[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 154 (2008), Part 3]
[House]
[Pages 3416-3422]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]
{time} 1630
FOSSIL FUELS TO RENEWABLES
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 18, 2007, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Bartlett) is
recognized for 60 minutes.
Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, in just a few days now will be
the third anniversary of the time I came to this floor to talk about
this subject. I believe this may be the 39th time that I have come to
the floor, and what an auspicious time to come, because when I got up
this morning and turned on the television, I could hardly believe it,
oil was $105 a barrel.
There are three groups in this country that are interested in
transitioning from fossil fuels to renewables. They have very different
agendas, they have very different concerns, but they have common cause
in wanting to transition from fossil fuels to renewables. One of these
groups is the group that is concerned about the national security of
our country. This first chart speaks to that.
There were 30 people about 3 years ago leading Americans: Boydan
Gray, McFarland, Jim Woolsey, and 27 others, retired Four-star admirals
and generals, who really understand the problems we face, who wrote a
letter to the President saying, Mr. President, the fact that we have
only 2 percent of the world's oil reserves and we use 25 percent of the
world oil, and we import almost two-thirds of what we use is a totally
unacceptable national security exposure. We really have to do something
about that.
A couple of other statistics on this chart are interesting to note.
With our 2 percent of the world oil reserves, we are pumping 8 percent
of the world's oil. We are pumping our wells four times faster than the
average of the rest of the world. What that means of course is if there
is the end of oil, our wells will go dry before the others because we
are pumping them faster.
The last statistic here is truly a bit less than 5 percent. We are
one person out of 22 in the world, and we use one-fourth of the world's
energy, and this fact is not lost on the rest of the world. They
recognize this.
The next chart is a statement by our Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice. She had in mind the statistics that you just saw, and she had
some other things in mind that we will come to in a few moments. When
she said we do have to do something about the energy problem, I can
tell you that nothing has really taken me aback more as Secretary of
State than the way the politics of energy is, I will use the word,
warping diplomacy around the world. We have simply got to do something
about the warping now of diplomatic effort by the all-out rush for
energy supply. So our Secretary of State recognizes the national
security implications of the world's oil energy supply.
One of the things she had in mind was this next chart. This is a
really interesting one. This shows what the world would look like if
the size of the country was relative to the amount of oil that it had
in reserve. Boy, this is a warped map of the world, isn't it? There is
China and India over there, so small you can hardly find them because
they have very little oil.
Saudi Arabia is huge. It just dominates the landscape. Saudi Arabia
has 22 percent, more than one-fifth of the world's reserves of oil. And
notice little Kuwait through there, a tiny little province way down in
there in the southeastern corner of Iraq, and Saddam Hussein thought
that would look good as a province of Iraq, which was a problem about
12 years, 16 years ago, I guess. But look at the size of their
reserves. Iraq and Iran, the United Arab Emirates, just dots on the
map, and look at how much oil they have. Then across northern Africa,
Nigeria, Libya, Algeria, Egypt, and so forth.
Look in our hemisphere. Venezuela of course dwarfs everything else.
Venezuela has more oil than all the rest of our hemisphere put
together. Russia, big, but not huge compared to these other reserves.
Little Kazakhstan, you see it's fairly large there.
So some really striking things about this map. One is the size of the
reserves in India and China. About almost one-fourth of the world's
population lives in India, about one-third, really, live in India and
China, and they have no more oil than we have. Notice that our two
biggest suppliers of oil are Canada and Mexico, and they have less oil
than we. Now, there aren't very many people in Canada to use the oil,
so they can export it to us. Although there are a lot of people in
Mexico, most of them are too poor to use the oil, so they can export it
to us. But look how Venezuela is dominating this hemisphere.
Another thing that Condoleezza Rice had in mind when she made that
statement about how oil is warping the world's diplomacy was the
distribution of the reserves of oil. On the right over there, we have
the top 10 oil and gas companies on the basis of oil reserve holdings
in 2004. Notice that 98 percent of those are governments, nationally
owned oil reserves. LUKOIL in Russia, big, and they have 2 percent, and
they are kind of quasi-government, really.
