One of my favourite recreational pursuits is to listen to podcasts – ranging from finance/economics, to nutrition, to mixed martial arts – whilst walking or working around the home.
Over the past few weeks, I have listened to an amazing set of podcasts from NPR’s Planet Money, which produced a five-part series on the oil market.
These are linked below, along with episode descriptions:
Oil is everywhere, and in nearly everything: Our phones, our clothes, our food, and our medicine. It has driven industrial progress and technology. It has shaped our civilization, powered its rise. Despite all this, oil has exacted an enormous price: our climate is changing, smog is smothering cities around the world. That all comes, in part, from burning fossil fuels like oil.
Yet — how many of us have actually seen crude oil? How does it get from ground to gas tank? And who are the people along the way turning thick black crude into light, clear, gasoline. Oil companies are some of the largest businesses on earth, but there are thousands and thousands of tiny operations that are just as essential to the oil industry. We wanted to get to know them.
Here at Planet Money, we thought the best way to see into the business of oil would be to get into the business of oil. Today on the show, that’s exactly what we’re going to do, starting with a briefcase full of cash and plane tickets to Kansas.
In the first episode of our oil series, we bought oil — and we paid $40 a barrel.
A few weeks earlier, the price of that same oil would have been about 25 percent more. A few weeks from now, it might be 25 percent lower. Oil is just that volatile. But why?
Today, we try to figure out who really sets the price of oil? We go from an oil well in Kansas to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. We even manage to talk to an actual oil speculator.
Oil #3: How Fracking Changed the World
The Planet Money oil gets put to a test by a lively trucker with his own centrifuge. He also shows us how to stay clean on a dirty job site. At the end of the episode, we make a deal to sell our oil with a middleman.
We also go visit the well that changed the oil world: S. H. Griffin Estate #4. That’s where slickwater fracking began.
Fracking has become a charged word. It’s a boon and a curse depending on how you look at it. Fracking has unlocked incredible amounts of oil and gas, all but ended the threat of scarcity. It has led to an American petroleum boom, lowered the price of oil and gas around the world. Fracking has also raises a new level of environmental fear. It has been linked to earthquakes and toxic tap water. The cheaper prices it caused mean it’s all that much harder to move beyond fossil fuels, making it harder to fight climate change.
The discovery of fracking as we know it was also an accident.
For years and years, the giants of the oil industry ignored oil and gas that was trapped in hard shale rock all around the United States. It was just too expensive to extract the petroleum from shale. So much so, that the headquarters of Exxon sits right on top of a huge deposit, but the company still looked offshore and overseas instead of trying to tame the underground shale right in their backyard.
On today’s episode, we meet the mild-mannered oil engineer who unlocked the secret to making fracking work like it does today, little by little, and largely by accident. We ask him how he feels about changing the world, what he regrets, what makes him proud, how it feels to change the world.
Oil #4: How Oil Got Into Everything
Some of Planet Money’s oil is going to end up in someone’s gas tank— and some of it might end up in someone’s someone’s sandwich. On today’s show, we follow our oil to a refinery, where it’ll become gasoline, propane, and fertilizer.
Oil doesn’t just fuel the factories that make our stuff. It’s in our sneakers, our clothes, and the computer or phone that you’re looking at right now. Today on the show, we meet one chemist who helped put oil into everything — and another chemist who’s trying to get it out.
Oil #5: Imagine A World Without Oil
On today’s show, we follow the Planet Money oil to the end of the line.
And we ask: What would the world be like if fossil fuels did not exist? What if you dug down in the ground and there was nothing but dirt and rock.
Oil, coal and natural gas are this incredible store of energy, just sitting there in the ground waiting for us to dig them up. Amazing boon to humanity! But also: Climate change!
Would a world without oil be better? Worse? Or just different?
Again, I cannot recommend this series enough, particularly if you are seeking to understand the oil market. Happy listening.
