[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 60 (Tuesday, May 16, 2006)]
[House]
[Pages H2618-H2624]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      ENERGY PRODUCTION AND SUPPLY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. 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, recently our Secretary of 
State, Condoleezza Rice, made a statement that I would like to read. In 
this statement she said: ``We do have to do something about the energy 
problem. I can tell you that nothing has really taken me aback more as 
Secretary of State than the way that the politics of energy is, I will 
use the word `warping diplomacy,' around the world. We have simply got 
to do something about the warping now of diplomatic effort by the all-
out rush for energy supply.''
  Mr. Speaker, the 8th of this March was a really historic date, and it 
passed and really very few people knew how historic it was. It was 50 
years since a report given in San Antonio, Texas, by a world-famous 
scientist. And I will talk about that a bit more in a few minutes.
  The 15th of March of this year marked one year from the date that I 
first came to this floor to talk about the problem that Condoleezza 
Rice was talking about, about the energy problem; and since that time I 
have been to the floor several times to talk about that. Since then, 
there have been two major government studies on this same topic. One of 
them is known as the ``Hirsch Report,'' from Robert Hirsch, who was the 
principal investigator for SAIC, a very large prestigious scientific 
engineering organization.
  This study was sponsored by the Department of Energy; and for several 
months after the report was available, it was kind of bottled up inside 
the agency and we were kind of asking the question, why wasn't it out 
on the street sooner because it really makes some very significant 
points.
  A second study was done at the request of the Army by the Corps of 
Engineers. And I have those two reports here. Here is the ``Peaking of 
World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation and Risk Management.'' The 
project leader was Dr. Robert Hirsch. And here is that report, paid for 
by our Department of Energy and done by SAIC. That was dated February 
of 2005.
  A few months later, in September of 2005, a report by the Corps of 
Engineers, and here is a copy of that report, which just got out to the 
street about 3 months ago, by the way. So for a number of months this 
was bottled up inside the Pentagon. Both of these reports say 
essentially the same thing, and I would like to spend a few minutes 
this afternoon talking about what these two reports say.
  The first is a quote from the ``Energy Trends and Their Implications, 
U.S. Army Installations.'' And, Mr. Speaker, anywhere in this report 
that the Army is mentioned, you could put the United States in, or for 
that matter the world, and it would have the same meaning. But since 
they are a part of the Army and this was an Army study, they talk about 
the Army.
  This first statement: ``In general, all nonrenewable resources,'' and 
fossil fuels are generally perceived of as being in the time scale that 
we are concerned about, nonrenewable. ``In general, all nonrenewable 
resources follow a natural supply curve. Production increases rapidly, 
slows, reaches a peak, and then declines at a rapid pace similar to its 
initial increase. The major question for petroleum is not whether 
production will peak, but when. There are many estimates of recoverable 
petroleum reserves, giving rise to many estimates of when peak will 
occur and how high the peak will be. A careful review of all of the 
estimates leads to the conclusion that world oil production may peak 
within a few short years, after which it will decline. Once a peak 
occurs, then historic patterns of world oil demand and price cycles 
will cease.''

[[Page H2619]]

  And the next is a quote from the ``Hirsch Report'': ``World oil 
peaking is going to happen,'' saying the same thing as the Army Corps 
of Engineers. And, by the way, we have no reason to believe that there 
was any interchange between these two groups that were doing the study. 
``World oil production is going to peak. World production of 
conventional oil will reach a maximum and decline thereafter.'' Exactly 
the same thing that the Army Corps of Engineers was saying. ``That 
maximum is called the peak. A number of competent forecasters project 
peaking within a decade, others contend it will be later. Prediction of 
the peaking is extremely difficult because of geological complexities, 
measurement problems, pricing variations, demand elasticity, and 
political influences. Peaking will happen, but the timing is 
uncertain.''
  ``Oil peaking presents a unique challenge,'' they say. And then this 
astounding statement: ``The world has never faced a problem like 
this.'' There is no precedent. You cannot go back in history to find a 
problem like this. They say: ``The world has never faced a problem like 
this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, `` 
and most of the world experts believe we do not have a decade, in fact, 
we may be there, ``without massive mitigation more than a decade before 
the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary. 
Previous energy transitions, wood to coal and coal to oil, were gradual 
and evolutionary. Oil peaking will be abrupt and revolutionary.''
  The next chart shows that these same data inspired 30 prominent 
Americans, Boyden Gray, Jim Woolsey, and Frank Gaffney, and 27 other 
very prominent people, among them several retired four-star generals 
and admirals, to write a letter to the President. In effect what they 
said was, Mr. President, the fact that we have only about 2 percent of 
the world's reserves of oil, and we use 25 percent of the world's oil 
and we import about two-thirds of what we use, presents a totally 
unacceptable national security risk. We really have to do something 
about that.
  As the chart shows here, we represent a bit less than 5 percent of 
the world's population, about 1 person out of 22. And we are really 
good at pumping our oil. We have only 2 percent of the reserves, which 
from that 2 percent of the reserves we are pumping 8 percent of the 
world's oil, which means we are pumping our wells four times faster 
than the average.

