Goodbye ANWR, Hello Nukes

The American Enterprise Online ^ | 3/6/05 | William Tucker

[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.

[Jack of all Trades]

With regard to the phyisical processes, rather than to the business climate, are refinery processes downward scaleable? What is the general impact on efficiency as batch size, or throughput decreases?

[theBuckwheat]

>>
The only thing that is keeping us going is the vast reserves of oil beneath the Persian Gulf.
<<

Which Nazi leader showed that a lie oft repeated becomes the popular truth?

Canada has almost as many barrels of hydrocarbons stored in the form of oil sands as Saudi has in the form of crude oil.

The US has more hydrocarbons in the form of coal and oil shale than Saudi has in form of crude oil.

Even a new process, TCP, which right now is refining the waste of turkey processing into high quality fuel oil, has been shown to successfully refine *sewage* and *urban garbage* into fuel oil.

see:
http://www.discover.com/issues/jul-04/features/anything-into-oil/

Plant output based on various waste feedstocks:
http://www.changingworldtech.com/information_center/pdf/plantoutput.pdf

http://www.changingworldtech.com/when/index.asp

One competing technology (BioOil):
http://www.dynamotive.com/biooil/technology.html

On synthetic fuels made from 'stranded' natural gas:
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2004/0524/100_print.html


Then there are methane hydrates, of which the government says:

>>
...gas molecules locked into hydrate crystals is up to 160 times greater than the same volume of pure gas. The result may be the largest single reservoir of carbon on the planet—at least twice as much as all other fossil fuels (e.g. oil, natural gas, coal) combined. The U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone (which extends to 200 m offshore) may contain as much as 200,000 trillion cubic feet of methane in hydrates (Kleinberg and Brewer, 2001). This is enough clean natural gas to power the United States for centuries.
<<

see:
http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/deepeast01/background/fire/fire.html

The only issue is what each will cost.

Liberals who would insist on only selling their family home for the going price, and who just take it for granted when they go to the grocery store that they will find the shelves stocked, cannot understand how the free market works for energy products, nor can they see the harm done when government tries to manage any free market better than it can manage itself.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

I don't know if I can answer that question as I've been in sales rather than production. The small refineries didn't close because they were small. They closed because their owners couldn't afford the 1993 and other federal mandates for upgraded fuels. 1993 was the big one and the next is 2006 for ultra low sulfur fuel and gasoline. It cost my employer something like $250 million to meet the 1993 regulations for a 260,000 bbl/day refinery.
The Feds allowed the smaller plants some extra time to meet the '93 rules and allowed both .50 and .05 sulfur diesel to be sold with the high sulfur product identified with red die. By 1997, the small plants had closed and the remaining plants were making only .05.

[biblewonk]

NO NUKES, just windmills.

[nuke rocketeer]

Then get ready for electricity rationing, 30%+ unemployment, and no more internet.

[hattend]

Who needs fusion power research when we have welfare bills to pay?

[biblewonk]

That's silly. Wind can power this country 10 times over.

[Diana in Wisconsin]

"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."

Well said! That sentence speaks VOLUMES about what self-serving chickenchits EnviroWackos can be.

You know, I don't mind people having convictions. I conserve natural resources where I can, but I don't demand that anyone else do so.

I've always wanted to see some in-depth interviews with these types. Where do they live? Do they have electricity and running water? Do they only use (chemically soaked when grown) natural cotton garments? What about leather shoes? Do they drive? If not, they'd better be biking because mass transit consumed natural resources as well.

You get my drift...

[jpl]

Never seen a better place for burying stuff and forgetting about it.

Agreed. But a lot of people out there have been successfully and deliberately brainwashed by the lefties into believing that if they live within 50 miles of spent nuclear waste that their children will all grow a second head. Unbrainwashing these folks with logic and reason is going to be a significant challenge. We should be starting the process now.

[knittnmom]

I had some fun at the pumps yesterday. As I was filling up, another woman pulled up at the next pump. Though a stranger, she asked me where I thought it would stop. I said, "Gee, that depends. If we can get some new refineries built, start drilling in ANWR, and use alternate transportation when it makes sense, we might have a chance. If not, it'll go over $3/gallon." This is in Madison, WI (80 square miles, surrounded by reality), so I suspect she didn't care for any of my suggestions. I was done filling up, though, so I didn't stick around! :-)

[Jack of all Trades]

Thanks. This really isn't the forum for such questions anyway.

[delacoert]

You live in a dream world.

[lilmsdangrus]

bump

[biblewonk]

You really don't understand windpower's potential do you?

[whereasandsoforth]

I never hear it suggested that eliminating gasoline taxes would be a great way to bring down the pump price. I wonder why. And yes, those pennies do make a difference.

[Republican Wildcat]

I believe that he does all too well.

[Rightwing Conspiratr1]

"soft path"--solar collectors, backyard windmills

Haha. These two forms of producing energy would destroy or render uninhabitable more acreage than oil, gas and nuclear power.

[Dog Gone]

And from what I have heard so far, all of the oil in the Alaska Pipeline is sold to users outside the United States.

Baloney. A tiny fraction goes to Asia. The rest goes to the American west coast refineries.

[delacoert]

You really understand the ecomonic and environmental problems with windmill farms do you?

[biblewonk]

It's like a blind faith thing for you isn't it. Nevermind a few simple numbers.