[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 18 (Tuesday, January 30, 2007)]
[House]
[Pages H1047-H1052]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
{time} 1945
ENERGY
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mrs. Boyda of Kansas). Under the Speaker's
announced policy of January 18, 2007, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr.
Bartlett) is recognized for 60 minutes.
Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Madam Speaker, this is the 22nd time, I
believe, that I have come here to the well of the House to talk about a
subject which I think will be the overarching concern of our world for
the next decades and several decades beyond that. That subject is
energy and specifically the energy that we get from oil.
As an illustration of the problems we face, I have here a map of the
world as it would be drawn if each country was sized relative to the
amount of oil reserves that it had. So this is the world according to
oil. And you see here Saudi Arabia, and it would swallow up the United
States. How many times would it swallow us up, a dozen, 15 times?
Notice the incredible wealth of oil in the Middle East. Venezuela
looms, what, two, three times the size of the United States as far as
reserves of oil are concerned. The little United Arab Emirates, you can
hardly find them on a map. They are kind of a little pinpoint on a
usual map, and there they are six, eight times larger than the United
States with their reserves of oil. The famed reserves of Russia up
there. Notice that the United Arab Emirates have more oil than Russia
has. And Saudi Arabia, of course, and Iraq. And little Kuwait, a little
province that Saddam Hussein thought ought to belong to Iraq when he
invaded it more than a decade ago, has many times as much oil as the
United States and more oil than Russia has.
Remember this map when we put the next map of the world up here
because this is an interesting map. And this is a map with the
continents, the countries drawn relative to their actual size. And you
will notice here the little symbols that represent several things, and
one of them is oil that China has bought around the world. And this is
Unocal, which they almost bought in our country. Everywhere you see
this little symbol, the Chinese have bought rights to oil. They are
scouring the world for oil.
And the next chart shows a statement by Condoleezza Rice, who
recognized this. And this is a pretty interesting statement made by our
Secretary of State: ``We do have to do something about the energy
problem.''
Thank you. I am pleased that you recognize that.
``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 wharping diplomacy around the world. We have simply got to
do something about the wharping now of diplomatic effort by the all-out
rush for energy supply.'' And, of course, China has been preeminent in
this.
Several days ago I came upon an article. I have no idea why it took
so long to come to light. It really is not an article. It really is the
script of a speech that was given by Rear Admiral Hyman Rickover, the
father of the nuclear submarine. And he gave this speech, it will be 50
years this coming May 14, 1957. He gave this speech to a banquet of the
Annual Scientific Assembly of the Minnesota State Medical Association
in St. Paul, Minnesota. And we will recognize, celebrate the 50th
anniversary of that here in a relatively few months. That speech, by
the way, was just 14 months and 6 days after a really famous speech
that was given by M. King Hubbert in San Antonio, Texas, to a group of
oil people in which he made a prediction that we will be talking about
this evening, and that is that the United States would reach its
maximum oil production just 14 years after that in 1970.
And right on target, that is exactly what happened. And no matter
what we have done since then, we have pumped less oil than before until
now we are pumping about half the oil that we pumped in 1970. He
predicted that the world would be peaking about now, and that is the
subject that brings us here tonight. I have a few excerpts here from
this speech that he gave:
``High energy consumption has always been a prerequisite of political
power. The tendency is for political power to be concentrated in an
ever smaller number of countries. Ultimately the nation which controls
the largest energy resource will become dominant. If we give thought to
the problem of energy resources, if we act wisely and in time to
conserve what we have and prepare well for necessary future changes, we
shall ensure this dominant position for our own country.''
He said this 50 years ago: ``If we act wisely and in time,'' he says
50 years ago, ``to conserve what we have and prepare well for the
necessary future changes, we shall ensure this dominant position for
our own country.'' We have done nothing in the last 50 years except try
to find more and more gas and oil and coal and use more and more of
what we have found.
Another quote from this very interesting speech: ``In the 8,000 years
from the beginning of history to the year 2000 A.D., world population
will have grown from 10 million to 4 billion . . .''
Now, he missed it a little because we are at nearly 7 billion now.
`` . . . with 90 percent of that growth taking place during the last
5 percent . . . ''
Way more than 90 percent taking place during the last 5 percent of
that period.
`` . . . in 400 years. It took the first 3,000 years of recorded
history to accomplish the first doubling of population, 100 years for
the last doubling, but the next doubling will require only 50 years.''
And it occurred well before that because we are now at nearly 7 billion
people.
The next chart shows what he says in chart 4. If you were to plot
population on this chart, it would pretty much follow the curve here
for the increased use of gas and oil. This is only about 400 years of
the 8,000 years that he spoke of, of recorded history. So you can move
this way, way back a great long distance here to see the whole history
of the world. In the long history of the world, 8,000 years of recorded
history, the Age of Oil will last but about 300 years. We are about 150
years into the Age of Oil from when we started to where we are now. And
if M. King Hubbert was correct, and he was correct about the United
States, but if he is correct about the world, for the next 150 years
there will be less and less oil pumped at higher and higher prices
until finally, roughly 150 years from now, there will be little or no
more gas, oil, and coal which is economically recoverable.
