Energy security and the meaning of technology

This past week, I gave a lecture to a Georgetown University graduate seminar. The instructor’s challenge to me was to talk about technology as integral to energy security.
Here is the argument I laid out for these students. In wind and solar energy—which only significantly depend on hydrocarbons during manufacturing and transport—technology is a relatively simple lens on energy. For wind and solar, we can measure resources, conversion efficiencies, materials inputs and manufacturing processes to get a fairly accurate assessment of what wind and solar energy will cost. Oil is partly measurable, and partly not-so-measurable. We can measure the molecular energy density of fuels and have some idea of their availability underground, but other factors are still powerful. It takes years or decades to develop a giant oil field, and the OPEC factor and geopolitics are complex. But even in the world of molecules formed millions of years ago and bound up in sovereign territories, technology rules all. US oil and gas reserves are the best example.
The US government’s annual estimate of the country’s oil reserves had been declining for decades when a spectacular reversal started after the financial crisis in the late 2000s. In its most recent annual assessment, the Energy Information Administration put proved oil reserves at levels not seen since the early 1970s.
Proved gas reserves followed the same pattern of decline but had an even more spectacular rise; the EIA put gas reserves at all-time highs.
The hydrocarbons trapped in US geological formations aren’t actually created by technology, obviously, but they might as well be: Unrecoverable reserves might as well not exist. It takes technology to bring them into existence.
The trick, then, is to spot the moments when technology could be changing the landscape—and to spot them as early as possible. A look back at the US drilling rig count is a help. Horizontal rigs, which are used in fracking to allow a well to run parallel to a hydrocarbon-bearing geological formation, were a tiny fraction of total active rigs in the US for decades—until shortly before the financial crisis. Now, they are the vast majority of active rigs.
A “new” technology took hold, became established and now dominates. While horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing were not exactly new, that technology eventually changed our interaction with fundamental geology and, in so doing, reshaped America’s role in the global energy landscape as well.
Fracking required decades of research and development, and years of small-scale deployment, before it had a major impact. That timeline—and that long period of low deployment and less-than-spectacular results—made fracking easy to ignore by oil-exporting countries.
The computer scientist Alan Kay once said something wonderful about technology: “Technology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born.” Perhaps energy’s version is this: “Technology is anything that didn’t work very well when you were starting out.” It is important to assess new technologies not just for what they are when they come into being (when they tend to not work very well), but also to imagine what they could be when they do work well, at higher efficiency, lower cost and wide-scale deployment.
— Bloomberg