[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 153 (2007), Part 2]
[House]
[Pages 1645-1651]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                                PEAK OIL

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Murphy of Connecticut). Under the 
Speaker's announced policy of today, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. 
Bartlett) is recognized for 60 minutes.
  Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, last evening we were here just 
about this time talking about this same subject, the subject we have 
been talking about for the last hour. We had been discussing the 
phenomenon known as peak oil. That is the term given to a prediction 
that a geologist made, M. King Hubbert, working for the Shell Oil 
Company in 1956. He gave a speech in San Antonio, Texas, which I 
believe within a decade will be recognized as the most significant, 
most important speech given in the last century.
  What he predicted was that the United States, which at that time was 
king of oil, we were producing more oil than any other country. We were 
using more oil than any other country, and we were exporting more oil 
than any other country. M. King Hubbert had the audacity in San 
Antonio, Texas, in 1956 to predict that in just a bit less than a 
decade-and-a-half, by about 1970, he said that the United States would 
reach its maximum oil production, and after that, inevitably, no matter 
what we did, oil production would tail off.
  That prediction came true. Surprisingly, in 1970, some may say 1971, 
we peaked in oil production. In 1969, using this same analysis 
technique, he predicted that the world would be peaking in oil 
production about now. So last night we had come in our discussion to 
the point that we were looking at the potential for the alternatives 
that we and the world would need to turn to as we slide down the other 
side of what is referred to as Hubbert's peak. We noted that there were 
some finite resources, some nuclear resources and then the true 
renewables.
  There are three justifications one might use for moving to 
alternatives. One is peak oil, and we will transition from fossil fuels 
to alternatives. Oil,

[[Page 1646]]

gas and coal obviously will not last forever, and as the earth at some 
point runs down the other side of what we call Hubbert's peak and there 
is not enough oil, gas and coal to meet our energy needs in the world, 
we will transition to alternatives. The only question is whether we do 
that on a time scale that we control so that it is a pretty easy ride, 
or whether we do it as dictated by geology, where it may be a very 
difficult ride.
  Two other reasons for moving to alternatives. One is our dependence 
on foreign oil. Today, we have only about 2 percent of the known 
reserves of the oil in our country. We use about one-fourth of all the 
oil in the world, and we import about two-thirds of what we use. 
Obviously, if M. King Hubbert was right about the world, and there is 
every reason to believe he will be right about the world, we will need 
to transition to alternatives.
  From a national security perspective, we ought to have been doing 
this a long while ago. A couple of years ago, 30 prominent Americans, 
Jim Woolsey, Boyden Gray, McFarland and 27 others, wrote a letter to 
the President saying, Mr. President, and they used the statistics I 
just used, the fact that the United States has only 2 percent of the 
known reserves and uses 25 percent of the world's oil and imports 
almost two-thirds of what we use is a totally unacceptable national 
security risk. Mr. President, we really need to do something about 
that. So even if you think that there is a whole lot of oil and gas out 
there, you still may be very incentivized to look for alternatives if 
you are concerned about our national security.
  There is another reason to look for alternatives, and that is, if you 
believe that we have global warming, and I think there is an increasing 
body of evidence that suggests that that is probably true, and that we 
are probably contributing to that, although in the past the earth has 
been very much warmer, this is in a very distant past. Ordinarily, the 
past that we are talking about is from the last ice age, which is like 
some 10,000 years back. It is now the warmest we have ever been since 
that last ice age, but sometime way in the past the earth has been very 
much warmer because there were apparently subtropical seas in what is 
now the north slope of Alaska and the North Sea because we are finding 
oil and gas there.
  The general belief is that this oil and gas was produced by organic 
material that grew in these subtropical seas, that every season it 
matured and fell to the bottom and was covered and mixed with sediment 
that was washed off of the adjacent hills, and then that built up for a 
very long time. Finally, with moving, the tectonic plates was submersed 
down with enough pressure and enough heat from the molten core of the 
earth and enough time that this finally was processed into gas and oil, 
and then if there was a rock dome over it which would hold the gas, now 
you have a very fertile place in which to drill. It took a very long 
time to grow all of that organic material and to turn it into gas and 
oil.
  We are now in a relatively few years releasing all of the carbon 
dioxide that was sequestered in this organic material over quite a long 
time, until we are driving up the CO2 of the world, which in the last 
century or so is nearly twice now what it was a century or so ago. This 
is what we call a greenhouse gas.
  You can get some idea as to the greenhouse effect. If tomorrow is a 
sunny day and a cold day, and if your car is parked outside with the 
sun shining on the windshield, you may find quite a warm car when you 
go out there. That is because of what we call the greenhouse effect. 
The light that comes in from the sun, call it white light, it comes in 
over a long spectrum of wave lengths, and it goes through the glass of 
your car. Then it warms up the material of your car and it reradiates 
only in the infrared. Well, the glass of your car is pretty much opaque 
to the infrared. It keeps the heat inside. It reflects it back, and 
that is why your car gets so warm.
  The greenhouse gases out there, you may remember being in an 
airplane, you are 44,000 feet, and the pilot tells you it is 70 degrees 
below zero, when down just below you may be flying over south Florida 
where it is very warm, and this is because of the greenhouse effect. 
The energy coming in from the sun heats up things in the earth, and 
when that heat is reflected back out, emanated back out, it is 
reflected by what we call the greenhouse gases and CO2 as one of those.
  So there is increasing evidence that we have global warming, and 
there may be a need to move to the alternatives because many of these 
alternatives, although they will produce CO2 when you burn them like 
ethanol, that CO2 was taken out of the atmosphere by the corn plant 
when it grew. So you are not contributing any more CO2 to the 
atmosphere if you are using a product that just last year or so took 
the CO2 out of the atmosphere.
  Now, what you would want to do in these last 2 cases is a little 
different in moving to alternatives. We have a essentially run out of 
time and run out of energy to invest in alternatives. We absolutely 
knew by 1980 that M. King Hubbert was right about the United States. We 
had peaked in 1970. We have done nothing in the ensuing years. If M. 
King Hubbert is right about the world, we have no excess energy to 
invest or oil would not be $50, $60 barrel, which means we have 
essentially run out of time and have no energy to invest.