But notice over here on the left. Now, this is the top 10 oil and gas
companies on the basis of production. The graph on the right shows how
much oil they have, and the graph on the left shows how much oil they
are producing. The big boys up here, ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell
and BP and so forth, they weren't even big enough to show up over here
on the right. They are not numbered among the top ten. So they don't
own much oil but they are pumping a lot of oil that somebody else owns.
So they are pumping 22 percent of the oil. But notice still that 78
percent of the oil is pumped by these national companies that own it
there. Condoleezza Rice I'm sure had this in mind when she made that
statement.
She also had this next chart in mind. This is an interesting one.
This looks at holdings around the world. World energy picture of
January of 2005. You will notice the symbols there for China. China is
buying oil all over the world. Why would they do that? Because in
today's world, it really doesn't make any difference who owns the oil.
We own very little of the oil. We have 2 percent of the world's
reserves, but we are using 25 percent of the world oil, and we do that
because we come with our dollars. Let's hope it continues to be dollars
rather than euros. We come with our dollars and we buy the oil.
So why are the Chinese buying up the oil when it doesn't make any
difference in today's world economy who owns the oil? The person, the
company, the country that comes with the dollars buys the oil. Well, at
the same time that they are buying up all this oil, and I am sure
Condoleezza Rice had this in mind, they were also very aggressively
building a blue water navy. You see, you would need a blue water navy.
We have the only one in the world now. You would need a blue water navy
to protect the supply routes if you wanted to take the position that
the oil was yours and you couldn't share it.
They have 1 billion 300 million people, and I can imagine that one
day they may, with pressure from their people, tell the world, gee, I
am sorry, but this oil is ours and we can't share it. They have 900
million people in what they call rural areas that, with the miracle of
instant communication and television, have observed the benefits of the
industrialized world, and they are clamoring for some of those
benefits. I think that the Chinese recognize that they must do
something to meet those demands or they might see their empire
unraveling the way the Soviet empire unraveled.
So this is one group of people that have a concern about moving away
from fossil fuels to alternatives, renewables. We have very few fossil
fuels and so we have a big incentive to move away and develop
renewables, and these are those who are concerned about national
security interests.
[[Page 3417]]
There is a second group, and I don't have any charts for this group,
but you have seen so much of this that you don't need me to have
charts. This is a very large group of people who believe that our
excessive use of fossil fuels, which is some releasing of carbon
dioxide that has been sequestered through the ages when the sun shown
on ancient subtropical seas and algae and small animals and plants and
so forth grew there. Then at the end of the season they drop to the
bottom and silt came in, and then more the next season. And then
finally the tectonic plates opened up and they went down to a proper
point where, with pressure and temperature and time, this organic
material was converted into what we know today as oil and gas.
Coal is a little different. As a boy, I knew very well where coal
came from because we lived in coal mining country. As a matter of fact,
we had a coal mine on our farm, and the coal would come out of the
mine, dust up to big chunks of coal. And we'd have to break some of
those chunks to put it in our furnace. I remember taking that
sledgehammer where it leaned against the wall and breaking a lump of
coal and there it opened up and there was a big fern leaf. I remember
as a kid the feelings I had. I wonder how long ago that fern grew. So I
knew where coal came from plants. It came from plants that died. We can
see the beginning of coal in the bogs of England, by the way.
But what we are doing in burning these fossil fuels is releasing the
carbon dioxide that was sequestered in these plants over very long time
periods. You see, what happens in photosynthesis is carbon dioxide is
taken out of the air and oxygen is released into the air. If you now
bury that plant, you now have sequestered the carbon dioxide. When you
take it out and burn it, you are releasing the carbon dioxide.
In the last 100 years or so, we have doubled the concentration of
carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. Now this is what we call a greenhouse
gas. You see the effects, the greenhouse effects when you go out to
your car in the parking lot in the summer and you open the door and
that blast of heat hits you. What has happened is that the rays of the
sun have come in over a broad spectrum of ways and they have heated up
the interior of your car and that re-radiates in the infrared, and the
glass of your car is relatively impervious to infrared, so it keeps
that heat in there. The same thing happens in our world. The sun shines
down and warms up things down here and they radiate back.
