FROM FOSSIL FUELS TO
RENEWABLES -- (House of Representatives - March 15, 2007)
The SPEAKER pro tempore.
Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 18, 2007, the gentleman from
Mr. BARTLETT of
And so those who are
concerned about national security are urging that we make a transition from
these fossil fuels, most of which are owned by countries over there, and move
to renewables so that we can have a sustainable source of energy for our
country from a national security perspective.
There is a second group of
people who believe that our burning of these fossil fuels is polluting the
environment to an unacceptable level. And it is not just the greenhouse gases,
because that introduces us to a third group. But it is all of the other
pollutants that come in the atmosphere as a result of using these fossil fuels
in all the ways that we use them to produce energy, coal, fire, power plants,
our automobiles, our trains, heating our buildings, all the ways that we use
energy.
By the way, you can make
an argument that even if you are producing more CO2, that may not produce global warming if you are producing it by burning
hydrocarbons in a way that puts a lot of other pollutants up in the atmosphere.
I remember a number of
years ago when Carl Sagan, the great astronomer, was noting that if we had a
nuclear war we might go through what he called nuclear winter; and the trash
thrown up into the atmosphere as a result of the nuclear explosions, he
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thought, might block enough
of the Sun's rays that there would be a cooling of the Earth so that we would
go through a kind of an ice age. Indeed, there is some natural phenomena that
give some credibility to that possibility.
Whenever there is a major
volcano that goes off, an eruption that throws millions of tons of trash up
there that may circulate for a couple of years before all the fine particles
finally come down, we can see a degree or two of temporary cooling in the Earth
as a result of that. So there is the environmental group that is concerned
about our excessive burning of these fossil fuels and the pollutants that come
from that, and they are very interested in conservation, in efficiency, and
moving to true renewables.
[Time: 15:00]
And then there is the
growing group of those who are concerned that the release of these greenhouse
gases, CO2 being one of the major ones,
is warming our Earth.
Now, it is true that our
Earth is warmer than it has been in the last 10,000 years, since the last Ice
Age, and maybe as warm as it has been, some say, in the last million years if
in fact we have been here that long. It is not certain that there is a
cause-effect relationship between CO2
and warming.
But when you go back
through history, and they do this in Antarctica by doing ice borings, and that
is a desert down there; they have less than 2 inches of precipitation per year;
it doesn't fall as snow, it falls as tiny little ice granules, and that
accumulates very slowly. There is nearly 2 miles of ice piled up at the South
Pole down there. And so with borings you can go in there and you can look back
through tens of thousands of years, and the scientists can tell pretty much
what the climate was like and what the temperatures were by the kinds of
materials that were deposited there during that time. And they note that every
time that CO2 was up, the Earth was
warmer. So that at least is a presumptive evidence that CO2 certainly as a
greenhouse gas is the cause of the present global warming that we are looking
at.
And, of course, what the
global warming people want is to move away from fossil fuels, because what we
are doing with fossil fuels is releasing into the atmosphere carbon dioxide
that was sequestered by plants a very long time ago.
As a little boy, I knew
that that is what was happening, because we lived up in western
There was an abandoned
mine on the farm and we got the services of a miner in the little local town
and he opened up the mine and we shared the coal that he got from it, and we
would use coal as it came from the mine, some big chunks and down to very small
ones, and some were too big to put in the furnace. And as a little boy, when it
was my time to tend the furnace I would have to go down and sometimes break a
lump of coal so that I could get it into the furnace.
I remember taking that
sledgehammer that stood by the wall there and breaking the lump of coal, and
once in a while it would open up and there would be a fern leaf. I remember as
a little kid looking at that fern leaf and wondering, how long ago did that
fern live and die and fall over and now be compressed under dirt and with time
it finally converted to coal? So as a little boy I knew that the coal that we
were burning came from plants that lived a very long time ago, and they had
sequestered the CO2 then over thousands
of years perhaps.
And now what we are doing
in a relatively few years, because we are in the age of oil, only about 150
years now in the age of oil, and we are now releasing into the atmosphere all
the CO2 that has been taken out of the
atmosphere over a very long time period.
So what the global warming
concerned people are interested in is an energy economy that uses the energy
that we are producing. If you are burning the tree that grew, you are now releasing
into the atmosphere the CO2 which the
tree took out of the atmosphere. So although, and if it was possible, I am not
sure that it is, that we could get as much energy from these alternative
renewable sources that we are now getting from fossil fuels, you can use them
to your heart's desire and you wouldn't increase the CO2 in the atmosphere
because for every pound of CO2 that you released into the atmosphere, that
pound was taken out of the atmosphere by the tree or the grass or whatever grew
that you were getting energy from.
