[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 44 (Friday, March 14, 2008)]
[House]
[Pages H1765-H1769]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                                PEAK OIL

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 18, 2007, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Bartlett) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, I need to begin today with an 
apology first. I need to apologize to my very good friend and chairman 
of our subcommittee on Armed Services, Gene Taylor, and I need to 
apologize to Ron O'Rourke and Eric Labbs who are testifying in a very 
important subcommittee hearing that I was not able to attend between 
the two series of votes this morning because I had orthostatic 
hypotension and I could not maintain a standing hydrostatic column. 
What that means, Mr. Speaker, if I stood up too long I would faint 
because I was suffering through flu. So I want to apologize to 
Congressman Taylor and Ron O'Rourke and Eric Labbs and assure them that 
I was, indeed, sick. I was in the attending physician's office, and I 
want to thank the attending physician and his assistants there. They 
really do take good care of us.
  I guess I ought to thank my parents, too, for the good genes they 
gave me because the recuperative powers of the human body are just 
amazing. Because of the great genes I got from my parents, I am really 
blessed to have more recuperative power than the average person, for 
which I am very thankful.

[[Page H1766]]

  I wouldn't be here except, for me, this is a very important day. I 
think it is a very important day for the country and the world. You 
see, 2 months from today will be the 51st anniversary of what I think 
will be regarded very shortly as the most insightful speech given in 
the last century. This was a speech given by Hyman Rickover to a group 
of physicians in St. Paul, Minnesota.
  I will have a quote or two from his speech in our little discussion 
today, and I encourage you to do a Google search for Hyman Rickover and 
energy and it will pop up, and I think you will agree it is the most 
prophetic, insightful speech you have read.
  Mr. Speaker, I think this is probably the 40th time I have come here, 
because this is the third anniversary of the first time I came here, 
which was on March 14, exactly 3 years ago. Between then and now, I was 
very privileged to have the widow of Hyman Rickover join me. She sat in 
the gallery up there where I, for an hour, read from her husband's 
speech and commented on it because it was a very historic speech.
  Well, this is a very special day for me today because I have a very 
good friend, Kjell Aleklett. He is from the Uppsala University in 
Sweden, and he is the president of ASPO, the Association for the Study 
of Peak Oil. They have been around for a long time, and if the world 
had been listening to them, we would not have $110 oil today. And I 
think you will agree with me as we go through the charts, that would be 
correct. He sits in the gallery, and thank you, sir, very much for 
joining us.
  The first chart I have is a chart that I have used every one of the 
40 times that I have been to the floor. I just wanted to start with 
this chart because apparently a lot of people have trouble 
understanding it. I just don't know what is hard to understand about 
this chart. This seems to me to be a very simple chart.
  You need to go back to 1956 to kind of set this in context. In 1956 
on the 8th day of March, just a few days ago was that anniversary, a 
speech was given that I think will be the most important speech given 
in the last century of Hyman Rickover. It was very insightful. I think 
the speech given to M. King Hubbert to those assembled oil engineers 
and oil company people in San Antonio, Texas, will be judged to be the 
most important speech given in the last century.
  At that time, the United States was king of oil. We were producing, 
using, and exporting more oil than anybody in the world. In that 
climate, M. King Hubbert got up and told the assembled experts there 
that in just about 14 years, no matter what they did, the United States 
would reach its maximum production of oil. And after that, there was 
going to be less and less and less, no matter what they did.
  Here is a chart which shows that, and I don't know what is so hard to 
understand about this chart. It has been out there for a very long 
time. The data has been out for a very long time. You could have 
constructed this chart very easily many years ago.
  What M. King Hubbert predicted was that the lower 48 States, the rest 
of the United States plus Texas, and Texas was pretty big, that they 
would peak in 1970, and after that, no matter what we did, the 
production would fall off. Indeed it did. Now, we found a lot of oil in 
