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“America is addicted to oil”

zuzu

Put this one in the “No shit, Sherlock” file. Bush tells the country during his SOTU that we need to cut dependence on foreign oil. Well, Middle Eastern oil, anyway:

In energy policy, a major part of his address, Mr. Bush promoted the construction of nuclear power plants and renewed a call for the development of alternative fuel for automobiles, including ethanol, which is made from corn, as well as the development of fuel made from the waste of plant crops.

Energy analysts also said Mr. Bush’s goal to replace 75 percent of America’s Mideast oil imports by 2025 was not as meaningful as it appeared because the bigger suppliers to the United States are Mexico, Canada and Venezuela.

But for Mr. Bush, the emphasis on reducing foreign dependence on oil, particularly in the often volatile Persian Gulf, reflected a critical political dynamic this year: Republicans have been increasingly alarmed that escalating gas and home heating prices could prove a major issue in Congressional elections this year, particularly as oil companies are reporting record profits.

I’m sure I’ll be accused of just hating on the Shrub, but this just seems like lip service to me. Here we have a guy lecturing us about our oil addiction when he, his family and members of his Administration are dealing the stuff, and the dealers are making record profits.

We do need a serious, serious effort aimed at finding alternative sources of fuel and encouraging conservation. But when you turn over your energy policy to a guy who dismisses conservation as a “personal virtue” but of little use as policy (a point he was quite wrong on), who holds meetings on this energy policy in secret, refusing to name who he’s meeting with (*coughEnroncough*), who profits quite handsomely from government oil deals, you lose just a leetle credibility on the issue. It also does not help when you back out of international environmental agreements, dismiss a government report on global warming as “the report put out by the bureaucracy,” and go so far as to try to silence climate experts who speak out about the need to reduce greenhouse gases.

This Administration has never been about giving people hard choices or telling people things they don’t like to hear. I mean, this is the same crew who told the public after 9/11, at a time when the public was just itching for some way to sacrifice or contribute, to go shopping. They’re also the same crew who have been fighting two wars, stretching the volunteer military almost to the breaking point, yet haven’t even suggested that military service is just the kind of sacrifice the public should be making.

The only reason they’re jumping on the conservation bandwagon now is that in the face of rising prices, conservation is a lot less painful than huge heating bills. The problem is, it may be too little, too late.

19 thoughts on “America is addicted to oil”

  1. I doubt this proposal would be made if they thought they would really be able to control the direction Iraq is going in. A successful manipulation of the political forces might bring enough of a stable supply of “cheap” oil that they wouldn’t have to talk about anything so unpleasant until after the next presidential election at least, but of course they’re too incompetant to do so, and now they’ve got to hit the fallback plan.

  2. I’ll take liberal concerns about energy independence seriously when liberals stop frustrating every conceivable attempt to attain that independence. Proposals for drilling for oil in ANWR or off the coasts, building new refineries, or meeting more of our needs through nuclear power all meet with inevitable obstruction from the left. It’s also important to invest in technology for new fuel sources, but we’re not going to make that change overnight.

  3. It DID sound good when he said it. Until you stop to think for just a second and remember that he’s talked about alternative energy before… and hasn’t done anything about it.

    Jon C, the ANWR oil supply is minimal; the environmental devestation would be significant; a tiny oil supply in Alaska is not an ALTERNATIVE energy supply. Remember, lots of liberals are environmentalists, and the world’s oil supply is going to run out eventually anyway… the goal isn’t oil independence from certain states, the goal is and must be independence from oil.

  4. You mention nuclear and local oil resources, which are both dangerous and anti-envirnmental. What about wind, water, and solar energy which are all useful and non-harmful?

  5. You mention nuclear and local oil resources, which are both dangerous and anti-envirnmental.

    Nuclear is actually far cleaner than other fuel sources. France gets the majority of its energy through nuclear power, quite safely and cleanly. Liberals usually jump at the chance to import French policies to the US, but here, where it might actually do some good, they’re weidly reticent.

