The oil's there, but not for the taking

It must be frustrating to environmental extremists how much oil there is in the world.

They are apocalyptic in their desire for less combustion. We are warming the earth ruinously, they aver, by burning so much fossil fuel. And although the world is bound to "run out," that we will be sorry someday is no comfort to them.

Just when we should be bicycling more, taking walks and public transit, somebody somewhere is finding more oil. And in the worst places -- everywhere we are hated.

Just the other day, the country of Turkey, a friend, announced a big push to find oil in the Black Sea. For the first time in history, amazingly enough, partly because although an old sea, it is a dauntingly deep sea (average 6,500 feet).

But you can bet Texans, Europeans, Asians, Ukrainians, Brazilians -- they're all going to get drills into those ancient sailing waters of Greek, Roman, Persian and Tartar.

And why not• The OPEC price-fixers have pushed the barrel worldwide price to around $75, crazy by the forecasts of only a few years ago, while the world's greatest market, the United States, refrains from looking for oil where it's practically bound to be. Mostly to satisfy environmental pressures. (And yet, promoting an artificial "scarcity" does help keep the price up, doesn't it?).

New supplies wouldn't be that hard to bring on. Everybody knows there's oil in Alaska. Can't drill for it, though. Might upset the wildlife migrations. There's oil in the Santa Barbara Channel off California. Again, can't drill for it. Might mar the views from beachfront, never mind that an oil rig a few miles offshore is a toothpick on the seascape. Offshore Florida and portions of the Gulf of Mexico as yet undrilled are alike absurdly barred.

One effect of this environmental timidity is that we import more.

Another is that alternative energy forms -- Canadian oil sands, "clean coal," ethanol, and the environmentalists' own favored wind and solar inputs are market-boosted. Meanwhile, the auto companies and countless research labs and inventors keep seeking the pot of gold of modern technology: a car that wouldn't have to run on gasoline.

Meantime, however, the realists of the world look for oil.

Turkey told a recent energy conference it's ready to spend as much as $8 billion over the next decade to develop fields in the Black Sea. It already has cost more than $100 million to ship a deep-water drilling rig across the Atlantic, the Mediterranean and through the Turkish straits to the hoped-for pay zone.

The situation brings to mind a onetime chairman of Pittsburgh's long-defunct Gulf Oil Corp. He was congratulated for the company's development work years ago in Colorado's oil shale deposits. There are hundreds of years of energy supply out there, but they have never proved feasible to this day. The veteran oilman wrinkled his nose at the futile expense. "Oh, there's still so much of the cheap stuff around!" he said.