Facing the Anthropocene by Ian Angus

Author:Ian Angus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Monthly Review Press
Published: 2016-09-22T16:00:00+00:00

Cheap and Abundant Oil

Although no one yet knew how big it was, production was about to start in what turned out to be the largest conventional petroleum deposit in the world. In the next six decades, about 60 billion barrels of crude oil would be extracted in Ghawar, Saudi Arabia, and it wasn’t just abundant, it was cheap. “One of the reasons why the Golden Age was golden was that the price of a barrel of Saudi oil averaged less than $2 throughout the entire period from 1950 to 1973, thus making energy ridiculously cheap, and getting cheaper all the time.”29

The Great Acceleration would not have been possible without cheap oil—as a commodity in its own right, as the raw material for plastics and other petrochemicals, as the enabler for high-energy manufacturing processes, and above all as the fuel for hundreds of millions of cars, trucks, ships, and planes.

Total world energy consumption more than tripled between 1949 and 1972. Yet that growth paled beside the rise in oil demand, which in the same years increased more than five and a half times over. Everywhere, growth in the demand for oil was strong. Between 1948 and 1972, consumption tripled in the United States, from 5.8 to 16.4 million barrels per day—unprecedented except when measured against what was happening elsewhere. In the same years, demand for oil in Western Europe increased fifteen times over, from 970,000 to 14.1 million barrels per day. In Japan, the change was nothing less than spectacular; consumption increased 137 times over, from 32,000 to 4.4 million barrels per day.30

Between the Second World War and 1973, the fossil economy was solidified and globalized in the Global North:

Between 1946 and 1973 the world consumed more commercial energy than had been used in the entire period from 1800 to 1945. While the world consumed around 53 billion tons of oil equivalent of energy in the 1800–1945 period, over 84 billion tons of oil equivalent were used in the twenty-seven years that followed the war. . . .

These years witnessed the emergence of large-scale natural gas and nuclear power industries, as well as a recovery of world coal production. The most dynamic energy industry of all, however, was oil. Indeed, world oil production grew by more than 700 percent in the period 1946–73.31

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