[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 21]
[House]
[Pages 28146-28152]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          PEAK OIL PRODUCTION

  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, I would first like to thank 
Congressman Dingell for his many years of service to his country. 
Sometimes there is a young person who is very bright and well-achieved. 
And it is said of them that they are wise beyond their years. 
Congressman Dingell has served 50 years in the Congress. Before that, 
he served in World War II. Matter of fact, he is just about a year 
younger than I, so obviously he is not a really young person. I can 
truly say of Congressman Dingell that he, too, is wise beyond his 
years.
  As a matter of fact, the subject I am going to talk about tonight is 
better understood by Congressman Dingell, I think, than any other 
Member of the House. I remember a conversation with him some time ago, 
several months ago, when he noted that he did not believe that oil 
would ever be $50 a barrel again. I spoke with him tonight, and he 
said, you know, we probably had better hope that it is not ever $50 a 
barrel again because the only thing that could cause it to drop to that 
level would be the demand construction that would be precipitated by a 
world crisis. Thank you, Congressman Dingell, for your friendship, and 
I thank you for your contribution to your country.
  The first chart is taken from a publication from a report that was 
funded by the Department of Energy. I want to make that clear. The 
principal investigator was Robert Hirsch. He works for SAIC, a very 
prestigious scientific organization.
  ``The peaking of world oil production presents the U.S. 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 costs 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.''
  Dealing with world oil production peaking will be extremely complex, 
involve literally trillions of dollars and require many years of 
intense effort.
  Mr. Speaker, what is he referring to? To put this in context, as the 
next slide shows us, we need to go back about six decades. Working for 
the Shell Oil Company was a scientist by the name of M. King Hubbert, 
and he watched the exploitation and exhaustion of oil fields. He found 
that they all tended to follow a similar pattern. Oil came freely at 
first and then reached a peak production, and then, not surprisingly, 
the last oil from the field, as a matter of fact, roughly the last half 
of the oil from the field, was more difficult to get than the first 
half of the oil from the field.
  So he judged that if he could add up all of the little fields in the 
country and the curve that would be produced by the exploitation and 
exhaustion of that, and these are called bell curves, they are typical 
curves of phenomena, that he then could predict when the United States 
would peak in oil production.
  He made this prediction in 1956, and he said that the United States 
peak oil production would occur about 1970, certainly in the early 
1970s. Right on target, the United States peaked in oil production in 
1970 or 1971.
  The smooth green curve here shows what he predicted. The somewhat 
more ragged curve with symbols shows the accurate data points. You see 
how closely this is for the lower 48 States. It shows how closely they 
followed his predicted curve.
  The red curve is the similar curve for the Soviet Union. You notice 
that on the down side, they peaked some years ago, after us, but some 
years ago, and on the down side, when the Soviet Union fell apart, they 
lost a lot of production capacity. Now they are going to have a second 
small peak, but then on down. Russia is now a major producer of oil in 
the world, but they were in the past a larger producer of oil in the 
world.
  The next chart shows the sources from which our oil production has 
come.

                              {time}  2130

  And notice that this peak, about 1970, and this curve differ from the 
previous one in that we have added here the oil from Prudhoe Bay in 
Alaska. There was a tiny blip on the down slope. Without that oil, 
there was no blip at all. But in spite of that enormous find in Prudhoe 
Bay, about a fourth of our total production for a number of years, we 
still continued our slide down the other side of Hubbert's Peak.
  I want to note the yellow there, that is the fabled discoveries of 
oil in the Gulf of Mexico where there are now, I think, what, 4,000 oil 
wells. That was supposed to solve our problems with oil for quite some 
time. Notice the fairly trifling contribution it made. This was a big 
find. But we and the world use a lot of oil, and that kind of puts it 
in perspective.
  The next chart shows two characteristics of the world. The previous 
one, the one just removed, we were looking at the United States, and in 
this one we look at the world. And there are

[[Page 28147]]