And so what the people
concerned with global warming want us to do is to move as quickly as we can
from fossil fuels to these renewables. So they have common cause with the
environmental people and with the national security people.
And then there is a group
of people growing, not large yet but growing, who believe that, even if you
don't have any concern about the environment, even if you don't have any
concern about global warming, even if you don't think that it is a national
security risk to be getting so much of our oil from over there, it just isn't
going to be there because we are going to have such a phenomenon as peak oil.
By the way, our country reached that plateau in 1970. We will talk about that
in a few moments.
And then there is a fourth
group that really ought to have common cause here, and that is the group that
is concerned about what could
So we desperately need an
area in which we can be premier, in which we can export to the world, and I
would submit that that would be in the energy efficiency and alternative energy
area. There is no society in the world that is half as creative and innovative
as the American people if we are challenged and if we see the need and if we
see the goal.
So I wanted to talk today
about this phenomenon which I think that these five groups have common cause
in: Those that are concerned about national security, those that are concerned
about the environment and isn't our air polluted enough, those that are
concerned with global warming, those that believe that by and by the oil just
isn't going to be there, the Moon isn't made out of green cheese and the Earth
isn't made out of oil and, quite obviously, it is not going to last forever,
and then the group that is looking for something where we can again become a
premier engineering and manufacturing Nation. And, of course, we have now
relinquished that premier position to other parts of the world.
The first chart that I
have here kind of explains a lot of our dilemma, the World According to Oil.
And I found this, and I found it so intriguing that I have shown it now a
couple of times. But what this does is to show you what our planet would look
like if the size of the nation was relative to how much oil it had. And, boy,
do we have a warped geography here.
Here is
The countries that we
think of as being important in the world economy like
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to reclaim it and that is
why he went in more than a decade ago, but it is tiny compared to
Something of particular
note on this. The two countries that contain about 2 1/2 billion people total,
more than 1 billion now in India, and 1,300,000,000 in China, and look at how
big they are relative to oil.
The next chart is a
prediction that was made by a very famous speech that was given 51 years ago
the 8th
day of this month. And I
will submit that, within a decade, this may well be recognized as the most
important speech given in the last century. It was a speech given by M. King
Hubbert, who was an oil geologist and he worked for the Shell Oil Company. And
there was a convention of oil people in
What he said was that the
United States, and if you look back in your history at that point in time we
were king of oil; we were producing more oil and I think exporting more oil
than any other country in the world. And he predicted that this giant in oil
would reach its maximum production of oil in just about 14 years, and he was
predicting that by about 1970 we would reach our maximum production of oil.
Now, he was talking only
about the lower 48. He couldn't imagine at that time that we would be able to
go out and drill in the
As you see, right on
schedule in 1970, his prediction came true. That shocked a lot of people. And
whereas he had been an object of ridicule before that, now he became kind of a
legend in his own time.
And then we found that
huge strike of oil in Alaska in Prudhoe Bay up at Dead Horse, I have been
there; I saw the beginning of that 4-foot pipeline, through which for a number
of years now about one-fourth of our total oil has flowed. And then the nongas
liquids you see up here. If you add those two in, there was just a bump on the
way down the other side of Hubbert's Peak.
And here we are today. In
the lower 48, we are producing considerably less than half of the oil that we
produced in 1970. And if you even add to that the liquids made from gases and
the Gulf of Mexico oil, now that is recent enough that people can remember
that, and you may remember the hype that went on over that. Gee, we don't have
to worry about oil for the foreseeable future. We found this enormous amount of
oil in the Gulf of Mexico; and, as I mentioned, there are about 4,000 oil wells
there. Notice that hardly made a blip in our slide down the other side of
Hubbert's Peak.
The next chart shows a
depiction of Hubbert's Peak, and this is from a very interesting publication.
This is in a publication by CERA. Now, CERA is one of the few organizations
that believes that you don't need to be worrying about oil for the next number
of years, and they have this chart in their publication and they intend to
repudiate and ridicule M. King Hubbert with this chart. And they are saying
that M. King Hubbert couldn't have been right because look at the actual data
here.
Now, this is the total
U.S. production, the red, and the yellow is the Hubbert's lower 48. And what he
is saying was that Hubbert must have been all wrong, because the actual lower
48 production are these green things down here, and they think that is far
enough away from the yellow that his prognostication is repudiated by this.
I would think the average
person looking would say, well, gee, he was right on. Wasn't he? He said it was
going to peak in 1970, that is 1970. He said it would go downhill after that.
Well, it didn't go downhill quite as fast as he thought it would, but it
certainly has gone downhill after that. Maybe he couldn't have imagined that we
would drill more than 1/2 million oil wells in this country. We have more oil
wells drilled in this country than all the rest of the world put together.
