[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 153 (2007), Part 5]
[House]
[Pages 6464-6471]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                    FROM FOSSIL FUELS TO RENEWABLES

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 18, 2007, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Bartlett) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Madam Speaker, I want to talk about a 
subject today that at least five groups in our country have a common 
cause in. They

[[Page 6465]]

come from quite different perspectives, but they all end up at the 
final common pathway. And these groups are those who are concerned with 
national security. They are concerned because our country has only 2 
percent of the known reserves of oil in the world, and we use 25 
percent of the world's oil and import almost two-thirds of what we use. 
And as the President says, we get a lot of that from countries that 
don't even like us.
  And so those who are concerned about national security are urging 
that we make a transition from these fossil fuels, most of which are 
owned by countries over there, and move to renewables so that we can 
have a sustainable source of energy for our country from a national 
security perspective.
  There is a second group of people who believe that our burning of 
these fossil fuels is polluting the environment to an unacceptable 
level. And it is not just the greenhouse gases, because that introduces 
us to a third group. But it is all of the other pollutants that come in 
the atmosphere as a result of using these fossil fuels in all the ways 
that we use them to produce energy, coal, fire, power plants, our 
automobiles, our trains, heating our buildings, all the ways that we 
use energy.
  By the way, you can make an argument that even if you are producing 
more CO2, that may not produce global warming if you are 
producing it by burning hydrocarbons in a way that puts a lot of other 
pollutants up in the atmosphere.
  I remember a number of years ago when Carl Sagan, the great 
astronomer, was noting that if we had a nuclear war we might go through 
what he called nuclear winter; and the trash thrown up into the 
atmosphere as a result of the nuclear explosions, he thought, might 
block enough of the Sun's rays that there would be a cooling of the 
Earth so that we would go through a kind of an ice age. Indeed, there 
is some natural phenomena that give some credibility to that 
possibility.
  Whenever there is a major volcano that goes off, an eruption that 
throws millions of tons of trash up there that may circulate for a 
couple of years before all the fine particles finally come down, we can 
see a degree or two of temporary cooling in the Earth as a result of 
that. So there is the environmental group that is concerned about our 
excessive burning of these fossil fuels and the pollutants that come 
from that, and they are very interested in conservation, in efficiency, 
and moving to true renewables.

                              {time}  1500

  And then there is the growing group of those who are concerned that 
the release of these greenhouse gases, CO2 being one of the 
major ones, is warming our Earth.
  Now, it is true that our Earth is warmer than it has been in the last 
10,000 years, since the last Ice Age, and maybe as warm as it has been, 
some say, in the last million years if in fact we have been here that 
long. It is not certain that there is a cause-effect relationship 
between CO2 and warming.
  But when you go back through history, and they do this in Antarctica 
by doing ice borings, and that is a desert down there; they have less 
than 2 inches of precipitation per year; it doesn't fall as snow, it 
falls as tiny little ice granules, and that accumulates very slowly. 
There is nearly 2 miles of ice piled up at the South Pole down there. 
And so with borings you can go in there and you can look back through 
tens of thousands of years, and the scientists can tell pretty much 
what the climate was like and what the temperatures were by the kinds 
of materials that were deposited there during that time. And they note 
that every time that CO2 was up, the Earth was warmer. So 
that at least is a presumptive evidence that CO2 certainly 
as a greenhouse gas is the cause of the present global warming that we 
are looking at.
  And, of course, what the global warming people want is to move away 
from fossil fuels, because what we are doing with fossil fuels is 
releasing into the atmosphere carbon dioxide that was sequestered by 
plants a very long time ago.
  As a little boy, I knew that that is what was happening, because we 
lived up in western Pennsylvania and we had a coal furnace; as a matter 
of fact, we didn't buy it, we mined it on our own farm.
  There was an abandoned mine on the farm and we got the services of a 
miner in the little local town and he opened up the mine and we shared 
the coal that he got from it, and we would use coal as it came from the 
mine, some big chunks and down to very small ones, and some were too 
big to put in the furnace. And as a little boy, when it was my time to 
tend the furnace I would have to go down and sometimes break a lump of 
coal so that I could get it into the furnace.
  I remember taking that sledgehammer that stood by the wall there and 
breaking the lump of coal, and once in a while it would open up and 
there would be a fern leaf. I remember as a little kid looking at that 
fern leaf and wondering, how long ago did that fern live and die and 
fall over and now be compressed under dirt and with time it finally 
converted to coal? So as a little boy I knew that the coal that we were 
burning came from plants that lived a very long time ago, and they had 
sequestered the CO2 then over thousands of years perhaps.
  And now what we are doing in a relatively few years, because we are 
in the age of oil, only about 150 years now in the age of oil, and we 
are now releasing into the atmosphere all the CO2 that has 
been taken out of the atmosphere over a very long time period.
  So what the global warming concerned people are interested in is an 
energy economy that uses the energy that we are producing. If you are 
burning the tree that grew, you are now releasing into the atmosphere 
the CO2 which the tree took out of the atmosphere. So 
although, and if it was possible, I am not sure that it is, that we 
could get as much energy from these alternative renewable sources that 
we are now getting from fossil fuels, you can use them to your heart's 
desire and you wouldn't increase the CO2 in the atmosphere 
because for every pound of CO2 that you released into the 
atmosphere, that pound was taken out of the atmosphere by the tree or 
the grass or whatever grew that you were getting energy from.
  And so what the people concerned with global warming want us to do is 
to move as quickly as we can from fossil fuels to these renewables. So 
they have common cause with the environmental people and with the 
national security people.
  And then there is a group of people growing, not large yet but 
growing, who believe that, even if you don't have any concern about the 
environment, even if you don't have any concern about global warming, 
even if you don't think that it is a national security risk to be 
getting so much of our oil from over there, it just isn't going to be 
there because we are going to have such a phenomenon as peak oil. By 
the way, our country reached that plateau in 1970. We will talk about 
that in a few moments.
  And then there is a fourth group that really ought to have common 
cause here, and that is the group that is concerned about what could 
America do to get back as a premier manufacturing Nation? And you know 
that we are not now, because all you have to do is to look at the cars 
on the road and where they are made, and I think more than half of them 
are now made overseas. And all you have to do is go into a store and 
buy things and just look at the tag at where it is made. And I have to 
look and look and look to find something that is made in the United 
States anymore. You would make a lot of money if your wager was that 
the first thing you pick up is going to be made in China, because 
almost always the first thing you pick up is made in China.
  So we desperately need an area in which we can be premier, in which 
we can export to the world, and I would submit that that would be in 
the energy efficiency and alternative energy area. There is no society 
in the world that is half as creative and innovative as the American 
people if we are challenged and if we see the need and if we see the 
goal.

