Oil, Oil, Everywhere . . .
The price of oil remains high only because the cost of oil remains so low. We remain dependent on oil from the Mideast not because the planet is running out of buried hydrocarbons, but because extracting oil from the deserts of the Persian Gulf is so easy and cheap that it's risky to invest capital to extract somewhat more stubborn oil from far larger deposits in Alberta.
The market price of oil is indeed hovering up around $50-a-barrel on the spot market. But getting oil to the surface currently costs under $5 a barrel in Saudi Arabia, with the global average cost certainly under $15. And with technology already well in hand, the cost of sucking oil out of the planet we occupy simply will not rise above roughly $30 per barrel for the next 100 years at least.
The cost of oil comes down to the cost of finding, and then lifting or extracting. First, you have to decide where to dig. Exploration costs currently run under $3 per barrel in much of the Mideast, and below $7 for oil hidden deep under the ocean. But these costs have been falling, not rising, because imaging technology that lets geologists peer through miles of water and rock improves faster than supplies recede. Many lower-grade deposits require no new looking at all.
To pick just one example among many, finding costs are essentially zero for the 3.5 trillion barrels of oil that soak the clay in the Orinoco basin in Venezuela, and the Athabasca tar sands in Alberta, Canada. Yes, that's trillion -- over a century's worth of global supply, at the current 30-billion-barrel-a-year rate of consumption.
Then you have to get the oil out of the sand -- or the sand out of the oil. In the Mideast, current lifting costs run $1 to $2.50 per barrel at the very most; lifting costs in Iraq probably run closer to 50 cents, though OPEC strains not to publicize any such embarrassingly low numbers. For the most expensive offshore platforms in the North Sea, lifting costs (capital investment plus operating costs) currently run comfortably south of $15 per barrel. Tar sands, by contrast, are simply strip mined, like western coal, and that's very cheap -- but then you spend another $10, or maybe $15, separating the oil from the dirt. To do that, oil or gas extracted from the site itself is burned to heat water, which is then used to "crack" the bitumen from the clay; the bitumen is then chemically split to produce lighter petroleum.
In sum, it costs under $5 per barrel to pump oil out from under the sand in Iraq, and about $15 to melt it out of the sand in Alberta. So why don't we just learn to love hockey and shop Canadian? Conventional Canadian wells already supply us with more oil than Saudi Arabia, and the Canadian tar is now delivering, too. The $5 billion (U.S.) Athabasca Oil Sands Project that Shell and ChevronTexaco opened in Alberta last year is now pumping 155,000 barrels per day. And to our south, Venezuela's Orinoco Belt yields 500,000 barrels daily.
But here's the catch: By simply opening up its spigots for a few years, Saudi Arabia could, in short order, force a complete write-off of the huge capital investments in Athabasca and Orinoco. Investing billions in tar-sand refineries is risky not because getting oil out of Alberta is especially difficult or expensive, but because getting oil out of Arabia is so easy and cheap. Oil prices gyrate and occasionally spike -- both up and down -- not because oil is scarce, but because it's so abundant in places where good government is scarce. Investing $5 billion dollars over five years to build a new tar-sand refinery in Alberta is indeed risky when a second cousin of Osama bin Laden can knock $20 off the price of oil with an idle wave of his hand on any given day in Riyadh.
The one consolation is that Arabia faces a quandary of its own. Once the offshore platform has been deployed in the North Sea, once the humongous crock pot is up and cooking in Alberta, its cost is sunk. The original investors may never recover their capital, but after it has been written off, somebody can go ahead and produce oil very profitably going forward. And capital costs are going to keep falling, because the cost of a tar-sand refinery depends on technology, and technology costs always fall. Bacteria, for example, have already been successfully bioengineered to crack heavy oil molecules to help clean up oil spills, and to mine low-grade copper; bugs could likewise end up trampling out the vintage where the Albertan oil is stored.
In the short term anything remains possible. Demand for oil grows daily in China and India, where good government is finally taking root, while much of the earth's most accessible oil lies under land controlled by feudal theocracies, kleptocrats, and fanatics. Day by day, just as it should, the market attempts to incorporate these two antithetical realities into the spot price of crude. But to suppose that those prices foreshadow the exhaustion of the planet itself is silly.
The cost of extracting oil from the earth has not gone up over the past century, it has held remarkably steady. Going forward, over the longer term, it may rise very gradually, but certainly not fast. The earth is far bigger than people think, the untapped deposits are huge, and the technologies for separating oil from planet keep getting better. U.S. oil policy should be to promote new capital investment in the United States, Canada, and other oil-producing countries that are politically stable, and promote stable government in those that aren't.
Messrs. Huber and Mills are co-authors of "The Bottomless Well: The Twilight Of Fuel, The Virtue Of Waste, And Why We Will Never Run Out Of Energy," just out from Basic Books.
