[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 154 (2008), Part 6]
[House]
[Pages 8287-8293]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1930
                                PEAK OIL

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Mahoney of Florida). 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. Mr. Speaker, several days ago I came into 
the office early and I found at my door the usual package of newspapers 
and I opened them up and was placing them out on the table, and I 
noticed the headlines. And this is every paper that was at my door that 
morning. There were four newspapers and there were three inside-the-
Beltway newspapers intended primarily for those interested in the 
Congress. I want to go through the headlines in every one of those 
papers.
  Here is the Baltimore Sun, and they had two headlines above the fold 
both related to energy, ``Demand Eats Supply,'' and ``Energy Bill Aids 
Payouts on Rise.''
  Then I went to the Washington Times and there was a headline, ``Bush 
Lays Gas Blame on Congress.''
  And then I went to the Wall Street Journal and the Wall Street 
Journal headline was ``Grain Companies' Profits Soar as Global Food 
Crisis Mounts.''
  Then I turned to the U.S. News part of the Wall Street Journal and 
what do you know, above the fold there were two more headlines, ``Bush 
Prods Lawmakers on Economy and Energy Prices,'' and ``GOP Senators Urge 
Halt to Oil Reserve.''
  Then I noted the three papers that are kind of inside the Beltway 
papers: Roll Call, ``Alexander Eyes Energy Agenda''; The Hill, 
``Politics At the Pump''; and Politico had ``Gas Prices Fuel Effort to 
Jam the GOP.''
  So every one of these seven papers that were on my doorstep that 
morning had headlines talking about energy. Now I noted just a few days 
before that there was a New York Times op-ed piece by Thomas Friedman. 
This is what he says about energy. Here is what is scary. Our problem 
is so much worse than you think. We have no energy strategy. If you are 
going to use tax policy to shape energy strategy, then you want to 
raise taxes on the things that you want to discourage--gasoline 
consumption and gas-guzzling cars--and you want to lower taxes on the 
things you want to encourage--new renewable energy technologies. We are 
doing just the opposite, he says.
  The gas holiday proposal is a perfect example of what energy expert 
Peter Schwartz of Global Business Network describes as the true 
American energy policy today, and I quote, ``Maximize demand, minimize 
supply, and buy the rest from the people who hate us most.''
  This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering, he says. We 
borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little 
cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. No, no, no, we will 
just get the money by taxing Big Oil. Even if you could do that, what a 
terrible way to spend precious tax dollars, he says.
  For almost a year now, Congress has been bickering over whether and 
how to renew the investment tax credit to stimulate investment in solar 
energy and the production of tax credit to encourage investment in wind 
energy. And a little later I will go over this bill that has already 
passed the Senate, and we have introduced it in the House now.
  The Democrats wanted the wind and solar credits to be paid for by 
taking away tax credits from the oil industry. President Bush said he 
would veto that. Neither side would back down. Stalemate, he says.
  I first came to this floor to talk about this subject more than 3 
years ago. It was, I believe, the 14th day of March in 2005. I noted 
then that we have known, we had known at that time for 25 years that we 
would be facing this crisis. Now it is 28 years. We have known for 28 
years that we would be facing this crisis. I will present the evidence 
for that in just a moment, and I think the evidence is absolutely 
unassailable. Anybody who looked at the evidence would have to conclude 
that there was a reasonable, indeed probably a high probability that we 
would be here today with oil at over $100 a barrel.
  This all started in 1956 on March 8 when an oil geologist from the 
Shell Oil Company gave a speech that I think may shortly be recognized 
as the most important speech given in the last century. He gave that 
speech in San Antonio, Texas, to an audience of people interested in 
oil. What he told them was at that time absolutely audacious and 
incredible. He told them in just 14 years the United States is going to 
reach its maximum oil production and no matter what you do, after that 
the production of oil will decrease year by year.
  At that time the United States was the largest producer of oil in the 
world, the largest consumer of oil in the world, and I think the 
largest exporter of oil in the world. So this was absolutely audacious 
to suggest that the king of oil in just 14 short years would reach its 
maximum ability to produce oil.
  He was a pariah for a number of years, and then in 1970, when right 
on schedule as this chart shows, when right on schedule the United 
States reached its maximum oil production, he became a legend in his 
own time. He made his prediction in 1956. You see how much oil we were 
producing then. In 1970 we were producing a lot more oil. And right on 
schedule, just as he predicted, the United States after that produced 
less and less oil each year, in spite of several things, Mr. Speaker. 
In spite of finding a lot of oil in Alaska. And notice just a little 
blip down the slide of what is called Hubbert's peak as a result of 
this enormous find in Alaska. I have been to Prudhoe Bay, a 4-foot 
pipeline through which for a number of years a full 25 percent of all 
our domestic production flowed. And then a big find some years later in 
the Gulf of Mexico. I remember the hype over that find. You see the 
yellow there, just a blip in the slide down the other side of Hubbert's 
peak.
  So not only did we find a lot of oil that M. King Hubbert had not 
included in his prediction, his prediction included only the lower 48 
States, in spite of this large find of oil in Alaska and the large find 
of oil in the Gulf of Mexico, and in spite of increasing amounts of 
natural gas liquids, we today produce about half of the oil that we did 
in 1970.
  Another thing that we have done, we have drilled more oil wells than 
all of the rest of the world put together. In spite of doing that, in 
spite of ever-better techniques for finding oil, computer modeling and 
3-D seismic, in spite of ever-better techniques for getting the oil, 
enhanced oil recovery, nothing we have done has proved M. King Hubbert

