Sweet, Shiny And Slimy
I. Prologue
As a Malayali, blood comprises not only plasma, RBCs, WBCs and platelets but also oil. It’s not just any oil but rich, golden, nutritious coconut oil. I have often been ridiculed by many people, presuming my fondness for various extracts from the nuts of the curvy tree. As I journeyed to various non-Arecaceae regions, my sense organs did acclimatize to other oils such as olive and sunflower. Howbeit, I don’t deny that life without the holy nut cannot be imagined by my tongue, skin and hair.
Over the years, just like Severus Snape’s eternal love for Lily, I’ve ‘always’ felt that nothing else could ever beat the rich aroma, texture and allure of the nectar of the coconut tree soul. They say likes and dislikes are all about perspectives. Every individual has a preference based on their experiences or assumptions. If planet Earth was a living entity of its own, the Bhoomi Devi, there has to be an oil dear and near to her, the crude oil.
II. Samsara — The cycle of birth, death and rebirth
“Live in the moment. There is no other land, there is no other life but this”, said Henry David Thoreau. This is a near impossibility as every nanosecond becomes past before we even realise it. And every moment we live is based on what we want to do for at least the next two seconds of our lives. Sounds puzzling? There you go! You are now living back and forth between the past and the future.
I prefer to live in the present. However, when my internet buffers, what’s after death is something I often wonder about. The myths and ideologies such as reincarnation, rebirth, and an after-world (Duat) fascinate me. No one knows for sure if such things are absolutely true and if souls and consciousness transcend to another spectrum after death, but the physical body lingers to exist.
There is life after death, not to the amplitude of our current lives but a subtle one. Lives that lived millions of years ago and that died and sank under the seafloor under extreme pressure and temperatures are transformed into a new avatar — fossil fuels. This volatile fluid is destined to give life to a mechanical heart, the engine! Now isn’t this reincarnation? If not of the soul but of the body?
Strangely, during any journey, it’s not always what you seek that finds you but it’s something you’ve never premeditated. Christopher Columbus landed in the Bahamas instead of discovering India. The Chinese in Sichuan province in 600 BC conducted deep drilling with bamboo pipelines in search of salt but ended up discovering oil. That was 2469 years before John D. Rockefeller founded the Standard Oil Company! History has shown that the oil & gas industry expect the unexpected. Despite a plethora of oil discoveries, it is still a mystery where the next biggest oil discovery could come from!
III. The land of many rivers and barrels
Guyana is a sweet child of Mother Earth, home to the golden Demerara sugar, sleeping under the thick duvet of rainforest covering 85% of the landmass.
The land of many waters is also a land of many discoveries. The land blessed with timber, diamonds, bauxite and yellow gold must have had sweet dreams of black gold somewhere in the basin of the Atlantic Ocean. Fast forward to May 2015, Exxon Mobil under the Liza 1 project discovered the most treasured caramel under the ocean, 90-meter high-quality oil-bearing sandstone reservoirs, before many to-come discoveries.
Harvard International review states that Guyana, a country of just over 800,000 people is set to become the fourth largest offshore oil producer in the world. As per Reuters, Guyana’s oil production is set to rise to 645,000 barrels in a day. In other words, 102,546,615 litres of oil in a day! With this, instead of becoming an El Dorado, the country is on its way to becoming ‘Reino Petroleum’. But is this a lot of oil? Perhaps let’s take a look at the demand. The International Energy Agency (IEA) forecasts that global demand will reach 121 million barrels a day by 2040.
After the haunting Jonestown massacre in the 1970s which brought Guyana into the spotlight for the wrong reasons, the massive oil discovery in 2015 is helping the nation paint anew on its canvas. Will it be a masterpiece or a malign-piece? Only time will tell.
IV. Some “don’t” like it hot
Power outages in the tropical regions give rise to two habits. Drip in productivity and rise of climate activities. Let’s ask the most pressing question of greenies — Is this sustainable?
The 2015 United Nation’s Paris Agreement on Climate Change, set forth its overreaching goal to limit global warming to 1.5°C by the end of this century. It is predicted that crossing 1.5°C would result in more frequent natural disasters. How does it appear in terms of CO2 emissions?
The economist Dan Welsby of University College London published a study in Nature that claims that the world must not emit more than 580 gigatonnes of CO2 emissions before 2100 to hit 1.5°C. To make this audacious move closer to reality, fossil fuels must not be extracted beyond 59% of the current reserves, even for a 50% chance of hitting internationally agreed climate-change goals. In simple terms, the world will have to reach net zero emissions by the year 2050. However, in reality, there are other factors apart from oil, gas and coal that affect the global climate, for example, the El Nino phenomenon.
While this is all true, and while we all want the world to be a better place, is grass greener on the other side? Is the dystopian version true? Can the world (people) survive without oil for the foreseeable future?
V. Love me or hate me?
Oil addiction cannot be compared with tobacco. While smoking is a choice, using energy is not. At the end of the 18th century, there were fewer than 1 billion people on the planet. Today there are more than 7.8 billion. The energy needs of a bigger and richer global population have risen sixfold in the past 50 years. Out of the demand, almost 80% of energy is supplied by fossil fuels — coal, gas and oil.
There is an ‘electric’ variant in the pipeline of many modern-day companies. However, if oil were to disappear suddenly, life won’t be easy for many.
Firstly, for the transportation of people and goods, we might have electric trains and cars. But an end-to-end electric solution is yet to take place. Either the flight runs on fuel or the motor vehicle at the end of the track runs on fuel.
The major growth in energy demand from now on is going to come from the developing world. As per Exxon Mobil, non-OECD countries share of global energy demand will reach around 70% in 2050. Countries in sub-Saharan Africa are home to around 630 million people with no electricity. Achieving universal access and a tenfold increase in power generation will take huge domestic investments and a generous international financing effort.
Consistent and uninterrupted supply of energy is another factor. Most renewable energy output varies with the amount of sunshine or wind, not only for a few days but sometimes for weeks. Countries with minimal sunlight or wind for most part of the year would find it difficult to depend entirely on renewable sources. Additionally, fossil fuels are often used to provide “firm” power that can come on at any time of the day or night. Without that power, electricity grids would see widespread blackouts.
From a market point of view, there is a possibility of a financial crash due to the pricking of the carbon bubble. There has talks at the meetings of been research that shows that the stock-market valuation of fossil fuel companies is inflated by overestimating the worth of reserves of oil, coal and gas. In the unlikely event that investors all pulled out of fossil fuels at once, the result would be much worse than what followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 — a colossal stock market crash, followed by an equally epic slump.
VI. Epilogue
Paraphrasing a verse from the Nāsadīya Sūkta of Rig Veda, “Who knows, who can say for sure if there are still plenty of reincarnations to be discovered in this tiny pale blue dot?”
What if the Genie’s magic lamp was never taken out of the Cave of Wonders? Genie and oil serve nobody but humans. We are creatures of desire. Imagine if the lamp was never caressed or the oil was never refined. Without black magic and black gold, the world would appear entirely different!
Oil, from crude to coconut, is significant to mankind. Too much leads to a resource curse, and too little leads to a resource crunch! Someday, once all of Bhoomi Devi’s horcruxes are discovered and extracted, the peak oil will decline. When that happens, I hope the Sun and Wind Gods don’t feel vexed at humans for toiling around their amorphous bodies. Whatever may happen, I hope coconut oil survives and continues to salve the tongue, hair and skin of mankind. Insha’Viśhva.
