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CHAPTER 9

Fossil Fuels and Nuclear Energy

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A devastating oil spill highlights our dangerous dependence on fossil fuels.

On the night of April 20, 2010, a slurry of methane gas, mud, and seawater shot up the drilling apparatus of an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico and geysered into the air like a shaken bottle of champagne. With a resounding bang, the gas erupted in flames and the rig quaked back and forth violently. The commotion woke 23-year-old Christopher Choy—one of 126 workers onboard—who climbed out of his bed as fire alarms blared in the hallways. When he got outside to the inferno, he watched men leap 50 feet off the deck into the dark, roiling ocean below. “I’m fixing to die. This is it,” he thought, as he later told a news reporter. “We’re not gonna get off of here.”

In fact, Choy was one of the lucky ones who escaped to safety on a life boat—but that night 11 of his coworkers perished. They died in what would become the largest accidental oil spill in history. The oil rig was called the Deepwater Horizon because it had previously pushed the limits of human engineering by penetrating more than 10,700 meters (35,000 feet) into the ocean floor in search of the precious “black gold” that fuels our energy-hungry economy. On the night of the disaster it was drilling at a more modest 4,000 meters (13,000 feet) deep. Even after the flames were extinguished 36 hours later, thick, black crude gushed from the wellhead on the seafloor for the next three months. All told, approximately 780 million liters (206 million gallons) of oil were released into the Gulf of Mexico.

Following the spill, dozens of diseased dolphins washed up on Gulf coast beaches. Seabirds were coated in thick, black tar. And Louisiana’s alligator-filled wetlands smelled like a corner gas station. The fishing and tourism industries along the U.S. Gulf Coast from Louisiana to Florida were devastated. In July 2015, British Petroleum (BP), which was responsible for the well, agreed to pay out $18.7 million in fines and compensation—the largest environmental settlement in U.S. history—and estimates it has incurred more than $40 billion in spill-related costs overall.

“It is evident that the fortunes of the world’s human population, for better or for worse, are inextricably interrelated with the use that is made of energy resources.”

M. King Hubbert, 1956

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It’s been 150 years since the drilling of the world’s first commercial oil well—the Drake Well in northeastern Pennsylvania—and we’re more dependent than ever on this fossil energy source. Fossil fuels and other nonrenewable energy sources, including uranium for nuclear power, supply 87% of the planet’s power needs. Such nonrenewable energy sources require millions of years to form through biological, geological, and chemical processes and will eventually be depleted. In the next chapter, we examine the quest to replace them with renewable energy sources, such as solar power and biofuels, which can be replenished in a relatively short period of time and are not exhausted by use. But for now we focus on the nature of nonrenewable energy sources and why they continue to underlie the global economy. We discuss some solutions to the environmental challenges they create in the concluding section of the chapter.

The U.S. Energy Information Agency predicts that energy demand will increase approximately 50% over the next 30 years. This rising energy demand, coupled with the rapid pace at which we are depleting nonrenewable energy sources and the extent to which their use impacts the environment, brings us to the central question of this chapter.

Central Question

How can we manage nonrenewable energy resources in a way that reduces environmental harm?