[[Page 8288]]

a liar. He said we would peak in oil production in 1970, and we did. 
And we have been sliding down the other side of Hubbert's peak ever 
since.
  In 1979 he predicted using the same analytical techniques which 
aren't all that hard to understand. He noted that in an individual oil 
field, that the production of the field increased and increased and 
increased until it reached a maximum which was when about half the oil 
was exhausted. After that, the last half which reasonably would be more 
difficult to get, was more difficult to get and production was slower. 
And so he rationalized that if he could add up all of the little oil 
fields in the United States and make a good prediction as to how many 
more we would find, he could have one big bell curve which is basically 
the shape of that curve, and he could then predict when the United 
States would reach its maximum oil production. He was right on target.
  Using that same technique, he predicted that the world would be 
peaking in oil production about now. Now I say that we have known this 
for 28 years. I say that because by 1980 it was very obvious that M. 
King Hubbert was right about the United States. We were already well 
over the peak and sliding down the other side of what is called 
Hubbert's peak. What did we do? We have done as a world, as a country, 
absolutely nothing to prepare for the inevitability that M. King 
Hubbert would probably be right about the world because he was right 
about the United States.
  Now as the next chart shows, the two entities which track oil 
production and consumption, and it is essentially the same thing, very 
little oil is stored in the world compared to the amount that we use, 
that is the EIA, the Energy Information Administration, a part of our 
Department of Defense, and the IEA, the International Energy 
Association, both of those track very well the production of oil. And 
you can see they have the production of oil about flat for the last 3 
years.
  Now when I first came here, and I think that was 43 times ago, I 
think this is the 44th time I have been to the floor, when I was here 
in 2005, oil was about $50 a barrel, a little over $50 a barrel. Using 
the predictions of M. King Hubbert, I with some confidence have been 
saying now for these 43 times, 44 times including tonight, that we were 
going to get here, that the world was going to reach maximum oil 
production.

                              {time}  1945

  And we ought to have been preparing for this. And since we hadn't 
been preparing in the past, we ought to start preparing for this with 
some realistic measures.
  Notice what happened to the price of oil. Of course, when you have a 
static production and an increasing demand, the supply/demand mechanism 
which controls the pricing of almost everything in our world, caused an 
increase in the price of oil. Now, it would be well off the top of our 
chart here. We're now at $123, $124 a barrel. That's well off the top 
of the chart here. As far as I know, these lines are extending out 
flat. There is no increase in oil production.
  The next chart, this chart shows the discoveries of oil through the 
years, and it shows the use of oil through the years. Now, if you had 
only one chart that you could look at, this chart, I think, conveys 
more information than any other. And even without M. King Hubbert's 
predictions, I think that you would conclude that we're probably going 
to max out in oil production about now. Because look what we have here.
  We have discoveries back through the 1940s and the 1950s, and boy did 
we discover it in the 1960s and the 1970s, and then another surge 
around the 1980s. But down, down, down since then. And that's in spite 
of ever better technologies for discovering oil, ever more interest in 
discovering oil. It's been down, down, down.
  Now, obviously, if you add up all of these bars, you will know the 
total amount of oil that we have discovered. That is frequently done by 
simply drawing a smooth curve over those bars. That tells you that the 
area under the curve represents the total volume. I say that because 
there's another curve here which is very important, and that is the 
consumption curve.
  Notice that early on in the 1960s, boy, in the 1970s, we were finding 
enormously more oil than we were using. So every year we had bigger and 
bigger reserves behind us that we could rely on. And then about 1980, 
when the discovery of oil was down, and we were using more and more 
oil, ever since about 1980, we have been using more oil than we found. 
Well, we could do that because we had extra back here that we hadn't 
used. So we simply could borrow from this and pump it here and fill 
that volume with it.
  I want to point out something about this curve which is really very 
interesting. You notice how steep the curve is here. This is up through 
the Carter years. Now, had we continued on that trajectory, we would 
now be well off the top of this chart.
  The oil price spike hikes of the 1970s, and the recession that 
occurred then, notice the little dip there, were really blessings in 
disguise. There's an old saying that it's an ill wind that blows no 
good.
  I lived through all of those gas lines, even, odd, the end of your 
license plate, the day you could fill up your tank.
  But look what happened as a result of that wake up call. Boy, are we 
more efficient now than we were then. Look at the slope of this curve 
as compared to the slope of this curve. And we're getting even more and 
more efficient. This is an exponential rise. And it would be off the 
top of the chart.
  As a matter of fact, there was a stunning statistic during the Carter 
years. Every decade the world used as much oil as it had used in all of 
previous history. Now, that's stunning, because what that says is that 
when you used half of it, only 10 years will remain. We're very much 
better off.
  By the way, oil's not going to run out in 10 years or 20 or 30. We 
have another 150 years of oil, gas and coal, but at ever decreasing 
amounts, ever more difficult to find, ever more expensive.
  When we talk about peak oil and the energy crisis, that does not mean 
we're running out of oil. What that means is we're running out of our 
ability to produce oil as fast as we would like to use it.
  Well, what will the future look like?
  Now, I said if you had only this chart to look at you could make some 
really educated guesses about what the future is going to look like, 
because you cannot pump what you have not found. And unless you think 
that there's going to be some startling new discoveries in the future, 
it's been down, down, down, for 30 years. Unless you think there's 
going to be some startling new discoveries in the future, these are the 
reserves that we have to fill in the volume here about what this chart 
suggests we might find.
  Now, it won't be smooth like that. It will be up and down, but it 
might be reasonably that kind of a slope.
  So I think that even without the predictions of M. King Hubbert, just 
looking at this oil chart, it would be very easy to conclude that we 
probably, very soon, if not now, would have reached the maximum 
production of oil.
  The next chart looks at some of the geopolitical consequences of 
this. This is the world according to oil. This is what the geography of 
the world would look like if the size of the country was related to how 
much oil it had. Some really interesting things here.
  Saudi Arabia dominates the landscape. They should. They have 22 
percent of all the known reserves of oil in all the world. And notice, 
their near neighbors, Iraq, Kuwait, Iran, second, third and fourth. 
United Arab Emirates. You almost have to have a magnifying glass to 
find them on the map, and there they are. Look how huge they are in 
terms of the amount of oil they have. And then Northern Africa.
  Here we are, the United States. The yellow means that we're a big 
user of oil. Our small size means we don't have much. And notice the 
people from whom we get most of our oil. Canada is our Number 1 
supplier. They have much less oil than we. But they don't