really two curves here, and they are superimposed because that helps us 
to understand the situation a little better.
  The bar graph here, the dark shows the discoveries of oil; and notice 
that we started discovering a lot of oil back in the 1940s and the 
1950s and the 1960s; and after the 1980s, that is 25 years ago, we have 
had diminishing discoveries of oil. The heavy black line here shows the 
use of oil. For many, many years we were discovering far more oil than 
we used. But since about the early 1980s, every year we have used more 
oil than we found. And until today, and that is at this point, you can 
see that we are using several times as much oil as we find, maybe four 
barrels of oil used for every barrel of oil that we find.
  Now, of course one can only extrapolate into the future. But if you 
make reasonable assumptions for what we will find, and that is this 
curve here, we could find more; we could also find less. But if you 
look back through the last 20 years, this is a fairly optimistic 
assumption of what we will find for the next 25 or 30 years.
  And then, of course, you cannot pump oil that you have not found. And 
so the consumption curve, this curve, suggests that that will peak in 
about 5 years. But the consumption curve must have under it exactly the 
same area as is the area under the discovery curve, because obviously 
you cannot pump oil that you have not found.
  We will come back to this chart a little later, and we will mention 
some of the critical relationships here a time or two as we address 
other points.
  Now, there are a number of critics, and the next chart points to the 
statements that one critic has made. And we will come to the floor, Mr. 
Speaker, in the future to talk about other critics and the points that 
they have made, and we will carefully and respectfully address each of 
the points that they make.
  This critic made four comments, four points. And what he said was, if 
we really understood this, you would not have any concern about peak 
oil because we are really not facing a problem, in his view.
  I am only going to talk about the first one now, and then we will put 
this chart down here, and we will pull it up after we have talked about 
this one and then talk about the second, third, and fourth bullet here.
  In the first bullet, he says: Simply put, known reserves can produce 
far more oil if more aggressively drilled, as in the United States.
  That is true, and it is not true. As the next chart shows, this shows 
the relationship between drilling and pumping oil in this country. By 
1980, when Ronald Reagan became President, we had already slid 10 years 
down the other side of Hubbert's Peak; and we knew in this country, and 
the world knew, that M. King Hubbert had been correct, that the United 
States had peaked in its oil production.
  Mr. Speaker, I wonder why there was not more recognition given to the 
fact that M. King Hubbert also predicted when the world would peak, 
which, considering events like a worldwide recession and the oil price 
spike hikes and so forth, would be about now. I wonder why more people 
were not concerned that maybe if M. King Hubbert were right about the 
United States, he might be right about the world. And if he was right 
about the world, then we really ought to be paying attention to that.
  This curve shows the effect of the extra drilling that was encouraged 
by the tax policy of the early Reagan years. It showed that that had no 
effect on the amount of oil that we pump, because we went from 
positive, pumping more oil than we were consuming, to negative, pumping 
less oil than we were consuming, in spite of the fact that there was a 
very large spike here in increased drilling.
  So depending upon the state of exhaustion of the oil fields, 
increased drilling may not produce any increased flow of oil. It 
certainly did not here. In spite of all this increased drilling, we 
produced relatively less and less oil. Now, it is true that if there is 
still a lot of oil left in the fields, you could exhaust it more 
quickly by drilling more wells.
  I think that in this country, Mr. Speaker, we have drilled at least 
three-fourths of all of the oil wells that have been drilled in all of 
the world. And the critic was saying if we drilled relatively as many 
wells in Saudi Arabia as we have drilled in this country, that we could 
get that oil out more quickly. That may be true. But as we will 
discover a little later in this discussion, Mr. Speaker, that probably 
is not a good idea.
  There is an old adage that says: If you're in a hole, stop digging. 
And I think a good corollary to that is, if you are climbing a hill and 
you know that you will fall off the other side, it is obvious that the 
higher you climb, the greater the fall will be.
  So if there is only so much oil there, if we are able to get it out 
more quickly now by drilling more holes, then does it not stand to 
reason that there will be even less oil for the future, and the slope 
down the other side of Hubbert's Peak will be even sharper?
  The next slide shows again a relationship between drilling and the 
amount of oil that you discover. The red curve here is a hyperbolic 
model. It approaches in ascentot. It will never quite reach the top 
because it will go up ever more slowly. And the yellow points here show 
the actual cumulative discovery of oil. And notice that it follows this 
very clear ascentotic curve.
  What that points to, Mr. Speaker, is that there is probably not a lot 
more oil in the world that we are going to find. For the last number of 
years, we have had very good techniques: seismic, 3D modeling with 
computers. We are really very good now at characterizing the geologic 
formations in which oil is likely to be found, and we have drilled and 
exploited all of those that held much promise.
  The next chart is another one taken from this very excellent report 
called the ``Hirsch Report,'' done by SAIC, and funded by our own 
Department of Energy. This shows the net difference between annual 
world oil reserves, reserve additions, and annual consumption. And this 
showed when we flipped over from every year finding more oil than we 
used to the point that for every year since, what, the early 1980s, as 
you can see from this chart, the world has found less and less oil than 
it has pumped.
  I would like to now come back to the chart that I showed a few 
minutes ago because I think that this chart actually shows if you make 
this curve here a straight line, then that produces the curve that you 
have just seen. I would like to come back to this and point out that 
the history of discovery indicates that we probably are not going to 
have any more really large oil fields discovered. The last of the great 
oil fields were discovered in the 1980s. And in spite of intense 
drilling and vastly improved discovery techniques, just about on the 
average every year since then we have found less and less.
  And I would like to point out again something which is very obvious, 
that you cannot pump oil that you have not found. Now, if you want to 
change the shape of this consumption curve, and you can change the 
shape of that curve, if you want to change the shape of that curve and 
have it ever go up and up, then you are obviously going to have to find 
a lot more oil.
  Now, you can in the short term have it go up somewhat faster if you 
simply were to drill in Saudi Arabia relatively as many wells as we 
have drilled in this country. But what that will do, Mr. Speaker, is 
maybe to extend this curve a bit like this.
  But you cannot pump more oil than you have found, so then it will 
fall off very sharply on the other side. I am not sure that is what our 
economy needs, and I am not sure that is what the world needs. So I am 
not certain, Mr. Speaker, that in the absence of finding more oil that 
it is in anybody's self-interest to find ways to exhaust the oil that 
we have found more quickly than we are doing it now.
  Now, if you believe that just around the corner we are going to find 
enormous additional amounts of oil, then that might be a supportable 
philosophy. But I would suggest, looking at this history of our 
discovery of oil,

