[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 48 (Wednesday, April 20, 2005)]
[House]
[Pages H2389-H2392]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     OUR DEPENDENCE ON FOREIGN OIL

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Ms. Foxx). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 4, 2005, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Bartlett) 
is recognized for half the time until midnight.
  Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Madam Speaker, on March 24 of this year, 30 
of the prominent leading individuals in our country wrote a letter to 
the President about what they considered a very

[[Page H2390]]

critical national security issue. The letter was signed by Robert 
McFarlane, James Woolsey, Frank Gaffney, Boyden Gray, Timothy Wirth, 
and 30 other people, including 12 retired generals and admirals, five 
Secretaries of Defense Departments, and several retired Senators and 
Representatives.

                              {time}  2340

  To understand their concern, we need to go back about 6 decades to a 
sequence of events that brought us to a situation that very much 
concerned them. We have only 2 percent of the world's oil reserves, we 
use 25 percent of all of the oil used in the world, and we import two-
thirds of that. We have less than 5 percent of the world's population.
  How did we get here? The next chart shows us that, and this goes back 
the 6 decades that I mentioned to a Shell oil scientist by the name of 
M. King Hubbert who, in the 1940s and 1950s watched the exploration, 
the pumping, and the exhaustion of oil fields, and he noted that each 
of the fields followed a bell curve. It rose to a maximum, and then it 
fell off as they pumped out the remaining oil. He noticed that at the 
peak of that curve, that about half of the oil had been consumed from 
the average field. It is logical that the second half of the oil would 
be harder to get and take more time, and it would not flow as quickly. 
He theorized that if you added up all of the individual fields in the 
country, you could predict when that country would peak in its oil 
production. And in 1956, he made a projection for the United States. 
Fourteen years later, which was when he said it would occur, the United 
States peaked in its oil production.
  This curve here in green, the smooth, green curve was his prediction. 
The little more ragged curve, the points that do not fall quite on the 
curve were the actual data points which we see fell remarkably close to 
his prediction. We are now well down that curve. We are now producing 
less than half of the oil that we produced in 1970.
  The red curve there, by the way, is the curve for Russia. There is 
going to be a second peak there, because after the Soviet Union fell, 
they kind of got their act together and they are going to have a second 
peak, but not so high, and so their real peak was when it is shown 
there.
  The next chart shows us the elements of the oil in this country, 
where we got it from. We see a whole bunch of it came from Texas, and 
then the rest of the United States, and then nos gas liquids, the red 
above, and we see what is called Alaska there. That is all the oil that 
we got from Prudhoe Bay, the north slope, a lot of oil. But it really 
did not make a very big difference. You see, we are still sliding down 
that slope and there is just a little blip produced by Prudhoe Bay, and 
then we slide down the slope.
  Mr. Speaker, we remember a couple of years ago, the Gulf of Mexico 
oil, and that oil w going to solve our oil problem. That oil is 
represented by that yellow there. Not a whole lot, and it did not stop 
our slide down Hubbert's peak. The amount of oil that may be present in 
ANWR is predicted to be, who knows; it may be very little, it may be a 
whole lot, but the prediction is about half of what was in Prudhoe Bay. 
So you may agree or disagree that we should drill in ANWR, but it 