[[Page 6466]]

  So I wanted to talk today about this phenomenon which I think that 
these five groups have common cause in: Those that are concerned about 
national security, those that are concerned about the environment and 
isn't our air polluted enough, those that are concerned with global 
warming, those that believe that by and by the oil just isn't going to 
be there, the Moon isn't made out of green cheese and the Earth isn't 
made out of oil and, quite obviously, it is not going to last forever, 
and then the group that is looking for something where we can again 
become a premier engineering and manufacturing Nation. And, of course, 
we have now relinquished that premier position to other parts of the 
world.
  The first chart that I have here kind of explains a lot of our 
dilemma, the World According to Oil. And I found this, and I found it 
so intriguing that I have shown it now a couple of times. But what this 
does is to show you what our planet would look like if the size of the 
nation was relative to how much oil it had. And, boy, do we have a 
warped geography here.
  Here is Saudi Arabia, and it dominates. Look how big Saudi Arabia is. 
How many times could we put the United States in Saudi Arabia, 20? That 
is about how much more oil they have than we have. Canada looks pretty 
big here; they have got a meaningful amount of oil compared to the 
lower 48, compared to their size. Look at Venezuela down here, it just 
dwarfs the rest of South America. And look at the North of Africa here.
  The countries that we think of as being important in the world 
economy like England and Europe and so forth, look at them there, they 
look like little splotches here on the globe if the countries were 
sized according to the amount of oil that they have.
  Iraq. So you can see why people are concerned about Iraq, it is a 
pretty big reservoir of oil. Little Kuwait. If you look at a map of 
that part of the world, you will see that Kuwait, and Saddam Hussein 
thought that it looked like a province down there in the most 
southeastern part of Kuwait that he wanted to reclaim it and that is 
why he went in more than a decade ago, but it is tiny compared to Iraq. 
You could fit the United States into Kuwait five, six times. Here is 
Qatar, a little nation so small you can hardly see it on the globe but 
there it is probably as large as the United States. Iran, now problems 
with Iran, note how large Iran is.
  Something of particular note on this. The two countries that contain 
about 2\1/2\ billion people total, more than 1 billion now in India, 
and 1,300,000,000 in China, and look at how big they are relative to 
oil. Russia north of them, which has only 140 million people, dwarfs 
them. By the way, notice how big Russia is, 1\1/2\ or maybe twice as 
big as the United States, it doesn't have all that much oil. We have 
only 2 percent of the known reserves, this is about 2 percent of that 
total volume of oil nations there. And Russia looks big as an oil 
exporter because they don't use that much oil so they can export, but 
they really don't have all that much oil compared to countries like 
Saudi Arabia and so forth.
  The next chart is a prediction that was made by a very famous speech 
that was given 51 years ago the 8th day of this month. And I will 
submit that, within a decade, this may well be recognized as the most 
important speech given in the last century. It was a speech given by M. 
King Hubbert, who was an oil geologist and he worked for the Shell Oil 
Company. And there was a convention of oil people in San Antonio, Texas 
on the 8th day of March 1956, and he got up and gave an absolutely 
audacious speech. It was inconceivable and unbelievable when he gave 
the speech.
  What he said was that the United States, and if you look back in your 
history at that point in time we were king of oil; we were producing 
more oil and I think exporting more oil than any other country in the 
world. And he predicted that this giant in oil would reach its maximum 
production of oil in just about 14 years, and he was predicting that by 
about 1970 we would reach our maximum production of oil.
  Now, he was talking only about the lower 48. He couldn't imagine at 
that time that we would be able to go out and drill in the Gulf of 
Mexico where there are now 4,000 oil wells, I think, and he did not 
take into account that we might find oil. I expect the technology for 
getting it out of there probably would have been very difficult at that 
time. So he was predicting the lower 48. And that would be everything 
here of the rest of the U.S. and Texas. You see how big Texas was here. 
Maybe a third in total oil we have ever produced has come from Texas. 
And that would be the lower 48.
  As you see, right on schedule in 1970, his prediction came true. That 
shocked a lot of people. And whereas he had been an object of ridicule 
before that, now he became kind of a legend in his own time.
  And then we found that huge strike of oil in Alaska in Prudhoe Bay up 
at Dead Horse, I have been there; I saw the beginning of that 4-foot 
pipeline, through which for a number of years now about one-fourth of 
our total oil has flowed. And then the nongas liquids you see up here. 
If you add those two in, there was just a bump on the way down the 
other side of Hubbert's Peak.
  And here we are today. In the lower 48, we are producing considerably 
less than half of the oil that we produced in 1970. And if you even add 
to that the liquids made from gases and the Gulf of Mexico oil, now 
that is recent enough that people can remember that, and you may 
remember the hype that went on over that. Gee, we don't have to worry 
about oil for the foreseeable future. We found this enormous amount of 
oil in the Gulf of Mexico; and, as I mentioned, there are about 4,000 
oil wells there. Notice that hardly made a blip in our slide down the 
other side of Hubbert's Peak.
  The next chart shows a depiction of Hubbert's Peak, and this is from 
a very interesting publication. This is in a publication by CERA. Now, 
CERA is one of the few organizations that believes that you don't need 
to be worrying about oil for the next number of years, and they have 
this chart in their publication and they intend to repudiate and 
ridicule M. King Hubbert with this chart. And they are saying that M. 
King Hubbert couldn't have been right because look at the actual data 
here.
  Now, this is the total U.S. production, the red, and the yellow is 
the Hubbert's lower 48. And what he is saying was that Hubbert must 
have been all wrong, because the actual lower 48 production are these 
green things down here, and they think that is far enough away from the 
yellow that his prognostication is repudiated by this.
  I would think the average person looking would say, well, gee, he was 
right on. Wasn't he? He said it was going to peak in 1970, that is 
1970. He said it would go downhill after that. Well, it didn't go 
downhill quite as fast as he thought it would, but it certainly has 
gone downhill after that. Maybe he couldn't have imagined that we would 
drill more than \1/2\ million oil wells in this country. We have more 
oil wells drilled in this country than all the rest of the world put 
together.
  Now, the red here reflects that contribution from Prudhoe Bay and 
from the Gulf of Mexico that we saw in the previous one, that little 
blip going down the other side of Hubbert's Peak.
  Mr. MARKEY. Will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. I would be happy to yield to the gentleman 
from Massachusetts.
  Mr. MARKEY. I would like to say that the gentleman from Maryland is 
like Socrates up here lecturing to the Members and to the country on 
this incredibly important issue. And I would just like to take note 
that you do it day after day, and you are relentless.
  There is no question that, still, there is this denial with regard to 
the amount of oil that the United States has in terms of reserves 
compared to OPEC, compared to Russia, compared to other countries in 
the world.

