[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 131 (Monday, October 17, 2005)]
[House]
[Pages H8824-H8830]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  2000
                                PEAK OIL

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Burgess). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 4, 2005, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Bartlett) 
is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, I have here an article that 
appeared on the front page of USA Today. It is above the fold. It is 
the center article. It says: Debate Brews: Has Oil Production Peaked?
  The undeniable facts that spawned this article were noted by a number 
of the leading persons in our country several months ago, Boyden Gray, 
McFarland, James Woolsey, and a large number of retired four-star 
admirals and generals when they noted the facts that are on our first 
chart here: That we have in our country only 2 percent of the world's 
reserves of oil; we have 8 percent of the world's oil production. Just 
those two statistics together say something rather interesting. If we 
have only 2 percent of the oil reserves but are producing 8 percent of 
the world's oil, that means we are really good at pumping oil, does it 
not? That means that we are pumping down our reserves four times faster 
than the rest of the world.
  We represent only 5 percent of the population, they noted, and we 
consume 25 percent of the world's oil and import about two-thirds of 
what we use. They wrote a letter to the President saying: Mr. 
President, the fact that we have only 2 percent of the reserves and use 
25 percent of the world's oil and import two-thirds of what we use is a 
very large national security risk. We really need to do something about 
that as a country.
  Whether you believe, as this article points out, that oil has 
peaked--in just a moment, Mr. Speaker, we will note how this term came 
into existence--or whether you believe that we need to do something 
about energy because of this national security concern, what you are 
going to do is essentially the same thing, because what you need to do, 
if this is just a national security concern, is to free ourselves from 
the dependence on foreign oil. That is exactly the thing you have to 
do. If you believe that we have reached peak oil, you have to free 
ourselves from the dependence on oil, most of which is foreign oil. In 
the former, if you just think it is a national security concern, we may 
muddle through that and come out okay. If you think that it is a peak 
oil issue, then there is no way of muddling through that, because 
unless you forcefully and intelligently approach that problem you are 
going to have some big problems.
  The next chart shows us how this term originated, and we need to go 
back about six decades to the 1940s and the 1950s when a scientist by 
the name of M. King Hubbert whose name is widely known. I was reading 
an article just today. Without ever telling the readers the derivation 
of the term they were talking about Hubbert's Peak. Well, in 1956, 
Hubbert as a result of his analysis for nearly two decades of the 
behavior of oil fields made the prediction that the United States would 
peak in oil production in about 1970. As it turned out, he was right on 
target, we did peak in 1970.
  He made that prediction because, as he noted, the exploitation and 
exhaustion of an individual oil field followed a typical not surprising 
or unsurprising bell curve, that it went up and up as you pumped a 
field until you reached the peak, and then at that peak about half of 
the oil had been pumped, and then the last half was more difficult to 
get and so you came down the other side of that typical bell curve, and 
that has come in the literature to be known as Hubbert's Peak.
  This smooth green line is his prediction for the United States. The 
rougher green line with the heavy symbols indicates the actual 
production of oil. What you see, it roughly followed his prediction. 
The red curve here is for Russia that had more oil than we. They peaked 
after us. But when the Soviet Union fell apart, you see that they did 
not reach their potential, and they are now experiencing a second 
smaller peak that does not show here but it is a peak about like so.
  If we look at the next chart, we see where we got the oil from in our 
country. I am going to spend a couple of minutes just to say what peak 
oil is, and I have got several colleagues that are going to join us. 
This shows where we have gotten the oil from in our country, Texas and 
the rest of the United States and Alaska and natural gas liquids. 
Notice the small contribution that Prudhoe Bay made, a big source of 
oil. We were starting down the other side of Hubbert's Peak. Remember, 
he said we would peak in 1970, and right on target that is when we 
peaked, and the big Prudhoe Bay oil field was a little blip in our 
downward coast on Hubbert's Peak. I am sure you can all remember the 
fabled oil discoveries in the Gulf of Mexico which was going to save us 
for the future. That is this yellow here. That is all that amounted to. 
There are 4,000 oil wells out there, I think, and that is their 
contribution to oil in our country.
  The next chart shows the world situation, and this is a too busy 
chart. It is like reading a textbook. There is really a whole lot of 
information there. They

[[Page H8825]]

