[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 110 (Wednesday, September 7, 2005)]
[House]
[Pages H7732-H7738]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
ENERGY EFFICIENCY
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Kuhl of New York). Under the Speaker's
announced policy of January 4, 2005, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr.
Bartlett) is recognized for 60 minutes.
Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, this evening I wanted to spend
the first few moments reflecting on the crisis in the gulf.
{time} 2300
I have been privileged to observe nearly 8 decades of life and I will
tell you that this is the only time that I can remember that I was
looking at television, coming from our country that seemed really
surreal to me. I had
[[Page H7733]]
to pinch myself to make sure that I was not dreaming, because how could
it be that in our country, the United States of America, there were
people sitting dead in wheelchairs by the sidewalk, there were people
rolled up in sheets dead and others walking by them, there were corpses
floating by in the water?
There were tens of thousands of people in buildings that they could
not leave because water was around them and they had no food, no water,
no bathroom facilities and no power.
The situation is better now and it is improving; and no one is happy
with the response of either the local officials, the State officials or
the Federal Government. But, Mr. Speaker, this is not the time to look
at what went wrong.
Now is the time to make sure that these people are all rescued, who
are not already out, to make sure that they all are comfortable in
housing, to make sure that their needs are met, that their children are
in school.
There will come a time that is not now, Mr. Speaker, when we will
really take a hard look at what went wrong, not to place blame. Because
I really believe, Mr. Speaker, that everyone at every level made what
they thought was the right decision at the time they made it.
Obviously, in hindsight, it was not the right decision and we need to
make sure that we learn from this experience so that we do not repeat
it when we have another crisis. And there will be another crisis,
either a natural disaster or a terrorist-induced crisis.
Americans are really helping. When a tragedy occurred overseas we
poured out ourselves to help in the tsunami and Americans are doing
that now for other Americans. And we are learning that sometimes
bureaucracy gets in the way because we have people who want to help and
they are ready to help and they wait and they wait. What can we do? And
they are ready with supplies. We are working very hard, Mr. Speaker, as
we clear away these roadblocks in our bureaucracy because we know that
what the Bible says is true, that it is more blessed to give than to
receive.
We are now taking a lot of money from our people and from our
children and our grandchildren because we will not be able to pay it
back, money we need to help the survivors of this catastrophe. But we
must not deny our citizens the satisfaction, the reward, the
fulfillment that they get from helping themselves. And so we must
continue to work to make sure that bureaucracy does not get in the way
of people helping people because that really, in the end, is the best
kind of help.
Just a little example about how much some of our agencies have done.
This is the Coast Guard. They rescued over 23,000 survivors, assisted
in the evacuation of another 10,000 from area hospitals. They have
brought in over 2,600 servicemen and women, called up another 800
Reservists to undertake response operations. They moved over 75
aircraft, 22 cutters, those are ships, 110 small boats into the
disaster area to execute search and rescue, environmental clean-up and
to restore navigation to ports. That is very important because a lot of
oil moves in there.
They dispersed tons of food, potable water and other supplies to
survivors, surveyed and replaced dozens of aids to navigation required
to reopen 62 percent of the local ports and waterways to deliver
critically needed oil, gas and other natural resources.
They have begun the environmental remediation on gulf waterways by
removing 60,000 gallons of oil, 665 floating containers of unknown
liquid, 132 compressed cylinders and 10 petroleum tanks.
Mr. Speaker, as a result of this crisis, gas that was already high
has skyrocketed higher, and now many people are talking about energy.
We started talking about energy and a coming crisis on March 14.
Katrina has just hastened and magnified the process that we began
talking about then.
On March 4, just 10 days before we gave our first floor speech here
on this subject, gas was $1.93. By August 29, just before the hurricane
hit, it was $2.60. That is a pretty big increase, from March 4 to
August 29 a 67 percent increase. In just 7 days from August 29 to
September 5, the price of oil jumped from $2.60, this is an average
nationwide, more some places, less some others, to $3.04 average. This
is an increase of $1.22 in just 1 year.
But, Mr. Speaker, it could have been much worse. We have over 4,000
wells in the gulf; 953 of those are manned rigs and platforms. Only
about 20 of those were cut. And, by the way, from those 4,000 wells we
get about 1.5 million barrels of oil a day, which is just a bit more
than a fourth of all the oil that we pump. So we pump just a little
over 6 million barrels of oil. But, Mr. Speaker, we use 21 million
barrels of oil and the rest has to come from somewhere else and that
somewhere else is all over the world, and much of it from countries
that are relatively unstable, whereas, the President says, the people
do not particularly like us.
I have here, Mr. Speaker, a little chart that shows the density of
the oil rigs off the coast. And notice the little line here, the little
symbols here. That shows where the hurricane came in. Lucky for us the
hurricane came in where there was the least density of oil wells. Had
it come in just a little west of that, it would have hit a very much
higher density of oil wells, and the crisis might have been much worse
than it is.
On September 7 there was an article by Reuters that said another
storm would devastate U.S. energy, and it was quoting some analysts.
And one of the analysts I know, because I have spoken with him several
times and met him, was Matthew Simmons; by the way, he is the energy
adviser for the President. He was an energy adviser in his first
campaign and in his second campaign. He is the president and CEO of the
largest energy investment bank in the world.