                              {time}  1515

  And the gentleman from Maryland on a consistent basis comes here to 
the House floor. I know you do it in other places to bring this 
message. And if I

[[Page 6467]]

may, just for 10 seconds because I know the gentleman shares my view on 
this, I think we both drive hybrids. I think the gentleman is the Chair 
of the Hybrid Caucus, as a matter of fact. And we both know that the 
technology exists if we make a commitment as a nation. So here is just 
one little statistic I would like to put out there:
  In 1970, the United States imported 20 percent of its oil; 80 percent 
we produced. By 1977, just 7 years later, we imported 47 percent of our 
oil. We went from 20 percent imports to 47 percent imports. But then 
the Congress and Gerald Ford, President Ford, passed legislation which 
mandated a doubling of the fuel economy standards for the United States 
of America. By 1985, 1986, we had dropped back down to 27 percent 
imports. So we went from 20 percent to 46 back down to 27 percent 
because we improved our technology. We doubled the fuel economy from 13 
miles per gallon to 27 miles per gallon. We did it technologically.
  Today, unbelievably, the United States imports 60 percent of its oil. 
So from 1986 to 2006, we went from 27 percent of our oil that we 
imported to 60 percent of our oil that we imported. And as the 
gentleman graphically, in eye-watering detail, continues to present out 
here on the House floor, the places from which we import this oil is 
not healthy for the United States of America. It is an unhealthy 
relationship with countries that we should not be dependent upon. Three 
hundred billion dollars worth of oil imports last year. Three hundred 
billion dollars. And we know that much of that money is spent on things 
that are completely adverse to the overall national security interests 
of the United States of America even as we emit more greenhouse gases 
out into the atmosphere that we would not be emitting if our fuel 
economy standard was much higher.
  So I saw you out here again like a preacher, and I thought that I 
would just let you know that I am out here in the congregation 
listening to you, and I know that there are many, many other people who 
are very much in debt to you for having the resolute commitment to 
getting this message into the minds of the American people.
  So I thank the gentleman for yielding.
  Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman very 
much for his kind words.
  This is, in fact, the 25th time that I have been here. And, wow, it 
was the 14th, just about a year ago I came here for the first time, the 
14th of last month, March. And we were putting our charts together and 
we were trying to decide what to call this phenomenon. Were we going to 
call it the ``great rollover,'' when you reach the top and start down 
the other side, or were we going to call it ``peak oil''? And we had a 
long conversation in the office about what we should call it, and we 
finally decided we would call it ``peak oil.''
  Now, I didn't know that there were some other people out there 
already calling it ``peak oil'' because I am a whole lot wiser now than 
I was then, but this kind of indicates the status of the recognition of 
the problem a year ago, and I was one of the more interested people in 
the Congress in this and I didn't even know what to call it. I was 
arguing with myself and with the staff. We were discussing it. Should 
we call it the ``great rollover,'' and it will be a great rollover, or 
should we call it ``peak oil''? We finally settled on ``peak oil,'' and 
now today there is an increasing number of people who are concerned 
about peak oil.
  Mr. MARKEY. Will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Yes, sir.
  Mr. MARKEY. Why do you think it is so hard to convince people that we 
don't have the oil reserves that would allow us to have a healthy 
relationship with the rest of the world that does have the oil reserves 
that ultimately we are going to need to import if we don't change our 
habits? Why do you think our country doesn't come to grips with that? 
Where is the gap in communicating with the American people on this 
issue?
  Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Well, thank you. I think there are several 
reasons for this. One is an irrational confidence, worship almost, of 
the marketplace, and technology. And the third is that people just 
don't like to think about tough, hard things. I love to think about 
those things because there is no exhilaration like the exhilaration of 
meeting a big challenge and overcoming it. So this is exhilarating to 
me, and there are many people that don't like this. And my wife tells 
me that I shouldn't be doing this because don't you remember that in 
ancient Greece they killed the messenger that brought bad news? And my 
response is this is a good news story. If we start today, we will have 
a less bumpy ride than if we start tomorrow.
  Mr. MARKEY. Will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Yes, sir.
  Mr. MARKEY. You tell your wife that in Massachusetts the messenger's 
name was Paul Revere and we actually built statues to him up in 
Massachusetts for telling us the Red Coats were coming, the British 
were coming, the regulars were coming. And that is what you are telling 
us right now, that at 60, 61 percent dependence upon imported oil, we 
are heading inexorably towards a very, very dangerous foreign policy, 
national security crisis in our country because we are averaging about 
1\1/2\ percent per year increase in our dependency. So in order to move 
from 27 percent back in 1985, 1986 to 60, 61 percent today, it just has 
to go up that much. So if we come back here in 67 years and we haven't 
done anything, we will be over 70 percent, 75 percent dependent upon 
imported oil, all unnecessary if we looked at the facts and looked at 
the facts today and began to change our national habits.
  So tell your wife that Paul Revere is more likely the analogy that 
applies to you rather than the messenger that they shot.
  Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. I want to thank my friend for joining me. 
This is absolutely a bipartisan issue. I don't know that energy and oil 
knows the difference between a Democrat and a Republican. So I am very 
pleased that you joined me on the floor.
  I might say just a word about these two philosophies that are keeping 
us from really focusing on this issue. One is an almost reference for 
the marketplace. There are many people who believe that the marketplace 
is both omniscient, it knows everything; and it is omnipotent, it is 
all powerful and it will solve everything. Well, I believe the market 
is really very powerful. But, you know, there are some things that even 
God can't do. God can't make a square circle, can he? So there are some 
things that the marketplace won't be able to do.
  I do not think that the market signals will be able to be responded 
to quickly enough to meet this challenge. If there were infinite 
resources, then this blind faith in the market might have some 
relevance. But there clearly are not infinite resources. The amount of 
oil out there is, in fact, finite.
  The other is the near worship of scientists and technology: Don't 
worry, they will fix it. I mentioned to one of our really high 
officials in government that peak oil was a reality and that it just 
wasn't going to be there in the future in the amounts that we need for 
our economy. And he said, Well, I guess when that happens, the price 
will go up and people will use less and they will find something else 
and that solves the problem. Don't worry about it, they will fix it.
  Well, I point to two different societies: The Mayan society down in 
Central America. That didn't get fixed and they are gone. Our cliff 
dwellers out in the West. I am sure that a number of folks have been 
there and seen those cliffs, and their world is gone. And I am sure 
when it was deteriorating, they were saying to each other, Don't worry, 
they will take care of it.
  Easter Island, a vigorous civilization there, and when we finally 
found the last survivors of it they were living in caves. They were 
eating rats and each other because they had done, in that little part 
of the planet, what we may one day do to our total planet; that is, 
they were living beyond the renewable resources of their little island 
there in

[[Page 6468]]

