Frank Schätzing - Limit

He saw approval on their faces. Keowa nodded.

‘I know, Gerald. You tried to steer the EMCO juggernaut in the direction of renewable energies. Everybody knows that you are highly critical about your own sector. But they also know that none of your suggestions has been taken on board.’

‘That is regrettably the case. The old Exxon management who still had EMCO in their clutches were only interested in our core products. It was only when the oil market went into free fall, when even the hard-liners had to step aside and the new chairman put me in charge of strategic management, that I was able to act. EMCO has been transformed in the meantime. Since 2020 we have done everything we can to make up for the shortcomings of the past. We have moved into photovoltaics, into wind and water power. Perhaps people aren’t generally aware, but we are in a position to transfer our staff into future-oriented commercial sectors. Except that when mistakes have been made for decades, we can’t sort them out overnight.’

‘Can it still be repaired?’

Palstein leaned back in his chair. Basically he didn’t need to reply. Helium-3 was establishing itself as the energy source of the future, there was no doubt about that. Orley’s fusion reactors were working reliably around the clock, and in terms of the balance between energy and environment everything was fine; the transport of the element from the Moon to the Earth was no longer a problem. Palstein’s sector, however, seemed to be traumatised. The oil companies had reckoned with everything – except the end of the oil age, without oil and gas running out! Not even the boldest visionaries of Royal Dutch Shell or BP had been able to imagine that their sector could be wiped out so quickly by an alternative energy source. Only ten years before, UK Energies had calculated the market share of alternative technologies at thirty per cent, nuclear energy included. Equally, it had been clear to everyone that most of those technologies could only be offered at competitive prices by companies operating on a global level. The photovoltaic sector, for example, got a good market share in sunny countries, but it required complex logistical infrastructures. And who was capable of doing that, if not the big multinational oil companies, who only had to make sure that they could make a quick getaway and switch to a different area when it came to the crunch?

That most of the companies weren’t even ready to make this shift was down to prognoses about when oil and gas would actually run dry. Like Jehovah’s Witnesses constantly changing the date of the end of the world, throughout the 1980s various prophets of doom had predicted that the oil age would come to an end in 2010; in the 1990s it was 2030; at the start of the new millennium, in spite of increased consumption, it was 2050. But now it was clear that the existing reserves would last until 2080, even though production had already peaked, while the resources available suggested an even longer life. There was only one point on which they had all agreed: there would never be cheap oil again. Never again.

But in fact it had become very cheap.

So cheap, in fact, that the sector had started to feel like the Incredible Shrinking Man, for whom a house spider represented a deadly threat. The most likely survivors were those who had invested in renewable energies early on. UK Energies had succeeded in reversing their fortunes, the French Total group had diversified enough to survive, even though personnel downsizing was rife. High-efficiency solar technology, as developed by Locatelli’s Lightyears, was considered the most trustworthy fuel, alongside helium-3, and there was also money to be made in wind power. On the other hand the Norwegian association Statoil Norsk Hydro was in its death-throes, while China’s CNPC and Russia’s Lukoil gazed dispiritedly into an oil-free future, clearly in culpable ignorance of the now legendary statement of Ahmed al Jamanis, the former Saudi Arabian oil minister: ‘The Stone Age didn’t end for want of stones.’

The problem wasn’t so much that petrol wasn’t needed any more: it was used for plastics, fertilisers and cosmetics, in the textile industry, in food production and pharmaceutical research. Orley’s new-fangled fusion reactors were still thin on the ground; most cars ran on combustion engines, aeroplanes were fuelled with kerosene. The United States was the chief beneficiary of the new resource. The global switch to a helium-3-based energy economy was still years away, that much was clear.

But not decades away.

The mere fact that the so-called aneutronic fusion of helium-3 with deuterium worked in reactors had sent already sickly oil prices through the floor. At the end of the first decade it had turned out that people were not in fact prepared to pay just any sum for oil; if it became too expensive, their ecological conscience sprang to life, they saved electricity and encouraged the development of alternative energies. The notion popular among speculators that the barrel price might be driven up by panic buying had not become reality. There was also the fact that most countries had set aside strategic reserves, and had not had to make any new purchases, that new generations of cars had batteries with generous storage capacities and filled up at sockets on environmentally friendly electricity which, thanks to helium-3, would soon be available in ample quantities. The United States of America, which had turned a deep dark green in the years after Barack Obama’s terms as president, was urging an international agreement on emission reduction, and had discovered the devil in CO 2. A few years after the first helium-3-fuelled fusion reactor had gone live, it was also clear that astronomically high profits could be achieved with environmental-oriented thinking. In the course of these developments, EMCO had slipped in the ranking of the world’s biggest mineral-oil companies from first place to third, while the entire sector was threatening to shrink to a microverse. Atrophied by ignorance, EMCO increasingly found itself stumbling, like King Kong just before the fall and, dimly aware that it was doomed to failure, clutching around for something to hold on to, and grasping only air.

Now they’d lost Alaska too.

The drilling plans won through years spent battling against the environmental lobby had to be abandoned because no one was interested in the huge natural gas deposits there any longer. This press conference was barely different from the one they had had to hold in Alberta, Canada a few weeks before, where the exploitation of oil sand was coming to an end, an expensive and environmentally harmful procedure that had given the conservationists nightmares for ages, but which had been feasible as long as the world was still crying out for oil like a baby for milk. What use was it that certain representatives of the Canadian government shared EMCO’s concerns, when two-thirds of the world’s oil resources were stored in this sand, 180 million barrels on Canadian soil alone? The overwhelming majority of Canadians were glad that it would soon be all over. In Alberta, mining had permanently destroyed rivers and marshes, the northern forest, the complete ecosystem. In view of this, Canada had not been able to stick to its international obligations. Greenhouse emissions had risen, the signed protocols were so much waste paper.

‘It can be repaired,’ said Palstein firmly. ‘We’re about to conclude negotiations with Orley Enterprises. I promise you, we will be the first oil company to be involved in the helium-3 business, and we are also in discussion about possible alliances with strategists from other companies.’

‘What concrete offers do Orley Enterprises have to make to you?’

‘There are a few things.’