                              {time}  2145

  Now, we could buy some time and free up some energy with a very 
aggressive conservation program.
  Now, if your concern is foreign oil, then you could also get some 
additional energy from such things as tar sands and oil shales and 
coal. But if your concern is global warming, this will be a very bad 
place to get energy to invest in the alternatives that we will 
ultimately have to transition to because it take a lot of energy to get 
energy out of tar sands, and that energy is fossil fuel energy and that 
releases CO2 into the atmosphere.
  So you are making a bad situation worse if your concern is global 
warming and you think CO2 is the cause of that and you want to 
transition to renewables, and you are going to get the energy to 
transition to renewables from tar sands and oil shales and particularly 
in coal somewhat. You will simply be releasing more carbon dioxide into 
the atmosphere. But let's look at these, because if the other two 
incentives are your incentives, then these are good bets.
  If you are simply concerned that we have got to transition to 
renewables, then you will use whatever energy is available, and there 
is potentially enormous amounts of energy available in these tar sands 
and oil shales. And if you are concerned about dependence on foreign 
oil, then this is a good place to begin.
  The tar sands. Some may call them oil sands; they are tar, thank you. 
It doesn't flow; it is really very much like tar. It is, I guess, a bit 
better than the asphalt parking lot out here, but not much better. If 
you put a blow torch on the parking lot, that will flow, too, which is 
pretty much what we have to do with the tar sands. They exist in Canada 
around Alberta, Canada. There is an incredible amount of potential 
energy there. There is more energy in these tar sands than in all the 
known reserves of oil in the world.
  But why aren't we resting easy, then, that we have got an easy 
transition, a big source of energy? Because this energy is not all that 
easy to get out of the tar sands. The Canadians are now getting about a 
million barrels of oil a day. That sounds like a lot of oil, and it is 
a lot. It is a little less than 5 percent of what we use in our country 
and just a bit more than 1 percent of the 84 million, 85 million 
barrels a day that the world uses; but they are using an incredible 
amount of energy to get this.
  They are mining this, if you will. They have a shovel there that 
lifts 100 tons at a time, they dump it into a truck that hauls 400 
tons, and then they take it and they cook it, and they are cooking it 
at the present with natural gas. They have what is called stranded 
natural gas there. There are not very many people in Alberta, Canada, 
that use it and gas is very difficult

[[Page 1647]]

