[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 61 (Wednesday, May 11, 2005)]
[House]
[Pages H3184-H3193]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
ENERGY
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Jindal). Under the Speaker's announced
policy of January 4, 2005, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Ehlers) is
recognized for 60 minutes.
Mr. EHLERS. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise tonight with several of
my colleagues to discuss an issue of great importance to our Nation,
and I know that everyone that gets up here starts the same way, but
this is a particularly important issue, one that the three of us wish
to discuss as scientists, or those who have a great interest in
science.
Tonight's topic is going to be energy. You have heard a lot about
energy recently, worried about the gas prices, worried about the energy
policy bill that we have worked on in the House and the Senate is now
studying. Energy is extremely important, but what is most important to
me when we are talking about energy or any other issue is to talk about
the long-term effects because that is what the people hire us for. They
elect us to come here and discuss and debate the future of this Nation,
and it is very easy to forget that because we are always caught up in
the instantaneous things we do, the stuff we have to get done today;
but the people of this land, struggling
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every day to make a living, keep ends together, do not have the time to
do the long-range thinking.
Corporate leaders are bound by their requirement to produce profits
every quarter, to get the stock price up. It is up to us to really
think about where this Nation is going and what is really important and
what is likely to happen to it.
So I wish to approach this topic this evening to talk about our
energy future, where are we now, what is energy like, what is going to
happen in the future; and between the three of us discussing this this
evening, I hope that we can enlighten our colleagues and others who are
interested in the topic.
Let me begin by an introductory way just talking about energy and the
nature of energy.
I happen to be a scientist, a physicist to be more precise; and I
have been involved in energy studies for some 30 years, but also
because of my background in physics, I have learned a lot about energy,
and I would like to tap some of that knowledge to talk about some of
the issues and point out some of the characteristics of energy.
First of all, energy is unique. Unique means there is nothing else
like it. It is unique in several ways. Energy is our most basic natural
resource.
{time} 2100
For one simple reason: Without it, we cannot use our other natural
resources.
Now, let me give an example of that and to prove my point that energy
is our most basic natural resource. If you would like to build
something out of iron, suppose it is a car or a can or whatever, the
first thing you have to do is dig the iron ore out of the ground. That
takes energy. Then you have to transport the ore to the smelting plant
and recover the iron out of the ore. Transportation takes energy.
Smelting it takes energy. When you are finished with that, you
transport it the rolling mill. That takes energy. And you roll it out
into sheet steel so it is easier to work with. That takes energy. Then
you transport it to the factory. That takes energy. Finally, you
fabricate a car or something else out of it, and that takes a lot of
energy. Finally, you transport the finished product to the consumer,
which once again takes energy.
Notice that every step of the way you were using energy in order to
use other natural resources. I could have picked any other natural
resource, and the same thing would be true. So energy is our most basic
natural resource. You must always remember that. But secondly, and
perhaps even more important, energy is a non-recyclable resource. Once
you use it, it is gone. Now, if we use up our iron, we could go mine
our landfills. We can recover scrap iron, as we do already to a great
extent, and we can recycle it over and over and over. There is only so
much iron on this planet, but we can keep using it over and over and
over, and we are not likely to run out. Its cost may go up, but it is
still there.
But when you use energy, it is gone. When you fill your tank with
gasoline and you drive it for a week and the tank is empty, the energy
is all gone. It is used up. Where does it go? We know energy is
conserved, but it can change form. All the energy from the petroleum
you put in your car, from the gasoline you use, gets consumed and
turned into heat energy, largely unusable heat energy. And eventually,
that gets radiated out into space, and it is gone for us forever.
So these two important features define a great deal about energy and
how we should treat it and how we should handle it. Finally, because of
this, the price of energy affects our economy more than the price of
almost any other resource, simply because when the price of energy goes
up, that price gets added on to every step of the manufacturing process
which I mentioned.
Let me mention some other characteristics of energy. Energy is
intangible to most people. To me, as a scientist, it is very tangible.
I have worked with energy so long I can almost touch it, feel it, taste
it, et cetera. But to the average person, you cannot touch it. You
cannot see it, unless it is light energy. You cannot feel it, unless it
is heat energy. You cannot smell it, and you cannot taste it. So energy
is intangible. To most people, the only tangible aspect of energy is
the price at the gas pump or the utility bill at the end of the month.
Because energy is intangible, people tend not to understand it. They
do not know how to use it properly. I have a saying I often use, and I
even have a tie to match the color I am talking about, I wish energy
were purple. Because if energy were purple and people could see it,
their behavior would change. When they drive home from the store or
from the church and drive up to their house in the middle of winter and
see a purple haze oozing through the walls because of poor insulation,
or purple rivulets around the windows or doors because they are leaking
heat, they would say, Man, that is terrible; I have to insulate this
house better. I have to seal up the windows and doors more. Because
they do not see it, it is not purple so they cannot see it, they are
not aware of this.
If you were driving down the highway and a little Toyota Prius or
some other hybrid car goes by, something like the gentleman from
Maryland (Mr. Bartlett) drives, and he may discuss that a little later
this evening, and this little Prius goes by, and there is just a little
purple around it, because it does not use much energy; but then a
Hummer or a large SUV goes by, and there is a purple cloud around it,
if people could see it they would say, Hey, I am going to get a Prius
or some other hybrid car and use less energy. So I wish energy was
purple so it would be tangible to everyone. I think behaviors would
change very quickly.
To show the importance of energy, I would like to point out that
energy affects civilization in a very direct way because energy
represents the ability to do work. That, in fact, is the definition of
work in physics. Energy represents the ability to do work.
With the first use of nonhuman energy, in other words using animals
to plow the fields and so forth, we had the agricultural revolution
beginning. We talk about these big revolutions in the human history,
and the agricultural revolution is a large one. There is no contention
about that. But the agriculture revolution occurred only after we
started using nonhuman energy, because people were not strong enough to
really do a good job of pulling plows. Before they had plows that they
could pull, people tried agriculture, and it never really succeeded
until they discovered they could domesticate oxen or other animals and
have them do their work, and then the agriculture revolution succeeded.
The next big step was again related to energy. You have heard of the
industrial revolution, where we began using industry to manufacture
things and to replace human labor. What did we use? Fossil fuels. Coal
first and then oil and eventually natural gas. So the first use of
nonanimal energy led to the industrial revolution. Once again, this
indicates how important energy is to life on this planet and to
civilization and to our economy.
I have drawn here on this chart a model for responsible energy use,
trying to relate it to something that everyone understands. When you
talk about your money, you go out and get a job because you need to
eat, and you would like to have a house and a car. So you get a job,
and you earn money. That is income. And most people in this country
have to live within their income. That is what everyone aspires to.
Sometimes, there are special needs, and you dip into your savings. And
some are fortunate enough to inherit some money. So that is the model
of individual use of money.
Now, you can look at energy the same way. If you look at the income
of energy on our planet, most of it comes from solar energy. We talk a
lot about using biomass. That is energy from the sun captured by
plants, and we can try to retrieve the solar energy from that. Wind
energy. Lots of efforts to build windmills and use wind energy. Once
again, that energy comes from the sun because the sun differentially
heats the atmosphere and that causes the wind to blow. How about
hydropower? Huge dams generating lots of electricity for us. Once
again, that is solar energy, because the sun evaporates the water off
the oceans and the lakes, gets into the clouds and comes down as rain,
collects behind the dams, and we use that energy. Waves are also
related to solar energy, because that powers the wind, which generates
the waves, and people have tried to extract that energy.
