Energy is on everyone’s mind these days. While several factors have conspired in a perfect storm to drive up the cost of fuel at the pump, all forms of energy have risen in cost. Gas and diesel are just the only thing that average Americans can put their finger on. In the last few months of the energy debate, I have heard some of the most ludicrous crap about energy. So… because I pay for this site… I’m going to address the ludicrous crap and all the ludicrousity surrounding its crapness.
We Are Running Out of Oil
Uhm… no. The idea that we’re running out of oil is driven by a thesis known colloquially as “Peak Oil”. I’m not going to explain Peak Oil - I will point out that it has merit and is widely misunderstood - but instead I want to address the assertion that is attributed to it - the idea that we have tapped out the black stuff. In reality, we are just running dry at existing wells, and are having trouble finding new ones. All the easy-to-get-to deposits of oil on the planet have pretty much been found and exploited, and some of the top producers are starting flow lightly. This means that we now have to look further, drill deeper and find more efficient means of refining it. This adds cost too, but more importantly because of nonsensical environmental legislation, much of the oil we know about is off-limits. The buzz lately is about offshore drilling and drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (aka “ANWR”). A lot of people are against drilling because they thing - as precious as oil is - that the drilling will spill lots off the stuff on the ground. Any of these people who have ever been to a modern well site would be hard pressed to find a single drop of precious crude on the ground. Also, some people are under the notion that drilling will disturb wildlife and force species to extinction. This argument was proven false when the Alaska pipeline was pushed through. It was claimed that it would halt migrating Moose herds and caused huge declines and possible extinction. In reality, it gave them a landmark to guide them, shelter and a warm place to to bow-chicka-wow-wow. The result is that we now have more moose than squirrel (the opposite problem, particularly if you’re an arch-villain with a slavic accent). Oh, and there’s a huge contingent of overly-rich people who think they have an exclusive right to live on the coast and have an unspoiled view of the horizon. They want oil rigs in the distance about as much as they want the common man to have access to their beach. (We call these the NIMBY crowd - Not In My Back Yard.)
There is No Supply Problem
This is also known as “prices are being driven up by speculators/record demand/old greedy white men/George W Bush”. Again.. false. Economics is simply supply and demand. They exist relative to each other. If supply exceeds demand prices go down. If demand exceeds supply, price goes up. When you’re talking about oil, demand is created by a mix in which speculators have a small share and consumers have the lions share. And in a global market, everyone who is buying gasoline, diesel or petrochemical products (plastics, fertilizers, etc) are driving consumer demand. So no matter how much oil is out there, unless there is an efficient error-free flow from the wells to your gas tank, supply is a problem. The only time there won’t be a supply problem is when there is more gasoline at the pumps than people asking for it, pure and simple.
Alternative and Renewable Energy Won’t Save Us - We Have to Drill Now
No, but yes. Alternative energy, like wind, solar, tidal, geothermal and biofuels will do two things. One, it will lessen our dependence on oil - particularly foreign oil - which will also soften the blow of changing global demand. It will also diversify our energy sources so that when supplies become tight in one area, it doesn’t impact all of our energy costs. Right now we get almost 98% of our energy from Oil and Coal - oil for transportation, coal for electricity. If we can leverage alternative energy in both these mixes, then it will make things cheaper even if the alternatives are slightly more expensive because of competitive pressure.
The problem is that those alternatives don’t effectively exist today. Without an all-out Manhatten Project for energy, we are almost two decades away from those alternatives being able to alleviate the pressures on our energy supplies. If we allow exploration in all the places that are currently off limits, we would have wells producing in 18 months.
Domestic Oil Production Cannot Make Us Energy Independent
It can. There is more oil sitting in the deep waters in the Gulf of Mexico than in all of the middle east. Oil in the North Slope outweighs all the oil in Russia, and we don’t even know the amount of reserves in the Beaufort Sea (which is becoming accessible as polar ice retreats). We produce 2 billion barrels of oil (and exports 10 million) annually. We import 10 billion barrels annually from around the oil. We have 20 billion barrels in proven reserves that we aren’t allowed to drill for. We have the resources to fuel ourselves and become a major exporter of oil if we were only allowed to drill domestically. (Source: US Department of Energy).
There are 67 Million Acres under lease that oil companies could be drilling to get oil from.
