Posted on 03/25/2005 7:40:52 PM PST by neverdem
OP-ED CONTRIBUTORS
WHEN it comes to energy, we are trapped between a rock and several hard places. The world's soaring demand for oil is pushing against the limits of production, lifting the price of crude nearly 90 percent in the last 18 months. Congress's vote in favor of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge won't make much difference because the amount of oil there, at best, is tiny relative to global or even American needs. And relief isn't likely to come anytime soon from drilling elsewhere: oil companies spent $8 billion on exploration in 2003, but discovered only $4 billion of commercially useful oil.
Sadly, most alternatives to conventional oil can't give us the immense amount of energy we need without damaging our environment, jeopardizing our national security or bankrupting us. The obvious alternatives are other fossil fuels: natural gas and oil products derived from tar sands, oil shale and even coal. But natural gas supplies are tightening, at least in North America.
And, of course, all fossil fuels have a major disadvantage: burning them releases carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that may contribute to climate change. This drawback is especially acute for tar sands, oil shale and coal, which, joule for joule, release far more carbon dioxide than either conventional oil or natural gas.
As for energy sources not based on carbon, it would be enormously hard to meet a major percentage of America's energy needs at a reasonable cost, at least in the near term. Take nuclear power - a source that produces no greenhouse emissions. Even assuming we can find a place to dispose of nuclear waste and deal with the security risks, to meet the expected growth in total American energy demand over the next 50 years would require building 1,200 new nuclear power plants in addition to the current 104 - or one plant every two weeks until 2050.
Solar power? To satisfy its current electricity demand using today's technology, the United States would need 10 billion square meters of photovoltaic panels; this would cost $5 trillion, or nearly half the country's annual gross domestic product.
How about hydrogen? To replace just America's surface transportation with cars and trucks running on fuel cells powered by hydrogen, America would have to produce 230,000 tons of the gas - or enough to fill 13,000 Hindenburg dirigibles - every day. This could be generated by electrolyzing water, but to do so America would have to nearly double its electricity output, and generating this extra power with carbon-free renewable energy would mean covering an area the size of Massachusetts with solar panels or of New York State with windmills.
Of course technology is always improving, and down the road some or all of these technologies may become more feasible. But for the near term, there is no silver bullet. The scale and complexity of American energy consumption are such that the country needs to look at many different solutions simultaneously. On the demand side, this means huge investments in conservation and energy efficiency - two areas that policy makers and consumers have sadly neglected.
On the supply side, the important thing is to come up with so-called bridge technologies that can power our cities, factories and cars with fewer emissions than traditional fossil fuels while we move to clean energy like solar, wind and safe nuclear power. A prime example of a bridge technology - one that exists right now - is gasification.
Here's how it works: in a type of power plant called an integrated gasification combined-cycle facility, we change any fossil fuel, including coal, into a superhot gas that is rich in hydrogen - and in the process strip out pollutants like sulfur and mercury. As in a traditional combustion power plant, the heat generates large amounts of electricity; but in this case, the gas byproducts can be pure streams of hydrogen and carbon dioxide.
This matters for several reasons. The hydrogen produced could be used as a transportation fuel. Equally important, the harmful carbon dioxide waste is in a form that can be pumped deep underground and stored, theoretically for millions of years, in old oil and gas fields or saline aquifers. This process is called geologic storage, or carbon sequestration, and recent field demonstrations in Canada and Norway have shown it can work and work safely.
The marriage of gasified coal plants and geologic storage could allow us to build power plants that produce vast amounts of energy with virtually no carbon dioxide emissions in the air. The Department of Energy is pursuing plans to build such a zero-emission power plant and is encouraging energy companies to come up with proposals of their own. The United States, Britain and Germany are also collaborating to build such plants in China and India as part of an effort by the Group of 8. Moreover, these plants are very flexible: although coal is the most obvious fuel source, they could burn almost any organic material, including waste cornhusks and woodchips.
This is an emerging technology, so inevitably there are hurdles. For example, we need a crash program of research to find out which geological formations best lock up the carbon dioxide for the longest time, followed by global geological surveys to locate these formations and determine their capacity. Also, coal mining is dangerous and strip-mining, of course, devastates the environment; if we are to mine a lot more coal in the future we will want more environmentally friendly methods.
On balance, though, this combination of technologies is probably among the best ways to provide the energy needed by modern societies - including populous, energy-hungry and coal-rich societies like China and India - without wrecking the global climate.
Fossil fuels, especially petroleum, powered the industrialization of today's rich countries and they still drive the world economy. But within the lifetimes of our grandchildren, the age of petroleum will wane. The combination of gasified coal plants and geologic storage can be our bridge to the clean energy - derived from renewable resources like solar and wind power and perhaps nuclear fusion - of the 22nd century and beyond.
Thomas Homer-Dixon is director of the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto. S. Julio Friedmann directs the carbon sequestration project at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif.
Two NYTIMES articles claiming the sky is falling and the oil's running out..
Whoda thunk it?
The article is a load of bull manure.
So let's get started then. No time to waste.
So we come up with one standardized plan, we tell the greenies to kiss off and we start building.
What is the problem?
Oil sands / tar sands are economically viable at $30/bbl. That is why a number of petroleum companies have commercial production facilities already producing oil from these fields in Canada and Venezuela.
Au contraire...normally I'd agree with you on ANYTHING spewed out by the Slimes, but the author is spot-on here. Believe me, the near term future of electric power is as he described.
I work for AEP...trust me, these combined cycle units ARE the future.
And, the guy has some very rare candor ( for the Slimes, that is). He's nailed the current situation in the energy biz.
I remember back when I was in the 4th grade a teacher telling my class that when we grew up and could drive the world would be out of fossil fuel, which meant no more gasoline for our cars. Well, guess what..I've been grown up for several years now and we haven't run out yet. I say drill away in ANWAR- the bison or whatever those animals are up there can just get out of the way of the oil pumps!
Oops, I almost wasted my time reading this article before I saw that it was form the NYT. Whew!
read #8
Those states deserve it.
That's what I heard too. In addition, they said Canada was producing light sweet crude from tar sands which means low sulfer. Not sure this article is entirely accurate.
But our flying cars would use something else.
A simple fix even back:
High Pressure Fuel injection
We could have saved 33% of the fuel burned in the last 50 years & had only half the pollution.
Only production high pressure engines being made today are for boats(E-tech by Evenrude).
Nope. The Author is wrong about nuclear power. We have a lot more reactors than he states, they just happen to be on Navy ships. I once figured out that pound for pound the energy value of Uranium is worth many times more than it's weight in gold, and that's only going to improve as oil runs out. The only real problem with nuclear power is the fools who have churned out so much red tape it's not worth pursuing. Case in point: we have treaties keeping us from putting nuclear waste in the deep oceans or Antarctica. I suspect said treaties were engineered by the Soviet Union to help cripple nuclear power production by the west..
We had standardized plans in the 70's.
The NYT, bunch eagerly waiting, hoping for that dreaded day, (which they will be totaly exempt exempt from doncha know?),,, what a--holes.
Integrated gasification combined-cycle seems like a good technology, although it is obscure and I haven't read much about it. Don't worry, though. Now that the NYT has made the enviroweenies aware of it, it is bound to come under protest before too long. The only way for a new technology to be environmentally ok is to keep the enviros in the dark about it, because for the most part, they're too stupid to understand it in the first place.
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