The only one on this list that is income energy but not from the sun
is
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from the moon, and that is the tidal energy. And efforts have been made
to tap that, but it is pretty tough to do and you do not get a lot of
energy out of it.
What about the savings? Our savings account are all the fossil fuels;
coal, oil and natural gas. Those are stored solar energy. That comes
from plants which grew many, many, many, many years ago. Those plants
eventually got covered up and over the years decayed and turned into
coal, petroleum, natural gas.
Then there is wood, which is also a short-term savings account.
Again, it is plant. It really could go up in biomass here, but trees
live a long time, so I put it down here in our savings account because,
normally, we do not use all that energy in our lifetime.
Finally, our inheritance, that is energy we inherited with this
planet. Our universe and our planet were so beautifully created, and
there are energy sources within the planet. There may be more than I
have listed, but certainly geothermal energy. Heat energy within the
earth can be used to drive power plants and already is in certain parts
of California and other parts of the world. And nuclear energy. Nuclear
energy is so long term, and it is basically there from the creation of
the earth, so nuclear energy I would also classify as an inheritance.
Now, I would propose that when we are using energy, we should treat
it the same way we do our money; try to live within our income. In
other words, try to use as much as we can of the solar energy, lunar
energy and so forth. Recognize we have to dip into our savings account,
and so we can use the fossil fuels and wood for that, but not to the
extent we are using it now so that we use it all up, unless we use that
to develop new energy resources for our children and grandchildren.
And, finally, the inheritance. That is a long-term thing, but we do
not want to depend totally on it. But certainly, that is there and that
is a very promising thing to pursue.
Finally, I hope as a result of the discussion we have tonight that
all of us in this Congress and all the people of this country will come
to appreciate energy. It is my hope that a better understanding of
energy will lead to a wiser use of it by our citizens. And so that is
the theme of this hour's discussion we are going to have tonight.
Mr. Speaker, I have been joined by several colleagues, and next I
would like to yield to my colleague, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr.
Gilchrest).
Mr. GILCHREST. I thank the gentleman from Michigan for yielding to
me, Mr. Speaker, and I want to thank the gentleman from Michigan for
the fascinating discussion mixed with science, history and a little
poetry there, I think. Mr. Speaker, I hope many of our constituents
across the country are listening to this most important topic.
My colleague, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Ehlers), began to
speak about energy as not something that you can see or touch, and very
few people think about that or think about where energy comes from. It
comes from that fuel tank that you lift to fill your car. It comes from
someone delivering it to your house. But I would suspect that many
Americans and many of our colleagues here in the house feel that energy
is a resource that will last forever.
I would like to pose a question tonight to follow on with what my
colleague from Michigan was saying, and that is: Is energy infinite? Is
energy a bottomless well? And if we look at the bottom of the
bottomless well, what do we see?
If we are to have a cohesive energy policy in this country and in
this world, in fact, we need to know what that is at the bottomless
well, because I happen to think there is no bottom to the resource of
energy. But we have to know what that is. What is that resource? What
energy source can we rely upon for the unforeseeable future, for
generations to come?
The modern world right now is dependent, the industrialized world and
the new industrializing world are enormously dependent on an energy
source known as fossil fuel. That is coal, natural gas and oil. We also
know that the demand is increasing as the supply is diminishing,
dramatically. The U.S. oil reserves peaked in 1970.
What is at the bottom of the bottomless well? I think it is
initiative. It is ingenuity. It is intellect, and it is logic. Oil, or
natural gas, is not at the bottomless well. Oil or natural gas or
fossil fuel are finite, and they will not last forever. So we are in a
transition period, because the demand is increasing dramatically, and
the supply continues to decrease.
{time} 2115
The gentleman from Michigan gave us a history lesson about
transitions from one energy source to another over a long period of
time and showed how our cultures, our industry, our economy, and our
cultures have changed. We know that coal in this country some time ago
replaced wood and actually saved the forests. Coal was actually more
efficient and better for burning or for heating in those earlier years
because we stopped burning our forests. Our forests create habitat for
wildlife; it is an environmental issue. So coal replaced wood. Oil
supplemented coal and oil is more efficient than coal and it is
actually cleaner burning. Natural gas supplemented oil. Natural gas is
cleaner than oil.
If we looked at it a little bit closer from a chemist's perspective,
we would show that there is more hydrogen in coal than there is in
wood. There is more hydrogen in oil than in coal. There is more
hydrogen in natural gas than there is in oil. So we are moving up the
ladder of a better understanding of what sources of energy are
important. But all of them are finite. And as our demand increases, our
supply diminishes, and we need to begin to rethink our energy sources.
In 1910 if we look at BTUs, British thermal units, if you buy a
heater of almost any sort, it will have the number of BTUs that it puts
out, the energy output. If we are to measure BTUs from the perspective
of how many BTUs the United States uses, what is our energy output, it
is measured in quadrillion. If we looked in the year 1910 as an example
of BTUs, the United States burned 7 quadrillion BTUs. That is a 1 with
15 zeros. Seven quadrillion BTUs in 1910. If we looked at 1950, we
burned 35 quadrillion BTUs. If we looked in the year 2005, it is up to
100 quadrillion BTUs.
The demand is increasing exponentially. In 1970, the year we peaked
in our oil, we produced, the United States, 11 million barrels of oil a
day. In 2004, we produced 5 million barrels a day. In 2005, we burn
roughly 20 million barrels a day of oil. We import about two-thirds of
our oil, and that will continue actually to worsen, and we have about 3
percent of the world's oil reserves, or less, and our demand is
increasing while our supply is diminishing.
We are actually beginning to see the end of cheap oil in the United
States. And burning this resource, burning oil, is not the best use of
that resource. We use it, as the gentleman from Michigan said, for a
whole range of things, for heating our homes, for air conditioning, for
airplanes, for electric lights, for clothing, much of the clothing that
we wear, for plastics, for fertilizers, for modern agriculture, for
asphalt to maintain our roads. Can you imagine the interstate highway
system if we did not have oil to make the asphalt to maintain those
many millions of miles? Surgical devices, hip replacement, national
defense, all of these things come from oil. It is an integral part of
our economy.
Should we really be burning it as fast as we can, as if oil were at
the bottom of the bottomless well? Are there other better uses for
burning oil? There are. Can we improve our resources here in the United
States with something other than fossil fuel? If we continue to rely on
fossil fuel, we will never be energy independent and our security will
be reduced because most of the oil we import right now comes from areas
of the world that are not very stable.
We should begin to seriously think about three things and think of
these three things in the way that we use our initiative, our
ingenuity, and our intellect to understand what lies at the bottom of
the bottomless well. The first thing is fuel efficiency. That is one of
the first things we can actually do, tangible things we can do. We have
the technology right now to double fuel efficiency. We should start
immediately, because it takes about a decade before
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you see any results. We could save billions of dollars, reduce our
trade deficit, save oil supplies so they last longer. The American
Petroleum Institute estimates that we have 25 years of oil left with
present demand. That is not with any increase in demand. Is demand
going down? Will we burn less than 100 quadrillion BTUs? I do not think
so. What will we do about importing the millions of barrels of oil
every day? So doubling our efficiency with oil and natural gas will
spread these supplies longer and offer us that transition period
between a new fuel economy that we desperately need.
The second thing are alternative fuels. The gentleman from Michigan
(Mr. Ehlers) and I know the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Bartlett) will
mention these. There is solar. It is a small piece, but it is a piece.
There is wind. It is significant, but it is a small piece of the pie.
