[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 6]
[House]
[Pages 8461-8465]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  2320
                                PEAK OIL

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Dent). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 4, 2005, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Bartlett) 
is recognized until midnight.
  Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, several weeks ago I read a 
treatise written by Matt Savinar, and I was galvanized by his 
introduction. Let me read it.
  ``Dear reader,'' he begins, ``civilization as we know it is coming to 
an end soon. This is not the whacky proclamation of a doomsday cult, 
apocalypse Bible prophesy sect, or conspiracy theory society. Rather, 
it is the 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 a phenomenon known as global peak oil.''
  Mr. Speaker, in the weeks since I read this, I have checked with a 
large number of experts in this area across the country and indeed 
around the world. He could be right. He will be right unless we 
appropriately address this big challenge which faces the world and 
particularly faces the United States, and that is what we will be 
talking about in our Special Order this evening.
  I have been joined by the gentleman from the eastern shore of 
Maryland (Mr. Gilchrest), one of my colleagues who shares a concern in 
this area of energy, and I yield to the gentleman.
  Mr. GILCHREST. Mr. Speaker, I am only going to speak for just a 
couple of minutes because the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Bartlett) 
has a fascinating story to tell, one that richly deserves everybody's 
attention.
  But, just briefly, I want to thank the gentleman for yielding to me.
  The gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Bartlett) will talk about energy, 
peak oil. As the demand increases enormously, the supply of the fossil 
fuel that we are using continues to decrease. We know that energy is 
power, and energy is what drives the Nation's economy. And we have 
assumed for a long time, for decades anyway, that energy supplies have 
a bottomless well. And that is correct. The energy source at the bottom 
of the well is bottomless. It is endless. But what is at the bottom of 
that well is not oil. It is not even natural gas. It is not coal. What 
lies at the bottom of the bottomless well is our intellect, our logic, 
our knowledge, our know-how.
  We used to light our homes with whale oil. They did not stop lighting 
homes because we ran out of whales, thank goodness; but we transitioned 
to a number of other things. We used to use just wood all over the 
world, and thank goodness we transitioned from wood to coal because we 
were tearing our forests down, and there are a lot better uses for wood 
than to burn that wood.
  We transitioned for our transportation needs and many other needs 
from coal to oil, and oil is a lot cleaner and it is a lot more 
efficient. Then we went from oil and we found that natural gas is 
cleaner yet and more efficient than oil. We also began to realize that 
coal has more hydrogen than wood. Oil has more hydrogen in its content 
than coal. Natural gas has more hydrogen than oil. The transition 
through our energy sources has not come about because we ran out of 
those energy sources. It has come about because we got a little 
smarter. Our intellect, our quest for knowledge, our curiosity about 
something that is better overtook the status quo.
  And when the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Bartlett) talks about peak 
oil, not only do we need to move away from the status quo when we hear 
his words about fossil fuel; it is essential. There is a sense of 
urgency to move away. In all our measurements of oil or natural gas, 
whenever one looks at a heater in their home, whether it is their oil 
furnace, a Carison heater or whatever it is, it is measured in Btus.
  I want to show a number. This is a 1 with 15 zeros. That is 1 
quadrillion. In 1910 we used 7 quadrillion Btus in the United States. 
In 1954 we used 35 quadrillion Btus, energy demand increase. Right now 
we use 100 quadrillion Btus, and that is not slowing down.
  What we need in this country is logic and intellect to move us away 
from an energy source that has now lost its usefulness for a number of 
reasons. It is putting carbon dioxide into our atmosphere faster than 
we have seen that infusion of carbon dioxide in the last 400,000 years, 
and our supply is diminishing quickly as our demand is increasing even 
faster.
  There are a number of energy sources. The gentleman from Maryland 
(Mr. Bartlett) will talk about some of them. We will have these on a 
number of occasions. We are looking at nuclear. We are looking at 
solar. We are looking at wind. We are looking at hydrogen. We are 
looking at a number of alternatives. But before we have the technology 
to move into those alternatives for energy security, which means energy 
independence, the transition has got to be vastly improved efficiency 
for oil, for natural gas, to move into biofuels, and I am not talking 
about ethanol, which is corn which will feed the world. I am not 
talking about biodiesel, which is soy beans, which is used to feed the 
world. What I am talking about are other sources like certain