These greenhouse gases act very much in the atmosphere like the glass
in your car or the glass in the greenhouse. It reflects the infrared
back in, so it keeps us warmer. There are a growing number of people
who believe that this increase in carbon dioxide, increasing the
greenhouse gases are producing climate change in our world and
producing a global warming. Of course, enough global warming could
melt, it would take a very long time, couple of hundred years,
probably, but could melt the polar ice caps. That would raise the level
of the oceans about 200 feet. If you look around the world at the
number of people who live in less than 200 feet above sea level, it's a
big, big part of the world's population.
So these people who are concerned about global warming and climate
change, and by the way, I would note that very small differences in
temperature make huge changes in climate. During the last ice age about
10,000 years ago, our Earth was about 5 degrees Centigrade cooler than
it is now. That is about 9 degrees Fahrenheit. That is not a whole lot.
That is about like going from here to Minnesota. But that 9 degrees
Fahrenheit difference in temperature caused the ice age.
So when you're looking at a temperature change and saying I go from
one room in my house to another and there's a bigger change than that
and the sky isn't falling, how come that is a big deal? Just remember
that relatively small temperature changes can make huge climate
changes.
Now, the solution to the problem that the climate change-global
warming people see is exactly the same solution to the problem that the
national security-concerned people see, and that is we have got to move
away from fossil fuels. We have got to move to renewables where we are
recycling the carbon dioxide. You see, if you burn something that grew
this summer, if you burn it this fall, like burning wood from a tree
that may have been growing for 30, 40 years, and taking CO2
out of the air and storing it in the tree, then when you burn the tree,
you put the CO2 back in the air, but that is the same
CO2 the tree had taken out, so it's a balance and the
CO2 doesn't go up.
So what the climate change global-warming people want to do is to
reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and the concomitant release of
carbon dioxide and instead substitute these renewables which simply
recycle the carbon dioxide.
{time} 1645
Now, if you are going nuclear, by the way, it is even better. After
you have paid a carbon cost for building the nuclear power plant, then
there is no carbon dioxide produced for the duration of that nuclear
power plant.
The third group that have common cause, and before I talk about this
group, I want to note that I think that the best interests of mankind,
the best interests of our country, the best interest of Republicans and
Democrats, will be served if we don't criticize each others' premise.
There are those who believe that the global warming thing is just
silly. There are others who believe that the foreign countries that own
all this oil are going to play nice and give us the oil, so why worry
about the national security interests.
But rather than criticizing the premise of these others, why don't we
just lock arms, because what we want to solve the problems, and in just
a moment I am going to talk about the third problem, which I think is
really the big one, is to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and
increase our reliance on alternatives.
The next chart, and I have got to go back 52 years to talk about the
origin of this chart, because this all began 52 years ago. As a matter
of fact, that anniversary will be the day after tomorrow. The 8th day
of March in 1956, a speech was given in San Antonio, Texas, that I
believe within a few years will be recognized as the most important
speech given in all of the last century. That speech was given here in
1956, so we are right here on the chart now.
The United States is king of oil. We are producing more oil, using
more oil, exporting more oil I think than any other country in the
world, and an oil geologist by the name of M. King Hubbert in this very
famous speech in San Antonio, Texas, told a group of oil people that in
14 years, roughly 14 years, it turned out to be 14, you will peak in
oil production, and no matter what you do after that, you will not be
able to produce more oil.
Now, remember, the United States then is king of oil. Oil wells
everywhere, Oklahoma, Texas. A little interesting sidelight here, why
were there so many? That is because, as I understand it, of the law of
capture. If the oil came out of your well, you owned the oil, even
though much of it might have been sucked out of the ground of the
person that owned the land next to you. It was called the law of
capture, I think. So if you wanted to get some of those revenues, you
had to drill your own well. I understand that wells were drilled in
graveyards and through the foyers of churches. If you look at some of
those pictures, it looked like a forest of oil rigs out there, and I
think the reason was this law of capture. But, right on schedule, in
1970 we peaked in oil production. This is a chart of that peak. We
reached a peak here in 1970.