Alaska and we found a fair amount of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. Those 
fabled discoveries in the Gulf of Mexico hardly made a blip in the 
slide down the other side of Hubbert's peak. I have been to Alaska to 
the beginning of that 4-foot pipeline through which, for a number of 
years, 25 percent of our domestic production of oil flowed. And that 
made a little blip in the downward slide on the other side of Hubbert's 
peak, but it didn't reverse the slide except for momentarily.
  Now, the reason I ask what is so hard to understand about this chart 
is that the same man who predicted this in 1979, I believe, predicted 
that the world would be peaking in oil production about now. I think 
the obvious question that any rational person would ask themselves is: 
If M. King Hubbert was right about the United States, which certainly 
has to be a microcosm of the world, why shouldn't he be right about the 
world? If, in fact, by 1980 it was very clear that he was right, that 
we have peaked in 1970, that was 28 years ago, shouldn't the United 
States and the world have been doing something about the inevitability 
that the world would probably follow this same kind of a pattern, that 
the world would reach its maximum production of oil, and no matter what 
they did after that, it would tail off.
  Let me tell you what we did in our country to try to make M. King 
Hubbert a liar. That is not why they did it, but that is the effect of 
it. We have drilled more oil wells in our country than all of the rest 
of the world put together. In spite of having 530,000 producing oil 
wells, today we produce a bit more than half the oil that we produced 
in 1970, in spite of the fact that we have large amounts of oil from 
natural gas liquids, from oil from Alaska, and from oil from the Gulf 
of Mexico.
  I have used this chart 40 times here, and what is so hard to 
understand about this chart?
  In 1956, we were here, and he predicted in 1970 we would be here. And 
then he predicted, in spite of enhanced oil recovery, in spite of the 
best discovery techniques and modeling in the world, in spite of 
drilling more oil wells than the rest of the world put together, we are 
still producing in the lower 48 way less than half of the oil than we 
produced in 1970. What is so hard to understand about this?
  And the same man who predicted that predicted that the world would be 
peaking in oil production about now. Well, you know, it is hard for me 
to understand why with this knowledge that the world wouldn't have 
said, gee, we really ought to be doing something because this oil is 
not going to last forever.
  Mr. Speaker, it was probably 40 years ago, maybe it is because of the 
scientist in me, that I started asking myself that question. I looked 
around the world and there was rock and stones and trees and grass, and 
I said, you know, oil has to be finite. There has to be a finite 
amount, and how much is there. And when should I start being concerned 
about the amount of oil that is there. Is it a year, 10 years, 100 
years? Maybe it is a thousand years. But at some point I knew we would 
be where we are today.
  Again, Mr. Speaker, what is so hard to understand about this chart? 
And why has there been denial worldwide, just forget it, don't think 
about it, ignore it? Ignoring it won't make it go away.
  The next chart is a statement by Condoleezza Rice, and this comment 
was mirrored in the President's State of the Union. ``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.'' That was 
April 5, 2006, about 2 years ago. What have we done since then? This 
was a recognition of a real problem.
  If you look at what this Congress has done in the last 2 years, what 
this administration has done in the last 2 years, what the world has 
done in the last 2 years, what have we done in response to this 
recognition by the Secretary of State that this is a huge problem?
  Well, one country has been doing something. China has been doing 
something. China has been going all over the world, and you can see by 
the symbol here for China, they have been going all over the world. 
They wanted one in the United States. They almost bought Unocal. 
Remember the furor over that. I wasn't that disturbed because the 
reality is in today's world, it doesn't make any difference who owns 
the oil because almost all of the oil is owned by countries, most of 
them, but he who comes with the dollars gets the oil. So whether they 
own Unocal I didn't think made all that much difference, but 
symbolically it made a difference. And fortunately, they didn't buy it.
  The next chart is a really interesting one. I guess if there were 
only two charts to look at, this would be one of them. And several 
charts from now I will point to the second one that I think is the most 
instructive. These are the two most instructive charts that I have 
seen.