spent a lot of time putting this together, and what I have done is to 
pull out one part of this. This little inset here will be our next 
chart, and this inset shows two curves. They are really very 
interesting curves. The bars here show the discovery of oil, and you 
notice that we were discovering oil way back in the early 1900s and a 
whole lot of it was discovered in the 1960s and 1970s. The black curve 
here indicates our consumption of oil. Notice, up until about the early 
1980s the world was finding a lot more oil than it was consuming.
  Up until this point, this is all history, and from this point on now 
is a guess as to where we will be going. Because these two curves have 
the same abscissa, the area under these two curves, and this is one 
curve, the production curve, and this is the consumption curve. The 
area under those two curves has to be the same. What that means is that 
the only oil that we can pump is the oil that we found, and what the 
authors have done is to make a guesstimate of the oil which is yet to 
be found, and this is their estimate of what we are yet to find. We may 
find more, a little, we may find less. I will tell you, Mr. Speaker, 
that most of the world's experts agree that we have probably found 
about 95 percent of the oil that we will find, of the recoverable oil 
that we will find.
  I did a little play with these curves, and I noted that this part of 
the consumption curve will consume some of this discovery, and I noted 
that it took all of the discovery to about this point just to make up 
the difference between the rate at which we are using oil, which you 
can see is three or four times as high as the rate at which we are 
finding oil. So what we have got yet to consume is this oil which 
remains here, and the authors believe that it will follow that kind of 
a slope.
  The next chart shows a simplistic bell curve. By the way, this bell 
curve can be very sharp. All you have to do is change the ordinate and 
abscissa, you can make it very short and sharp, or you can make it 
spread out. This is a 2 percent growth rate in the production and 
consumption, because up until this point the production of oil and the 
consumption of oil have been the same thing. There have been no real 
shortages until currently, and there have been no big surpluses that 
have been stored away somewhere except for our strategic reserve and 
some other countries that have some strategic reserve.
  This shows that the problem will occur not at peak oil but sometime 
before peak oil, because you see that the demand curve will separate 
from the supply curve quite a while before you reach a peak. If this is 
a 2 percent growth rate, that means you double, that is exponential, 
you double in 35 years. So that yellow area on the abscissa is 35 years 
long. What this says is that you should start seeing some little 
perturbations a decade or so before you reach peak oil.
  The next chart kind of puts this in context, and I think that it is 
good to look back through history to see how we got here. Here we have 
three little curves, one of which shows our economy, and this starts 
way back in the 1600s and goes up to the present. This shows the 
economy of the world with wood, the brown; black appropriately for 
coal; and then look what happens when we get to oil. It just does not 
show the quadrillion Btus that the world has produced, that also 
mirrors pretty much the population growth of the world. We started out 
back here with less than a billion people for hundreds of years, less 
than a billion people. When we finally had the energy available from 
fossil fuels, primarily oil, our population has shot up from about 1 
billion people to now almost 7 billion people.
  I want to show one more chart before I put one up that we can talk to 
with the Members that have joined me. This is an interesting one that 
kind of tells you where we are today. The analogy I use is that we as a 
country are very much like a young couple that has gotten an 
inheritance from their grandparents, a pretty good inheritance, and 
they have established a lavish lifestyle where 85 percent of all the 
money they spend comes from their grandparents' inheritance and only 15 
percent from what they earn, and the grandparents' inheritance is not 
going to last until they retire at the rate they are spending it. So 
they have got to do one of two things. Either they have got to spend 
less money, or they have got to earn more money. I use those numbers, 
85 and 15, and some other people may use 86 and 14, by the way, but 
that is pretty much where we are in our country in terms of energy use. 
85 percent of all the energy we use comes from fossil fuels and only 15 
percent comes from other sources, a bit more than half of that 15 
percent comes from nuclear. That could and probably should grow. There 
are obviously some problems with using nuclear, but you will make a 
choice between borrowing those problems or not having energy in the 
future, I believe.
  The 7 percent which is what we call renewables has been blown up here 
so that we can see what it consists of. Notice that the biggest part, 
nearly half of that renewable energy, is hydro. That is probably not 
going to grow in our country, we are breaching more dams than we are 
making now and so hydro has probably peaked out in our country.
  The next biggest source is wood. That is not rural people burning 
wood to keep warm. That is the paper industry and the timber industry 
wisely using what would otherwise be a waste product and they are using 
it to produce energy. Then, waste. That is a really interesting one 
because that is pretty big, well, pretty big compared to other things 
in renewables but not very big compared to the total amount of energy 
that we use. That is municipal waste being burned. The county instead 
of a landfill ought to have a generating plant that is burning this 
waste. There is a very good one, by the way, up at Dickerson not very 
far from here that they would be happy to show you.
  Now we get down to those renewables that are talked about as the 
sources of energy that we are going to have to increasingly turn to as 
we slide down the other side of Hubbert's Peak. They are solar, 1 
percent. That is 1 percent of 7 percent, which is .07 percent. Wind, 1 
percent of 7 percent, .07 percent, more than that of electricity, 
because this nuclear power which is 8 percent of total energy is 20 
percent of electricity in our country. Then agriculture.

                              {time}  2015

  By the way, there are two ways we use geothermal. One is the true 
geothermal where you are tapping into the molten core of the Earth and 
getting heat there. There is not a chimney, I believe, in Iceland, 
because they get all of their energy that way. We are now using that 
term ``geothermal'' in another way where you wisely couple not to the 
air, which you are trying to heat in the wintertime and cool in the 
summertime to condition your house, but you are coupling your heat pump 
to the ground or ground water which stays a constant temperature. 
Fifty-six degrees seems pretty cool in the summertime and pretty warm 
in the wintertime, does it not, and that is ground water temperature 
here.
  Then we get to agriculture, and what we can expect to get from 
agriculture. I know one of the Members who has joined us is going to 
talk about agriculture. Let me just call on the gentleman from 
Minnesota (Mr. Gutknecht) because he wants to talk about agriculture. 
Let me put the next chart up here, because what we are going to be 
speaking to now is the finite resources we have, the things we can turn 
to; but they are finite. They will not last forever, and then the 
renewable resources, and the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Gutknecht) 
is interested in one of those down here in the agricultural resources 
area.
  Mr. GUTKNECHT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Maryland. I am 
so delighted that the gentleman took this hour tonight, because this is 
an issue that every American is thinking about, in terms of our energy, 
and the gentleman has probably done more research on overall energy and 
energy policy, how much good we get out of a barrel of oil. I apologize 
for being a little late, but I do want to talk just for a minute, 
because there are so many misunderstandings about ethanol and other 
renewable energies.
  This is a chart based on numbers from the United States Department of 
Agriculture, and they have part of their numbers, I think, from the 
United States Energy Department, but it is a chart that most Americans 
would be surprised to learn. Frankly,