[[Page 8289]]

have very many people so they can ship oil to us.
  Mexico, until about a month ago, was our Number 2 supplier. But their 
largest oil field, which is the second largest oil field in the world, 
Cantoral, is now in steep decline, about 8, 10 percent a year. Now our 
Number 2 supplier is Saudi Arabia.
  Mexico. But notice that Mexico and Canada together have little more 
oil than we have. And we have only 2 percent of the known reserves in 
the world. Maybe they have 3 percent. Maybe all three of us together 
here have 4, 5, 6 percent of the oil in the world. That's all.
  Even more alarming, notice the size of China and India. Here they 
are. 1.3 billion people and 1.1 billion people, more than a third of 
the world's population, and they have less oil than the United States 
has.
  When you go to China, and I did with 8 other Members of Congress 
about 16 months ago, and they begin their discussion of energy by 
talking about post-oil. So China knows that they have to transition.
  The next chart is kind of a bar chart which shows the same thing, 
pretty much, that we saw in that chart. If you take the 10 largest 
owners of oil in the world, 98 percent of all that oil belongs to 
countries rather than companies. Saudi Aramco, National Iranian, Iraqi 
National Oil, Kuwait Petroleum Company and so forth. Only 2 percent by 
Lukoil, that's a big Russian oil company.
  Now, if you look at the 10 producers of oil, 78 percent of the first 
10 producers of oil, all that oil comes from countries, not companies, 
again, these nationally owned oil companies. And only 22 percent comes 
from the big three.
  There's obviously a lot of angst over the high price of oil, and 
people are looking around for who to blame. And there are a lot of 
people who blame the big oil companies. They're gouging us.
  There are a lot of people who blame the OPEC countries, and many of 
them are here; because they say they're holding back on oil to drive 
the prices up. Probably neither one of those things are true. There is 
pretty good evidence that OPEC is pumping oil about as fast as it can 
pump oil.
  Russia, not a part of OPEC, but a big producer, noted several weeks 
ago that they had reached their maximum oil production.
  Saudi Arabia, just last week admitted to maximizing out on oil 
production. They're trying to bring a new field on-line, the Kuras 
field. It's a very technical field. It may get 1.2 million barrels a 
day. That's a lot. But they may get nothing. They've spent billions of 
dollars drilling wells. They're going to have to flood the field with 
seawater under pressure because that oil is so tightly held in the 
rocks that it won't flow. And if they do is just right they can get the 
oil to flow in large amounts, and they may get for quite a number of 
years, 1.2 million barrels a day. But that's kind of iffy.
  But even if they get that and get it on-line, it will barely maintain 
their present oil production. It will not increase their oil 
production.
  The next chart speaks again to this geopolitical situation. This is 
the chart which shows who is buying oil where in the world. And you see 
these symbols for Russia. Here they tried to buy UniCal in our country. 
They have bought a lot of the production from Canada, South America, 
the Middle East, Northern Africa. You see their symbol all over the 
map.
  Why are they buying oil? Today it doesn't make any difference who 
owns the oil. The person who comes, the country, the company that comes 
with the dollars buys the oil. It doesn't make a bit of difference.
  We own only 2 percent of the oil in the world, and we use 25 percent 
of the oil in the world because we come with our dollars and we buy the 
oil from those who have it for sale.
  So why would China be buying oil? You can't get inside their head, 
but you can make some prognostications from what you see. You go to 
China, by the way, and they talk about post-oil. There will be a post-
oil world. It's not forever. It is finite. It will run out. And China 
is talking about post-oil.
  But while we still have some oil, they have a policy, a 5-point plan, 
and everybody knows it over there, all of their leaders know it, not 
just the people in energy and oil and coal know it. Everybody over 
there talked to us about the 5-point plan.
  Number 1 is conservation. That's where whatever country, and this is 
where it's got to begin. We have now run out of time. We have run out 
of excess energy. We can buy some time and free up some energy if we 
have an aggressive program in conservation.
  Number 2 and Number 3 were alternatives, and as many of those as you 
can from your own country.
  Number 4 may surprise you. Be kind to the environment. They know 
they're awful polluters, but they have 900 million people in rural 
areas that, through the miracle of communications, know the benefits of 
industrialization. And I think they see their empire unraveling the way 
the Soviet empire unraveled if they cannot meet the demands of these 
people.
  So why are they buying all the oil? At the same time they're buying 
this, oh by the way, they're not just buying oil; they're buying good 
will. Would you like a soccer stadium? Is it hospitals you need, roads? 
So in addition to buying the oil they're buying goodwill.
  At the same time that they're doing this, they are aggressively 
building a blue water navy. They launched many times, I don't know the 
exact number, maybe 10, submarines last year. We launched one.
  Now, their submarines aren't ours yet, but I would note that they are 
graduating six times as many engineers as we graduate, and about half 
of our engineers are Chinese students.
  I was stunned the other day when I learned that in our patent office 
more than 60 percent of the applications for a new patent come from 
Asia.
  They are very aggressively building a blue water navy. Might the day 
come that they would say well, gee, I'm sorry, guys, but we have 1.3 
billion people, the oil is ours and we can't share it.
  Today there's no alternative, the way the marketplace works but that 
you're going to share your oil.
  The next chart, and I've already mentioned some of these numbers. We 
have only 2 percent of the world's reserves of oil. By the way, these 
numbers encouraged 30 of our prominent leaders, Jim Woolsey and 
McFarland and Boyden Gray and 27 others, several retired 4-Star 
admirals and generals to write a letter to the President saying, Mr. 
President, the fact that we have only 2 percent of the world's reserves 
of oil, and we use 25 percent of the world's oil and import almost two-
thirds of what we use is really a totally unacceptable national 
security risk.