Easter Island and somebody didn't fix it. There wasn't somebody there 
to fix it.
  The next chart looks at a number of the experts and what their 
predictions are as to when this peak oil that Mr. Markey was talking 
about is going to occur. And we are now here in 2007 and notice that 
there is a large number of them here: Colin Campbell, Kenneth Deffeyes, 
Matt Simmons. Several of these I know personally. And their predictions 
are all in the very, very near timeframe. As a matter of fact, Deffeyes 
believes that we now have passed peak oil. He said he used to be a 
prognosticator and now he is an historian. He is now looking back at 
the event of peak oil. And then we have a few that believe it will be 
between 2010 and 2016. And then CERA. CERA is the largest one here. 
Shell. No visible peak. Very few who believe that it may be some time 
off in the future.
  We will have an opportunity in a few moments to talk about CERA and 
some of their projections. But notice that most, the large percentage 
of all of those who have been looking at this and studying this believe 
that peak oil is either present or imminent.
  The next chart is a really interesting one. And if you had only one 
chart to look at, this I think is the most instructive of all of the 
charts that we have because on this one chart, it shows the discovery, 
and that is the large bars here. And you see that back in the 1940s we 
were discovering lots and in the 1950s, and, boy, in the 1960s and 
1970s huge amounts of oil. But notice what has happened. Since about 
1980 it has been down, down, down. And that is in spite of ever better 
technologies for discovering oil and ever better incentives.
  When Reagan came to office, that was in 1980, and we were already 10 
years down the other side of Hubbert's Peak; so we knew darn well that 
M. King Hubbert was right, that the United States had reached its peak 
and we were sliding down the other side of the peak. And I really liked 
Ronald Reagan. I can like a person without liking everything that they 
do. And I thought then and I am more convinced now that his solution to 
this oil problem was totally the wrong solution. His belief was that if 
you gave them a profit incentive they would go out there and find it. 
So they gave them a profit incentive, and, boy, did they drill. And I 
don't have it with me, but I have a chart that shows the number of 
wells that were drilled and how much oil was found. And drilling didn't 
help. You can't find what is not there and you can't pump what you 
haven't found. So in spite of ever better techniques like 3D seismic 
and computer modeling, we now pretty much know what the whole globe 
looks like geologically except maybe we would like to know a little 
more about Saudi Arabia and some of the countries around the Caspian. 
But largely we are pretty aware of what the geology is, and we know 
that gas and oil can occur in only certain unique geological 
formations.
  The dark line here represents the use of oil. And you see that for a 
long while we were finding enormously more oil than we were using. But 
from about 1980 on, we were finding less and less and using more and 
more.
  By the way, notice this little blip here in the 1970s. This is the 
result of the Arab oil embargo, and had this curve kept going up at the 
rate it was before, where would it be? There was a stunning statistic 
up through the Carter years, through this time; every decade we used as 
much oil as had been used in all of previous history. Wow. What that 
says is that when you have used half of all the oil in the world, there 
would be what, one decade left at current use rates? Now, obviously, 
that couldn't happen because you are not going to use it and then fall 
off a cliff at the end because the last remaining oil is going to be 
harder and harder to get. But since about 1980 on, we have now been 
eating into or reserves, and you will have to take some of this surplus 
here and fill in this area here. And then what will the future look 
like?
  This chart presumes that it will peak in about 2010. And you can make 
the future, within limits, look differently, depending upon how 
aggressive you want to be in using enhanced oil recovery and if you 
want to drill everywhere in the world the equivalent of the half 
million wells that we have drilled in this country. If you drilled 10 
wells rather than one in the Oil Patch, you obviously would get the oil 
out quicker. You are not going to get any more oil out probably, but 
you will get it out more quickly.
  So there may be some argument about what the future looks like, but 
there can be no argument that you can't pump what you haven't found. 
Now, if you put a smooth curve over this discovery curve, the area 
under that curve represents the total amount of our discoveries. That 
is the equivalent of adding up all these little individual bars. And if 
you look at the area under the use curve, that will be the amount of 
oil that we have used.
  Now, obviously, at the end of the day, those two areas are going to 
be the same. So unless you think that we are going to reverse this 
discovery curve and find a lot more oil, and some people do think that, 
by the way, and we will talk about that in a few moments, but unless 
you think that we are going to find a lot more oil, the future cannot 
look very much different than this because you can't pump what you 
haven't found.

                              {time}  1530

  Because you can't pump what you haven't found, and the area under 
this discovery curve cannot be different than the area under the use 
curve. There are many people who are projecting uses that would just 
indicate that we are going to have to find enormously more oil in the 
future. One of those projections is in the next chart.
  This is from our Energy Information Agency, and this is projections 
of discoveries. Now, they didn't draw a really smooth curve. They took 
in some of the big humps, but they could have smoothed this whole thing 
out.
  This is the discovery curve we were just looking at. I think you can 
recognize that, way up here in the seventies and down, down, down since 
then. Back in about 2000 they were projecting what we would find in the 
future. Now, they used some very interesting assumptions here.
  The USGS has done a series of simulations. They have some computer 
modeling, and they have done a whole series of computer modelings, 
thousands of these, with different inputs. If this was true, if that 
was true, then what would the likely amount of yet-to-be-discovered oil 
be. And they have charted those things, and they have the frequency on 
the ordinate, and on the abscissa they have the amount of oil yet to be 
found.
  Now, this is all a computer game. They simply are making some 
guesses, assumptions; and they are putting those into this computer 
model and they are running that model; and as they change the 
assumptions, they will change the amount of oil they think we will 
find.
  So they have gone to the midpoint of that, and they have said that 
was F, they call it F, and somehow that got distorted to P and they are 
now talking about probabilities, which is just bizarre, because these 
are not probabilities. But this is the fraction of oil that you will 
find more or find less than this.
  So what did they have here? Three of these curves. They have the P-
95, that is 95 percent probability they say. Then they have the P-50. 
That is really F-50 in the data they took this from. And then they have 
the 5. What they are saying is that since 50 is halfway between 5 and 
95 it is the mean and therefore that is the most probable. So their 
projection when they made the chart was that this downward slope was 
now going to be reversed and we were going to start going up.
  Of course, if they really are probabilities, and it didn't start as 
that, it started as these fractional things, but it ended up being 
projected here as probabilities, if they really are probabilities, 
there should be another green line down here and another blue line down 
here.
  It is like that little funnel-shaped thing you see from the 
hurricane. Tomorrow you are pretty certain where it is going to be. The 
day after tomorrow,