[[Page 28148]]

that it would be very prudent to not use techniques for more rapidly 
exhausting the oil until you have found more oil, or we are simply 
going to be building a larger and larger economy in the world that is 
going to be even more and more difficult to support as we inevitably 
run down the other side of Hubbert's Peak.
  I would like now to put back up the comments of this critic, and we 
want to look at the second bullet here. There is enough tar and natural 
gas in the world to fuel the globe for hundreds of years at current 
rates of consumption. And I should have underlined it there, the ``at 
current rates of consumption.'' There are two things I want to talk 
about on this.
  The first is that there is a great deal of natural gas and other 
sources of hydrocarbons in the world. I am not sure that they are 
economically exploitable. And the second thing is at current-use rates. 
Let me finish this, and then I will put the next chart up. And that 
does not include even more massive amounts of coal that could be turned 
into gas and oil, and indeed it can be turned into gas and oil.
  That is the way Hitler ran his country and his military in World War 
II, because we cut him off from oil and he made oil from coal. As a 
matter of fact, when I was a little boy, the lamps you now call 
kerosene lamps we called coal oil lamps. And that is because it was 
coal oil that first replaced whale oil before we learned how to refine 
crude oil and make kerosene. So we can do that.
  The next chart points to what Albert Einstein said was the most 
powerful force in the universe. After we discovered nuclear power as a 
result of his theory of relativity and his contributions, he was asked, 
Dr. Einstein, we have now discovered this incredible power source, 
energy source. What will be next? And he said, you know, the most 
powerful force in the universe is the power of compound interest.
  Now, that is an exponential function. What we show here are several 
curves, and this lower curve here shows a 2 percent growth rate; and 
the straight line shows, if you extrapolate that out without 
compounding, that is you do not add this year's growth to the baseline 
for next year's growth, if you have money and interest and you take the 
interest every year and do not let it accumulate. But notice how much 
it grows if you let it accumulate. And this is only a 2 percent growth 
rate. There is a 4 percent growth rate. Notice how much more quickly it 
grows. By the way, a 2 percent growth rate doubles in 35 years.
  This steepest curve here is a 10 percent growth rate. I would like to 
remind you that that is pretty much the curve that China is on, and 
India very close behind them. China, about 9.5 percent; 10 percent 
growth rate doubles in 7 years. It is four times bigger in 14 years, it 
is 8 times bigger in 21 years. That is exponential growth.