    What about wind, water, and solar energy which are all useful and non-harmful?

    Remember when they wanted to put a wind farm off Martha’s Vineyard? Ted Kennedy and Walter Cronkite weren’t exactly enthused. I remain open to persuasion on the viability of these energy sources, but so far it looks like a pipe dream to expect that they’ll ever be financially feasible enough to yield more than a fraction of our energy needs. Like it or not, we are stuck with oil for now- we can give in to short-sighted NIMBYism, or we can try to get more of it domestically.

  7. We do need a serious, serious effort aimed at finding alternative sources of fuel

    All the politicians who speak to this topic base their approaches on platitudes and a cursory understanding of the physics and engineering involved.

    The much touted hydrogen economy is a joke, that is with hydrogen as it is currently extracted – from natural gas. Hydrogen isn’t a new source of energy, just a transformed fuel, IOW it’s a battery.

    Ethanol consumes more energy to produce than it yields.

    What about wind, water, and solar energy which are all useful and non-harmful?

    True, they are useful sources of energy, but they are by their inherent nature limited to being supplementary sources. WInd and solar are intermittent by nature and can’t form the foundation of a generating system.

    With solar, you have varying degrees of PV cell sophistication. The simplest, cheapest and least effective, are simple silicon PV cells. As you increase the PV cell you also increase your energy yield, but what many people overlook are the manufacturing pollution that arises to create a PV cell with a 20 year lifespan. To give you an idea consider what results from semiconductor manufacture, which also uses a silicon base:

    “In 1993, Texas Instruments estimated the resources required and waste produced in the manufacture of a single six-inch semiconductor wafer. (In the intervening 16 years, production has likely become more efficient, but more recent industry-wide estimates are unavailable.) Producing one wafer required 3200 cubic feet of bulk gases, 22 cubic feet of hazardous gases, and 20 pounds of chemicals, along with 285 kilowatt-hours of electrical power (enough to power a refrigerator around the clock for several months) and 2,275 gallons of water (enough for over 70 bathtubs). Each wafer’s production generated seven pounds of hazardous waste, 25 pounds of sodium hydroxide, and 2840 gallons of waste water.”

    Apart from the environmental pollution created by PV cell manufacture, you have the issues of insufficient insolation, intermittancy and storage. Not everyplace in the US has the insolation of Pheonix. Most of what follows is a clipping of a past debate I was involved in:

    Consider a typical household’s usage of 1,356 Kwh per month. Most locations within the US can expect between 1,200 – 2000 hours of sunlight per year. If you look at national data you see that Seattle’s insolation ranges from 0.8 in the winter to 6.4 in the summer (kW/h/m^2/day) compared to 3.3 – 7.3 in Los Angeles, 1.8 – 6.6 in Chicago, and 1.3 – 6.2 in Rochestor.

    If you’re going to heat your home with electricity rather than natural gas or oil, then you need to factor in more power demand:

    – 20,087 kW/h year – electrical resistance heating
    – 8,812 kW/h year – Heat pump with back-up below 40 F

    Split the difference and you need 14,500 kW/h per year for home heating. So, the monthly energy use for a home really amounts to 2,560 kW/h. So let’s say you’re living in Rochester, NY and you need to insure that you have sufficient power and heat for your average home, how much solar PV area will you need? You’ll need about 85 kW/h per day. You can count on 0.1222 kW/h/m^2/day generating capacity.

    If we assume that the demand can be directly met by the solar PV for 5 hours of the winter day, then the remaining 19 hours must be met by their reversible fuel cell which operates at 70% efficiency.

    So, 67 kW/h must be supplied by the fuel cell and 18kW/h can be supplied directly from the solar PV during the 5 hour day. The 67 kW/h supplied by the fuel cell will require 96 kW/h to power the reversible electrolytic process. The 96 kW/h must be collected during the period that the sun is shining so the solar PV system must be overbuilt in order to collect energy during the short period that it is available. All told the system will have to collect 114 kW/h per day.