Now, M. King Hubbert had included only the Lower 48 in his
prediction. He had not included Alaska, where we found a lot of oil. He
had not included the Gulf of Mexico, where we found a meaningful amount
of oil. But you notice that the slide down the other side of Hubbert's
Peak just had a little blip from the oil that we found in Alaska and
the Gulf of Mexico.
So, right on schedule M. King Hubbert and his prediction of a
phenomenon which we call today peak oil,
[[Page 3418]]
said that we would reach that maximum in the United States in 1970.
Now, this same forecaster, with the enormous credibility of having been
right on target for the United States, said that the world would be
peaking about now.
The next chart is an interesting one, and if you had only one graph,
one chart you could look at to talk about this, it would be this one,
because this has so much information on it. The little bars here show
the discoveries of oil. You notice that we started discovering it way
back there, some of it in the Depression really, and then after the end
of the Depression just before the war, and then huge discoveries in the
fifties, the sixties and seventies. But ever since then, down, down,
down, down. Kind of a ragged down, because every once in awhile you hit
a pretty big field, and here is the spike here. But on average every
year since the seventies and eighties it has been down, down, down.
The solid black line here represents the oil that we have produced,
which is also the oil we have used, because there is no big store of
oil anywhere. We use it as we produce it. And a really interesting
curve.
Notice the shape of this curve here. If nothing happened to change
that curve, it would have gone off the top of the graph by this time.
Well, something did happen to change the shape of that curve. You
notice that changed in the seventies, and these were the oil price
spike hikes engendered by the Arab oil embargo, and it caused a
worldwide recession. Here is the worldwide recession, and, boy, we woke
up, we and much of the rest of the world, and we found ways to do
things more efficiently. Now we are recovering from that and the
economy is great for most of the world, there is a little tremor now,
but it has been a great economy. But you notice the slope of this curve
after that is very much less than the slope of this curve.
There is an interesting statistic during the Carter years, up to the
Carter years, as a matter of fact, that every decade we use as much oil
as had been used in all of the world in all of previous history. Wow.
What that means is, of course, when you have used half the oil, you
have only one decade left. Well, we have really slowed down now. You
can see the slope of this curve is very much less.
Now, when will the world reach its maximum oil production? See, what
we have been doing since about 1980, we have found less and less oil,
but we have used more and more oil, so this area here, the area above
the oil that we found has been filled in by the oil that we found way
back.
Now, we have got a lot these reserves left, and the makers of this
chart say that this is the average of what we will find in the future.
It won't be smooth, it will be up and down, but that is probably about
the quantity that we will find. But we are using more. And they are
suggesting that we will be peaking about now, as you can see, and that
this area here will have to be filled in by reserves that we found back
here, because we aren't finding any meaningful amount of oil now. So
those who made this chart believe that oil in the world should be
peaking about now.
The next chart shows the estimates of a number of authorities. Some
of them have enormous uncertainty in when they think peak oil might
occur. Here is one that says it could occur anytime between now and
2120, between 2020 and 2120. Here is one that says, gee, it could be
anytime. But a great number of them believe it could be as early as
about now. Here we are at about this point. A great many of them
believe it could be now or shortly after this. So there is general
consensus through most of the authorities in the world that peaking
could be now.
The next chart kind of puts all of this in perspective, and this is
an interesting chart. Let's just refer to the upper part of it. The
lower part of it is a blowup of the upper part separating out gas from
oil.
Hyman Rickover, who gave a great speech the 14th day of May, 1957, so
this will be the 51st anniversary of his speech, noted that we were in
an age of oil. I will have some quotes from his speech in a few
moments. That we were in an age of oil. And he said in 8,000 years of
recorded history we were, when he gave his speech, about 100 years into
the age of oil.