  Now, what are they talking about? As the next chart shows, this was 
all predicted quite awhile ago. To understand the history of this, to 
put it in context, we have to go back more than half a century to the 
1940s and 1950s. A scientist by the name of M. King Hubbert was working 
for the Shell Oil Company, and he observed the pumping and the 
exhaustion of individual oil fields. The United States was pretty much 
first on the scene in any large way. At one time we were the world's 
largest producer of oil, and I believe the world's largest exporter of 
oil. And right when we were in our heyday in 1956, M. King Hubbert went 
to San Antonio, Texas, and gave that famous paper I referred to a few 
minutes ago, saying that in just 14 years, in about 1970, the United 
States would peak in oil production; we would reach a maximum.
  Shell Oil Company did not believe that was going to happen and 
cautioned that he would make himself a fool and them a fool for hiring 
him if he went to give that paper and published it. And he went anyway. 
Then 14 years later, right on schedule, we peaked in oil production.
  The smooth green curve here was the M. King Hubbert's curve. The more 
ragged green curve with the larger symbols is the actual production 
data. And you see that that peaked in 1970 and then fell off. Now, this 
is the lower 48. In just a moment, we will put another chart up here 
which shows what happens when you include the Alaskan oil finds.
  This is the lower 48, and this is what has happened in the lower 48. 
The red curve there, by the way, is the former Soviet Union, and they 
kind of came unglued when the Soviet Union fell apart. You see that 
their production did not reach the potential. They are already on the 
downside, by the way. They have somewhat more oil than we. They peaked 
a little bit later. They had a second small peak, but then it is all 
downhill after that.
  The next chart shows where our oil has come from in our country. And 
the rest of the U.S. and Texas, the dark blue and light blue, are what 
M. King Hubbert was talking about, and these are the actual data points 
from 1935 to now. We have added to this now the natural gas liquids and 
the Alaskan oil find, that big oil find in Alaska, Prudhoe Bay, Dead 
Horse. I have been there, at the very beginning of that 4-foot pipeline 
through which about a fourth of our domestic production has been 
flowing. That is on the downside now, by the way, and it is becoming 
less and less. Notice that there was just a blip and the slide down the 
other side of Hubbert's Peak with that big Alaska oil find.
  The thing on this chart, Mr. Speaker, which interests me is that 
little yellow there on the downside. Just a blip. A small blip. That is 
the famed Gulf of Mexico oil find. You may remember that. It wasn't all 
that many years ago we found that, and, boy, that was a lot of oil. 
There are now 4,000 oil wells out there in the Gulf of Mexico. And that 
was to save us. It just barely, barely is a ripple in our slide down 
the other side of Hubbert's Peak.
  The next chart puts this in world perspective. We have been talking 
about the United States, and now this takes us to the world. The big 
bars here are the discovery of oil, and you will notice some of that 
was found way back in the 1940s, some big discoveries, then the 1950s, 
and, boy, the 1970s and the 1980s. But notice that since 1980, the 
finds of oil have been ever less and less, and that is in spite of 
really good techniques for finding oil.
  We now have 3D seismic, we have computer modeling, and we have been 
very aggressive. You see, since about 1980, we have been finding less 
oil than we are using, because the consumption curve here is this solid 
black line. At about 1980, you see there the consumption of oil 
exceeded the oil that we were finding. So for that period between 1980 
and now, the deficit between what we found and what we are using has 
been filled with reserves that we have. Worldwide, pretty big reserves.

                              {time}  1545

  Not much in our country because we have been pumping our oil for a 
long time, very aggressively.
  This is an interesting chart, and anyone who works with these charts 
knows that the area under one of these curves represents the total 
amount available. So if you add up all of these little bars, we made a 
smooth curve through the discovery here. The area under that discovery 
curve would represent the total amount of oil that we have discovered. 
Similarly, the area under the consumption curve will represent the 
total amount of oil that we have consumed.
  Now, what is very obvious is that you can't consume oil that you 
haven't found. So what does that mean? Now, you can have any projection 
for the future that you like. You can assume that we are going to do a 
lot of enhanced oil recovery, that we are going to find a little bit of 
oil, most experts believe there isn't that much left, the little bit of 
oil that remains and pump it very quickly.
  But one thing is certain: you cannot pump what you haven't found. And 
so ultimately the area under the consumption curve cannot be greater 
than the area under the discovery curve.
  Notice that they are suggesting in this little chart that peaking is 
going to be at about 2010. Some believe that it may have already 
occurred.
  The next chart is an interesting one from the Energy Information 
Agency, and they use a very strange, in a way, bizarre application of 
statistics. We have the 95 percent probability in statistics which is 
the most probable, and something is significant if it is the 95 percent 
probability. It is highly significant at 97. You can go on down with 
the 50 percent probability or a 5 percent probability.
  You can get a little sense of these probabilities when you look at 
the little chart they draw about a hurricane's path. You notice that 
for the next 24 hours it is a fairly narrow funnel, and then it gets 
wider and wider as they go out because of the increased uncertainty as 
you go out.
  Well, here the Energy Information Agency has drawn the oil curve, and