[[Page H8826]]

even back in my own district of Minnesota, many people are surprised 
that right now, in Claremont, Minnesota at the Alcorn ethanol plant, we 
are producing ethanol for 95 cents a gallon. That number reflects a 
higher price for corn than corn is today. Actually, corn is dirt cheap, 
as they say out in the Midwest. But the price right now is at about $60 
a barrel for oil, and to produce a gallon of unleaded gasoline is 
$1.65.
  Now, the truth of the matter is, we have to be honest, we get fewer 
Btus out of a gallon of alcohol than we do out of a gallon of gasoline; 
but even when you make that comparison, ethanol today is cheaper than 
gasoline on a Btu basis. On a Btu basis, $60 for oil, $2.25 for corn, 
these are the raw costs of that product.
  Now, there are a lot of other benefits to using more ethanol. One, of 
course, is we become less dependent on foreign sources of energy. I 
think even if these numbers were reversed, it seems to me it would be 
worthwhile for us at the Federal level to do more to encourage more use 
of renewable energies like ethanol.
  The other thing about ethanol is it is better for the environment, 
and perhaps the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Bartlett) can talk about 
this sometime now or later, but ethanol is an oxygenate. It is roughly 
30 to 35 percent oxygen, which means that it burns far leaner than 
unleaded gasoline. More importantly, one of the by-products, of course, 
is carbon dioxide; but that gets used the next year in growing the next 
crop of corn. So in many respects, it is a perfect carbon dioxide 
cycle, if you will. So it is better for the environment; it is better 
for our economy, because in the month of August we spent $22 billion, 
over $22 billion, the United States, in buying oil from countries that 
are not particularly friendly to us.
  I think we ought to set as a vision that we are going to become 
energy independent.
  Now, I was taught many years ago in sales training class that a goal 
is a dream with a deadline, and so I tried to offer last week in the 
energy bill that we had what we described as a 10-by-10 amendment 
mandating that by the year 2010, 10 percent of our gasoline will be 
renewable energy. We did not get a chance to offer that amendment, so 
now I am having it redrafted as a bill. I am planning to offer it as a 
bipartisan effort. I think energy policy does not have to be partisan. 
But these numbers, I think, speak for themselves. Even if ethanol were 
more expensive, because of the environment and in terms of keeping more 
of those dollars rotating through our economy, it makes sense to use 
more renewable energy.
  So I want to thank the gentleman for what he is doing tonight, I want 
to thank him for what he has done in the past, and I want to encourage 
Members, if they would like more information, because there are so many 
myths about renewable energy and particularly about ethanol, if they 
would like a fact sheet, we have some in our office, get ahold of my 
office or go to my Web site at gil.house.gov. We have some great 
information, and we have sources for all of it. This is from the actual 
people who produce it, and it was authenticated and authorized by the 
United States Department of Agriculture. Ethanol is cheaper than 
gasoline. I yield back to the gentleman, and I thank him for having 
this Special Order.
  Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for 
joining us this evening.
  Ethanol is certainly one of the alternatives to which we can turn. 
But if there were some here on the other side, let me just indicate 
what they would probably say because, as a friend told me a number of 
years ago, the thinnest sheet of paper has two sides, and so let us 
look at what they would say on the other side.
  I have here a chart which shows the energy input for producing a 
million Btus from gasoline and the energy input for producing a million 
Btus from ethanol. And to get a million Btus out of gasoline, we have 
to input 1.23 million, because you are not going to get it all. You 
have to transport it and refine it and you are going to lose something 
in the process. But for ethanol, we have the happy consequence of 
getting a lot of energy from the sun. So this chart says that for every 
million Btus you get from ethanol, it takes only .74 million Btus of 
fossil energy to produce it, and that is a good bet.
  But, there are others, Dr. Pimentel, for instance, and his colleague 
from the West Coast. About 6 weeks ago I attended an all-day conference 
at the National Press Club, and their argument was that if you really 
look at all of the fossil fuel energy that goes into producing ethanol, 
you use more fossil fuel energy in producing ethanol than you get out 
of it. I hope they are wrong; but even if they are not wrong, the 
energy profit ratio is not going to be really large.
  Let me look at this next chart for just a moment, and then I am going 
to come back to this one for a minute, because both of these relate to 
ethanol. This is an interesting chart. What it shows is energy profit 
ratios for several fuels. This is energy profit ratio.
  Now, what the gentleman was looking at was dollar profit ratio. It is 
really profitable dollar-wise to produce ethanol today because it takes 
less money to produce it than you would pay for an equivalent gallon of 
gasoline. This is the energy profit ratio, and this is contrasted with 
a quality, economic effectiveness in transport, how feasible is it to 
use over a wide range of uses. Of course, the source that tops the list 
is the giant oil fields. We do not have any of those, by the way; they 
are all in the Middle East. But the energy profit ratio is very high: 
if you put in $1 you get out $60. And they are very economically 
useful, because you can make a whole lot of things out of it. You can 
make pharmaceuticals out of it, you can heat your house with it, you 
can run your car with it, you can make plastics out of it, do a whole 
lot of things with oil.

