January 8, 2013

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Oil Might Be a Renewable Resource, and Other Things You Did Not Know

By Scott Huler

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This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American

Or, "Thank God there's a North Carolina."

Yep. We have a new governor, which means new secretaries of this and that. Meet John Skvarla, new secretary of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR, to tarheels). To cut to the chase, here’s your takeaway idea: maybe oil is a renewable resource. And he doesn’t mean in the wait-45-million-years-and-we’ll-get-more sense.

“The Russians for instance have always drilled oil as if it’s a renewable resource,” says Skvarla. “And so far they haven’t been proven wrong.

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“There’s a lot of different scientific opinion on that.”

Yep. There’s just TONS of scientists out there figuring that maybe oil is like those trick cups Barbies used to drink from, where you tilt them and the stuff vanishes, and then it magically fills back up when you set it down. TONS of scientists.

Except oops, actually not. There’s a crazy theory that crude oil comes from phytoplankton and another that it just sort of trickles up from the earth's mantle (here's a wonderfully simple dismissal of the notion), but you’ll have to work pretty hard to find anybody in mainstream science who buys into it. Here's a very nice summation -- and debunking -- of the theory by the Independent Weekly's Lisa Sorg.

All that said, it’s almost anticlimax to note that Skvarla believes climate science is unresolved: "I have studied this every day for 10 years and there is a great divergence of opinion on this. I’m not ready to say which is right or wrong." Never saw that coming, did you.

We're still waiting for his take on sea level rise.

* Yep -- edited title to change "Natural" to "Renewable." Oh for the days of editors, to save writers from themselves. Thanks, @Robinlloyd99!

Scott Huler was born in 1959 in Cleveland and raised in that city's eastern suburbs. He graduated from Washington University in 1981; he was made a member of Phi Beta Kappa because of the breadth of his studies, and that breadth has been a signature of his writing work. He has written on everything from the death penalty to bikini waxing, from NASCAR racing to the stealth bomber, for such newspapers as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Los Angeles Times and such magazines as ESPN, Backpacker, and Fortune. His award-winning radio work has been heard on "All Things Considered" and "Day to Day" on National Public Radio and on "Marketplace" and "Splendid Table" on American Public Media. He has been a staff writer for the Philadelphia Daily News and the Raleigh News & Observer and a staff reporter and producer for Nashville Public Radio. He was the founding and managing editor of the Nashville City Paper. He has taught at such colleges as Berry College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

His books include Defining the Wind, about the Beaufort Scale of wind force, and No-Man's Lands, about retracing the journey of Odysseus.

His most recent book, On the Grid, was his sixth. His work has been included in such compilations as Appalachian Adventure and in such anthologies as Literary Trails of the North Carolina Piedmont, The Appalachian Trail Reader and Speed: Stories of Survival from Behind the Wheel.

For 2014-2015 Scott is a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, which is funding his work on the Lawson Trek, an effort to retrace the journey of explorer John Lawson through the Carolinas in 1700-1701.

He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with his wife, the writer June Spence, and their two sons.

More by Scott Huler

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