Macondo

You are sipping upon an unusually precious and vivacious glass of wine. You bring the heirloom, crystal glass to your lips to allow a small stream of the bright red liquid to excite the taste buds in your mouth. Just as the tantalizing flow touches you, your fingers unexpectedly spasm. The wine glass falls. You’ve got a stain on your blouse. There’s red wine soaking into your carpet. And, the floor is covered with dangerous shards of broken glass. You sigh loudly when thinking of both the lost wine and the effort needed to make things clean again. Also, that was the last of the bottle of that vintage so you will never have it again. What a sip!

Can you imagine energy as the same as this wine? Let’s try. We have stores of precious energy scattered at and near the surface of the Earth. Do we cleanly extract it for use by society? Well, not always. Remember the failure of the test well at the Macondo site in the Gulf of Mexico? This spasm allowed 4.9 million barrels (2.87e16 J) of oil to coat the seas, soak into the coastline and destroy environments. Cleaning it has indeed been an effort. To date, BP has put over $42B into a trust fund to pay for remediation as well as paying $18.7B in fines. Yet, the stain lingers. Let’s take a value of 1.1e8 J per dollar ($50/bbl) then the clean-up effort will have required an expenditure of 7.1e18 J. That is, we’ve had to invest 24 times more energy to clean up the mess than what we were hoping to savour. For this, the similarity to the wine seems apt.

Perhaps our imaginative person sipping wine in our example will learn and mature from the accident. Certainly we as a society are learning and maturing from the accident at the Macondo site. But as much as anyone’s wine cellar is limited so is the supply of readily accessible non-renewable energy limited. Can we afford to access oil from more and more difficult locations when consequences can be so dire?
Owl

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