(First of two parts -- Part One Fuel)
From time to time we hear politicians paying lip service to American Energy Independence, and whether it can be achieved in our lifetime. The time has come to put our money where our politician's mouths are, and achieve energy independence NOW!
The lifeblood of the world economy is oil. Politicians will demagogue the situation with such statements as, "The United State is addicted to oil." This is on the same par as saying, "Americans are addicted to food." Take away food, and people will starve. Take away oil and the world economy will starve as well. And, if the world economy starves, so will the peoples of this world. It is a politically charged problem, long on rhetoric, that has gone largely ignored when it comes to seeking answers.
The problem is not that the world is addicted to oil; that the world runs on oil; the problem is that the world is in short supply of oil. Whenever demand for a product exceed the supply of that product, the cost is going to go up. And when that supply is tightly controlled, and kept in short supply and high demand, the price will skyrocket. Such is the case with oil.
The time has come to stop with the demagogic rhetoric, and to seek solutions, rather than point fingers and assign blame. Punitive taxes and restrictive leasing will not bring in a single additional barrel of oil. Nor will increased CAFE standards on vehicles or other conservation methods increase the world oil supply. The United States, with a growing economy cannot conserve its way out of shortage. It simply cannot be done. The answer is more complicated than that.
Because the answer to meeting out ever increasing energy needs cannot be summed up in a 10-second sound bite on the evening news, or distilled into a 30-second campaign spot during American Idol, politicians continue to dodge the hard question of just what must be done to meet our energy future.
That energy future lies not with oil alone, nor with ethanol or with Biofuels. The answer is not solar energy, nor is it wind power. All of those are pieces, some large, and some small of a larger more complicated and comprehensive energy picture. Because it is complicated, our politicians refuse to tackle the problem, chosing instead to offer sound-bite fixes, and campaign ad bandaids.
Oil
The sudden and for most Americans, shocking increase in the price of gasoline and diesel at the pump has finally stirred them to action. While their elected leaders have paid lip service to energy for the past four decades, all the while blocking any real increase in American supply, the people of this country have awakened to sticker shock at the pump, and have begun to demand of their government that oil companies be allowed to drill for more supply in this country. Areas put off limits by the Federal Government, including offshore drilling along the Continental Shelf and The Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) are suddenly receiving scrutiny from the public.
The United States has become increasingly dependent on foreign oil. In 1985 American oil companies took 9 billion barrels of oil a year out of the ground in the United States. Today we pump about 5 billion barrels a year, while the needs of our ever growing economy now requires more than 12 billion. As economic needs have increased by more than 30 percent, due to growth in the American economy, our domestic production has decreased by more than 40 percent.
Experts have been studying this trend and warning Washington about the consequences for years. In the year 2000 The National Center for Public Policy Research wrote:
Although the U.S. has about 20 billion barrels of proved reserves, most Americans would be pleasantly surprised to learn that experts believe the nation probably has more than 110 billion barrels of recoverable oil, five times the estimated current supply. A 1995 National Assessment of U.S. Oil and Gas Resources prepared by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) concluded that, in addition to the 20 billion barrels of proved reserves, there are another 30 billion barrels of undiscovered oil that could be recovered using conventional drilling and exploration technology. There are at least 60 billion barrels of inferred reserves which can be recovered with new technology. Including the oil that can be extracted from shale and other unconventional sources, the USGS believes the U.S. has 112.3 billion barrels of oil.
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The numbers are similarly disturbing for offshore oil development. Over the years, Congress has prohibited exploration and production on more than 460 million offshore acres, which includes virtually all of the best prospects for major new offshore discoveries outside the Western and Central Gulf of Mexico.5 This relatively narrow portion of the Gulf of Mexico produces the majority of current offshore oil and gas, but new reserves are increasingly short-lived. The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that the federal portion of offshore drilling, which currently comprises 18% of U.S. production, will rise to nearly a third of domestic oil and gas supply within a decade. Failure to relax federal restrictions in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic Ocean and on the Pacific coast would amount to a de facto strangulation of domestic oil production capacity.
By far, the most dramatic example of the federal government's war against domestic oil production is the prohibition on development of the oil-rich Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). The American Association of Petroleum Geologists estimates that ANWR contains at least 9.2 billion barrels of oil.7 Other estimates show that ANWR probably contains as much as 16 billion barrels, making ANWR the single most important oil reserve in the nation. But environmentalists, citing ecological concerns, have successfully stopped drilling in ANWR even though oil drilling equipment would cover just 2,000 of ANWR's 19 million acres.
No amount of conservation is going to prevent shortages and increased prices as a result of those shortages.