to move long distances; and so they are using this gas to produce oil 
from the tar sands.
  I am told, and you can be told a lot of things that aren't true, but 
I am told that they may be using more energy from the natural gas than 
they are getting out of the oil that they produce. But from an economy 
perspective, that is okay, because the gas is very cheap and the oil is 
very expensive. And I understand it costs them $18 to $25 a barrel to 
produce the oil; and if it is selling for $50, $60 a barrel, obviously 
there is a big profit there. But this natural gas will not last 
forever.
  And where will the next energy come from? They are talking about 
building a nuclear power plant there so they will have additional 
energy for cooking this oil.
  And they have another problem. The vein I understand, if you think of 
this as a vein, it now ducks under a big overlay of rock and soil, so 
that they will not be able to continue to develop this by mining it 
which is what they are doing now. They will have to develop it in situ, 
and I don't know that they have any economically feasible way of 
developing it in situ.
  So although there is an incredibly large amount of potential energy 
available there, it will take a lot of energy to get it out, so what 
you really need to be thinking about is the net energy or the energy-
profit ratio that you get out of this.
  Who knows what new technologies we may come up with, what the 
engineers may be able to do, but one should not be too sanguine that 
this will be a savior, that we will get enormous amounts of energy from 
this, because of the difficulty of getting the oil out.
  The oil shales. The name might better be called tar shales, but we 
refer to oil shales, and they are found in our western United States, 
in Utah and Colorado and so forth. And, again, there is absolutely an 
incredible potential amount of oil that could be extracted from these 
oil shales, or tar shales. Probably more than all of the known reserves 
of oil in the world, if we could get it all out. There have been a 
couple of attempts to do that. The most recent one was by the Shell Oil 
Company, and there was some glowing reports in the papers about what 
they did there. But there are aquifers associated with this shale that 
they need to protect, and so what they do to develop this is to go in 
and drill a bunch of holes around the perimeter and then freeze it.
  So they in effect have a frozen vessel, and the oil will not move 
through that frozen vessel. And then they drill wells in the middle of 
it and they cook it, and they cook it for a year. And then they drill a 
third set of wells, and then when they get to the bottom, they go 
horizontally. They are very good at doing that now. So the oil that 
they cooked, loosened up by the second set of wells they drilled, now 
flows down through the shale, into the well that they drilled that 
finally went horizontal, and then they pump it out of those wells, and 
then they pump it for several years and they get a really meaningful 
amount of oil out.
  A couple of years ago I was out in Denver, Colorado, speaking to a 
peak oil conference there, and the engineer, the scientist who did this 
little experiment cautioned that it would be several years before Shell 
Oil Company decided whether it was even economically feasible to get 
any oil out of the oil shales using that technique. Now, there may be 
other techniques, but at present to my knowledge nobody has any big 
exploitation
  of the oil shales. The one that got the most publicity was this 
experiment by the Shell Oil Company, and they have indicated it would 
be several years before they can determine whether $60 a barrel is even 
feasible to get that oil.
  The next one here is coal, and we will put another chart up in front 
of this one, because we hear a lot about coal. And you may hear it said 
that we have 250 years, 500 years of coal. We don't have 500 years, but 
we do have 250 years of coal at current use rates. Be very careful when 
people are telling you how much we have of some resource. If it is at 
current use rates, you have to factor in how long it will last you if 
you have an increased use rate.
  After the development of atomic energy, and the world was amazed by 
that, Dr. Albert Einstein was asked: What will be the next great energy 
source in the world? And he said the most powerful force in the world 
was the power of compound interest.
  And when you look at exponential growth, if you increase the use of 
coal just 2 percent, and I submit that we will have to dig into coal 
much more than just 2 percent increase per year over what we now use, 
but if it is only 2 percent, that 250 years immediately shrinks to 
about 85 years; and then you can't fill your trunk with coal and go 
down the roads. You have to convert it to a gas or liquid. And, by the 
way, we have been doing this for decades. Hitler ran his whole military 
and his whole country on oil from coal. When I was a little kid, the 
lamps that you now call a kerosene lamp we called coal oil lamp because 
it was coal oil that replaced whale oil in the lamps, and long after we 
were using kerosene I still called it coal oil.
  But if you use some of the energy from the coal to convert the rest 
of the coal into a gas or a liquid, now you are down to 50 years with 
just 2 percent growth rate. And there is something else to look at. 
Because oil is fungible and moves on a world market, and it really 
doesn't matter in today's world who owns the oil, the guy who bids the 
highest gets the oil. It all moves on a global marketplace. And since 
we use one-fourth of the world's oil, our 50-year supply at only 2 
percent growth rate will last the world just one-fourth of 50, or 12\1/
2\ years.
  So the coal is there. It is the most readily developed, 
unconventional fossil fuel energy source, and we need to husband it. 
But it is dirty. You will pay an environmental penalty if you use it 
without cleaning it up, or you will pay a big economic penalty if you 
clean it up.
  Let's go back to the original chart we were looking at. And the 
previous speakers talked about nuclear, and indeed today we produce 
about 20 percent of our electricity, 8 percent of our total energy from 
nuclear. We could and maybe should do more. There is no energy source 
that is without its drawbacks. When you burn any fossil fuel, you 
release CO2 into the atmosphere and that produces greenhouse 
effects, which might very well produce global warming. There are 
potential drawbacks to nuclear, but so are there drawbacks to not 
having enough energy for your civilization.
  There are three ways in which we can get energy from nuclear 
materials. One of them is the lightwater reactor, which is the only 
kind of reactor that we have in our country that uses fissionable 
uranium, and there is not an inexhaustible amount of fissionable 
uranium in the world.
  And one of the big problems in this whole dialogue is agreement on 
what the facts are. When I ask how much fissionable uranium remains in 
the world, and I guess you have to say at current use rates, I get 
numbers that range from 15 years to 100 years. We desperately need an 
honest broker to help us agree as to what the facts are so that we can 
have a meaningful dialogue.
  I have thought a lot about this, and perhaps the National Academy of 
Sciences, which is highly respected and very knowledgeable, would be 
this honest broker. Because when we sit at the table discussing where 
we are and where we need to go, you can't have a rational discussion 
without agreeing on the facts. But nobody disagrees that there is an 
inexhaustible supply of fissionable uranium. So obviously at some point 
in a few years, or a few more years with building more nuclear power 
plants, and China wants to build a lot more nuclear power plants, we 
will run out of fissionable uranium.
  And then we will have to move to the second type of energy released 
with nuclear fission, and that is the breeder reactor. The only breeder 
reactors we ever had were those that were used for producing nuclear 
weapons. France produces about 80 percent, 85 percent of its 
electricity from nuclears, and they have some breeder reactors. The 
breeder reactor does what its name implies,

