity built our sprawling cities, unequalled military might, and major industries—from automobiles and agriculture to plastics and computing—and seeped into the fibers of our daily lives. It examines how the oil and coal that built us up now threaten our ruin, tainted as they are with political strife and corruption, and pollutants that kindle environmental chaos. It also looks forward—to the transfusion of clean and renewable power sources that are beginning to course through the copper veins and combustion-engine heart of our nation.
The story of America is, in sum, the story of a power trip; to understand it, I had to go on my own. In January 2007, I set out to explore the most extreme frontiers of our energy landscape—from its deepest wells to its tallest towers. I wanted to pull at the threads of connection between fossil fuels and everyday American life and see what places they led me to, however strange or unexpected. They led me, as it turned out, to some very strange spots, from deep-sea oil rigs to Kansas cornfields, NASCAR tracks to high-priced plastic surgeons, dank city manholes to Texas wind farms, Pentagon offices to my local produce aisle.
I saw places where the old energy system is flaming out and the new system—smart, efficient, whisper-quiet, and high-performance—is sparking to life. I interviewed architects of the oil-guzzling twentieth-century economy—great and innovative in their own right—and pioneers of tomorrow’s new machine.
My goal as I describe this journey is not to cast judgment on what has gone wrong in America’s energy landscape—as I have said, I’m guilty myself of buying into and even relishing it. Instead, I want simply to understand this landscape, and to celebrate its successes for all their unintended consequences. It was, after all, American ingenuity that led us down the path of fossil fuel dependence. So I set out to discover how that same ingenuity can change our future course. The following pages are a chronicle of both journeys through the fast-changing energy frontier—America’s, and my own.
One
LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF OIL
The Story of the American Century
J.R.: There’s nothing realer than oil, that’s for sure.
Sue Ellen: Not to you darlin’, except perhaps money.
J.R.: Same thing, honey, same thing.
—Dallas, season two
1 Over a Barrel THE BOOM AND BUST OF AMERICA’S DOMESTIC OIL EMPIRE
The oil field known as “Jack” is located 175 miles off the coast of Louisiana, below 7,200 feet of water and another 30,000 feet under the seabed, occupying a geological layer formed in the Cenozoic Era more than 60 million years ago. This layer—the “lower tertiary”—lies beneath waters far deeper than those surrounding any other Gulf of Mexico oil discovery, which is one reason why many in the industry initially dismissed it as too remote to exploit. But in 2006, Chevron defied the odds when its engineers drilled a test well at Jack and discovered that oil could flow from this ancient sediment at profitable rates. Their success opened up a new drilling frontier—a monster oil patch holding between 3 billion and 15 billion barrels of crude. It was hailed as the largest discovery in the United States since 1968—a discovery potentially big enough to boost national oil reserves up to 50 percent.
Since then, global oil companies have been pouring billions of dollars into these so-called ultradeep waters of the Gulf in pursuit of the region’s buried treasure. Jack is among a cluster of nearly a dozen new fields there—including “Blind Faith,” “Great White,” and “Cascade”—that companies are now tapping in waters from 4,000 to 8,000 feet deep and in sedimentary rock extending between 1 and 6 miles below the seabed.
Coaxing oil from such great depths poses unprecedented risks for oil drilling—and that’s why I decided to visit the area. I wanted to witness firsthand the world’s most extreme drilling territory, the Mount Everest of oil frontiers, where the industry has to tackle the tallest odds and gravest circumstances to eke out new discoveries before global petroleum production peaks and begins to decline.
I set out at dawn on an April morning in a Sikorsky S-76 helicopter. The sky above the New Orleans heliport was a pea-soup green, thick with rain and pitchfork lightning. I was traveling with