                              {time}  2000

  We've got to do something about that. That little 2 percent we have, 
by the way, from that we produce 8 percent of the world's oil. So we're 
good at pumping oil.
  As I mentioned earlier, we have drilled more oil wells than all the 
rest of the world put together. So it is not surprising that we're 
pumping down our oil reserves four times faster than the rest of the 
world. We have a bit less than 5 percent than the world's population, 
and we use 25 percent of the worlds' oil.
  I'm going to next look at some of the things that I personally have 
been doing and some of the things that Congress has been doing, and 
then I am going to recognize my very good friend, Zach Wamp from 
Tennessee, who has come with us to share some of this time with us.
  Mr. WAMP. I thank the gentleman for yielding, and I want to thank Mr. 
Bartlett for this lesson. I should say Dr. Bartlett. It is rare that a 
person has been in Congress for as long as you have. I first met you, 
Congressman Bartlett, when you and I were running for Congress in the 
1992 cycle. I did not prevail, and you did, so you got a 2-year jump on 
me here.
  And I've been here on the floor in the past when we talked about this 
challenge, and my only regret tonight is that all of the Members of the 
House

[[Page 8290]]

were not here to hear again your comprehensive explanation of some of 
these problems and the solutions and the realities, and that everyone 
in our country could not understand as well as you understand the 
realities of what we are seeing today.
  I want to begin elementally by saying that the nexus between energy 
and national security and our environment is the most important policy 
challenge of our time. And all of the conflicts of the world have some 
relation to those three challenges. There's obviously religious 
undertones and whatnot, but those have been around forever. These 
challenges now all kind of collide. That's this nexus that I am talking 
about.
  On the national security front, you mentioned Thomas Friedman's 
column, and there is one quote in it that I wanted to point out where 
he says, `` `There are 23 countries in the world that derive at least 
60 percent of their exports from oil and gas and not a single one is a 
real democracy. Russia, Venezuela, Iran, and Nigeria are the poster 
children' for this trend where leaders grab the oil tap to ensconce 
themselves in power.''
  That makes this peak oil challenge a critical national security 
problem for the United States of America.
  When I talk about the environment, one of the most important issues 
now as we face the next Congress and the next administration after this 
fall's election will be the American response to this global warming 
challenge. And I would argue this: We can't deny the problem. We can't 
bury our head in the sand from the problem. We should not ignore it, 
but we better be very careful that we don't over-regulate our free 
society as we respond to it.
  The world needs to see us proactively addressing this problem, but I 
would say the best way we can do it is deploy the technologies, use the 
innovation, parlay and capitalize on our free-enterprise system to 
solve these problems for the world, much in the same way that the 
information revolution in the last 30 years in this country was led by 
the United States of America and the likes of Microsoft; and in doing 
so, a robust U.S. economy erupted that led to a balanced budget in this 
modern era that was unprecedented where revenues actually surpassed 
expenses.
  So we see energy and the environment and national security all come 
together.
  Now, earlier tonight I talked about an all-of-the-above approach that 
I promote that we should promote because the capacity needs, both from 
transportation and fuels and electricity are so great, even today but 
even more so in the future, the capacity needs are so great with this 
demand that we have to not, in my view, leave anything off the table 
but have an all-of-the-above solution.
  But I want to zero in, because you have rightly talked about these 
issues of conservation, efficiency, new technologies, renewables; and I 
want to highlight a few because I said earlier tonight on the floor, 
I'm a conservative. I think conservatives should promote conservation. 
That's a logical thing to say and to do. And that should be first and 
foremost, and it is not wimpish, as I said earlier, for us to promote 
conservation. It's smart. It reduces demand and lowers price. That's 
what we have to see. And it should be led by the top, and it should be 
a grassroots call for us to be as efficient as possible in all aspects 
of our life, frankly.
  We have sat on the couch for a generation knowing these problems 
existed, and we haven't acted, and there's plenty of blame to go 