[[Page H2620]]

you see that they peaked in 1970. We have been going downhill ever 
since. And back there, a little bit before 2000 I guess on this graph 
they made a projection of where we were going. Now, they are using 
these statistics you see at the bottom down there, the past, which is 
the red line, and then the 95 percent probability and the mean, which 
is the 50 percent.
  The 50 percent probability is not the mean, Mr. Speaker. If you were 
going to draw this chart realistically, you would have to have another 
green line that came as far below the yellow line as that one is above 
it like here, and another blue line that is down here. They are using 
the 50 percent probability as if it were the mean and saying that is 
the most probable. Of course in statistics, 95 percent probability is 
obviously more probable than the 50 percent probability.
  Well, this bizarre use of statistics results in something that the 
next chart will show. But just a moment on this one. Notice what has 
happened since they made this projection. Notice where the red line has 
been going. It has of course been following the 95 percent probability, 
although they believe that it should be following the 50 percent 
probability, or the green line. In other words, we should be finding 
more and more oil.
  The next chart looks at that in another way. By the way, they say 
here the probability, they say 95 percent is low probability. That is 
the highest probability. I have no idea how you get this warped 
statistic; 95 percent is the highest probability. The 50 percent 
probability is not the mean, and the lowest probability is 5 percent.
  Well, they mean that the lowest amount of oil you would find is a 95 
percent probability. The highest amount is 5 percent. But the 5 percent 
could just as well be the other side of the 95 percent probability 
which would be really, really low.
  Well, here is a graph that they have drawn, and this graph points out 
something very interesting, the peak for the 95 percent probability, 
which says that the world had totally about 2,000 gigabarrels of oil. 
By the way, we use ``giga'' rather than billion because in England a 
million million is a billion. In our country it is a thousand million, 
which is a billion. But giga means the same thing to everybody world 
around, so we use gigabarrels.
  If we have in fact 2,000 gigabarrels total, we have used about a 
thousand of that, and about a thousand remains, which means that we are 
at this point here; and this should start sliding downhill after that. 
But they have imagined another thousand gigabarrels of oil to be found; 
and if that is true, notice that moves the peak out only to 2016.
  We are using oil at such a horrendous rate in the world, that even if 
we found 50 percent more oil than we have ever found, that moves the 
peak out only that far. And then they show what happens if you go out 
to 2037. If you have enhanced oil recovery and so forth and get that 
much more, look what happens. Look at the way it drops there.
  The next chart is an interesting one. It shows the same thing pretty 
much that we showed in that big oil chart that showed the discovery 
curve. And these are, this is the relationship of discovery to use. 
Notice, in about 1980 here, we started using more than we had 
discovered. So this curve says the same kind of thing that the previous 
one said, only this shows the relationship of discoveries to use.
  The next chart is another statement from the ``Hirsch Report,'' and I 
want to spend a few minutes now on these two reports because they are 
really very meaningful reports. I will note, Mr. Speaker, that both of 
these reports have come out in the past year after we gave our first 
discussion here a year ago, the 14th of March.
  This again is from the ``Hirsch Report.'' The peaking of world oil 
production presents the United States and the world with an 
unprecedented risk management problem. As peaking is approached, liquid 
fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically. And 
without timely mitigation, the economic, social and political cost will 
be unprecedented. Viable mitigation options exist on both the supply 
and demand side, but to have substantial impact they must be initiated 
more than a decade in advance of peaking.
  Mr. Speaker, we probably do not have a decade. As a matter of fact, 
we may be here. Dealing with world oil production peaking will be 
extremely complex, involve literally trillions of dollars, and require 
many years of intense effort.
  Mr. Speaker, the question I am asking is, If this is true, and if 
this report was paid for by the Department of Energy, why aren't the 
leaders in our country telling the American people this?
  Now, if they didn't believe this report, just a few months later came 
the report from the Corps of Engineers that says essentially the same 
thing as we will see from some following charts. The next chart is 
another quote from the ``Hirsch Report'': ``We cannot conceive of any 
affordable government-sponsored crash program to accelerate normal 
replacement schedules.'' They are talking now about what will we do to 
make sure that there is enough oil available when we have reached peak 
production; what can we fill that gap with.
  They are saying they can't conceive of any affordable government-
sponsored crash program to make this happen, so as to incorporate 
higher energy efficiency technologies in the privately owned 
transportation sectors. Significant improvements in energy efficiency 
will thus be inherently time consuming on the order of a decade or 
more. For some things like efficient automobiles, the average light 
trucks and cars out there, some 16 to 18 years in the fleet, the big 
18-wheelers are out there 28 years. So if you are going to make any 
impact on efficiency in that market, you have to really wait awhile 
unless you think people are going to scrap their newly purchased SUV.
  The next chart is from the Corps of Engineers study, and this is 
really an interesting chart. Remember the date of this was September 
`05. The current price of oil is in the $45 to $57 per-barrel range and 
is expected to stay in that range for several years. Mr. Speaker, I 
don't think $70 a barrel is within the range of 45 to 57. And it has 
been less than a year.
  So what this shows is that even the experts, these people who spend a 
long while studying this, when they look at the picture, they didn't 
anticipate the extent, the seriousness of this problem.
  Oil prices may go significantly higher and some have predicted prices 
ranging up to $180 a barrel in a few years. Mr. Speaker, if that is 
true, why aren't the leaders of our country telling the American people 
this?
  Friends, we have got a problem ahead of us. It is not an insoluble 
problem; but the longer we wait, the tougher it is going to be to get 
through it. We really need to get started now. I don't here our 
leadership telling us that, Mr. Speaker. And in view of these two 
reports both saying essentially the same thing, I am wondering why.
  Another chart from the Army Corps of Engineers study: oil is the most 
important form of energy in the world today. I think few would deny 
that. In addition to transportation, and we use 70 percent of our oil 
in transportation, it is the feed stock from a really large 
petrochemical industry. We live in a plastic world. Just look around 
you at all the things made of plastic. Without oil, most of them 
wouldn't be here.
  Historically, no other energy source equals oil's intrinsic qualities 
of extractability, transportability, versatility, and cost. The 
qualities that enabled oil to take over from coal as the front-line 
energy source for the industrialized world in the middle of the 20th 
century are as relevant today as they were then.
  And another chart from this same Corps of Engineers study, over and 
over, Mr. Speaker, they are saying the same thing: we face a big 
challenge.
  Petroleum experts Colin Campbell, John LaHerrere, Brian Fleay, Roger 
Blanchard, Richard Duncan, Walter Youngquist and Albert Bartlett, no 
relative of mine, but you can pull up on the Web Albert Bartlett, do a 
Google search for Albert Bartlett and he gives the most interesting 1-
hour lecture I have ever heard on energy and the exponential principle, 
have all estimated that a peak in conventional oil production will 
occur around 2005. This is 2006.
  The corporate executive officers, CEOs at Eni SPA Italian oil 
companies and ARCO have also published estimates of a peak in 2005. So 
the problem may already be here.
  The next chart shows a very interesting quote from one of the experts 
in