There are biofuels, a whole range of biofuels from corn to soybeans to
poplar trees, to certain grasses, to a range of things that we have
already mentioned here tonight; but they are a small piece.
There is hydropower. There is hydrogen which does offer us some hope.
It is not a fuel. You can produce it from solar, from wind, from
nuclear, from coal. What we have here is a membrane; it excites the
molecules and you produce electricity without combustion. But we do not
have the technology to mass produce hydrogen to take the place of oil.
There is methane from landfills and livestock. There is nuclear power,
which is cleaner. The storage of fuel rods is difficult and also, even
though it is nuclear, it is a finite source.
We have to start now to make the transition to a new energy source
smooth and not disruptive. We must understand the dynamics of this from
an economic standpoint, a geopolitical perspective, and cultural life-
style.
The third thing is life-style. Our lives, our culture right now,
dependent on fossil fuel, our lives are filled with things, things and
more things. Look around your home. Where do these things come from?
What are they made of? And how do they get delivered to us? The world
is dependent on fossil fuel, mainly oil, to make those things,
transport those things, and bring them to your home. We import them
from all over the world. Oil is related to every aspect of production,
distribution, marketing, and consumption of the products you get from
megaretailers like Wal-Mart and Sears to McDonald's and Burger King.
Our culture.
What will replace oil to keep this kind of economy ever expanding? We
talk all the time about a growing economy. How will it expand without
oil? We should start talking in terms of a dynamic, sustainable economy
without oil. Without oil, our life-styles, in conclusion, our
communities, are likely to be smaller and more compact. Our farms are
likely to be smaller and more diverse. There will be fewer expanding
suburbs wholly dependent upon the automobile. Solar, wind, biofuels can
accommodate smaller communities. Nuclear at least for the time will be
more significant.
But if we use what is at the bottom of the bottomless well,
ingenuity, initiative and intellect, we will have cleaner energy
sources, more jobs, drastically reduced trade deficits, more of our own
goods will be produced here, a stable economy, more security.
What does the future hold for us? Look deeply at what is or should be
at the bottom of the bottomless well. We need the time to transition to
this new economy.
Mr. EHLERS. I thank the gentleman from Maryland for his perceptive
comments and his poetic, almost philosophical, statements. I appreciate
that.
I would just like to add one quick note. When you refer to
photovoltaics, I just read an article a week or two ago on this. It is
just astounding to me how fast the field has developed in the last few
years. Let me just give one quote: We expect that by 2015,
photovoltaics will be producing electricity at the cost of 6 cents per
kilowatt hour. That is generally less than people are paying for their
electricity at their home. And there are no transition costs because
you can keep the photovoltaic unit right in your home generating
electricity for your home. A friend of mine has built a house which is
totally independent of outside energy using photovoltaics and other
things. He lives 5 miles from the nearest power line. It works
beautifully.
But the very interesting thing is that the prediction is that half of
new U.S. electricity generation by 2025 will be produced by
photovoltaics, replacing a lot of power plants. I was pleased when I
read this. I thought, this fellow really knows what he is talking
about. I got to the end and looked at the name. It is Mr. Al Compaan,
professor at the University of Toledo and a former student of mine. I
did not realize until I reached the end that he was one of my students.
We have approximately 30 minutes, and I have three more speakers so
if each of them could limit themselves to 10 minutes or less, I would
appreciate it. Next I am pleased to recognize the gentleman from South
Carolina (Mr. Inglis) who was with the Congress for 6 years, term-
limited himself, very honorably, and has now returned to us having
fulfilled that commitment.
Mr. INGLIS of South Carolina. I thank the gentleman for yielding. I
am excited about the work that the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Ehlers)
is doing on the Science Committee and for the innovations that I think
that we can together bring about and can encourage from here in the
Congress. I am happy to be part of this Special Order to talk about
what could be part of our future.
In particular, the aspect that I want to focus on is cars and to have
us think about what cars could be in the future. We are bound now by
burning petroleum in our cars. We are bound to lethal accidents where
people traveling at a high rate of speed end up being killed because
cars crash together, blowouts on tires or whatever cause them to have
crashes.
What I am excited about is imagining a completely different future,
one that has smart cars, has fuels of the future; smart cars that know
their position relative to other cars on the road by sensors and by
automatic braking systems that take over for the driver, that make it
so that a computer is actually driving the car. That for many people
sounds like science fiction, but it really is not that far away.
I think it is very interesting that Bill Gates was here recently and
spoke with members of the Intellectual Property Caucus and opined that
it is not a question of if; it is a question of when we get smart cars.
He said in the future, there will be no accidents. Of course, it might
not be wise to bet against Bill Gates when it comes to technology
issues. While we were waiting, a colleague of ours pointed out that if
you had invested $10,000 in a company called Microsoft in 1980, it
would be worth $25 million today. So it is not a good idea to bet
against Bill Gates when it comes to technology.
What we have, I think, is the opportunity to dream that big, to think
of a car totally differently, that it could run itself, that you get in
it and it is not so much a steering wheel as it is a computer screen.
Unless we think this is far away, think of the blue screen tracker
system that is right now deployed in Iraq on the vehicles that we have
got over there and so that our men and women know where they are, where
their unit is, relative to other units. That is updated every few
seconds. The technology, in other words, is not far away. It is on the
ground right now in the blue screen tracker system, and it is not far
away, in my opinion, for the car.
If you think about what that means, it means compression on the
highways. It means that you do not have to have the spacing that we
have now, where cars in order to be safe should be driving a fair
distance from each other at 60 or 70 miles an hour. As it is, we have
got to have a lot of asphalt on the ground to accommodate that many
cars traveling at that rate of speed. But if they are smart cars, they
can be within relatively few feet of each other, traveling at
significant speeds but knowing where one is relative to the other.
That seems like science fiction, but consider this: a number of auto
manufacturers, including BMW which makes X5s and Z4s in Spartanburg,
South Carolina, are working on braking systems that actually take over
the braking decision for the driver. BMW will release a car very soon
that does just that. It has a braking system that decides for you when
it should apply the brake and keeps you from hitting something.
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So if you think about that, the breakthroughs that we are going to
get in cars, the compression on the highways, braking systems that make
those decisions for you, the ability to get in a car, program it to go
somewhere, say from here to Baltimore, take your hands off the wheel,
read the newspaper, the productivity gains in the economy are very
exciting. There are some very exciting things there now. The key to
that is a new energy system, too, one that hopefully will emit only
water as you travel, say, from here to Baltimore. That is what the
hydrogen economy could promise for us. That is why I am very excited
about producing that hydrogen and figuring out how to store it and
distribute it. Those are, of course, as I understand it, the three big
challenges, producing it, storing it, and distributing it.
Producing it, as one of our colleagues just mentioned, could be in
various ways.
{time} 2130
Perhaps by concentrating enough energy from the sun, sunlight into a
spot to reach temperatures to crack water. And I heard the gentleman
from Michigan's (Mr. Ehlers) Special Order a week or so ago about
nuclear, and we seem to be of the same opinion that nuclear seems to be
one of the more promising ways at this point to crack water. A reactor
built for that purpose cannot only generate electricity but can also
generate the heat necessary to crack the water. And the beauty, of
course, of that is, rather than cracking natural gas, which produces
C02, cracking water would create no C02, and we
would have this wonderful operation that creates electricity plus heat,
cracks water, creates hydrogen, and we have got a stable source of
fuel.
So production is crucial in envisioning this future that I am talking
about here. Second is the ability to store it, to store this hydrogen.