Now, the red here reflects
that contribution from Prudhoe Bay and from the Gulf of Mexico that we saw in
the previous one, that little blip going down the other side of Hubbert's Peak.
Mr. MARKEY. Will the
gentleman yield?
Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland.
I would be happy to yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts.
Mr. MARKEY. I would like
to say that the gentleman from Maryland is like Socrates up here lecturing to
the Members and to the country on this incredibly important issue. And I would
just like to take note that you do it day after day, and you are relentless.
There is no question that,
still, there is this denial with regard to the amount of oil that the United
States has in terms of reserves compared to OPEC, compared to Russia, compared
to other countries in the world.
[Time: 15:15]
And the gentleman from
Maryland on a consistent basis comes here to the House floor. I know you do it
in other places to bring this message. And if I may, just for 10 seconds
because I know the gentleman shares my view on this, I think we both drive
hybrids. I think the gentleman is the Chair of the Hybrid Caucus, as a matter
of fact. And we both know that the technology exists if we make a commitment as
a nation. So here is just one little statistic I would like to put out there:
In 1970, the United States
imported 20 percent of its oil; 80 percent we produced. By 1977, just 7 years
later, we imported 47 percent of our oil. We went from 20 percent imports to 47
percent imports. But then the Congress and Gerald Ford, President Ford, passed
legislation which mandated a doubling of the fuel economy standards for the
United States of America. By 1985, 1986, we had dropped back down to 27 percent
imports. So we went from 20 percent to 46 back down to 27 percent because we
improved our technology. We doubled the fuel economy from 13 miles per gallon to
27 miles per gallon. We did it technologically.
Today, unbelievably, the
United States imports 60 percent of its oil. So from 1986 to 2006, we went from
27 percent of our oil that we imported to 60 percent of our oil that we
imported. And as the gentleman graphically, in eye-watering detail, continues
to present out here on the House floor, the places from which we import this
oil is not healthy for the United States of America. It is an unhealthy
relationship with countries that we should not be dependent upon. Three hundred
billion dollars worth of oil imports last year. Three hundred billion dollars.
And we know that much of that money is spent on things that are completely
adverse to the overall national security interests of the United States of America
even as we emit more greenhouse gases out into the atmosphere that we would not
be emitting if our fuel economy standard was much higher.
So I saw you out here
again like a preacher, and I thought that I would just let you know that I am
out here in the congregation listening to you, and I know that there are many,
many other people who are very much in debt to you for having the resolute
commitment to getting this message into the minds of the American people.
So I thank the gentleman
for yielding.
Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland.
Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman very much for his kind words.
This is, in fact, the 25th
time that I have been here. And, wow, it was the 14th, just about a year ago I
came here
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for the first time, the 14th
of last month, March. And we were putting our charts together and we were
trying to decide what to call this phenomenon. Were we going to call it the
``great rollover,'' when you reach the top and start down the other side, or
were we going to call it ``peak oil''? And we had a long conversation in the
office about what we should call it, and we finally decided we would call it
``peak oil.''
Now, I didn't know that
there were some other people out there already calling it ``peak oil'' because
I am a whole lot wiser now than I was then, but this kind of indicates the
status of the recognition of the problem a year ago, and I was one of the more
interested people in the Congress in this and I didn't even know what to call
it. I was arguing with myself and with the staff. We were discussing it. Should
we call it the ``great rollover,'' and it will be a great rollover, or should
we call it ``peak oil''? We finally settled on ``peak oil,'' and now today
there is an increasing number of people who are concerned about peak oil.
Mr. MARKEY. Will the
gentleman yield?
Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland.
Yes, sir.
Mr. MARKEY. Why do you
think it is so hard to convince people that we don't have the oil reserves that
would allow us to have a healthy relationship with the rest of the world that
does have the oil reserves that ultimately we are going to need to import if we
don't change our habits? Why do you think our country doesn't come to grips
with that? Where is the gap in communicating with the American people on this
issue?
Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland.
Well, thank you. I think there are several reasons for this. One is an
irrational confidence, worship almost, of the marketplace, and technology. And
the third is that people just don't like to think about tough, hard things. I
love to think about those things because there is no exhilaration like the
exhilaration of meeting a big challenge and overcoming it. So this is
exhilarating to me, and there are many people that don't like this. And my wife
tells me that I shouldn't be doing this because don't you remember that in
ancient Greece they killed the messenger that brought bad news? And my response
is this is a good news story. If we start today, we will have a less bumpy ride
than if we start tomorrow.
Mr. MARKEY. Will the
gentleman yield?
Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland.
Yes, sir.
