Posted on 04/06/2005 7:55:45 AM PDT by Valin
I hope environmentalists have learned a lesson from the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge vote.
ANWR held up President George Bush's energy bill for three years. Conservatives claimed--correctly--that drilling wouldn't have the slightest impact on the 19-million-acre wilderness. As supporters have been pointing out for almost a decade, the entire drilling operation would occupy only 2,000 acres, about the size of Dulles Airport.
But Democrats hung on anyway, calling ANWR the "crown jewels of America" and conjuring images of grimy oil derricks fouling pristine nature.
Then, suddenly, drilling in the ANWR passed the Senate last month. Sure there was the usual parliamentary maneuvering but very little public protest from environmentalists.
What happened? The answer is printed right on your gas pump. Gas is now far north of $2 a gallon, and oil is $57 a barrel. Last Thursday Goldman Sachs spooked Wall Street by predicting oil prices of more than $105 a barrel within the next few years. The market dropped 100 points in one day on the news.
In a word, economic reality suddenly intruded. No environmentalist is going to chain themselves to the gates of ANWR when it costs $40 to fill your tank. Pillorying "Big Oil" is one thing. Confronting an angry public is another.
Environmentalists better get used to this. Some of their long-standing predictions on fossil fuel shortages are coming true. Unfortunately, they have become their own worst enemies in meeting them.
As I outlined in the January/February issue of The American Enterprise, we may be seeing the leveling off of world oil production. Global oil discoveries peaked in 1960. Global reserves peaked in 1988 and production outside the Middle East peaked in 1997. The only thing that is keeping us going is the vast reserves of oil beneath the Persian Gulf.
That doesn't mean we're "running out of oil." But with China now the world's second largest importer (behind us), demand is starting to pull away from supply. The same thing happened in 1970 when our domestic product reached "Hubbert's Peak"--named after the Shell oil geologist who predicted it in 1956. Domestic consumption began to outstrip domestic production. We solved the problem by turning to imports. You know what happened next. When world production hits its own "Hubbert's Peak"--and we may be on top of it right now--we won't have anywhere to turn, unless we start importing from another planet. What we're running out of is cheap oil.
Such shifts have occurred throughout history. We turned to kerosene lanterns after 1860 because whale oil was getting scarce. When oil supplies thin out, we may get a boost from natural gas. But natural gas supplies are also limited, which means we must eventually turn to running our cars on electricity or hydrogen generated from electricity.
In either case, that means generating electricity from coal or nuclear power. The rest of the world is opting for nuclear. We're still playing around with coal. In just a few years, we're going to face a very important turn in the road.
Environmentalists got on the wrong track in the 1970s. Up to that point, they had supported nuclear power. The Sierra Club was one of the biggest boosters. Then, a few radicals started to have second thoughts. Paul Ehrlich objected to nuclear precisely because it promised large, clean sources of energy. He feared that would lead to more consumption and population growth.
But the anti-nuclear movement didn't hit its stride until the emergence of Amory Lovins in a 1975 article in Foreign Affairs. Lovins preached that not only was nuclear power the essence of evil; the world could do without it as well. In his book Soft Energy Paths--which influenced Jimmy Carter-- Lovins argued against centralized electricity. The grid was inefficient, he said, and could be phased out through a two-pronged strategy: 1) heroic efforts at energy conservation and 2) a gradual switch to the "soft path"--solar collectors, backyard windmills, industrial "co-generation" facilities (steam and small amounts of electricity), "biofuels" (corn-into-ethanol), plus miniature hydroelectric dams. The thesis had quite a bit in common with Mao Tse-Tung's vision that China could replace its steel mills with backyard forges.
Lovins turned out to be right about the possibilities of energy conservation, which has obscured the woeful romanticism of the soft path. California took it seriously under Governor Jerry Brown. From 1980 to 2000, the Golden State did not commission a single central generating station. Instead it built co-generation--the last major contribution being a 158-megawatt plant from Campbell Soups. To that, it added windmills, geothermal plants, and mandated energy conservation. By 2000 California had the lowest per capita electrical consumption in the country, the nation's largest fleet of methane-from-garbage facilities (one megawatt apiece)--and, of course, the nation's first "electricity shortage." When confronted with the consequences of California's "soft path," Lovins argued that it hadn't worked because other Western states hadn't followed it along with California.
California's failure hasn't affected Lovins' reputation a bit. In fact his influence grows every day. Last August, Fortune magazine ran a cover story entitled, "How to Kick the Oil Habit." Incredibly, the 5,000-world article did not once mention nuclear power. Instead, it dutifully laid out his thesis of biofuels, conservation, windmills, and solar energy--all of it giving due credit to Lovins.
