[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 4]
[House]
[Pages 4544-4550]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              OIL DEMANDS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Daniel E. Lungren of California). 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, in this first chart we have 
some headlines from The Washington Post just a month or so ago. These 
are headlines from just one day in The Washington Post. The Dow drops 
174 points driven, the article says, by economic damage from rising oil 
prices, the plunging dollar, and growing worries about consumer 
spending. It goes on to say that a recent oil price rise of 20 percent 
is continuing to crunch the profits of struggling airlines and is 
believed to be a factor in disappointing retail sales.
  Another headline: ``Dollar Slides Against the Euro and the Yen.'' And 
another headline: ``Consumer Confidence Slips in February.''
  Now, should we have had any indication that these were going to be 
the kinds of headlines that we have been reading in our paper recently? 
We need to go back a few years, as indicated on this next chart. Let us 
go back to the 1940s and the 1950s when a scientist by the name of M. 
King Hubbert, a geologist, was working for the Shell Oil Company. He 
was watching the discovery and the exploitation and final exhaustion of 
individual oil fields. He noticed that every oil field followed a very 
typical pattern. It was a little slow getting the oil out at first, and 
then it came very quickly and reached a maximum, and then it tailed off 
as it became more difficult to get the oil out of the ground.
  This followed a bell curve. Here is one of those bell curves. Now, 
bell curves are very familiar in science, and in life, for that matter. 
If we look at people and how tall they are, we will have a few people 
down around 4\1/2\ or 5 feet and some up to 7\1/2\ feet; but the big 
mass fall in the middle, clustered around 5\1/2\ to 6 feet.
  Looking at a yield of corn, a few farmers may get 50 bushels per 
acre, some may get 300, but the big mass today it is somewhere around 
200 bushels per acre for corn.
  Hubbert noticed when the bell curve reached its peak, about half of 
the oil had been exhausted from the field. Being a scientist, he 
theorized if you added up a lot of little bell curves, you would get 
one big bell curve, and if he could know the amount of reserves of oil 
in the United States, and he was doing this in the 1940s and early 
1950s, and could project how much more might be found, he could then 
predict when the United States would peak in its oil production.
  Doing this analysis, he concluded that we would peak in our oil 
production in 1970. This curve is what is known as Hubbert's Curve. The 
peak of the curve is what is known as Hubbert's Peak. Sometimes this is 
called the ``great rollover'' because when you get to the top, you roll 
over and start down the other side. It is frequently called ``peak 
oil.'' So peak oil for the United States occurred in 1970, and it is 
true that every year since then we have pumped less oil and found less 
oil. The big blue squares here are the actual and Members see they 
deviated a little from the theoretical as M. King Hubbert predicted, 
but not all that much.
  At the bottom, see the difference the big field in Alaska made, and 
see what that made in the down slope, that never increased production 
in our country. It just meant that we were not going down quite as 
fast. You can see that here on the curve. Notice that the Alaska oil 
production was not the typical bell curve. It should have been, but a 
couple of things meant it could not be. One was it could not flow at 
all until we had a 4-foot pipeline. So the fields were developed and 
they were waiting; then we got the pipeline on board, and it was filled 
with oil and oil started to flow, and Members see the rapid increase 
here. It could not flow any faster than through that 4-foot pipe, and 
so it levels off at the top. We have pumped probably three-fourths of 
the oil in Prudhoe Bay.
  Many people would like to open up ANWR. ANWR has considerably less 
oil than Prudhoe Bay, so the contribution will be significantly less. I 
want to note on this chart we also have the red curve, which is the 
theoretical curve for the former Soviet Union. It is a nice bell curve, 
peaking a little higher, they have more reserves than we do, and later 
because we entered the industrial age with vigor before the Soviet 
Union was quite there. Notice what happened when they came apart; 
notice how precipitously it fell here. After they got things organized, 
the fall stopped and now they are producing more oil. As a matter of 
fact, we might see a little upsurge in this; but the general trend is 
still going to be down.
  On the next chart, and we have here the same Hubbert Curve, but the 
abscissa is a little too long and the ordinate a little too compressed, 
so it is not the sharp peak that we saw before. That is the curve we 
saw before. It shows the Texas component, and it shows the rest of the 
United States;

[[Page 4545]]

and it also shows some natural gas liquids. We learned how to extract 
those a little later. So if you were plotting that as a bell curve, it 
would peak about here. It is little and then it is much, and then it 
tails off.
  This is the contribution of Alaska, and you can see this not going to 
be our salvation to pump ANWR because ANWR contains probably not even 
half as much as Prudhoe Bay. And notice the small contribution that 
Alaska made. And that is not a bell curve for the reason I mentioned 
before because we had to develop the fields and they waited for the 
pipeline, and then it would surge through the pipeline when it was 
developed. So you do not see the tail getting greater and tailing off.
  This is gulf oil. Remember the hullabaloo about the big finds of gulf 
oil that were going to solve our problem? That is what it did. There 
never was a moment in time between the big Alaska oil find and all of 
the pumping discovery and pumping in the gulf, there never was a moment 
in time when it decreased the fall in our country. The peak occurred, 
as you see here, about 1970.
  Now, the next chart shows what is happening worldwide.

