THE ENERGY CRISIS

Driven by machines and electronics, the world faces a major energy crisis as population explodes of both man and machine. Food is fast becoming a secondary necessity. In a world dominated by robot-produced gadgets, mortal costs lose significance to hi-tech maintenance needs on the production line. The law of economies of scale regards the more sensitive issues of output and costs above the politics of who gets what.

Key on this issue of recurrent cost ranks that of energy. This comes in a diversity of forms: petroleum products, coal, and gas. Within the backdrop of the debilitating consequences of global warming, sustainable clean fuel has surfaced as alternative necessity for good source of power generation. Countries with potentials in coal now assess their highest common factor. An odd consortium of nations such as Russia, India and Germany now stand queued in prospective brotherhood.

An observer of times would have thought the era of ‘puff-a-train’ was relegated to nursery book pages. Though shoveling men were replaced by machines, what about the health hazards of excavation processes? The fast replicating world population is bound to take its toll on hills of reserves, at that, as cities spread into countryside.

What one would have thought most convenient in a world addicted to ‘machine-snacks’ should be a resource inexhaustible that deals little damage to the environment and causes minimum interference with normal daily life.

Oil very well suits the description as a fuel of minimal interference since it comes from beneath the earth’s surface. Significant exploration little tampers with the balance of the ecosystem. Gas flaring, its major nuisance ranks below the combined devastation from chloroforms emitted by jeeps, refrigerators and air conditioners—secondary luxuries.

Flared or not gas was bound to burn, anyway. Incidental damage to farm lands and surface waters by periodic spillages are high collateral for locals to pay for global benefit. Diplomacy and humanitarian gestures are the centripetal devices to be imported to ameliorate the situation.

As to the fact of inexhaustibility, statistical data depicts depleted world resource by another half a century. Let’s borrow a thing or two from history; Malthus, the economic genius predicted economic doom for the world long before the mid twentieth century. He knew nothing of the future contingency of the Industrial Revolution. What wonder he would have suffered to have witnessed for the first time in human history, world population explosion in vertical progression by 1960, which was naturally assimilated

. Yet, that oil-doom, according to geology now lingers four decades ahead.

There is a God, I believe, that won’t close shop before we leave. He centralized West African reservoirs beneath the greatest African congestion long before Nigeria was conceived. It certainly is well.

Let’s go back: the statistics of prospecting, placed before the British Government in the 1950’s certainly weren’t a-tenth as attractive as they are today, otherwise Nigeria would have had to deal with problems of power-sharing in an Apartheid government. Data of oil prospecting released in the 1990’s, using cutting edge technologies evinced the presence of oil in all but one state of North-West Nigeria. Though many sites were not of commercial quantities yet; large reserves were found in surprising areas such as Lagos and Maiduguri.

What this goes to prove is that alternative factors exist to the ‘sudden overturn’ theory of the earth’s crust requisite for oil to form within mind-boggling ciphers of years. In 1990, the Late Chief M.K.O. Abiola discovered a well that made the combined potentials of all oil companies in Nigeria like a smile. Presently, Shell Nigeria has sited a well with hitherto unprecedented potentials in Nigeria, and the beat goes on.

Since profit is the major constrain of commerce, turn-over and productivity should be the focus. Coal ought to be mined with no less vigor. The talk, however, of a substitute to oil is wishful thinking. Say nothing about Hydrogen fuel, least we suffice with more than 21% of Oxygen in the atmosphere and the attendant puzzles that holds for the ecosystem.

As unlikely fields of interest merge in a world that forges weapons of manipulation out of any unseemly advantage, set policies must be fixed between buyer and seller nations to protect the interest of investor multinationals who undertake to spend billions of dollars in investment. The recent episodes up between Russia and Ukraine on gas as well as Bolivia and Brazil on oil prospecting are evidence enough how energy resource may constitute a greater tool of political weaponry then nuclear arsenals.

A quest to avoid facing up to a difficult decision often enough leads to dangerous addictive practices. When the mirage of fuzzy figments are gone the problem abides unscathed. The shortcut around a payment due may well be the further route around the problem. Communities in distress caused by spillages ignored for too long, it will be discovered in retrospect, are proving to be more unyielding than they would have been for a much smaller fee at an earlier date.