Then in September, Lovins' Rocky Mountain Institute published Winning the Oil Endgame, a 332-page, $40 encyclopedia making the same arguments in encyclopedic detail. What's so exciting about that? Well, the whole project was sponsored by the Pentagon! It won an endorsement from Robert McFarlane, President Reagan's one-time security advisor, and George Schultz wrote the introduction. When the editors of Fortune, a former secretary of state, and the entire Defense Department have been bamboozled into believing we don't need nuclear power, we're in serious trouble.
All of this will be quickly overtaken by events. On Saturday, the New York Times ran a remarkable story of how Prius owners are starting to hack their gas-electric hybrids so they can plug them into the grid. Toyota had quietly removed this accessory on the American version, because it didn't want buyers to think they had to recharge every night. But with gas selling at $2.20 a gallon, buyers want to recharge their cars.
So what's the problem? Well, environmentalists are already tearing their hair: "We don't want to substitute addiction to one polluting fuel for addiction to a more polluting fuel," complains Dan Becker, head of the Sierra Club's global warming and energy program. "Coal is more polluting than gasoline, and nearly 60 percent of U.S. electricity is generated by burning coal."
And there you have it. When push comes to shove, windmills and solar collectors will all be swept off the board, and all we'll have left is the opposing black and white queens--coal versus nuclear. As I pointed out in my TAE article, the only realistic scenario for "kicking the oil habit" is to power America's auto fleet with a combination of electricity and hydrogen-from-electricity. The only environmentally benign way to produce this electricity--twice what we consume now--will be nuclear power.
The question is this: Will we experience the whole transition as another "energy crisis?" Or will we start now making a smooth transition to a nuclear-hydrogen economy?
Contributing writer William Tucker is the author of "Right Idea," a weekly column for TAEmag.com.
New oilfields are only half the answer. We need to increase refining capacity as well.
Most of the little tea kettles closed a long time ago. Big refineries are getting bigger and the owners of these plants are the first to object when new refineries are proposed.
Bump for later read.
BTTT
Last August, Fortune magazine ran a cover story entitled, "How to Kick the Oil Habit." Incredibly, the 5,000-world article did not once mention nuclear power.
That is incredible.
Nuclear power can be extremely efficient. I was a nuclear power plant operator on Nimitz class carriers. On one ship we calculated our fuel usage rate at over 8,000 Nautical Miles per gram. With improvements in fuel loading and core design it can be even better.
See this article about hybrid cars and expensive gasoline
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1378468/posts
Hybrid-Car Tinkerers Scoff at No-Plug-In Rule
And from what I have heard so far, all of the oil in the Alaska Pipeline is sold to users outside the United States. So other then Oil companies making more money, how the h*ll are we going to reduce our dependence on Foreign(Read Opec) oil this way?
Is the ANWR debate really over? After all the decades of arguments, it's hard to imagine that this has now been settled. If so, it's great news.
Nuclear power for the grid(s), and two words for mechanized transportation: methane clathrates.
It's time for this country to reinvent the whole energy system to include all sources; oil, nuclear, hydrogen...how about some incentives on taxes for new inventors and R&D, the Hewlett Packards and Edisons of today....that is where the breakthroughs will come from and forget about any new Guv.Orgs.
As I understand it, oil is "fungible." The world oil market is like a giant bathtub -- produces put oil in and consumers take oil out. Increasing the supplies will help lower prices. But it's expensive (and counter-productive) to try to use export or import controls to control which oil source goes to which country.
And we get hydrogen from where? Oh yeah from fossil fuel... never mind.
And from what I have heard so far, all of the oil in the Alaska Pipeline is sold to users outside the United States. So other then Oil companies making more money, how the h*ll are we going to reduce our dependence on Foreign(Read Opec) oil this way?
Yes it does. Remember it's a small world, and there is (for all practical purposes) one pool for oil. The more oil there is in the pool the cheaper it is. The days are long past (if they ever existed) where one nation could go it alone. We are never going to be "Energy independant" if by that you mean we won't import any oil, we (the whole world) are a petroleum based civilization.
I was talking to a guy the other day about the price of gas. He wanted us to use more ethanol, I pointed out that it takes 2 gals.(?) of gas to make 1 gal. of ethanol, and that pound for pound Gasoline is the best source of enery, you get the most bang for your buck.
ANWR was amply justified, but relatively speaking it's a drop in the bucket.
There's nothing wrong with exporting Alaskan Oil and importing oil to some other part of the country if that works out most efficiently. It all balances out.
But this article is correctamundo. There's no substitute for nuclear power in the foreseeable future. And there's a long lead time to plan and build, so we really should be starting in on this NOW.
Vehicles can be hydrogen powered. But hydrogen can only be usefully produced by hydrolizing water with electrical power. And that means more nuclear power for the electrical grid. There's no alternative, because the other "alternate" power sources will never contribute more than 2 or 3 percent of what we need.
bump
Can I hear a hell yeah? I knew I could.
After my very first drive across the high desert of California through Arizona and New Mexico I wondered why in the hell we had problems with land fills and getting rid of nuke waste. Never seen a better place for burying stuff and forgetting about it.
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