really does not matter because there is not enough oil in ANWR to 
really make a difference.
  The next curve we have shows a very simple curve, the problem that we 
face. If, in fact, we have reached peak oil, and I spoke here on the 
Floor a bit more than 5 weeks ago for an hour on this subject and we 
have had a lot of people come through our offices and a lot of phone 
calls and e-mails from all around the world, and I will tell my 
colleagues that there is nobody who does not believe that we are either 
at peak oil or will shortly be at peak oil. As this chart shows, you do 
not have to be at peak oil to have a problem. If peak oil occurs here, 
and we are here, you see that there is a bit of yellow between our use 
curve and by the way, this use curve is only a 2 percent growth. Now, 
we think that if our economy is not growing 2 percent, that the sky may 
fall, the stock market reacts very badly, and this is only a 2 percent 
growth curve. Look what happens with this 2 percent curve, with that 
yellow there, that is what we would like to use at only 2 percent 
growth, and the blue line there shows us the oil that will be 
available. Now, we cannot use oil that is not there. So that is going 
to be all the oil that we have available to use if, in fact, this is 
correct.
  Now, I would point out 2 things. One is that M. King Hubbert was 
right about the United States. Using exactly the same prediction 
techniques, he predicted that the world would peak in about 2000. It 
did not quite, because he could not have known about the Arab oil 
embargo or the big price spike hikes or the world recession that 
resulted from that net delay that is probably occurring about now. But 
we have a problem of a shortfall before we actually get to peak, and 
that is probably where we are now.
  Let me just spend a moment on this chart, because I want to point out 
some realities here. This is the amount of oil that we would like to 
use, following up this just 2 percent slope. And the amount of oil we 
will have to use is represented by the blue curve here. But we cannot 
use all of that oil for the present purposes for which we use oil, 
because if we do, there will be no oil left over to make the 
investments we have to make in the alternatives and the renewables that 
ultimately must take the place of oil, because you see, we are shortly 
going to be sliding down Hubbert's peak.
  The next chart shows us the slopes of these peaks when you have more 
than a 2 percent growth. This is the 2 percent growth line, if you 
chart out with 2 percent growth and then extrapolate that as a straight 
line, but that is not what growth is. Growth is always exponential. It 
is like compounding interest, and people understand compound interest, 
and I am not sure why they do not understand exponential growth, but 2 
percent growth follows this curve, it does not follow this straight 
line curve. The next curve above it is only 4 percent growth. I would 
note that last year, the world economies grew by 5 percent on average. 
Now, we did not do quite that well, but China did a whole lot better. 
China grew at 10 percent. I was kind of playing around with this chart 
and I think the 10 percent curve goes about here.
  Mr. Speaker, with a 10 percent growth curve, every 7 years, it 
doubles. That means in 14 years, it is 4 times bigger, and in 21 years, 
it is 8 times bigger. As a matter of fact, one of the biggest forces in 
this world is the force of exponential growth, and it is very difficult 
for a lot of people to understand. Albert Einstein was asked, Dr. 
Einstein, you have been instrumental in developing nuclear energy. It 
is really very powerful; from a little tiny bit of this, you get a 
great big explosion. What will be the next big energy source? And his 
response was the most powerful force in the universe is the power of 
compound interest, which is an exponential growth curve.