Mr. MARKEY. You tell your
wife that in Massachusetts the messenger's name was Paul Revere and we actually
built statues to him up in Massachusetts for telling us the Red Coats were
coming, the British were coming, the regulars were coming. And that is what you
are telling us right now, that at 60, 61 percent dependence upon imported oil,
we are heading inexorably towards a very, very dangerous foreign policy,
national security crisis in our country because we are averaging about 1 1/2
percent per year increase in our dependency. So in order to move from 27
percent back in 1985, 1986 to 60, 61 percent today, it just has to go up that
much. So if we come back here in 67 years and we haven't done anything, we will
be over 70 percent, 75 percent dependent upon imported oil, all unnecessary if
we looked at the facts and looked at the facts today and began to change our
national habits.
So tell your wife that
Paul Revere is more likely the analogy that applies to you rather than the
messenger that they shot.
Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland.
I want to thank my friend for joining me. This is absolutely a bipartisan
issue. I don't know that energy and oil knows the difference between a Democrat
and a Republican. So I am very pleased that you joined me on the floor.
I might say just a word
about these two philosophies that are keeping us from really focusing on this
issue. One is an almost reference for the marketplace. There are many people
who believe that the marketplace is both omniscient, it knows everything; and
it is omnipotent, it is all powerful and it will solve everything. Well, I
believe the market is really very powerful. But, you know, there are some
things that even God can't do. God can't make a square circle, can he? So there
are some things that the marketplace won't be able to do.
I do not think that the
market signals will be able to be responded to quickly enough to meet this
challenge. If there were infinite resources, then this blind faith in the
market might have some relevance. But there clearly are not infinite resources.
The amount of oil out there is, in fact, finite.
The other is the near
worship of scientists and technology: Don't worry, they will fix it. I
mentioned to one of our really high officials in government that peak oil was a
reality and that it just wasn't going to be there in the future in the amounts
that we need for our economy. And he said, Well, I guess when that happens, the
price will go up and people will use less and they will find something else and
that solves the problem. Don't worry about it, they will fix it.
Well, I point to two
different societies: The Mayan society down in Central America. That didn't get
fixed and they are gone. Our cliff dwellers out in the West. I am sure that a
number of folks have been there and seen those cliffs, and their world is gone.
And I am sure when it was deteriorating, they were saying to each other, Don't
worry, they will take care of it.
Easter Island, a vigorous
civilization there, and when we finally found the last survivors of it they
were living in caves. They were eating rats and each other because they had
done, in that little part of the planet, what we may one day do to our total
planet; that is, they were living beyond the renewable resources of their
little island there in Easter Island and somebody didn't fix it. There wasn't
somebody there to fix it.
The next chart looks at a
number of the experts and what their predictions are as to when this peak oil
that Mr. Markey was talking about is going to occur. And we are now
here in 2007 and notice that there is a large number of them here: Colin
Campbell, Kenneth Deffeyes, Matt Simmons. Several of these I know personally. And
their predictions are all in the very, very near timeframe. As a matter of
fact, Deffeyes believes that we now have passed peak oil. He said he used to be
a prognosticator and now he is an historian. He is now looking back at the
event of peak oil. And then we have a few that believe it will be between 2010
and 2016. And then CERA. CERA is the largest one here. Shell. No visible peak.
Very few who believe that it may be some time off in the future.
We will have an
opportunity in a few moments to talk about CERA and some of their projections.
But notice that most, the large percentage of all of those who have been
looking at this and studying this believe that peak oil is either present or
imminent.
The next chart is a really
interesting one. And if you had only one chart to look at, this I think is the
most instructive of all of the charts that we have because on this one chart,
it shows the discovery, and that is the large bars here. And you see that back
in the 1940s we were discovering lots and in the 1950s, and, boy, in the 1960s
and 1970s huge amounts of oil. But notice what has happened. Since about 1980
it has been down, down, down. And that is in spite of ever better technologies
for discovering oil and ever better incentives.
When Reagan came to
office, that was in 1980, and we were already 10 years down the other side of
Hubbert's Peak; so we knew darn well that M. King Hubbert was right, that the
United States had reached its peak and we were sliding down the other side of
the peak. And I really liked Ronald Reagan. I can like a person without liking
everything that they do. And I thought then and I am more convinced now that
his solution to this oil problem was totally the wrong solution. His belief was
that if you gave them a profit incentive they would go out there and find it.
So they gave them a profit incentive, and, boy, did they drill. And I don't
have it with me, but I have a chart that shows the number of wells that were
drilled and how much oil was found. And drilling didn't help. You can't find
what is not there and you can't pump what you haven't found. So in spite of
ever better techniques like 3D seismic and computer modeling, we now pretty
much know what the whole globe looks like geologically except maybe we would
like to know a little more about Saudi Arabia and some of
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the countries around the
Caspian. But largely we are pretty aware of what the geology is, and we know
that gas and oil can occur in only certain unique geological formations.
