For the people who call this
place home, nothing will ever
be the same. You see, an oncoming oil
boom is un-avoidable. ($20 trillion
worth of oil can do that to a town).
Coober Pedy has been
a speck (5 ‘soles’ short of 1700 people lived their in residences literally
carved out in its caves until recently) of a town since
it’s founding in 1915 shortly after the
gemstone ‘opal’ was discovered there; it’s located in a remote inhospitable region
of Southern Australia.
Although a very small town, the community has
you might say, its oddities; it’s about halfway between Port Augusta and Alice
Springs. Attractions include the opal mines,
the graveyard, and several underground churches. The first tree (image displayed on right) ever seen in
the town apparently brought about quite a ‘stir’; it was welded together from scrap iron and
still sits on a hilltop overlooking the small municipality.
The Coober Pedy golf course (yep, they have one) is most often
played at night with the help of glowing balls, to avoid extreme daytime
temperatures; the course is completely free of grass and golfers. You see, there's little to no water
and temperatures routinely reach above 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
Surprisingly the settlement
also has an ‘Australian rules’ football club, the Coober Pedy Saints was created in 2004 and
competes in the Far North Football League (formerly the Woomera &
Districts Football League). Because of the town’s remote location, to play
matches the Saints must make round trips of over 900 km (about 562 miles) to
Roxby Downs located
in
northern South Australia, where the rest of the league’s teams are situated.
Lately another 20,000 or so people have suddenly flocked there,
making it one of the hottest real estate markets in all of Australia; taking
into account the location and climate conditions, the sudden influx is just
short of remarkable. The recent ‘stampede’ is only the beginning; the phones of
local real estate agents have been ringing off the hook since the news broke.
The big draw is the riches
about to be extracted from an enormous geological structure called the ‘Arckaringa’
basin, encompassing an area exceeding 30,000 square miles (77,700 km²). Buried
within the basin is enough black gold to completely change the global oil
landscape. Specialists in the field now
believe ground zero will be much like Saudi Arabia was in the 1950’s; early
estimates project the basin may contain more oil than Iran, Iraq, Canada, and
Venezuela combined.
The resource is estimated to hold between 3.5 and 223 billion barrels of oil, which provides
the potential for Australia to become a net oil exporter; a huge spread yes,
but at the lowest estimate (3.5 billion
barrels), the Coober Pedy find is capable of making Australia a net oil exporter
and at the higher estimate (223 billion
barrels), Australia could in a few years become one of the world’s biggest oil
exporters.
The world’s dependence on
OPEC’s crude is already slipping because both the U.S. and Canada are
successfully unlocking unconventional oil supplies from deep underground shale
deposits with new drilling techniques. Given
all the unrest in the Middle East, crafters of OPEC’s oil monopoly has good
reason to be worried.
Now there’s another source of completion from “Down Under.” With
this discovery, perhaps the world will have yet another chance to wean itself
from a total dependence on crude. With a little help from the gods, may-be we can
get-it-right the second time.
Sources:
http://moneymorning.com/ob-article/arckaringa-saudi.php?code=131883
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coober_Pedy
https://www.google.com/search?q=coober+pedy+australia+map&hl=en&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=cjL5Uf3nH4XGqAGLx4CQDw&ved=0CCwQsAQ&biw=1366&bih=576#facrc=_&imgdii=_&imgrc=u0gEi_QONrN8fM%3A%3BDliuiv4cSnAVvM%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.delsjourney.com%252Fimages%252Fnews%252Fmaps%252Fmaps_oz%252FOz_Map_-_02-03-08_-_Coober_Pedy.gif%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.delsjourney.com%252Fnews%252Fnews_02-03-08.htm%3B651%3B564
http://www.metricamerica.com/convert%20square%20miles%20to%20square%20kilometers.htm
http://www.panoramio.com/photo/23086975
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