This is what Matt Simmons said in talking about our refineries and
the infrastructure that moves the refined product to a great many users
on the east coast. He says, ``We shoved it all into Texas and
Louisiana. We put the heart of the industry in the middle of hurricane
alley.''
Mr. Speaker, we may want to rethink where we have this infrastructure
in light of its vulnerability to this kind of natural disaster.
I have here a news story from the 4th of March of this year, that was
just 10 days before we gave our first floor speech here on this
subject; and I am quoting from this. ``The average pump price then was
$1.93,'' as I just said.
Trilby Lundberg--this is the Lundberg family, everybody has heard of
the Lundberg Report that for many years now has been giving the price
of gas and predicting what it will be in the future--she said, ``The
chances of gasoline rises are very, very strong, if not immediately,
then in coming weeks as we move into spring.'' It was $1.93 then,
remember.
A government official who works for the U.S. Energy Information
Administration, and I will not give you his name, Mr. Speaker, because
he would be quite embarrassed, because this is what he said. He said,
``It takes about 8 weeks for crude prices to make it to the pumps,''
and he did not think the increase would be more than 10 cents. It was
$1.93 so he did not think it would go up in the summer to more than
$2.03. Mr. Speaker, it was $2.60 before the price was pumped up by the
hurricane.
I guess it just goes to show, Mr. Speaker, that you cannot believe
everything your government tells you.
The AAA reporting in that same story made this statement, Mr. Robert
Sinclair from the AAA said, ``Probably the era of cheap oil as we have
known it, where a barrel of crude oil was $29 or $30 is gone forever.''
Sadly, Mr. Speaker, I think that Mr. Sinclair was exactly right, and
the chart that I have here shows that.
Now I have had to modify this chart. This shows inflation steadily
rising and it shows the price of oil which has been up and down. And we
notice what I had to do over there at the end, because a few weeks ago
when I used this chart, we had not gone over $55 a barrel for oil and
so I put that down as the 2005 figure. But just a few days ago during
intraday trading, the price of oil went up to $71.85, almost off the
chart.
When I come back again, Mr. Speaker, and I will, to talk about this
subject, because I think it is so important that we need to emphasize
it over and over again so that we have enough interest and enough
knowledge so that we do the things that we really must do to avoid a
really big problem with this in the future. So I suspect, Mr.
[[Page H7734]]
Speaker, that when I come back to talk again that this might very well
be off the chart, and we will try to add something to the corner of the
chart to show you how high it has gone.
{time} 2310
On the next chart are some numbers that are widely known. We have
only 2 percent of the known reserves of oil. We use 25 percent of the
world's oil. As I said just a few moments ago, about two-thirds of that
is imported.
By the way, we have gone from bad to worse. In the Arab oil embargo
in 1973 we imported 34 percent, about one-third of the oil we use. We
did not learn a whole lot from that, did we, Mr. Speaker, because now
we are importing two-thirds of the oil that we use. So we are even more
vulnerable, and look what happened then with the Arab oil embargo.
We represent only 5 percent, as a matter of fact less than 5 percent,
of the world's population, one person out of 22, and we use a fourth of
all of the oil which is used in the world. The other figure here is a
really interesting one, and that shows that we pump 8 percent of the
world's oil. If we have only 2 percent of the reserves, and from that 2
percent of the reserves we are pumping 8 percent of the oil, that means
we are pretty good at pumping oil, and we are. It also means that we
have a whole lot of oil wells probably, and we do. More than half of
all the oil wells drilled in the world, Mr. Speaker, are drilled in
this country. So we do not have much oil, and we are using it up really
quickly. When there is an end to oil, we will come there before the
rest of the world because we use so much, we have so little, and we are
pumping the so little we use so fast.
The next chart shows a consequence of this, and by the way, those
numbers inspired about 30 of the leading citizens in our country,
McFarland, Jim Woolsey, Frank Gaffney and about 30 names total, retired
generals and admirals and leading people in our country wrote a letter
to the President saying, Mr. President, the fact that we have only 2
percent of the oil and use 25 percent of the oil and import two-thirds
of what we use is a national security risk, which is unacceptable. We
have to do something to wean ourselves from foreign oil.
The chart that I have here, Mr. Speaker, points out one of the
problems that we face, and that is, that we are not only a country that
needs a lot of oil. China now is the second largest importer in the
world. Last year, they increased their importation 25 percent. I saw
the number. They increased their oil use by 14.7 percent. I am not sure
how we get so precise, but this chart of the world here shows where
they are. They are now scouring the world to make sure that they have
oil, and they are entering into contracts and buying assets.
You may remember, Mr. Speaker, they bid on Unocal in our country,
almost got it, bid more than Chevron. Fortunately, they withdrew their
bid. By the way the price of oil is not set by who owns it. It is set
by how much of it there is in the world compared to demand in the
world. It would have not been nice for China to own oil right in our
country, but it really would not have affected the price of oil at all.