[[Page 6469]]

you are less certain, so that gets to be a big funnel as you go out. So 
that is what these various probabilities are.
  Now, not surprisingly, the actual data points have followed the 95 
percent probability. If you say those are probabilities, obviously this 
95 percent probable is a whole lot more probable than 50 percent 
probable. But for what it is worth, the actual data points for a decade 
or so have been following the 95 percent probability.
  The next chart, this is from the Hirsch Report. I might digress for a 
moment to note what the Hirsch Report is. There have been two major 
studies that are financed by our government. One was financed by the 
Department of Energy and that was SAIC report. Dr. Hirsch, which is why 
this is called the Hirsch Report, Dr. Hirsch was the leading 
investigator on that, and this came out, oh, a year-and-a-half ago 
roughly. I think we will have some quotes from it a little later. But 
they looked at this situation, peaking of world oil production, 
impacts, mitigation and risk management. It is going to peak. What 
should we do about it, what can we do about it, is what was in this 
report.
  This is one of the charts from this report, and these are USGS 
estimates of ultimate recovery. This is the F that I was talking about. 
They somehow changed it to P. But this is low, 95 percent; high, 5 
percent; and the mean, or expected value, 3,000.
  Just a word about what these numbers are. These are thousand 
gigabarrels. Now, we use gigabarrel because a billion in England, I 
understand, is a million million. A billion in this country is a 
thousand million. So if you are talking about billions, you may confuse 
some people. But apparently everybody knows what a giga is, and a giga 
is our billion. So we are talking about gigabarrels of oil.
  So this is 2,248 gigabarrels of oil. That is about, what, 2,000 
gigabarrels of oil. That, by the way, is roughly the amount of oil that 
most of the world's experts believe we have found, and we have used 
about half of that. We have used about 1,000 gigabarrels of oil, so 
there are about another 1,000 that we have yet to use.
  But what this prognostication indicates is that we are going to find 
as much more oil, another roughly 1,000 gigabarrels to bring this 2 up 
to 3, we are going to find as much more oil as all the oil that is 
still left in the world. Now, that is conceivable. I think it is about 
as likely as winning the lottery. I don't think there is much 
probability of that happening.
  But even if that was true, and that is the stunning thing that this 
chart shows, even if that is true, that only takes the peak out to 
2016. That is just around the corner. That is 9 years away, even if 
that is true.
  This is the power of the exponential function. One of the most 
interesting lectures I have ever heard was given by Dr. Albert 
Bartlett, emeritus, University of Colorado, no relative of mine. I wish 
he were. I wish I had some of his genes. He gives some fascinating 
explanations of the exponential function. One of them I think is worth 
spending just a moment on.
  The story is told that chess was developed in an ancient kingdom, and 
the king was so pleased at the invention of chess that he asked the 
inventor to come in and he promised him any reasonable thing. And the 
inventor of the chess game said, O, king, I am a very simple person. I 
have simple needs. If you will just take my chess board and put a grain 
of wheat on the first square and two grains of wheat on the second 
square and four grains of wheat on the third square and eight on the 
fourth square and keep doubling until you have filled all of the 64 
squares on my chess board, that will be reward enough.
  The king said to himself, simple fellow. He could have asked for 
something meaningful, and all he has asked for is a few grains of wheat 
on a chess board. Of course, the king could not deliver, because it is 
my understanding that it would take the world's harvest today of a 
decade to fill the chess board. That is the power of exponential 
growth.
  Albert Einstein was asked about what the next great power in the 