  This shows the other compounds. Here is U.S. oil. We never were very 
good, and now we are getting on down further, tar sands and ethanol. 
Ethanol is way down here at the bottom because they say there is not a 
big energy profit ratio. But if it is even positive, it is really good, 
because when you use ethanol, it is relatively nonpolluting as compared 
to fossil fuels.
  As the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Gutknecht) properly pointed out, 
there is no CO2 penalty for that, because every bit of 
CO2 you get out of it, next year's plant is going to absorb 
in growing it. We use oxygen, produce CO2, the plants, happy 
neighbors; they use our CO2 to produce oxygen which we then 
can breath. But you must be very careful with the energy profit ratio. 
The dollar profit ratio is one thing; and, today, that is about all 
economists look at. But energy profit ratio, at the end of the day, if 
we really have finite sources of these fossil fuels, is going to be 
important.
  Let us go back now to the previous chart. I just want to take a quick 
look at the bottom of it because this shows something that most people 
have no idea about. This is the energy that goes into producing a 
bushel of corn which you are using for your ethanol, and notice that 
nearly half of all of the energy that goes into producing a bushel of 
corn comes from natural gas. And the other sources are the tractor that 
guides it, the seed, the phosphates, the diesel fuel, the gasoline, the 
electricity, natural gases and so forth.
  But nearly half the energy comes from natural gas which produces 
nitrogen, and most people have no concept of that. Before we learned 
how to do that, the only nitrogen sources we had in the world were 
barnyard manures and guano, and it was a big industry a number of years 
ago. Guano, of course, is the droppings of bats and birds over tens of 
thousands of years that accumulated, and that is gone. If we wait a 
couple of hundred thousand more years, there will be some more. But 
ethanol is certainly something we ought to look at. It is one of a 
number of things on this list and it is down here in ethanol, and it is 
one of the things we can get out of agriculture. We will come back a 
little later in the hour to talk more about agriculture. Several other 
Members have joined us, and let me let them speak in terms of the time 
they appeared. I yield to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Gilchrest).
  Mr. GILCHREST. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman for his 
initiative to give us an insight into the world of peak oil and all its 
ramifications. I just wanted to speak briefly tonight in support of the 
gentleman's effort to bring this information across

[[Page H8827]]

the board to the administration, to Members of Congress, and to the 
country as a whole so that all of us can understand what is transpiring 
over the next couple of decades to have an enormous impact on not only 
our Nation's economy but on the world's economy.
  The question that I would pose that I think everybody should think 
about is what is at the bottom of the bottomless well. I think most 
people think that oil will go on forever, that there is plenty of 
reserves out there, that they will never dry up, they are not a finite 
resource, they are there for the foreseeable future, and that nature is 
not dynamic, but it is static.
  Well, I think the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Bartlett) is bringing 
to the forefront that what is at the bottomless well is not oil; and if 
it is not initiative, ingenuity, and intellect, we are in for a lot of 
problems in the very near future. If, at the bottom of the bottomless 
well is initiative, ingenuity, and intellect, we will take the next 
logical step in cultural evolution.
  We all used to burn wood for thousands of years. People burned wood 
for energy, for heat to make their communities whole. Then we 
discovered coal, and coal was a lot more efficient. It burned a lot 
better, and our industries prospered, plus we had better uses for wood 
than just to burn it. Coal was then, to a large extent, supplemented by 
oil, and oil was more efficient. Our industries could prosper even 
more, and it increased the ability to advance technology.
  Now, coal has more hydrogen than wood. Oil has more hydrogen in it 
than coal. And then we discovered natural gas, which was even more 
efficient than oil or coal, and that expanded our markets for our 
economic progress even more, and natural gas has more hydrogen than 
oil.
  We are running out of oil, and I think the gentleman from Maryland 
(Mr. Bartlett) said we have about 2 percent of the known reserves in 
the United States. Many people say it is a little bit more than that; 
but whether it is 2 percent or 3 percent or 4 percent or whatever, it 
is a limited resource. In 1970, we produced in the United States 11 
million barrels of oil a day, in 1970. In the year 2004, we produced 5 
million barrels a day. We produce less than half now than we did 30 
years ago, and yet we are burning a lot more. We burn 20 million 
barrels of oil a day. Now, if we compared what we have done in the last 
100 years in BTUs as far as oil energy use is concerned, we can put it 
into the number quadrillion. This is what a quadrillion looks like.
  In 1910, our BTU energy output from oil was 7 quadrillion BTUs, 7 
quadrillion. In 1930, it was 35 quadrillion BTUs. In 2004, it was 100 
quadrillion BTUs. The point here is that as supplies go down from this 
finite resource, demand goes up exponentially.