Notice, they are in Colombia. They are in Venezuela. They are in
Brazil. They are really in the Middle East. In the big far eastern
Russian oil reserves in the Sakhalin Islands, they are now building a
pipeline. Originally, we thought it would go to a port where the oil
would then go to Japan. Russia has just recently said that at least a
large part of that is going to be diverted on down to a pipeline that
goes to China. So we now have a world in which China and India and all
of the developing countries, many of them in northern Africa,
particularly in the Orient, are now demanding more and more oil.
To put this in context, Mr. Speaker, and to kind of see how we got
here, we need to go back 60 years. Our next chart takes us back there
60 years and just a word about the origin of this chart.
Working for the Shell Oil Company in the 1940s and 1950s was a
scientist known as M. King Hubbert. He watched the pumping and the
exhaustion of oil fields and he noticed that for almost all of those
fields that they followed a bell curve. Now, most people are familiar
with a bell curve. There are some people very short, some very tall,
but most of us are somewhere in the middle. So there is a bell by
weight, and most things out there in the nature, their distribution
follows a bell curve. What he found was that we pumped oil faster and
faster until finally we reached a peak, and at that peak, he noticed
that about half of the oil that was in the field had been found, and no
matter how hard they sucked and pumped, the production of oil from that
field fell down the other side. It is perfectly reasonable that the
last part of the oil is more difficult to get than the first part of
the oil.
So what M. King Hubbert did was to say, gee, if I knew how many oil
fields there were in the United States, and I knew how many more we
were likely to find, and if I added up all these little bell curves, I
could get a big bell curve which would tell me when the United States
was going to peak in oil production. He did this study and he made that
prediction in 1956. Everybody thought that he was going to be really
wrong and really be embarrassed, and Shell Oil Company said, please, do
not do that.
He published the paper anyhow, and right on target, in 1970, we
reached our peak oil production. M. King Hubbert went from being
something of an embarrassment to being an icon because he was right on
the money. He predicted 14 years ahead when we would peak in oil
production in this country.
Using those same analytical techniques, he predicted that the world
would peak in oil production about 2000. That did not happen because he
could not have known of the Arab oil embargo and the oil price spike
hikes and the worldwide recession that occurred as a result of these
oil price spike hikes.
Many experts believe that we in the world are peaking about now. If
not now, soon. The next chart shows where we have gotten our oil from
in the United States, and it shows the production curve and the fact
that right on target in 1970 we peaked in oil production, and it has
been downhill since.
This shows where we get the oil from, a whole bunch from Texas, the
rest of the United States, natural gas, liquids. Notice Alaska there.
This is Prudhoe Bay, from which we get a fourth of our oil, and Mr.
Speaker, that produced only a little blip in sliding down Hubbert's
Peak, and notice the yellow there. I am sure you can remember the
fabled Gulf of Mexico oil discoveries. This was going to solve the
problem. There would be oil for a very long time. That is all the
contribution. That yellow there is the total contribution from the Gulf
of Mexico oil discoveries.
Mr. Speaker, I am having some trouble understanding why we ought to
drill ANWR. Let me tell you why. We have only 2 percent of the known
reserves of oil. We use 25 percent of the world's oil. I am having
trouble understanding how it is in our national security interests to
use up that little bit of oil we have as quickly as we can. If we could
pump that oil tomorrow, and we cannot, but figuratively, if we could
pump that oil tomorrow, what would we do the day after tomorrow? And
there would be a day after tomorrow.
ANWR will be, most people believe, not more than half of what Prudhoe
Bay was, and you see that it did little or nothing to stop our slide
down Hubbert's Peak. So I would like to reserve ANWR. We are really
going to need oil in the future. It and gas are the feedstock for an
enormous petrochemical industry. We live in a plastic world, and in the
future, when we look back at what we have done, we will be embarrassed
that we burned, just to get energy, so much oil, and particularly gas,
because they are such an important feedstock for our petrochemical
industry that we see all around us.
We live really in a plastic world. It builds our tractors and makes
the insecticides, makes the herbicides. It makes the plastics. It is
anything and everything in our society.
{time} 2320
The next chart shows something very interesting. In spite of
increasing techniques, in spite of computers, in spite of 3D seismic,
the peak oil discoveries were about 40 years ago. Now, this is blocked
off by 5-year increments, and there was a big one here at about 1980,
but generally speaking the discovery of oil has been down, down, down.
And the experts do not believe that there is
[[Page H7735]]
more than about maybe 5 percent of the known reserves that are yet to
be discovered.
We have drilled a lot of holes. We have done a lot of exploration. We
are really good at finding oil. And most of the experts do not believe
we should count on much more than maybe about 5 percent of our current
reserves as unknown, yet-to-be-discovered reserves.
The next chart shows something very interesting, and that shows that
you cannot drill your way out of this problem. This shows the
production of oil in the United States; and in 1980, when the Reagan
administration came in, we were already 10 years down Hubbert's Peak.
We had slid over the top and were starting down the other side of this
bell curve called Hubbert's Peak. We were importing oil, and Reagan was
concerned that we needed more oil. And so he did what you do in a
market society like we have, he gave incentives for drilling. If we
just give them some incentives, some tax advantages, some profit motive
for drilling, they will go out and drill.
