Day by day, our situation grows more precarious…we are dependent upon imported oil, and much of it comes from unstable places like Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Venezuela, and Nigeria. The US Congress have decided that the attitude of “what, me worry?” is appropriate…Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) has already scuttled plans to build a wind power farm off Nantucket (his rich friends don’t want their sea view spoiled).
What I have always wonderd…instead of fighting this $255 billion/year war, how about if we did the following:
-began a massive program of building nuclear power plants
-built garbage into fuel plants (either petroleum synthesis or methanol synthesis)
-investiagted plant-produced oil substitutes (and began a massive program of growing these oil-substitution crops)
If we did all of this, could we free ourselves from imported petroleum?
As I see it, the benefits would be enormous:
-less air pollution, as more efficient cars/trucks displace gas-guzzlers
-lower balance of payments deficits: we don’t have to send $250 million/day to SA
-employment for millions of Americans, in the new fuel plants, windmill producers, solar energy plants, etc.
=no need to maintain half of the US Navy in and around the Perisn Gulf (to deal with the NEXT war in unstable SA)
How long would it take to achieve complete energy independence?
I am very surprised nuclear power isn’t in the ascendancy. How long has it been since they built a reactor?
Not to play down the risks or say that Chernobyl or Three Mile Island weren’t dicey. But technology’s improved, and the cost:benefit ratio just seems to favor it (wind and solar are feel-good alternatives that are largely inefficient, using present technology, for producing large amounts of energy without covering the entire landscape with gigantic installations).
Put differently: why was it so easy to build nuclear plants without much public opposition even in the years after Hiroshima had made it plain radioactivity could be deadly, but it’s now been politically impossible to do it, even absent any real mishaps in the U.S.?
Are France and the rest of Europe, or Japan, still building new plants?
ralph: Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) has already scuttled plans to build a wind power farm off Nantucket (his rich friends don’t want their sea view spoiled).
'Scuse me a second while I open up a can of ignorance-fighting here…
Now then. No, the Cape Wind Project planned for Nantucket Sound has by no means been scuttled. It’s still going through an extensive permitting process, but the Army Corps of Engineers has just (8 November) released its draft environmental impact statement for the project, which was overall quite positive.
And if you’re going to pick on MA politicians who have called for more extensive review of the project before approval (whether or not you consider that equivalent to “scuttling”), you have to pick on, say, Republican Governor Mitt Romney as well as Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy. Overall, however, the long-term prospects for the project look pretty good.
Of course we should and could be doing a lot more than we are. Replacing the existing level of use is just a pipe dream now however.
If you can described how a civilization can protect nuclear waste for hundreds or perhaps even thousands of years, I’d be interested in hearing it.
The US could possibly become energy independent in five years or so, but the people, the government and industry would not stand for it. It would entail replacing the 16 MPG SUV with the 50 MPG car, and car pooling at that, reducing our heating 4 degrees, making one not 16 monthly car trips to Walmart, shuting off the Tellie and internet after one hour per day etc.
Who do you believe has exactly been preventing nuclear plants from being built? It seems to me that nuclear just hasn’t won out in the marketplace in the U.S. Now, that is likely in large part because of subsidies (and indirect subsidies due to not internalizing externalized costs) to fossil fuels. However, the solution here seems to me to be to get rid of the subsidies to fossil fuels and not necessarily to subsidize nuclear.
The arguments for actual subsidization of nuclear are pretty weak to me. It is a mature technology; it has already received lots of subsidization in the past; and, while it does have environmental advantages over fossil fuels, it also has some serious safety / environmental issues to a greater degree than some of the renewable energy technologies.
In answer to Huerta88’s question: I do believe they are still building nuclear plants in France and Japan. At any rate, in those two countries nuclear plays a larger role than here (where it supplies ~20% of our electricity, which I believe comes out to something like 8% of our total energy needs). And, at a conference a few years ago, we were told that if you look at the difference between those countries and us, the difference is not that nuclear is more expensive here (e.g., due to safety regulations or whatever one might claim) than it is there but rather that fossil fuels are much cheaper here, which is more evidence that the need to level the playing field is by making fossil fuels more expensive rather than by artificially lowering the price of nuclear. [The problem with subsidizing nuclear rather than de-subsidizing fossil fuels is that the former option disfavors conservation and also disfavors renewable energy sources.]