This is a chart that looks not back through 8,000 years. But if we
went back that far, the amount of energy used by mankind would be down
here so near zero you could hardly see the difference. We go here about
400 years and the industrial revolution began with wood. And then we
found coal, and, boy, it jumped up. And then we found gas and oil, and,
wow, the quality of the energy, the extractability, how easy it was to
get, how easy it was to use. And look what happened to energy use. It
just spiked. Here we see that same discontinuity in the seventies, the
worldwide recession, the oil price spike hikes.
Now, let's look at the next curve here, because this shows exactly
the same curve. What we have done here is to expand the abscissa, that
is this bottom, and compressed the ordinate, so now it is a low, smooth
curve. If you pull this in and push that up, you can make the sharp
curve that we saw over there. We had only gone this far over there. Now
we really dip down the other side.
But I want to focus here on the yellow area of this chart. If we in
fact are peaking in oil production, and if the world follows the
pattern that we have been following in the United States, then the
production of oil will look, it has looked up until now about like
this, and in the future it will slide down the other side of Hubbert's
Peak.
Today in the United States we produce half the oil that we produced
in 1970, in spite of finding a lot of oil in Alaska and a fair amount
of oil in the Gulf of Mexico, and in spite of drilling more oil wells
than all of the rest of the world put together. So we are about at this
point, I believe, and the demand is about 2 percent.
Now, 2 percent doesn't seem like much, does it? As a matter of fact,
our stock market doesn't like 2 percent growth. It thinks that is
anemic and it is likely not to do well. But 2 percent growth doubles in
35 years, and here we are talking about long time periods. It doubles
in 35 years, it is four times bigger in 70 years, it is eight times
bigger in 105 years, and it is 16 times bigger in 140 years.
This phenomenon of exponential growth caused Albert Einstein to
respond to a question, gee, Dr. Einstein, what will be the next big
energy force in the world? And he said the most powerful force in the
world is the power of compound interest. The next, of course, after
nuclear energy.
So, with this 2 percent growth, and I would submit that it is going
to be hard to hold growth to 2 percent, because we have India and China
coming on board. I was in Beijing about a year or so ago and they had
banned bicycles in parts of Beijing because they were getting in the
way of cars. With the demand of oil in India and China, I think it will
be hard to hold it to 2 percent growth. But this is 2 percent growth,
and it doubles in 35 years. So this period is 35 years.
Many people looking at the problem we face with peak oil say, gee,
let's fill the peak. I think it is manifestly impossible to fill the
peak, and I don't think we need to fill the peak. I would be happy if
we were reasonably sure that we could just fill the area below this
peak so we would have a plateau out here. I am not sure that the world
will be able to do that. Neither am I sure that we have to do that to
live well, actually.
The next quote is a quote from this really great speech given by
Hyman Rickover. If M. King Hubbert's speech was the most important
speech of the last century, and I think that it may have been, then I
think maybe the most insightful speech of the last century was that
speech given 51 years ago the 14th day of this May.
I came to this floor on the 50th anniversary of that, and Hyman
Rickover's widow sat in the gallery there when I read largely from the
really, really insightful prophetic speech that he gave.
These are some of the quotes. ``I suggest that this is a good time to
think soberly about our responsibilities to
[[Page 3419]]
our descendants.'' I do a lot of that. I have 10 kids, I have 16
grandkids, and I have two great grandkids, so I think a lot about my
descendants. ``Those who will ring out the fossil fuel age.''
Wow. I was thinking of this statement when I led a CODEL to China the
last holiday, not this Christmas and New Year's, but the one before
that, and we went there to talk about, the nine of us, went to talk to
the Chinese about energy. And it was really interesting.
They began their discussion of energy by talking about post-oil. Wow.
As Hyman Rickover said, there will be a post-oil, because if there is a
fossil fuel age, the age of oil, then there will be some time after the
age of oil. We in this country think in terms of the next quarterly
report and how am I going to get myself elected the next time, and it
is really interesting that people in that part of the world tend to
think more in terms of generations and centuries. But the Chinese
recognize that there will be an age of oil.