This is an astounding picture, and future generations looking back at
this Age of Oil may very well ask themselves how could they have done
that, this incredible wealth?
In a few minutes I am going to read a fascinating history, a very
brief history of the world and energy that Hyman Rickover gave to those
lucky physicians that night nearly 50 years. They will ask themselves
how could they have done that when they found this incredible wealth
under the ground? Couldn't they have understood that it couldn't last
forever? Wouldn't they have asked themselves what can we do with this
to provide the most good for the most people for the longest time? But
instead of that, we simply have used that energy as rapidly as we could
with little or no thought for the future.
Another quote from this very interesting talk: ``I suggest that this
is a good time to think soberly about our responsibilities to our
descendants, those who will ring out the Fossil Fuel Age.'' And he
recognized 50 years ago that there would be a Fossil Fuel Age. ``We
might give a break to these youngsters by cutting fuel and metal
consumption so as to provide a safer margin for the necessary
adjustments which eventually must be made in a world without fossil
fuels.''
Less than a month ago I came back from China. Nine of us went there,
nine Members of Congress. We went there primarily to talk about energy.
We met with a number of relatively high officials in the Chinese
Government. I was surprised in our discussions first with the energy
people and then with others that they began their discussion of energy
by talking about post-oil. Hyman Rickover 50 years ago anticipated that
there would be a world without fossil fuels when we had gone through
the Age of Oil.
[[Page H1048]]
The next chart is another quote from this very interesting speech:
``There is nothing man can do to rebuild exhausted fossil fuels
reserves. They were created by solar energy.'' He says: ``500 million
years ago it took eons to grow to their present volume. In the face of
the basic fact that fossil fuel reserves are finite, the exact length
of time these reserves will last is important in only one respect. The
longer they last, the more time that we have to invent ways of living
off renewable or substitute energy sources and to adjust our economy to
the vast changes which we can expect from such a shift.''
What a speech. Fifty years ago when the United States was king of
oil, the biggest consumer in the world, biggest producer in the world,
and he recognized, as I think any rational person would recognize, that
gas and oil and coal cannot be forever. It is finite. It one day will
be gone. The only question is when, which is what we are here to talk
about.
And this is a great quote here: ``Fossil fuels resemble capital in
the bank. A prudent and responsible parent will use his capital
sparingly in order to pass on to his children as much as possible of
his inheritance. A selfish and irresponsible parent will squander it in
riotous living and care not one whit how his offspring will fare.'' I
will suggest that this is precisely what our offspring will accuse us
of doing.
You know, there are only a few places that we believe there are any
meaningful amounts of oil left. One of those is in ANWR and the other
is in offshore drilling. The vast majority of experts in the world
believe that we have probably found 95 percent of all the oil we will
ever find. And notice that the new finds of oil are way out there,
difficult to get, expensive to get. That big find in the Gulf of Mexico
under 7,000 feet of water, roughly 50,000 feet of rock and dirt under
that. I am told, and I don't know whether this is true or not, you can
hear a lot of things, that when oil is $211 a barrel, they will be able
to develop that because it will cost that much to get that oil out.
What I would like to do now is to take a look at some of the thoughts
in this speech given by Hyman Rickover. I wish I had been a physician
50 years ago. I would have been 30 years old at that time sitting in
that audience. He predated me by about 10 years in thinking about this
problem. It was probably 40 years, and maybe because I am a scientist
that I started asking myself the question: you know, Roscoe, oil and
gas and coal are finite. They are not an inexhaustible supply. At some
point in time, we will have to be concerned about those supplies. Is
that 1 year, 10 years, 100 years, 1,000 years? I had no idea, when I
first asked myself this question, how long that time would be, but I
knew that a time had to come when we would be asking ourselves the
question isn't it time that we should start thinking about this.
Just a few excerpts from this really interesting speech: ``Each
American has at his disposal each year energy equivalent to that
obtainable from eight tons of coal.'' Then coal was the primary energy
source, a primary energy source, much less important now. Eight tons of
coal, that is a lot of energy.
``With high energy consumption goes a high standard of living. Thus
enormous fuel energy which we in this country control feeds machines
which makes each of us master of an army of mechanical slaves.''
And notice these numbers, and these were 50 years ago. You decide how
much this has changed today. ``Man's muscle power is rated at 35 watts
continuously, or one twentieth horsepower.''
Now, you can do more than that in working, but you can't do it 24
hours a day, and this is a 24/7 figure.
``Machines therefore furnish every American industrial worker with
energy equivalent to that of 244 men, while at least 2,000 men push his
automobile along the road, and his family is supplied with 33 faithful
household helpers. Each locomotive engineer controls energy equivalent
to that of 100,000 men; each jet pilot of 700,000 men. Truly, the
humblest American enjoys the services of more slaves than were once
owned by the richest nobles and lives better than most ancient kings.''