  The next chart shows a reality here that we really need to pay 
attention to, and this was the reason, this was the reason for the 
letter that these gentlemen wrote. It was in the letter that they said, 
the United States' dependence on imported petroleum poses a risk to our 
homeland security and economic well-being. If we have only 2 percent of 
the known reserves, and we use 25 percent of the world's oil, and we 
import more than two-thirds of it, and as the President said himself, 
much of that oil, he said, we rely upon energy sources from countries 
that do not particularly like us. Yes, Mr. President, that is true. 
Most of the reserves of oil are in the Middle East, and many of those 
countries go a bit further than just do not particularly like us.
  What we have here on the easel is a view of the world which shows 
what China has been doing. China has been scouring the world, looking 
for oil. And all of the blue, here is where China has been: In the 
Orient, in the Middle East, several places in the Middle East, in our 
backyard. They have contracts in Canada, they have contracts in 
Colombia, they have contracts in Venezuela, they have contracts in 
Brazil, they have contracts in Argentina, and they almost bought an oil 
company in our country; they were just outbid a little. They will be 
back again trying to secure an oil company in our country.
  China now is the second largest importer in the world. Last year, 
they increased their demand for oil by 25 percent. Now, that will not 
go on year after year, because last year, they shut

[[Page H2391]]

down a lot of coal-fired power plants because the pollution was killing 
them, so they bought a whole bunch of diesel generators; I suspect that 
the pollution might be almost as much from them, but they are more 
widely distributed, which is one of the reasons they used so much oil 
last year.
  The next chart shows us something very interesting about energy and 
the effect that it has had on civilization and on growth of economies. 
On this chart, and I am sorry that most of it is blank, but that is 
just the reality of what has happened through history. We started out 
the industrial revolution relying on wood, and here it is, the brown 
curve here. We were burning wood. As a matter of fact, the industrial 
revolution almost floundered before we discovered that we could get 
energy from coal, because we had largely denuded New England in sending 
the trees to England to produce charcoal to produce coal. There is a 
little relic of bygone years up by Thurmont, Maryland, and they denuded 
the hills of Thurmont, Maryland for a tiny foundry there in Catoctin, 
up near Thurmont, and then we discovered coal. And notice, there is a 
big jump. This is quadrillion Btus.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Ms. Foxx). The gentleman from Maryland (Mr. 
Bartlett) is recognized for 10 more minutes.

                              {time}  2350

  We were going along with the coal economy, they are about leveled 
out, and we discovered that we could get even more energy from oil. And 
look what happened in the age of oil: way up. This chart points out 
something very interesting and very important about these fuels.
  Every time we went to a new fuel, we went to a higher density fuel, 
higher energy density fuel. The energy density in oil is just 
incredible. One 42-gallon barrel of oil, which if you bought it for 
$50-some and refined it, maybe another $40-some, it would cost you $100 
for the refined products of that barrel of oil.
  But the energy you get from that is the equivalent of 25,000 man-
hours of labor. That would be 12 people who did nothing but work for 
you all year long. Everything they did was for you, and the energy they 
would expend in that full year is the energy equivalent of one barrel 
of oil.
  Now, you may have a little trouble understanding that, but let me 
give you a little anecdote that may be simpler to understand. A couple 
of weeks ago we took my brother-in-law and his wife down to West 
Virginia. And we have a little Prius car, we get 45 miles per gallon, 
not that time because it was very heavily loaded and we were going up 
mountains. And the worst mileage we got was 20 miles per gallon in this 
Prius hybrid electric, hybrid car, carrying this big load up this steep 
mountain in West Virginia.
  That was 1 gallon of gasoline. Still cheaper, by the way, than water 
in the grocery store. But look at the energy in that 1 gallon of 
gasoline. It took this car, heavily laden, 20 miles up a steep mountain 
in West Virginia. Now, how long do you think, Madam Speaker, that it 
would take you or me to pull that car up the mountain?
  Obviously, we cannot pull it, but we can use a little mechanical 
advantage and get it up there. It is a winch called a come-along and 
there is a guardrail and there are trees and you can use a chain, and 
you could get the car 20 miles up the mountain. Do you think you can do 
it in 90 days? If you did it in 90 days that would be just about the 
equivalent. By the way, that would be a tough pull. That is a long 
distance per day to go 20 miles in 90 days pulling your car up the 
mountain.
  That is the kind of energy density that is there. So the big 
challenge we have is finding alternatives that have something near the 
energy density of oil, because there is an enormous amount of energy 
density there.
  The next chart I want to show you is a very interesting one, because 
one of things that we have got to do very quickly is to conserve the 
use of oil. We have got to buy time through efficiency and 
conservation. This is a very interesting chart. This shows the energy 
use for people in California and the energy used per person in the 
United States.
  And notice that the people in California are only using about 60 
percent of the energy that is used by the average person in the rest of 
the United States. Now, nobody told them that they had to do that. I 
know that they have some regulations that are a little more stringent 
than some in other States because they have some bigger problems with 
pollution.
  But you remember several years ago they had some blackouts there and 
it was predicted that they were going to have rolling blackouts year 
after year there. They did not have any. That is because voluntarily 
the Californians, without anybody telling them they had to do it, 
reduced their consumption of electricity by 11 percent. It was enough 
that they did not have any rolling blackouts.
  I will tell you, it is going to be awfully hard to argue that people 
in California do not live as well as the people in the rest of the 
United States. And they are doing it on just a bit more than half of 
the energy that the average person in the rest of the United States 
uses. So this is really doable, friends. We can conserve. We can reduce 
our use of oil. And we must do that, because as the next chart shows, 
we have got to ultimately move to some other sources of energy.