                              {time}  2000

  The red curve here shows the actual discovery of oil. Notice that 
that peaked. There was a big find here that distorted the curve a 
little but if you rounded that off, you would have the typical bell 
curve. It started somewhere back here off the chart, then it peaks, and 
then it is downhill and it tails off. These are the discoveries. The 
last find there is simply an extrapolation. We have no idea where it is 
going.
  We are, by the way, very good at finding oil now. We use 3D seismic 
detection techniques. The world has drilled, I think, about 5 million 
oil wells and I think we have drilled about 3 million of them in this 
country, so we have a pretty good idea of where oil is.
  A couple of Congresses ago, I was privileged to chair the Energy 
Subcommittee on Science. One of the first things I wanted to do was to 
determine the dimensions of the problem. We held a couple of hearings 
and had the world experts in. Surprisingly from the most pessimistic to 
the most optimistic, there was not much deviation in what the estimate 
is as to what the known reserves are out there. It is about 1,000 
gigabarrels. That sounds like an awful lot of oil. But when you divide 
into that the amount of oil which we use, about 20 million barrels a 
day, and the amount of oil the rest of the world uses, about 60 million 
barrels a day, as a matter of fact, the total now is a bit over the 80 
million that those two add up to. About 83\1/2\, I think. If you divide 
that into the 1,000 gigabarrels, you come out at about 40 years of oil 
remaining in the world. That is pretty good. Because up until the 
Carter years, during the Carter years, in every decade we used as much 
oil as had been used in all of previous history. Let me repeat that, 
because that is startling. In every decade, we used as much oil as had 
been used in all of previous history. The reason for that, of course, 
was that we were on the upward side of this bell curve. The bell curve 
for usage, only part of it is shown on this chart. That is the green 
one down here, the bell curve for usage. Notice that we are out here 
now about 2005. Where is it going? The Energy Information Agency says 
that we are going to keep on using more oil. This green line just going 
up and up and up is a projection of the Energy Information Agency. But 
that cannot be true. That cannot be true for a couple of reasons. We 
peaked in our discovery of oil way back here in the late sixties, about 
1970. In our country it peaked much earlier than that, by the way. But 
the world is following several years behind us. And the area under this 
red curve must be the same as the area under the green curve. You 
cannot pump any more oil than you have found, quite obviously. If you 
have not found it, you cannot pump it. If you were to extend this on 
out where they have extended their green line, even if it turned down 
right there at the end of that green line, the area under the green 
curve is going to be very much larger than the area under the red 
curve. That just cannot be. We will see in some subsequent charts that 
we probably have reached peak oil.
  Let me mention that M. King Hubbert looked at the world situation. He 
was joined by another scientist, Colin Campbell, who is still alive, an 
American citizen who lives in Scotland. Using M. King Hubbert's 
predictive techniques, oil was predicted to reach a maximum in about 
1995, without perturbations. But there were some perturbations. One of 
the perturbations was 1973, the Arab oil embargo. Other perturbations 
were the oil price shocks and a worldwide recession that reduced the 
demand for oil. And so the peak that might have occurred in 1995 will 
occur later. How much later? That is what we are looking at this 
evening. There is a lot of evidence that suggests that if not now, then 
very quickly we should see world production of oil peak.
  What are the consequences? What are the consequences of this 
depletion? The remaining oil is harder to get. It requires greater 
energy investment, resulting in a lower return on energy invested. That 
is the energy-profit ratio, which is decreasing. When we started out, 
you put in one unit of energy and you could get 30 out. Then that fell 
off, and then we found a few more fields and we got really good at 
extracting oil with better techniques. It looked for a little while 
like it was going up, but look what happened. It falls off to where it 
would have come anyhow if this curve had simply gone down. This is an 
inevitable consequence of pumping a field.
  Lower profits are not the only concern. When more energy is required 
to extract it than is contained in the recovered oil, that is, when 
this ratio is less than 1, notice, we are over there at about 1984, we 
have got to get now another 20 years, I am not quite sure where we are 
now when you plot that day. We are getting very close to the unit it 
takes as much energy to get the oil out as you get out of the oil. It 
may still seem profitable from a monetary perspective, but when you are 
using more energy to get oil out of the ground than you are getting out 
of the oil, then clearly you need to leave it there when we reach that 
point. I mentioned the bump there was caused by a few more discoveries 
and particularly by increased efficiency in pumping the oil.
  What is the current U.S. status? We have only 2 percent, between 2 
and 3 percent, not really known for certain, but approximately 2 
percent of the known reserves of oil. We use 25 percent of the world's 
oil. By the way, we have about 8 percent of the world production. What 
that means is if we have only 2 percent of the reserves and 8 percent 
of the production, that means we are real good at pumping oil, does it 
not? That means we are pumping our reserves at roughly four times 
faster than the rest of the world. That means that this 2 percent will 
not stay 2 percent by and by because we are so good at pumping oil, we 
are going to be down to 1 percent of the known reserves in the world 
and we will still be using about 25 percent of the world's oil. We are 
now importing about two-thirds of that. At the Arab oil embargo we 
imported about one-third of that. So we are now importing, relatively, 
two times more oil, actual quantity much more than that, but relatively 
about two times more oil.
  Chart 6 shows us that more drilling just will not solve the problem. 
This is a very interesting chart. This shows the difference between the 
amount of oil that you are finding and the amount of oil that you are 
pumping. Notice from 1960 on until about 1980, declining for sure, but 
every year except for one we found more oil than we pumped. The yellow 
line up here is drilling. You remember the Reagan administration and 
all the emphasis on drilling because we knew that we were approaching 
this flipover point where we were going to be pumping more oil than we 
found and so there was a rationale that if you just give them a profit 
motive and you have the right incentives, tax and regulatory incentives 
and so forth, they will go out and they will dig more wells and they 
will find more oil. Sure as heck they went