A lot of issues there about whether to try to store it in a gaseous
state or whether to cool it and try to get it to a liquid state or
whether to have some breakthroughs with metal hydrides and determine a
way to store it in a solid state. Those are some areas that we need
work on, and the gentleman from Michigan can add to that, I think.
And then the third area where we need breakthroughs is how to
distribute it, how to set up either pipelines or some other system of
distributing this fuel. If we can crack those things, get at producing,
storing, and distributing hydrogen, I believe that we are going to be
there, not forever away. One of our colleagues who is not so inclined
to believe that this is all going to happen once told me, ``Yes, that
will work maybe for your grandchildren.'' Well, I think this is going
to be here before my grandchildren, and it had better be because, as we
have been hearing tonight, we are running out of this stuff called
petroleum, and we have got a lot better things to do than burn it. We
can make pharmaceuticals. We can make plastics. We can do a lot better
things.
Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for giving me the opportunity to
share these dreams of the future that may seem like some watching
dreamers, but that is how we got to the moon. That is how we get
breakthroughs. We have got to be about it and here in the Congress fund
it, fund good research on these things, spend good money to create
these breakthroughs.
Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding to me.
Mr. EHLERS. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman
for his comments. And I particularly would like to emphasize a couple
of things. First of all, many people tend to assume hydrogen is a new
source of energy. It is not a source of energy because free hydrogen
does not occur in nature. We have to produce it. And highlighting the
needs, we have to develop means of production and storage and
distribution, which includes transportation to the gas stations. It is
going to be a real revolution. I would expect, by 2020, we will see a
substantial number of those vehicles on the road. It is going to take a
lot of hard work, but it will be worth it because they will be
essentially pollution free, and if we produce the hydrogen using
nuclear energy or solar energy, something other than petroleum, we will
also be contributing to a cleaner atmosphere and get rid of the
greenhouse gasses.
So I thank the gentleman very much for his contribution, and I am
delighted to have him on the Committee on Science with me.
Mr. Speaker, next I yield to the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Wamp)
who has Oakridge National Laboratories within his district and is very
interested in science and particularly in energy, which is natural
because the Oakridge Laboratories is a Department of Energy facility.
So I am very anxious to hear what he has to add to the discussion this
evening.
Mr. WAMP. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Michigan (Mr.
Ehlers) for yielding to me.
Let me say how encouraged I am that five senior Republicans would
come together tonight to share different perspectives on the need to
secure our energy sources in this country and to help bring the
American people along to some of the reforms that are necessary, I
think, to secure our future in the world and to create more
opportunity. I believe that we have done a lot of good things on this
side of the aisle, but I think that we have a whole lot left to be
done. And before this energy bill gets back from conference, I think we
all need to advocate for quite a few changes.
Let me say that energy and economic development are hand in hand. The
gentleman from South Carolina invoked the name of Bill Gates. I would
submit that the reason that we balanced the budget a few years ago for
a few years in a row was not because we cut spending. We did hold the
line on spending for like 3 consecutive years and kept the growth of
spending below inflation. But it was because we actually led the world
in a particular area of our export economy and information technology
and we created such a robust U.S. economy that revenues surpassed
expenses, and we balanced the budget. And I would challenge the country
that the one great area that we can do that again, as we look over the
next 10 to 15 years, is in what I call ``entech,'' energy technologies.
Because there are so many energy needs around the world as the
population explodes, as third-world countries become industrialized, as
people are more mobile, and this global economy that we all live and
operate in is increasing the demand for energy, the whole world is
looking to us for leadership. And it is an export potential in
manufacturing that could lead to the most robust U.S. economy that
could actually increase revenues so greatly, because we are so
productive, and we are solving the world problems. We could balance the
budget again. I do not believe, given today's needs, we can cut
spending enough to balance the budget because of homeland security,
because of entitlement spending. As a matter of fact, if we eliminate
all of the nondefense discretionary funding, we still would have a
deficit in this current fiscal year. So we have got to grow this
economy, and energy technologies are the way to do it.
Energy, as we have heard already, is a source of many of our
problems. But I have get got to tell my colleagues, energy is also the
source of the solutions to a lot of our problems, and I am looking
forward to the development of technologies. And when we look at this
continuum, I love the combination of history and knowledge on energy,
but think about the next 100 years and think back on the last 100
years. Man has only been flying a little more than 100 years. That
ought to blow people's minds that, in less than 100 years, we can go
from Kitty Hawk to people routinely being catapulted into space with a
hydrogen system, catapult them into space. They stay out there for a
period of time. They reenter the earth's atmosphere in a big ball of
fire, and then they safely land and walk away. And except for two great
tragedies with Challenger and Columbia, this became routine in less
than 100 years. Where are we going to be with technology in the next
100 years? Children ought to look forward to their future. The Jetsons,
which was a cartoon we watched, could very well be a reality within the
next few decades.
Transportation, though, has to be at the forefront of the energy
revolution in this country because two-thirds of the petroleum is used
in the transportation sector, and as the gentleman
[[Page H3189]]
from South Carolina so well articulated, we have got to look for
solutions. I am encouraged by the development of hybrid vehicles. It is
the bridge to the hydrogen economy as it develops, and right now, there
are more and more automotive systems, cars and light trucks, that are
moving to hybrid technologies, both foreign and domestic. And next
year, the American consumer will have a host of options.
One of the things that I regretted about the energy bill, and I think
several of our colleagues here on our side did not vote for the House
version, and I believe we will be able to vote for the conference
report when it comes back soon, because the House version did not
include the tax incentives to stimulate renewables, alternative fuels,
did not extend the tax credit for these hybrid vehicles. And, frankly,
we have got people waiting in line, and we need to incentivize more of
that so that the manufacturers will be encouraged to make them and
consumers will be encouraged to buy them, and we did not do enough in
that bill. As a matter of fact, here is what folks need to know,
because I have met with President Bush recently and listened to him on
this issue: When he sent his proposal over here, 72 percent of the tax
incentives in his energy plan were for renewables and energy
alternatives, and he really wanted to rachet this up. But, by the time
the House got through with it, they had lowered that 72 percent to 6
percent and replaced a lot of the renewables and alternative energy
sources with oil and gas. And when they asked the President what he
thought about that he said, You do not need to incentivize oil and gas;
$2.35 a gallon will incentivize oil and gas. They have got incentives.
It is called the marketplace. We need to incentivize the alternatives
to oil and gas.
And that is really what we are excited about here, and I believe,
when the Senate finishes its work, brings this back, the Republicans in
Congress and quite a few good Democrats will come together and pass an
energy bill that really moves us towards these alternatives.
Let me tell my colleagues that I look to the private sector to see
what they are doing because there is some division at DOE as to whether
or not hydrogen is safe and if hydrogen is the solution, and there are
still some question marks behind it. But GM and Shell, they do not just
throw their money away. They are interested in the bottom line. And
they now have 40 hydrogen fuel cell vehicles on the road, a permanent
hydrogen station in New York City, a permanent hydrogen station here in
Washington, D.C., to demonstrate what can be done.
The challenge, we have heard some of the challenges; another
challenge is cost. These units cost $400,000 each. We have got to find
ways to bring that cost down to a $40,000 or $50,000 each so that it is
cost-effective for the American consumers to jump across this bridge to
the hydrogen economy.
I have said that I believe our tax code is the best way to encourage
and incentivize manufacturers and consumers to move towards these new
sources of energy. Our energy independence, though, is a homeland
security issue. I co-chair the Renewable Energy Caucus here in the
House, and in the last Congress, we got over half the Members. It is
very bipartisan; about 60 percent Democrats, 40 percent Republicans.