[[Page 8462]]

grass or poplar trees, which farmers can grow, which they can use to 
produce.
  So peak oil, the transition to a new energy source, has got to come 
now. We cannot wait a decade. It is vastly important.
  I want to thank the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Bartlett) for 
yielding to me and I urge the Speaker to listen to the words of the 
gentleman from Maryland.
  Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from Maryland 
(Mr. Gilchrest) was talking about growth in the use of energy; and I 
have here some curves, some exponential curves. Ordinarily, when people 
think about growth, they may think about a straight line. And on the 
bottom here it shows the extrapolation of 2 percent growth starting at 
this point. If it is a straight line, it would look like that. But that 
is not 2 percent growth because every year we are growing something 
less than 2 percent. To be 2 percent growth, one has got to grow 2 
percent more than they were the last year, and that is called 
exponential growth, and this is a 2 percent growth curve for 
exponential growth, just 2 percent.
  The next curve here is a 4 percent exponential growth curve and then 
5 percent. And I put on here the growth curve that China has been 
following, and that is a 10 percent growth curve. In just 7 years, if 
they are growing at 10 percent, they double. They double again in the 
next 7 years; so in just 14 years, they are four times bigger. They 
double again in the next 7 years so that at 21 years it is eight times 
bigger. That is why this curve is so sharp.
  China is now following this growth curve. It is very difficult for 
one's economy to grow at 10 percent without their energy use growing at 
somewhere near 10 percent. So we need to keep that in mind as we go 
through the charts that are going to follow this, that China is growing 
at this rate. The world, by the way, grew last year at 5 percent. We 
grew probably a bit over 2 percent in this country. Of course, we were 
way ahead to start with; so with our 2 percent growth, we are still way 
out in front of everybody else in terms of the amount of energy we use.

                              {time}  2330

  As a matter of fact, the next chart shows some figures which alarmed 
30 of the leading figures in our country: Jim Woolsey and McFarland and 
Frank Gaffney and 27 others who wrote a letter to the President just a 
few weeks ago, and they noted to the President that we have only two 
percent of the world's oil reserves. By the way, from that two percent, 
we are generating eight percent of the world's oil. And what that 
means, of course, is that we are getting four times as much oil 
relatively out of each of our wells as the world gets out of their 
average wells, so we are really good at pumping oil. In fact, we are so 
good at pumping oil that just recently, the Saudis came here to find 
out how we do it, how we get out those last dribs and drabs from our 
oil reservoirs, because we have been doing this for a very long time. 
We represent a bit less than 5 percent of the world's population, one 
person in 22 in the world, but we consume 25 percent of the world's 
energy, and we are importing about two-thirds of that. And, as the 
President himself said, a lot of that oil comes from countries that do 
not even like us.
  These 30 people, about half of them were retired generals and 
admirals. There were several retired secretaries of previous 
administrations. These were really the leaders in America that wrote to 
the President: Mr. President, this is an unacceptable national security 
risk that we have only two percent of the world's oil reserves and we 
use 25 percent of the world's oil, and we import two-thirds of that. By 
the way, that is up from about one-third that we imported during the 
Arab oil embargo. We peaked in 1970. As a matter of fact, the next 
chart shows when we peaked and we can get a better idea of this.
  To explain how this curve got here, I have to go back about six 
decades. It was in the 1940s and 1950s, a scientist at the Shell Oil 
Company named M. King Hubbert was watching the exploitation and 
exhaustion of oil fields, and he noted that each of those fields 
followed a bell curve. The oil came out very rapidly at first and then, 
when it reached a peak, at which time he noted about half of the field 
had been pumped, and then it stands to reason the last oil out of the 
field is going to be harder to get, so there was now a downslope. So in 
1956 he kind of guessed at the additional fields that we were going to 
find in this country, and he mathematically calculated when we should 
peak, and he thought that would be in the early 1970s, and he made this 
prediction in 1956. As a matter of fact, we did peak in 1970.
  Now, his curve is the smooth curve here, his projected curve, and he 
did that back in 1956, and the data points here, the rougher curve, the 
actual data points which fall remarkably near his curve, Prudhoe Bay, 
the Alaska oil, that occurred after we were already on the down slope 
of what is called Hubbert's Peak here, and we see what Prudhoe Bay did. 
And then we are going to go to a chart just after this that shows the 
different places we get oil from in our country.
  The red curve here shows Russia, and when the Soviet Union was 
falling apart, they had more oil than we, so they peaked higher. When 
the Soviet Union was falling apart, they did very poorly and, as a 
matter of fact, there is now a little secondary peak, here is a 
recovered one, but it is on down; the first peak was considerably 
higher than the second peak.
  The second chart shows where we get our oil from. A great deal of it 
came from Texas. I saw some early photographs of some of the oil fields 
in Texas, and I will tell my colleagues, the oil derricks were about as 
close together as trees in a forest, just an incredible bonanza of 
derricks down there getting this oil out of the ground. The rest of the 
United States is the big area here, natural gas liquids, we have 
learned how to liquefy natural gas, and now that is supplementing the 
petroleum.
  There are two parts of this curve that I want to pay special 
attention to. One of them is Alaska here, that is Prudhoe Bay. And 
notice that it was just a little blip in the downslope here from 
Prudhoe Bay, we are still going down. It delayed it just a little; it 
never got back to the peak production in 1970. By the way, we are now 
sliding down this curve and we produce about half as much oil now as we 
did in 1970.
  Mr. Speaker, I am sure that my colleagues can remember all of the 
hullabaloo about the enormous finds of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. That 
was going to solve our energy problems for the foreseeable future. What 
that turned out to be is this little yellow here. That is all there was 
to it. And again, it did not bring us back to where we were in 1970; we 
are still sliding down Hubbert's Peak.
  I would like to come back to the Alaska oil for just a moment. We are 
now talking about going into ANWR. It really does not matter whether 
one is for going into ANWR or one thinks that is a pristine wilderness 
that we should not drill in, because the amount of oil in ANWR is 
probably not more than half of this. Even if it were that much, it is 
not going to come on line; the chairman of the Committee on 
Transportation, the gentleman from Alaska (Mr. Young) says it may be 10 
years before it comes on line, and it is really not going to make 
enough difference to matter. My concern is that if we drill in ANWR, 
Americans will think, gee, we have solved our energy problem, we are 
drilling in ANWR. It will be little more than a nit in terms of the 
enormous amounts of oil that we use. That kind of helps us put ANWR in 
perspective, because this is Prudhoe Bay, which may be twice as large 
as ANWR. So it kind of gives us a picture of what we can expect from 
ANWR.
  The next chart is a generic chart which kind of shows us where we 
are, very probably where we are, and we have here only a two percent 
growth. Remember those curves I showed earlier? This is only the two 
percent growth curve. But notice what happens: it gets steeper and 
steeper as we go out. That is the interesting thing about exponential 
growth. The blue