``Those who will ring out the fossil fuel age, we might give a break
to these youngsters by cutting fuel and metal consumption so as to
provide a safer margin for the necessary adjustments which eventually
must be made in a world without fossil fuels. There will one day be a
world without fossil fuels.''
I think that has to be obvious. If you look at the world, the whole
thing is not oil, and, even if it was, it wouldn't last for oil. But it
is certainly not. So there will be one day be a world without oil, and
Hyman Rickover was suggesting 51 years ago was a good time to start
thinking about how we make that transition.
The next chart shows a reality that I don't know how many have
thought about. This is a chart which shows on the abscissa the amount
of energy you use, and on the right over here it shows how happy you
are with your station in life.
{time} 1700
Now, we use more energy than anybody else, and so there we are, the
furthest one over here to the right, but we are not the happiest Nation
in the world. There are 24 countries, everybody above this line, feels
better, not just as good, better, about their quality of life than we
feel about our quality of life, and some of them use only about half as
much oil as we use. And when I look at the future and the huge
challenges that we have from the future, I note that we have a lot of
opportunity to live more efficiently and to live, not just as happily,
but to live more happily, because there are 24 countries that use less
oil than we, some only half the oil that we use, who feel better about
their quality of life than we feel about ours.
Now, this third group that has common cause with the first two, the
first two being those who are concerned about our national security, we
get far too much of our oil from over there and, as the President
appropriately said, from people who don't even like us. The second
group is concerned about global warming and releasing all of this
sequestered CO2 from these fossil fuels and dumping it into
the atmosphere and producing these greenhouse gases that reflect back
the infrared radiation to the Earth and warm up the Earth.
By the way, I lived in Siberia. You might have a hard time convincing
me that a warmer Earth would be all that bad. And I would note that, if
they played nice over there, these guys who have all the oil, that may
not be a problem, so the national security thing may not be a problem.
I would submit that the Earth has been very much warmer in the past.
That is the only way we could have had subtropical seas in the north
slope and the North Sea and ANWR and so forth. A warmer Earth will be
very different, better for some people, worse for others, and I don't
think it is a risk worth taking. But many will argue that, gee, the sky
may not fall if the Earth gets warmer.
But I will tell you that this third group of people, the people who
are concerned about peak oil, there is no way that we are going to get
through that without a very bumpy ride unless we aggressively pursue
this challenge.
Now, I am excited about this. My wife tells me that I really
shouldn't be talking about this because people in ancient Greece killed
the messenger that brought bad news, and I need to get myself reelected
and I shouldn't be talking about this. I tell her, this is a good news
story. The good news is that if we start today to meet this challenge,
the ride will be less bumpy than if we start tomorrow.
But the really good news part of this is that there is no
exhilaration like the exhilaration of meeting and overcoming a big
challenge. And, boy, this is a big challenge.
Many of the problems we have with our unemployed and our kids and so
forth in this country are because time weighs heavily on their hands,
and they end up doing sometimes hurtful things to themselves and
society. I lived through World War II, the last war, by the way, in
which everybody was involved. It was the last war in which our country
was at war. Now, our military has been at war since then and our
military families have been at war since then. But, boy, World War II,
our country was at war. Everybody knew we were at war. Not a single
automobile was made for public consumption in 1943, 1944, and 1945. You
had to have a ration coupon to buy gas. If you convinced them you were
a good churchgoer, they would give you enough to go to church;
otherwise, you stayed home or walked to church. You had to get a coupon
to get sugar to do your canning with. There was a real scarcity of
automobile tires. We saved our household grease and took it to a
central repository. We had daylight savings time, that comes this
weekend, and we had daylight savings time because then we had an extra
hour to spend in our victory gardens. And there was no law from
Congress that said you had to have a victory garden, but, boy,
everybody who could, talk to your grandparents, they probably dug up
their backyard and they put a garden there. I saw pictures of vacant
lots in New York City where they took all the rubble and piled it up in
rows and planted gardens between them. Everybody was involved in that
war.
And I will tell you, if we are going to get through this, this is a
huge challenge, it will require the best of us. But we are the most
creative, innovative society in the world. And, with leadership, which
is I think fairly conspicuously absent today, I think that we can rally
to this cause.