[[Page 1648]]

it breeds fuel, so you now will have essentially a replaceable and 
therefore inexhaustible amount of fuel.
  But there are problems that go with the breeder reactor. It has waste 
products that you have to somehow store away for maybe one-quarter of a 
million years. Now, we have only 5,000 years of recorded history. It is 
hard for us to imagine one-quarter of a million years. Something that 
is so hot that I have to store it away somewhere for one-quarter of a 
million years I think ought to have enough energy in it that we ought 
to be able to do something productive with that energy. As a matter of 
fact, the usual nuclear power plant gets only a tiny percentage of all 
the potential energy out of the nucleus.
  So I would like to challenge our engineers to look at a way to make 
something good out of what is now a big problem when you have breeder 
reactors, and that is a byproduct that you need to store away for very 
long time periods.
  The second type of nuclear energy release is what is called fusion. 
And we have a great fusion reactor; it is called our Sun, which is a 
mediocre star over near one end of the Milky Way. By the way, if you go 
someplace where the air is not so polluted and you look up at night, 
you can see across the sky that great Milky Way. It looks like you have 
taken a brush across the sky. There are just billions and billions of 
stars out there.

                              {time}  2200

  All of the stars are the equivalent of our sun, by the way. Nuclear 
fusion, power plants, if you will, and we are kind of a mediocre one 
near one end of the Milky Way.
  We invest about $250 million a year in nuclear fusion. I happily 
support that. I wish there was a technology out there to and a 
technologist to use more money. I would happily vote for that. But if 
you think that we are going to solve our energy problems with nuclear 
fusion, you probably have some confidence you are going to solve your 
personal economic problems by winning the lottery. The gamble is about 
the same.
  I think there are huge, huge engineering challenges with nuclear 
fusion. We have been working for many years, and we are always about 
20-30 years away from a solution. We have been 20-30 years away from a 
solution for the last 20-30 years. We may get there. But it is not the 
kind of thing that you would want to bet the ranch on. By the way, we 
are home free if we get that. That would be an inexhaustible source of 
energy, essentially pollution free except for thermal pollution.
  I would like to talk about thermal pollution in our power plants. We 
have had the luxury in this rich country we live in to put our nuclear 
power plants away from where we live, and the heat energy that comes 
out of them, we dissipate. If you drive, you see the big cooling towers 
for the nuclear power plants. What we are doing is we are evaporating 
drinking water to cool these power plants.
  Almost everywhere else in the world, whether it is nuclear or coal, 
no matter what it is, unless it is hydro, then it is where the water 
is, but every other power plant is pretty much in the city right where 
people live, and they use the heat from that for what they call 
district heating. They pipe it to homes and businesses, and they use it 
in the wintertime to heat. In the summertime, you can use the heat to 
cool by the ammonia refrigeration, ammonia cycle refrigeration system, 
which used to be very popular in this country. But now you have to buy 
one from Argentina if you want one, for some reason. They have no 
moving parts and last a very long time. You can get cooling out of 
heat. So you can both heat and air conditioning with the excess heat 
from these power plants if you simply sited them nearer where people 
live.
  Once you have used these finite resources, and they are finite, 
except for the nuclear that we have discussed. The others are finite. 
They will not last forever, then we will have only the true renewables 
left. They are such things as solar and wind and geothermal. This is 
true geothermal.
  You may have people talk to you about geothermal and they are talking 
about connecting your heat pump to the earth or a well. What you are 
doing with your heat pump in the summertime, your air conditioner is 
really trying to heat up the outside air, that is how it cools the 
inside. And in the wintertime, your heat pump is keeping you warm by 
trying to cool down the outside air.
  If you are working against groundwater, and here it is about 56 
degrees, groundwater looks very cool in the summertime, and it looks 
very warm in the wintertime. I remember as a little boy we had a 
springhouse on our farm, and that is where our food was kept cool. I 
used to wonder how does that happen.
  In the summertime I went into the springhouse and it was so cool. And 
in the wintertime, it felt so warm. Of course it was essentially the 
same temperature. But in contrast with the hot summer air it felt cool, 
and in contrast with the cold winter air it felt warm.
  True geothermal is where we are connected to the heat from the molten 
core of the Earth. If you have been to Iceland, there is not a chimney 
in all of Iceland because they have geothermal and they get all of 
their heat sources from that.
  Several places in our country we can tap that, and wherever we can we 
should. It is not really inexhaustible. The molten core of the Earth 
will not be there forever, but it will be there for millions and 
millions of years, so from our perspective that is an inexhaustible 
source of heat so we include it under renewables.
  Then we have a number of sources of energy from the oceans. There is 
huge potential from the oceans. The tides, and by the way, the tides 
are one of the few energy sources that are not either the direct or 
indirect result of the sun. All of the fossil fuels that we are 
burning, gas and oil, and all of these tar, sands and oil shale were 
all produced by organic material that grew because the sun was shining 
a very long time ago.
  I knew that when I was a little boy for coal because we lived on a 
farm in western Pennsylvania, and there was a coal mine on our farm. 
There had been a cave-in and they simply took the mules and the people 
out an air shaft that had a walkout slope, and so there was still some 
coal left. There was not enough to open the mine, but we partnered with 
a miner from the local town but he opened the mine and they drug coal 
with a pick and a shovel and a wheelbarrow. So we had what was called 
run-a-mine coal. We had a coal furnace, as did everybody in western 
Pennsylvania. Some of the lumps were too big to get in the furnace. 
Leaning against the cellar wall was a sledge hammer. If the lump was 
too big, you would break it. I remember breaking those lumps of coal 
and they would break open and there would be the imprint of a fern 
leaf. I still get a chill when I think about that.
  Here I am looking at something that grew who knew how many eons ago. 
So I knew very well where coal came from, it came from vegetation that 
had fallen and was overlaid with Earth.
  You can see coal in the process of production, by the way, in the 
bogs of England. It is not yet coal but it is on the way to coal. And 
if you take it out, it will burn.
  The sun produces most of the energy that you can get from the oceans. 
It produces thermal gradients. It produces the waves. How does it do 
that, by producing wind. The wind is the result of the differential 
heating of the Earth, and that therefore is sun driven.
  There is one big potential source of energy in the ocean that is not 
sun generated, and that is the tides. They are generated by the 
gravitational pull of the Moon, which lifts the whole ocean 2 to 3 
feet.
  Can you imagine the incredible amount of energy it takes to lift 
three-fourths of the earth's surface 2 or 3 feet a day. We have tried 
to get meaningful energy from the tides without a whole lot of success, 
and it is simply because they are so disperse. There is an old axiom, 
energy or power to be effective must be concentrated, and the tides are 
anything but concentrated. They are spread over huge, huge expanses.