[[Page 8463]]

curve here is the available oil. Now, obviously, the use of oil and the 
production of oil paralleled each other going up the slope because 
nobody was storing it in large reservoirs anywhere. The yellow area 
between the amount of oil that can be produced and the oil that we 
would like to use represents the deficit. We do not even have to get to 
peak oil to have a problem, as the curve shows here, because we start 
deviating from this curve before we get to the peak of the curve. So we 
might expect, if we are at this point where the arrow points here, we 
might expect it for the next couple of years or so that it will be 
marginally greater increases in the production of oil, but they will 
not begin to keep up with the increased demand for oil.
  Last year, for instance, China increased their oil imports about 25 
percent. They now are the number two importer in the world. They have 
replaced Japan as the number two importer in the world. Of course, we 
are number one. We import more oil than anyone else in the world. India 
is following closely behind China. The Third World is now 
industrializing and probably, one of the things that we could most 
productively do would be to help India and help China and help the 
Third World countries who are industrializing to do it more 
efficiently. They are not only industrializing 30, 40 years after we 
did; they are kind of following the same path that we followed and 
using very inefficient techniques. So we could help alleviate the 
world's energy problem by helping these countries, which are now 
following us by 30 years or more in industrialization, to use 
techniques that are more efficient, which would make more oil available 
for everyone.
  The next chart shows the discovery of oil, and the discovery of oil, 
if my colleagues see, that peaked for the world back here before 1970, 
and it peaked for the United States considerably before that. So 
discoveries peak a long time before consumption, and they are down, 
down, down now. I just had a paper sent to me that says that there is a 
whole lot more oil out there that we have not found.