                              {time}  2030

  And what are we going to do? I would just like us to think about a 
couple of things. Oil is not going to last forever. The horizon is 
seeing to its completion in a number of decades, and so the transition 
to find alternatives to that type of fossil fuel is now.
  There are a number of alternatives that some of the other Members 
will talk about, whether it is solar or even hydrogen or using soybeans 
or corn or wind or other technologies, advancing nuclear. The idea that 
we need to transition and find alternatives to our transportation needs 
is vital.
  The second thing is we have the technology right now to more than 
double our efficiency across the board. The technology exists right now 
to more than double what you can get out of an automobile, from 20 
miles a gallon to 50 miles a gallon. We have the technology to make all 
of our appliances way more efficient.
  When we burned coal, we found a lot better uses for wood. If we know 
what uses there are for oil, other than burning it, we would be 
astounded. Our whole economy, our medical field, our industry, our 
clothes, our trinkets, the things that we have in our house, it is all 
a byproduct of oil.
  So we have better uses for oil than putting it in, pardon the 
expression, a gas hog, so we can run off to the 7-Eleven and buy a cup 
of coffee and maybe some item that is made in some other part of the 
world.
  So think about peak oil. Think about energy efficiency. Think about 
alternatives. These are not 100 years away. And think about your own 
lifestyle and how that fits into the mix.
  Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland, thank you very much for joining us. You 
mentioned gas hog. The other day my wife read a new definition for SUV, 
it was a suddenly useless vehicle with the high gas prices we have now.
  The gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Gilchrest) mentioned conservation 
and efficiency. I just wanted to come back for a moment to this chart 
to point out something that is quite obvious when you think about it.
  If we are here, and I am going to call next on my colleague from 
Michigan (Mr. Hoekstra). And I see he has the same article that I 
started with. But here we have a curve that shows that as we approach 
peak oil that our demands for oil are going to exceed the supplies of 
oil. What that means is that there will not even be enough oil to fuel 
our present economies.
  And if we are going to have any oil to invest, any energy to invest 
in alternatives, we are going to have to reduce our use of oil. Now we 
have blown, if you will excuse the term, 25 years. We absolutely knew 
in 1980 that M. King Hubbert was right about his 1970 prediction that 
we would peak.
  By the way he predicted the world would peak about now, and we knew 
in 1980 that he was right about our country. Should not we have assumed 
that maybe, just maybe, he was right about the world and we ought to do 
something about that? We did absolutely nothing about that except grow 
an ever more and more lavish lifestyle that used ever more and more 
oil.
  And so now just emphasizing what this curve tells us is if we are 
going to have any energy to invest in the renewables, we should have 
been investing for the last 25 years at least. We were not doing it. If 
we are going to have any to invest now, we would like to use this much 
oil, only this much is available totally so we cannot even use that 
much for ordinary activities, we are going to have to reduce that so 
that we have something to invest in the alternatives.
  By the way, Mr. Speaker, I hope I am wrong. I hope all of these 
experts are wrong. Because if we are not wrong, the world and the 
United States mostly, because we are the biggest consumers of energy, 
are in for a very rough ride.
  Let me turn now to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Hoekstra).
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, we must have both had our eyes drawn to 
the same article in USA Today that ran where it talks about the debate 
brews. Has oil production peaked?
  As my colleague has pointed out, there are those that would advocate 
that say we have not reached the peak yet, that I think one of the 
authors or one of the people quoted in here says we have run out of oil 
five times since 1890 and we always find additional sources.
  But it also goes on to say that the only debate should be over when 
we peak, not whether we will or will not peak. It is going to happen. 
And as we have seen over the last 12 months, especially the last 6 
months, all of the indications are that we are going to continue to 
feel significant stresses with oil prices and the demand for oil.
  With gasoline at one time having been close to $3 a gallon, now being 
back in the $2 and a half range, you know, we can see that perhaps at 
least for the short term some of the problems have been alleviated. But 
that only provides us what I believe is a short window, a very small 
window of opportunity for Congress and the United States to address 
this issue.
  We know that our demand is going to continue increasing. We know that 
global demand is going to continue increasing, especially for two 
significant countries like China and India coming on-stream, their 
demand for fossil fuels is going to increase dramatically.
  With increased demand, probably static production, we know that we 
are going to continue seeing increases in the pressure for the prices 
of fossil fuels.
  You know I chair the Intelligence Committee. One of the things that I 
look at this as, I think this is a national security issue. We are 
extremely vulnerable. Today we import about 60 percent of our fossil 
fuels.
  Who do we import from? Well, we import from our southern and our 
northern neighbors. We get 16 percent of our

[[Page H8828]]