石油，石油，到处都是……
编者按：本文作者彼得?休伯(Peter Huber)和马克?米尔斯(Mark Mills)是《The Bottomless Well: The Twilight Of Fuel, The Virtue Of Waste, And Why We Will Never Run Out Of Energy》一书的共同作者。
石油价格居高不下，只是因为它的成本依然太低。我们继续依赖中东石油，并不是因为地球上其他地方的石油资源已经耗尽，而是因为从波斯湾的沙漠中开采石油是如此的容易和廉价，在加拿大阿尔伯达省投资开采难度更大的油田就显得风险重重。
目前，石油的现货市场价格浮动在每桶50美元上下。但在沙特阿拉伯，石油的开采成本还不到每桶5美元，全球范围内的平均成本则不到15美元。依据我们已经掌握的技术，全球石油开采成本至少未来100年都不会超过每桶30美元。
石油的成本可分为勘探成本和开采成本。首先，你必须确定在哪里钻井。在中东许多地方，勘探成本目前还不到每桶3美元，海底油田的勘探成本不到每桶7美元。而且，这些成本一直呈现下降趋势，而不是上涨。因为成像造影技术的提高远远快于石油供应的下降。许多低品质油田都不值得再看第二眼。
有些油田的勘探成本几乎为零，比如蕴藏在委内瑞拉奥利诺科流域土层以及加拿大阿尔伯达省阿萨巴斯卡油砂中总计3.5万亿桶的石油储量。没错，万亿桶。如果按目前全球年消费量300亿桶来计算，足可供100多年消耗。
找到油砂矿后，必须将石油和砂石分离。在中东，这个成本至多是每桶1美元至2.50美元，伊拉克可能低至50美分。石油输出国组织(OPEC)一直在竭力掩盖这些令人尴尬的低成本数据。即使是在成本最高的北海近海油田，开采成本（资本投资加上经营成本）目前也远远低于每桶15美元。相比之下，油砂矿都在露天开采，成本更低，但开采之后分离石油和砂石需要再花费每桶10美元，或许15美元。
总而言之，从伊拉克的沙漠下开采石油，每桶成本还不到5美元，在阿尔伯达省大约为每桶15美元。那么，我们为什么不买加拿大的石油？传统的加拿大油井为美国提供的石油量早已超过了沙特阿拉伯，加拿大油砂也将开始交货。壳牌(Shell)和雪佛龙德士古(ChevronTexaco)去年在阿尔伯达省启动的50亿美元阿萨巴斯卡油砂项目现在日产油15.5万桶。在美国南面，委内瑞拉的奥利诺科日产石油50万桶。
但关键在于：沙特阿拉伯只要连续几年增产，很快就能使在阿萨巴斯卡和奥利诺科的巨大资本投入化为乌有。投资数十亿美元兴建油砂炼油厂风险很高，原因并不是阿尔伯达省开采石油特别困难或昂贵，而是因为在沙特阿拉伯开采石油太容易，成本太低廉了。油价起伏并非因为石油资源稀缺，而是因为石油资源主要分布在缺乏高效率政府的地区。花5年时间，投资50亿美元在阿尔伯达省建设一座新的油砂精炼厂，的确风险很大，因为恐怖分子在利雅得的任何举动都可能导致油价轰然暴跌20美元。
让人略感安慰的是沙特阿拉伯也面临一个两难境地。一旦北海的近海石油钻井平台建设完成，一旦阿尔伯达省庞大的炼油厂建成，开采成本就会大大降低。也许最初的投资者将血本无归，但在这些投资被冲销后，会有人继续经营这些项目，并从石油开采中获取丰厚利润。资本成本将继续下降，因为油砂炼油厂的成本取决于技术，而技术成本总是在下降。比如，细菌已被成功地应用于重油分子分解，帮助清理溢油以及开采低品质铜矿等领域。
近期，任何事情都有可能发生。中国和印度的石油需求日增夜长，两国政府的效率正在改善，而地球上大多数可开采的石油资源依然潜藏在被封建集权或者狂热分子统治的土地之下。日复一日，市场似乎试图将这两个矛盾的现实融入到原油的现货价格中。但所谓目前的价格预示著地球石油资源即将耗尽的说法，自然无法成立。
石油开采成本100年来并没有上升，而是保持著相当的稳定。未来较长一段时间内，这个成本可能会逐步逐步地上升，但肯定不会太快。地球要远比人们想像的更大，尚未开采的油田储量依然庞大，开采技术也日益完善。美国的石油政策应能鼓励在美国、加拿大和其他政局稳定的产油国进行新的资本投资；也应当能够鼓励那些政局动荡的地区形成一个更加稳定的政府。
