There are a lot of science fiction fans in the oil and gas industry. That sounds like a huge presumption, but it's a fairly safe one. Sci-fi appeals, naturally enough, to science-oriented professionals, especially those with a bent toward exploration or engineering. That aptly describes the bulk of OGJ's readership.
The theme at the heart of sci-fi is humanity's interaction with scientific and technological dilemmas, and the best examples of the genre dramatize this in ways that are thought-provoking while remaining entertaining. Some of the most venerable tales are updates of the Promethean myth: How mankind's reckless hubris in exploring the frontiers of science can invite disaster. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was the forerunner of such tales.
A lot of sci-fi, both written and cinematic, is the equivalent of junk food. The late, revered sci-fi writer Theodore Sturgeon, responding to a critic's claim that "90% of sci-fi is [let's just say, 'junk']," invoked what has come to be known as Sturgeon's Law: "Ninety per cent of everything is [junk]."
Better to have "junk food" that also lets one think about bigger issues beyond car chases, explosions, and the random mating habits of the human animal.
Petroleum and sci-fi
Despite the base canard—made popular during the dotcom investor swoon of the '90s—that the petroleum industry is low-tech, a glance at the industry today actually reveals a shiny sci-fi veneer: "robots" working in the depths of inner space (ultradeep water) or downhole in "smart" wells, simulations of remote "terrain" in four dimensions, computer processing capabilities that dwarf those envisioned in sci-fi just a few decades ago—the list goes on.
This week's lead article, beginning on p. 20, posits an energy future a half century from now and even gets into wild stuff such as "nuking" oil shale.
Meanwhile, the CERAWeek conference, sponsored by Cambridge Energy Research Associates in Houston last week (see related stories on pp. 29-30 and 34), at times offered forays into what felt like sci-fi, such as presentations on a "digital oil field" initiative and on prospects for hydrogen as an nonpolluting energy source.
Nanobots and energy
But nowhere did petroleum and sci-fi intersect more resoundingly at CERAWeek than in the presentation slated for Feb. 13 by J. Craig Venter, president of the Institute for Biological Energy Alternatives.
IBEA last November received a $3 million US Department of Energy grant for research to develop a synthetic chromosome, a first step in the institute's work toward developing cost-effective and efficient biological energy sources. IBEA is studying microbial genomics with an eye to solving energy and environmental concerns. A possibility is development of synthetic organisms at the cellular level to use as biological fuel cells. Keen stuff.
Now that investors are getting the vapors over genetic engineering and nanotechnology stocks, maybe some of this keen sci-fi stuff can rub off on the gritty guys and gals of the petroleum industry.
Bogeymen
But no fictional genre is complete without a bogeyman. Sci-fi's Promethean theme encompasses fictional forays from Dr. Frankenstein to the bogeymen in all of Michael Crichton's sci-fi novels, from "The Andromeda Strain" to "Jurassic Park."
Crichton is no Ted Sturgeon, but sometimes you just want popcorn instead of a gourmet dinner.
Just as there is sci-fi "junk food," there is a lot of junk science being bandied about these days, in fiction and in politics. And much of this junk science is served up in the form of the bogeyman du jour.
The bogeyman in megaselling Crichton's latest novel, "Prey," is a cloud of nanoparticles—microbial robots—that escapes from a lab and becomes self-sustaining, self-replicating, intelligent, and predatory. Guess who the prey is.
Cautionary stuff to consider after mulling IBEA's work. But IBEA isn't just pioneering nanotechnology and genetic engineering to push the envelope of clean fuels. IBEA also is exploring ways genomics can be applied to enhance the ability of terrestrial and oceanic microbial communities to remove carbon from the atmosphere.
Wow. Using microscopic bugs to remove the No. 1 bogeyman from the climate change furor.
So maybe all this fuss over an urgent need to decarbonize the world's energy supply can be rendered moot. What if we can decarbonize the atmosphere instead, so we can keep affordable energy supplies? There goes the global-warming bogeyman.
But wouldn't that also have the effect of removing Big Oil as the environmental pressure groups' favorite bogeyman?
It might also have the salutary corollary effect in the energy-environment debate of killing off another literary archetype, one that predates both the petroleum industry and sci-fi: Chicken Little.