[[Page H2621]]

this area, and this really focuses on a chart that we had just a few 
minutes ago. Jean LaHerrere made an assessment of the USGS report that 
concludes, now, USGS says that we are going to find half again the oil 
that we have already found. We have found about 2,000 gigabarrels, used 
about 1,000 of that. They say we are going to find another 1,000 
gigabarrels. This is what Dr. LaHerrere says. The USGS estimate implies 
a fivefold increase in discovery that is over the present anemic 
discovery, a fivefold increase in discovery rate and reserve addition, 
for which no evidence is presented.
  Such an improvement in performance is in fact utterly implausible, 
given the great technological achievements of the industry over the 
past 20 years, the worldwide search, and the deliberate effort to find 
the largest remaining prospects.
  In other words, he is saying that we have been looking really hard 
with really good technique and we haven't found it for the last decade. 
There is just no justification to this euphemistic projection that we 
are going to find another 1,000 gigabarrels of oil.
  The next chart puts this in kind of a global and time perspective. 
The chart on the top shows the last 400 of 5,000 years of recorded 
history. And it shows the beginning of the Industrial Revolution with 
wood, and it did begin with wood. We were making steel with wood, with 
charcoal, denuded the hills of New England, carrying it to England to 
make steel. You can visit Little Catoctin Furnace up here in Frederick 
County, and we denuded the hills of Northern Frederick County to make 
charcoal for that little furnace there.
  And then we discovered coal. And on the ordinate here is quadrillion 
Btus. That is the amount of energy you produce. Not very much from wood 
down there. You see the brown.
  It really got six or eight times bigger with coal. And look what 
happened when we found oil and gas. That is the red curve there which 
seems to go almost straight up. This is only about a 2 percent 
increase.
  Albert Einstein said that the force of compound interest is the most 
powerful force in the universe which, after discovering nuclear energy 
he was asked, Dr. Einstein, what will be the next great force in the 
universe? And he said that it was the power of compound interest, which 
is exponential growth, of course.
  Notice what happened in the 1970s there, and the downturn. There 
really was a world recession. We used less oil, fortunately, because 
what was happening up until that time, Mr. Speaker, is really quite 
phenomenal. Every decade we were using as much oil as had been used in 
all of previous history. What that means is that when we used half of 
all the oil, only one decade of oil remained at current-use rates.
  Of course that is not the rate at which oil will be used. We are now 
about 150 years into the age of oil; 5,000 years of recorded history. 
That curve is now coming down. It is peaking and will be coming down. 
And it will come down for about another 100, 150 years. So in 200, 300 
years we will have been through the age of oil.
  It is interesting, Mr. Speaker, to put this in this perspective: 
5,000 years of recorded history, we found this incredible wealth under 
the ground. It really was incredible wealth. Just one barrel of this 
oil provides you the energy of 12 people working all year for you; 12 
people working all year. You can buy that for a little more than $100, 
42 gallons, a little more than $100 at the pump.

