Monday, November 24, 2003

Okay so its Monday, and time for my weekly ponderance. This thought began yesterday, and continued through the evening, fermenting overnight and is to be spewed forth now.

What if you could poison oil wells?

That's right, what if you could take the oil digesting bacteria that have been created and insert them into large oil reserves? What if you created a particularly hardy and vehement strain, so strong in fact that it would rapidly move into the deepest recesses of the earth to eat oil out of the wells, a strain that with even the mildest contact with other oil it would contaminate it, effectively shutting down any facility that were to handle it for fear of contaminating clean oil.

Now lets say one prior to doing this founded an alternative energies company offering devices that ran off of renewable source, or had renewable energy power plants (although coal fired power plants wouldn't be affected by this, the surge in electrical demand would require capacity to exist). Also lets say that company had formed partnerships with the major oil companies that would become the next "energy" companies, forming maps of those regions that would no longer be producing energy. That would be worth a tremendous amount of money.

So what wells do I think would be worth eliminating? Well Saudi and Iranian ones of course. All the countries that were made rich by oil would now perish by the lack of it. All of a sudden all that money they had would be gone and they couldn't continue living the way they currently do, there would be major upheaval in the population by the vast lifestyle differences. This would be especially dangerous in a country like Saudi Arabia where the entire population are servants to the one ruling family. Basically, the whole Saudi family would probably get eliminated in short order and their wealth redistributed if such a revolution were to occur. But sadly of course even after that the people would still continue to sink farther into poverty because there would no longer by a viable economic need to the world that they could provide.

In the short term one could use this sudden change to significantly help out a countries like Georgia and Russia with much needed funds and jobs from the oil that would pass through from the Caspian sea. Of course all good things will come to an end so they would have to already have other industries in place by that time. Hopefully the world shock would force people into changing over to be less dependent upon oil so that way if a cure would be found for these poisoned wells it would by that time be worthless.

Such a dramatic change the switch to renewable would probably be fast enough that we wouldn't even deplete the remaining wells in the world. This could be a saving grace for places like the United States and to a lesser extent Europe returning manufacturing and engineering jobs back since this energy source shift would allow these places to be suppliers instead of consumers.

Anyways, back to designing snubbers.

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