[[Page 1649]]

  We get some meaningful energy from the tides in the fjords where 
because of funneling effects you may have a 60-foot tide. You let it 
come in and then you wall it off and let it flow out through a 
generator when the tide goes out.
  There is another potential source of energy from the oceans, it is 
not really oceans but you find most of it there, and that is gas 
hydrites. There is more potential energy in the gas hydrites I 
understand than in all of the fossil fuels in all of the Earth, but we 
have been singularly unsuccessful in trying to collect those little 
nodules of gas hydrites and get the energy from them because they are 
dispersed largely on the ocean bottom over enormous expanses of the 
ocean. Well, these are all challenges. And one day when energy becomes 
less and less available from fossil fuels and more and more expensive, 
some of these other sources will be more exploitable.
  And then the agricultural resource, and let me put the next chart up 
here.
  I would like to start on the left-hand side of this because it really 
shows us where we are and the challenges we face. We are very much like 
the young couple whose grandparents have died and left them a pretty 
big inheritance, and so they have established a life-style, pretty 
lavish life-style where 85 percent of the money they spend comes from 
their grandparents' inheritance and only 15 percent, some people will 
say 14, 15 percent comes from their income. They look at how old they 
are and how much they are spending, gee, it is going to run out before 
they die, before they retire, as a matter of fact. So they obviously 
have to do one of two things, or both: They have to make more money or 
spend less money. That is pretty much where we are with energy.
  Three-fourths of all of the energy that we use comes from fossil 
fuels: Petroleum, natural gas, and coal.
  Only 15 percent of it comes from something other than fossil fuels. 
Eight percent comes from nuclear power, and that is 8 percent of our 
total energy. Nuclear power represents 20 percent of our electricity. 
If you don't like nuclear power, imagine when you go home tonight that 
every fifth business and every fifth home doesn't have any electricity 
because that's what the picture would be if we didn't have nuclear 
power. So 8 percent. And this is data from 2000. It is a little 
different because we have been trying to do something since then.
  Seven percent of the energy represents the true renewables, like 
solar and wood and waste and wind, conventional hydro. Agriculture, 
here we have alcohol fuel and then the geothermal that we talked about 
where you are truly tapping into the heat from the molten core of the 
Earth.
  These numbers would have to be a little bigger now, but they would 
have to be a lot bigger to be relevant because in 2000, solar was 0.07 
percent. That is trifling. It has been growing at 30 percent a year so 
it is several times larger than it was in 2000. But still, it is 
minuscule compared to the 21 million barrels of oil that we use per 
day.
  And 38 percent of this comes from wood and that's largely the paper 
and timber industry burning waste product.
  Then a very interesting one, waste to energy. A lot of people look at 
the incredible amount of waste we have and say if we could just burn 
that waste, we could get a lot of energy from that. That's true.
  As you go up into Montgomery County, they have a very nice one, I 
would be proud to have it beside my church. You don't even know it is a 
waste to energy power plant. It is a nice looking building and the 
train or the truck comes in and the waste is all in containers and you 
don't even see it.
  But let me remind you that almost all of this waste is the result of 
profligate use of fossil fuel energy. What you are really doing when 
you burn that waste to produce electricity is you are kind of burning 
secondhand fossil fuels because that's what was used to produce this 
waste. In an energy deficient world, there will be far, far less waste 
because waste is a by-product of large energy use, and in an energy-
deficient world we would be using nowhere near as much energy.
  Wind. Wind is really growing. Our previous hour talked about wind. 
The wind machines today are huge. You may see the blades for them go 
down the highway. They may be 60 feet long, as big as an airplane wing. 
They are huge, and produce megawatts of electricity. They are producing 
them at about 2.5 cents a kilowatt hour.
  By the way, because we did not have the proper incentives in our 
country, we have now forfeited the manufacture of this product. Almost 
all I understand of the new big what I think are handsome wind machines 
are made overseas. Most are made in Denmark.
  The cheapest electricity costs several times the 2.5 cents a kilowatt 
hour, so wind machines are now really competitive with other ways of 
producing electricity.
  There are a lot of siting problems, a lot of nimby kinds of 
reactions. That is, not in my backyard. My wife says these are really 
bananas, build absolutely nothing anywhere near anybody, she says is 
the attitude of many of these people.
  You know, pretty is as pretty does, and if your alternative is 
shivering in the dark in an energy deficient fossil fuel world, that 
may be what we are coming to, and wind machines may start to look a 
whole lot better. I know some people who live along the coast would 
mind wind machines if they couldn't see them, so they are trying to 
site them out in the ocean beyond the horizon so they won't see the 
wind machines.

