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Buzzwords of the future:
Energy & Water

Lines and Type

   If you listen to the experts we’d better all start looking at ways to cut back on our energy consumption. Either that or ask local oilman John R. Parish if he’s got any oil wells for sale.

   Last week on CNBC Amarillo oilman Boone Pickens predicted $100 oil, which wasn’t all that far away by Thursday when a barrel of crude topped $90 before slipping back a bit to $89 on Friday morning. West Texans are dancing for joy except when they fill up at the gasoline pumps.

   Its heaven right now for oilmen and related service companies who for years tolerated pitifully low oil prices before the last few years as the demand seems to be outpacing the supply, or at least that’s one theory.

   World demand is consuming oil as fast as it can be pumped out of the ground, especially in the civilized world, including a glutinous American society that continues on with their love of big cars, SUVs and pickups and the belief that there’s more oil below us and if there isn’t there’s plenty under Saudi Arabia’s sand dunes, so why worry.

   But oilmen…and the experts, and I’m not talking about Washington bureaucrats, know better but haven’t ever been able to get anyone to listen. Now, there’re listening.
   Folks in West Texas and Southeastern New Mexico know there’s a limit to oil having been punching holes in the ground for 70 years. As we pump more oil it is depleted or, quite simply, there’s less of it and while there’s still supposedly plenty left in the ground, it’s not just us consuming it at a helter-skelter pace anymore.

   Now, there’s Chinese and Indians are trading in their bicycles for a piece of something they’ve never had before…a middle class lifestyle that’s hungry for, you got it, those cars we’ve got parked around and in the driveway.

   The Chinese are buying cars, and McDonald hamburgers and Starbucks coffee at a faster rate than ever imagined and the Chinese aren’t worried about environmental concerns, which our companies must adhere to. A piece on television the other day said they haven’t even hit the tip of the iceberg of their countrymen wanting cars, televisions and central heat and air, meaning they’re going to be needing lots of oil for their huge appetite.

   Add that to the continued uses around the industrialized world, including us, Europe and Southeast Asia and you’ve got global consumption at a record level. Add that to other aspects that affect oil prices like speculators on Wall Street, unrest in the Middle East, terrorists, aging oil refineries, cold winters, and global warming and Pickens’ prediction of $100 oil doesn’t look so far-fetched at all.

   It was back in the late ’80s during that oil bust when oil had dropped to $10 a barrel that it seemed the world was collapsing. How could oil be worth so little, yet be so important that the government keeps a huge Strategic Oil Reserve in case there suddenly wasn’t any? It didn’t make sense and yet the rest of the country didn’t seem to care that companies and families were being devastated at the time. No jobs meant no paychecks, which meant no way to make those home mortgages and car payments.

   At the time you couldn’t find a U-Haul truck within two hundred miles because of the exodus from Andrews, Midland, Odessa, Hobbs and many other little small towns that had depended so much on oil. About then the word diversification became popular.

    Now, nearly two decades later we’re seeing what many said would happen…albeit sooner than expected. The world has continued to crave oil, for driving, flying and heating and cooling our homes, but that “D” word is slowly and methodically, coming around. The world’s supply of oil is being used up. It won’t likely happen in our time but its pretty obvious oil is going to get pretty expensive, harder to find and costlier to be pumped up to be refined, and likely used by some as a bargaining chip in the worldwide scheme of things. Energy and water will be the buzzwords of the future.

   There will be the haves and the have-nots and those with new ideas for getting that last drop of oil and coming up with new energy sources will keep their economies humming along, and the others, well, there’ll likely be looking for those bicycles the Chinese are giving up. 

Publisher Don Ingram:

Don Ingram is the publisher
of the Andrews County News.

The grandson of the ACN founder, C.W.
Roberts, he has been the publisher for
over 9 years.

Don's article, Lines & Type, is published
in the Sunday and Thursday editions.

You may comment on Don's article here:
publisher@basinbroadband.com

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