[[Page 4546]]

out and dug more wells. But did they find any more oil? As a matter of 
fact, in 1982, more oil was used in looking for oil than the oil they 
found in 1982. Pretty consistently for every year after 1982, we have 
used more oil than we found. Today worldwide we are pumping at least 
six barrels of oil for every barrel that we find.
  Chart 7 shows that worldwide discoveries are repeating the U.S. 
pattern. This is a rough bell curve. You find a big find of oil and it 
is going to make a spike. This is average for 5 years. If you look at 
it on a year for year, it is really up and down as you find big 
reservoirs of oil. But generally it starts low and it goes up and it 
comes down. It follows roughly a bell curve. I would not pay too much 
attention to the figures on the ordinate here, because the area under 
this curve must equal just a little bit over 2,000 gigabarrels of oil. 
If I visually sum the area under this curve, it is going to equal 
something more, not frightfully more but something more than 2,000 
gigabarrels of oil which from other sources we know ought to be the 
total amount of oil under the sun. Notice that we are tailing off to 
something very low. It is unlikely that we are going to find big 
additional finds in the future. Again, we are very good at that. We 
have dug about 5 million wells worldwide. We have done a whole lot more 
than that explorations with detonations and seismic and 3D and 
computers and we are very good at looking at the kind of geology where 
you might find oil. There is just no real expectation that there are 
going to be big additional fields of oil found out there. This dropoff 
in discovery is really in spite of very improved technology for finding 
oil.
  Chart 8. This is a very interesting chart. It has nothing to do with 
time, because on the abscissa here, we have the number of wells that 
are drilled, the cumulative oil caps, and on the ordinate, we have the 
amount of oil that was found. For any relatively big field, here we are 
talking about 50 gigabarrels. Remember, there are about 2,000 
gigabarrels worldwide, so this is a meaningful part of the world 
reserves of oil. We see that that goes up and up and then it tails off. 
You cannot find what is not there. No matter how many more wells you 
drill, you are not going to find oil that is not there. The same 
pattern should be apparent on a world scale.
  Chart 9. This is a very interesting chart. It is a little too busy, 
but let me try to explain what is there. The oil companies for reasons 
of pricing and regulations and so forth have had the habit through the 
years of underreporting initially how much oil they found. Then later 
when it was appropriate to their license to produce more oil, they 
would report additional oil. They never found any additional oil, they 
simply reported oil they had found previously. By the way, you may have 
noted that three times in the last roughly 3 weeks, oil companies have 
admitted that their estimates of the reserves were exaggerated and have 
downscaled the reserves that they said were there. If you took the 
original reporting of the reserves, you might be able to construct a 
curve, a straight line curve which said we are just getting more and 
more. But if you backdated that to the actual discoveries, then you get 
this curve. This curve is asymtoting at a bit over 2,000 gigabarrels, 
which is about what the world's experts say had been there. We have now 
pumped about half of that. We have about 1,000 gigabarrels remaining.
  What now? Where do we go now? One observer, Matt Savinar, who has 
thoroughly researched the options, and this is not the most optimistic 
assessment, by the way, but may be somewhat realistic, he starts out by 
saying, Dear Readers, civilization as we know it is coming to an end 
soon. I hope not. This is not the wacky proclamation of a doomsday 
cult, apocalypse Bible sect or conspiracy theory society. Rather, it is 
a scientific conclusion of the best-paid, most widely respected 
geologists, physicists and investment bankers in the world. These are 
rational, professional, conservative individuals who are absolutely 
terrified by the phenomenon known as global peak oil.
  Why should they be terrified? Why should they be terrified just 
because we have reached the peak of oil production? Last year, China 
used about 30 percent more oil. India now is demanding more oil. As a 
matter of fact, China now is the second largest importer of oil in the 
world. They have passed Japan. When you look at how important oil is to 
our economy, you can understand the big concern if, in fact, we cannot 
produce oil any faster than we are producing it now and there are 
increasing demands, as there will be, for oil. In our country, for 
instance, we have a debt that we must service. It will be essentially 
impossible to service that debt if our economy does not continue to 
grow. So there are enormous potential consequences, which is why he 
says that these people are absolutely terrified by the phenomenon known 
as peak oil.
  What can we do to avert the kind of a catastrophe that he hints at 
with those words? We must not squander an opportunity. One is always 
reminded of Malthus. I am sure you have heard of him. He was looking at 
the increase in world population and he looked at our ability to 
produce food and he says, gosh, those two curves are going to cross 
because the world population was increasing faster than our ability to 
produce food and we are going to have mass starvation. That did not 
happen. The reason that did not happen was because Malthus could not 
have anticipated the green revolution, which, by the way, was made 
possible almost entirely, well, the plant science had a lot to do with 
it but better plants and better genes without the fertilizer to make 
them grow is not going to do you much good, so the green revolution was 
very largely the result of our intensive use of oil. Most people do not 
know it, but all of our nitrogen fertilizer is made from natural gas. 
You may have observed that when you have a thunderstorm in the 
summertime, your lawn is greener than when you have watered it.