    So you’ll need about 933 m^2 of 10% efficient solar cells hooked up to a 94% efficient inverter and feeding power into a 70% efficient fuel cell in order to achieve complete power independence. Recall that you can substitute any efficiency of solar conversion that is to your liking and thus modify the requirements I just listed.

    Wind power is no better, and the same applies to tidal generation, ocean thermal, and other renewable resources. None have the energy intensity of oil, nuclear, coal, or natural gas.

    If we want to wean ourselves off of non-renewable energy sources and move to a renewable power source then Space Solar Power is the most efficient option for the insolation is 11.4 times better than LA in the winter and 27.1 times greater than Seattle in the winter and the sun shines at full stength 24 hours a day in orbit. With a more robust source of electrical energy we can then entertain electrolyzing water in order to extract hydrogen and transition our automotive fleet to that power source.The hydrogen is still a battery but instead of using natural gas as the source for the hydrogen we use water and solar power to break it into hydrogen and oxygen.

    But now we’re talking about a massive effort to industrialize Earth orbit and you’re not going to do that for less than a few hundred billion dollars – what we spent in Iraq.

  8. My BIL, who works in the auto industry, says that the main reason we haven’t yet switched to something more efficient for fueling our cars is pretty simple: nobody wants to invest in changing the infrastructure.

    We have the technology and have for decades, but we haven’t had the will or the incentive to do so.

  9. Yes. There’s no point to spending fifty billion to create a new fuel infrastructure while the old fuel works just fine, and has plenty of supply left.

  10. Define “plenty” Robert. Yeah, there’s probably enough to last my generation (born in the ’80s), but what about the next? Eventually (as in, in the next 100-150 years at most), we’re going to need a completely new way of creating/harnessing energy. We can’t wait until 98 years down the road to start trying to figure out what we’re going to do. This isn’t a college essay that you can write at 4 in the morning. We have to start putting in the infrastructure very soon.

  11. We have to start putting in the infrastructure very soon.

    Putting in the infrastructure for the completely new way of harnessing energy, that we haven’t even invented yet? Good luck with THAT project.

    (We won’t be finding new ways of creating energy anytime soon, unless you’ve got some inside dope on the whole humans-becoming-God project that I haven’t heard about. Cf. Einstein. E equals mc hammer or something like that.)

    As a species we have made energy technology paradigm transformations several times already. Sometimes these changes have been made gradually, other times very abruptly, in historical terms. The one thing that we’ve never been able to do is to plan out the details of how a shift will go, before we even know what the next paradigm will be.

    I’m betting on space-based power generation, personally. But that doesn’t mean we should start dropping teradollars on putting PV panels in orbit just quite yet.

  12. Robert,

    There’s a point that needs to be thrown into the debate and that is that our oil infrastructure has benefited, and still does, from massive federal subsidies. Oil is not priced in a completely free market, nor are oil exploration, refining, and distribution. Further, a strong case can be made that our presence in the Middle East is motivated by the need to keep the oil extraction and transportation activities functioning smoothly, which is not to say that we invaded Iraq for the oil. Without an interest in oil, the US has little strategic interest in the Middle East, afterall the whole region, from Tunisia to Pakistan, has less non-oil related GDP than Spain.

    If we’re to let the inviisble hand of the market decide our energy path then we should take the butcher’s thumb off of the scale so that accepted subsidies don’t unfairly benefit the oil alternative.

  13. We’re talking about the same government that knew for decades New Orleans might be leveled if a large hurricane struck anywhere in the vicinity. Did the U.S. government improve things? No. All New Orleans had to shield itself were those second-rate levees. You saw the end result.

    What the hell makes you think the Feds care about our dependency on foreign oil? They’ll wait until the worst happens and then try and deal with it. Trademark.

