Suppose we decide we want to stop sending dollars to people likr Hugo Chavez, and decide to make our gasoline from coal? How much would this cost to implement? How long would it take, and how much would it cost?hink of the benefits-no longer worrying about the ME. Plus, we would generate thousands of jobs here, and our deficits would drop. Instead of spending billions in Iraq, we would reduce our costs considerably. So, supposing we could build Fischer_Tropsch conversion plants like crazy, how much would it cost? 
Well, first you have to hire thousands of hitmen to bump off anyone who’ll create obstructionist legal challenges to the construction of new nuclear facilities. At $500 a pop, that’ll be about $10 million to start…
First, you’d have to explain to everyone that instead of buying gas made from oil at world market prices, they’re going to have to pay considerably higher prices for gas made from domestic coal.
Second, you’d have to make sure the other political party likes this idea because your party isn’t going to win any elections outside of West Virginia for the next twenty years.
It would probably take a couple of decades to achieve energy independence for the U.S., even if we could get the majority of Americans to agree that it would be a good thing. We could theoretically just announce that we would no longer import any oil into the U.S… bit the economy would promptly collapse. To do it slowly, we would need some method to gradually decrease the amount of oil imported into the U.S. The obvious way to do it would be to slowly increase the Federal tax on imported oil over the next two decades. There would then be crash research programs at all auto companies to make cars much more efficient. People would quickly begin buying the most energy-efficient vehicle that would get them around. Society would begin re-organizing to allow people to take public transportation more and use cars less. Houses would be built or rebuilt to be more energy-efficient. There would probably have to be some electrical generating plants switching to solar, wind, and water power. There would be at least an attempt to create plants that did things like converting coal to gas, assuming that that’s even possible. Many uses of energy that are available today but which are (at least arguably) a waste would simply go away because they would be too expensive.
My guess is that it would take twenty years, and that assumes that most Americans continue to agree that it would be a good thing for those twenty years.
I wrote:
> . . . no longer import any oil into the U.S… bit the economy . . .
I meant:
> . . . no longer import any oil into the U.S., but the economy . . .
Use less. How hard is this?
Pretty damn hard, considering the US is the industrial center of the entire world, and decreasing energy usage to domestically available levels would precipitate a global economic crisis that would make the Great Depression look like a vending machine that stiffed you for a nickel.
Just to be dull
The 2005 USA Total Primary Energy Supply in millions of tonnes oil equivalent (mtoe) ( that’s just how they define TPES) was 2336.6 mtoe (source BP statistical review 2006)
This is broken down as
Oil - 944.6
Nat gas - 570.1
coal - 575.4
Nuclear - 185.9
Hydro - 60.6
Others (solar wind etc don’t get a look in)
Coal nuclear and hydro are all 100% self supplied.
Gas production is 472 mtoe
oil production is 310.2 mtoe
so you are short 734 mtoe in energy production.
So double your combined coal and nucler plants and you are home and dry.
If you invade canada and mexico and call them the USA as well, then you can add another 230 mtoe in excess production of what they need and avoid having to double up on nuclear plants , which are not popular. So you will only then need to build twice as many coal power plants.
So if you need 735 mtoe. With 7.33 bbl per tonne, and mtoe being per year so factor in 365 you end up with needing an additional 14 million bbl per day. If we assume that this will come from oil alternates (shale oil, tar sands, deep water, unconvetional gas etc etc ) at a lift cost of 25 bucks a bbl, an opex cost will set you back 350 million a day. I am not sure but that will probaly keep a couple of carrier battle groups and a well equiped divison or two of infantry in body armour to keep the oil flowing form places less stable. Or you could just pocket the change and make do with what is forces are available.
Renewables, unfortunatly are not registering on the scale of what is needed today.
Conservations - yes taxing daft SUVs and Hummers off the road would be a good plan. But to get a sense of the numbers, 45% of US crude is taken up in light distilates - AFAIK that is mostly used for gas for cars. Significant savings here will help the numbers - although even on eurpean consumption, but scaled up to account for the higher US per capita GDP (don’t have numbers in front of me) will probably not get you anywhere close to self sufficiency.
anyway - the question was how much would it cost - I’d say about 350 million a day.
You can of course substitute any type of alternate source you like, just figure out a equivalent cost per bbl for the energy it produces and have at the numbers.
Obviously domestic consumption can be tamed to some extent, conventional oil reserves exist at about 6-8 $ per bbls that can keep the US going, gas production could be raised. So the actual number would be lower.
Wendell mentioned a gradual change, increasing taxes on imported energy, and subsidizing domestic energy production. This is the only way of doing it.
Another person suggested solar and wind power. These things are great green ideas, and I wish they would work, but they just don’t deliver enough energy to factor into the equation.
Bio-Fuels intrigue me, and they might offer good solutions to our problems, but they will not supply enough energy in the near term. Again, 10-20 years on this. I wonder if there are enough soy beans to provide us with the quantity of fuels that we need.
Nuclear power is a very good alternative, though it is not a popular topic for discussion. People have made great advances with inherent safety features in nuclear power plants over the years. I think this is the the most practical solution of all. Still almost all of our existing nuclear reactors are boiling water reactors or similiar variants and it will take at least 20 years to build new modern reactors in the quantity that they will be needed. Cecil wrote about this some while back, and cited an article which said words to the effect; it is not fashionable to use nuclear power, but when the time comes, america will be forced to embrace nuclear power as it’s primary source of energy. And embrace it we will.