                              {time}  1600

  If you produce electricity with it, for less than 25 cents a day, an 
electric motor will do more work than a hardworking, athletic worker. 
Really incredible wealth.
  What the world should have done when we discovered this, realizing 
that it could not be infinite, that there just had to be an end to it, 
that the world is not made of oil and even if it was made of oil, there 
would still be an end to it by and by, but it is not made of oil; we 
should have stopped and said, what can we do with this incredible 
wealth to provide the most good for the most people for the longest 
time? That clearly is not what we did. As this chart shows here, we 
just pigged out like kids who found the cookie jar, with no thought for 
tomorrow. We behaved as if oil was infinite, that it would be there 
absolutely forever. And, of course, that could not be true.
  I started asking myself these questions maybe 40 years ago. I knew 
that oil and gas and coal could not be forever, and I asked myself what 
does that mean? Is it something that we need to worry about in 10 
years, 100 years, 1,000 years, 1 million years? What does it mean? And 
a number of people have been asking themselves this question.
  The next chart is interesting, and it kind of simplifies this curve. 
By the way, this is the same curve that we saw before, the red curve 
going up very steeply. All we have done here is to compress the scale 
on the ordinate and expand the scale on the abscissa so that now we 
have a more gradual curve. But it is still a 2 percent growth rate. 
That doubles in 35 years.
  At the beginning of the little yellow there, which is the difference 
between what we would like to use, that is, the demand curve, and the 
supply curve, which is the blue-green curve, that is doubled at the end 
over there. So we know that took 35 years to get there because it 
doubles in 35 years. If we are there, and there should be a question 
mark after that because we are not dead certain, what this shows is 
that the shortage actually starts to occur a bit before the peak 
occurs, as you are breaking away from that nice, smooth curve. And, of 
course, there are going to be ups and downs, as we have seen in the 
price of oil. It is up $5 and down $4 and up another $5 and down $4, 
but ever up and up as we go through. We face some big challenges.
  What most people want to do since we are, as the President says, 
hooked on oil, we would like to keep that habit. We do not want to kick 
that habit. We would like to keep that habit. So what most people are 
focusing on is how do we fill the gap? The gap is that yellow. The gap 
is the difference between what we have and what we would like to use. 
And as time goes on, that gets bigger and bigger.
  I would like to make the argument, and we will come back to that in a 
few minutes, that we probably should not be trying to fill the gap, for 
a couple of reasons. One is that I do not think that we can fill the 
gap. And the second thing is that there will be a future and we do have 
kids and we do have grandkids, and to the extent that we are successful 
today in finding and pumping what oil remains, we are dooming them to 
an increased crisis where they are going to have less and less 
opportunity to live like we have lived because our incredibly lavish 
life-style is in large measure built on this really high-quality fossil 
fuel energy.
  The next chart shows us what we will ultimately transition to, and 
there is no escaping this, oil is finite. There will be a peaking. It 
could be now; it could be in a few years. It is not if, it is when. And 
there are some finite resources that we can have that we can work with, 
but they are finite, although they are enormous in volume. For 
instance, the tar sands, the Canadians would rather call them oil sands 
because ``tar'' does not have a good sound to it. But it is tar. It is 
not much better quality than the asphalt out here in the roadway, which 
flows with the hot sun, as you may notice. The cars sit on it and it 
sinks down. Put a blowtorch on it and it will really flow. The oil 
shales in our west and coal are all finite resources.
  The Canadians are aggressively pursuing the production of oil from 
their tar sands, or oil sands, as they like to call them. But I 
understand that they are using more energy from natural gas to cook 
that oil sand to get the oil out and more energy from natural gas than 
they are getting out of the oil. From a business perspective, that 
makes good sense because that gas up there is stranded. It is in 
Alberta, Canada. There are not very many people there. Gas is hard to 
transport, and stranded gas is very cheap. So they use a cheap gas to 
produce very expensive oil. It costs them about $18 a barrel, I 
understand, to produce it. And they are getting $70 a barrel. That is a 
really good dollar/profit ratio. The energy/profit ratio is less than 
one; so ultimately that is not sustainable, of course, using more 
energy in than you get out.
  The oil shales in our west, there have been some very glowing 
articles in the papers. I talked to the investigator there. He attended 
a conference out in Denver, Colorado a few months ago that I was at. 
And Shell Oil Company,

[[Page H2622]]

it will be several years before they decide whether or not it is even 
feasible economically to get oil out of our oil shales. There is an 
enormous quantity there, nearly as much as the world has found, but not 
all recoverable. There are estimates that 800 billion barrels may be 
recoverable, but at what cost? What they do out there is to drill a 
series of holes around the periphery, and they freeze that so that the 
oil that they melt out in the middle will not contaminate the 
groundwater, and then they cook it with steam for about a year. And 
then after they have cooked it for about a year, heating it up, they 
drill a well there and they start pumping and cooking, and they do that 
for another year or two, and they can get meaningful amounts of oil. 
But the scalability of this and the economic feasibility of this are 
still unknown, so they are pursuing that.
  I would caution, Mr. Speaker, not to be too euphoric about their 
prospects of getting energy out of these tar sands and oil shales. 
There is a lot of energy there. It will be difficult to get it out 
economically, particularly difficult to have a meaningful energy/profit 
ratio getting it out. But it is there and we have to do the best we can 
to get it out as efficiently as we can.
  Then coal, you will hear we have 250 years of coal, and the next 
chart shows that is true. We do have 250 years of coal at current use 
rates, at no growth. But notice what happens when there is only 2 
percent growth. Now, I think that as we have less oil, we are going to 
have to use coal more. Hitler ran his whole economy and his military on 
oil from coal. So did South Africa with the embargoes that we had 
there. With just 2 percent growth rate, this exponential growth has an 
incredible effect. This 2 percent, the 250 years shrinks to about 85 
years. And for most of its uses, you cannot use coal. You are going to 
have to convert it to a gas or a liquid. And if you take the energy to 
do that, you have now shrunk it down to about 50 years. And that is 
only 2 percent growth. I believe we will have to increase the use of 
coal more than 2 percent.
  Now, back to this chart of the potential alternative sources:
  Nuclear. Nuclear produces now about 8 percent of our total energy in 
this country and about 20 percent of our electricity. In France it 
produces about 80, 85 percent of their electricity. There are three 
kinds of nuclear power. Two kinds of nuclear fission: the lightwater 
reactor and breeder reactors. We use only lightwater reactors in this 
country. The only breeder reactors we ever used were in producing the 
fuel for our nuclear missiles. The world has a limited supply. It is 
hard to get good numbers on that, but the world has a limited supply of 
fissionable uranium, and then we will have to go to breeder reactors, 
which, as the name implies, produce more fuel than they use. But you 
also buy big problems with that, transporting it around and enriching 
it, and some of it is weapons grade; so you have to deal with those 
problems if you want to go to fission with a breeder reactor.

