[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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