The dark line here
represents the use of oil. And you see that for a long while we were finding
enormously more oil than we were using. But from about 1980 on, we were finding
less and less and using more and more.
By the way, notice this
little blip here in the 1970s. This is the result of the Arab oil embargo, and
had this curve kept going up at the rate it was before, where would it be?
There was a stunning statistic up through the Carter years, through this time;
every decade we used as much oil as had been used in all of previous history.
Wow. What that says is that when you have used half of all the oil in the
world, there would be what, one decade left at current use rates? Now,
obviously, that couldn't happen because you are not going to use it and then fall
off a cliff at the end because the last remaining oil is going to be harder and
harder to get. But since about 1980 on, we have now been eating into or
reserves, and you will have to take some of this surplus here and fill in this
area here. And then what will the future look like?
This chart presumes that
it will peak in about 2010. And you can make the future, within limits, look
differently, depending upon how aggressive you want to be in using enhanced oil
recovery and if you want to drill everywhere in the world the equivalent of the
half million wells that we have drilled in this country. If you drilled 10
wells rather than one in the Oil Patch, you obviously would get the oil out
quicker. You are not going to get any more oil out probably, but you will get
it out more quickly.
So there may be some
argument about what the future looks like, but there can be no argument that
you can't pump what you haven't found. Now, if you put a smooth curve over this
discovery curve, the area under that curve represents the total amount of our
discoveries. That is the equivalent of adding up all these little individual
bars. And if you look at the area under the use curve, that will be the amount
of oil that we have used.
Now, obviously, at the end
of the day, those two areas are going to be the same. So unless you think that
we are going to reverse this discovery curve and find a lot more oil, and some
people do think that, by the way, and we will talk about that in a few moments,
but unless you think that we are going to find a lot more oil, the future
cannot look very much different than this because you can't pump what you
haven't found.
[Time: 15:30]
Because you can't pump
what you haven't found, and the area under this discovery curve cannot be
different than the area under the use curve. There are many people who are
projecting uses that would just indicate that we are going to have to find
enormously more oil in the future. One of those projections is in the next
chart.
This is from our Energy
Information Agency, and this is projections of discoveries. Now, they didn't
draw a really smooth curve. They took in some of the big humps, but they could
have smoothed this whole thing out.
This is the discovery
curve we were just looking at. I think you can recognize that, way up here in
the seventies and down, down, down since then. Back in about 2000 they were
projecting what we would find in the future. Now, they used some very
interesting assumptions here.
The USGS has done a series
of simulations. They have some computer modeling, and they have done a whole
series of computer modelings, thousands of these, with different inputs. If
this was true, if that was true, then what would the likely amount of
yet-to-be-discovered oil be. And they have charted those things, and they have
the frequency on the ordinate, and on the abscissa they have the amount of oil
yet to be found.
Now, this is all a
computer game. They simply are making some guesses, assumptions; and they are
putting those into this computer model and they are running that model; and as
they change the assumptions, they will change the amount of oil they think we
will find.
So they have gone to the
midpoint of that, and they have said that was F, they call it F, and somehow
that got distorted to P and they are now talking about probabilities, which is
just bizarre, because these are not probabilities. But this is the fraction of
oil that you will find more or find less than this.
So what did they have
here? Three of these curves. They have the P-95, that is 95 percent probability
they say. Then they have the P-50. That is really F-50 in the data they took
this from. And then they have the 5. What they are saying is that since 50 is
halfway between 5 and 95 it is the mean and therefore that is the most
probable. So their projection when they made the chart was that this downward
slope was now going to be reversed and we were going to start going up.
Of course, if they really
are probabilities, and it didn't start as that, it started as these fractional
things, but it ended up being projected here as probabilities, if they really
are probabilities, there should be another green line down here and another
blue line down here.
It is like that little
funnel-shaped thing you see from the hurricane. Tomorrow you are pretty certain
where it is going to be. The day after tomorrow, you are less certain, so that
gets to be a big funnel as you go out. So that is what these various
probabilities are.
Now, not surprisingly, the
actual data points have followed the 95 percent probability. If you say those
are probabilities, obviously this 95 percent probable is a whole lot more
probable than 50 percent probable. But for what it is worth, the actual data
points for a decade or so have been following the 95 percent probability.