around. I don't want to come to the floor and blame everybody. There's 
a lot of that that goes on. Frankly, that's one reason people tune out 
Washington so much is there's too much of a blame game going on here. 
American people want these problems solved, but I really believe we 
should look at these incredible technologies that we have.
  So let's talk a little bit about transportation because there's a 
Farm Bill coming. There's a lot of talk about alternative fuels.
  I believe in the south that cellulosic ethanol will be part of the 
solution, but it's a bridge, in my view. Even at best, it's a bridge to 
the future. It's not the permanent solution. The fuel mix could 
certainly be improved, and cellulosic ethanol doesn't destroy our 
agriculture and our food capabilities and pricing like corn-based 
ethanol does, so that obviously has been a net loser for the 
environment; it has been a net loser for agriculture; it has been a net 
loser economically in some ways.
  But cellulosic ethanol, say switchgrass that you don't eat, it could 
actually be productive in creating an alternative fuel. But that's a 
bridge to the future because if you ask the automotive industry 
leaders, they will tell you that in a couple of years, the price points 
on plug-in hybrids will be such that Toyota and General Motors in 2010 
will have a cost-competitive plug-in hybrid.
  So the vehicles of the future are going to run probably for a while 
on some form of electricity, some kind of a battery, an ion lithium 
battery. The technologies are developing very quickly. Imagine plugging 
your car in in your garage overnight and having it charged where you 
can take it 400 miles before recharging it and getting an equivalent 
horsepower of 260 to 280 horsepower. People would be excited about that 
if they could afford it. Right now the price point on a hydrogen fuel 
cell car is not cost effective. It's a couple hundred thousand dollars 
at best, which obviously is not ready for the marketplace. That may be 
15 to 25 years from now.
  And there is a silver lining in the cloud. You talked, Dr. Bartlett, 
about the silver lining during the Carter years, that it caused us to 
blunt the sharp increase in consumption. The silver lining today with 
these price points is that technologies are rapidly being deployed 
because the marketplace knows there's opportunity there.
  And we were with the President of the United States yesterday 
discussing this, and he talked about that specifically that you're 
seeing the most rapid movement towards alternative transportation 
systems and technologies that we've seen in the modern era because 
people cannot afford gasoline today, and therefore, alternatives will 
hit the marketplace faster. And surely we could have done better in the 
past, but we've got to find these solutions so we're going to have some 
kind of electricity.
  Now that brings all of the energy problems together when you're 
talking about electric cars because two-thirds of the oil consumption's 
in the transportation sector, and we've got some capacity problems in 
the electricity sector, and we are not bringing on nuclear plants at 
anywhere near the rate of European countries because we're still caught 
in this Three Mile Island time warp of safety and security. And the 
waste stream is such here that you can't permit a place to bury it, 
like Yucca Mountain, in a timely manner.
  So we need to look at the proposition that they do in France of 
recycling the spent fuel back into energy. Reprocessing spent fuel. 
It's a closed-fuel cycle. We can do that. We should look at that. And 
we should bring nuclear up.
  But I want to throw a new technology into the electricity production 
which could very well help us on transportation as we move towards 
battery-powered cars if they're cost effective. See, I believe the 
market will determine which ones come first and which one consumers 
will buy and which ones hit the price points quickest, and that's where 
people, I think, will buy.
  So I think if electric cars or the plug-in hybrid is the first one 
there at $25,000, $35,000 for a new car, that's where consumers will 
go. But where is the electricity going to come from if we do this? We 
don't have the capacity right now to meet today's demand based on 
commerce and industry, let alone new transportation systems that need 
electricity.
  And we are the most abundant source of coal. We're the Saudi Arabia 
of coal for the world. But we have got to, if we're going to take this 
leadership position on climate change and not bury our head in the 
sand, we've got to have clean coal technology, we've got to have carbon 
capture. We've got to invest there. We've got to still use coal, but 
it's also a finite resource, which you have identified.

