TECHNOLOGY REFUTES ANTIOIL ARGUMENTS

Technology can do more for the oil and gas industry than improve operating performance. Technology can be an effective political tool. The industry must not hesitate to cast light on technology in its defense of the world's most important fuel against misguided political attacks.

Those attacks may soon intensify in the U.S. The proposed BTU tax, with its unfair extra levy on oil, has foundered. If it sinks, the Clinton administration's tax-and-spend economic initiative sinks too. The spending part of the package has already gone under.

Clinton thus may have to reinvent himself again. His transformations usually pivot about a villain-the press, "special interests," an unfavored industry. In recent speeches, he has scolded the oil business for its opposition to his ruinous proposal. Even if the BTU tax goes away, therefore, antagonism toward oil probably will not.

STANDARD ARGUMENTS

There are two standard arguments against petroleum, both of which weaken in the face of advancing technology. One argument concerns oil's depleting nature, the other its environmental disadvantages.

According to the depletion argument, the world must reduce its use of oil because someday it will run out. One of the many problems with that proposition is uncertainty about the moment of oil resource exhaustion. The world has been running out of oil since production began, yet reserves have grown with time. The reason is knowledge. As industry learns more about the underground, it recognizes more places where oil can occur and finds more ways to bring it profitably to the surface.

As. the special report on p. 29 shows, technology is rapidly expanding what the industry knows about oil in the ground. Teams of exploration and development professionals use high-power computers to blend data types and build models of the underground with unprecedented resolution and accuracy. They're modeling fluid movements, finding drilling targets in old fields, and improving exploration success rates. Their technological triumphs push the moment of oil exhaustion ever deeper into the distant future.

Technology also reduces petroleum's environmental drawbacks. Modern drilling and production methods do not leave nearly as great an imprint as did those of past decades. Refineries and their products are cleaner now than in the past. And industry has new ways to repair its mistakes.

indeed, the geophysical tools now taking exploration and development to new levels of efficiency also help environmental remediation. A new group called the Environmental and Engineering Geophysical Society, Englewood, Colo., encourages environmental applications of geophysical techniques. A symposium it sponsored last month showed how oil field geophysical methods are being used to trace spilled chemicals, find buried drums, and examine landfills. If it hasn't happened yet, oil companies may soon shoot 3D seismic surveys around refineries to help track the flow of leaked oil.

ALARMISM SILLY

Progress like this makes environmentalist alarmism over petroleum look silly. But alarmism - typified by "Crude Awakening," the contorted history of oil accidents published by Friends of the Earth this month - makes for effective politics. The best antidote for this economic poison is information about the technologies making petroleum increasingly clean and safe to produce, transport, process, and consume.

Alarmists have their heads in petroleum's past. Technology makes petroleum's present altogether different - and its future longer than anyone can imagine.