                              {time}  2215

  Conventional hydroelectric. You see, that is the biggest sector of 
these renewables. We have about maxed out on that. We have dammed every 
river we should have dammed and maybe some we shouldn't. The migratory 
path of fishes, and I saw a big article the other day about eels, we 
are now building some ladders so that eels, which are snake-like fish, 
can get back to their spawning grounds, but there is a huge potential, 
I understand, maybe as big as that, from something called microhydro. 
And that is using the water flow and drop in small streams. And there 
you can use it without the big impacts on the environment that you have 
when you dam up a big river.
  By the way, if you have dammed that river up for water for a 
downstream city, that will become less and less effective as it 
gradually fills in with silt, and it will. And by and by, who knows how 
many years later, there will be little water there because it will be 
mostly filled with silt that came down from further up in the 
watershed.
  If you are just interested in electricity, it still, when it comes 
over the dam, falls the same distance. So that silting in won't really 
effect how much electricity you can produce, but it will affect how 
much you can vary the height of the reservoir so as to always maintain 
some reserve for producing the electricity.
  I would like to spend a few moments talking about energy from 
agriculture. There is an awful lot of hype about energy from 
agriculture. I read the other day, and I don't know why it took us so 
long to find this, but in 1957, 50 years ago this year, Hyman Rickover, 
the father of the nuclear submarine, gave a talk to a group of 
physicians. It is an incredible speech. He was so prophetic. He 
understood that gas and oil were not forever. That, I think, is 
obvious.
  Maybe it is because I am a scientist, but probably 40 years ago I 
started asking myself the question, you know, since gas and oil 
obviously are finite, they are not infinite, they will not last 
forever, at what point do we need to start being concerned about what 
is left? Is it a year, 10 years, 100 years, 1,000 years? I didn't know 
when I first started asking this question. But I knew that at some 
point in time the world would have to start thinking about, gee, what 
do we do when gas and oil and coal are gone? Because one day gas and 
oil and coal will be gone.
  So there is a lot of hype about energy from agriculture. But Hyman 
Rickover, very, very astutely observed that as our population 
increased, the ground would be more used for producing food than it 
would be something you burned or fermented. And he also noted, talking 
about biomass, that biomass might

[[Page 1650]]