This yellow line represents the number of wildcat wells that were
drilled. And, boy, was he successful. He got them to drill a whole lot
more wells. But notice what happens down here. They produced less and
less oil. They soon tired of drilling those extra wells when they were
not finding any oil; and so, notice that the number of wells they
drilled slipped down and down because they were finding less and less
oil and we were going more and more negative.
The next chart shows something which Albert Einstein said was the
most powerful force in the universe. When we had discovered atomic
energy and the nuclear weapons, Albert Einstein was asked, Gee, Dr.
Einstein, what will we do next? What will be the next big increment in
energy? What will we fight the next war with and so forth? He said, The
most powerful force in the universe was the force of compound interest;
that is exponential growth.
And so here we show some exponential growth curves. The bottom
straight line here is a 2 percent growth in the first year, and then
just extrapolating out there from that. If you have money in the bank
and it is getting 2 percent interest, and every year you take out the 2
percent and just keep it and do not let it in there to create any more
interest, that is the rate at which it will grow. But if you leave the
interest in and it is compounded, then you see what happens. You have
what is called an exponential curve. This is 2 percent and 4 percent
and 5 percent.
And this one on the left here is a really interesting one, Mr.
Speaker. That one that goes almost straight up, that is the rate at
which China is growing, almost 10 percent a year. With a 10 percent
growth rate, you double in 7 years, 7.2 years to be precise, but
roughly 7 years. You are four times bigger in 14 years and you are
eight times bigger in 21 years. Now, I do not think China will
necessarily continue with a 10 percent growth rate for 25 years, but if
they do, their economy will be eight times bigger than it is today.
The next chart shows this same 2 percent growth. And, by the way, you
can make that bell curve very sharp, very high and very sharp. You can
simply change the numbers on the abscissa and the ordinate here. But
this is the same 2 percent we saw in the previous one, and this has
been about the rate that the consumption of oil has grown in the world,
about 2 percent a year. That is the 2 percent curve here.
Now, obviously, up until this time the rate of reduction has equaled
the rate of use because we have used all the oil that was produced and
we have had all the oil we needed to use. But there will come a time,
if in fact there is a phenomenon known as peak oil, when you peak, and
there was for our country.
I want to remind you, Mr. Speaker, that there are a couple of
unassailable facts. The first one is that M. King Hubbert was right
about the United States. We did peak in 1970. He predicted that we
would peak in 2000. Now, why should not M. King Hubbert be right about
the world if he was right about the United States? And we now have oil
at, what, roughly $65 a barrel, that has recently spiked up to over $71
a barrel.
But notice, Mr. Speaker, from this chart that the problem does not
wait until peak. And, by the way, this 2 percent growth curve doubles
in 35 years. So from this point to the end here, all the shaded area,
that spans 35 years, because the upper point here is twice this one.
That would mean that you start to have problems, if you could see them
that precisely, 17\1/2\ years before peak. So we do not necessarily
have to reach the peak before there is a discrepancy between what you
would like to use, India and China and us.
We think, Mr. Speaker, if our economy is not growing at least 2
percent a year, the sky is going to fall, so we need to grow. China is
certainly growing. India is growing. All of the Orient is growing and
all demanding more oil. And if we stay with only a 2 percent increase--
China last year increased 14.7 percent, India increased. If we stay
with only a 2 percent increase, we are going to be really lucky. And,
Mr. Speaker, we will not even be able to use all of the energy that is
available here if, in fact, we are going to make a reasonably smooth
transition to alternatives.
Mr. Speaker, we will transition to alternatives, because the age of
oil will not last forever. And as oil runs down, we must move to
alternatives. We will either move to alternatives because there is not
any more oil available in the quantity we would like, and by the way we
are not running out of oil; there will be oil for another 100 years.
What we are running out of is readily available, high-quality oil
produced in the quantities that we need to meet our current economic
demands.
Now, we really are going to have to reduce our consumption here so
that we will have some energy to invest in the alternatives, because
you are not going to make the transition without investing three
things: Money. Mr. Speaker, we do not worry much about money. We just
borrow it, without permission, from our kids and grandkids. But we
cannot borrow time and we cannot borrow energy. So we are going to need
to have time and need to have energy. So what we are going to need to
do is to conserve, so that we reduce our energy demands so that we have
something to invest.
The next chart shows us, Mr. Speaker, that we really can do that.
This shows through the years from 1960 to 2000 the energy use per
capita, per person, in the United States. Now, on this chart, Mr.
Speaker, we see something very interesting. We, and by ``we,'' me and
everybody else in the United States and California, started out at the
same place, about 4,000 kilowatt hours per person. We have been using
more and more energy as we have lived better and better from 1960 until
now. We have more labor-saving things that are using fossil fuels to
help us. But notice what has happened. Because of their emphasis on
environment and efficiency in California, the average Californian uses
only about 65 percent as much energy as the rest of America. This
shows, Mr. Speaker, that we can conserve. We can be more efficient. We
can reduce our consumption of energy.
The next chart shows what we have available to us to transition from
fossil fuels, oil, gas, and coal to renewables. We have some finite
resources. These are things which we have that are not the typical
petroleum product that we can rely on to give us some energy. Tar sands
and oil shales and coal and nuclear fission and nuclear fusion. Just a
word about these.