universe would be after the discovery of nuclear energy, and he said 
the most powerful force in the universe was the power of compound 
interest.
  Well, Dr. Albert Bartlett's fascinating 1-hour lecture, and just do a 
Google search for Dr. Bartlett, Albert Bartlett and energy, and you can 
pull it up, and he has some very interesting illustrations in there.
  He says the biggest failure of our industrialized society is the 
failure to understand the exponential growth. But even if we were to 
find as much more oil as all the oil that now exists, it would push the 
peak out to only 2016.
  Now, if you use enhanced oil recovery and pump a lot of 
CO2 down there and live steam and so forth, maybe you can 
push it out to 2037, but look what happens after that. Then you fall 
off a cliff, is what they say in this prognostication.
  The next chart is an interesting chart from CERA. In an article 
entitled ``Undulating Plateau Versus Peak Oil,'' it says there is not 
going to be any peak. I looked at this, and, by golly, it looks like a 
peak to me. It goes up and then it comes down.
  Now, they have several different assumptions in here, and they are 
pretty easy to sort out, I think. This is roughly that 2 trillion, the 
current known amount of oil; and if that is all the oil there is, they 
agree that the peak is pretty imminent. But they believe that we are 
going to find about as much more conventional oil as still exists in 
reserves. If that is true, then the peak moves out only this far.
  Then they think we are going to get a lot of oil from the 
unconventional oil sources, like the Canadian tar sands and our western 
oil shales and the really heavy oil from Venezuela; and if we get that, 
then we are going to go up that high plateau. But this is still a 
plateau
  I have 10 kids, 15 grandkids and 2 great grandkids. Wouldn't it be 
nice if we left a little energy for them? We are bequeathing them, not 
with my votes, but we are bequeathing them the largest 
intergenerational debt transfer in the history of the world. I would 
like to leave them a little energy, thank you, which is why I don't 
vote to drill in ANWR and I don't vote to drill offshore. I think there 
is a real moral element to this discussion.
  If we are going to bequeath them this horrendous debt, which I think 
is immoral in itself, then I think it is doubly immoral that we give 
them a world from which we have raped all the readily available energy. 
Someone suggested in the future they may look back at what we have done 
and say to themselves, how could the monsters have done that? I hope 
that they won't be able to say that about this generation, because I 
hope that we will do better.
  Well, this curve that they meant to repudiate, peak oil, I think 
confirms there will be a peak oil.
  The next chart here is a statement from one of the experts in this 
field, Dr. Laherrere, and this is what he says. The USGS estimate 
implies a five-fold increase in discovery, to reverse the current 
trend, which is going down, and it is going to go up, a five-fold 
increase in discovery rate and reserve addition for which no evidence 
is presented. Such an improvement in performance is in fact utterly 
implausible, he says, given the great technological achievements of the 
industry over the past 20 years, the worldwide search and the 
deliberate effort to find the largest remaining prospects.
  And we found a pretty big one just recently out in the Gulf of 
Mexico, under, what, 7,000 feet of water, roughly 30,000 feet of rock. 
If you notice, they aren't developing that yet. I am told, and not 
everything I am told is true because it is sometimes hard to get the 
correct facts, but I am told that they will start developing that when 
oil is $211 a barrel, because that is what it is going to cost to get 
it out of there. I am not sure whether that is true or not.
  The next chart, I mentioned the oil chart that we showed before as 
being the single chart I would use if I had only one. If I was awarded 
two charts to use to talk about this, this would be the second one I 
would use, the upper part of it. This is a really revealing chart.