The next chart, this is
from the Hirsch Report. I might digress for a moment to note what the Hirsch
Report is. There have been two major studies that are financed by our
government. One was financed by the Department of Energy and that was SAIC
report. Dr. Hirsch, which is why this is called the Hirsch Report, Dr. Hirsch
was the leading investigator on that, and this came out, oh, a year-and-a-half
ago roughly. I think we will have some quotes from it a little later. But they
looked at this situation, peaking of world oil production, impacts, mitigation
and risk management. It is going to peak. What should we do about it, what can
we do about it, is what was in this report.
This is one of the charts
from this report, and these are USGS estimates of ultimate recovery. This is
the F that I was talking about. They somehow changed it to P. But this is low,
95 percent; high, 5 percent; and the mean, or expected value, 3,000.
Just a word about what these
numbers are. These are thousand gigabarrels. Now, we use gigabarrel because a
billion in England, I understand, is a million million. A billion in this
country is a thousand million. So if you are talking about billions, you may
confuse some people. But apparently everybody knows what a giga is, and a giga
is our billion. So we are talking about gigabarrels of oil.
So this is 2,248
gigabarrels of oil. That is about, what, 2,000 gigabarrels of oil. That, by the
way, is roughly the amount of oil that most of the world's experts believe we
have found, and we have used about half of that. We have used about 1,000
gigabarrels of oil, so there are about another 1,000 that we have yet to use.
But what this
prognostication indicates is that we are going to find as much more oil,
another roughly 1,000 gigabarrels to bring this 2 up to 3, we are going to find
as much more oil as all the oil that is still left in the world. Now, that is
conceivable. I think it is about as likely as winning the lottery. I don't
think there is much probability of that happening.
But even if that was true,
and that is the stunning thing that this chart shows, even if that is true,
that only takes the peak out to 2016. That is just around the corner. That is 9
years away, even if that is true.
This is the power of the
exponential function. One of the most interesting lectures I have ever heard
was given by Dr. Albert Bartlett, emeritus, University of Colorado, no relative
of mine. I wish he were. I wish I had some of his genes. He gives some
fascinating explanations of the exponential function. One of them I think is
worth spending just a moment on.
[Page: H2606]
The story is told that
chess was developed in an ancient kingdom, and the king was so pleased at the
invention of chess that he asked the inventor to come in and he promised him
any reasonable thing. And the inventor of the chess game said, O, king, I am a
very simple person. I have simple needs. If you will just take my chess board
and put a grain of wheat on the first square and two grains of wheat on the
second square and four grains of wheat on the third square and eight on the
fourth square and keep doubling until you have filled all of the 64 squares on
my chess board, that will be reward enough.
The king said to himself,
simple fellow. He could have asked for something meaningful, and all he has
asked for is a few grains of wheat on a chess board. Of course, the king could
not deliver, because it is my understanding that it would take the world's
harvest today of a decade to fill the chess board. That is the power of
exponential growth.
Albert Einstein was asked
about what the next great power in the universe would be after the discovery of
nuclear energy, and he said the most powerful force in the universe was the
power of compound interest.
Well, Dr. Albert
Bartlett's fascinating 1-hour lecture, and just do a Google search for Dr.
Bartlett, Albert Bartlett and energy, and you can pull it up, and he has some
very interesting illustrations in there.
He says the biggest
failure of our industrialized society is the failure to understand the
exponential growth. But even if we were to find as much more oil as all the oil
that now exists, it would push the peak out to only 2016.
Now, if you use enhanced
oil recovery and pump a lot of CO2 down
there and live steam and so forth, maybe you can push it out to 2037, but look
what happens after that. Then you fall off a cliff, is what they say in this
prognostication.
The next chart is an
interesting chart from CERA. In an article entitled ``Undulating Plateau Versus
Peak Oil,'' it says there is not going to be any peak. I looked at this, and,
by golly, it looks like a peak to me. It goes up and then it comes down.
Now, they have several
different assumptions in here, and they are pretty easy to sort out, I think.
This is roughly that 2 trillion, the current known amount of oil; and if that
is all the oil there is, they agree that the peak is pretty imminent. But they
believe that we are going to find about as much more conventional oil as still
exists in reserves. If that is true, then the peak moves out only this far.
Then they think we are
going to get a lot of oil from the unconventional oil sources, like the
Canadian tar sands and our western oil shales and the really heavy oil from
Venezuela; and if we get that, then we are going to go up that high plateau.
But this is still a plateau
I have 10 kids, 15
grandkids and 2 great grandkids. Wouldn't it be nice if we left a little energy
for them? We are bequeathing them, not with my votes, but we are bequeathing
them the largest intergenerational debt transfer in the history of the world. I
would like to leave them a little energy, thank you, which is why I don't vote
to drill in ANWR and I don't vote to drill offshore. I think there is a real
moral element to this discussion.