                              {time}  2340

  I hope that is true. But whether it is true or not for the moment is 
not going to make much difference, because it is not going to come on 
line, as Chairman Young says, for maybe 10 years. And in 10 years we 
are going to be sliding down Hubbert's Peak. So if there is a lot more 
oil out there, the most it will do is kind of slow our descent down 
Hubbert's Peak. We cannot escape the reality that the world production 
of oil will peak, many believe that it has peaked, and the demand for 
oil is certainly not going to peak. That is going to keep on going up.
  The next chart shows something very interesting, that is, that 
drilling more will not help. And this is an interesting chart, because 
what it shows, the green shows the discoveries above use by the United 
States, and the red shows when we started to run a deficit.
  What you see is in the 1980ish time zone, the yellow here shows the 
wells that we drilled. And notice this big spike in the number of wells 
we drilled. This was early in the Reagan administration.
  Now, President Reagan recognized that we had a problem. We were 
already sliding down Hubbert's Peak. And he thought that the reason 
that we did not have more oil was simply because they did not have 
enough incentive to drill for more oil. And so he gave them incentives 
to drill for oil, and these incentives did work, they did drill for 
oil; but notice the increased drilling for oil simply followed an ever-
decreasing discovery of oil with increased use, so now we have been 
operating in the red for a long time.
  Notice that in spite of enormously increased profits, the industry is 
not drilling very many more wells. Why are they not drilling many more 
wells? It quite obviously is because they have done a lot of 
exploration, we are really pretty good at that today, and we use 
seismic and 3-D and computers. And if they thought there was a whole 
lot more oil out there to be found, they would be drilling more wells, 
because they certainly have the capital to do that now.
  There is another dimension in this story that our next chart shows 
for us. And this is what is happening around the world. And I want to 
pay particular attention to China. China is now, remember, the number 
two importer in the world, 1.3 billion people, with an economy growing, 
remember that 10 percent curve, very sharp growth in their economy. And 
they are now scouring the world for oil.
  They have contracts in Canada for oil, in Colombia, Venezuela, 
Brazil, Argentina, a number of them in the Middle East and Africa. They 
are now negotiating with Russia for oil there. They are talking with 
Russia about building a pipeline from the Sakhalin Island, in the 
Russian far east. Russia spans 11 time zones.
  This ought to be colored green here, because Russia comes clear 
around here, nearly up to Alaska. They cover 11 time zones. And their 
far eastern oil is so far away from their major population centers, 
that they just cannot get it there over this large expanse.
  And so now they are talking about a pipeline that would carry it down 
to China and perhaps down to the Korean Peninsula. By the way, they 
negotiated for an oil company in our country, and were just barely out-
bid. They may be back bidding for oil companies in our country. They 
now control a number of assets around the world to make sure that they 
have access to this oil.
  For instance, for a number of years now they have had ports at both 
ends of the Panama Canal. A poll, kind of an informal poll, was 
conducted in India and China over a several-month period by sending 
people that would just talk to people across the spectrum of their 
society there to ask them about energy and the future, and there is 
pretty broad knowledge in both of those countries that energy is going 
to be an increasing problem.
  And in China they found a big recognition that China was dependent on 
the sea lanes for their oil, and they do not control the sea lanes. The 
United States controls the sea lanes. And so China is know aggressively 
developing a blue water navy. By a blue water navy, I mean a navy that 
operates in the oceans of the world. Many countries have a navy, but 
most of them are designed to protect the country close in.
  Only we now, since the Soviets and the Russians have pulled back, 
only we now have a blue water navy that controls the world's oceans. 
And China recognizes that we could, if we wished, cut off their oil 
supply. And so they now are aggressively developing, among other 
armaments, a blue water navy.
  By the way, last year our trade deficit with China was $162 billion. 
So it is not that they are without resources to develop this blue water 
navy. The next chart is a very interesting one, and Congressman 
Gilchrest talked about this. And this shows the transition from one 
fuel to another. And notice the lower brown curve here is wood.
  And we really started using wood when we learned how to make steel. 
As a matter of fact, the hills, the mountains of New England were 
largely denuded of trees. There are now more forests in New Hampshire 
than there were when the Industrial Revolution began here, because it 
began in England a bit sooner, and they were cutting trees from New 
England to take to England.
  As a matter of fact, the Industrial Revolution almost foundered 
because, as Congressman Gilchrest mentioned, we were exhausting the 
forest and cutting the trees for energy, and then we discovered coal. 
And notice how much greater the economy became, because over here is 
quadrillion Btus. Remember you talked about Btus, these are quadrillion 
Btus over here. I think you were up, what, over a hundred quadrillion 
Btus? Here it is 70. We are now up over a hundred quadrillion Btus.
  And then we discovered oil. And here it goes. Up to a hundred 
quadrillion Btus total energy production. By the way, the lower curve 
here is a breakout of these, and it shows what maybe I hope is the 
future, what better be the future, or the future is pretty grim, that 
is, some alternatives to fossil fuels. Those are things like nuclear 
and