{time} 2000
``In retrospect'', he says, and this is 50 years ago, ``and despite
wars, revolutions and disasters, the 100 years just gone by'', 150 now,
``just gone by may well seem like a Golden Age.'' And well they will
when we look back on this.
``Whether this Golden Age will continue depends entirely upon our
ability to keep energy supplies in balance with the needs of our
growing population.'' He thought it would grow to 4 billion by this
time. It is nearly 7 billion.
Before I go into this question, let me review briefly the role of
energy resources in the rise and fall of civilizations. And I found
this part of his speech just captivating, fascinating. ``Possessant of
surplus energy is of course a requisite for any kind of civilization,
for if man possesses merely the energy of his own muscles, he must
exhaust all of his strength, mental and physical, to obtain the bare
necessities of life.
``Surplus energy provides the material foundation for civilized
living: A comfortable and tasteful home, instead of a bare shelter;
attractive clothing instead of mere covering to keep warm; appetizing
food instead of anything that suffices to appease hunger. It provides
the freedom from toil without which there can be no art, music,
literature or learning.
``There is no need to belabor this point. What lifted man, one of the
weaker animals'', an interesting observation. We are really weak in
muscle power. A chimpanzee the size of a man has four or five times the
strength of a man. A dog has enormously better smell than you, the
eagle infinitely better eyesight than you. Man is indeed one of the
weaker animals.
``What lifted man, one of the weaker animals above the animal world
was that he could devise with his brain ways to increase the energy at
his disposal, and use the leisure so gained to cultivate his mind and
spirit. Where man must rely on the energy of his own body he can
sustain only the most meager existence.
``Man's first step on the ladder of civilization dates from the
discovery of fire and his domestication of animals. With these energy
resources, he was able to build a pastoral culture. To move upward to
an agricultural civilization, he needed more energy. In the past this
was found in the labor of the pendent members of large patriarchal
families, augmented by slaves obtained through purchase or as war
booty.
There are some backward communities which to this day depend on this
type of energy, less today thankfully than there were 50 years ago.
``Slave labor was necessary for the city states and the empires of
antiquity. They frequently had slave populations larger than their free
citizenry. As long as slaves were abundant and no moral censure
attached to their ownership, incentives to search for alternative
sources of energy were lacking.
``This may well have been the single most important reason why
engineering advanced very little in ancient times. A reduction of per
capita energy consumption has always in the past led to a decline in
civilization, and a reversion to a more primitive way of life.''
I would like to pause for just a moment to reflect on that. If all of
the energy available to the United States was the energy from the
United States, we would now be living on half of the energy that we had
available in 1970. If you believe that the United States is a microcosm
of the world, and if you believe that M. King Hubbert's analyses, which
were so right on for the United States, are probably pretty good for
the world, then the world now or very shortly will reach its maximum
oil production.
After that, no matter what we do, there will be less and less oil
available. And finally over the next 150 years, if the second half of
the age of oil is as long as the first half, and M. King Hubbert found
a bell curve in the exploitation and exhaustion of each of these oil
fields, then we will have available to us less and less fossil fuel
energy.
Now, unless we can contrive to replace that fossil fuel energy by
alternative energy sources, we will have available to us year by year
less energy than we had the year before.
And I was fascinated by Hyman Rickover's discussion of how energy
contributed to the development of civilizations. And then he notes
here, ``That a
[[Page H1049]]
reduction of per capita energy consumption has always in the past led
to a decline in civilization and a reversion to a more primitive way of
life.''
Will we be able to avoid that? Will we be able to create enough
energy sources, other than fossil fuels, that we can replace the energy
that will not be available from fossil fuels as we exhaust, slowly
exhaust their supplies in the world?
For example, exhaustion of wood fuel is believed to have been the
primary reason for the fall of the Mayan civilization on this
continent, and of the decline of once flourishing civilizations in
Asia. India and China once had large forests, as did much of the Middle
East. Deforestation not only lessened the energy base but had a further
disastrous effect. Lacking plant cover, soil washed away, and with soil
erosion the nutritional national base was reduced as well.
It is a sobering thought to recognize that life on this planet is
largely dependent on about the upper, on average, 8 inches of our soil.
That is the top soils which grow our crops. And then he notes something
that few people want to talk about, I am glad he had the courage to
mention, that another cause of declining civilization comes with
pressure of population on available land.
No matter how clever we are at developing other energy sources, if
population continues to grow, and I will say that I am a 100 percent
pro-life person. I think there are ways to control population without
killing the preborn. And so when I read this, do not think that I am
advocating that we need abortion to control population.
``A point is reached where the land can no longer support both the
people and their domestic animals. Horses and mules disappear first.
Finally, even the versatile water buffalo is displaced by man, who is
2\1/2\ times as efficient an energy converter as are draft animals. It
must always be remembered that while domestic animals and agriculture
machines increase productivity for man, maximum productivity per acre
is achieved only by intensive manual cultivation.