[[Page H1767]]

  This is what the world would look like if the size of the country 
were relative to how much oil reserves the country had. That is a 
different looking world, isn't it.
  Here is our hemisphere over here, kind of an anemic hemisphere. 
Venezuela has way more than half of all of the oil in all of our 
hemisphere. But look at where most of the oil is. The land mass of 
Saudi Arabia would be 22 percent of the land mass of the world if the 
size of Saudi Arabia was relative to the amount of oil that it held.
  Look at little Kuwait. You look at Iraq, way down to the east is what 
looks like it ought to be a province of Iraq, and that is what Saddam 
Hussein tried to do in the Gulf War. They have the second, third, or 
fourth depending on what you believe about the numbers they give us for 
their reserves. Iraq is huge. And Iran is big. The little United Arab 
Emirates, you almost have to have a magnifying glass to find them on 
the globe, but they have quite a bit of oil there.
  Look at where we are over here. We have only 2 percent of the known 
reserves of oil, and we get most of our oil from Canada and Mexico. 
Notice that Canada and Mexico, each of them has even less oil than we 
have.

                              {time}  1515

  So how come we're getting oil from Canada and Mexico? Well, there 
aren't very many people in Canada so they can ship us surplus oil. And 
although there are a lot of people in Mexico, they're too poor, most of 
them, to use much oil, so they can ship oil to us.
  But notice how Venezuela just dominates the map here in our 
hemisphere. Look at Russia there. They're really a huge country. They 
go through 11 time zones, they go nearly halfway around the world. 
They're not so big relative to oil as they are relative to actual land 
mass, but they're still a pretty big country. They're a major shipper. 
Russia has many fewer people than we, and they still are not using near 
as much oil per person as we, so they are in the happy circumstance of 
being able to be a major shipper of oil.
  What I really want you to look at for a moment here is China and 
India. Together, they have, what, about as much oil as we, which is 2 
percent of the known reserves. China has 1.3 billion people. India has, 
I guess, a bit more than a billion people now. So between them they 
have, what, about a third of the world's population and 2 percent of 
the world's oil.
  And China's doing something about that by going about and buying 
reserves all over the world. Why would they do that? Since in today's 
world, it doesn't make any difference who owns the oil, he who comes 
with the dollars, buys the oil. It's impossible to get inside their 
head to know why they're doing this, but one might note that 
simultaneously with buying up all this oil, they're doing two things: 
one is, they're pleading for international cooperation.
  I led a codel of nine Members to China a year ago this last 
Christmas/New Year's break. And we had a chance to spend several days 
with the Chinese talking about energy. And they began their discussion 
of energy by talking about post-oil. You know, it's hard for us in this 
country to think much beyond the next quarterly report if you're in 
business, or much beyond the next election if you're in Congress. But 
the Chinese are thinking generations and centuries ahead, and there 
will be a post-oil world. And they have a five point plan. It ought to 
be the world's five point plan.
  The first point in this plan is conservation. With oil at $110 a 
barrel, we have run out of excess oil to invest in alternatives, and 
we've run out of time. And you could free up some oil and buy some time 
if you had a really aggressive, worldwide conservation effort.
  Their second and third points were, get energy from alternatives, and 
as many of those as you can from your own country.
  The fourth one is one that may surprise you, and that is, be kind to 
the environment while you do that because now they're the world's 
biggest polluter and they know that. But they have 1.3 billion people. 
They have 900,000 people in what they call rural areas, which, through 
the miracle of information technology, know how the rest of the world 
lives, and they are clamoring for the benefits of the industrialized 
society. And I think that China is concerned that if they're not able 
to provide those benefits, that their empire may unravel the way the 
Soviet Empire unraveled.
  The fifth point in that five-point plan is a really significant one, 
international cooperation. They know that if only one country does it, 
that you really could have kind of a Jevons paradox, that is, the 
harder you work the worse it gets.
  Let me give you an example from our country. I suppose that we, 
alone, I don't think that we have any alternative, Mr. Speaker, we use 
a fourth of the world's oil. We're a fourth of the world's economy. We 
are a role model. We're a leader, whether we like it or not, and people 
are watching us.
  But suppose that we decided that what we were going to do was to have 
an aggressive conservation program. What that would do is to drop the 
price of oil and gas and coal because energy is fungible and those 
prices will move somewhat together. And then that would make oil even 
cheaper for the Chinese who are already aggressively competing with us 
economically and militarily. So it would make them easier to compete 
with us economically and militarily. So maybe from a national security 
perspective one might argue that, gee, let's pig it all up as soon as 
possible so there won't be any for the Chinese or anybody else. Of 
course that's a grossly irresponsible, irrational response.
  But this points out Jevons paradox, that our unique local situation 
could in fact be made worse if we didn't seek the cooperation of the 
world, and if we unilaterally, and I don't think we have any choice, 
Mr. Speaker, because we are a world leader, and the world is headed for 
some really rough bumps if we don't do something. So I think that we've 
got to move and hope that the world will follow. But if the world 
didn't follow, it would simply make more oil available at cheaper 
prices to our adversaries, both economic and military adversaries. This 
is known as Jevons paradox; the harder you work the worse the problem 
gets.
  Well, this is one thing that China is doing is pleading for 
international cooperation. But at the same time they do that, and I 
can't get inside their head to know why they're building, very 
aggressively building a blue water navy, but one might suspect that if 
you had all that oil around the world and you envisioned that a time 
might come when you would have to say, gee guys, I'm sorry, but we have 
1.3 billion people and the oil is ours and we can no longer share it, 
the only way to make that happen is to have a blue water navy big 
enough to protect the sea lanes. At the moment we have the only blue 
water navy that's large enough to do that.
  The next chart is one that inspired, oh, maybe nearly 3 years ago 
now, 30 of our prominent Americans. Jim Woolsey and McFarlane and 
Boyden Gray and 27 others, retired admirals and generals, sent a letter 
to the President saying, Mr. President, the fact that we have only 2 
percent of the reserves of oil in the world and we use 25 percent of 
the world's oil, and we import almost two-thirds of what we use is 
really a totally unacceptable national security risk. We've really got 
to do something about that. That is true, of course. That is a totally 
unacceptable national security risk. And the President has mentioned 
that risk in his State of the Union messages. That recognition, in my 
view, has not been followed by appropriate actions on either the part 
of the administration or of the Congress.
  A couple of other interesting numbers here. We really represent less 
than 5 percent of the world's population. We are one person in 22 in 
the world, and we use a fourth of the world's energy, and that 
statistic is not lost on the rest of the world. As oil becomes 
critically short, and the prices rise, they will be looking more and 
more at this relatively little land mass across the Atlantic and 
Pacific that's using a fourth of all of the world's energy.
  This 8 percent is really interesting. We have only 2 percent of the 
world's reserves, and I mentioned that we had 530,000 functioning oil-
producing oil wells, so we are pumping our oil down about four times 
faster than the average in the world.
  This group of people, and they're a sizeable number of them and I 
commend them, who are really concerned about the price of oil and peak 
oil and

