The wisdom of Herrera
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A strange similarity between geologists and climatologists feeds disparity
Steve Sutherlin Petroleum News
"In 1960 I came to Alaska straight out of college in the UK and was given a job by BP as an exploration geologist," Roger Herrera said in remarks to Meet Alaska March 22 in Anchorage. "I cut my teeth here in Alaska in the days when there were no maps, only oblique aerial photographs, which were very distorted and not much information, so you started from scratch."
Herrera, reprising his role as closing speaker at the first Meet Alaska in 1984, shared that he traveled the world to many lands, taking the "broad consensus of the area I was in as far as its geological potential is concerned."
"A field geologist never has enough information or hard data; if he or she doesn't have a fairly vivid imagination -- perhaps a disciplined one but nevertheless vivid -- they're not going to be any good at all because most of the rocks are hidden from them."
The rocks of interest are either under the ground or inaccessible on the surface, he said. You must work it out with intelligence and persuade somebody to spend tens of millions of dollars to drill a well and make a discovery.
Herrera spent some 20 years "doing that sort of thing" with BP before moving permanently back to Alaska for a second phase of his career.
"Basically, after 5 years of trying to get permits to drill exploration wells on the North Slope of Alaska, I decided that the government part or the political part of oil and gas was just as important as the geological part."
Herrera went to Washington, D.C., to advance the idea that the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge should be open to responsible oil and gas development.
Which was the better, finding Prudhoe Bay in about 7 years or going to knock your head against the political hierarchy in D.C. for 15 years? he said, adding, "I don't have to explain that."
Herrera said a similarity he found between geologists and climatologists is very important to the situation in which we find ourselves in Alaska and natural resource states.
"If we can't develop our natural resources, we do not really have a future," he said. "They've got to beat these climate people."
"The climatologist is in the exact opposite position to the field geologist, he or she has too much information, too much data, so with that situation they feel free to choose and pick the data that they think is relevant to what they want to achieve -- their thesis of the moment -- and so you find when you look at the international panel of climate change set up for the United Nations, which is really the bug bear of the present global warming situation. ..."
"If I may give you an aside: sedimentary geologists are basically paleo climatologists, they're looking at paleo environments and the climate that laid down the sediments at that time and for example I can tell you that in the days of the dinosaurs in Alaska the whole state was covered in lush tropical forest."
Why? The climate was different and carbon dioxide was 10 times higher than it is here today, he said. Who was responsible for the formation of that carbon dioxide? "I don't think it was the oil industry or anybody else for that matter at that time."
"To finish off that little aside, what killed off the dinosaurs? A huge meteor or whatever it was, and that created the Gulf of Mexico and changed the climate of the world for thousands of years thereafter," he said. "Climate is always changing -- any geologist knows that -- and what we can thank our stars for is that today the climate is very compatible with us as human beings. We should be enjoying it and if it gets a bit warmer, so what?"
Snowbirds could fly north to Kaktovik or somewhere on the North Coast and build a golf course there, if it gets too hot -- we're adaptable, he said.
Herrera said the current climate change hysteria is manufactured and must put into a perspective which is not being realized by governments today. He recommended reading "denial" books for information the media, the press, and the government don't disclose.
"I'm not saying that man's production of some carbon dioxide has no effect, but I am saying that the reaction to that effect is out of all proportion to reality," he said.
Over geological time, there is time to modify things, "especially if you have hydrocarbons to bring out the modifications, control the climate, and so on," he said.
The next job -- more difficult perhaps -- is to persuade the powers that be that they're wrong worldwide, not just in D.C., he said, adding, "Perhaps you need to employ lots of geologists."
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