                              {time}  2145

  Mr. Speaker, if you will do a Google search for Dr. Albert Bartlett, 
not a relative of mine, but he gives the most interesting 1-hour 
lecture I have ever heard, and pull up his lecture on exponential 
growth and energy. He has some excellent analogies to help understand 
exponential growth.
  I will give just one true story from an ancient kingdom where one of 
the citizens of the kingdom invented chess. The king was so impressed 
he called his citizen in and said, I will give you any reasonable 
request for the contribution you make for inventing chess.
  The inventor said, I am a simple man with simple needs; Mr. King, if 
you will simply take my chess board and put one grain of wheat on the 
first square and double that and put two grains of wheat on the second 
square and double it and four on the third square and eight on the 
fourth until you have finally filled all of the squares of my chess 
board, that is all the reward I would ask. The king thought, silly man, 
I would have given him a great deal more. No problem.
  But had the king understood the power of exponential growth, he would 
have had to place on that chess board more wheat than the world has 
harvested in the last 40 years. That is the power of compound growth.
  We see that in the next chart that looks at one of these assumptions, 
and that is that we have a lot of coal. We do. We have 250 years of 
coal at current use. But if you have to use more of it, and we 
certainly will have to use more of it as we have less natural gas; 
today that topped $15 for a thousand cubic feet, the highest ever, and 
if you increase the use of coal only 2 percent a year and compound 
that, notice what happens. It shrinks to about 85 years. That is the 
power of compound growth. And for much of its use, you will not be able 
to use coal, you will have to make it, as the critics suggested, into 
gas and oil, and that takes energy to do that, and so now it has shrunk 
down to about 50 years.
  With just 2 percent growth, we will be really lucky if we can get by 
with increasing the use of coal only 2 percent, but that now lasts only 
50 years. It is there. It is a very valuable resource, and we need to 
use it, but it is not a long-term solution to our problem.
  The next chart shows something which is really very interesting. This 
shows the current consumption, and it is making an interesting 
assumption. I would like to pause for just a moment because, in another 
life, I had a course in statistics, and they give you some 
probabilities here. That is what statistics is all about, 
probabilities. They have the 95 percent probability and the 50 percent 
probability and the 5 percent probability. The 5 percent probability 
means only 1 time in 20 would you expect that to happen. The 95 percent 
probability is what is called statistically significant, and 97 percent 
probability is highly significant.
  What they have done here is to take the mean and to assume that is 
the expected value. No, Mr. Speaker, that is not the expected value. 
The 50 percent probability means there is 50 percent probability it 
could be more. There is also 50 percent probability it could be less. 
What they have done, they say that is the mean. That is really, I 
think, a major distortion of statistics and reflects a misunderstanding 
of statistics because it could be just as well less than that as more 
than that.
  But this red curve assumes that there will be 50 percent more. The 
total amount of oil most authorities believe that was recoverable, and 
we have recovered about half of it, was about 20,000 giga barrels. That 
is 2,000 billion barrels. This mean is 3,000. This is roughly the 2,000 
here, and the 3,000 is here. Notice, even if you assume, which I think 
is a very rash assumption, that there will be 50 percent more oil than 
most of the world's experts believe, notice how little that pushes out 
the peaking. That is what exponential growth does.
  Albert Bartlett uses another interesting explanation of exponential 
growth. He has a little colony of microbes that are growing in a liter 
flask and notices that they are doubling every minute. When they are 
only partially full, they say, we better be looking for more territory 
because we are soon going to fill up this liter vessel. They send out 
scouts and find not one or two or three more liters. Wow, three times 
as much as they now have. That should last them for a long time. 
Remember, they are doubling every minute.
  If they fill their present liter flask at midnight, 1 minute after 
midnight they fill the second one because they double every minute, and 
in 2 minutes after midnight, they fill the third and the fourth.
  That shows why if we find 50 percent more oil than most of the 
experts believe is there, that will only push out peak oil those 
relatively few years. If by some means you are able to extract oil more 
quickly, like drilling a whole lot more wells or using this enhanced 
recovery technique, you might push the peak out to 2037, but this curve 
acknowledges a reality that you cannot pump what is not there. And so 
now you fall off very quickly, and the area between these two curves is 
going to have to equal the area between these two curves.
  So from a very real perspective, Mr. Speaker, if we are not going to 
find enormously more oil or gas or coal or large amounts of 
alternatives, it will

[[Page 28149]]