imports from Canada. We get almost exactly that same amount from 
Mexico. And after that, we have got to be really careful in terms of 
how we describe these countries, but the next three countries, Saudi 
Arabia, roughly 15 percent. Venezuela, Hugo Chavez who has shown 
himself to be not a great friend of the United States, we get about 13 
percent from Venezuela, and we get about 11 percent from Nigeria, and 
then you know a much lesser extent from a whole long list of countries.
  But it becomes a national security issue, because at any particular 
given time, if these countries believe, or their leaders believe that 
they want to hold us hostage, they have the potential to perhaps do 
that.
  So it is a national security issue. It is an economic issue. I agree 
with my colleagues and the comments made by my friend, the gentleman 
from Minnesota (Mr. Gutknecht), earlier that we ought to establish a 
goal, with a firm implementation date of when we will be energy 
independent. We ought to define exactly what that means and then we 
ought to develop those strategies to get there.
  You know, he talked about ethanol. My friend, the gentleman from 
Maryland (Mr. Bartlett) has talked about various conservation methods. 
There is probably no single magic bullet to solving this crisis, but if 
we push a whole range of efforts forward at the same time, there is no 
reason why by 2010 we could not be using 10 percent of our gasoline, or 
that all of our gasoline would be a 90/10 mix, 90 percent gasoline, 10 
percent ethanol.
  We just need to have a will to make it happen. Ford and GM, you 
talked about the SUVs, the interesting thing today about the 
automobiles that are being produced, I believe that every automobile 
being produced today can burn a mix of 90 percent gas, 10 percent 
ethanol. It is not a technology problem for the automotive companies.
  As a matter of fact, everybody who is driving a relatively new car, 
something that has been produced in the last 5 to 7 years, can burn a 
90/10 mix. The other interesting thing is all of the SUVs, the bigger 
vehicles with the bigger engines, because of some quirk in technology 
that my colleague from Maryland or my colleague from Michigan can maybe 
explain to me exactly how it works, but all of the larger engines today 
can burn a mix of 85/15, and that is 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent 
gasoline.
  So the industry has come a long way. They have come a long way in 
moving forward on hybrids. And as much as I am against mandates, this 
may be an area, because I do not believe the oil companies, as I have 
talked to folks in my district who produce biodiesel, who produce the 
ethanol and these type of things, and I am asking if these are things 
are more economical to produce than fossil fuels why do not we see a 
richer mix of these fuels available at the pump?
  And the answer is very clear. It is not a priority for the oil 
companies. They do not want to make it happen. They like selling fossil 
fuels and making significant profits. Maybe it is time for us to 
mandate that some of these products move forward so that we can 
facilitate the type of change that we really need.
  Technology has moved forward. You know, we need alternatives. It is a 
national security issue. It is only going to become a larger national 
security issue in the future.
  I thank my colleagues for allowing me to participate. I thank my 
colleague for his deep in-depth knowledge on these issues, and for 
bringing it forward. When I take a look at the mix of Members that we 
have here, we have got a great cross-section of the Republican 
Conference, I am optimistic that we actually can come together with a 
legislative fix to address this issue and hopefully do it in this 
Congress.
  Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Thank you very much. You mentioned 
prioritizing. And, you know, if we are going to avoid a really rough 
landing here, we need as a country, indeed as a world society, we need 
to have a mentality like the Manhattan Project or putting a man on the 
moon. This is a big, big challenge.
  I just wanted to note your observation about we would reach peak oil. 
I come back to this chart for just a moment. This is only since 1630. 
We had a lot of recorded history about, what, 4,000 years before that 
of recorded history. Out of 5,000 years of recorded history we have 
been about 100 years in the Age of Oil, and we are probably about half 
way through the Age of Oil. There is a little argument whether it is 50 
percent through, 40 percent through the Age of Oil. But we are roughly 
halfway through the Age of Oil. And during this Age of Oil, now we have 
permitted the world's population to grow to almost 7 billion people.
  We will come down the other side. This will reach a peak. It will 
come down the other side. What will we do as we come down that other 
side? Now we can avoid catastrophic consequences of this, but we really 
must anticipate them to do that. Let me go back for just a quick moment 
to the analogy of the thinnest sheet of paper has two sides.
  The argument for ethanol is great, and we need to go to ethanol. But 
I just want to dissuade people from believing that this is the solution 
to our problem. We are barely able to feed the world today. Tonight I 
understand maybe a fifth of the world will go to bed hungry.
  We are just barely able to maintain the quality of our topsoils. Now 
taking corn does not degrade that, because we are taking the corn off 
anyhow. But ethanol will be a really meaningful contribution when we 
have drastically reduced our total need for energy, because to produce 
enough ethanol to make a dent in the amount of energy we use now is 
just going to take more corn than there is out there to do that.
  Let me give you a real quick example of the energy density of these 
fossil fuels. One barrel of oil, the refined product of which will cost 
you a little over $100 will buy you the work output of 12 people 
working all year for you. We have some difficulty getting our arms 
around that. Imagine how far one gallon of gas or diesel fuel takes 
whatever you drive, from a big SUV that gets 8, 10 miles a gallon to I 
drive a Prius that gets 45 miles per gallon.
  How long would it take me to pull my Prius 45 miles? How long would 
it take you to pull an SUV 8 or 10 miles? If you can do it with a come-
along and chains and guardrail you can get it there. It would take you 
a long time.
  Something, another analogy to help you understand how energy rich 
these fossil fuels are. If you work in your yard real hard all day 
long, I will get more work out of an electric motor with less than 25 
cents worth of electricity. So in terms of fossil fuel energy, we are 
worth less than 25 cents a day in terms of work output.
  So that is the challenge we have. Now ethanol is nearly as good as 
gasoline. But as I showed on the chart before, it takes an enormous 
amount of fossil fuel input to produce the ethanol.
  You know all of these are solutions, but I tell you, none of them 
will work with the amount of energy that the world is presently using, 
particularly in the United States.
  Now me turn now to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Boehlert). I know 
that he has had a long-time concern about energy and particular 
concerns that we ought to be getting more mileage from our motor 
vehicles.

                              {time}  2045

  Mr. BOEHLERT. I thank the gentleman from Maryland (Dr. Bartlett). You 
will notice during this presentation the colleagues of the gentleman 
have constantly, as I have, referred to him as doctor. The reason we do 
so is out of respect for his background, his knowledge; because that 
Ph.D. that he has indicates he is a very distinguished scientist. So he 
is not just talking about some pet theory or some gut reaction. He is 
talking about facts, scientifically produced evidence; and I applaud 
the gentleman for that, and I want to compliment all of my colleagues 
for participating in this special order.
  In sum and substance, I think the viewers might say, what do I take 
out of this tutorial? It has been a great academic exercise and the 
gentleman from Maryland (Dr. Bartlett) has presented a compelling case 
why we should all be concerned about peak oil. But if you are watching 
this in your living room someplace across America you might say, what 
does it mean to me right now? What does it mean to my family right now 
and what can I do about it?
  Let me suggest something that everyone can do. They can write their

[[Page H8829]]