I would first like to make an observation about energy density,
because this is a quality of energy that is very important in our
society. Fossil fuels have enormous energy density. For instance, Mr.
Speaker, one barrel of oil, the refined product of which is 42 gallons
of gasoline, you can buy at the pump for just a little over $100 now.
That will give you, Mr. Speaker, the work output of 12 people working
all year for you and it costs you just a little over $100.
Now, to give you some sense that that is probably correct, I would
like you to reflect for a moment, Mr. Speaker, on the car you drive and
how many miles per gallon you get. That gallon of gas is still, at $3-
something, cheaper than small bottles of water in the grocery store, by
the way. But reflect on how far that gallon of gas will take you in
your car and then you think about how long it would take you to pull
your car that far.
[[Page H7736]]
{time} 2330
So you will get some notion that this energy density is probably
correct, that a barrel of oil, 42 gallons of gas, the refined product
will give you the work output of 12 people working all year for you,
and it costs you just a little over $100.
Mr. Speaker, another way of looking at this is to go out this weekend
and work very hard in your yard, manual labor, digging a ditch, cutting
grass, whatever you want to do. I will use an electric motor and less
than 25 cents worth of electricity, and I will get more mechanical work
done than you will working all day long real hard. That is kind of
humbling, is it not, Mr. Speaker, to recognize that in terms of the
energy in fossil fuel, you and I are worth less than 25 cents a day.
But this is really the problem we have had, because these fossil
fuels are so good, they are so available, the energy density is so high
that we have just come really to rely on them. So when we are looking
for alternatives, if we are going to continue the lifestyle anything
like the lifestyle we have now, we are going to have to find
substitutes that have something like the quality of energy this our
fossil fuels. That is not going to be easy, Mr. Speaker.
Here are the finite resources that we have. There are some big oil
sands, they call them oil sands up in Canada, and they are now
producing oil from the oil sands at about $30 a barrel. Oil is selling
at $65 a barrel, and that is a good deal, so Canadians are producing a
lot of oil up there from the oil sands. From a dollars and cents
perspective, that makes a lot of sense. They are doing that and selling
it.
But there is another profit ratio that we have to think here, and
that is energy profit ratio. That is energy in and energy out. I am
told that at this time they are using more energy from natural gas.
You see, this tar and the tar sands is so stiff that it will not flow
at normal temperatures. So they drill two wells together, then they go
horizontal, and in the upper well they put hot water, steam, and that
softens the oil. Then it goes down through the rock and sand and then
they pick it up in the lower well that is drilled under that. They can
now drill down perpendicularly and go horizontally, as they have been
able to do for a number of years.
I am told they are using more energy from natural gas than they will
get out of the oil they produce. For them that is still maybe a good
idea, because the natural gas is up there and it is cheap for them and
hard to transport. Because it is a gas and there is not very much of
it, the density is very low. They are converting gas energy into oil
energy, and although they get less energy out of the oil, you can put
it in a pipe or ship and you can easily move it and you are getting $65
a barrel for the oil, so they are doing it.
But this points out, Mr. Speaker, that we should not be too sanguine
about all of the potential energy in the tar sands and oil shales,
because it may take, even if we get really good, and they are now
talking about putting a nuclear power plant up there to heat the water,
to soften the oil to get it out of the ground, if we are really good at
getting this out, it is not going to be very energy positive. We are
going to have to be good to make it energy positive at all.
Then coal, in a couple of moments I will show you a chart on coal, we
have 250 years at current use rates, but that shrinks when you have to
use it in higher quantities, and we will have to use it in higher
quantities.
Nuclear fission, that is the conventional nuclear power plants, now
we get 14 percent of our total energy, 20 percent of our electricity,
from nuclear. As you drive home tonight, Mr. Speaker, note that every
fifth house and every fifth building would be dark if we did not have
nuclear energy.
We probably in this transition period need to have a lot more of
that, and we need to think through what we do with the waste from that
and how we handle that. But either you are going to end up using far
less energy than you are using now, or you are going to get energy from
sources you are not now getting it from, and nuclear is a very
attractive source to get energy from because you have such enormous
energy output from a single plant.
But that is not a final solution with the kind of power plants we
have now, because they use fissionable uranium, and that is in limited
supply in the world and that will not last forever. Maybe, I get
different numbers, I get numbers between 30 years and 200 years,
depending on who you are talking to. We desperately need an honest
broker, like maybe the National Academy of Sciences, to help us agree
on a number so we have something to work with.
But in any event, when fissionable uranium is gone, and that is at
current use rates, by the way, we have 30 to 200 years. If you ramp up
the use rates, it goes more quickly. Then we have to go to breeder
reactors, with which we have little experience and which produce by-
products that have to be stored away, even more critical by-products,
end products, than from the fissionable uranium, that have to be stored
away for maybe a quarter of a million years, and that kind of boggles
the mind to think of storing something away for that long.
The last one here is nuclear fusion. I support all the money that
technology can absorb. I think the chances of getting to nuclear fusion
in our lifetime are about the same as my chances of winning the lottery
and solving my personal economic problems. If I think the lottery is a
good bet, I am going to think that nuclear fusion is a good bet. But I
would not bet the ranch that we are going to get to nuclear fusion.