                              {time}  2015

  That is because of what is known as poor man's fertilizer. The 
lightning combines some of the nitrogen so they can be carried down by 
the water and one's lawn is, in fact, greener after a thunderstorm than 
it is when they water it. We have kind of learned how to mimic 
lightning, and we now know how to make nitrogen fertilizer from gas. By 
the way, before we knew how to do that, the only sources of nitrogen 
fertilizer were barnyard manurers. If one is on the Eastern Shore with 
a lot of chickens, one could go a long way with that now in 
agriculture, could one not? But barnyard manurers would fertilize only 
a tiny percentage of the nitrogen needs of our plants.
  And other than that it was guano. My colleagues know what guano is. 
Guano is the droppings of bats or of birds on a tropical island, their 
droppings accumulating for thousands of years, and there was a major 
industry in sending ships around the world to tropical islands and 
getting the guano.
  We must not squander the opportunity that we have. Jevons Paradox 
becomes applicable here. Just a word about what Jevons Paradox is 
because I am going to mention it a time or two again. But Jevons 
Paradox says that frequently when one works to solve a problem, they 
really make the situation worse.
  Let me give one little example. Suppose there is a small businessman 
who owns a store. He is really concerned about peak oil, and he is 
concerned about energy, and he wants to do something. His little store 
is using $1,000 worth of electricity a month, and he decides that he 
can really cut that use. So he does several things. He gets a storm 
door. He puts on storm windows. He insulates more. He turns down the 
thermostat, and he asks his workers to wear sweaters. And he is 
successful because he reduces his electric bill from $1,000 to $500. 
Almost no matter what he does with that $500, he has just made the 
situation worse by doing that.
  Let me explain. One of the things that he may do, and it is a natural 
thing for a small businessperson to do, he may decide, I could hire 
more people and have a bigger business if I expanded. And so now he 
will expand, and

[[Page 4547]]