Ugh. How many times is Una going to have to repeat that electricity is a trivial portion of our national oil need before it sinks in? Look, here’s a pretty graph. The little teensy purple part on top? That’s electric generation. Here’s another. Again, the purple part, this time on the right, is electric generation. Not only is it a small part of the total oil consumed, it tends to be from the dregs left over after refining. Electric oil is about one step up from asphalt and it’s better to use it for something than to dump it into the Houston ship channel.
Don’t focus too much on the pinkish “industrial” usage, either. That’s stuff like plastics and lubricants and heat transfer mediums. Start messing with that and U.S. industrial production (and the associated jobs) will decline even more quickly than it already is.
The light blue. Look at all that light blue. That’s transportation. That’s you and me driving to the grocery story, flying to Grandma’s and eating fresh fruit trucked up from Florida. It’s all of us, each making an independent rational decision each day, to consume oil. If you want to get rid of all that light blue, you’re not talking about regulations, you’re talking about changing behavior.
Start with yourself. March down today and buy a Prius. I don’t care if you can’t afford it – if you can’t afford it you certainly won’t be able to afford it with fifty layers of bureaucracy making the decision for you and taking a cut off the top. Then buy a Trek. Made in the USA and everything. Then shop downtown – park and shop, walking from store to store. I don’t care if the MegaMart has better prices – you want to cut our dependence on oil, right? That means making choices. Sometimes expensive choices. Speaking of which, move. Move closer to work, or at least on a public transit line which passes your workplace. Again, I don’t want to hear it. And either get your family to move closer or send an email at Christmas.
Here’s the nasty secret about our oil consumption per capita and why it’s so much higher than other rich countries. We’re big and we like it. We’re big people living on big plots of land riding around in big cars to go to big stores, travelling across our big country in big planes. Growing more acres of corn that will somehow be smushed into complex hydrogen molecules is not going to change that.
manhattan: Growing more acres of corn that will somehow be smushed into complex hydrogen molecules is not going to change that.
Well, there’s biodiesel, which can be applied directly to transportation needs. Availability, cost-effectiveness, and adaptability to current technology are currently not up there with petroleum transportation fuels, but the use of biodiesel is growing rapidly, so that will probably change.
manhattan: […] you’re not talking about regulations, you’re talking about changing behavior. Start with yourself. March down today and buy a Prius. […] Then buy a Trek. Made in the USA and everything. Then shop downtown – park and shop, walking from store to store. I don’t care if the MegaMart has better prices – you want to cut our dependence on oil, right? That means making choices.
A-fucking-men. There simply is no way, in the big picture and in the long run, to live wastefully and cheaply at the same time. No amount of nuclear plants or new “miracle fuels” will ever be able to keep up with a mindset of ever-increasing waste. As long as we feel compelled to build ever-bigger houses (even while family size continues to shrink), climb into 6MPH Hummers to go a quarter-mile for a quart of milk, and fly cross-country to meetings for purposes that could just as well be served by a conference call, we will always have energy-use problems.
We’ll always need to satisfy reasonable demands for transportation, heating, and electricity, and even a certain amount of luxury, extravagance, and waste. But we have got to stop expecting our energy policy to be able to satisfy every unlimited appetite for unchecked energy use. It’s ridiculous to expect energy policy to go on privileging waste over common sense indefinitely.
“Could /Should The USA Adopt a National Program To Eliminate Oil as a Fuel?”
Good luck trying to get that going with this administration…
Well, or any Administration. When was it that SUVs and exburban sprawl exploded on the scene? The Clinton Administration (well, sprawl had I guess been going on for awhile, but SUVs were Clinton era).
A handful of activists drive Priuses. Other than that, the clowns behind the wheel of SUVs and imported sports cars include millions o’ Dems as well as millions of Republicans. You really see a Dem Administration acting in any way that would alienate them?