Many of my colleagues here, I think all of them are members of it. It
is so important that we do these things, but I also serve on the
Homeland Security Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations. Our
energy security is a top homeland security issue. As a matter of fact,
former national security advisers all came together last month and
signed a letter to the President of the United States saying that
energy security is a crisis and that it is a national security issue
and that we need to address it with the highest level of priority. And
there are several crises floating around. We are spending a lot of time
talking about them. In my view, this energy issue is right at the end
of our nose in terms of a crisis. We have got to mobilize quickly so
that we can secure our independence. I do not want to be reliant on the
Middle East for petroleum for two-thirds of our transportation needs.
And the sooner we act, the sooner we are going to be stable and secure.
It is a very important national security and homeland security issue.
We talk about natural gas. The prices have spiked so quickly that now
we look at photovoltaics. We look at solar panels for home
construction, and because of the rise in natural gas prices, they
become cost-effective to put them on their house early. They make solar
energy panels in Memphis, Tennessee. Sharp Solar does. And in a lot of
places that are cold in the winter, now where natural gas has gone to
$7, I think, we can actually put in our building materials these
energy-efficient technologies. Go to the National Renewable Energy Lab
in Colorado and see the breakthroughs. One will be stunned as to how
quickly, as the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Ehlers) has said, these
things are advancing. A host of things. Wind power, we are building
more and more windmills in the Tennessee Valley. TVA has the green
power switch option. More and more consumers are signing up for that.
Pay a little more but know that they have got totally renewable energy
coming into their home. It is a popular thing. And, frankly,
Republicans leading with a national energy policy for the first time
since the late 1970s are doing the right thing for the environment.
But that brings me to a problem we have, and that is in the
electricity sector, the cleanest, most efficient electricity in this
country is nuclear. In France, these people are very environmentally
sensitive. They actually get it, and over 70 percent of the electricity
in France is provided by nuclear, but they do prototype their design.
They eliminate the margin of error, and they do the same thing over and
over again. We need to do that here, and we need to go back into the
nuclear business. We have the waste stream problems worked out with
Yucca Mountain. We need to be bold enough to say, if we are going to
secure our energy sources, and the main thing is there is absolutely no
emissions with nuclear. We have clean air. We could actually
participate in Kyoto if we would replace fossil with nuclear, and we
are smart enough to do it. Dadgum, if the French are smart enough to do
it, then we are smart enough to do it.
The House Republicans have a strong energy plan. By the time we
finish, we are going to do extremely well. We have got several
deliverables from renewable energy and energy efficiency, moving to the
hydrogen economy, making sure that our electricity grid is reliable,
expanding nuclear power and cleaning up the coal technologies in this
country. I am proud to serve with these men and advocate for energy
security. I believe we are going to actually send that bill to the
President and do the right thing, grow the economy and hopefully
ultimately have revenues pass expenses again.
{time} 2145
Mr. EHLERS. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman
for his comments, and I appreciate his words about the Jetsons. Both
previous speakers mentioned we have to be smart with the smart cars of
the future. I would say if we are not smart, we may end up like the
Flintstones, instead of the Jetsons. So it is very important for us to
do the long-term planning we need to in this body.
Also the gentleman mentioned the document from the Energy Future
Coalition, which I also have. National security is a very, very
important part of this discussion, and it really irritates me that we
are financing our foes in the Middle East by sending all this money
over there which they are diverting into instruments of war against us.
With that, I am pleased to recognize our final speaker of the day,
another scientist, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Bartlett), who is
an expert on what is called ``peak oil.'' In other words, we talked
about the finiteness of the oil and natural gas supplies. The gentleman
from Maryland (Mr. Bartlett) is the expert, and he will explain that to
us.
Mr. BARTLETT. Mr. Speaker, I really want to thank the gentleman for
organizing this hour this evening.
The gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Ehlers) mentioned the energy future,
and I have a chart here which looks at the past. If you understand how
we have gotten here, why, you may be able to see the future a little
better.
The gentleman mentioned the wood, and that is the brown line way down
here. Then the gentleman mentioned
[[Page H3190]]
coal. We transitioned, and the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Gilchrest)
mentioned that also. We transitioned to coal. You see that we got lots
more energy out of coal than we got out of wood.
Then look at the energy that we get out of oil. Of course, as we look
to the future, we need to find something that will at least come close
to producing the kind of energy that we get from oil.
Our next slide relates to something the gentleman said about energy
represents the ability to do work. Here we have a chart which lists the
energy density in a variety of things that we get energy from.
To kind of put this in perspective, I would like to note that if we
come down here to crude oil, I will give you some idea of the energy
density of crude oil, one barrel of crude oil, 42 gallons, represents
the energy from 25,000 man-hours of labor. That is about 12 man years
of labor. That is the equivalent of having 12 people that work all year
for you. And what will it cost you for that? $100 today, about $50 for
the barrel of oil and maybe $50 to refine it and distribute it. So that
is the kind of energy density that we get from fossil fuel.
Now, we are going to have to find something that comes close that
that in the quantities we are using fossil fuels. We are talking about
oil and gas. We use in our country 21 million barrels of oil a day. The
rest of the world uses 63 million barrels of oil a day. That is 84
million barrels of oil a day total.
If you look here, you will see we did go to higher and higher energy
density fuels. As we moved along, you can burn domestic refuge, and we
ought to be doing that, by the way, instead of putting it in landfills.
We ought to be burning that. Some are doing that. You get heat for the
surrounding houses, you get electricity from it.
Brown coal, that is not very good coal. Straw, you can burn bailed
straw, that is called biomass. There are lots of things you can do with
biomass. In some parts of the world they burn dried dung. That also has
lots of energy in it, about the same as wood.
Then we move to black coal, that is what we really mean by coal. You
see coal has a higher energy density than wood. And here is coke and
ethanol. Notice that ethanol has a lesser energy density than crude oil
and diesel and petrol, that is what you put in your car. Naptha has a
higher energy density, aviation fuel a still higher energy density, and
natural gas, it was mentioned, the hydrogen content goes higher and
higher in these so you get more energy out of it.
The gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Ehlers) mentioned the agricultural
revolution. We have a chart here that looks at the agricultural
revolution. This is a very interesting chart.
The top part of the chart shows how we get energy from petroleum, and
it goes from petroleum clear down to gasoline and all of the energy
inputs in the stages that are involved in doing that. You have to
recover it. Here is the energy input that you need to recover it. You
have to transport it. You have got to refine it. You have got to
transport it again. And this is what you get from it, 1 million Btus of
gasoline at the refueling station. And what did that cost you? It cost
1.23 million Btus. So about a fifth of all the energy you started with
in petroleum now is gone in getting this gallon of gasoline.
Well, on the other side here we have now energy from ethanol, from
corn. If you go down, we have to farm the corn, we have to produce it,
we have to transport it, we have to produce it, we have to transport it
again to where you are going to use it, and we still have the 1 million
Btus, a little more than a gallon here, by the way, because it does not
have the energy density of gasoline. But still we are making the
equivalent 1 million Btus. Notice that that took 0.74 million Btus of
fossil energy. The difference, of course, was the energy we got from
the sun. So here we are capturing energy from the sun to make ethanol.
The bottom of this chart is really very interesting, because this
points to a big problem that we face in this country particularly, and
in the world in general, as the availability of fossil fuels winds
down, because this is the total energy requirement that goes into a
bushel of corn.