he will still be using as much energy. Or if he decides to invest his 
money, if he invests his money in the bank, the bank will lend his 
money out five or six times, and at least some of those loans will be 
to small business people. And what the small business people will do is 
to create jobs and use energy. So the store owner is concerned about 
energy and the environment and being a responsible citizen, cutting his 
use of electricity, because everybody did not do it, because only he 
did it and nobody took advantage of the opportunity that was presented 
because he used less energy, he really contributed to the problem.
  Because after he expanded his business, he would be using still more 
energy. Or if the money was lent out by the bank and small businesses 
created more jobs and they used more energy, the situation would have 
just gotten worse.
  All that the ``green revolution'' did was temporarily extend the 
caring capacity of the world. If we think about that, ultimately if we 
cannot do something about it to stabilize it, the green revolution just 
made matters worse. In the meantime we have all eaten very well in 
spite of the fact that about a fifth of the world will go to bed hungry 
tonight; but on the average, we are eating very well, and because of 
the average American, we are eating maybe too well.
  But what we have done with the green revolution is to permit the 
population of the world to double and double again. So if we cannot now 
make sure that we stabilize population and bring it to the point where 
it can be supported by a technology where there is not what was 
ordinarily perceived as an inexhaustible supply of oil, there will 
simply be more people out there to be hungry and starved if we cannot 
meet their needs. So we have got to make sure that whatever we do to 
solve this problem that Jevons Paradox does not contribute.
  Chart 10, this shows that this growth cannot be sustained forever. 
The greatest power in the universe, Albert Einstein was asked this 
question: Dr. Einstein, you have now discovered the ability to release 
energy from the atom. We get just incredible amounts of energy from the 
atom. A relatively small amount of fuel in one of our big submarines 
will fuel it for 33 years now. Enormous energy density. And they asked 
him, Dr. Einstein, what is the most energy-intensive thing in the 
world? He said, ``It is compound interest.''
  That is what we have here in this exponential curve. And by the way, 
we, and when I say ``we,'' I mean the world, have been using oil as if 
our economy could just continue to grow on this unlimited exponential 
curve. Whether it is 2 percent a year or 5 percent a year or near 10 
percent, which is what China has been growing in the last few years, we 
are still on an exponential curve. Not quite so steep if we are on a 
lower growth rate. It goes up and up forever and ever.
  Obviously, there is not an inexhaustible amount of oil in the world; 
so we have the exhaustible resource, which is this lower curve. It 
reaches a peak, which, if not now, shortly. Oil, as the Members may 
have noticed, is $54 or $55 a barrel. I saw the other day one future 
had sold for $100 a barrel, and the experts are saying we are probably 
going to see $60 before we see $50. We will wait and see.
  The third curve here is the renewable resource curve. Do not be 
confused by the size of these curves. They are simply placed here so 
that lines would not cross other lines. But in actual practice, the 
renewable resource curve is likely to be nowhere near the peak of the 
exhaustible resource curve, energy.
  Let me give a little example of what the problem is and why this is 
almost certainly true. One barrel of oil, 42 gallons of oil, equals the 
productivity of 25,000 manhours. That is the equivalent of having 60 
dedicated servants that do nothing but work for someone. We can get a 
little better real-life example of this. A gallon of gas will drive a 
3-ton SUV, and some of those are better than others, and let us say it 
takes it 20 minutes, which some will but most will not. Most are around 
10. But let us say one gallon of gas will take a 3-ton SUV 20 miles at 
60 miles an hour down the road. That is just one little gallon of gas, 
which, by the way, is still cheaper than water. We pay more for water 
in the grocery store than we pay for gas at $2 a gallon at the pump, 
added up.
  How long would it take one to push their 3-ton SUV the equivalent of 
60 miles an hour, 20 miles down the road? To get some idea of the 
energy density in these fossil fuels, there is just nothing out there 
in the alternatives that have anything like this energy density. There 
are some potentials, nuclear, and we will talk about those in a little 
bit. But of the general renewables, there is nothing out there with 
that kind of density. So this curve is likely to be much lower than 
this curve; and notice that if it is, in fact, going to be renewable, 
it cannot go to an unrealistic height. There is only so much wood to 
cut. Easter Island had that experience. When they cut the last tree, 
they totally changed the ecology.
  The Bible talks about the large clusters of grapes and the honey and 
so forth that they found when the spies went out. That now is a desert. 
The Cedars of Lebanon, the grand Cedars of Lebanon that built the 
temple, that is now largely a desert. Why is it a desert? Because they 
cut the trees, they changed the environment, they changed the climate. 
So obviously this line has to be a reasonable sustainable level. It 
just cannot go on forever.
  The challenge, then, is to reduce consumption ultimately to a level 
that cannot be sustained indefinitely without succumbing to Jevons 
Paradox.
  How do we buy time, the time that we will need to make the transition 
to sustainability? Obviously, there are only two things that we can do 
to buy time. One is to conserve, and the other is to be more efficient. 
And the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Gilchrest) mentioned our 
increasing efficiency. We have done a great job. Our refrigerators 
today are probably twice as efficient as they were 20 or 30 years ago. 
But instead of a little refrigerator, we have a big one. Instead of 
one, we may have two. So I will bet we are using as much electricity in 
our refrigeration as we ever used.
  Conservation, we can do that. Remember several years ago when there 
were brownouts, blackouts in California and we were predicting, boy, 
the next year is really going to be rough? Do the Members know why it 
was not and we did not see any headlines about blackouts in California? 
Because knowing that there was a problem, the Californians, without 
anybody telling them they had to, voluntarily reduced their electricity 
consumption by 11 percent. That is pretty significant. And that avoided 
the rolling blackouts or brownouts.
  And, finally, we must commit to major investments in alternatives, 
especially as efficiencies improve. This must ultimately lead to the 
ability to do everything within the capability of renewable resources. 
If we have got a solar breeder, and this shows a picture of a solar 
breeder. That, by the way, is about 5 miles from my home. It was built 
by Solarex, and it is a sign of the times. Mr. Speaker, this is now 
owned by BP. They know that oil is not forever. They are now the 
world's second largest producer of solar panels.
  A few years ago, the largest buyer of solar panels in the world, and 
I do not know if that is true today, but a few years ago it was Saudi 
Arabia. Why would Saudi Arabia, with the most oil in the world, be the 
biggest purchaser of solar panels in the world? The reasons are very 
simple. These are not dumb people, and they figured out that solar 
panels were better for them in producing electricity than oil because 
they had widely distributed communities that were very small. Electrons 
in a wire are very different than oil in a pipeline. Put a gallon of 
oil in a pipeline up at Prudhoe Bay, and a gallon will come out where 
it goes on the ship. If we put electrons in a line which is long 
enough, nothing will come out in the other end. It is called line loss.
  And they knew that in their small communities, widely distributed, 
with the enormous line losses they had from big plants, that they would 
be better off with distributed production.