[[Page 8291]]

  Let me tell you about a new technology that's really got potential. 
It comes out of the Silicon Valley and the Tennessee Valley, 
interestingly enough, where I live. We're in a partnership with them. 
We have built a stationary solid oxide fuel cell system. It looks like 
the HVAC unit in your home. We now have a 100 kilowatt system, meaning 
it generates 100 kilowatts of electricity, and it runs off of one 
feedstock going in but no transmission system. So unlike the 
electricity that comes to your house, it is not connected on a grid 
somewhere to a power source. It's a standalone system for electricity 
production, but you do have to have a feedstock going in.
  But this unit runs off of the feedstock as natural gas, can run off 
ethanol, it can run off of solar, it can run off of a variety of 
renewable sources; but it has to have a feedstock as you know--are you 
a physicist?
  Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Physiologist.
  Mr. WAMP. Physiologist. As you know it has to have a feedstock, but 
it has tremendous potential.
  And just recently here in the House, I have promoted, and much to his 
credit, Dan Beard, the chief operating officer of the House, has been 
and viewed these systems as has the chairwoman of the Legislative 
Branch Appropriations Subcommittee, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, been in 
consultation with us about the notion that in just a couple of years, 
we could take an entire House office building in Washington, D.C. and 
take it off of the fossil-fired powerhouse here on Capitol Hill, take 
it off of that coal powerhouse and put it on a solid oxide stationary 
fuel cell to demonstrate to the country that emissionless, completely 
emissionless, not nuclear, but through a new technology called a 
stationary solid oxide fuel cell, you could completely power and cool 
and heat and cool the water in a huge House office building or a 
100,000 square foot commercial center with this new technology. 
Tremendous.
  You would think every utility in the country would be interested in 
that because there is no transmission grid. It makes us more terrorist-
proof because you can't shut down the transmission grid because 
everybody's got their own electricity source. And if transportation is 
moving towards electricity, it has tremendous potential.
  I would just say that your energy efficiency, renewable energy, 
conservation programs should be at the forefront followed by a real 
understanding that we have capacity needs in this country. I, too, was 
in China in January. I have a great concern because what I heard and 
saw in China about their attitudes towards the environment is that this 
is indeed their industrial revolution and they're entitled to it.
  The problem with them having an industrial revolution in 2008 is 
they're almost one-fourth of the world's population, and if they have 
an industrial revolution without environmental responsibility at the 
same time the rest of the world is being called on to reduce carbon and 
their carbon footprint, it's a regulatory burden to the industrialized 
world and it lets these developing nations, including China, off 
without those regulations.
  That levelizes the world at our expense. That's a dangerous notion.
  So back to the nexus. This is critical. You're taking excellent 
leadership. I want to thank you for that, and I want to thank you for 
the time tonight.
  Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Thank you very much for your observations.
  We're doing a number of things in the Congress. It would have been a 
whole lot better if we were doing them 25, 28 years ago, by the way, 
because what we're doing in the Congress will not be adequate to meet 
the challenge. But it's a start. It's what we can do.
  I have a book here that came across my desk: ``A Very Unpleasant 
Truth . . . Peak Oil Production and Its Global Consequences'' by two 
very credentialed authors, both Ph.Ds from one of our large oil 
companies. And they say in this book, The first and most important 
thing that needs to be done is to educate and convince the public that 
a problem even exists; and that's what I have been trying to do for 
more than 3 years now. The public must accept, they say, that the 
current system based on cheap oil is not sustainable and cannot be kept 
intact regardless of what politicians promise.

                              {time}  2015

  Let me mention quickly four things that I'm personally involved with 
and personally doing.
  We have a new bill just introduced last evening. It is a companion 
bill to S. 2821 that has enormous support that I will mention very 
briefly. Our bill is H.R. 5984.
  In one of his columns last week, New York Times' Thomas Friedman 
decried the stalemate that has so far prevented the extension of 
renewable energy tax credits that would otherwise expire this year. I 
noted that in some opening comments this evening, and this was one of 
the things that inspired us to pick up this Senate bill and to file it 
in the House.
  This bill does several things: Extension and modification of the 
renewable energy production tax credit; extension and modification of 
the solar energy and fuel cell investment tax credit; clean renewable 
energy bonds; extension of the special rule to implement FERC 
restructuring policy; extension and modification of the credit for 
energy efficiency improvements to existing homes; extension of the tax 
credit for energy efficient new homes; extension of the energy 
efficient commercial buildings deduction; modification and extension of 
the energy efficient appliance credit.
  So it's a broad-based bill. It has passed the Senate by 88-8. It has 
43 cosponsors in the Senate. We have 35 original cosponsors in the 
House and two more have been added to that today.
  This bill has gotten a lot of support from the community out there. 
The Christian Science Monitor has an article on it supporting the bill. 
``Big Oil's Friends in the Senate'' is an editorial by New York Times 
on this subject, and here I have a list and I want to just mention a 
few of those because it's so important. It notes how broad the support 
is for this bill.
  Here are letters from the National Association of Manufacturers, the 
United States Chamber of Commerce, the Retail Industry Leaders 
Association. And then I have here a letter signed by more than three 
pages of double column organizations, more than three pages, double 
column, and let me just mention a few of them.
  American Council on Renewable Energy, Alliance to Save Energy, 
Alternative Fuels Renewable Energies Council, American Council for an 
Energy Efficient Economy, American Solar Energy Society, American Wind 
Energy Association, the Audubon Society, Babcock and Brown, Bloom 
Energy, Business Council for Sustainable Energy, California Energy 
Commission, Center for Energy and Environmental Sustainability at James 
Madison University. Constellation Energy, well-known locally. They 
provide much electricity for the Baltimore area. The Dow Chemical 
Company, Duke Energy, Earthjustice, Edison Electric Institute.
  And so you notice the broad, broad spectrum of support for this bill 
from a lot of those who are concerned about the environment and those 
who are concerned about the simple fact that we have got to have more 
energy.
  Environmental Defense Fund, Exelon Corporation, GE Energy, Geothermal 
Energy Association. Greenpeace? The Home Depot, Honeywell, Idaho Rural 
Council, John Deere Renewables, JP Morgan, League of Conservation 
Voters, Lowe's Companies, Michigan Alliance of Cooperatives. National 
Association of Home Builders, a very conservative organization to which 
I belonged in another life. National Association of State Energy 
Officials, National Electrical Manufacturers Association.
  I'm reading, by the way, about one-tenth of all of those who have 
signed on.
  National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council, 
Northeast Public Power Association.
  Oh, my, more pages, one-and-a-half more pages. I won't bother reading 
those, but it's the same kinds of broad, broad spectrum.