Since the current alternatives to gas-powered vehicles . . . suck, and since increasing gas mileage for internal combustion cars means . . . crappy small cars that Americans don’t like as much as their SUVs, I suspect oil as a fuel is here for awhile. Maybe the next Dem candidate will prove me wrong (and commit political suicide) by telling soccer moms the Cherokee has to go. Much more likely, he won’t, as there are only a small number of single-issue environmental voters, but would likely be a large number of single-issue pro-Humvee voters.
I think that eventually, whether the US goes through with it willingly or not, our hand will be forced- look at the modernization of India and China, both nations with populations exceeding the US. Eventually their oil consumption will outpace ours, and the price of oil may rise. Regardless, the oil is getting sucked up at an increasing rate, and cheap methods of extraction will eventually be a thing of the past.
We have to focus on reducing our oil dependence, not just eliminating it since that’s much further off. But I do think it’s an important issue.
It sounds like we may soon be dropping sanctions on Libya, which has a lot of oil. So I’m not optimistic that the ball is about to get rolling here.
Yeah…Good point. I am sort of embarrassed that I didn’t catch this flaw in the OP’s logic. Oil is indeed a non-player in electrical generation. You showed how little of the oil goes to electric generation. On the flip side, the percent of our electricity that is produced by oil is only something like 2 or 3%. [The numbers as I remember them are something like 40% from coal, 30% from natural gas, 20% from nuclear, 8% from renewables (mainly hydroelectric), and 2% from oil.]
Well, Kerry did support things like significantly raising the CAFE standards when he was in the Senate. So while I might agree that noone is going to do nearly what needs to be done, I do think who is in charge makes a difference.
And, why do you claim that increasing gas mileage means “crappy small cars”? I love my Prius and the long waitlist on them (and the pre-waitlist for the hybrid Lexus they are introducing) clearly shows that demand is turning out to be much greater than anticipated. (I waited 7 months for mine after signing up for it like 3 or 4 days after the first one was available at the dealer for a test drive. Local dealers are apparently now telling people that the waitlist is 18 months.) Far from people not wanting to buy the cars, it seems that the problem is the auto companies unable to supply them fast enough.
Here is an article on hybrids in general:
Here is the scoop on the Lexus:
As long as oil men run our country there will be no alternative fuels on a scale big enough to change things.
As for those “hybrid” vehicles…any internal combustion engine can run on alternative fuels. With just a few alterations.
But…
See above.
Yes, of course we should.
I agree with most of what manhattan said, but have one caveat: Maybe it’s 20 to 50 years off, but even a Prius is not without greenhouse emissions, and the most fuel-efficient SUV on the road right now, the Ford Escape Hybrid, still only gets about 28mpg in mixed city/highway driving; so hydrogen is really the way we want to go. If you put a hybrid drivetrain in every motor vehicle on the road, my WAG, at best it would cut our gasoline usage by a third. That’s pretty significant, but a long way off from zero.
The thing about hydrogen is, of course, you can’t pump it up from a well or something. It has to be extracted from compounds like water, which is an energy-expensive process. Hydrogen automobiles will run with wonderful cleanliness, but producing all that hydrogen will take loads of electricity. Where’s that going to come from?
I’d say nuclear is the only game in town worth considering in the short term. I’m not holding my breath for fusion; hydroelectric has the obvious “flooding vast acreage” weakness; solar is too inefficient with current technology; people fight windfarms tooth-and-nail because it “ruins their view”; etc. But if people get irate over windfarms, they go batshit crazy when you try to build a nuclear power plant within 500 miles of where they live, and then up the hysteria when you try to bury the waste on, oh, the same planet as the one they live.
Which brings us back to fossil fuel being the easiest way out of the predicament, and screw my great-grandkids, I’ll be dead when the icecaps melt anyway…
Well, right up front, forget wind & solar. They are pipe dreams. The math has been done. There is not now nor will there ever be enough energy in air molecules or sun photons to make either of them a primary energy source.
Second, regardless of who’s in the White House nothing will replace oil until oil becomes too expensive. Or rather, more expensive than something else. Not pollution, not war, not tanker spills. Only economics will drive the creation of an alt-fuel infrastructure.