Representative in Congress and urge their Representative to support 
CAFE standards. What are CAFE standards? Corporate Average Fuel 
Economy, CAFE. That is where you get the acronym. That is, the Federal 
Government should require the automobile industry, the manufacturers of 
automobiles, SUVs, light trucks, all of these vehicles that traverse 
our Nation's highways which we are so dependent on, we should require 
them to be more fuel efficient.
  We have tried mightily to convince our colleagues of that basic fact 
using some of the facts that the gentleman from Maryland (Dr. Bartlett) 
made in his presentation about peak oil, pointing out that we have 25 
percent of the world's energy consumption but we have only 5 percent of 
the population and only 2 percent of the world's oil reserves, yet we 
are consuming 25 percent of the world's energy output. Now, something 
is wrong there.
  I would suggest we are on a collision course with disaster and we 
have to do something very meaningful about it. We are consuming 21 
million barrels of oil a day in the United States. 21 million. We 
import 14 million barrels of oil a day. So we are starting every single 
day with a couple of problems on our hands.
  Number one, if we are importing 14 million barrels of oil a day and 
oil is costing $60, $65 a barrel, that means we start each and every 
day somewhere in the neighborhood of $750 million, three-quarters of a 
billion dollars in the hole, in the red in our balance of trade 
deficit. And ironically, we are sending, as you have heard from 
previous speakers, so much of that money to countries where we are not 
quite certain what they are doing with the money. And the saddest part, 
as we have heard from our chairman of the Permanent Select Committee on 
Intelligence, some of that money that we send abroad to purchase this 
oil from less than enthusiastic embracers of our democratic ways, ends 
up in the hands of people who are trying to undermine everything that 
is so dear to us that we cherish.
  So, in effect, you could make an argument that we are helping to 
sponsor terrorism by sending so much of that money abroad to countries 
that do not really give two hoots about our way of life, and some of 
that money ends up in hands that are intent on doing us harm. That is 
established. That is a fact. That is not just a pet theory.
  Now, in addition to creating further pressure on our balance of 
trade, sending all of this money abroad, we are also doing something 
that is mind boggling to me. We are concentrating all of our efforts 
not on how we can conserve energy, but how we can consume more and find 
new sources of energy. Now, that is important. We have got to 
constantly be searching for new sources of energy but we ought to think 
in terms of how we can conserve energy, and making our vehicles more 
fuel efficient is a way to do it.
  Now, back in the mid-seventies I was a member of the staff here in 
Congress at that time when CAFE standards were first introduced into 
the American lexicon. The opponents of that fought every step of the 
way, screaming and scratching, do not do it. If you force CAFE 
standards, and we only did it minimally, very modestly initially, said 
the opponent, that will put a death knell in the domestic auto 
industry. As a matter of fact, they asserted, if you do that, within 10 
years all Americans will be driving compacts or subcompacts. That did 
not happen. You know it did not. So do I. So do the facts verify that. 
But they opposed it every step of the way, and these same forces are 
trying to oppose it today.
  Now, what are their arguments? Well, the one argument they trot out 
is to make vehicles more fuel efficient the only way to do it is to 
make them less safe under the theory that you have to make them 
lighter, therefore less safe. Unmitigated nonsense. That is not my 
theory. That is not the theory developed by the Committee on Science of 
which I am privileged to share. That is the scientific consensus 
embodied in papers produced by the National Academy of Science, the 
most distinguished scientists in America.
  Now, everybody in this body loves to say ``we are for science-based 
decision making'' until the scientific consensus leads to a politically 
inconvenient conclusion. Then they want to go to plan B. So the safety 
argument is phony on its surface.
  The next big argument, well, if you require the American domestic 
auto industry to make more fuel efficient vehicles, SUVs, light trucks, 
passenger cars, well, that is going to cost jobs. How is it going to 
cost jobs? I think the American public would challenge more to go to 
the showroom to buy vehicles that are more fuel efficient because you 
know what? At today's price when you fill up, I filled up my vehicle 
today, $56 for one tank of gasoline. Do you know what $56 means to a 
lot of families in America? It means, boy, they have got to make some 
hard choices and they are going to have to go without something just to 
pay the gas bill. And most Americans just are not driving around on a 
Sunday afternoon drive to look at the scenery. They are going to work. 
They are going to church. They are taking the kids to school. They are 
going to the doctors. They are doing what they have to do. They do not 
have a choice. They have got to fill up their vehicle and they have to 
drive to places their family has to go.