[[Page 8292]]

  Like Suntech, I'll mention Suntech, second largest solar cell 
manufacturing company in the world. Six years ago it didn't exist. I 
was privileged to have lunch with the young Chinese man who started it 
just 6 years ago, and now, it's number two in all of the world.
  Another thing that I am doing personally, we are having a SMART Green 
Showcase in conjunction with the SMART Organization. This will be on 
July 18 in Frederick, Maryland, and we're going to showcase there a 
number of smart energy solutions for many of the problems that 
homeowners and small businesses have. It has its own Web site, 
www.smartgreenconference.com. So you can find more information on it 
there.
  I have a bill, the Self-Powered Farm Energy Bill. We're going to give 
a prize to the first farm that can demonstrate that they're capable of 
independence from off-site sources of energy, fuel, and raw materials; 
a community resource for food and energy. They will have food and 
energy left over to provide for the community or raw materials for 
food. It minimizes or eliminates ongoing operating expenditures to off-
site entities for fossil fuel-derived energy; employs sustainable 
farming practices for long-term soil fertility; and produces at least 
two times as much energy, including fuel or raw materials for fuel, as 
it consumes.
  Now, if we can't do this, we're in trouble. If our farms can't be 
energy independent, and I think they can, and we have a prize for that 
farm that will get there first.
  The next chart speaks to the fourth thing that I'm personally 
involved in. This is the DRIVE Act. The Dependence Reduction through 
Innovation in Vehicles and Energy is what DRIVE stands for. The purpose 
of the bill is to achieve liquid fuel independence through alternative 
energy sources. Some of the key points include incentives for the auto 
industry to produce flexible fuel, hybrid and electric vehicles; the 
conversion of gas stations to fuel stations, where consumers can plug 
into an electric car to fill up on ethanol; as well as tax credits for 
Americans who buy flexible fuel cars.
  It costs so little, maybe less than $100 to build a flex-fuel car. 
Every car in Brazil is flex-fuel. They could be, I think should be in 
our country, and we have a bill, H.R. 670, on flex-fuel vehicles, 
incenting the industry to move to flex-fuel vehicles. When we have the 
new fuels we'll be ready for it. If we haven't done that, there will 
only be a small percentage of the cars that could use the new fuels.
  In addition to these things, I'm working with my colleague, 
Democratic Congressman Mark Udall from Colorado, to distribute a new 
report about green collar jobs from energy efficiency and renewable 
energy technology. This industry is small but it is really growing. The 
report is called Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency: Economic 
Drivers for the 21st Century. It's available for free. You can download 
it at www.ases.org.
  Solar power grew worldwide by an average of 18 percent between 1980 
and 2000. It's accelerated dramatically in recent years, growing by 
close to 50 percent annually since 2002. In spite of that dramatic 
growth, it still produces a tiny, tiny percentage of our electricity. 
That's because we get electricity production in huge, huge amounts, 
primarily from coal, 50 percent in our country, and from nuclear power 
and hydro power. Those are the three largest sources of energy for 
coal.
  From a significantly larger base, wind power has also been growing 
rapidly. U.S. wind power capacity surged 45 percent in 2007. So lots of 
new jobs are being created. We need to create more.
  I want to spend the remaining time, and it won't be very long, 
looking at the alternatives that we have and what reasonable 
expectations should be. And I need to come back, and we'll spend a full 
hour just looking at reasonable expectations.
  I'd like to point to two expectations that did not turn out to be 
reasonable. It kind of represented the irrational exuberance that Alan 
Greenspan spoke about in the market.
  The first of these was hydrogen, not hydrogen from renewables as the 
chart indicates here but hydrogen from any source. Remember, we were 
going to have a hydrogen economy? The President mentioned this in his 
State of the Union. I think we spent $1.5 billion on it. You don't hear 
anybody talk about hydrogen today, and that's because I think we've 
finally figured out that hydrogen is not an energy source. It is simply 
a way to carry energy from one place to another place.
  There is no hydrogen out there free for the having. You have got to 
produce it by using more energy than you will get out of hydrogen. That 
is the immutable second law of thermodynamics. If you can repeal that 
law, you can repeal the law of gravity, and then we have a whole 
different world, don't we? So hydrogen is rarely, rarely mentioned now 
because that bubble broke.
  Another bubble that broke very recently was the corn ethanol bubble. 
High, high hopes were held out for corn ethanol, very unrealistic 
expectations. I did some computations with Dr. John Darnell, the most 
broadly knowledgeable scientist that I know and I'm privileged to have 
on my staff. We did some back-of-the-envelope computations several 
years ago and convinced ourselves that ethanol from corn could never 
make any meaningful contribution to freeing us from our need for oil.
  The National Academy of Sciences has now said that if we use all of 
our corn for ethanol, every bit of it, and discounted it for fossil 
fuel input, which is huge, at least 80 percent--and you're just kidding 
yourself if you're burning fossil fuel in another form and pretending 
that you're displacing gasoline. If we used all of our corn for 
ethanol, discounted it for fossil fuel input, it would displace 2.4 
percent of our gasoline. They noted that if you tuned up your car and 
put air in the tires you could save as much gas.
  Well, now there's a backlash over corn ethanol. A U.N. official said 
that what we had done was a crime against humanity. There are other 
factors involved. One of the major ones is the very high cost of oil as 
energy, but certainly, our diversion of corn to ethanol is one of the 
factors that has increased the cost of food around the world. And I was 
shocked at how quickly these food shortages developed, and just a 
couple of weeks ago, you remember reading about food riots in a number 
of the countries in the world.
  There is a new bubble that I think will break, and that is the 
cellulosic ethanol bubble. We will get something from cellulosic 
ethanol.
  Oh, the National Academy of Sciences has also looked at soybeans for 
soy diesel, and they said that if we use all of our soybeans for soy 
diesel, no soybean oil for our cooking, no soy protein for feeding our 
cattle and so forth, if we use it all for soy diesel, it would displace 
2.9 percent of our diesel.
  Now, I'm going to make an observation, just an intuitive observation, 
the kind of thing that I think a rational person might conclude. We 
grow our corn and our soybeans on our best land. It's level, it's 
fertile. We dump all sorts of fertilizers and herbicides and 
insecticides on it to nurse out these huge, huge yields of corn, 250-
bushels per acre.
  Now, we are going to get this cellulosic ethanol from our wasteland. 
It's not good for growing corn or soybeans or wheat or any of these 
things. And just intuitively, I wonder how much more energy we could 
get from our wasteland, which isn't good for growing any of these 
crops, and we're going to get it without fertilizer, how much energy 
can we get from that sustainably? Well, we can get a lot the first year 
and the second year by simply going in and in effect raping the soil, 
taking off all the organic material.
  But to at least some measure and in some soils to a very large 
measure, this year's weeds and grasses grow because last year's weeds 
and grasses died and are fertilizing them. It's a recycling of the 
nutrients that is really, really apparent in a tropical rain forest. If 
you take the tropical rain forest vegetation away in many places, you 
leave what's called laterite soils which grow very little because all 
of the nutrients were in circulation, in growth, death, decay,

