Cormac MacConnell: Does our saucer-shaped geology store oil?
But I am a cynic too and accordingly I fear that all of us are going to be well and truly fracked by the oil barons before the year is out. I hope I am wrong but I don’t think so.
All your lifetime and mine, and throughout the tenures of all our Governments of whatever hue, a constant reality has been the perennially rising cost of topping up the tank of the family car.
There was a time long ago when a fiver could keep you on the road for two or three days but that era is long dead and gone.
We were brainwashed into the mindset that the Arabian nations have only a finite supply of the so-called Black Gold under the desert sands and it was expensive to extract. We were also aware that our political leaders levied a heavy tax on top of the original cost of the imported barrels of oil.
We have been waiting for a long time now for our own Black Gold to begin flowing ashore from areas such as the Porcupine Bank and other offshore sources but that has not happened yet and meantime, until this month really, the pumps on the forecourts of the nation have been our most predatory one-armed bandits.
Now, with amazement, we have seen the price of world oil drop by virtually 50% since Christmas, even though the oil barons are insisting on producing as much of it as before even as they are laying off staff members by the thousand and ceasing exploration works internationally.
The whole scenario reeks of suspicious intrigue.
We will surely be fracked right, left and centre before the year is out. Take my word for it.
It was suggested to me recently by a wise source that Ireland, because of its saucer-shaped geology, is one of the best sites in Europe for fracking Grade A oil from our arable acreage of shale, especially in Munster.
I have even been told that a map exists indicating the really prime sites for the oil prospectors.
Given the recent crash in the world price of oil, some allegedly informed sources are suggesting that the era of exploration for oil is dead and gone and a whole generation of powerful electric cars are about to take over our transport functions. I don’t accept that. We will be fracked to the eyeballs before we know it.
It is a fact that the price of petrol and diesel fuel, in a remarkable way, has always been just one element of the economic equation connected to our wheels.
Exactly similar to the other Old Reliables that get hit by Budgets, like drinks and smokes, we always complain bitterly about increases for about a week or 10 days and then absorb them and carry on as usual.
Those of us who were driving cars through the sharp fuel shortage of the late 1970s will never forget queuing up for hours sometimes on forecourts to get five pounds worth of petrol ... and using up the most of it to queue again the following day!
Out of somewhere in the distant past I remember doing a unique story in Galway during that pressure period about an inventor who demonstrated a special lawnmower he had created which, though not equipped with a steam engine, ran perfectly on nothing but pure water.
It was some kind of hydrogen system, we were told, and would work as well for a big truck engine as for the little lawnmower. I seem to recall the inventor had some kind of connection with the then prospering sugar beet factory in Tuam.
That little lawnmower engine, maybe in a Tuam garage corner to this day, could come in very handy yet for the nation. So, yes, being a cynic, I expect the world price of a barrel of oil will shortly begin to soar again just as fast as it has been falling recently.
And by then we will all know much more about the dark arts of fracking than we do now.
