Freezing temperatures, fatal falls through the ice, any body parts not covered by thick thermal clothing quickly, painfully, turning black. This isn't Captain Scott's race to the South pole, it's the reality of energy resource extraction. Energy companies are increasingly braving these dangerous conditions in the hope of realising the massive untapped potential for fossil fuels extraction.
Energy woes
In recent years, energy prices have been rising incredibly. This has been hurting many motorists at the pumps and families when their energy bill arrives in the post. This may seem like a general trend which is unavoidable and should be borne as another one of life's constants but the bigger picture is much more grim.
Volatility
Within the sphere of general fuel price rises, there are the ups and downs over monthly periods
due to wholesale gas / oil price rises and falls. This volatility is not due to supply and demand and there physically being more oil extracted from one day to the next but due to futures markets and speculation ( the selling of the oil produced in a country at a later date, at the price that it was at today). This allows traders to make short term gains on the highs and lows of oil prices. Oil and gas spot prices (price at any one time on the oil / gas market) are also affected by the news and industrial data concerning the performance of a well or the confidence of the market in a ability of a company to satisfy the demands of their energy consumers.
Conflict
A major factor in the price of energy on the market is the conflict and military activity in an area.
The recent conflicts in northern Africa (specifically Libya and Bahrain) are a prime example of what conflict and warring can do to the price of energy. Libya exports 2% of the world's oil. This may seem like a small amount in the big picture but when it was revealed that during the Gaddafi conflict that oil exports were stopped or seriously reduced, the oil price shot up as there was increased competition between the nations of the world for the oil that remained on the market at that time. It's no secret that the increased economic activity of China and India has created a greater demand for more fossil fuels at a time when their production is reaching an unavoidable plateau using traditional sources.
Innovation
To circumvent the problem of limited capacity and dwindling confirmed resources, energy companies have been looking in more and more extreme environments from which to extract the remaining oil from the earth. This search for the remaining pockets has led energy companies to the poles. A few years ago, there was a furore between the UK government and the
Argentinian government over the sovereignity of the Falkland Islands (Las Malvinas to the Argentines). The Falkland Islands are close to Antarctica. The same islands were fought over decades ago by the same countries but for different reasons. Now the reason is oil. After preliminary tests and drilling, it appears that there are oil reservoirs in earth under the sea in the territorial waters of the Falkland Isles. This means that the UK government can sell / lease the fields to private industry to generate income and energy. Not surprisingly, the Argentine government wanted in on the action as it has suffered from a collapsed economy in recent times.
A clear and present danger
This leads us from the South to the North pole, energy companies have been scouring the globe for easy energy deposits and the other major location for exploitation is the area around the North Pole and Northern Canada. There has been much made of the extraction of oil and gas from the tar sands of Canada and Alaska but more recently, the focus has been the drilling for oil in the waters around the North Pole and the resulting mini oil spills that result during the erection of the drilling rig and initial well tapping.
This has the potential to create an environmental catastrophe on the scale of the Gulf disaster of 2010 or the Exxon -Valdez disaster of Alaska not too long ago. History has many examples of oil drilling gone wrong but there is not a lot of scope for cleaning up a disaster on the scale of the Deepwater Horizon rig in an environment as raw and difficult to work in as the icy Northern wastes.
The future is uncertain
As energy prices go up, more work goes into trying to discover more sources of fossil fuels to help bring the price of energy down. The sporadic, desparate nature of new oil discovery will mean that in the near to mid future, black-outs and times of limited electricity supply will become the norm. To avoid this embarrasing situation, more and more money will be diverted to helping solve the supply problem. This will, as it does now, often involves oil companies aggresively lobbying governments to pass legislation to permit more drilling in the previously off-limits areas, this sort of activity looks set to contine. Don't be surprised if, as a result of desparate attempts to obtain more fuel, we see more animals coated in oil on our TV screens and blighted oil-slick seas.