Every American cannot go to their auto dealer and buy a hybrid today. While many major metropolitan centers have mass transit available, the infrastructure does not exist to dramatically increase public transportation in most areas of the country, nor is there a viable way for most Americans to use it. The Utopian dream of Americans commuting to work in their hybrid electric minicar, or riding their bikes to the train station for their daily commute, as is seen in Europe, is not going to happen in any great numbers in this country. Certainly, it is not going to happen in the foreseeable future.
The changes necessary to bring about such change would take decades to accomplish. Such a dream would require the collapse of the suburbs, as American commuters eschew the comfort of suburbia, to return to living in the cities where they work. Housing costs in cities, already inflated, would make this move prohibitively expensive, further eroding an economy that is increasingly in crisis.
The American people, through their elected representatives, have a clear choice that they can make. They can choose to prosper in an ever growing economy, or they can choose to stagnate in an ever smaller piece of an eroding American Dream.
Popular Mechanics has a most illuminating pdf that compares and contrasts the relative costs of a variety of alternative energy sources for powering a vehicle.
Ethanol
If ever there was a case to be made for The Law of Unintended Consequences it is Ethanol. The boon to farmers who grow corn, the massive push by the Federal Government to turn corn into Ethanol for our automobiles, has been the single biggest disaster of the 21st Century.
Ethanol, as a fuel source has a number of disadvantages over other fuels. Ethanol is a particularly poor choice, as it results in at least a 15 percent decrease in mileage due to the lower BTUs availabe for energy. The cost of making Ethanol is greater than the benefit, resulting in the use of additional gasoline in the process. From the American Enterprise Institute:
Pimentel found that one acre of U.S. corn field yields about 7,110 pounds of corn, which in turn produces 328 gallons of ethanol. Setting aside the environmental implications (which are substantial), the financial costs already begin to mount. To plant, grow, and harvest the corn takes about 140 gallons of fossil fuel and costs about $347 per acre. According to Pimentel's analysis, even before the corn is converted to ethanol, the feedstock alone costs $0.69 per gallon of ethanol.
More damning, however, is that converting corn to ethanol requires about 99,119 BTUs to make one gallon, which has 77,000 BTUs of available energy. So about 29 percent more energy is required to produce a gallon of ethanol than is stored in that gallon in the first place. "That helps explain why fossil fuels (not ethanol) are used to produce ethanol," Pimentel says. "The growers and processors can't afford to burn ethanol to make ethanol. U.S. drivers couldn't afford it, either, if it weren't for government subsidies that artificially lower the price." All told, a gallon of ethanol costs $2.24 to produce, compared to $0.63 for a gallon of gasoline.
Federal subsidies that have resulted in Ethanol Plants popping up all across the country have resulted in massive increases in the price of corn. Since corn is the main feed crop of every farm animal, and the profitability of growing corn has caused farmers to pass on planting other, less profitable crops, the worldwide cost of food has risen pricipitously.
President Bush, in a recent speech, defended corn Ethanol, making the claim that the cost to the public has only been about 3 percent in rising food costs. Reports by the World Bank, however tell a different story, as estimates show Ethanol has caused food prices to skyrocket by as much as 75 percent worldwide.
World Bank President Robert Zoellick has said the surging costs could mean "seven lost years" in the fight against worldwide poverty.
"While many are worrying about filling their gas tanks, many others around the world are struggling to fill their stomachs, and it is getting more and more difficult every day," Zoellick said late last week in a speech opening meetings with finance ministers.
Food riots in developing nations around the world punctuate the dismal failure of this policy of turning food into fuel. A national policy that promotes the American public to cause world famine is destined for disaster. The United States spends billions of dollars each year to aid developing nations economically, while this policy starves their people.
Proponents of cellulose based Ethanol, from such sources as wood pulp or switchgrass, make the claim that the answer lies there. The problems with that approach are still two-fold. There still exists the lower BTUs for energy problem addressed above. In addition, there is the problem inherent in the transportation difficulties and water resource problems of the Ethanol process.
Ethanol cannot be transported through pipelines as are petroleum, due to water vapor condensation. As a result, Ethanol must either be produced locally, or trucked to its destination, a costly proposal. The process by which Ethanol is processed, in escence, a large still much like the old moonshiners of the 1930s, requires massive amounts of water. Water resources that are often in short supply for personal use, are being diverted to the use of Ethanol plants, driving up the cost to consumers. In those regions of the country where water is not abundent, trucking is the only answer.
While Ethanol has become a political winner for politicians in Washington, it has become a dismal failure in destroying the lives of peoples around the world. In some regions, rich with water resources, cellulose based Ethanol might add to the nation's energy needs, but as an overall answer it is a dead end.