[[Page 8464]]

solar and wind. They are so far down here in the noise level you do not 
see them so we have blown it up.
  By the way, you do not see this big red peak here, because this 
combines petroleum and natural gas which come together, and here they 
are separated so you add this to this, you will get this big peak up 
here.
  This explains some of the characteristics that alternatives must 
have, and that is energy density. Why were the Btus so much higher with 
coal and enormously higher with oil? And Congressman Gilchrest 
mentioned this, it is the energy density there.
  Give you a little example of energy density. At maybe 25 percent 
efficiency only, because in your internal combustion engine you are 
lucky if you get 25 percent efficiency, which is the reason that you 
have that big radiator and all those pipes and fins to get rid of the 
heat. A barrel of oil contains the energy of 25,000 man-hours of labor.
  That is the equivalent of having 12 people work for you full time for 
a whole year. And it costs you about $100, $50 for the oil, that is 
about what it was today, maybe another $50 to refine it. So you have 
got 42 gallons at $2-something a gallon. That is about $100, is it not? 
And that $100 will buy you the work equivalent, the energy equivalent 
of 25,000 man-hours of labor.
  So when we are looking for something to replace these fossil fuels, 
we have got to find something with a lot of energy density, or we are 
going to have to change the way we live and change the way we use 
energy. You may have trouble calibrating that 25,000 man-hours and 12 
man-years, but let me give you a little example that it may be easier 
to identify with, and that is what your car does with a gallon of gas, 
a gallon of gas, not very big.
  By the way, still cheaper than water in the grocery store, at $2-and-
something a gallon, unless you are buying it in Wal-Mart or KMart a 
gallon at a time. But in the little bottles you buy it in, it is much 
more expensive than gas. Recently, I went with my brother-in-law and 
sister-in-law in our little Prius. We have been driving one for a 
number of years now, since 2000 as a matter of fact; but the first one 
in Maryland, the first one in Congress. 85,000 miles on it. We were 
down in West Virginia going up mountains down there. It has an 
instantaneous record of your efficiency, miles per gallon. The worst 
mileage we got was 20 miles per gallon.