  14. I was trying to think of something witty to say as an introdution, but I think this just speaks for itself:

    WASHINGTON – One day after President Bush vowed to reduce America’s dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent by 2025, his energy secretary and national economic adviser said Wednesday that the president didn’t mean it literally.

  15. Space Solar Power? Wow, I haven’t heard that one since re-reading all my early Asimov…

    Two questions: one – how the heck do you plan on getting several terrawatts of power out of orbit and onto the ground? Run a really long cable? Two – do you have any idea what the net EROEI on such a proposition might be? It takes a heck of a lot of energy to get stuff into orbit, you know… Never mind the fact that the lifetime EROEI of PVs is approximately 1 to start with.

    Next you’ll be telling me that Multivac will one day figure out how to reverse entropy and become God. đŸ™‚

    Meanwhile, back in the real world, the best return on investment (by a couple of orders of magnitude) is energy efficiency and conservation. Make do with less.

  17. Meanwhile, back in the real world, the best return on investment (by a couple of orders of magnitude) is energy efficiency and conservation. Make do with less.

    With all due respect, that’s the same argument as the one advocates of abstenance-only education make, and it’s a bad argument for some of the same reasons: it’s easy to say, but it’s not going to happen, and everyone who is not a crazy ideologue knows it’s not going to happen.

    Voluntary conservation is subject to a free-rider problem, while engineering massive taxes to cure that problem is politically impractical. Plus, frankly, less energy consumption on the whole is simply a lower material standard of living: less heat, less light, less movement, etc. The only people who are for dramatic reductions in consumption of energy in practice (as opposed to in theory) are doing tree-sits in the Pacific Northwest.

    Nuclear energy in the U.S. suffers from a problem largely created by the incompetence of the U.S. energy industry. They completely botched the building and running of nuclear power plants. Europe, as pointed out above, has not had the same problems (excepting the old Eastern Bloc, which is further evidence of the failure of state socialist administration, if more was needed). I’m not entirely comfortable that we’ll do better this time, but given our energy needs, fission is coming back.

    Also, remember those crackpots who thought they had cold-fusion in a test tube in the late 1980s? I read recently in the NYT that the proponents of that method have produce enough energy that the easy electrochemical reaction explanation now fails and nobody claims to have a good understanding of what’s going on, but it apparently is a new way to harness energy. It’s my understanding that the jury’s still out on whether it’s actually fusion. Anybody with a better science background know the details?

  18. Dunc,

    First off, I second Thomas’ points. Secondly, the engineering on the issue of SPS is old hat, all of the components were proved out in the ’70s.

    Your power transmission cable line was funny, but it was actually in a FAQ of a major renewable energy advocacy group. Their point was that the cable from orbit to earth would become hopelessly tangled having to contend with the Earth’s rotation. It took me nearly 2 years to get them to remove that idiocy from their FAQ.

    I would suggest that you do some homework on the issue and you’ll find the answers you seek and realize that the transmission problem is configured differently from how you imagine, as are lift costs, construction sourcing, net energy returns and a whole host of other issues.

    If people want to migrate to a renewable energy infrastructure then the viable technologies are limited. WInd is out, solar is out, geothermal is out, ocean thermal is out, tidal is out. None are robust nor reliable enough though they can contribute a respectable amount of ancillary power, but not baseload power.

  19. With all due respect, that’s the same argument as the one advocates of abstenance-only education make, and it’s a bad argument for some of the same reasons: it’s easy to say, but it’s not going to happen, and everyone who is not a crazy ideologue knows it’s not going to happen.

    Well, yes and no. It will happen when consumption becomes expensive or painful enough that conservation is a good option, but we’re nowhere near that point now. I’m old enough to remember the gas lines in the 70s and the whole odd/even license plate thing, as well as Carter’s speech about turning the thermostat down to 65. The difference between then and now is that the real cost of fuel was much, much higher then than it is now. Once people started feeling the pinch, they cut back, buying smaller, more fuel-efficient cars, driving less and turning the heat down. But when fuel became cheap again, SUVs became popular, as did McMansions.

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