True, and False. There are 67 million acres that oil companies have lease oil rights from the government on, but they did that as many as fifty years ago based on the idea that there might be oil there. Technology in that last fifty years has proven that we either don’t have oil there, or that it’s not practical to drill for it. Unfortunately, you don’t pay for oil leases on an annual basis like you do apartments. These oil companies took big risks and lost big time, but are locked in for decades because we didn’t have the technology then to tell us what we can easily discover now - whether there is oil on a piece of land. That is why today, some of the largest land trusts and nature preserves actually belong to oil companies. Now the people who love to slam oil companies love to say that the only reason for this is good PR, and as soon as we turn our back they’ll drill on those trust sites. In truth, they would have already done that if there was oil there, and since they’re left holding the land anyway, and the only reason they’re holding the land in trust is good PR. (So… like a stopped watch.. environmentalists are sometimes right.)
Going Nuclear Will Solve Our Problems
Yes. And no. It takes years to even start building a nuclear reactor. The last fission plant that went online in the US was completed in 1994, based on a permit issued in 1979 for a plant designed in the early 1960’s. The problem is that there is too much beauracratic red tape due put in place by fearmongering politicians who fed off of two nuclear accidents; the 3 Mile Island Incident (where noone was killed and no actual meltdown occurred) and Cherynobyl (a shoddy Russian design that still wouldn’t have failed if not for the human factor). It also costs tens of billions of dollars to actually build one of the current designs, money that won’t be recouped until after about a decade of operation. And then, there is the real concern of the disposal of waste generated by these current designs, the risk of terrorist attack and the fear of accidents, all of which are valid concerns for current designs.
Notice I said current designs, which in the US are now an average of more than half a century old. However, under a Manhatten Project for Energy we would be able to incorporate new technologies developed since then, or borrow technologies developed by other countries. France, for instance, runs high efficiency nuclear reactors that produce more power than American designs (ironically, built by American, French and Canadian companies) and produce less hazardous waste. South Africa has developed low power nuclear reactors that are physically incapable of meltdown, and produce enough energy to drive small cities. (The latter can be modularized and deployed worldwide to provide power in places like disaster areas or developing nations.) And American fission reactor designs have been proposed that would produce small amounts of radioactive waste with half-lives in the order of five to ten years!
That’s just fission. We are on the cusp of a revolution in fusion reactor technology. While the US and other world governments are pursuing a “magnetic bottle” reactor design (aka “tokomak”) with the ITER research reactor in Southern France, physicists in the US have looked to two other designs proving promising The first is the table-top experiment of the much maligned Ponns and Fleischmann who announced a cold fusion discover in the late 80’s, then were publically lynched by the scientific community as frauds. Their experiment has been repeated several dozen times since then, and scientists have concluded that fusion did indeed occurr in that experiment. What is in question now is if this fusion can be scaled up to a commercially viable system. Then there is a reactor design which has existed for nearly a century, and used to be found in every television in the world. The “fusor” forgoes the complicated magnetic bottle and uses a natural force known as “Inertial Electrostatic Confinement” to contain the hot fusion plasma. Ironically the Farnsworth guy is Philo T Farnsworth, the man who invented the high-frequency vacuum tubes that made early television possible. Farnsworth noticed a problem with his high frequency vacuum tubes, realized what was going on, and built the first Fusors in the 60’s. Today, high school kids are making fusors and entering their fusion reactors in science fairs. Improved designs known as Polywell Fusors (pioneered by the late Robert Broussard) are actually about to break the barrier thanks to a grant from the US Navy and a dedicated team of scientists at EMC2 Fussion Development Corporation, we will soon be a society free of fossil fuels and able to harness the power of a star.
Unfortunately… fusion by any means is still at least a decade away, fission plants won’t be able to do anything in the mean time, and we’re still stuck with fossil fuels.