[[Page 4548]]

  By the way, just a hint to our people who are concerned with homeland 
security, the more distributed production we have, the less vulnerable 
we are going to be to terrorist attacks on our power infrastructure.
  Transition to sustainability will not happen if left applying market 
forces alone. Everyone must be part of the effort or Jevons Paradox 
will prevail. If only our country tries to do it and nobody else helps, 
we will just put off the day when we must make the transition, and it 
will be even more difficult. The market will, indeed, signal the 
arrival of peak oil. To wait until it does, however, is like waiting 
until we see a tsunami: by then it may be too late to do anything.
  We now are doing a lot of talking here in the Congress and 
fortunately across the country about Social Security, and it is a big 
problem. But I tell the Members if the problem of Social Security is 
equivalent to the tidal wave produced by the hurricane, then this peak 
oil problem is equivalent to the tsunami. The impact and the 
consequences are going to be enormously greater than the impact and the 
consequences of Social Security or Medicare or those two put together.

                              {time}  2030

  It will take a sustained, conscious, coordinated national and even 
international, effort. If everybody is not working together and buying 
time by conserving and being efficient and using wisely that time we 
bought, then all we do is put off the inevitable.
  The hydroelectric and nuclear power industries did not arise 
spontaneously from market forces alone. They were the product of a 
purposeful partnership of public and private entities focused on the 
public good. This is what we have to do relative to alternatives.
  As I mentioned, California solved their energy crisis by voluntarily 
reducing their demand for electricity. Time, capital and energy 
resources are all finite. We have only so much time until it would be 
too late to avoid a real problem. Capital is limited and energy 
resources are certainly limited.
  This time it will not be like the seventies. The big difference 
between now and the seventies is that in the seventies, we were just 
going up this curve, we were nowhere near the top of the curve, so 
there was always the ability to expand, to surge. If, in fact, we are 
now at peak oil, there is no such ability remaining.
  Is there any reason to remain optimistic or hopeful? Let me go back 
to Matt Savinar, that not-too-optimistic journalist. ``If what you mean 
is there any way technology or the market or brilliant scientists or 
comprehensive government programs are going to hold things together or 
solve this for me or allow for business to continue as usual, the 
answer is no. On the other hand, if what you really mean is is there 
any way that I still can have a happy, fulfilling life, in spite of 
some clearly grim facts, the answer is yes. But it is going to require 
a lot of work, a lot of adjustments, and probably a bit of good fortune 
on your part.''
  What now? Well, what we need to do now clearly is to buy time, and we 
buy that, as I mentioned, with efficiency and conservation. This will 
keep energy prices affordable. If demand continues to increase and 
output cannot increase, energy prices are going through the ceiling.
  So we have got to reduce demand so that prices do not get so high 
that it is impossible to invest the capital necessary to develop the 
alternatives, using existing conventional technologies to make the 
transition as new technologies are developed.
  We must use it wisely. If we do not use it wisely, and I have talked 
about Jevons Paradox several times, we have got to make investments in 
efficient, sustainable technologies, further reduce requirements for 
energy in any form, making smaller systems feasible which reduce both 
initial and operating costs.
  The benefits are enormous. Additional benefits include business 
opportunities, lots of business opportunities we do not even dream of. 
Look at the business opportunities created by putting a man on the 
moon. I have 200-some companies in Maryland alone which are there only 
because of technology breakthroughs in putting a man on the moon.
  That same thing could happen if we had a Manhattan type project 
focusing on renewables, potential worldwide markets, if we are the 
leader, and we have every reason to be the leader because we have the 
biggest problem. We can develop worldwide markets, domestic job 
creation and environmentally benign technologies with potential to 
reduce and or eliminate pollution. We could be a real role model.
  We are, as I mentioned, less than 5 percent of the world's 
population, and we use 25 percent of the world's energy. I was in 
Europe a month or so ago, and their comment was somewhere between anger 
and disdain. ``You are still only paying $2 a gallon for gasoline in 
your country.'' It is $5.50 or $6.00 a gallon there. And they are not 
unmindful that this one person in 22 in the world is using 25 percent 
of the world's energy. We have a real opportunity to be a role model.
  Let me put up the last chart. This is potential alternative 
solutions. For what time we have remaining, let me ask my colleague, 
the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Gilchrest) to join us as we talk about 
this.
  I have only have some of the potential solutions here. I just want to 
go down this list and look at these. There may be some others. The 
gentleman mentioned hydrogen from the ocean. That is certainly one.
  There are some finite resources here, ones we have not maximally 
exploited here, and some renewable resources here, and we want to spend 
another whole hour talking about this, because there are a lot of 
things to talk about in these resources. But almost none of these have 
the density of energy that we find in fossil fuels.
  There are tar sands in Canada, there is oil shale in this country, 
but it takes an awful lot of energy to get energy out of those. You may 
not have much more than a one-and-a-half to one. I have heard it takes 
six barrels of oil to get one net barrel of oil out of these tar sands 
and oil shale. There is an awful lot there, but there are considerable 
environmental costs and enormous economic costs to develop it.
  Mr. GILCHREST. If the gentleman will yield, another analogy I heard 
recently about the efforts to bring out ever-increasing and diminishing 
oil reserves and how that simply is not going to work for sustaining 
our energy needs, this particular physicist gave an analogy that 
compared the oil to a lion in Africa taking the energy of catching two 
gazelles to catch one gazelle. How long would that lion last? It takes 
the energy of catching two gazelles to only catch one, but he needs it 
to sustain himself, and that simply is not going to work.
  I want to compliment the gentleman from Maryland, and I would like to 
be a part of the extra hour that we will do maybe this week to show 
what the alternatives are, simply because our energy requirements are 
increasing, they are not decreasing, and they will continue to 
increase.
  Political parties are not going to let the grid go cold, but what do 
we do when we rely on oil and natural gas as the predominant energy 
source for this country? We have to simply find alternatives.
  If I could just say briefly, there are two problems with our 
dependence on oil, and the gentleman has laid those out exceptionally 
well tonight. Part of the first problem is trade deficits and national 
security because of our oil dependence. When the price goes up, because 
we do not have most of the reserves, when oil peaks, we have no control 
over that. There will never be a decrease in demand. There will always 
be an increase in demand, no matter what happens, and our energy hunger 
is gargantuan.
  The other problem with our oil dependence is that we are burning 
fossil fuel. We are returning to the atmosphere carbon that has not 
been there in this amount for millions of years, and what we are 
burning in decades it took the natural processes millions of years to 
lock away.
  One other comment about letting the market forces deal with this 
fairly

