“The presence of deep faults in the Earth’s crust is a well-known scientific fact and, in this case, we have got a new exploration of criteria for giant oil and gas deposits. All giant deposits should be distributed around these migration channels; this is very simple.”The easiest way to find these faults is by looking at places where they could have been created.

“When a comet hits, there is an explosion. During this explosion, a lot of cracks and faults are created from the surface to the mantle. These cracks and faults are migration channels for hydrocarbon fluid,” he says. “There are many impact craters in the world and some of them are full of oil and gas.”

In Canada for instance, there are the Steen River oil deposits in Alberta and Viewfield oil and gas deposits in Saskatchewan. There are productive impact craters in India, Mexico, the United States and many other countries.

Beginning with impact craters, which are only one way to find faults, Kutcherov believes that there is limitless oil and gas to be found if only industry starts looking in the right places.

“There are a lot of areas where oil and gas had not been searched for, for instance east Siberia, the Arctic and the Antarctic. Do we have a method to predict possible oil and gas deposits? Yes, we do. We are not 100 per cent sure of course – nature is nature – but the probability of finding giant oil and gas deposits is very, very high, and several times higher using our method.”

But whether there is more oil and gas, and whether more is needed, are two different matters altogether. The man who all but guarantees that more exists is, ironically, a conservationist.

“I am not going to say that our civilization needs more oil. Not at all,” says Kutcherov, slowly. “The annual consumption could be frozen, even decreased. No, I don’t think we need to increase the production of oil in the world. But we need to be sure that during the next 100 years we have enough both for electricity and for energy production.”

The geologist maintains that through policy and pricing, it is possible to change oil consumption patterns and minimize environmental damage. It is not necessary to burn oil as fuel. There is no need to burn two-thirds of oil supplies in vehicles, he says. The American norm of two or three vehicles per family is not something that should be adopted by the rest of the world. However, extreme measures must be taken to ensure that production of the raw material for synthetic goods, such as plastics, continues.

“If we are not right, the opposite camp thinks we have oil for 50 to 70 years. But in this case, 61 per cent of energy on this earth is produced from oil and gas and only one per cent is from renewable sources of energy. If people say that in 60 years, the substances that give us 61 per cent of energy will have disappeared, we should stop and do everything and work only in the direction of what are we going to do about that. If they are correct, our civilization will be destroyed in 70 years. This is not true.”

Maybe not. But if Kutcherov’s camp is right and there is no constraint on the world’s supply of hydrocarbons, and if countries that have been at the forefront of the alternative energy movement suddenly discover they have access to the world’s most efficient fuels, then economics points to dismal outcomes. There will be price collapses and disincentives for the very conservation he espouses. It is hard to imagine too many people in either the oil business or the green business would want that.

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Patrycja Romanowska is a former Alberta Oil associate editor, a mother and a bicycle commuter who is currently completing a graduate degree in economics.

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