``It is a sobering thought that the impoverished people of Asia--''
now this is less true today with a booming economy in China and a good
economy in India, but this was true in that day. ``It is a sobering
thought that the impoverished peoples of Asia who today seldom go to
sleep with their hunger completely satisfied,'' 20 percent of the world
will go to bed tonight hungry, ``were once far more civilized and lived
much better than the people of the west.''
And not so very long ago either. It was a story brought back by Marco
Polo of the marvelous civilization in China which turned Europe's eyes
to the riches of the East and induced the adventurous sailors to brave
the high seas in their small vessels searching for direct routes to the
fabulous Orient, which, of course, brought Columbus to our shores.
The wealth of the Indies is a phrase still used. But whatever wealth
may be there is certainly not evident in the lives of the people today.
Now, the last 50 years have seen meaningful industrialization in that
part of the world, which just has consumed increasing amounts of
energy.
Asia failed to keep technological pace with the needs of her growing
populations and sank into such poverty that in many places man has
become again the primary source of energy. That was true then, it is
still true in rural areas in these countries.
Since other energy convertors have become too expensive, this might
be obvious to the most casual observer. What this means is quite simply
a reversion to a more primitive stage of civilization, with all that
implies for human dignity and happiness.
Anyone who has watched a sweating Chinese farm worker strain at his
heavily laden wheelbarrow creeping along a cobblestone street, or who
has flinched as he drives past an endless procession of human beasts of
burden moving to market in Java, the slender women bent under
mountainous loads heaped on their heads.
Anyone who has seen statistics translated into flesh and bone
realizes the degradations of man's stature when his muscle power
becomes the only energy source he can afford. Civilization must wither
when human beings are so degraded.
Let me skip now to a little later in this very interesting talk. I
think no further elaboration is needed to demonstrate the significance
of energy resources for our own future. Our civilization rests on the
technological base which requires enormous quantities of fossil fuels.
True 50 years ago, truer today. And then this statement. Now,
underline this. Use red ink. What assurance do we then have that our
energy needs will continue to be supplied by fossil fuels? The answer
is, in the long run, none. The earth is finite. Fossil fuels are not
renewable. In this respect our energy base differs from that of all
earlier civilizations, which is why the Hirsch report says that man has
never faced, the world has never faced a problem like this. There is no
precedent in history.
In this respect our energy base differs from that of all earlier
civilizations. They could have maintained their energy supply by
careful cultivation. We cannot. Fuel that has been burned is gone
forever. Fuel is even more effervescent than metals. Metals too are
nonrenewable resources, threatened with ultimate extinction, but
something can be salvaged from scrap. Fuel leaves no scrap. And there
is nothing that man can do to rebuild exhausted fossil fuel reserves.
They were created by solar energy, he says, 500 millions years ago and
took eons to grow to their present volume.
I might pause here to note that those who belief in a literal flood
believe that all of this occurred with the upheavals that occurred
during the flood and the time since then. But most people believe that
it took a very, very long time. In the face of the basic fact that
fossil fuel reserves are finite, the exact length of time these
reserves will last is important in only one respect.
The longer they last, and I am repeating one of the charts I had. But
you know we need to hear this again because this is so significant. The
longer they last the more time do we have to invent ways of living off
renewable or substitute energy sources, and to adjust our economy to
the vast changes that we can expect from such a shift.
Fossil fuels resemble capital in the bank. And I am going to repeat
this again. This needs to be heard again too. A prudent and responsible
parent will use his capital sparingly. Now have we been using this
energy capital sparingly? Anything but. In order to pass onto his
children as much as possible of his inheritance. A selfish and
irresponsible parent will squander it in riotous living and care not
one whit how his offspring will fare.
I am afraid that that is exactly what our children and our children's
children will say of us when they recognize how little attention we
paid to the warnings that we have been given for a very long time. This
is Hyman Rickover 5 years ago, and just a year before that, M. King
Hubbert and his prediction.
Engineers whose work familiarizes them with energy statistics, far-
seeing industrialists who know that energy is the principal factor
which must enter into all planning for the future, responsible
governments who realize that the wellbeing of their citizens and the
political power of their countries depend on an adequate energy supply,
all of these have begun to be concerned about energy resources. Gee, I
wish that were true.
If they began, then they stopped. Because I notice hardly anybody
today is concerned about this problem. In this country especially, many
studies have been made in the past few years. 50 years ago, seeking to
discover accurate information on fossil fuel reserves and foreseeable
fuel needs.
Now he may have been referring to the studies that were made by M.
King Hubbert just the year before when he predicted that the United
States would peak in oil production in 1970.
The chart that I have here kind of indicates to us the dimensions of
the problem that Hyman Rickover was talking about and the problem we
face.
{time} 2015
The little analogy I use for this is that we are very much like a
young couple whose grandparents have died and left them a big
inheritance. And they have established a lifestyle where 85 percent of
all the money they spend
[[Page H1050]]
comes from their grandparents' inheritance and only 15 percent from
their income. And they look at how old they are and how large the
inheritance is and they recognize, gee, it is not going to last till we
retire, so, obviously, we have got to do something. Either we have got
to spend less or we have got to make more.