not be in the long-term best interest of the world to exploit our 
present reserves more quickly.
  The next chart shows the characteristics that any alternatives will 
have to be useful because the primary crisis that we face is not just 
an energy crisis; it is really a crisis of liquid fuels because that is 
where our economy and the world's economy will be first impacted.
  This is an interesting chart, and it has an ordinate and an abscissa. 
The ordinate is energy-profit ratio. The energy-profit ratio is the 
amount of energy you have to put in to get out a certain amount of 
energy, and obviously, the best energy sources will be those where you 
put in just a little bit of energy, like drilling one well and getting 
out an awful lot of oil. And the energy profit ratios may be 60 or 80 
or 100, and some even 200. That means you get out 200 times as much 
energy as put into drilling and developing the field.
  Now on the abscissa here, we have economic effectiveness in 
transport. What that means is how convenient it is to use transport. 
The source that is the highest in both of these is the giant oil 
fields. None of those exist in this country. They are all in the Middle 
East and many in Saudi Arabia. But notice that they have a very high 
energy-profit ratio and also a very high economic effectiveness in 
transport.
  Our oils were just as effective in transport, so they are way over 
here in the abscissa. But notice they are much more expensive to get 
than the Middle East oil. This is 1970, and now they are harder and 
harder to get, and so now we are down at this point where it is maybe 
five to one. We put in one unit of energy and get out five units of 
energy. Notice where the tar sands and ethanol are. They are really 
easy to use once you develop them, but you get very little more energy 
out of them than you put in them.
  Over here we have hydro, coal-fired and nuclear, photo voltaics, and 
they have really improved, and direct use of coal. So any alternative 
that we are going to develop to replace our current oil for 
transportation needs to be put on this table, this chart, to see where 
it fits. It must have a very high energy-profit ratio, and it should 
have a very high economic effectiveness in transport quotient.
  I will return now to the next of these points made by the critic. He 
says we have just produced the tip of the shale gas iceberg, and the 
likely resources in the U.S. are vast. What he is saying is, do not 
worry about energy; there is absolutely an enormous amount of energy in 
these shale gases. What they are, are gases trapped so tightly in shale 
that the only way to get them out is to drill a well and then to put 
sand and water in that well under a very high pressure, kind of an 
explosive pressure that fractures the rock and pushes the sand in 
between the levels of the shale so the gas can now come out. Yes, there 
is a lot of gas there, and you can get it out by doing that, but it is 
quite expensive. It is one well for every one relatively small area of 
the reservoir where this gas is trapped.
  What I want to show now is a number of potential sources of energy. 
As we run down the other side of Hubbard's peak, we are going to have 
to turn to other sources of energy. Some of those are finite like the 
tar sands and the oil shales and the shale gas that he was talking 
about, and coal and nuclear fission and nuclear fusion. I guess the 
nuclear thing ought to be put in a category kind of by itself because 
if you are talking about the light water reactors and fissile uranium, 
you are talking about a finite source. If you are talking about nuclear 
fusion, and I support all of the money that that technology can absorb, 
but I do not think that it is likely in any timely manner that we are 
going to have economically viable fusion to produce power. The general 
estimates are, in 30 to 50 years, that technology may have matured to 
where you will be using electricity produced by fusion. That is what 
happens in the sun and in the hydrogen bomb.
  If we were to go to breeder reactors, they are pretty much 
sustainable, and they would not be finite, so nuclear is in a category 
by itself. We need to exploit all of these areas, but the energy-profit 
ratio is very low for those.
  Let me give an example of an enormous amount of energy, and we really 
would have no energy problem if we just could harness that energy. It 
is called the tides. Every day, the moon lifts all of the oceans about 
2 feet. I just pick up two 5-gallon buckets of water, and they are 
pretty heavy. Can you imagine the amount of energy it takes to lift the 
oceans 2 feet every day? The oceans are three-fourths of the earth's 
surface. If we just could capture that energy, we would be home free. 
But the problem is the energy-profit ratio is very low. There is a lot 
of energy there. It is very disbursed, very diffuse, very hard to 
harness, and we still try.
  Ocean thermal gradients are another potential source. Here are some 
potentially enormous sources of energy.
  Solar. If we paved our desserts with solar cells, we would have all 
of the energy we needed. That is a big if. It is about as big an if as 
getting all of this gas out of the gas shales.
  Wind. If we put a wind machine every place the wind was blowing, we 
would produce incredible amounts of energy, but it is very diffuse, 
very expensive to build them, and it would take a long time to build 
enough of them to make any real difference.
  Geothermal. If we just drilled down deep enough to tap into the 
molten core of the earth, there is essentially inexhaustible energy 
there. But again, the energy-profit ratio, except for a few places 
where the crust is thin, is very high, and so we are not doing that.
  I would like just a word of caution about energy from agriculture. I 
am a big fan of energy from agriculture, but you must recognize its 
limitations.

                              {time}  2200

  We barely are able to feed the world. Now, you would not believe that 
by looking at many Americans, but tonight maybe a fifth of the world 
will go to bed hungry. And so if we are going to take what would 
otherwise be a food crop like corn or sugarcane and use it for energy, 
then we have to ask the question, How will we feed the world?
  Another caution about energy from agriculture. A lot of the sources 
of energy are from what is called cellulose or agricultural waste like 
beet pulp and corn fodder and soybean stocks and switch grass. Now, all 
of these things are organic. All of them, in one way or another, by 
sheet composting or some other composting techniques, are returned to 
the soil to help make what we call top soil. And topsoil is different 
from subsoil because it has organic material in it that supports life, 
and it has a quality which we call tilth which is not there if you take 
the organic material away.
  To rob our topsoils of organic material will be the exact equivalent 
of mining them. You may get away with it for a year or two or a few, 
Mr. Speaker; but in the long run, unless you husband our topsoils, we 
will not be able to continue to grow the food we need.
  Now, there are potentials for getting energy from agriculture. But 
they are going to necessarily be limited by our need to feed the world 
and our need to maintain our top soil. I just heard the other day that 
for every bushel of corn that we produce in Iowa, three bushels of 
topsoil go down the Mississippi River. So in spite of no-till farming 
and the other advanced techniques we have, we still have a problem 
holding our topsoil.
  Here is a great one: waste to energy. Up here in Montgomery County 
there is a facility that burns waste to produce electricity. I would be 
proud to have my church next to it or live next to it. You would think 
it is an office building from the front. The waste comes in in big 
containers on the back of trucks or trains, and you do not even see it. 
It is really quite an engineering marvel. We are producing some energy 
that way. We could produce more and probably should produce more.
  The last bullet here: hydrogen. Hydrogen, Mr. Speaker, is not an 
energy source. Hydrogen is simply a convenient way, and sometimes not 
all that convenient way because of what it is, an explosive gas. But it 
is a way to move energy from one place to another. If you think of it 
in terms of a

