By Josh Siatkowski | Staff Writer
It’s been well over 100 years since oil and gas was the sleek and sexy new disruption to the global economy. But unlike other historic, yet revolutionary discoveries and inventions — fertilizer, air conditioning or aviation — oil and gas has not been able to quietly age into an unsung hero of modern life. Instead, the industry and its nearly 11 million American workers, have been villainized and rejected by the very people who reap the benefits of oil and gas.
The narrative that the oil and gas industry must be extinguished rapidly like it’s an invasive species is not just unfair to the millions of nine-to-five workers just trying to put food on the table; it’s also flat-out wrong.
Micah Smith, head of consulting giant Mckinsey and Co’s oil and gas team, summarizes the state of the energy industry perfectly: “The energy transition toward cleaner, less carbon-intensive sources is real. Oil and gas are not going away any time soon. That may sound like a contradiction, but it is more like a description.”
And oil and gas isn’t just lingering around at the will of a few greedy oilmen. It is and will continue to be a critical part of the global economy because – get this — it does a lot of good things for the world. Here are just some of those good things.
Oil and gas are reliable
Recent studies have found that renewable energy sources can now compete with oil and gas in many arenas, one of the most important being prices. This is a great thing whether you’re on team zero-carbon or the world’s biggest fan of pump jacks. Climate change aside, we need affordable alternatives to fossil fuels because oil will eventually run out.
But even as wind and solar power become cheaper to generate, there’s a significant issue: reliability. Solar and wind power are most often stored in batteries, which require constant recharging, which in turn require more sun and more wind.
For now, without oil and gas, cloudy or windless days also mean powerless days.
Renewable energy’s storage problem is also why we won’t see electric planes or other energy-hungry machinery anytime soon. As scientists inevitably figure this challenge out, you can thank oil and gas that your trip to Europe took a day and not a month.
Oil and gas are the greatest agents against energy poverty
Energy poverty, or the lack of reliable access to energy, affects over a billion people, mostly in India and Sub-Saharan Africa. For these people, heating fuel often comes in the form of wood chips or animal dung — both of which are less hygienic and cause more pollution than oil and gas.
Nothing can more quickly and reliably get Sub-Saharan Africa fully on the grid than oil and gas, and it’s already starting to happen.
Oil and gas are getting cleaner
There is a conception that the oil and gas industry does not care about the environmental impact of its work. I won’t contest that some oilmen care more about the bottom line than emissions, but we’ve reached an era where lower emissions and more profitability can move in the same direction.
Natural gas is already overtaking dirty coal in electricity production because of its cost effectiveness and abundance. But with this replacement, carbon emissions are coming down — something even President Barack Obama boasted during his administration.
There’s also the incredibly under-discussed invention of horizontal drilling. Replacing inefficient vertically-drilled wells, this method of extraction can produce a whopping 200,000 times more energy than an old well, according to Continental Resources CEO Harold Hamm. Horizontal drilling means more energy with fewer wells and fewer disruptions to the surfaces we drill beneath.
Oil and gas have fueled industrial revolutions – and will do it again
As it has already done before, oil and gas looks poised to be the power behind another industrial revolution — the AI boom. As power-hungry data centers scramble for all the energy sources they can get — even Three-mile Island will reopen.
But with demand for energy soaring here and now, no one is willing to wait for more renewables to be brought onto the grid. Natural gas has been, and will continue to be, the driver behind data centers, and thus, any question you ask ChatGPT.
I’m not going to say “enjoy it while you can,” because nobody is going to particularly miss oil and gas when their power comes from another source, so long as it is cheap and reliable. But respect the fact that as we are creating an energy system that’s cheap, reliable and sustainable, we at least have resources and people to keep us comfortable while we get there.