If we get there, Mr. Speaker, we are home free, because there is
essentially a inexhaustible amount of energy there. We ought to support
all of those skilled people that have expertise in this area to see if
it is possible to get there. But it is certainly something we should
not bank on. It will be really nice if it happens, but we better have
an alternative course of action, because it is unlikely to happen.
Once we have gone through these finite resources, then we come to the
alternatives. I would like to look at the next chart and leave this one
up, because I want to come back to it.
This now shows where we are. This is our total energy use in the
little circle here, and three-fourths of that, the natural gas, the
petroleum and the coal, if you add those up, they add up to 85, it
should be 85 percent.
The other sources of energy are then 15 percent total. A bit more
than half of that comes from nuclear power and so-called renewables.
Here the chart has blown that up so we can see it. The biggest part of
that comes from hydroelectric, and that is not likely to grow in our
country, because we have dammed up about every river we should and
maybe a few we should not and we are breaching more dams than we are
creating now. So that is probably not going to grow.
The next biggest source of renewables is wood. This is not the rural
person burning it for heating their home. This is a big timber industry
and paper industry wisely burning what would otherwise be a waste
product to get energy.
Then waste. This one can grow, the waste, and it should grow. It is
really kind of dumb to bury our waste rather than burning it to get
energy from it. Landfills create problems. When you burn it many of
those problems, when you control it the pollutants disappear and you
get energy from it.
But what this points out is that the sources that we are going to
have increasingly turn to as we run down Hubbard's peak are things like
solar, which is now one percent of 7, which is one out of 7 percent,
which is .07 percent. Wind, these are just now really minuscule, but
they are the resources that we have got to invest in, because they are
going to have to be big sources of energy for us in the future.
Here, alcohol. A couple of weeks ago I spent a full day, Mr. Speaker,
at the National Press Club here on a conference on ethanol. There is a
big controversy out there about whether or not we can produce ethanol
and get more energy out of the ethanol than we put into producing it,
mowing the land, building the tractor, putting the tires on the
tractor, fertilizing and so forth. There are a couple of really good
scientists who believe they have looked at all of the energy inputs and
they think that you have an energy deficit when you go from corn to
ethanol, that you put more energy into producing it than you get out of
it. Others think it is maybe energy positive.
But the point I am making is if it is energy positive, it is not
going to be
[[Page H7737]]
very energy positive, and it may be a nice convenient way to end up.
You cannot put cornstalks in your car and go, but you could have a
little critter that breaks down the cellulose there into glucose and
then ferment that and get alcohol and put that in your car and go. I am
not saying it is not a good idea, but I am saying we are not going to
get enormous amounts of energy from it.
{time} 2340
It may be energy positive; but if energy positive, not very energy
positive.
Here is geothermal, and, by the way, that is not the geothermal of
the guy who is selling the heat pump and telling us he is going to put
in a heat thermal system. And what he is doing is very wisely
connecting us either to groundwater or the ground so that we are not
trying to heat the summer air to cool our house or cool the winter air
to warm our house. It is what we do with the heat pump that interfaces
with air, and they call that geothermal. And I agree they ought to put
that in quotes because the real geothermal is where we are doing what
Iceland does and tap into the molten core of our Earth where we are
close enough where we can drill down and get the benefit of that heat.
If one goes to Iceland, I have never seen a chimney there. I have
been there several times. They do not need chimneys because they have a
lot of geothermal there. This points out the importance of these now
very miniscule contributions to our energy. We are very much, Mr.
Speaker, like a young couple that has just gotten married and we have
really lucked out. We have got a big inheritance from our grandparents.
We really lucked out. We found a lot of fossil fuels.
So now we have established a life-style where 85 percent of all the
money we spend is our grandparents' inheritance and only 15 of percent
of it comes from our income. But our grandparents' inheritance is not
going to last until we retire and certainly not until we die. So we are
going to do, Mr. Speaker, one of two things. Either we are going to
have to spend less money, or we are going to make more money; and that
is exactly where we are in energy. Eighty-five percent of what we use
is fossil fuels. Fifteen percent of it is what we have earned in a
sense because it comes from nuclear power, and if we go to breeder
reactors, that could be a perpetual source of power, and it comes from
these renewables.
And we are going to have to transition as we run down Hubbert's Peak.
We are going to have to transition from this 85 percent inheritance of
our grandparents to the 15 percent, and would it not be nice if we
could make it more than 15 percent? But the probability is that we are
going to have to have life-styles in the future which require less
energy.
And let us go back to our previous chart. If we look at the potential
for energy sources from all of these solar and wind and geothermal and
ocean energy, can one imagine, Mr. Speaker, how much energy it takes to
lift the ocean 2 feet, the tides? But the problem with that is it is so
diffuse, it is very hard to harness. But people are trying. Wave
energy, thermal gradients in the ocean, there are lots of possibilities
of energy from the ocean; but it is very diffuse. It is very difficult
to get it concentrated so we can use it.