[[Page 4549]]

eminent problem. The global marketplace deals with the CEOs that are 
rightly so in the business to make a quick profit. The international 
marketplace is when nations get together, discuss an issue and they 
find mutual benefit to these vast problems. Vast solutions are 
available through what the gentleman has described so well tonight.
  Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, of course 
the real challenge is to have everybody agree on what the facts are. I 
suspect a big percentage of the people that might read or listen to 
what we say this evening had not even heard of peak oil.
  We really had about 30 years warning that this was going to happen. 
When M. King Hubbert predicted oil would peak in this country in 1970 
and it did, and 5 years later, certainly by 10 years later we knew 
absolutely he was right, because we were well down on the curve 10 
years later, we should have had some hint that he probably was right, 
he and Colin Campbell were probably right about world production? We 
paid no attention to that.
  As a matter of fact, the people that were talking about this until 
very recently have been quickly relegated to the lunatic fringe. If I 
had been up here 3 or 4 years ago talking about this, someone may want 
to relegate the two of us this evening to the lunatic fringe.
  But I think the evidence is out there. I think the evidence is out 
there, and the marketplace is saying that it is out there, because oil 
is now at $54 or $55 a barrel, they are saying we are going to see $60 
before we see $50. I saw one future that was $100 a barrel.
  By the way, at $100 or $200 a barrel, tar sands and oil shale become 
somewhat competitive, but with enormous costs. They will be positive, 
we will get a little more out than we put in, but not the kind of 
energy we are now using.
  Coal, we have a lot of coal. China has a lot of coal. We now use coal 
primarily in this country for producing electricity. It is very dirty. 
Our environmental requirements now, there has not been a new coal plant 
in a long while, it is all natural gas. It is a real pity. Oil and 
natural gas are, in a very real sense, too good to burn. They are the 
feedstock for an enormous petrochemical industry. I mentioned only the 
fertilizer that grows our crops and the pesticides we make from oil. We 
live in a plastic world, and all of that plastic is made from oil.
  Now, it is true that you can also use biomass and so forth to do some 
of that, but let us remember that we are just on the verge of not being 
able to feed the world. Tonight about one-fifth of the world will go to 
bed hungry. We we are not going to bed hungry in this country, not by a 
long shot, and we are living very high on the food chain. The time will 
come when you will not be able to eat the pig that ate the corn, 
because there is at least 10 times as much energy in the corn that the 
pig ate as you are going to get out of the pig by eating him. So we can 
certainly do a lot of by living lower on the food chain.
  Mr. GILCHREST. If the gentleman would yield for a second, first of 
all, I want to compliment the gentleman on this fascinating factual 
presentation which leads me to what I want to say.
  The gentleman said something earlier about finding solutions to the 
problem is going to be similar to the Manhattan Project or similar to 
placing a man on the moon within a decade when President Kennedy made 
that statement, and it is that kind of leadership from this Congress, 
from the administration, to incentivize, to create the kind of 
inspiration from the general public, to put these forces together to 
make it all work.
  Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, but now we 
must do it on a global basis, because of Jevons Paradox, if all the 
world does not cooperate, we will not get there. Had we paid attention 
to M. King Hubbert and not relegated him to the lunatic fringe, and he 
was right as evidence indicates on his prediction from 1970, had we 
paid attention to him we would have had at least 20 years headstart, 
and then we could have done it alone in this country because we are so 
big and use so much of the world's energy.
  Before we leave coal, we are going to come back to this and spend 
another hour with a lot of detail on this, but someone said there are 
500 years of coal, that is not true there is maybe 250, at present use 
rates. But as oil becomes harder and harder to find, we are going to 
turn more and more to coal, and that 70 years with enormous 
environmental penalty will shortly become a relatively few years. That 
is not forever. But we will be leaning on coal more than in the past 
nuclear.
  Three ways we can get nuclear energy. For one of them we are home 
free, and that is fusion. We send a little less than $300 million a 
year on that. I would like to spend more if there was the 
infrastructure out there to support it, because if we get there, we are 
home free.
  But I kind of think that hoping to solve our energy problems with 
fusion is a bit like you or me hoping to solve our personal financial 
problems by winning the lottery. That would be real nice. I think the 
odds are somewhere near the same. I am about as likely to win the 
lottery as we are to come to economically feasible fusion.
  I hope I am wrong. Frequently my hopes and my anticipations are 
different. My anticipation is we are not going to get there because of 
the enormous engineering challenges. My hope is I am wrong and we are 
going to get there.
  Two other ways to get energy from nuclear. One is the light water 
reactor, which is all we have in this country. By the way, tonight when 
you go home, every fifth home and every fifth business would be dark if 
we did not have nuclear. It produces 20 percent of all of our 
electricity. But there is not all that much fissionable uranium in the 
world, so we are not going to get there with light water reactors.
  France produces about 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear. 
They have a lot of breeder reactors. They do what the name implies, 
they make more fuel than they use, with big problems, in enrichment, 
shipping it around, squirreling away the products for a quarter of a 
million years. That presents enormous challenges to us.
  So there is the potential here in nuclear, but a lot of problems 
involved with it. It is not just that simple. By the way, it takes a 
lot of oil to build a nuclear power plant.