  I have friends here in the Congress who were devoutly opposed to 
nuclear. They are bright people, and when they are considering the 
alternative, which may be shivering in the dark if we do not have 
enough electricity, now nuclear is not looking all that bad to them if 
the alternative is shivering in the dark. Nuclear could and maybe 
should grow. But in this country it is very difficult to site a plant 
and to build it. It may take 10 years, and I understand that the plant 
has to be operating maybe 20 years before you get back the amount of 
fossil fuel energy that went into producing the plant.
  Again, Mr. Speaker, on many of these things we need good numbers. It 
is hard to have a rational discussion when there is so much 
disagreement in numbers, and we really do need to enlist an honor 
broker so that we can agree on numbers because it is very difficult to 
have a rational discussion when there are such wide differences of 
opinion as to how much is out there of this and that.
  Nuclear fusion. If we can discover that, we are home free. That is 
what the sun does to produce all the energy we get from the sun. And we 
are just a tiny, tiny speck in that whole sphere around the sun and the 
incredible amount of energy that comes from the sun. We are home free 
if we get there, by the way. But I think the odds of getting there are 
about the same as the odds of your or my solving our personal economic 
problems by winning the lottery. That would be nice, but I doubt, Mr. 
Speaker, that you are plotting your economic future on the assumption 
that you are going to win the lottery, and I do not think we ought to 
plot our energy future on the assumption that we are going to get 
fusion. I support all of the money, about $250 million a year or so. Of 
course, it goes into fusion. I hope we get there. But, frequently, my 
hopes and my expectations are not the same thing. In this case I would 
not bet the ranch that we are going to get fusion energy. If we do, we 
are home free, and we need to continue to invest all the money that 
that technology can reasonably absorb.
  And now we come to the truly renewable resources. And ultimately, Mr. 
Speaker, after this age of oil, which will end, and when I say ``oil,'' 
I mean gas and coal too, which will end in about another 100, 150 
years, we will be running our world on these energy sources: solar and 
wind and geothermal and ocean energy from tides or thermal gradients or 
waves. Agricultural resources, a lot of possibilities there: soy 
diesel, biodiesel, ethanol, methanol, biomass, cellulosic ethanol. You 
hear a lot of these words.
  Burning our waste to get energy, that is a really good idea, and we 
should do more of that. We need fewer landfills, and we would have a 
little more electricity if we did that.
  The last one here that I want to spend just a moment on, it says 
hydrogen from renewables. Today we are not making hydrogen from 
renewables. We are making hydrogen from natural gas. That is going to 
peak and be running down about the same curve that oil is running down. 
One thing is true, Mr. Speaker: We will always use more energy 
producing hydrogen than we get out of hydrogen. Unless we are going to 
suspend the second law of thermal dynamics, that will be true.
  Well, if it takes more energy to produce hydrogen, why are we even 
thinking about hydrogen? For two reasons: One is when you finally use 
it, burn it, you get only water. That is not a very polluting product. 
And the second reason we are really interested in hydrogen is that it 
is one of the better things to feed a fuel cell with if we ever get 
economically feasible fuel cells. A fuel cell will get more than twice 
the efficiency of a reciprocating engine. So even though you lose some 
energy when you go from electricity or coal or whatever to hydrogen, 
you will more than get it back in the increased efficiency of the fuel 
cell if we ever get to the fuel cell, if it is economically feasible. 
And you are certainly not polluting, you are producing only water.
  The next chart is an interesting look at one aspect of the 
agriculture, and that is the amount of energy that goes into producing 
a bushel of corn. On the chart we show two things: On the right is 
petroleum, and it shows that if you put in about 1\1/4\ million Btus, 
you will get out 1 million. On the left-hand side, it shows a picture 
for ethanol, that if you put in three-fourths of a million Btus, you 
get out 1 million. And some people will tell you that this is pretty 
optimistic. In fact, Pimentel says it is actually negative. You use 
more energy producing ethanol than you get out of it. But if this is 
true, what that means is that today the way we produce ethanol, for 
every gallon of ethanol you burn, you are burning the equivalent of 
three-fourths of a gallon of fossil fuels, because that is the fossil 
fuel energy it took to produce ethanol.
  The chart at the bottom shows why this is true, and it shows all of 
the total energy requirements of farm inputs.