If we are going to
bequeath them this horrendous debt, which I think is immoral in itself, then I
think it is doubly immoral that we give them a world from which we have raped
all the readily available energy. Someone suggested in the future they may look
back at what we have done and say to themselves, how could the monsters have
done that? I hope that they won't be able to say that about this generation,
because I hope that we will do better.
Well, this curve that they
meant to repudiate, peak oil, I think confirms there will be a peak oil.
The next chart here is a
statement from one of the experts in this field, Dr. Laherrere, and this is
what he says. The USGS estimate implies a five-fold increase in discovery, to
reverse the current trend, which is going down, and it is going to go up, a
five-fold increase in discovery rate and reserve addition for which no evidence
is presented. Such an improvement in performance is in fact utterly
implausible, he says, given the great technological achievements of the
industry over the past 20 years, the worldwide search and the deliberate effort
to find the largest remaining prospects.
And we found a pretty big
one just recently out in the Gulf of Mexico, under, what, 7,000 feet of water,
roughly 30,000 feet of rock. If you notice, they aren't developing that yet. I
am told, and not everything I am told is true because it is sometimes hard to
get the correct facts, but I am told that they will start developing that when
oil is $211 a barrel, because that is what it is going to cost to get it out of
there. I am not sure whether that is true or not.
The next chart, I
mentioned the oil chart that we showed before as being the single chart I would
use if I had only one. If I was awarded two charts to use to talk about this,
this would be the second one I would use, the upper part of it. This is a
really revealing chart.
This goes back through
about 400 years of, I generally say 5,000 years of, recorded history. Hyman
Rickover referred to it as 8,000 years of recorded history.
I might digress for just a
moment. I hope to come to the floor the 15th of this May to talk about a
really, really interesting speech that Hyman Rickover, the father of our
nuclear submarine, gave to a group of physicians in Saint Paul, Minnesota, 50
years ago the 15th of this May.
He notes that we have
8,000 years of recorded history. He said at that time, 50 years ago, we were
about 100 years into the age of oil. This now introduces us to that age of oil.
It was introduced, of
course, by the Industrial Revolution which started with wood, the hills of New
England, the mountains that were denuded, taking charcoal to England to make
iron. Up in Frederick County, which I have the honor of representing, there is
Catoctin Furnace up there, which is a little smelter up there, and they denuded
the hills up in Gambro where Camp David is. They denuded those hills to make
charcoal for that furnace. It is now a historic site. The Industrial Revolution
began with the use of wood. The Stanley Steamer used wood.
On the ordinate here is
the quadrillion BTUs. This is a measure of the total amount of energy produced.
Notice that is pretty far down here. Then we found coal. Boy, then the
Industrial Revolution took off. But it really took off when we found gas and
oil. And notice how that is standing up on end. And notice what happened at the
Arab oil embargo here in the seventies.
[Time: 15:45]
Where would we be if that
hadn't happened? That was really a wake-up call. As a result of that, we have
enormously more efficient appliances than we had then. Your air conditioner is
probably three times as efficient as it was then. Too bad our cars didn't
follow that path, isn't it?
Well, the interesting
thing is that the world's population just about followed this curve. For these
8,000 years of recorded history, we had half a billion to a billion people
worldwide. Now with the industrial revolution, the population has exploded. We
now have almost 7 billion people in the world.
There is, in Hyman
Rickover's speech to those physicians 50 years ago, a fascinating discussion of
the contribution of energy to the development of civilization.
I hope to come to the
floor on May 15 and we will spend the whole hour talking about his speech. It
was so prophetic. As a matter of fact, he predicted that if we start making too
much energy from a food substance, the price of food will go up. We have made trifling
amounts of ethanol from corn, and we have doubled the price of corn. We are
hurting the poor people who use tortillas because they are made out of corn. My
dairymen are financially dying because the price of corn has doubled and the
price of milk does not justify that feed cost. They are losing money month by
month.
Well, this is striking
symbolism here. In another 100-150 years, we will be down the other side of the
age of oil. This is going to fall off.
Is there any reason that
the world shouldn't follow the microcosm of the United States? M. King Hubbert
predicted in 1956 that we would peak in 1970. We did. He predicted the world
would be peaking about now. If he was right about the United States, why
[Page: H2607]
shouldn't he be right about
the world, and why shouldn't we have been doing something about that?
Since 1980, we have known
very well that M. King Hubbert was right about the United States. If he was
right about the United States, maybe he would be right about the world. If it
is true that the world's oil production would peak about now, then no matter
what we do, drill a half million wells, like we drill in the United States,
which would be millions worldwide, it still goes downhill no matter what we
have done. Our production is downhill.