[[Page H1768]]

its availability and who has the oil and who uses the oil, these people 
are concerned about our national security. And their solution to that 
problem, of course, is to use less fossil fuels and move to other 
sources of energy, like nuclear and wind and solar. These are all 
electric, by the way, and liquid fuels are going to be the real 
challenge. And there it really is a challenge. There is no silver 
bullet. It's going to be a little of this and a little of that.
  And at the end of the day, I was privileged to spend a week in South 
America with the chairman of our Agriculture Committee. And he believes 
at the end of the day that the world will be able to produce about a 
third as much liquid fuels as we are now using, and I will tell you 
that that's probably okay. I think that we could live very comfortably 
with a third of the liquid fuels that we now have with appropriate 
conservation and efficiency. So this is one group that has common cause 
with those of us who are concerned that the oil just isn't going to be 
there.
  There's a second group that has a common cause that I wanted to 
mention because what I think these three groups ought to do is stop 
criticizing each other's premise and simply lock arms and march on 
because all three want to do exactly the same thing. They want to move 
away from fossil fuels to alternatives.
  This third group are those that believe that our excessive use of 
fossil fuels and releasing the CO2 that was bound there in 
these ancient subtropical seas a very long time ago that produced our 
oil and gas, and it wasn't seas, but the furnace and stuff that produce 
the coal. They are now releasing that CO2, and this is a 
greenhouse gas and it's trapping the infrared radiations that come back 
from the Earth after the broad number of bandwidth that come in from 
the sun heats up the Earth and it radiates back just in the infrared, 
and these are called greenhouse gases because they do for our world 
what the glass in the greenhouse does for the greenhouse temperature or 
the glass in your car does for your car which may be 140 degrees on an 
80-degree day this summer when you open the door.
  Now, what the climate change global warming group wants to do is 
exactly the same thing. Their solution is the same solution as those 
who are concerned about national security and those who are concerned 
about the fact that it just isn't going to be there. They want to use 
less fossil fuels and move to renewables.
  And the question I ask is, Mr. Speaker, why do we criticize each 
other's premise? Since we all have a similar path to achieving our 
goal, why don't we just lock arms and expend our energies addressing 
the challenge by moving away from fossil fuels to sustainable 
renewables?
  The next chart, I wish this could go back the 8,000 years that Hyman 
Rickover referred to, but it goes back only about 400 years. But it 
wouldn't matter because if you extend it this way, it's going to be the 
same. The amount of energy used by mankind is going to be so small that 
it hardly shows above the baseline. This shows the revolution, the 
Industrial Revolution. The brown line is wood, the black line, 
appropriately, is coal, and the red is gas and oil. Wow, look what 
happened. When we found gas and oil and we learned how to use the 
incredible amounts and quality of energy and gas and oil, the use of 
energy just exploded. And with it, by the way, the world's population. 
If I had a population graph, it follows that same curve. It goes from a 
half a billion or so down here to roughly, what, 7 billion now, 
approaching 7 billion people in the world.
  Notice what happened in about the 1970s there. And notice the amount 
of trouble we would have been in if that hadn't happened. We had the 
embargo-inspired oil price spike heights in the 1970s and there was a 
worldwide recession. And notice the dip in gas and oil consumption. And 
then when we recovered from that recession, the slope, and that will 
show up better on some future graphs where the abscissa is spread out, 
the slope is very much less than it is here.
  The slope there, if we'd continued on that slope today, we would be 
above the chart there, wouldn't we? The statistics there were just 
stunning. Every decade the Earth used as much oil as had been used in 
all of previous history. What that meant, of course, was that had we 
continued on that path, and we'd used half of all the oil that we could 
ever recover, we would have had 10 years remaining.
  Hyman Rickover, in his speech, and in just a moment I'll have a quote 
from that speech. I just want to note something here before we put his 
quote up. He recognized that there would be an age of oil. That age of 
oil started back here, what, in the late 1800s. They were about 100 
years into the age of oil and gas and coal because you can move this 
back a little bit for fossil fuel energy, about 100 years into the 
fossil fuel era because oil and gas have so dominated that you could 
refer to it as the age of oil. And he noted that there would be an age 
of oil like there was a stone age.
  Now, I know the cute remark is the stone age didn't end because they 
ran out of stone; and, therefore, the age of oil won't end because we 
ran out of oil. That gets a smile and an applause line. But I think if 
you believe that we can just go through business as usual and we're 
going to come out okay, that you probably also believe that you'll 
solve your personal economic problems by winning the lottery, because I 
think the odds of that happening are about the same.