[[Page 28150]]

battery, then you get the notion of where hydrogen is going to fit into 
our economy. It is a good idea, because when you finally use the 
hydrogen, it produces, well, we say no pollutants. It produces a little 
bit of heat. And it produces water, but you know that is really no 
pollutants compared to what we get from the internal combustion energy 
in burning gasoline or diesel fuel.
  And you can now use it, not in an internal combustion engine, but if 
we ever perfect them, we can use it in a fuel cell which gets at least 
twice the efficiency of the internal combustion engine. So you are now 
burning something, using something that produces, at the point of use, 
essentially no pollutants, and which produces about twice the net 
energy output that you can get by burning it in a combustion engine. So 
it is a good idea, but fraught with problems because if you are going 
to carry it as a gas, you have to really compress it, a big thick 
vessel, the lightest element we have, gas molecules just wanting to 
separate themselves and get out of there, so you have to have a big 
heavy vessel to contain it.
  If you want to liquify it, it is very cold, a lot of insulation, 
again a big problem. And the experts believe that if it ever becomes a 
part of our economy, that it is going to be in a solid state form, in 
other words, a hydrogen battery. So if you will think of it as 
something maybe quite better than the electron battery that you have in 
your car, but very similar to that because it is simply something that 
takes energy from one place, a nuclear power plant for instance, 
producing electricity that is then used to split water and produce the 
hydrogen, taken to another place where you use it like using it in your 
car.
  The next chart shows the details on one of these possible 
alternatives, and that is ethanol. And on the right, we show there the 
energy balance in getting gasoline from fuel oil. And it shows there 
that you must start out with 1.23 million Btus of fossil energy to 
produce 1 million Btus. That is quite reasonable. You have got to drill 
for the oil. You have got to transport it. You have got to refine it. 
You have got to haul it to the service station. You have got to pump it 
out. That all takes energy, and so you put in 1.23 units and you get 
out 1 unit of energy.
  Now, when it comes to corn, to ethanol, which you get from corn here, 
you start with solar energy. So you would expect that there is going to 
be some contribution of solar energy. And this, by the way, I am told 
by some people, is quite optimistic because Dr. Pimental believes that 
the usual ways of producing ethanol use more energy than you get out of 
the ethanol because of all of the applications of fossil fuels to 
building the farm equipment, plowing the ground, putting the corn in, 
harvesting the corn, that if you account for all the fossil fuel 
inputs, he says with the usual techniques you use, you get less energy 
out of the ethanol than you put in growing the corn.
  But I think we will do better than that, and we may get to this goal, 
and that is, you put in .74 units of energy, and you get out one. Well, 
that is not a really big energy-profit ratio. You would probably never 
drill an oil well if that is all you got out of it. That is a very low 
energy-profit ratio. But it is one of the things that we will need to 
turn to.
  The bottom little pie chart here shows something that will stun most 
people. Notice the big purple, nearly half segment of that circle. That 
is the energy that goes into producing corn from natural gas producing 
the nitrogen fertilizer. Very few people know, Mr. Speaker, that 
essentially the only source today of nitrogen fertilizer is natural 
gas. When natural gas is gone, we are going to have to find another big 
energy source to produce nitrogen fertilizer.
  By the way, before we learned how to do that, the only source of 
nitrogen fertilizer were the barn yard manures. We still have those 
today, but they do not go very far with the enormous agricultural lands 
we have, and guano. Guano were the droppings of bats and birds over 
thousands of years in the tropical islands on the cliffs and the bat 
caves, and there was a generation ago a major industry of mining guano. 
If we wait another 10,000 years, there will be some more guano.
  If you look at this circle, you will see the contribution of oil and 
gas and natural gas to producing corn. It is hydrocarbon, very energy 
intensive. Almost literally, Mr. Speaker, the food you eat is gas and 
oil. If it were not for gas and oil, you would not be eating that food.
  The next chart kind of puts this challenge in perspective, and the 
analogy I like to use here is that we, in our country, are very much 
like the young couple that had their grandparents die and left them a 
big inheritance. And so they have established a lifestyle where 85 
percent of all the money they spend comes from their grandparents' 
inheritance, and only 15 percent comes from their earnings. And they 
look at the rate they are spending it and at the size of their 
grandparents' inheritance, and it is going to run out a long time 
before they retire.
  So obviously this young couple is going to do one or both of two 
things: either they are going to have to spend less money, or they are 
going to have to make more money. And I use that 85/15. Others will 
tell you it is 86/14, not quite as good as the 85/15, because this is 
exactly where we are in energy use in our country. Eighty-five percent 
of the energy we use comes from natural gas, today at the highest price 
ever, over $15, and oil and coal. And only 15 percent of it comes from 
other sources. A bit more than half of that 15 percent, 8 percent of 
it, comes from nuclear. It is 20 percent of our electricity, but only 8 
percent of our total energy production.
  As you drive home tonight, Mr. Speaker, every fifth house and every 
fifth business would be dark if it were not for the electricity 
produced by nuclear power. And here we have blown up the 7 percent of 
renewable energy. Now, as we run down the other side of Hubbert's Peak, 
and as we exhaust, as we surely will, in time, the fossil fuels in our 
world, this is what we will have to deal with, nuclear and renewables. 
Look at what these renewables are. Conventional hydro. Nearly half of 
it. We have tapped out in our country. We might get some microhydro, 
but the big stuff we have dammed up all the rivers we should have and 
maybe a few that we should not have.
  Second largest contributor: wood. That is the paper industry and the 
timber industry, wisely using what would otherwise be a waste product.
  And then burning waste. I mentioned that in a former chart, and that 
is 8 percent now. That is 8 percent of 7 percent. That is not a lot, by 
the way. That could grow and should grow.
  And then we get down to the things that we increasingly will have to 
rely on. Now, this is the 2000 chart, and things like solar and wind 
have been growing at 30 percent. Mr. Speaker, that doubles in about 
2\1/2\ years. It is four times bigger in 5 years. So this is 5 years 
later. So let us say it is four times bigger. So instead of being .07 
percent, that is what 1 percent of 7 percent is, is it not, .07 
percent, instead of being .07 percent, it is .28 percent. Big deal. A 
little over one-fourth of 1 percent.
  Now, eventually we will have to be getting a major proportion of our 
energy from such things as solar and wind and agricultural. Today they 
are trifling amounts. And it takes quite awhile to ramp these things up 
and a lot of investment. It takes investments of both time and energy 
and also money.
  The next chart, I think, is one that puts in perspective what we are 
talking about better than perhaps any other chart. And I want to look 
at the top here. The bottom of it, by the way, we simply, for a short 
time period, explode the petroleum and natural gas. They are joined 
here, and it is a little better to see them together. But this shows 
the history of the world from 1600s on, and it shows the Industrial 
Revolution that began with wood and we were making steel when we were 
using charcoal from wood.
  And then it shows what happened with coal and how much more energy on 
the ordinate here is quadrillion Btus of energy. Notice what happened 
when we found oil and gas. It exploded. That