                              {time}  1615

  This is BTUs per bushel of corn. The energy goes into producing a 
bushel of corn.
  You notice that big, nearly half of it, that says nitrogen? Mr. 
Speaker, that is natural gas from which we make nitrogen fertilizer. 
Before we learned how to do that, all of our nitrogen fertilizer came 
from barnyard manures or guano. Guano is gone. If we wait another 
10,000 or 20,000 years, there will be some more.
  But most people don't know that nitrogen fertilizer today, 
essentially all of it comes from natural gas, almost none of it 
produced in our country. Natural gas is too expensive here. It is

[[Page H2623]]

made in other countries where gas is kind of stranded.
  The next chart looks at where we are. I use an analogy here which I 
think is very apt. We are very much like a young couple that has gotten 
married and their grandparents died and left them a big inheritance, 
and they have established a lifestyle where 85 percent of all the money 
they spend comes from their grandparents' inheritance and only 15 
percent from their income.
  They look at the inheritance, and it is not going to last until they 
retire. So what will they do? Obviously, they have got to do one or 
both of two things. They either have got to spend less or make more. I 
use those numbers, others may use 86-14. I use those numbers because 
that is exactly where we are with our energy use today. Eight-five 
percent of all the energy we use comes from coal and oil and natural 
gas, and only 15 percent of it comes from some other source.
  Now, a bit more than half of that comes from nuclear electric power. 
That is 8 percent of our total energy, about 20 percent of our 
electricity. The rest, 7 percent, is the true renewables. Mr. Speaker, 
those are the things which we ultimately will transition to.
  Now this is a chart from 2000, and the solar and the wind and so 
forth would be bigger today. That is 1 percent in this chart of 7 
percent. That is .07 percent. It is really in the noise level. We are 
four times bigger than that today at .28 percent. Big deal. It is a 
long, long way to go from .28 percent to go to something really 
meaningful as a contribution. But that is what we will be turning to 
increasingly in the future.
  Notice that on this renewable sources there, the biggest one, 46 
percent, is conventional hydroelectric. That will not increase in our 
country. We are pretty much tapped out on that. We might go to 
microhydro and use little microturbines in thousands of little streams 
across the country without affecting the environment as much as the big 
ones, by the way, and get about that much more energy.
  But notice that solar and wind and agriculture down here, it is just 
alcohol fuel there; but it could be biomass, soy diesel, biodiesel and 
so forth, are very small amounts. Where we can get it, we ought to be 
getting more of geothermal. There is not much in this country. All of 
Iceland's energy comes from geothermal. I don't think there is a 
chimney in Iceland, because they don't need it. They get it all from 
geothermal sources.
  Notice the waste to energy up there, which is 8 percent. That could 
grow. Instead of putting it in a landfill, there is a very nice plant 
up here in Montgomery County they will be happy to show you through. It 
is really a very handsome plant, and they are burning waste up there to 
produce electricity.
  Just a word of caution about energy from agriculture. We must keep 
two realities in mind. The first is that we must feed the world. 
Tonight, about 20 percent of the world will go to bed hungry, obviously 
not in this country. And we have to maintain our top soils. If you 
don't have top soils, you will not feed the world.
  Now, if we would live lower on the food chain, if we ate the corn and 
the soybeans instead of the pig or the chicken or the cow that eat the 
corn and soybeans, we would have between 10 and 20 times as many 
calories to eat, because that is about the ratio. They say one pound of 
grain to three pounds of pig or chicken, but that is dry grain and wet 
pig and you can only eat about half of the pig. When you get down to 
the true ratio of dry to dry matter, it is about 10 to one for the 
steer. By the way, milk and eggs are very much more economically 
produced and really higher-quality proteins.
  When it comes to things like cellulosic ethanol and biomass and so 
forth, be careful that we aren't using so much of that that we are 
mining our top soils of an essential element called humus. Humus is 
what gives tilts to the soil. It is why top soil is different than 
subsoil. It holds water; it holds the nutrients. If you take all of 
that out, you no longer have top soil.
  We can get some energy from agriculture, but it will not fill the gap 
between what will be available and what we would like to use.
  The next chart is a really interesting one. This shows on an 
interesting scale, this is how good you feel about your station in life 
on the ordinate here. Then the absyssa is how much energy you use. 
Notice where we are. We are way over there in the far right. We use 
more energy than any other society in the world.
  You know, notice you can't feel very good about your station in life 
until you have used a meaningful amount of energy, but it is striking 
that this is all relative. China is up here. China feels really good 
about where they are. Notice how little energy the average man uses, so 
they are better off today than yesterday, so they feel good about it. 
They are improving. What I want to point out on this chart, you don't 
have to use the amount of energy we use to feel good about your 
position in life.
  There are about a dozen countries over there that use less energy 
than we. Everybody above that line uses less energy than we and feels 
better about their station in life than we feel. We have lots of 
potential to use less energy and feel good.
  The next chart shows a really interesting one on energy efficiency. 
There may not be this kind of opportunity everywhere, but on the left 
here is a usual incandescent bulb. If you are brooding chickens, you 
use a light bulb. It is not light you want; it is heat.
  But notice that 90 percent of all the energy that comes out of that 
incandescent bulb, that is what is up here, I am looking up at them, 
Mr. Speaker, 90 percent of the energy that comes out of that is heat.
  Now, if you go to a fluorescent, you have these little screw in 
fluorescents now, and notice, by the way, the green here is the same 
amount of light every time. Notice that you use demonstrably less 
energy, four times less energy. A 13-watt little spiral bulb will give 
you as much light as a 60-watt bulb. These fluorescents are very 
efficient.
  Now notice what happens with a light-emitting diode. Notice that the 
amount of heat produced in a light-emitting diode is only about one-
tenth of the light you get. No wonder much of new technology is moving 
to diodes.
  The next chart is an interesting one from our country, and this shows 
the energy used per capita electricity consumption in California and 
the U.S.A. Remember several years ago they had some blackouts and 
brownouts in California, and we were predicting massive rolling 
brownouts or blackouts the following year. It did not happen.
  The reason it didn't happen is because the Californians, without 
anybody telling them they had to, voluntarily reduced their consumption 
of electricity by 11 percent. And notice, the average Californian 
uses about, what, about 65 percent of electricity as the average in the 
rest of our country. It would be hard to argue that Californians don't 
live as well as we.

