1. Attacking free speech on climate change

On Wednesday, China’s space agency launched six titanium containers of crude oil into space. With oil prices this low, we’re all for any alternative use that could drive up demand – but this really has nothing to do with that. It’s part of an experiment that could further revolutionize the oil and gas industry.

“Launching stuff into orbit is expensive, and we don’t exactly need oil in outer space,” the tech website Gizmodo reported. “Most rockets today run on liquid hydrogen and oxygen. But China’s not interested in building a fleet of gas-guzzling spacecraft. It’s interested in finding more oil on Earth to support its gas-guzzling cars.”

It’s all about how oil behaves deep underground.

“The Soret Coefficient in Crude Oil Experiment, which consists of six tiny samples of highly compressed black gold, will study how the complex mess of molecules found in petroleum redistribute under intense pressures and uneven temperatures,” Gizmodo wrote.

European Space Agency scientist Olivier Minster explained: “Deep underground, crushing pressure and rising temperature as one goes down is thought to lead to a diffusion effect – petroleum compounds moving due to temperature, basically defying gravity. Over geological timescales, heavier deposits end up rising, while lighter ones sink. The aim is to quantify this effect in weightlessness, to make it easier to create computer models of oil reservoirs that will help guide future decisions on their exploitation.”

There are several important points to make about the experiment.

First, it’s a clear indication China and even the Europeans recognize fossil fuels will be an important part of our energy portfolio for decades to come.

As the Bloomberg news wire reported, “Even with a slowdown in economic growth now established, China is forecast to account for a third of the projected increase in global oil consumption by 2021.”

That’s good news for the U.S., which is now an oil-exporting country.

Another point to make is China and the Europeans simply aren’t serious about the Paris Climate Change agreement (the U.S., China and India are scheduled to sign it April 22).

“The Paris Agreement, reached in December, is the first global accord to commit nearly every nation to take domestic actions to tackle climate change,” TheNew York Times reported. “(Chinese President Xi Jinping’s) administration has endorsed an aggressive expansion of renewable energy sources in China. The country’s latest five-year economic plan calls for the country to generate 15 percent of its energy from non-fossil fuel sources by 2020.”

Even that number is just a relatively soft goal, rather than a hard target. The Soret Coefficient experiment shows China and the Europeans are interested in oil and gas exploration, even at depths far greater than what we drill to now.

As the ESA’s Antonia Verga explained, “The experiment is designed to sharpen our understanding of deep crude oil reservoirs up to 8 kilometers underground.”

The experiment will tell us much about how crude oil behaves in space, but even more about the continuing quest for oil and gas resources on Earth.