  Oil is not going to run out. But the age of cheap oil is probably 
over, and we are going to be sliding down Hubbard's Peak; there is 
going to be less and less oil. No matter how hard you suck on that, you 
cannot get more out if it is not there.
  This shows the alternatives that are available to us. Some of those 
are finite resources. Some of them are pretty big, by the way. It may 
be difficult to get it, but the tar sands of Canada, I am going up 
there in a month or so to look at that, Canadians called after they 
heard our speech 5 weeks ago, please come up and visit us and look at 
our tar sands. We have a lot of oil shale in our country. At $50, $60, 
$70 a barrel, that is probably going to be competitive, and we can get 
some oil from the tar sands and the oil shale.
  Now we have coal, and I should have brought a chart, next time we 
will bring a chart on coal. Because what it shows is that when we 
really start using coal to make up for the oil we are not going to 
have, there is only about 50 years of it there, at just a 2 percent 
growth rate, now the world grew 5 percent last year. China is growing 
10 percent. We sure as heck would like to grow more than 2 percent, but 
at just a 2 percent growth, that coal lasts only about 50 years.
  They will tell you there is a 250-year supply now. That is at 
current-use rates. But if we have to start using it faster; it is not 
going to last anywhere near as long. Then we come to nuclear. There are 
three kinds of nuclear. We need to explore all of them. I had in my 
office today a gentleman who really believes that we are going to get 
to fusion. Now, it is not tomorrow, it is not the day after tomorrow, 
as a matter of fact it is maybe 30 years from now; but he believes we 
will get there.
  Fusion is the kind of energy you have from the sun. It is the kind of 
energy that you have in a nuclear weapon. If we can really get there, 
we are kind of home free. But I will tell you, I think the odds of our 
solving our energy problems, at least for the immediate future through 
fusion, is about the same as you and me, Madam Speaker, solving our 
personal economic problems by winning the lottery. It would be nice if 
it happened, but the odds are not very good that we are going to solve 
our personal economic problems that way.
  There are two other kinds of nuclear power. One is the light water 
reactor. That is what we use in our country. And we need to have more 
of them. We produce now about 20 percent of our electricity through 
nuclear. Some of those who have been violently opposed to nuclear, 
looking at the peak oil problem, are now reevaluating whether we should 
go to nuclear or not.
  But there is not fissionable uranium in the world. So then you have 
got to go to breeder reactors, and they have lots of byproducts that 
you have to squirrel away somewhere for a quarter of a million years. 
So we face some real challenges that we have to think through what we 
are going to do with nuclear.
  Than we look at all of the renewables, solar and wind and geothermal, 
if you are close enough to the molten core of the Earth. Ocean energy. 
Boy, the moons raise the ocean about 2 feet on average. But it is 
awfully disbursed

[[Page H2392]]

out there. That takes a lot of energy to raise the oceans 2 feet. It is 
going to be hard to harness that. But we are trying and we need to try 
further.
  And then enormous opportunity in agriculture. And several previous 
speakers spoke to that, about agriculture: soy diesel, biodiesel, 
ethanol, methanol, bio mass. And our agriculture really has an 
opportunity to contribute here.
  And then waste to energy. We have a lot of waste that ends up in the 
landfill. Some places are burning it. More people ought to be burning 
it. Then hydrogen from renewables. By the way, hydrogen is not an 
energy source. Hydrogen is simply a convenient way of moving energy 
around. You burn it very cleanly. It produces only water. You can use 
it in a fuel cell and get twice the efficiency in a reciprocating 
engine.
  I would just like to close by going back to one of the charts I had 
before and to mention that the real challenge now is to use 
conservation and efficiency to reduce our demands for oil so that we 
have enough oil left to make the investments in these alternatives and 
renewables so that we can take the place of the oil that we are not 
going to have because we are sliding down Hubbard's Peak.
  Now, we have very clever people in our country. We are really 
innovative, we are really creative, and what we need is leadership, 
Madam Speaker, to make this happen.

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