                              {time}  1530

  Well, this is the first part of the age of oil. As you will see from 
M. King Hubbert's predictions, the other side of this should be a 
mirror and come down like this so we know pretty much how long the age 
of oil will be. We are about 150 years into this Golden Age, and in 
another 150, it will be gone.
  Now, the quote from Hyman Rickover. This is his speech given the 14th 
day of May, 1957, to a group of physicians in St. Paul, Minnesota: 
There is nothing man can do to rebuild exhausted fossil fuel reserves 
that were created by solar energy 500 million years ago and took eons 
to grow to their present volume. In the face of the basic fact that 
fossil fuels are finite, the exact length of time these reserves will 
last is important in only one respect: the longer they last, the more 
time 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.
  Fossil fuels resemble capital in the bank. I love this statement. It 
so correctly describes the collective attitude of the world. 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, or wanton 
drilling and consumption of oil might be substituted there, and care 
not one wit how his offspring will fare.
  I have 10 kids, 16 grandkids, and 2 great-grandkids. We are going to 
bequeath them a horrendous debt, not with my votes if you will check 
the record, but they're going to get the debt anyway.
  I tell those who would like me to vote to drill in ANWR and offshore 
that wouldn't it be nice if I left them a little oil. By the way, I 
will vote to drill there when I have a commitment that they're going to 
use all of the energy and the money that they get from pumping those 
reserves to develop alternatives.
  The next chart, and this may be my last chart because the hydrostatic 
column that I mentioned I had difficulty maintaining is giving me some 
problems. This is the second one. There were two charts that were very 
insightful, and this is the second of those charts. This shows the 
discoveries, and notice that those discoveries occurred a while ago.
  Here we are over here. Huge discoveries behind us, very few currently 
in spite of lots of money spent, lots of drilling and so forth.
  This solid black curve is the same curve we saw before. This is the 
use of energy. A system was compressed and the ordinate expanded, and 
here's a very sharp curve. Here is the recovery with much more 
efficiency after that recession in the 1970s as the result of the Arab 
oil embargo.
  Now, where will we go from here? Unless we find a lot more oil, we 
have these reserves that we can pump in the future. If we pump them 
very aggressively and bleed them down quickly, we may get more for the 
moment and less

[[Page H1769]]

for the future. And you can vary the slide down the other side of the 
world's Hubbert's peak there by some of the things you do with 
aggressive drilling and enhanced oil recovery. But remember, you cannot 
pump what you have not found.
  I want to look at one more chart, and then I will have to yield back 
my time.
  I have been saying for 3 years now that we were about to reach peak 
oil, and I started saying that back here 3 years ago. And at just about 
that time, the two big agencies in the world that track the use of oil 
have found that it's flat. One is the IEA, the International Energy 
Agency. This is a group that tracks what is happening in Iran, among 
other things. The other is the EIA, the Energy Information 
Administration, a part of the Department of Energy. Both of those have 
the production of oil flat for about the last 3 years. And while that's 
been flat, the price of oil has gone up, as it should with a flat 
production, and increased demand has gone up from $55 a barrel to $110 
a barrel. You can see that spike here.
  Mr. Speaker, I'm very sorry that the flu and its effect on my ability 
to maintain a hydrostatic column means that I am going to have to yield 
back my time and sit down.
  But I want to reemphasize how important this subject is. There is a 
solution, by the way. That solution will require the total commitment 
of World War II, the technology focus of putting a man on the Moon, and 
the urgency of the Manhattan Project.
  I'm excited about this. It's exhilarating. It's a huge challenge. 
There's no exhilaration like the exhilaration of overcoming a huge 
challenge.
  Mr. Speaker, at this time, I yield back.

                          ____________________