A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash – Online

“Oil is black blood. Oil is the blood of the dinosaurs. This is the bloodstream of the world economy”. Indeed.

The international award-winning documentary, produced by Lava Productions AG (Zurich, Switzerland), is now on the web for those of us who have not seen it at a festival premier in 2006 nor on DVD. If you want an overview of the peak oil issue with a candid account on how we’ve reached this state, then watch this 90-minute feature.

The history of oil production and the ‘Hubbert Peak‘ is not new information for some viewers. However, the environmental and economic impact of oil extraction in places such as Baku, Azerbabaijan; Maracaibo, Venezuela; and even McCamey, Texas is not only palpable but begs the colloquial question: What were they thinking? The answer can be found partly within the blunt reason why OPEC “exaggerated” their oil reserves since the mid-1980’s…

The peaking of oil should be evident with Alberta’s tar sands. A Republican U.S. congressman states that, “they’re using more energy from natural gas to produce the oil than they’re getting from oil shales”. “Even the fact that people are saying ‘we’re going to tap the oil sands'”, the founder of lifeaftertheoilcrash.net adds,”that right there tells you that we’re close to peaking because you don’t go to those areas unless you’ve used up the good stuff.”

We are moving to less stable places in the world for more oil, prolonging and intensifying war. How can we fight to maintain a high standard of living that is unsustainable? Perhaps the film’s oil geologist and consultant to several high-profile oil companies sums up the most salient point to this documentary: “There’s a strange irony relating to this subject… the better you do the job of exploiting oil and gas, the sooner it is gone”.

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