Then all the agricultural sources. Mr. Speaker, I am not so sanguine
about energy from agricultural as I once was as I recognize that we are
barely able to feed the world. Tonight, a fifth of the world will go to
bed hungry. When I recognize that we are barely able to maintain the
productivity of our soils with no till farming that helps us keep our
top soils.
Before that we were losing the battle, and our top soils in the
center of our country were ending up in the Mississippi Delta, from the
Chesapeake Bay Watershed. They were ending up in the Chesapeake Bay.
Now we are doing better; but I am concerned, Mr. Speaker, how much
biomass we can take from our agricultural land and still have enough
organic material, good tilth, which is what we call that quality of
soil. So we can get some energy from agriculture, but it is going to be
limited. It is not going to be enormous amounts of energy we get there.
But we need to get energy from every place we can get it because we
have an enormous challenge to come up with enough energy to replace the
fossil fuels as we run down Hubbert's Peak.
Waste energy, we mentioned that. It was on the previous chart. We
really need to do more of that. That is a really good idea.
Just a word about hydrogen from renewables. Hydrogen, Mr. Speaker, is
not an energy source. It will always take more energy to produce
hydrogen than we get out of hydrogen. Otherwise, we are going to have
to suspend the laws of thermodynamics, and they are not going to be
suspended. But still it is a good idea to use hydrogen because we can
get hydrogen from some things like coal, like electricity from a
nuclear power plant; and we cannot put a nuclear reactor in the trunk
of our car. We cannot put coal in the trunk of our car. We did that in
the coal car behind the engine, but we do not do it in our cars and we
will not.
So what we are doing really is converting one kind of undesirable
energy to a very desirable form of energy in hydrogen that burns and we
get only water from it. And in addition to that, Mr. Speaker, we can
now use it in a fuel cell. It is very adaptable to a fuel cell where we
will get about twice the efficiency that we do from a reciprocating
engine. But please think of hydrogen as the equivalent of a battery. It
takes energy from one place and stores it in a very convenient form so
we can use it someplace else.
Several weeks ago we had a hearing here, and we had experts here on
hydrogen and the hydrogen economy. And they all agreed that of the
three ways that we could store hydrogen, only one of them was really
feasible if we were ever going to move to a true hydrogen economy.
Three ways of storing hydrogen. One is to compress it. It is the
lightest element in the universe. It is always trying to get out of
wherever we put it. And it takes big, thick pressure vessels because it
is so light to store very much of it. So that is a big problem. They
say that we can never really have a really functional hydrogen economy
if we have to compress it.
Another way of storing is to liquefy it. Then it is really cold, and
it takes a lot of energy to compress it and cool it, compress it and
cool it until it finally becomes a liquid, and then we have to store it
in a really insulated vessel; and when we park our car, it is just
going off.
And they say that the third way of storing it is the only way that is
really going to make a hydrogen economy feasible, and that is solid
state storage. Storing the hydrogen in a reversible chemical reaction.
Mr. Speaker, that is exactly what we do with the electron battery,
which is the conventional battery we have. We take electrons and we put
them in a chemical form that is reversible so we can charge the battery
and then discharge the battery to get power from it.
So when we have a hydrogen economy, which will really be effective
and doable, these experts say we are going to have to find a battery, a
way of storing hydrogen in a solid form to make it really doable. So
just think of it as another kind of battery.
The next chart is really a very interesting one, and it points out to
us something that we should have realized, and this covers about 400
years. It goes from 1630 to the present. And on the ordinant it shows
the energy that our societies have produced; and over here, of course,
is time. And the brown here is wood, and it shows that when we really
learned how to use wood in the Stanley Steamer and our charcoal for
smelting iron and so forth, we started an industrial revolution. It was
stuttering, and then we found coal, and, boy, it really jumped. But
then the use of coal really dropped off when we found oil because oil
had qualities that exceeded coal. It was so much easier to use. The
energy density was higher. And look what happened to our production of
energy.
And, by the way, the increase in population pretty much followed the
increase in the production of energy. It made it possible now to live
so much easier. We could have more children. We could support the
children. And notice up at the top up there that little dip. That is
the Arab oil embargo and the worldwide recession. And what that did,
Mr. Speaker, was to delay the onset of peak oil.
The next chart shows us some characteristics of the alternatives that
we are going to have to replace these fossil
[[Page H7738]]
fuels. On the ordinant here, we have energy profit ratio. I talked a
little bit ago about energy profit. This is how much energy we get out
from what energy we put in. And if we go subzero, we may as well not do
it if we are putting in more energy in than we get out unless what we
are getting out has some qualities that are better than the qualities
we are putting in.
And we are down here now with hydrogen. Hydrogen is down here. It is
below zero. We are putting more energy in than we are getting out. But
never mind, because hydrogen has real economic effectiveness in
transport. We can put it in a vessel, and we can run our car with it.