Oil is a Fossil Fuel
You heard me say it - fossil fuel - but I cringe everytime the words leave my mouth. That’s because fossil fuels aren’t fossils. They may not even from the creatures that died and became fossils. While most geologists believe this, consensus is a false comfort. (Astronomers once held in consensus that the sun goes around the Earth… so there you go.). A minority of geologists in the west and many geologists and scientists in the former soviet union now ascribe to the theory that there is another origin for oil. Methane - a simple organic compound - is abundant in the universe. The entire atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan is made of methane, and there are significant amounts of methane gas in the atmospheres of Jupiter and Uranus. Obviously there are no dead animals or rotting vegetation on those planets. It’s been shown that when methane is placed in the presence of silicates and put under pressure, a complex series of chemical reactions occur which result in compounds contained in petroleum such as octane, heptane, paraffin, kerosene and more. The biogenic theory - that petroleum is the result of decaying plant and animal matter - is bolstered by the presence of fragments of biological compounds found in plants and animals. Proponants of the abiogenic theory of petroleum origin claim that this is likely from bacteria that live in the petroleum or in the rocks in which the petroleum was formed.
I’m not personally inclined to care either way… I put this out there as trivia and to enhance the debate (or, muddy the water if you prefer)… but since methane is still quite abundant and can be readily made as a biofuel, it might be worth pursuing bio-petrolum using reactors that turn methane directly into gasoline or diesel.
Biofuels Will Save Us
I sort of already talked about this, but I didn’t spend enough time dwelling on the idea of biofuels. Currently corn-ethanol is all the rage, particularly if you’re a corn farmer. Unfortunately, corn is a poor source of sugars from which ethanol can be made. We’d do much better with sugar cane like Brazil is doing, but we don’t have enough land in the right climate to make sugar-brewed ethanol cost effective. There is an alternative - ethanol made from a common weed in found in the southern US called “switch grass”. Requiring very little cultivation, switch grass is rich in sugars and cellulosic compounds which can be processed into ethanol fuel.
Having said that… ethanol is a bad idea. It is a very poor storage medium for energy. An ethanol powered car needs almost 50% more storage space to go as far as a gasoline powered car (and that means more weight, which subtracts from your fuel economy). Ethanol contains and tends to degrade into water, which makes it unsuitable for long-term storage and unable to be transported through existing metal pipelines.
One ray of hope is the ethanol fuel cell. Based on much more hyped hydrogen fuel-cell technology, a fuel cell powered vehicle (effectively an electric car with a battery that is recharged by adding hydrogen) can allow ethanol to compete with gasoline in terms of power storage. But then… why would we do that when we have hydrogen? Ethanol still turns into carbon dioxide and water, while hydrogen just turns into water.
Electric Cars Aren’t Practical
Point of interest: electric cars are the way to go. Whether it’s a fuel cell powered vehicle, a hybrid or a rechargable the technology now exists to make electric cars which are only marginally more expensive to buy, more reliable, cheaper to operate and have far better performance than most gasoline powered cars. At current electric prices, an electric car is the equivalent of a 400 mpg gasoline powered car (which doesn’t exist). Fuel cell vehicles can be recharged on your homes electrical current, or filled up at a pump, giving you the choice of convenience and cost savings at the same time.
The problem is that the market isn’t catching up. Automakers failed to recognize the success of the Prius until it was too late, then flopped miserably at copying it. They did discover the more desirable performance of electric assisted gas motors, and are now selling hybrid options to people who are concerned with performance first and economy second. (Note: Lexus “H” model performance sedans and GM hybrid heavy duty trucks.) Even Toyota was slow to figure out the advantage of their battery backup synergy system; while Prius owners have been modding their cars to be able to recharge from household current for years, Toyota will offer it’s first “plug-in hybrid” Prius in 2009. Only a handful of small companies are offering electric cars and those models aren’t at all attractive.
The End
You were probably hoping I’d get to the point. There really is none. There is a lot of disinformation about alternative fuels, alternative energy sources and ways to make energy cheaper. I was hoping to add to the information, but unfortunately it can be very confusing. What I hope you walk away from this article with is the following:
- We need a “Manhatten Project for Energy” to provide for our energy future. Our demand for energy will not stop growing, and the rest of the world is only slightly behind us.
- We need to diversify our energy sources so that Coal and Oil do not provide the vast majority. Competition will keep costs in check far better when you have replacement products mixed with competing products. That’s ECON 101.
- We need to be more efficient with the energy we use now and in the future. We slept at the wheel of energy inefficient cars, appliances and devices for more than a hundred years. It has tolled on our environment and our well being. Being wasteful is wrong no matter what your political or personal views are.
- Politicians lie.
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