I use that analogy because that is precisely where we are. Today, 85
percent of all the energy we use comes from coal and oil and natural
gas, and just 15 percent of it from other sources. Now, you may lump
all of those as renewables, but they are not quite because a bit over
half of that, 8 percent of the 15, comes from nuclear power. In this
country, that is 8 percent of our energy, but it is 20 percent of our
electricity, so as you drive home tonight, imagine that every fifth
home and every fifth business and every fifth street light was dark.
That is what our country would be without nuclear power.
Now, we have had not a single death, no meaningful accidents. By the
way, 3-Mile Island, and I lived within the drift zone of that, that
worked. The containment facility worked. Too bad we had the accident,
but good that we had prepared for it.
A lot of people are concerned about nuclear energy. But they really
don't reflect on how many people die from coal, all the black lung
disease. I remember a number of years ago when I worked for NIH and had
a contract to look at respiratory support devices, and one of the
places I went to was West Virginia, where they had a lot of black lung
disease. And I talked to the physicians there that were dealing with
these patients, and each year thousands died from black lung disease.
It wasn't so much, and this is not really related to energy, but the
real problem there was silicosis. But the lungs were black from the
coal, and so it was called black lung disease, but it was really rock
dust primarily which was the offender there.
How many miners are killed when the mine caves in or when it
explodes? How many people are killed at the railroad crossing when the
coal train goes by? We just seem to accept that as a part of the cost
of having coal to use.
There have been no injuries, I remind the listeners, from our use of
nuclear. We have had no Chernobyls, aren't going to have any because we
have designed them much better, so this could and probably should grow.
Then we come to the true renewables. And there we see them, solar,
and I am a big supporter of solar. I have a second home beyond the grid
and we have only solar power. We are shortly putting up a wind machine
because very frequently when the sun is not shining, the wind is
blowing and so they complement each other very nicely.
But notice how tiny they were. This was 2000. Now we are better today
because they have been growing very rapidly. So they are several times
bigger today. But that was 1 percent of 7 percent, .07 percent. Suppose
it is four times bigger today, .28 percent. Big deal. We have a long,
long way to go.
Notice the contribution of wood. That is the timber industry and
paper industry wisely using that waste product.
Conventional hydro. We have pretty much peaked out on that. There is
maybe as much as we could get from unconventional hydro, microhydro,
small streams where it wouldn't have the environmental effect that big
dams have.
The waste to energy here, that is 8 percent of the 7 percent. That
could certainly grow. It is probably a whole lot better to burn it than
it is to put it in the land fill.
But note that this is really kind of recycling fossil fuel energy
because, in an energy deficient world, there would be no enormous piles
of municipal waste. They are all produced with energy; and as we have
less and less energy, we will be able to live with less and less waste.
So that will be a diminishing source of energy in an energy deficient
world.
I want to take just a moment here to talk about ethanol. There are a
couple of bills, and I will have it up here in a few moments, that look
at developing ethanol. The price of corn, from which most ethanol is
made in this country, was $2.11 a bushel in September. It was $4.08 a
bushel in December. And that was because of the pressure of the demand
for corn for producing ethanol.
Now, I didn't read it in this speech, but Hyman Rickover cautioned
that if you are going to get energy from agriculture, please note that
you will be competing with two things for that energy. One, you will be
competing with food.
We eat some corn meal. Most of the corn goes to our animals, and our
dairy farmers are really hurting now, because milk has not gone up much
and their feed has gone up enormously because of the pressures put on
corn by ethanol.
Every gallon of ethanol that we burn represents at least three-
quarters of a gallon of fossil fuel to produce it. Almost half the
energy in producing corn comes from the natural gas that produces the
nitrogen fertilizer.
If we were to grow corn with energy from corn, which is the only fair
way to look at corn as an energy source, otherwise you are simply
recycling fossil fuels and growing the corn and making ethanol from it.
If we were to grow corn with energy from corn, and if you wanted to
replace just 10 percent of our current gasoline consumption, I checked
these figures with CRS, I think they are correct, you would have to
double our corn crop and use it all for ethanol to displace just 10
percent of our gasoline.
What is very likely to happen now that corn has doubled in price is
that farmers, recognizing that, gee, if I planted more corn I would
make more money, they are going to take land out of agricultural
preserve where it has been reserved by putting it in a bank, and it is
land that probably shouldn't have been farmed anyhow, which is why they
took it out, and the government helps pay them for that, which I am
supportive of, by the way, because it helps preserve that land.
If they take that out and plant it to corn, corn is one of the worst
crops for erosion. It is one of the heaviest feeders that we have,
demanding more fertilizer than almost anything else. The insult to our
environment by the erosion and so forth of this land as the result of
more corn cropping, may off-balance, offset the benefit we get from the
small decreased production of carbon dioxide, which is the primary
reason most people are thinking about ethanol today, because of global
warming and greenhouse gases.