[[Page 8293]]

rebirth and growing again. It's all recycling.
  So we're going to get some energy from cellulosic ethanol, but it is 
not a silver bullet. It will not solve our problem.
  Here I have a look at all of the different places from which we might 
get energy, and I'm going to put the last chart up now because our time 
is just about out. I want to come back and I want to spend the full 
hour talking about realistic expectations from tar sands, more 
potential oil than all the oil in the world. Oil shales, again, in our 
country, more potential oil than all of the oil deposits in the world.

                              {time}  2030

  How much can we realistically expect to get from them? I'll make a 
very quick observation. We are very much like the young couple that has 
gotten a big inheritance from their grandparents and they're living 
lavishly. Eighty-five percent of the money they spend comes from their 
grandparents' inheritance and only 15 percent from what they earn. And 
it's going to run out before they die, so obviously they've got to do 
something, they've got to earn more or spend less.
  That's precisely where we are. Eighty-five percent of all of the 
energy we use comes from fossil fuels. It will run out. It is not 
forever. And so this 15 percent is going to have to grow. And about 
half of that is nuclear, the rest of it is a broad spectrum of 
potential renewables here. That's going to have to grow.
  By the way, I think that this is an enormously exciting challenge. I 
am excited about this. America is the most creative, innovative society 
in the world. With proper understanding and proper leadership, we 
really can do miracles. We put a man on the moon in less than a decade.
  I think we need a program that has a total commitment of World War 
II. I lived through that war, I know what it was. Daylight savings 
time, victory guard, nobody told you you had to do it, that's just what 
you did because you were a patriotic American.
  We need the technology focus of putting a man on the moon--and many 
of us remember that exciting decade--and we need the urgency of the 
Manhattan Project. I think once again America has become a major 
manufacturing and exporting country, manufacturing and exporting to the 
rest of the world the technologies for sustainable renewables.
  Mr. Speaker, I think this is a challenging opportunity, but it will 
not be easy. And we have very unrealistic expectations about what we 
can get from many of these things. Two of the bubbles have already 
broken. I will predict the next bubble that will break is the 
cellulosic ethanol bubble. We will get something from that; it will not 
be the huge amounts that people expect that we will get from that. So I 
look forward to coming back and talking for another hour about 
realistic expectations: What can we realistically get from these 
renewable sources?

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