                              {time}  2045

  At some point, you pass the point of no return where there is not 
enough readily available high-quality fossil fuels to support our 
present economy while we make the investment we have got to make to 
transition to these renewables. And then we come to true renewables: 
solar, wind, geothermal, ocean energy. All of these suffer.
  By the way, I am a big supporter of these. I had the first hybrid 
electric car in Maryland. I had the first one in the Congress. I have a 
vacation home that is off the grid and totally powered by solar. And I 
am going to put in a wind machine. I am a big supporter of this.
  But the energy density here is very low. And it is intermittent. It 
takes a lot of solar panels to produce the electricity that you use in 
your home. It takes 12 of them to power your ordinary refrigerator just 
as an example. So those are real potential, and they are growing. Wind 
machines now produce electricity at 3\1/2\ cents a kilowatt hour. That 
is getting competitive. A whole lot of them in California. They are in 
West Virginia. We are putting some up on Backbone Mountain in western 
Maryland.
  Boy, if we could get down there to geothermal we would have it, would 
we not?
  There is not a single chimney in Iceland because they do not need 
them. They have got geothermal. They have a little bit of it in the 
West. But for most of the world that molten core is far too deep for us 
to tap.
  Mr. GILCHREST. If the gentleman would yield just for a second, I am 
sure he knows, but the general public, I do not think realizes it is 
not necessary to be sitting right on top of a volcanic area, an 
earthquake zone to get geothermal energy. We on the Eastern Shore of 
Maryland have a number of schools that are actually providing

[[Page 4550]]

heat for those schools from geothermal energy. Some of these things are 
sort of a hidden secret. But it is the classical conventional wisdom 
that keeps us from exploring some of these things a little bit further. 
And I think the gentleman is bringing those out tonight.
  Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Is this tying the school to the molten 
core, or is it simply using a heat pump and exchanging, not with the 
air? What you are trying to do in the winter-time is cool the air and 
what you are trying to do in the summer time is heat the air.
  Mr. GILCHREST. It is actually bringing water up from the surface, 
from the subsurface. The water is much warmer further down.
  Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. It is indeed. But you still have to have 
energy to use that. You are much more efficient using a heat pump that 
is tied to the ground, to groundwater than it is to the cold air in the 
winter and the hot air in the summer. If you are thinking about what 
you are trying to do is to cool the cold air in the winter-time and to 
heat the hot air in the summertime. And obviously ground water is very 
much better in both seasons than either the air in the winter or the 
cold, the hot air in the summer or the cold air in the winter.
  Ocean energy. You know, it takes an enormous amount of energy to lift 
the ocean 2 feet. That is roughly what the Moon does in the tides, is 
it not? But the problem with that is energy density.
  There is an old adage that says what is everybody's business is 
nobody's business. And the corollary to that in energy is if it is too 
widely distributed, you probably cannot make much of it. And we have 
really tried to harness the tides. In some fjords in Norway where they 
have 60-foot tides you put a bar there, when it runs in you trap it and 
then you run it out through a turbine. When it is running out, you can 
get some energy from it. And there is potential there, a lot of 
potential energy. But you know it is very dispersed. We have a hard 
time capturing that energy.
  I suspect that our hour is about up, and this is maybe a good place 
to end. We are going to come back and spend another hour looking at 
agriculture, enormous opportunities from agriculture. But let me remind 
the gentleman that we are just barely able to feed the world now. And 
if we start taking all of this biomass off the field, what is going to 
happen to the tilth of our soil, to the organic matter in our soil, 
which is essential to the availability of nutrients in the soil by the 
plant. So there are lots of challenges here. There are lots of 
opportunities here. And we will spend another hour talking about them. 
Thank you very much. And I yield back, Mr. Speaker.

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