And if you are simply releasing the carbon dioxide that the plant
picked up, you have not increased the amount of carbon dioxide up
there, because the plant took it out of the air. You are burning it and
putting it back into the air. So it is a balance.
Hyman Rickover also cautioned, be careful about your expectations for
energy from biomass. And today you will hear a lot of hype about energy
from cellulosic ethanol. And this is a fascinating pursuit. Cellulose
is made up of a lot of glucose molecules, simple sugar, half of the
sucrose which is your table sugar. But they are so tightly bound
together that there are no enzymes in our body which will separate
them. In fact, the cow and the goat don't have any either. But they
harbor in their gut some little critters that do have enzymes that do
that. And so this is a great example of symbiosis. They both benefit
from that relationship. These little microbes split the cellulose into
the glucose molecules, and then they are absorbed by the host animals.
Hyman Rickover cautioned, be careful how much of this biomass you
think you can take from the soil because it is biomass, organic
material, which makes top soil different from subsoil.
There were three men from the Department of Agriculture in my office
several months ago talking excitedly about the potential for cellulosic
ethanol. And I asked them if our top soils were increasing in quantity
and quality. And the answer is obviously, no.
We are really good today compared to how we were 20, 30 years ago.
But I am told that for every bushel of corn you grow in Iowa, three
bushels of Iowa top soil go down the Mississippi River, which is why we
have such a big delta down in Louisiana.
Well, these little microbes that exist in the gut of these animals we
have now learned to bioengineer so we can do this in the laboratory. So
we can now turn newspaper into alcohol and run your car on newspaper.
That is doable. But be careful how much energy
[[Page H1051]]
you expect to get from that because for a few years you may mine the
top soil, but soon you will decrease the product activity of the top
soil. So there is a limit to that.
So what do we do? The next chart, we buy time. How do you do that?
I mentioned that I have been to China, came back 3 or so weeks ago.
And they begin all of their discussions by talking about post-oil. And
they have a 5-point plan. And it is not just the energy people. It is
every member of government we talked to talked about this 5-point plan.
So they recognize that energy is a real challenge for them.
The 5-point plan begins with conservation. You see, today there is no
surplus oil. There is no surplus energy to invest in developing
alternatives. If there was any surplus oil, it wouldn't be $55 a
barrel.
So we have run out of time. We have run out of energy, but we can buy
some time and free up some energy if we have an aggressive program in
conservation. This is where they began their 5-point program:
conservation.
Two and three were produce as much of your own energy as you can, and
diversity will help. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. And the
fourth one, a really good one, especially for them, be kind to the
environment. They were apologetic. They are not kind to the
environment, but they have 1.3 billion people who are clamoring for the
kind of life style we have and want to go climb up that economic ladder
and they aren't using energy very efficiently, and we need to help
them.
The fifth point, a really interesting one, international cooperation.
They recognize that this isn't a U.S. problem or a Chinese problem.
This is a global problem because oil moves on a global marketplace. It
doesn't really matter who owns the oil. The person who has the highest
bid gets the oil. It sells to the people who have the money to buy it.
And when it is in short supply, there is more demand for it, so the
price goes up.
Once we have bought some time and freed up some energy, then we need
to use it wisely. I think one of the things that we need is an ARPA-E.
Many people know what DARPA is. It is an agency in our Defense
Department that looks at far-out, really interesting things. They
developed the Net, for one thing. And they invest in things that
industry couldn't invest in because there is no imminent payoff, not
even certain there will be any long-term payoff. You are running down a
lot of dead roads. But, boy, when you hit it, you hit it big. And DARPA
has been very creative. And we need something like that in the energy
world because there are some things that may be big, big producers
tomorrow, which may not be attractive to investors today.
I am a big fan of the marketplace, but the marketplace is neither
omniscient nor omnipotent, and there is a role for government here. And
I am one of the biggest small government people in Washington. But, you
know, we ought to get the government out of things that are not
productive and put them into things where they are productive.
And looking ahead and wisely deciding what some reasonable risk is
and investing the taxpayer money has paid big dividends in DARPA, and I
think it would in ARPA-E. Big benefits to this. We are now an
incredible importer. I think this year the trade deficit we were $800
billion or something like that. We could again become a major exporter.
The world is going to be clamoring for these renewable technologies,
and we could be a leader in this.
{time} 2030
Whether we like it or not, we are a role model. We are one person out
of 22 in the world, and we use one-fourth of the world's energy. So we
are a witness, we are a role model whether we like it or not.
There are a couple of bills that I wanted to mention. This is our
bill, and I am proud of this bill because if we can't do this, we are
in for a really rough ride. This is a bill that encourages our farms to
become energy independent. Not just energy independent, because if that
is all they did, then the people who live in the cities would be in a
world of hurt when we run out of fossil fuels.