Electric Cars and Hydrogen Fuel Cells
While the American public has been inundated with the charms and prospects of electric powered automobiles, and hydrogen fuel cells, the fact remains that either of these solutions are years away from any fruition. The problem with both is infrastructure. While an electric powered vehicle might well provide an answer for short commutes, the necessity of recharging the electric battery after even a short usage makes it prohibitive for anything longer. Hydrogen fuel cells, while promising because of their environmental strength, are decades away from common use. Again, the problem is infrastructure -- an infrastructure that cannot be built overnight.
While there is a gasoline station on every corner throughout the country, there are no hydrogen refueling stations. Entrepeneurs are unlikely to invest in the cost of building such refueling stations until the technology is proven. The technology is unlikely to gain widespread acceptance without the existence of refueling stations. As a result, even though the technology of hydrogen fuel cell powered vehicles might well be the long-term answer to our energy needs, it will be decades before such technology is widely available or accepted.
While now technologies provide optimistic, and misleading, headlines for a bright tomorrow, the cost of restructuring our current economy to meet that tomorrow is prohibitive. The process of bringing these new technologies into the American and world economy will take time -- time for which the world cannot wait. As those technologies develop, current technology must evolve to meet current needs, or else, there will be no future technological development.
Biofuels
Recent new developments in the production of biofuels, or biodiesel, have paved the way for a transition from current technology to the technologies of the future. Rapid advancements in the production of algae-based biodiesel looks to be the breakthrough necessary to propell the United States forward toward energy independence.
The American public, as a whole, has a prejudice against diesel. Large trucks run on diesel, shooting plumes of dark smoke into the air -- and it smells funny. Biodiesel, the process of creating diesel fuels from renewable based sources, has shown the most promise, even as it was rejected by a disinterested public.
Biodiesel is, for the most part, misunderstood by the American public. A large number of myths or misunderstandings have arisen over the viability or the use of biodiesel.
Biodiesel can be made from any plant oil or animal fat. Some examples include soybean, rapeseed, and palm kernel oils, and also animal fat left over from meat processing (disgusting I know). Biodiesel can also be made from recycled restaurant cooking-oil, often called waste-vegetable-oil (WVO), and is a major feedstock for some biodiesel producers.
The problem with biodiesel, like Ethanol, has been the cost of refining, versus the benefits of use. Most Americans prefer gasoline driven vehicles over diesel. Most commerical vehicles, on the other hand, are diesel powered, and make up a significant amount of the energy use in this country. Trucks, trains and even airplanes can be powered by biodiesel, with little or no conversion necessary from current design.
Like Ethanol production, biodiesel has, in the past been a losing proposition as an energy source because of the amount of land necessary to grow soybeans or other biodiesel derivitives. Algae based biodiesel has likewise been plagued by area usage, evaporation and contamination problems.
But, the algae based technologies being developed today demonstrate a geometric increase in the biodiesel produced over the amount of land required.
Given the right conditions, algae can double its volume overnight. Unlike other biofuel feedstocks, such as soy or corn, it can be harvested day after day. Up to 50 percent of an alga’s body weight is comprised of oil, whereas oil-palm trees—currently the largest producer of oil to make biofuels—yield just about 20 percent of their weight in oil. Across the board, yields are already impressive: Soy produces some 50 gallons of oil per acre per year; canola, 150 gallons; and palm, 650 gallons. But algae is expected to produce 10,000 gallons per acre per year, and eventually even more.
The above quote was from a Colorado-based inventor, Jim Sears, in March of 2007. Since that time, Texas-base Valcent Products has found a way to "go vertical" with its algae production, increasing that 10,000 gallons per acre to over 100,000 gallons per acre.
"By going vertical, you can get a lot more surface area to expose cells to the sunlight. It keeps the algae hanging in the sunlight just long enough to pick up the solar energy they need to produce, to go through photosynthesis," he said.
Kertz said he can produce about 100,000 gallons of algae oil a year per acre, compared to about 30 gallons per acre from corn; 50 gallons from soybeans.
In addition, for those who are ecologically disinclined to burn hydrocarbons, algae based biodiesel uses CO2, making it a green technology that even Al Gore could learn to love.
Locating algae processing plants intelligently can add to their efficiency. Locating algae facilities next to carbon producing power plants, or manufacturing plants, for instance, the plants could sequester the C02 they create and use those emissions to help grow the algae, which need the C02 for photosynthesis.
Algae based Biofuel looks to be an immediate and cost effective answer to our short term energy needs.
Conclusion: Answers For The Immediate Future
While all of these technologies need to be explored and pursued, for the immediate future, the most promise for Energy Independence comes from expansion of oil exploration in and around our own country, and the increased production of biofuels.
The production of algae-based biofuel demonstrates the huge potential for that fuel source. Rather than starving developing nations of their food through Ethanol production, or bankrupting our economy through forced "conservation," an ever expanding and cheap source of fuel, readily available now, is the answer to our current energy needs.
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