Sound bites need to give way to reasoned discussion.

Now that I’m writing a weekly news and commentary feature, a twice-monthly Web news article, a monthly e-newsletter, and a monthly magazine column, I’m accepting a lot more luncheon and dinner invitations than I used to, always hoping for a germ of an idea that can get me off the hook for another deadline.

For the handful of you who read my weekly news and commentary, for instance, you’ll note that several of them have been about topics presented at luncheons hosted by the Geophysical Society of Houston. If I miss a month it’s probably because I didn’t understand the topic well enough to comment on it.

But that wasn’t the case with the recent Houston Geological Society dinner I attended. The speaker was Scott Tinker, president of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, head of the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas-Austin, and keeper of a whole host of other job titles that would not leave me room to comment on his talk if I listed them all. (His business card must be in agate font.) Tinker did not talk about horsts and grabens and anticlines and synclines; he talked about sound bites. This I can understand.

While Tinker addressed many current sound bites, one of his more surprising comments referred to global warming, a sound bite that many geologists treat as a myth because the earth has warmed and cooled so many times in the past without our help. While it’s hard, in geologic terms, to study just the last 4,000 years when mankind could arguably have had an impact on the atmosphere, Tinker said that evidence shows that we have put more CO2 into the atmosphere in the last 400 years, and that the data do indicate an overall warming trend.

“CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and the physics work,” he said. “We need to recognize that and stop deluding ourselves.”

Another sound bite, the notion that we’re running out of oil, received a more pointed response. “There’s something missing in this sound bite, like, reality,” Tinker noted wryly. While conventional oil may be plateauing, unconventional oil is not taken into consideration in most metrics. Even if the industry doesn’t discover another atom of hydrocarbons, we have enough conventional oil left for 40 years, 60 to 70 years of conventional gas, and at least another 100 years in unconventional gas (which already makes up one-third of total gas production in the US).

“We’re building a whole new industry in unconventional gas,” he said.

He showed several slides indicating just how small the pore spaces in tight gas reservoirs are compared to, say, the size of a typical human hair. “I’m not sure we fully understand these systems,” he said. “Students who are here — this is your future.”

Tinker supports renewables and sees them as the fastest growing future energy sector, but brought up the usual concerns, primarily scale. To produce as much wind energy as one modern coal-powered plant would require an onshore wind farm the size of Los Angeles with today’s technology. Offshore, where there’s more space, new turbines are 400 ft (122 m) tall and have a wingspan of 300 ft (91.5 m) yet still are not particularly efficient at producing vast amounts of energy. “We need new technology, not a bigger hammer,” he said.

Another sound bite, “We can’t drill our way out of an energy crisis,” seemed counter-intuitive to most of the audience. Tinker said the more correct bite should be, “We can ‘not drill’ our way into an energy crisis.”

“When oil underperforms, you get layoffs,” he said. “It’s not a really healthy industry. It’s a tough, competitive environment, and we don’t control the world’s resources.

“‘Big Oil’ is not very big. If we can’t drill, we continue to go away. The public needs to be aware of this, and they need to save ‘Big Oil’ for energy security and as a stable bridge to the future.”

He added that energy security is not the same as independence. “Security means efficiency, diversity, infrastructure, increased trade, and global dialog,” he said. “If we can strengthen trade and our dealings between nations, this balance is a policy that engages.”

Tinker has been speaking around the globe for many years on these topics to industry, government, and academia. His data-based approach is, he said, “ringing true” with audiences, and he is now in the process of making a feature-length documentary. More to come.

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