But the farmer must be able not only to produce enough energy to run
his farm, but have some leftover energy, and I think this challenges
him to produce as much leftover energy as he uses on his farm. And
there are some rewards for farmers who can do this. There are a lot of
creative ways we can do this, and we hope that these awards will
challenge people to be as creative and innovative as Americans have
always been, and I am looking forward to some very exciting
developments here.
The next chart has some data on it that I referred to previously.
There is nothing like seeing it in a pretty colored chart. We can look
at the top part of the chart. And petroleum, of course, if you start
out with 1 million Btus, you won't have 1 million Btus to burn because
you have got to pump it and refine it and transport it and put it in
your car and so forth. So to get 1 million, you must start out 1.23
million.
Here we look at ethanol, and there is a big advantage here because
you get solar energy. These, I am told, are very optimistic figures.
Dr. Pimental believes that if you look at all the energy input into
producing corn, that more energy goes into producing corn than you get
out of corn. I hope that is not true. Most people believe that it is
energy positive.
You know, even if it were just balanced, once you have taken the
ethanol out, you have left some really good feed. Tragically, many of
the ethanol plants today carry that to the landfill. What a shame,
almost a crime, because all the fat is left, all the corn oil is left,
and all the protein is left. All we have taken out is the carbohydrate.
What this says is, as I have mentioned previously, for every gallon
of ethanol you burn, you are burning at least three-fourths of a gallon
of fossil fuels. That is a fossil fuel input. Now, this down here
depicts the fossil fuel input. I mentioned that almost half of it, this
big purple area here, comes from the natural gas that produced the
nitrogen fertilizer.
Before we learn how to do that, by the way, the only nitrogen
fertilizer--as a little kid I remember that pretty much the only
nitrogen fertilizer was barnyard manures and guano. And you took the
manure out of your barnyard, you spread it out on your fields, and the
fertilizer attachment on your tractor was about three times as big as
the seed, the corn bin. You put very little fertilizer on it. But now
we have learned to make enormous--we mine the phosphate rock and the
potash and we make nitrogen fertilizer as incredibly energy intensive,
as you can see. All of these are other fossil fuel energy inputs,
making the tractor, fueling the tractor, putting the tires on the
tractor, harvesting the grain, hauling it to market, drying it, the
chemicals that go into killing the bugs and so forth on it.
An incredible amount of energy goes into producing a bushel of corn.
And if you were going to grow corn with energy from corn--I gave you
the statistics a little bit earlier--I believe that you would have to
double your corn and use it all for ethanol to displace just 10 percent
of our gasoline.
That is an illustration of the huge challenge that we face. We use 21
million barrels of oil a day in this country, 70 percent of it in
transportation. Each barrel of oil, as Hyman Rickover so graphically
described, represents an enormous amount of human energy. One barrel of
oil represents the work of 12 people working all year. For less than
$10 you can hire a guy who is going to work all year for you. These are
part of those 33 faithful household servants that Hyman Rickover said
our energy use provided to the average family.
The next chart shows another energy bill, the DRIVE bill. This was
dropped just very recently. We love acronyms down here, and this is a
bill that has to do with transportation fuels, Dependable Reduction
through Innovation and Vehicles and Energy Act, H.R. 670. I didn't sign
on to any energy bills last year. There were some pretty good bills,
but somewhat, not just somewhat, enormously exaggerated claims were
made for them; and I did not want to give credibility to unrealistic
expectations from these bills.
The next chart here quotes several people: Petroleum expert Colin
Campbell. By the way, he kind of inherited the mantle from M. King
Hubbert. He is kind of the godfather today of all of these scientists.
Jean Laherrare, Ryan
[[Page H1052]]
Fleeley, Roger Blanchard, Richard Duncan, Albert Bartlett, no relative
of mine. But if you put Albert Bartlett, do a Google search for Albert
Bartlett and Energy, and you will put out the most fascinating 1-hour
lecture I have ever listened to. He has given it more than 1,600 times.
I will tell you, there will be no thriller on television that will be
as interesting as Albert Bartlett's 1-hour lecture on energy. You will
be captivated by it. They have all estimated that a peak in
conventional oil production will occur at around 2005. This is now
2007.
By the way, the world oil production has been roughly 84 million, 85
million barrels a day for the last several years. That may or may not
mean we have reached peak, but at least there has been a plateau. And
if it weren't for a fact that there has been a 40 percent reduction of
gasoline use in many South American countries, for instance, because it
has just gotten too expensive, the price of oil would be far greater
than roughly $55 a barrel today.
This has been what they call demand destruction. If you can destroy
demand, you can reduce the price. And when it got too expensive to use,
they just quit using it, so the price of oil has dropped because there
is less pressure.
The next chart shows a number of experts and what they have
predicted, and here are some of them there, Campbell and Goldstein and
Deffeyes, Skrebowski, Simmons. Matt Simmons is an investment banker, a
personal energy adviser to the President. They all believe that it is
going to occur very shortly. The previous list had it in roughly 2005,
these in the next decade and these further down. Now, CERA is one here
that says it is going to be after 2020.