[[Page 28151]]

is the result of exponential growth. That is 2 percent exponential 
growth.
  Now, it is very steep because we have really compressed the abscissa 
here. And the previous charts, we will show another one that shows it 
in a big spread out curve like this. But that is spreading out only a 
few years. If you expanded this abscissa, that curve would look like 
that.
  And by the way, the world's population has generally followed this. 
We started out with about a billion people, more or less here. And now 
we have 7 billion people.
  Mr. Speaker, we are about 100 to 150 years into the age of oil. It is 
probable that we are halfway through the age of oil. I would submit 
that when we found that incredible wealth under the ground, that we 
collectively, our country and all the other countries in the world, 
should have stopped and said, gee, what will we do with this? Now, this 
was incredible wealth. Let me give you a couple of examples of what 
this meant. One barrel of oil, the refined product which you can buy 
for less, about a hundred dollars, will give you the work output of 12 
people working all year for you. Imagine how far 1 gallon of gas or 
diesel fuel will carry your car and how long it would take you to pull 
your car or SUV or truck that far. You get some idea of the quality of 
energy, of the energy density in these fossil fuels.
  If you worked really hard all day long at manual labor, I will get 
more work out of an electric motor with less than 25 cents' worth of 
electricity. That is the quality of this wealth that we found. What we 
should have done is say, gee, what will we do with this, so that 
mankind, for now and for the future, will benefit most from this 
incredible wealth that we found under the ground. We did not do that. 
What we did, we collectively, the whole world, what we did was to pile 
in and exploit this just as quickly and irresponsibly as the kids who 
found the cookie jar.
  We really, Mr. Speaker, should have taken note--what will we do with 
this incredible wealth so that it will do the most good for the most 
people for the most time? In another 100, 150 years we will be through 
the age of oil, and 5,000 years of recorded history will be just a blip 
on this long screen. What will our world be like when we have run down 
the other side of Hubbert's Peak, when we have exhausted the natural 
gas, when we have converted the coal to gas and oil and used that?