Since no one else will do it, I will ask the question, why have we not considered these issues up unitl now? I mean I remember the 70’s oil crisis. Those OPEC bastards, rich arabs, and all…
There are ways of tightening up energy efficiency (and resource usage - which leads to generalized fuel and production cost savings; and waste reduction, which leads to fuel and landfill savings) without damaging efficiency.
In fact, many measures to minimize usage actually save companies money and positively affect their bottom line. It just appears that, since companies and individuals are addicted to cheap energy, nobody bothers controlling their profligacy, and arguments like yours prevail.
One arguement to produce oil elsewhere rather than domestically is based on oil being a finite resource. Use up the stuff in the rest of the world, then you have your own domestic supply to tap into when everone else is screwed. IIRC the taxation regime and issuance of oil licences for oil production in the US has fluctuated between encouraging development and discouraging development with the intent to conserve the resource. (source from The Prize James Gleick, do I have to do a proper citation?)
Fully agree with you Jjim, conservation will significantly help a companies bottom line, also the scale of development needed in alternate sources or a large nuke plant building program, would generally help the US economy as it is all internal investment. I would imagine industrial usage is looked at and most business will be, and have been trying to reduce waste. One key area in the energy conservation game where waste may be prevalent is transportation useage.
Personal transportation consumption can be easily, but very unpopularly dealt with. A significant amount of US produced goods in moved around by road (no numbers, my understanding is that it is a lot, anyone got any figures?) Moving this to rail may be expensive, and I am not sure what the impact on economywould be as yopu would then center industries back towards towns and near the rail stations.
I would wonder if rather than develping super high efficiency personal cars, would the development dollars be better spent on improving the fuel efficency of large tractor trailer units (articulated lorries) and reduce consumption in that area. Just weening people off of the 5 liter engines to a normal sized vehical is needed before high efficency engines are going to be used.
How much would it cost/how long would it take to get a cold-fusion plant working properly and producing more energy than is spent on it given a Manhattan project style commitment to its development?
:dubious:
Isn’t this a patent impossibility along the lines of a perepetual-motion machine?
That would be quite a surprise to the several very large US power plants who are my clients who import coal from Russia, Indonesia, and South America. Not that they couldn’t find US coal to burn, but coal imports are growing slowly, especially on the East coast of the US, due primarily to rail transportation gridlock, emissions, and economics.
You’d have to demonstrate the underlying principles driving cold fusion first, collect a Nobel and final commercialize the whole idea. So let’s just say a lot of money with a very chance that you never achieve anything.
Sorry, not cold fusion, I meant an actual working fusion plant.
Sure, but there’s a difference between conservation and improving efficiency, and wanting to immediately make the whole country energy-independant.
Well, that’s simply not true. The efforts to reduce SO[sub]2[/sub], emissions by introducing some simple economic incentives have been wildly sucessful, exceeding even the most optimistic expectations. And a huge part of that effort has been making industrial processes more energy efficient.
The US coal production for 2005 (bp stat review) was 576 mtoe. Consumption was 575 mtoe. I figured as consumption was the same as production then they were break even. As you say differences between where it is produced and used will no doubt accout for the import and export requirements.
From the EIA
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/coal/quarterly/html/t1p01p1.html
Domestic production was 1,133,253 short tons, imports were 30,460
Consumption was 1,128,299 and export was 49,942.
So the US was a net coal exporter - even though you customers need a shed load of coal from overseas. Damn logistics chains.
cheers
NBC
David Neeleman (JetBlue CEO) is pushing a Coal to Oil plan in Washington DC.
A BILL
To utilize domestic coal reserves to produce petroleum products such as jet fuel, low sulfur diesel, naphtha, propane, butane and kerosene, necessary to maintain the United States’ transportation industries, augment national defense and reduce dependence on imported oil.
This Act may be cited as the “Consumers Transportation and Energy Security Act of
2006.”
http://bearcreekledger.com/2006/08/20/american-energy-independence-plan/
What percentage of US energy is used by residential and small-commercial space-heating and space-cooling?
It is extremely-possible to build buildings that use massive earth or concrete walls to store warmth and/or “coolth”. (Yes, that is an actual term I’ve seen in the literature.)
By taking into account location and sun angle, and arranging windows and shaders to suit, you can build a building that requires NO furnace in climate zone four (Algonquin Park, Ontario), where the winters reach -35 degrees. My friends have built such a house, and have been living in it for the past five years.
You can arrange things differently and add cross-ventilation and evaporative cooling and build a house that will stay relatively cool during a New Orelans summer. Or a Phoenix summer.
Now, these houses may exhibit some seasonal temperature variation (my friends’ has a temperature range of around 10 degrees F, coolest in the winter). But they are quite livable.
Some people might say that these houses don’t look like what they are used to. I say, how badly do you want efficiency? Every month, when my friends get no heating or cooling bill, they are quite happy with what they have.
Are people in the US prepared to break out of convention and embrace freedom? Or are they going to go over the cliff in pursuit of social conformity? I think that is the real question.