Notice the kind of energy that goes into that bushel of corn. Nearly
half of it is nitrogen. That comes from natural gas. Before we learned
how to get it from natural gas, the only place we got it from was barn
yard manuers or plants that put it in the soil in rotation farming or
guano that we mine from bath caves and tropical islands.
Notice as we go around this pie, the input of oil. Here we have input
hauling, that is oil. Water, that was moved probably with energy from
fossil fuels. Chemicals, a lot of host chemicals are made from fossil
fuels, an enormous petrochemical industry. Custom work. The fellow came
in to do custom work, he used some oil. His tractor was made with oil.
Natural gas. Electricity. Natural gas goes along with oil. Electricity
could have been produced with natural gas or oil. Propane, again, a
product of fossil fuels. Gasoline, diesel.
So far, almost everything here is the product of oil or oil itself,
is it not? And then we get to some things we mine. We can mine
phosphate, lime and potash, but it takes energy to mine those and that
energy probably came from oil. So the food you eat in a very real sense
is oil, is it not, because that is where the energy came from to
produce that food.
Then you have the very interesting chart of income savings and
inheritance, and I have a chart here that looks at some of the
alternatives. These have been mentioned. We will just spent a couple of
moments looking at these alternatives, because we have been talking
about it this evening.
We have some finite resources and we need to husband those carefully.
We need to use them only as we have to. Some of them will not be very
valuable. Tar sands and oil shale may cost you almost as much to get
the energy as you get out of the energy after you have gotten it. Coal,
and I want to put a coal chart up here in just a moment, because that
is a very interesting one. And then nuclear. Several of the speakers
have mentioned nuclear this evening.
There are three kinds of ways you can get power from nuclear. Fusion,
I hope we get there. If we get there we are home free, are we not? I
think the odds of getting there are not all that good, so you better
not bank on it, the same way you better not bank on solving your
personal economic problems by winning the lottery. That would be nice
too, but the odds are not real high that you are going to do it. Then
there is the light water reactor, which we have, and then there is the
breeder reactor, which we do not have, which we are certainly going to
have to look at if we are going to be serious of getting nuclear
energy.
Then there is a whole list of renewables here. These are the ones we
really need to be focusing on. But the big challenge here is, and I
want to put the last chart up, is to move so we can make do with the
energy from these alternatives, because it is not going to be as
available in as large a quantity or with the energy density of the
fossil fuels. So I want to put up the last chart, and that is the chart
that shows the things we need to be doing.
These are the kind of things we need to be doing. The first thing we
need to be doing is voluntary conservation. Let me put up very quickly
the chart that shows California. This is a really interesting one.
It shows that you do not have to depreciate the quality of life to
useless energy. Californians use about 60 percent as much energy per
person as in the rest of the country. It would be hard to argue they do
not have a good lifestyle.
Let me put this down and look at the next one. The next thing we need
to do, we need to organize voluntary conservation. If we can organize,
we can do a little better job. Then this is with the government cuts in
now. We need to have monetary incentives, some policies for volunteer
conservation. We have to conserve to buy time so we can use the fossil
fuels remaining, not only total fuel our present economy, to make the
investment we need to make in these renewables so we will be able to
sustain ourselves for the duration.
Then we need to go to efficiency. We have done a lot with efficiency.
Your present refrigerator is at least twice as good as the one 20 years
ago in terms of efficiency. Then again the government is involved, we
need to have monetary incentives and policies for efficient
technologies.
I would say to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Ehlers), we should
have
[[Page H3191]]
been moving down this path for the last 25 years, because in 1980 we
knew absolutely moving down Hubbard's Peak. Tomorrow I think we have
another opportunity in one of these special order hours to talk about
this. We will be able to do this in more detail. I thank the gentleman
for yielding to me and for organizing this hour this evening.
Mr. EHLERS. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman
from Maryland. The gentleman has given an excellent presentation.
Unfortunately, we do not have time to go into details, but as the
gentleman mentioned, I believe we have other time next week when we can
do that. I look forward to hearing more from the gentleman about his
field of expertise.
Mr. Speaker, I would also enter into the record a letter from the
Energy Future Coalition which was sent to President George W. Bush
along with some attached material which I think is very important for
our colleagues to peruse and it will certainly be of interest to other
people in this Nation.
I want to thank the four gentlemen who joined me here this evening,
all of them are experts in different areas relating to energy. They
have done an excellent job of presenting things, and I hope this
clarifies the energy situation and sheds some light on our efforts to
ensure that we advance energy efficiency, advance energy conservation,
advance development of new sources of energy, and, in particular, in
terms of the chart I used, let us get away from using our savings; let
us get on to using our income and some of our inheritance so that we
have a balanced economy in the future and a safer Nation.
`Set America Free' a Blueprint for U.S. Energy Security
Introduction
Historically, the United States has pursued a three-pronged
strategy for minimizing the vulnerabilities associated with
its dependency on oil from unstable and/or hostile nations:
diversifying sources of oil, managing inventory in a
strategic petroleum reserve and increasing the efficiency of
the transportation sector's energy consumption. In recent
years, the focus has been principally on finding new and
larger sources of petroleum globally.
Rapidly growing worldwide demand for oil, however, has had
the effect of largely neutralizing this initiative, depleting
existing reserves faster than new, economically exploitable
deposits are being brought on line. Under these
circumstances, diversification among such sources is but a
stop-gap solution that can, at best, have temporary effect on
oil supply and, hence, on national security. Conservation can
help, but with oil consumption expected to grow by 60 percent
over the next 25 years, conservation alone will not be a
sufficient solution.
The `Set America Free' Project
Long-term security and economic prosperity requires the
creation of a fourth pillar--technological transportation of
the transportation sector through what might be called ``fuel
choice.'' By leading a multinational effort rooted in the
following principles, the United States can immediately begin
to introduce a global economy based on next-generation fuels
and vehicles that can utilize them:
Fuel diversification: Today, consumers can choose among
various octanes of gasoline, which accounts for 45 percent of
U.S. oil consumption, or diesel, which accounts for almost
another fifth. To these choices can and should promptly be
added other fuels that are domestically produced, where
possible from waste products, and that are clean and
affordable.
Real world solutions: We have no time to wait for
commercialization of immature technologies. The United States
should implement technologies that exist today and are ready
for widespread use.
Using existing infrastructure: The focus should be on
utilizing competitive technologies that do not require
prohibitive or, if possible, even significant investment in
changing our transportation sector's infrastructure. Instead,
``fuel choice'' should permit the maximum possible use of the
existing refueling and automotive infrastructure.
Domestic resource utilization: The United States is no
longer rich in oil or natural gas. It has, however, a wealth
of other energy sources from which transportation fuel can be
safely, affordably and cleanly generated. Among them:
hundreds of years worth of coal reserves, 25 percent of the
world's total (especially promising with Integrated
Gasification and Combined Cycle technologies); billions of
tons a year of biomass, and further billions of tons of
agricultural and municipal waste. Vehicles that meet consumer
needs (e.g., ``plug-in'' hybrids), can also tap America's
electrical grid to supply energy for transportation, making
more efficient use of such clean sources of electricity as
solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric and nuclear power.
Environmentally sensible choices: The technologies adopted
should improve public safety and respond to the public's
environmental land health concerns.
Key Elements of the `Set America Free' Project
Vehicles
Hybrid electric vehicles: There are already thousands of
vehicles on America's roads that combine hybrid engines
powered in an integrated fashion by liquid fuel-powered
motors and battery-powered ones. Such vehicles increase gas-
consumption efficiency by 30-40 percent.