                              {time}  2215

  What will we feed our people, 7 billion people now?
  The next chart shows some of these characteristics. This shows kind 
of the energy density quality. These are gigajoules per ton. A joule is 
a measure of energy. It is a scientific one that most people do not use 
in their usual discussions, but it shows here, we start with crude oil, 
and it gets better and better as we refine it. And then the things that 
we are going to have to replace it with, domestic refuge, brown coal, 
that will be gone. Straw, dung. We do not burn much dried dung in our 
country. In some parts of the world, they cook their meals and warm 
their houses with dried dung. Wood. Black coal, that will be gone. When 
we are through the age of oil, we will have used the coal. Ethanol, it 
does not look at all that bad here, does it? Way short of the energy 
density of these hydrocarbons from fossil fuels but better than most of 
these other things, many of which will be gone anyhow by that time. 
This speaks to the challenge that we have.
  Let us put the critics chart back up again. And the fourth one here, 
By the time we are close to peaking out on all of the types of 
hydrocarbon molecules which can be refined into oil, a host of 
competing fuel technologies will have overtaken hydrocarbons 
altogether, using technologies that no one can anticipate today.
  I hope he is right. I hope he is right. I also hope that everybody 
who has played the lottery today is going to win. Obviously, only one 
out of the millions who played it is going to win. And I think the odds 
of this happy scenario happening are roughly the same odds that you or 
I, and I do not play the lottery, but if I did, the odds of my winning 
the lottery. What could it possibly be?
  I would submit that we need to be very careful how quickly we exhaust 
the resources we have until we are sure what these miracle replacements 
are going to be. Once they are out there and definable and achievable, 
then, yes, okay. But short of that, we really need to husband what we 
have so that we can make this transition as smooth as possible.
  The next chart are some quotes that I would like to spend just a 
moment on because I think they are so significant. Again I would like 
to emphasize, this is a report that was funded by our Department of 
Energy, done by the very prestigious SAIC, Dr. Robert Hirsch, a real 
authority that headed this, and let me read what they said: World oil 
peaking is going to happen. No wishful thinking will avoid it. It is 
going to happen. World production of conventional oil will reach a 
maximum and decline thereafter. It happened in our country. King 
Hubbert predicted it. Why will it not happen in the world? It will 
happen in the world. The only question is, when it will happen? 
Predicting the peaking is extremely difficult because of geological 
complexities, measurement problems, pricing variations, demand, 
elasticity, political influences. Peaking will happen but the timing is 
uncertain. Most of the authorities believe that it will be within the 
next decade: Oil peaking presents a unique challenge. And then I 
emphasize here, The world, he says, has never faced a problem like 
this. And the first chart, it said, unprecedented challenges. Never 
have there been challenges like this. 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, as we just 
looked at, were gradual and evolutionary. Oil peaking will be abrupt 
and revolutionary, he says.
  In our closing moments, I would like to just show some of the things 
that they were doing. What they have done is to simplify this bell 
curve to make it a little triangle because they want to use that to 
depict the solutions that they are suggesting are possible. On the 
bottom here is an interesting one, and what it shows is that oil price 
spike hikes have not made any difference in the amount of oil that is 
available.
  This is the production of oil, and this is price spike hike. If 
making more profit because it sells for more would stimulate 
production, then one would have thought we would see a big production 
peak follow this. Notice we do not really see any big production peak 
following that.
  Now, they have simplified this bell curve, and the next chart shows 
the reason why. This is just a little schematic, and they have a number 
of alternatives that they could use to fill the gap. The gap is going 
up like this, and then it is going to fall off, and we would like it to 
keep on going up so we could keep using more and more, and these are 
things we would fill the gap with.
  The next chart shows what happens if we wait until it happens. Then 
we have a major, major economic problem because it takes quite a while 
to get these things going. If we anticipate it by 10 years, we have 
less of a problem but still a problem. To not have a meaningful 
problem, we must anticipate it by 20 years. Clearly, we have probably 
passed that point. By most people's reckoning, we have passed that 
point.
  The next chart is a little schematic that I think shows it very well. 
This, again, is a 2-percent curve. This is a schematic curve, and what 
it shows is a 2-percent increase in the rate at which we are using it, 
which has been the rate at which we are producing it. That will slow as 
we reach peak oil. And notice that the gap starts to occur before we 
reach peak oil.
  I would submit, Mr. Speaker, that what we do not want to do is to try 
to meet the challenge of filling that gap because, if we do, we only 
have a really sharp decline on the other side. What we really need to 
do is to depress our

[[Page 28152]]

use with conservation efficiency so that we have something to invest in 
the alternatives that we must invest in. With oil at $60 a barrel, 
obviously there is not as much as we would like to have or it would be 
cheaper.
  I would like to close by putting up again this chart which I think is 
so significant. This is kind of a global long-term look at the problem. 
This is where we are, about halfway through the age of oil. Now, we 
have been as a world and as a country, as a society, rather grossly 
irresponsible up to this time.
  Mr. Speaker, whether we like it or not, oil will peak. We will start 
down the other side. We will shift to the alternatives. That will be a 
much less traumatic transition if we plan for it. And my urging tonight 
is that we need in our country to address this problem with the kind of 
an overall commitment we had when we fought World War II, and I lived 
through that, with the kind of a technical commitment we had to putting 
a man on the moon and the kind of urgency we had in the Manhattan 
Project. Mr. Speaker, I think that if we have a national, an 
international program that has those elements in it, that we probably 
can have a relatively smooth landing. Minus that, it could be a very 
rough landing not just for us but for all of the world.
  Mr. Speaker, the great ingenuity of the American people cannot be 
harnessed, and I hope that we can challenge them so that we will meet 
this challenge and have a relatively smooth transition.

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