  So if you make more fuel efficient vehicles, they are not going to 
stop suddenly buying the vehicles. They are going to buy more because 
they are going to see, wow, this will get me farther on a gallon of 
gasoline. This will mean I do not have to fill up every week. Maybe I 
can fill up every 2 weeks. My family budget will be stretched.
  Then the argument, the business, if it requires to make them more 
fuel efficient, and I have shot down the safety argument and I have 
shot down the jobs argument and they say we do not have the technology. 
The technology is there, it is on the shelf. We have got to continue 
research to develop new ways to do things even more efficiently. But 
the fact of the matter is off-the-shelf technology is there that if 
employed by the domestic manufacturers or by manufacturers any place, 
we can make the vehicles more fuel efficient.
  So we work to the advantage of national security, make us less 
dependent on foreign source oil. Incidentally, I do not like the fact, 
I do not think any American likes the fact that a group of people can 
get together someplace a half a world away, they can get together and 
decide to turn off the spigot or reduce the flow on the spigot. That 
plays havoc on the domestic economy. The prices go up through the 
ceiling. We have all experienced $3 plus a gallon for gasoline. Some 
predictions indicate that it is going to go even higher. It is down 
temporarily.
  I filled up today and it is down to $2.89 a gallon. I thought, gee, 
some relief is on the way, but 2 weeks ago it was $3.29 a gallon. But 
the fact is if we deal in a responsible way with the CAFE standards, we 
will provide a benefit to the consuming public from coast to coast. Not 
that the Federal Government is saying, look it, Detroit, and I use that 
as a euphemism for the domestic manufacturers, you cannot make SUVs 
anymore. That is nonsense. There are a lot of people that want SUVs. 
They have got families. They have got things they cart around in 
addition to the kids and all the supplies for all the events. They need 
bigger vehicles. But they want bigger vehicles that are more fuel 
efficient. You can get them with existing technology. So I would argue 
that this is an idea whose time long since has come and we are making 
progress.
  In the 107th Congress when I first offered my amendment to increase 
the CAFE standards from an average of 25 miles per gallon up to 33, 
that is the current version of it. It was somewhat different back in 
the 107th Congress. We got 160 votes from Republicans and Democrats 
alike. And then in the 108th Congress we went up to 162 votes. Not much 
progress. Then at the beginning of 109th Congress we got 177 votes. 
Guess what? That was before we had $3 a gallon gasoline.
  Now, I would submit that the votes are there to finally pass CAFE 
standards but what happened? We had a vote last week on another energy 
bill and my amendment to increase CAFE standards was not given a rule 
which would allow open, public debate on the floor and a vote by the 
people's House. I was denied that opportunity. But I am going to be 
persistent. I am going to keep at it. One of the reasons I am going to 
keep at it is because the gentleman from Maryland (Dr. Bartlett)

[[Page H8830]]

has pointed out with his presentation on peak oil this is a serious 
matter that demands our collective attention and we have got to deal 
with it in a responsible way.
  So I thank the gentleman from Maryland (Dr. Bartlett) for his 
support, for his leadership in dealing with a very important issue for 
all Americans, energy.
  Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. The gentleman mentioned a collision course 
with catastrophe. I just wanted to make a quick quote from the article 
in the paper that the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Hoekstra) was 
mentioning.
  `` `The least-bad scenario is a hard landing, global recession worse 
than the 1930s,' says Kenneth Deffeyes, a Princeton University 
professor emeritus of geosciences.''
  He goes on to say that he made that prediction because ``the worst 
case borrows from the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.'' That is better 
than war, famine, pestilence, and death.
  It is interesting that the gentleman's ``collision course with 
catastrophe'' is mirrored by what he said.
  I want to yield the remainder of my time to a colleague who has a 
fascinating Energy 101. We will only get partway through it today and 
we will give him a chance for a full explanation of this.
  Mr. EHLERS. I thank the gentleman for yielding and I thank him for 
organizing this session.
  I want to go very quickly through one item, and as we said we will 
continue later. I am a physicist. As a physicist, energy is tangible to 
me but to most people energy is intangible. You cannot touch it, see 
it, feel it, smell it or taste it. In other words, with our senses we 
cannot detect it. The only tangible aspect of energy for most people is 
the price at the gas pump and the utility bill at the end of the month.
  But I have a wish and I wish it were true but my wish would be that 
energy would be purple. If energy would be purple it would be tangible. 
We could see it. And if you drive up to your house in the middle of the 
winter and saw the purple oozing through the walls and coming out in 
rivulets around the doors and windows where they are not sealed 
properly, you would say, oh, that is horrible. I am wasting all that 
energy. It is costing me money. So we would make sure that we would get 
the house sealed up.
  Or if we were driving down the road and a Toyota Prius such as is 
owned by the gentleman from Maryland (Dr. Bartlett) or Honda Insight or 
some other hybrid vehicle went past us, there would be just a little 
bit of purple around the outside of it because it is very energy 
efficient. But if an SUV roared by there would be a huge cloud of 
purple. You could hardly see it. If people saw that they would say, 
why, that is foolish. Why would I want an SUV that is using all that 
energy? We are wasting energy. We are wasting money. Why do I not get a 
hybrid vehicle?
  My point is simply because energy is intangible, it is very difficult 
for people to understand the problem and to deal with it. But if we can 
believe the experts who tell us about energy, it would be just as good 
if we saw it because energy is purple.

                              {time}  2100

  I am wearing a purple tie for a reason. First of all, I like it. But, 
secondly, its keeps reminding me if energy were purple, we would 
certainly change our energy use habits and we would do a much better 
job of conserving, as the gentleman from New York (Mr. Boehlert) 
observed earlier about conservation. That is very important.
  And I have to tell everyone in this Chamber and all of my colleagues, 
there is no faster, cheaper way to increase our oil supply than to 
conserve what we use. Because we can get the use of more energy at 
lower cost by doing that than by any oil exploration scheme and 
refinery-building scheme or anything else you wish to do. It costs less 
to conserve energy than it does to produce more. That is a very 
important principle to remember.
  So I hope that everyone in this Nation and certainly everyone in this 
Congress recognizes the importance of energy efficiency. Conservation 
is just one part of energy efficiency, but we can certainly use our 
energy more efficiently than we have in the past. We can get more bang 
for the buck because we have the technological capability to do that 
today.
  And it is absolutely essential to do that because, as you heard, we 
are being held hostage by other countries. Our energy costs are being 
used against us in various ways, and we simply have to start conserving 
energy, using it more efficiently, imagining that it is purple and keep 
trying to reduce the amount of purple that we produce by our use of 
energy. Then we have a chance of balancing our import-export balance, 
reducing the deficit of payments, and having a better economy at home 
because our money will be staying here rather than going abroad.

                          ____________________