be more valuable returning it to the soil so that you still had soil 
rather than taking it off to either burn or ferment.
  We will get some energy from agriculture, but every bit of corn you 
use to make ethanol is corn that is not used as a food. We are well fed 
in this country, many of us more than well fed, but tonight, about 20 
percent of the world will go to bed hungry. But as our population 
continues to increase, there will be less and less opportunity to use 
agriculture products for energy rather than food.
  By the way, there is one way we could free up a lot of agricultural 
products for energy. If you will eat the corn and the soybeans rather 
than the pig and the cow that ate the corn and the soybeans, then you 
could free up a lot of corn for ethanol and soybeans for biodiesel. The 
animal breeder may brag he has a pig or a chicken that is so efficient 
that three pounds of corn will make one pound of pig. That is true. But 
that is three pounds of dry corn and one pound of wet pig; maybe 90 
percent dry matter in the corn and for sure 70 percent water in the 
pig. And you can't eat his bones.
  And so on a dry matter to dry matter basis, it takes at least 10 
pounds of dry matter in corn to make one pound of dry matter in the pig 
or the chicken, and probably 20 in the steer. You get very much more 
efficient conversion of these grains and beans into good food if you 
use milk.
  A cow will today produce 20,000 pounds of milk in a year with a ton 
of dry matter. She doesn't weigh a ton, but you have a ton of dry 
matter in her milk for the year, which has very high food value. There 
is no protein that is as good as milk protein. We determine the quality 
of protein by feeding young rats. It may not be complimentary that the 
animal has dietary requirements nearer us than any other, rats, but 
they do. And they are also omnivorous. And we determine how good their 
protein is by how fast young rats grow.
  If you assign a value of 100 to milk protein, eggs come in at about 
96, and the meats on down. And that shouldn't surprise you. God or 
nature, or whoever you think did it, obviously designed milk to grow 
young animals. A 100-pound sheep will put a pound each on twin lambs 
just from her milk. Enormously efficient. And eggs are very efficiently 
produced compared to producing the chicken that you eat.
  So we can free up a lot of these food crops for energy if we will 
simply eat the food crops rather than processing them through animals.
  The next chart shows one of the challenges in producing ethanol. 
Indeed, there are some scientists who believe that we use more energy 
in producing ethanol, more fossil fuel energy in producing ethanol than 
we get out of it. I hope they are wrong. I believe that it can be 
possible. But even after you have made the ethanol, you still have all 
of the protein and all of the fat left in the corn, and that is pretty 
good feed.
  Just an observation about what we eat and give to our animals. If you 
go to the Orient, the main protein source there for people is what is 
called tofu, and that is soybean protein. In this country, we take the 
soybean and we express the oil, which is the least valuable 
nutritionally, and we use the oil and we feed what is left of it to our 
pigs and chickens. No wonder that they are healthier than many of us.
  Here is a little comparison of the energy inputs in producing ethanol 
and in producing gasoline. Obviously, you expend some energy. You don't 
get all the energy from the oil in your gas tank. You expend some of 
that in drilling it, in pumping it, transporting it, refining it and 
hauling it to the service station, and so forth. So you use 1.23 
million Btu's to get 1 million Btu's.
  Well, what is the story with corn? Now, you have a lot of free energy 
with corn. You have the solar energy, the photosynthesis that makes the 
corn grow. And this is about as good as it is going to get. To get 1 
million Btu's of energy out of corn, you are going to have to spend 
about three-fourths of a million Btus in growing the corn, harvesting 
it, processing the ethanol, and so forth.
  Down at the bottom here is a very interesting pie chart, and it shows 
something that very few people know, and that is that almost half the 
energy that goes into producing corn comes from nitrogen fertilizer, 
which is now made from natural gas. So this is a fossil fuel input. 
This is all fossil fuel input, by the way.
  You just go around this little pie here and you are talking about 
mining the potash, and mining the phosphate, and mining the lime that 
makes the soil sweeter so that the nutrients can be absorbed. The 
diesel fuel in the tractor, the gasoline, the liquid propane gas, the 
electricity you use is produced by fossil fuels. The natural gas you 
use for drying your crops, for instance, the custom work, the guy you 
hire to come.
  And then all of the chemicals, something that we rarely, rarely 
reflect on. Gas and oil are huge feedstocks for a very important 
petrochemical industry. Most of our insecticides, most of our 
herbicides and so forth are made from gas and oil. And this is the 
contribution they make to growing corn. It is really, really quite 
large there, isn't it?
  I have been told that 13 percent of our corn crop would displace 2 
percent of our gasoline. But the only fair way to look at the 
contribution ethanol can make is to grow corn with energy from corn, 
and you can do that. But if you grow corn with energy from corn, to get 
a bushel of corn to use here, you have to use three bushels of corn. 
Remember, the 750,000 Btu inputs to get a million? You need three 
bushels going in to get one out, which means that it is one to four. 
You only get a fourth of it out, which means that you are going to have 
to use 52 percent of your corn crop to displace just 2 percent of our 
gasoline.
  So when you are hearing the euphemistic projections of how much of 
our gasoline we are going to displace with ethanol, just remember these 
numbers.
  Now, some people are even more enthusiastic about what is called 
cellulosic ethanol. Cellulose and lignin, particularly cellulose, we 
can't digest. It is made up of a whole long string of glucose 
molecules, which is a simple sugar; half of what we call sucrose, which 
is a double sugar disaccharide. But they are so tightly bound together, 
we don't have any enzymes in our gut which will release them. And 
neither does any other animal, by the way.
  So, gee, you might say, how do cows, sheep, goats, horses, and guinea 
pigs make do eating grass and hay? They make do because they have in 
their gut what are called comincils, animals or little critters that 
live in there, some of them multi-cellular, some single cells, that 
have chemicals, enzymes that can split the cellulose into the requisite 
glucose molecules and then the host simply absorbs those.
  We are now able to bioengineer some little organisms that can do 
that. So now, when you look at the huge piles of beet pulp, look at the 
corn fields with all the corn fodder out there, people are saying, gee, 
look how much energy we could get from this agricultural waste. You can 
get it by burning it, or you can use it by making cellulosic ethanol 
from it. But, you know, topsoil is topsoil because it has organic 
material. It gives it tilth. Why does it have to be there? Because 
without the organic material, the soils can't hold the nutrients and 
they can't hold the water necessary for growing things. You can't grow 
plants in stone dust and you can't grow plants in sand. So you have to 
have organic material there. For a few years, we might be able to mine 
the organic material and still grow some crops, but there will be 
diminishing returns. I don't know steady state how much we can take.
  Some people are euphemistic about how much we are going to get from 
sawgrass, prairie grass. They see it growing in huge amounts. But I 
suspect this year's prairie grass is growing because last year's 
prairie grass died and is fertilizing it. Now, we certainly can get 
something from this biomass, from agricultural waste and from growing 
trees and so forth, but it will not be enormous.
  Let me give you some idea of what the challenge is. We use 21 million 
barrels of oil a day. Each barrel of oil has