  The next chart is a very interesting picture. We don't want to go 
there, and unless we do something meaningful to address this coming 
energy crisis, we could do what the Easter Islanders did. They had a 
good thing going for them there. They fished the oceans and the fish 
was there for the taking.
  To make their boats, they cut down the trees. And the trees weren't 
growing as fast as the boats they were making, and they cut down more 
and more trees, and ultimately they cut down the last tree. And when 
those boats rotted and they could no longer fish, their society started 
deteriorating. When they were finally discovered, they were down to 
eating rats and living in caves and eating each other. They had a 
civilization before that which could indulge in such things as these 
very large sculptures that you see here.
  What they did was to mine a nonrecoverable resource, and they had no 
fallback. They had no alternative to fall back on.
  The next chart shows kind of where we are and where we need to go. So 
far, Mr. Speaker, it may not be obvious that we have a really bright 
future ahead of us, but I think we do. We have some big challenges 
here. Challenges and opportunities are two faces of the same thing, and 
I would like to think of them as opportunities.
  I think that what we need to address this problem is the equivalent 
of a program that embodies the total commitment of World War II. I 
lived through that war. There were no automobiles

[[Page H2624]]

made in, what, '43, '44 and '45. There was gas rationing. I can't 
remember people grumbling about the gas rationing.
  Everybody had a victory garden who could. They were encouraged to do 
that. It was the patriotic thing to do. We started daylight savings 
time so you could have some time after work in the evening to work on 
your victory garden.
  Everybody saved their household grease. I am still not quite sure 
what they did with that, but we took it to a central repository.
  The point is everybody was involved. It was the last time in our 
country that everybody has really been involved, and we need a program 
that involves everybody. We also need a program that kind of has the 
technology focus of putting a man on the Moon, because there are some 
really big technology challenges here.
  Thirdly, this program needs to have the kind of urgency that we had 
in the Manhattan Project, because time is really of the essence here. 
We don't have the luxury of a leisurely approach to solving this 
problem.
  There will be an increasing deficit of oil in the world and in our 
country; but I will tell you, Mr. Speaker, I think the biggest deficit 
today is leadership, both here and in the world.
  With so many experts, and these two studies, and again I go back to 
the two studies, here they are, paid for by our government, saying that 
we are at or nearly at peak oil and pointing to the dire consequences 
if you haven't prepared for that, I don't see our leaders in our 
country or in the world standing up and telling their citizens that we 
face this problem.
  This chart shows what we need to do. The first thing we need to do is 
to buy some time. How do we buy time? Right now there is no surplus 
energy available to invest in alternatives, like building a nuclear 
power plant, like finding a really good way to make ethanol, to make a 
whole lot more solar panels, to make a whole lot more wind machines. By 
the way, wind machines are producing electricity at 2.5 cents a 
kilowatt hour. That is very competitive.
  If we can have a very aggressive conservation program that you can do 
quickly, we can free up some oil, which buys us some time so that we 
can invest in these alternatives.
  Then we need to use this wisely. Somehow we need an entity which is 
making judgments as to what is the best uses of the limited resources 
of both time and energy that we will have.
  By the way, Mr. Speaker, we need to invest three things to get these 
alternatives. We need money and we need energy and we need time. Of 
course, in this Congress, we never worry about money, we just borrow 
that from our kids and our grandkids without their approval. But we 
can't borrow time from them, and we can't borrow energy from them.
  Thinking about our children and grandchildren, Mr. Speaker, I would 
just like to make an argument that there is a moral dimension to the 
challenge we face. To the extent that we are able to go out there and 
get these remaining resources to fill the gap, to continue life as we 
know it, we are going to be denying our children and our grandchildren 
access to these energy sources.
  Right now, we are telling them although we cannot do it, we cannot 
even come close to running our government on current revenue, not only 
will they have to run their government on current revenues, they will 
have to pay back all the money we borrowed from their generation.
  I am having a moral problem with going out there with the techniques 
that we have to get this gas and oil and coal, the little that remains, 
more quickly. We will certainly be denying our children the opportunity 
to do that.
  Somehow we have to have an organization which makes decisions. We 
have only limited time. We have only limited energy. How will we invest 
it? What is the wisest way to invest it?
  There are many benefits that can come from this. One of the benefits, 
Mr. Speaker, I can imagine Americans going to bed in the evening 
feeling really good about the contribution they have made that day to 
this problem. This shouldn't be viewed as a problem; this should be 
viewed as a challenge. Life is really easy in our country. Most people 
don't have to really stretch to do well.
  I think that our people would marshal. We have the most creative, 
innovative society in the world; and if our people only knew that there 
was this problem, I think that all of our energy, our creativity, our 
innovation could be marshaled to address this.
  We have no alternative but to be a role model. We use a fourth of all 
the world's energy. We are a role model. We need to be a good role 
model for this transition.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time, with the 
realization that if every American is challenged to address this 
problem, that there is a way out, we will have a bright future. But the 
later we start, the more difficult that transformation will be. We 
should have started a decade ago. We can't turn back the hands of time, 
but we can from now on do what we should have been doing in the past.

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