Ultralight materials: At least two-thirds of fuel use by a
typical consumer vehicle is caused by its weight. Thanks to
advances in both metals and plastics, ultralight vehicles can
be affordably manufactured with today's technologies and can
roughly halve fuel consumption without compromising safety,
performance or cost effectiveness.
``Plug-in'' hybrid electric vehicles: Plug-in hybrid
electric vehicles are also powered by a combination of
electricity and liquid fuel. Unlike standard hybrids,
however, plug-ins draw charge not only from the engine and
captured braking energy, but also directly from the
electrical grid by being plugged into standard electric
outlets when not in use. Plug-in hybrids have liquid fuel
tanks and internal combustion engines, so they do not face
the range limitation posed by electric-only cars. Since
fifty-percent of cars on the road in the United States are
driven 20 miles a day or less, a plug-in with a 20-mile range
battery would reduce fuel consumption by, on average, 85
percent. Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles can reach fuel
economy levels of 100 miles per gallon of gasoline consumed.
Flexible fuel vehicles (FFVs): FFVs are designed to burn on
alcohol, gasoline, or any mixture of the two. About four
million FFV's have been manufactured since 1996. The only
difference between a conventional car and a flexible fuel
vehicle is that the latter is equipped with a different
control chip and some different fittings in the fuel line to
accommodate the characteristics of alcohol. The marginal
additional cost associated with such FFV-associated changes
is currently under $100 per vehicle. That cost would be
reduced further as volume of FFVs increases, particularly if
flexible fuel designs were to become the industry standard.
Flexible fuel/plug-in hybrid electric vehicles: If the two
technologies are combined, such vehicles can be powered by
blends of alcohol fuels, gasoline, and electricity. If a
plug-in vehicle is also a FFV fueled with 80 percent alcohol
and 20 percent gasoline, fuel economy could reach 500 miles
per gallon of gasoline.
If by 2025, all cars on the road are hybrids and half are
plug-in hybrid vehicles, U.S. oil imports would drop by 8
million barrels per day (mbd). Today, the United states
imports 10 mbd and it is projected to import almost 20 mbd by
2025. If all of these cars were also flexible fuel vehicles,
U.S. oil imports would drop by as much as 12 mbd.
Fuels
Fuel additives: Fuel additives can enhance combustion
efficiency by up to 25 percent. They can be blended into
gasoline, diesel and bunker fuel.
Electricity as a fuel: Less than 2 percent of U.S.
electricity is generated from oil, so using electricity as a
transportation fuel would greatly reduce dependence on
imported petroleum. Plug-in hybrid vehicles would be charged
at night in home garages--a time-interval during which
electric utilities have significant excess capacity. The
Electric Power Research Institute estimates that up to 30
percent of market penetration for plug-in hybrid electric
vehicles with 20-mile electric range can be achieved without
a need to install additional electricity-generating capacity.
Alcohol fuels: ethanol, methanol and other blends:
Ethanol (also known as grain alcohol) is currently produced
in the U.S. from corn. The industry currently has a capacity
of 3.3 billion gallons a year and has increased on the
average of 25 percent per year over the past three years.
Upping production would be achieved by continuing to advance
the corn-based ethanol industry and by commercializing the
production of ethanol from biomass waste and dedicated energy
crops. P-Series fuel (approved by the Department of Energy in
1999) is a more energy-efficient blend of ethanol, natural
gas liquids and ether made from biomass waste.
Methanol (also known as wood alcohol) is today for the most
part produced from natural gas. Expanding domestic production
can be achieved by producing methanol from coal, a resource
with which the U.S. is abundantly endowed. The commercial
feasibility of coal-to-methanol technology was demonstrated
as part of the DOE's ``clean coal'' technology effort.
Currently, methanol is being cleanly produced from coal for
under 50 cents a gallon.
It only costs about $60,000 to add a fuel pump that serves
one of the above fuels to an existing refueling station.
Non-oil based diesel: Biodiesel is commercially produced
from soybean and other vegetable oils. Diesel can also be
made from waste products such as tires and animal byproducts,
and is currently commercially produced from turkey offal.
Diesel is also commercially produced from coal.
Policy Recommendations
Provide incentives to auto manufacturers to produce and
consumers to purchase, hybrid vehicles, plug-in hybrid
electric vehicles and FFVs across all vehicle models.
[[Page H3192]]
Provide incentives for auto manufacturers to increase fuel
efficiency of existing, non-FFV auto models.
Conduct extensive testing of next-generation fuels across
the vehicle spectrum to meet auto warranty and EPA emission
standards.
Mandate substantial incorporation of plug-ins and FFVs into
federal, state, municipal and covered fleets.
Provide investment tax incentives for corporate fleets and
taxi fleets to switch to plug-ins, hybrids and FFVs.
Encourage gasoline distributors to blend combustion
enhancers into the fuel.
Provide incentives for existing fueling stations to install
pumps that serve all liquid fuels that can be used in the
existing transportation infrastructure, and mandate that all
new gas stations be so equipped.
Provide incentives to enable new players, such as
utilities, to enter the transportation fuel market, and for
the development of environmentally sound exploitation of non-
traditional petroleum deposits from stable areas (such as
Canadian tar sands).
Provide incentives for the construction of plants that
generate liquid transportation fuels from domestic energy
resources, particularly from waste, that can be used in the
existing infrastructure.
Allocate funds for commercial scale demonstration plants
that produce next-generation transportation fuels,
particularly from waste products.
Implement federal, state, and local policies to encourage
mass transit and reduce vehicle-miles traveled.
Work with other oil-consuming countries towards
distribution of the above-mentioned technologies and overall
reduction of reliance on petroleum, particularly from hostile
and potentially unstable regions of the world.
A New National Project
In 1942, President Roosevelt launched the Manhattan Project
to build an atomic weapon to be ready by 1945 because of
threats to America and to explore the future of nuclear
fission. The cost in today's prices was $20 billion. The
outcome was an end to the war with Japan, and the beginning
of a wide new array of nuclear-based technologies in energy,
medical treatment, and other fields.
In 1962, President Kennedy launched the Man to the Moon
Project to be achieved by 1969 because of mounting threats to
U.S. and international security posed by Soviet space-
dominance and to explore outer space. The cost of the Apollo
program in today's prices would be well over $100 billion.
The outcome was an extraordinary strategic and technological
success for the United States. It engendered a wide array of
spin-offs that improved virtually every aspect of modern
life, including but not limited to transportation,
communications, health care, medical treatment, food
production and other fields.
The security of the United States, and the world, is no
less threatened by oil supply disruptions, price
instabilities and shortages. It is imperative that America
provide needed leadership by immediately beginning to
dramatically reduce its dependence on imported oil. This can
be done by embracing the concepts outlined above with a focus
on fuel choice, combined with concerted efforts at improving
energy efficiency and the increased availability of energy
from renewable sources.
The estimated cost of the ``Set America Free'' plan over
the next 4 years is $12 billion. This would be applied in the
following way: $2 billion for automotive manufacturers to
cover one-half the costs of building FFV-capability into
their new production cars (i.e., roughly 40 million cars at
$50 per unit); $1 billion to pay for at least one of every
four existing gas stations to add at least one pump to supply
alcohol fuels (an estimated incentive of $20,000 per pump,
new pumps costing approximately $60,000 per unit); $2 billion
in consumer tax incentives to procure hybrid cars; $2 billion
for automotive manufacturers to commercialize plug-in hybrid
electric vehicles; $3 billion to construct commercial-scale
demonstration plants to produce non-petroleum based liquid
fuels (utilizing public-private cost-sharing partnerships to
build roughly 25 plants in order to demonstrate the
feasibility of various approaches to perform efficiently at
full-scale production); and $2 billion to continue work on
commercializing fuel cell technology.