[[Page 1651]]

the energy equivalent of 12 people working all year. Hyman Rickover 
used data which showed the average family in 1957 used fossil fuel 
energy resulting in the equivalent of having 33, he said, full-time 
servants.

                              {time}  2230

  If you have some trouble getting your mind around this one barrel of 
oil and 12 people working all year, and by the way, that is costing you 
less than $10 per person per year, think how far a gallon of gasoline 
or diesel fuel, I appreciate the chart from the previous hour which 
showed how cheap oil was. It costs considerable less than water in the 
grocery store, by the way. But think how far that gallon of gasoline or 
diesel fuel carries your car and how long it would take you to pull the 
car there. And that gives you some idea of the challenge we face.
  Another little example: if you are a strong man and work hard all day 
long, I will get more work out of an electric motor for less than 25 
cents' worth of electricity. Now, that may be humbling to recognize 
that you are worth less than 25 cents a day in terms of fossil fuel 
energy, but that is the reality.
  There are two publications. We have only a few moments remaining. I 
want to go quickly through some slides here. We have two major studies, 
one of them is a Corps of Engineers study and these first few slides 
will be from their study. The second one is the big SAIC study, 
commonly known as the Hirsch Report. I just want to read quickly some 
of the things they said. These are paid for by our government. They are 
out there. You may be asking the question, Gee, why aren't people 
talking about this and why aren't we doing something about it? Good 
question.
  This is from the Corps of Engineers: the current price of oil is in 
the 45 to 57 per barrel range and is expected to stay in that range for 
several years. When they wrote this, by the way, it was about 65. Oil 
prices may go significantly higher, and some have predicted prices 
ranging up to $180 a barrel in a few years.
  Oil is the most important form of energy in the world today. 
Historically, no other energy source equals oil's intrinsic qualities 
of extractability, transportability, versatility, and cost. The 
qualities that enabled oil to take over from coal as the front line 
energy source for the industrialized world in the middle of the 20th 
century are as relevant today as they were then. And then this quote: 
In general, all nonrenewable resources follow a natural supply curve, 
getting more and more till you reach a peak and then falling down the 
other side. And they are concurring, a careful estimate of all the 
estimates lead to the conclusion that world oil production may peak 
within a few short years, after which it will decline. Once peak oil 
occurs, then the historic patterns of world oil demand and price cycles 
will cease.
  And the last one from this source: Petroleum experts indicate that 
peaking is either present or imminent; will occur around 2005.
  And now some charts from the Hirsch Report. This is very widely 
publicized. They concluded that we would have unprecedented risk 
management problems as we face the problem of transitioning from 
declining quantities of gas and oil and moving to alternatives. The 
economic, social, and political costs will be unprecedented. And then 
they state, We cannot conceive of any affordable government-sponsored 
crash program to accelerate normal replacement schedules. They said we 
should have started 20 years before peaking. If it is here, we are 20 
years too late, aren't we?
  And then this quote: The world has never faced a problem like this. 
There is a third report out there and that is by the Cambridge Energy 
Research Associates, and they believe that peaking will occur sometime 
in the future. And they present this little chart. This shows Hubbert's 
peak here, by the way, and because the actual data points didn't 
exactly follow his prediction, they are saying that you can't rely on 
his analysis. The little peak here, by the way, and the next chart will 
show us, that is from the Alaska oil find. Just a blip and the slide 
down the other side of Hubbert's peak.
  And then in the couple of minutes remaining to us, the last slide we 
will have a chance to look at here. And this shows several predictions, 
depending upon whether you think the world will find enormously more 
oil than we now have found. And I will tell you that most of the 
experts that I have talked to believe we have found 95 percent of all 
the oil we will ever find. That is this curve. If you think we are 
going to double the amount of oil that we have now found, then that is 
this curve. And the one on top here, and by the way, they say that they 
don't believe in peaking, but they present this curve which shows 
peaking. This is unconventional oil.
  Make up your own mind how much of that we are going to get, 
remembering the discussion we had earlier of the difficulty of getting 
this oil.
  Mr. Speaker, we in the world face a huge challenge. I just returned 
from China. They are talking about post oil. They get it. I wish we 
did.

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