Very interesting, in 8,000
years of recorded history, the age of oil will be but a blip: 300 years. What
will our world look like? Our next chart introduces us to that.
Sooner or later, whether
we like it or not, we will transition from fossil fuels because they will one
day be gone. We will transition from fossil fuels to renewables. This chart
looks at the options that we have. We have some finite sources, and we need to
come back for another hour and talk in detail about some of these finite
sources that we have here and what their potential is, and then let the
listener judge as to what contribution they think will be made from this.
One of the challenges we
have is the fantastic density of energy in our fossil fuels. One barrel of oil
has in it the energy equivalent of 12 people working all year long. Hyman
Rickover gives some fascinating examples in his speech to those physicians
nearly 50 years ago. He said that each worker in the factory had at his
disposal the power equivalent of 244 men turning the wheels and so forth; that
every family had the mechanical system, stoves and vacuum cleaners, toasters,
that represented the work of 33 full-time faithful household servants. He said
100,000 men pushed your car down the road, and the equivalent energy of 700,000
men pushed a jet plane through the sky.
Two little examples to
help realize this, just think how far one gallon of gasoline or diesel, how far
that one gallon of gasoline or diesel takes you. I drive a Prius. It drives 50
miles on a gallon. How long would it take me to pull my Prius 50 miles?
If you go out and work
really hard all day, I will get more work out of an electric motor for less
than 25 cents worth of electricity. Now energy-wise electricity is about half the
cost of gasoline, but about 25 cents worth of electricity, and that may be
humbling to represent that you are worth less than 25 cents a day in terms of
fossil fuel, but that is the reality. And that is why we have such an
incredibly high standard of living, we have this incredible energy source at
our disposal.
The challenge is to
transition to renewable forms of energy that will provide the same quality of
life. We have some finite resources that we can go through. The tar sands, the
oil shales, the coal, nuclear fission, nuclear fusion. We don't have time today
to talk about these in detail. We will come back and talk about those in
detail. And then all of the renewables. These will one day be gone, except for
nuclear. We will talk about nuclear. If we ever get fusion, we are home free. I
think that is most unlikely. If we go to breeder reactors, we buy some
problems, but then we have relatively secure energy if you can handle the
waste, and so forth, from that.
But there are only so much
tar sands, oil shale, and coal. They come at great expense. They are pretty
polluting processes. Ultimately, we will be down here, getting all of our
energy from these resources: Solar, wind, geothermal, ocean energy,
agricultural resources, soy diesel, biodiesel, ethanol, methanol, biomass.
Now there is a lot of talk
about cellulosic ethanol. I understand the President on television was saying
that there is going to be limited amounts of energy we can get from ethanol
because already we have doubled the price of corn. So now we need to turn to
biomass, to cellulosic ethanol.
Cellulosic ethanol is
liberating the glucose that is so tightly bound in the starch molecule that
enzymes in our body can't liberate it, but there are microbes that live in the
guts of the wood-eating cockroach, cryptocercus, and in the stomach of cows and
sheep and goats and so forth that does that for them. So the cellulosic ethanol
is liberating the glucose from the big cellulose molecule.
Waste energy. Just a word
of caution, that huge stream of waste we have is the result of profligate use
of fossil fuels. In an energy deficient world, there will be nowhere near as
much waste as we have now. We jolly well ought to be using the waste energy
now. It is a much better use of this waste than burying it in a landfill, but
it will not be the ultimate solution to our problem.
Hydrogen. I want to make
sure that everyone understands that hydrogen is not an energy source. We talk
about it because when you burn it you get water that is pretty darn clean, and
it is a great candidate for fuel cells, if we ever get fuel cells. Think of
hydrogen as a battery, something to carry energy from one source to another.
We have only a few moments
remaining, and I would like to put the last chart up. That will introduce us to
a longer discussion we will have next time.
We are very much like the
young couple whose grandparents have died and they have inherited a lot of
money. They have established a lifestyle where 85 percent of the money they spend
comes from their grandparents' inheritance, and only 15 percent from what they
are earning.
Here we are getting 85
percent of our energy from fossil fuels and only 15 percent from anything else,
and the fossil fuels are not going to last. The kids look at what they are
doing and say gee, that is going to run out. We have to do something. Either we
have to make more or use less. That is exactly where we are.
A bit more than half of
all of this other than fossil fuel energy is nuclear power: 8 percent of total
use in our country, 20 percent of electricity, it probably could and should be
more than that, and then 7 percent. That is going to have to grow until it is
100 percent, but some don't have much potential for growth.
Conventional hydroelectric,
that is peaked out. We will come back and spend a full hour talking about the
potential of these. There are exciting challenges here, and I think it will
inspire the best of America
END