Since no major, new scientific advances are necessary to
launch this program, such funds can be applied towards
increasing the efficiencies of the involved processes. The
resulting return-on-investment--in terms of enhanced energy
and national security, economic growth, quality of life and
environmental protection--should more than pay for the seed
money required.
Gary L. Bauer, President, American Values.
Milton Copulos, National Defense Council Foundation.
Congressman Eliot Engel.
Frank Gaffney, Center for Security Policy.
Bracken Hendricks, Apollo Alliance.
Col. (ret.) Bill Holmberg, American Council on Renewable
Energy.
Anne Korin, Institute for the Analysis of Global Security.
Deron Lovaas, Natural Resources Defense Council.
Gal Luft, Institute for the Analysis of Global Security.
Cliff May, Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
Hon. Robert C. McFarlane, Former National Security Advisor.
Daniel Pipes, Middle East Forum.
Professor Richard E. Smalley, 1996 Nobel Laureate in
Chemistry.
Admiral James D. Watkins, Former U.S. Secretary of Energy.
Hon. R. James Woolsey, Former director of the CIA, Co-
Chairman, Committee on the Present Danger.
Meyrav Wurmser, Hudson Institute.
____
Energy Future Coalition
Washington, DC, March 24, 2005.
Hon. George W. Bush, President of the United States,
The White House,
Washington, DC.
Dear Mr. President: As individuals with a deep commitment
to our nation's security and well-being, we share our
overriding concern for the protection of the United States.
That is why we have come together to urge you and your
Administration to focus anew on a matter that directly
affects our national security: America's growing dependence
on foreign oil.
We believe that: The United States' dependence on imported
petroleum poses a risk to our homeland security and economic
well-being. Increasing petroleum consumption by developing
economies like China and India will exacerbate this risk.
Some foreign interests have used oil revenues in ways that
harm our national security. With only two percent of the
world's oil reserves but 25 percent of current world
consumption, the United States cannot eliminate its need for
imports through increased domestic production along. An
equivalent emphasis on demand-side measures--development and
deployment of clean, domestic petroleum substitutes and
increased efficiency in our transport system--is essential.
You have recognized the threat. As you said on the South
Lawn on February 25, 2002, dependence on foreign oil ``is a
challenge to our economic security, because dependence can
lead to price shocks and fuel shortages. And this dependence
on foreign oil is a matter of national security. To put it
bluntly, sometimes we rely upon energy sources from countries
that don't particularly like us.''
Mr. President, we agree. We are writing today to urge that
the United States respond--as it has so ably to other
national security challenges--with a focused, determined
effort that accepts nothing less than success. To reduce the
risk of an oil shock in a global market, we must reduce our
use of foreign oil. We ask that you launch a major new
initiative to curtail U.S. consumption through improved
efficiency and the rapid development and deployment of
advanced biomass, alcohol and other available petroleum fuel
alternatives.
Most importantly, we believe that, to demonstrate our
seriousness and resolve, this effort must be funded at a
level proportionate with other priorities for our nation's
defense. An investment of no more than $1 billion over the
next five years, for example, would establish a domestic
alternative fuels industry that could significantly reduce
our consumption of foreign oil.
We do not know today what form a crisis over oil will take,
but we know that a crisis is coming--one that could harm the
United States. Action to prepare for that day will pay
dividends for our national security, out international
competitiveness, and our future prosperity. We respectfully
urge that you call on the Congress to join you in supporting
the funding and other strong measures needed to reduce our
dependence on foreign oil, such as those set out in our
enclosed Findings and Recommendations. As Sun Tzu wrote,
``The art of war teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of
the enemy's not coming, but on our own readiness to receive
him.''
Sincerely,
Robert C. McFarlene,
R. James Woolsey,
Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.,
C. Boyden Gray,
Timothy E. Wirth.
Additional Signatories
Lt. Gen. John S. Caldwell, Jr., USA (Ret.).
Milton R. Copulos, National Defense Council Foundation.
Adm. William T. Crowe, Jr., USN (Ret.); former Chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Hon. John H. Dalton, Former Secretary of the Navy.
Vice Adm. Robert F. Dunn, USN (Ret.).
Brig. Gen. Gordon Gayle, USMC (Ret.).
Hon. Sherri W. Goodman, Former Deputy Under Secretary of
Defense.
Vice Adm. Lee Gunn, USN (Ret.); Institute for Public
Research, Center for Naval Analysis.
David A. Harris, American Jewish Committee.
Hon. Gary Hart, Former U.S. Senator; Co-Chair, U.S.
Commission on National Security for the 21st Century.
Rear Adm. Leland S. Kollmorgen, USN (Ret.).
Gen. Richard L. Lawson, USAF (Ret.); former President,
National Mining Association.
Gal Luft, Institute for the Analysis of Global Security.
Lt. Gen. William R. Maloney, USMC (Ret.).
Clifford D. May, Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
Vice Adm. Dennis V. McGinn, USN (Ret.).
Hon. William A. Nitze, The Gemstar Group.
John L. Peterson, The Arlington Institute.
Hon. Robert B. Pirie, Jr., Former Secretary of the Navy
(acting).
Hon. John D. Podesta, Center for American Progress; former
White House Chief of Staff.
[[Page H3193]]
The Hon. David Oliver, Jr., Former Principal Deputy Under
Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and
Logistics.
Hon. Joe R. Reeder, Former Under Secretary of the Army.
Maj. Gen. J. Milnor Roberts, USAR (Ret.).
Vice Adm. Richard H. Truly, USN (Ret.); former Director of
the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
Adm. James D. Watkins, USN (Ret.); former Secretary of
Energy.
Energy Future Coalition
the national security and petroleum dependence project
Findings and Recommendations
Findings: U.S. dependence on foreign petroleum poses a
serious risk to our national and homeland security as well as
our economic well-being; Increasing petroleum consumption by
developing economies like China and India will exacerbate
this risk; Some foreign interests have used oil revenues to
purchase destabilizing weapons or to support terrorism; With
just 2 percent of the world's oil reserves and 25 percent of
current world consumption, the U.S. cannot eliminate its need
for imports through increased domestic production alone;
equivalent demand-side measures are essential; Technologies
exist today that can improve efficiency and produce clean,
domestic petroleum substitutes; The cost of action is far
smaller than the risk of inaction, and there is no excuse for
further delay.
Recommendation:
1. It should be a top national security priority of the
United States to significantly reduce its consumption of
foreign oil through improved efficiency and the rapid
substitution of advanced biomass, alcohol and other available
alternative fuels, and this effort should be funded at a
level proportionate with other priorities for the defense of
the nation.
2. In addition to research and development, such
investments should include tax credits and other incentives
to encourage: (a.) Rapid production and consumer purchase of
advanced vehicles like hybrids, plug-in hybrids and flexible
fuel vehicles; (b.) Production of more efficient vehicles
across all models; (c.) Construction of domestic facilities
to produce alternative fuels from domestic resources; and
(d.) Wide deployment of alternative liquid fuel options at
existing fueling stations.
3. The Federal Government should consider mandating
substantial incorporation of hybrids, plug-in hybrids and
flexible fuel vehicles into federal, state, municipal and
other government fleets.
____________________