                              {time}  2350

  Well, that is going up a West Virginia mountain with four people in 
the car and luggage, and that one gallon took me 20 miles up the 
mountain.
  How long would it take me to pull my car 20 miles up the mountain?
  Of course, I cannot do that without some mechanical advantage. I 
could use a winch. We call it a come along and chains and the guardrail 
or trees or something, and by and by I could get my car up the 
mountain.
  If I got it there in 90 days, that would be 90 hard days work, if you 
want to calculate that out how many feet you have to pull it a day. 
That gives you some idea of the energy density in these fossil fuels. 
So that is the challenge we have.
  The next chart shows us the kind of things we can look to for getting 
energy to replace these fossil fuels. Now there are some finite 
resources we really have to pay attention to. They will not last 
forever, but in this transition we will have to use them as we can.
  The tar sands, and I am going to Canada this summer, when I gave a 
talk on a couple of weeks ago, they called and would like me to see 
their tar sands exploitation so we will look at that. There is a lot of 
oil in tar sand, but most of it is pretty poor quality and it takes a 
lot of energy to get it out. It may take almost as much energy to get 
it out as you get oil out of the tar sands.
  Then we have the oil shale in this country. The same thing is true 
there. Ultimately when Goldman Sachs has oil going to $105 a barrel, 
when it gets there it might be feasible to get oil shales. But again, a 
big environmental penalty and a lot of energy to get it out.
  Coal. We will leave this chart up and put another chart in front of 
this because we want to come back to this one. The chart we put in 
front shows coal, and you have heard that we have 250 years of use, 
that is true, with no growth at current use rates. Remember that flat 
curve we showed before? No growth at current use rates.
  This is perfectly flat. It will last us 250 years with no growth, but 
if it just grows 1.1 percent a year it will only last that long. Less 
than 150 years. At 2 percent growth it will last less than 100 years. 
But what are you going to do with coal? You cannot put it in the trunk 
of your car and go down the road. You have to convert coal to a liquid 
or a gas so that you can use it. And when you have a 2 percent growth 
rate and after conversion you are now down about 50 years of supply. 
And you have got to use a lot of energy to make sure that you clean up 
the coal.
  We appropriate money from the Congress for clean coal technology, I 
support that, because we cannot use coal in the traditional way because 
it is enormously polluting.
  We will go back now to our chart we were looking at the options that 
we have. The only thing on this table here that comes close to the 
energy density of fossil fuels is nuclear. Now, a lot of people have 
some big concerns about nuclear. But we have had 104 nuclear power 
plants in our country. We have never had a fatal accident. We have 
never had any real serious accidents there. Three Mile Island, by the 
way, was not a catastrophe. It was very unfortunate. As far as I know 
nobody was hurt from that and we learned a lot from that.
  There are three different ways we can get nuclear energy. The way 
that will get us home free is fusion, that is what happens in the sun. 
And by the way, the sun is the origin of the most of energy that we 
have. All of the fossil fuels came from the sun ultimately. The ferns 
grew that produced the coal. The little organisms that grew in the 
water that settled to the bottom and were later covered over by silt, 
and then with the movement of tectonic plates they were buried with 
heat and pressure. In time they became oil.
  The odds of getting fusion in time are pretty small. I would like to 
use the analogy that me trying to solve my personal economic problems 
by winning the lottery is pretty much the same kind of odds that we 
face if we want to solve our energy problems in our country with 
fusion. That does not keep me from voting for the something less than 
$300 million that we appropriate each year to fusion, because if we get 
there we are really home free. That is incredible. But that is probably 
not going to happen. We certainly would not bank on it. If it happens 
that is nice. Like winning the lottery, if it happens that is nice.
  Two other kinds of energy is from nuclear. These are fission. One of 
those is whitewater reactor, which is the kind we have in this country. 
This uses uranium which is in even shorter supply in the world than 
oil. So that will not last forever.
  Ultimately if we are going to get large amounts of energy from 
nuclear figures, we are going to have to go to breeder reactors. France 
gets about 80 percent of their electricity from nuclear and they have a 
lot of breeder reactors. With breeder reactors, you buy a problem of 
waste products that you have to store away we believe for maybe a 
quarter of a million years. That is a time span we can even think of 
and how do you safely store something away for a quarter of a million 
years?
  Anything that has that much energy in it ought to be good for 
something. If it is so hot, if it has so much energy in it that you 
have got to store it away, you cannot even come close to it for a 
quarter of a million years, I would think you have not unleashed the 
ingenuity of the American people to see what we can do with that 
energy. I just think there is some potential there that we have not 
tapped.
  Our time for this evening is nearly up. So what I want to do now is 
just mention, and we will be coming back again for a full hour and we 
will be talking about in detail about these renewable resources down 
here, what can

[[Page 8465]]

we realistically expect from them and what do we need to do to get them 
started? Solar and wind and geothermal, tapping that hot molten iron 
core of the earth. Ocean energy, the tides and the waves. Lots of 
potential from agriculture, soy diesel, bio diesel, ethanol, methanol, 
bio mass.
  Waste of energy. Great idea. Rather than filling landfills with it, 
burn it and get energy from it. By the way, the heat you got from it 
ought to be used for heating people's home. It ought not be wasted in 
evaporating water in a big tower outside town.
  Last, we will close with hydrogen from renewable. Hydrogen is not an 
energy source. You cannot mine hydrogen. You cannot suck it out of the 
air. The only way you get hydrogen is to produce it.
  Right now we are getting hydrogen from natural gas. It would be 
better to get it from renewables. We can do that. We can get it from 
nuclear. One of the things you might do with a nuclear plant is to 
split water to get hydrogen. You put that hydrogen in a fuel cell in 
your car. It has at least twice the efficiency of the reciprocating 
engine. It produces only water when you burn it. You do not have a 
flame but you are, in effect, chemically burning it in the fuel cell.
  There are lots of things to look at here. But the real urgency here 
is that we have got to buy time by conservation and by efficiency so 
that we can use the limited resources of oil that we have, not only to 
continue the economies we now have in the world, but to make the 
investments we must make in these renewables so that we are going to 
continue to be able to live the kinds of qualities lives that we have 
been living.
  I am sure that Americans are up to this. What we need is leadership 
articulating the problem and articulating the things that Americans 
need to do. Americans just need leadership. We are the envy of the 
world and we need to be a world leader in this because we use most of 
the oil in the world.
  I would note that you can turn to our Web site and there you will 
find a discussion of these items of links that will carry you are to 
other places. If you would like to order a video or DVD, this is the 
telephone number you call at C-SPAN.

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