{time} 2350
Now, what you want, of course, is an alternative that has the highest
energy profit ratio and has the highest economic effectiveness in
transport, and what meets that are the giant oil fields. We do not have
any of those in our country. Most of U.S. oil is way down here. It is
really good in terms of economic effectiveness, but it takes a whole
lot more energy to get it out than it takes over in Saudi Arabia, and
the big, giant oil fields are up here, and there never were any of
those in our country, they are in the Middle East. You can see here
coal. You get a meaningful amount of energy out of coal but, boy, it is
not very good in economic effectiveness. You have to convert it into
something else. Photovoltaics in 1995, they were way down here, and now
we have moved them up to here. Hydro and coal-fired and nuclear are
down here, and this tells you the qualities of the replacements that we
are going to need to find for fossil fuels if we are going to be able
to maintain anything like the economic activity and the lifestyle that
we now have.
The next chart is an interesting one. It shows us coal, and people
will tell us, do not worry about energy, we have 250 years of coal left
in our country. That is not forever, by the way, but that is a very
long time. That is true. At current use rates, we have 250 years of
coal. But, if we are going to use more coal, we are going to have an
increased use of coal, and if we use coal only with a 2 percent growth
per year, and, Mr. Speaker, we are going to have to use a much greater
growth rate than that to make up for the slide down Hubbard's Peak in
oil, but only 2 percent growth per year, compounded, it now shrinks to
85 years. And, since you cannot use coal for a lot of things like
running your car, you have to convert to a gas or liquid; well, you
have now made that conversion, you are now down to only about 50 years.
The coal is there, it is dirty, it produces a lot of pollutants. You
either put up with the pollutants or you pay a lot of energy and money,
and we will not worry about money, we should worry about energy, to
clean up the coal.
The next chart is an interesting one. The top shows you the subject
that I spent a full day down here at the National Press Club a couple
of weeks ago on, and that is ethanol. On the right here it shows the
energy you get from oil. You put in 1 million BTUs and you get out 1.23
million BTUs. I am sorry. With an input of 1.3 million, you get out 1
million BTUs. Obviously, you are going to have to use some of the
energy and the oil to transport it and to refine it and to deliver it
and so forth.
Now, the chart on the left here was given to me by our Department of
Energy. I am told by the experts that this is wildly optimistic, but
this is at least this group's view of what we can get out of it. The
Energy Conference had these two experts who said that you need to put
in more energy than you will get out. And even this optimistic
assessment says that to get a million BTUs out, you need to put in
three-fourths that amount. Now, of course, the extra energy comes from
the sun, which, by the way, is where the oil came from too, because the
oil and gas all come from things that grew a very long time ago with
sun.
On the bottom here is a really interesting chart. In this little pie-
shaped thing here, it shows all of the energy that goes into producing
a bushel of corn. And notice that nearly half the energy, Mr. Speaker,
that goes into producing a bushel of corn comes from nitrogen. And that
nitrogen fertilizer is made from natural gas, so that is natural gas
energy there. And notice almost every other slice of this pie, we are
talking about fossil fuel energy to grow the seed to haul, to supply
the water, many of the chemicals come from oil, custom work, putting
oil in the combine, natural gas that is liquefied or used as natural
gas for drying your crop, electricity that is used for a lot of things;
gasoline itself, diesel, the lime and the phosphate and the pot ash are
all mined using fossil fuels, so essentially, for every piece of this
pie, fossil fuels are used.
Now, what do we need to do? This next chart, which is our last chart,
shows us the challenge. And, Mr. Speaker, what we need is a focus that
is equivalent, if you are old enough to remember the Manhattan Project,
it is equivalent to the Manhattan Project, or putting a man on the
moon. That was a real challenge. And I think we need to challenge the
American people in a very similar way. We have to do something about
our dependence on foreign oil. If you do not think there is going to be
such a thing as peak oil, and I think we are probably here. I hope not.
I hope I am wrong, I hope these world experts are wrong. But if we are
right, then we face a very bumpy ride. But even if you do not believe
that as a problem, you have to believe that getting two-thirds of our
oil from overseas is a big national security risk. By the way, we need
to do exactly the same thing to reduce the national security risk that
we need to do to transition. We need to buy time, conservation, and
efficiency. We need to use that very wisely. If you do the wrong thing,
you may end up making the problem even worse.
I would encourage my colleagues, Mr. Speaker, to look into Jevons
Paradox. Very interesting paradox. For some problems, the harder you
work, the worse the problem gets. There will be real benefits to doing
this. We will have technologies we can sell to the world, not just we,
but the world, so we need to make this transition. We will create a lot
of new jobs. It will be challenging to our people.
Whether we like it or not, Mr. Speaker, we are going to be a role
model. We use 25 percent of the world's oil. We are a role model. We
are going to be a role model. We need to step up to that.
Mr. Speaker, I would like to challenge our government and our people
to step up to this challenge. There are those who believe that we
cannot do this. One writer begins his article by saying, dear reader,
civilization as we know it will end soon. His name is Mat Savinar, you
will find him with a google search of ``peak oil.'' Please read the
article. You will be genuinely frightened, having finished the article.
I am not as pessimistic as Mat Savinar. I think that the American
people, because we have met every other challenge, I think we can meet
this challenge. But, Mr. Speaker, we are not likely to meet the
challenge if we do not know there is a problem. So I am very
appreciative for this opportunity to speak about this problem, and we
will be back again, because this problem is not going to go away, and
we need to talk more and more about the solutions and the problem.
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