With that in mind, what we not only should do but inevitably will do is open up the Alaskan north for oil drilling. Again, Dem or GOP, once oil goes high enough this will happen.
As far as nuclear goes, nuclear isn’t as polluting but its also not that cheap. Not when you figure in the costs of mining and refining Uranium, the extreme safety factors that must be built into the power plants, and the costs of storing the waste.
The primary thing oil is used for is cars. IMO it will be fuel cells which replace the internal combustion engine. I mean fuel cells work, right now. But they’re expensive to manufacture. And so is Hydrogen.
But in our as well as our children’s liftime it will remain fossil fuels.
I question whether this means we’re stuck on oil far into the future, since car companies are learning that there IS a market for hybrid vehicles.
Cite?
Well, then you must have a cite showing us how the amount of oil likely available in ANWR would simply dwarf that ever available from wind or solar? Or, if you are arguing that we will simply not be able to replace internal combustion engines on the timescale in question (so that wind and solar are not an option for our transportation), you could just compare the amount of oil likely available in ANWR with what we currently consume and what could be saved by raising CAFE standards.
One thing that we more or less agree on.
Well, it is not just that hydrogen is expensive to produce. It is that it takes energy to produce it. Hydrogen is not an energy source; it is an energy carrier. While it certainly could free us up from using oil to fuel our automobiles and could eliminate all those point sources of pollution, it still begs the question of what energy source will be used to produce the hydrogen.
By the way, just to clarify, I am not claiming that either wind or solar (or both even together) can alone solve our whole energy problem. However, I am challenging the claim that they can’t be an important component of the solution.
The point is that there is unlikely to be any one “magic bullet”. We will have to do lots of different things to solve this problem. (Admittedly, I suppose one could use this argument to say that drilling in ANWR should be part of the solution too. However, there are a number of problems with this besides the direct environmental impact on ANWR. One is that it does nothing but excerbate the environmental issues related to fossil fuels, most notably global warming. Second, it actually seeks to continue to directly and indirectly subsidize oil, keeping the price artificially low and thus continuing to encourage our flagrant wastefulness of this resource. For fossil fuels, we should be focussing most intently on reducing the demand side of the equation not increasing the supply side.)
I disagree that wind and solar power are not the answer (or at least a part of it). They can be used to convert readily available resources into functional fuel sources. Water can be converted into H2O2 or just hydrogen and oxygen. Both of which can be used with conventional car engines with a little modification.
I agree that nothing will replace oil until it becomes cost competitive but that day is much closer than you think. We are beyond processing capacity with gasoline to the point we are now importing it. China is building roads (and the cars to run on them) at an exponential rate. They will increase the use of oil beyond the planet’s ability to pump it, regardless of how fuel efficient cars become.
On a separate note, wind generators don’t have to be a field of bird eating propellers. They can be built as vertical generators. Which would make them easy to hide given all the cell phone towers that exist today.
In 1975 the average desk job worker didn’t have a personal computer because it was too expensive. By 1985 they did, because it had gotten a lot cheaper. The price drop came about mainly because the federal government styarted buying PCs for its own employees. With a much larger market to sell to, the computer companies spent a lot more energy on creating low cost computers.
So lets get fuel cell cars in the same way. Require that every vehicle the federal government buys from 2010 onwards must be powered by fuel cells or some other means that doesn’t use oil. Then the car companies will have a serious reason to pour investment money into such vehicles, which would eventually lead to a generation of such vehicles that were affordable to the public. With gas prices always rising, that would eventually cause people to voluntarily switch to non-oil cars and trucks.
Would the government have to pay more for its vehicles? For a short time, yes. But look at the big picture. To support our current oil habits, we have to wage a major war in the Middle East every ten years or so, and keep large numbers of troops stationed there even in peacetime, which in turn provokes terrorist attacks of increasing frequency and severity, so we hemorrage not only money but human lives as well. And waging those wars makes us unpopular all over the world, which hurts our worldwide trade, … you get the idea. Raising the cost of each car and truck the government buys by $500 or so would be cheap by comparison.