[[Page 6470]]

  This goes back through about 400 years of, I generally say 5,000 
years of, recorded history. Hyman Rickover referred to it as 8,000 
years of recorded history.
  I might digress for just a moment. I hope to come to the floor the 
15th of this May to talk about a really, really interesting speech that 
Hyman Rickover, the father of our nuclear submarine, gave to a group of 
physicians in Saint Paul, Minnesota, 50 years ago the 15th of this May.
  He notes that we have 8,000 years of recorded history. He said at 
that time, 50 years ago, we were about 100 years into the age of oil. 
This now introduces us to that age of oil.
  It was introduced, of course, by the Industrial Revolution which 
started with wood, the hills of New England, the mountains that were 
denuded, taking charcoal to England to make iron. Up in Frederick 
County, which I have the honor of representing, there is Catoctin 
Furnace up there, which is a little smelter up there, and they denuded 
the hills up in Gambro where Camp David is. They denuded those hills to 
make charcoal for that furnace. It is now a historic site. The 
Industrial Revolution began with the use of wood. The Stanley Steamer 
used wood.
  On the ordinate here is the quadrillion BTUs. This is a measure of 
the total amount of energy produced. Notice that is pretty far down 
here. Then we found coal. Boy, then the Industrial Revolution took off. 
But it really took off when we found gas and oil. And notice how that 
is standing up on end. And notice what happened at the Arab oil embargo 
here in the seventies.