I want to show you the next chart here, and this is a CERA chart; and
CERA believes that we will find maybe several times as much more energy
as all the energy that now is known, all the oil that we now know is
out there. They think we will find two or three times that much more
oil.
Now, if we find only 5 percent more oil, then this will be when it
peaks. If we find as much more oil as all that exist out there, this
will be when it peaks. It still is not forever, it still is about 2040.
And if we now are able to get enormous amounts of oil from these
unconventional sources, the Canadian tar sands; and don't call it oil,
please, it is tar, and the oil sands out in our west, and I don't know
that we will ever achieve this, by the way. The Canadians are getting 1
million barrels a day, just a little over 1 percent of production,
using incredible amounts of energy, incredible amounts of water,
producing a big lake that they call tailing water; it is really toxic
water, and they know that what they are doing is not sustainable
because they don't have enough natural gas to produce the energy.
They are thinking about putting in a power plant. The vein, I
understand, dips under an overlay so they will have to develop in situ,
and they don't know how to do that. Enormous reserves, more than all
the oil in the world potentially, are out in our West. Shell Oil
Company had a little experiment out there. They said it would be 2013,
I think, before they said they could even make a decision as to whether
it was economically feasible to get that. So this is a huge ``if''
here.
The next chart is an interesting one. One of the world's experts in
this, Jean Laherrare, made an assessment of the USGS report. What I was
looking at was not a USGS report, but they were basing their prognosis
on USGS data, so this comment is appropriate to that chart as well. The
USGS estimate implies a fivefold increase in discovery rate and reserve
addition through which no evidence is presented.
Such an improvement in performance is, in fact, utterly implausible
given the great technical achievements of the industry over the past 20
years, the worldwide search, and the deliberate efforts to find the
largest remaining prospect. We have computer modeling in 3-D seismic
and enormously improved techniques for finding oil, and still every
year we find on the average less oil than we found the year before.
This is a very heartening chart. As we face an energy-deficient
world, I often think of this chart and the promise that it gives us. On
the abscissa here we have energy consumption per capita here, and on
the ordinate we have perception of how good life is. Now, it is not
perfect for anybody, but there are a whole bunch of people who think
that it is about 85 to 95 percent as good as paradise can be.
And notice where we are. We are the biggest users of energy. Little
Switzerland is close behind us. But what this chart tells me is that
you can use far less energy and be pretty happy with where you are.
These many people, by the way, use less energy than we and are happier
with their lives than we are, everybody above this imaginary line.
And notice that if you have very little energy, it is tough to feel
good about life. As soon as you reach 25 percent, as much as we use,
then you can feel pretty good, 80 percent compared to 90 percent, not
much improvement for an incredibly large increase in energy. So this
gives us hope.
Europe uses per capita about half as much energy as we use, and if
you have traveled to Europe, nobody who has traveled to Europe believes
that they live less well or are less content with their life than we
are.
The next chart shows an interesting, and this is one of many, many,
opportunities for efficiency, but this is such a dramatic one. This is
the efficiency of getting light. And this is the old incandescent bulb,
a red hot hairpin hung up in a bottle is the way one old farmer
described it. And this is the amount of heat you produce, which is why
you use it as a brooder for fish and to keep them warm, and baby
chickens, and this is the light you get, 90 percent heat, 10 percent
light.
This is fluorescence, which is why you have the little screw in
fluorescence. A great Time magazine article that showed that each one
of those bulbs saved a quarter of a ton of coal. And here is the light-
emitting diode. I have a light-emitting diode flashlight; I have
forgotten when I put the batteries in. They just last and last.
I have a couple of charts here, and we have only a few minutes
remaining, and I just want to show a couple of them to refer you to
very big studies paid for by our government, ignored by our government.
One is the Corps of Engineers, and this is the Corps of Engineers
study, and the other is the big Hirsch Report. You can find all of
those on the Web. In fact, you can go to our Web site and either find
these or find the link to it.
In general, all nonrenewable resources follow a natural supply curve.
Production increases rapidly, slows, reaches a peak, and then declines
at a rapid pace, remember, 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 oil will occur and how high
the peak will be. A careful review of all the estimates leads to the
conclusion that world oil production may peak within a few short years.
This was paid for by the Army, essentially ignored by everybody.
The next one, a bigger study, paid for by our Department of Energy,
SAIC, a big, prestigious organization: We cannot conceive of any
affordable government-sponsored crash program to accelerate the normal
replacement schedules to fill the gap created by a decline in oil
production.
I won't use any more of these charts because the others, I have a
dozen or so more, simply say the same thing, that one way or the other,
in different words, we are either at or shortly will be at peak oil
with potentially devastating consequences.
There is hope with leadership. We are an enormously creative society.
I think that we can meet the challenge, but it is going to require a
program I believe that has a total commitment of World War II, I lived
through that, that has the technology challenge of putting a man on the
moon and the urgency of the Manhattan Project. We can do that. It needs
the help of every American, and leadership; our children and
grandchildren are counting on it.
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