                              {time}  1545

  Where would we be if that hadn't happened? That was really a wake-up 
call. As a result of that, we have enormously more efficient appliances 
than we had then. Your air conditioner is probably three times as 
efficient as it was then. Too bad our cars didn't follow that path, 
isn't it?
  Well, the interesting thing is that the world's population just about 
followed this curve. For these 8,000 years of recorded history, we had 
half a billion to a billion people worldwide. Now with the industrial 
revolution, the population has exploded. We now have almost 7 billion 
people in the world.
  There is, in Hyman Rickover's speech to those physicians 50 years 
ago, a fascinating discussion of the contribution of energy to the 
development of civilization.
  I hope to come to the floor on May 15 and we will spend the whole 
hour talking about his speech. It was so prophetic. As a matter of 
fact, he predicted that if we start making too much energy from a food 
substance, the price of food will go up. We have made trifling amounts 
of ethanol from corn, and we have doubled the price of corn. We are 
hurting the poor people who use tortillas because they are made out of 
corn. My dairymen are financially dying because the price of corn has 
doubled and the price of milk does not justify that feed cost. They are 
losing money month by month.
  Well, this is striking symbolism here. In another 100-150 years, we 
will be down the other side of the age of oil. This is going to fall 
off.
  Is there any reason that the world shouldn't follow the microcosm of 
the United States? M. King Hubbert predicted in 1956 that we would peak 
in 1970. We did. He predicted the world would be peaking about now. If 
he was right about the United States, why shouldn't he be right about 
the world, and why shouldn't we have been doing something about that?
  Since 1980, we have known very well that M. King Hubbert was right 
about the United States. If he was right about the United States, maybe 
he would be right about the world. If it is true that the world's oil 
production would peak about now, then no matter what we do, drill a 
half million wells, like we drill in the United States, which would be 
millions worldwide, it still goes downhill no matter what we have done. 
Our production is downhill.
  Very interesting, in 8,000 years of recorded history, the age of oil 
will be but a blip: 300 years. What will our world look like? Our next 
chart introduces us to that.
  Sooner or later, whether we like it or not, we will transition from 
fossil fuels because they will one day be gone. We will transition from 
fossil fuels to renewables. This chart looks at the options that we 
have. We have some finite sources, and we need to come back for another 
hour and talk in detail about some of these finite sources that we have 
here and what their potential is, and then let the listener judge as to 
what contribution they think will be made from this.
  One of the challenges we have is the fantastic density of energy in 
our fossil fuels. One barrel of oil has in it the energy equivalent of 
12 people working all year long. Hyman Rickover gives some fascinating 
examples in his speech to those physicians nearly 50 years ago. He said 
that each worker in the factory had at his disposal the power 
equivalent of 244 men turning the wheels and so forth; that every 
family had the mechanical system, stoves and vacuum cleaners, toasters, 
that represented the work of 33 full-time faithful household servants. 
He said 100,000 men pushed your car down the road, and the equivalent 
energy of 700,000 men pushed a jet plane through the sky.
  Two little examples to help realize this, just think how far one 
gallon of gasoline or diesel, how far that one gallon of gasoline or 
diesel takes you. I drive a Prius. It drives 50 miles on a gallon. How 
long would it take me to pull my Prius 50 miles?
  If you go out and work really hard all day, I will get more work out 
of an electric motor for less than 25 cents worth of electricity. Now 
energy-wise electricity is about half the cost of gasoline, but about 
25 cents worth of electricity, and that may be humbling to represent 
that you are worth less than 25 cents a day in terms of fossil fuel, 
but that is the reality. And that is why we have such an incredibly 
high standard of living, we have this incredible energy source at our 
disposal.
  The challenge is to transition to renewable forms of energy that will 
provide the same quality of life. We have some finite resources that we 
can go through. The tar sands, the oil shales, the coal, nuclear 
fission, nuclear fusion. We don't have time today to talk about these 
in detail. We will come back and talk about those in detail. And then 
all of the renewables. These will one day be gone, except for nuclear. 
We will talk about nuclear. If we ever get fusion, we are home free. I 
think that is most unlikely. If we go to breeder reactors, we buy some 
problems, but then we have relatively secure energy if you can handle 
the waste, and so forth, from that.
  But there are only so much tar sands, oil shale, and coal. They come 
at great expense. They are pretty polluting processes. Ultimately, we 
will be down here, getting all of our energy from these resources: 
Solar, wind, geothermal, ocean energy, agricultural resources, soy 
diesel, biodiesel, ethanol, methanol, biomass.
  Now there is a lot of talk about cellulosic ethanol. I understand the 
President on television was saying that there is going to be limited 
amounts of energy we can get from ethanol because already we have 
doubled the price of corn. So now we need to turn to biomass, to 
cellulosic ethanol.
  Cellulosic ethanol is liberating the glucose that is so tightly bound 
in the starch molecule that enzymes in our body can't liberate it, but 
there are microbes that live in the guts of the wood-eating cockroach, 
cryptocercus, and in the stomach of cows and sheep and goats and so 
forth that does that for them. So the cellulosic ethanol is liberating 
the glucose from the big cellulose molecule.
  Waste energy. Just a word of caution, that huge stream of waste we 
have is the result of profligate use of fossil fuels. In an energy 
deficient world, there will be nowhere near as much waste as we have 
now. We jolly well ought to be using the waste energy now. It is a much 
better use of this waste than burying it in a landfill, but it will not 
be the ultimate solution to our problem.
  Hydrogen. I want to make sure that everyone understands that hydrogen 
is not an energy source. We talk about it

[[Page 6471]]

because when you burn it you get water that is pretty darn clean, and 
it is a great candidate for fuel cells, if we ever get fuel cells. 
Think of hydrogen as a battery, something to carry energy from one 
source to another.
  We have only a few moments remaining, and I would like to put the 
last chart up. That will introduce us to a longer discussion we will 
have next time.
  We are very much like the young couple whose grandparents have died 
and they have inherited a lot of money. They have established a 
lifestyle where 85 percent of the money they spend comes from their 
grandparents' inheritance, and only 15 percent from what they are 
earning.
  Here we are getting 85 percent of our energy from fossil fuels and 
only 15 percent from anything else, and the fossil fuels are not going 
to last. The kids look at what they are doing and say gee, that is 
going to run out. We have to do something. Either we have to make more 
or use less. That is exactly where we are.
  A bit more than half of all of this other than fossil fuel energy is 
nuclear power: 8 percent of total use in our country, 20 percent of 
electricity, it probably could and should be more than that, and then 7 
percent. That is going to have to grow until it is 100 percent, but 
some don't have much potential for growth.
  Conventional hydroelectric, that is peaked out. We will come back and 
spend a full hour talking about the potential of these. There are 
exciting challenges here, and I think it will inspire the best of 
America

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