What we need to get through this is the total commitment we had in
World War II. We need to have the technology focus of when we put a man
on the Moon and we need to have the urgency of the Manhattan Project.
By the way, that technology focus would do other really nice things
for us. I talk to a lot of businesses that cannot find enough
technically trained people. Our young people today just aren't turned
on to training in science, math, and engineering. Many of them are
becoming lawyers and political scientists. I think we have quite enough
of both of those, thank you.
I remember during the less than a decade, our President challenged us
to do it in a decade and we did it in less than a decade, putting a man
on the Moon. And I remember how turned on, it captured the imagination
of the American people and inspired our young people to go into careers
of math, science, and engineering. I remember a cartoon of a little
redheaded, freckle-faced buck-toothed young fellow who said, ``Six
months ago, I couldn't even spell `engineer' and now I are one.''
Everybody wanted to be involved in this. And we need to have the
technology focus that we had then, and what that will do is inspire
more of our bright young people. We have really bright young people,
and they need to be going into pursuits that will really be productive
like science, math, and engineering. If we inspire them to go into
those positions, we might once again become a manufacturing exporting
Nation.
By the way, the technologies that we will need to develop to exploit
these renewables, I think we could become the center for that in the
world and, once again, could become a major exporting Nation.
[[Page 3420]]
Again, I say, we are the most creative, innovative society in the
world. Somehow, somehow, the genius of our Founding Fathers and the
Constitution they gave us, which really, really respects the rights of
the individual, created a milieu, a climate in which creativity and
entrepreneurship would flourish, and it is still flourishing. Just look
at our small businesses, that they are responsible for bringing us out
of recession. So I am really enthusiastic about this.
Everybody needs to be committed. We need to have the technology focus
of putting a man on the Moon. And this is urgent. Just in the last few
days, I have three things in front of me here where others are
recognizing that this is urgent. There is a 2-day summit with our
National Academy of Sciences, and they are looking at America's energy
future. It is about time. They are going to be looking at America's
energy future.
We have a huge challenge. We use one-fourth of the world's oil, we
have 2 percent of the world's oil, and the President very correctly
said that we are hooked on oil. And, like the cocaine addict who is
hooked on his drug, he has just got to have another fix, and so now
there is a clamor to go out and drill for that oil up in ANWR and drill
for that oil offshore.
I haven't voted for those. I have 10 kids, 16 grandkids, and two
great grandkids. We are leaving them a horrendous debt, not with my
votes, but a horrendous debt. And I just ask, wouldn't it be nice if we
could leave them a little energy?
I was asked to vote to drill in ANWR, and my question was: If you
could drill and pump ANWR tomorrow, what will you do the day after
tomorrow? And for my kids and grandkids and great-grandkids, there is
going to be a day after tomorrow.
Now, I will vote to drill in ANWR and offshore when a commitment is
made that all of the energy that we get from those fields will be
invested in alternatives. You see, today we have a situation where we
have run out of time and there is no surplus energy. If there was
surplus energy, oil wouldn't be $105 a barrel this morning.
When I say we have run out of time, I am really very critical of what
we, the world, has done in the last 28 years. I say 28 years because
that takes us back to 1980. And, by 1980, it was absolutely certain
that M. King Hubbard was right about the United States. We peaked in
1970. By 1980, we are sliding down the other side of what is called
Hubbard's Peak. So we knew he was right about the United States. Now, I
believe it was in 1979, just a year before, that he predicted the world
would be peaking about now.
And I ask you, if M. King Hubbard was so right about the United
States, shouldn't there have been some concern that maybe, just maybe,
he might be right about the world? And wouldn't it have been
appropriate to look at that possibility and put some programs in place
that would address that potential eventuality?
You know, it is very difficult to look back on what we have done
without using a couple of not very complimentary analogies. When we
first found that incredible wealth under the ground, and, boy, that was
incredible wealth. One barrel of oil, and we use about 22 million
barrels a day in our country, by the way. One barrel of oil has the
work output of 12 people working all year, 25,000 man hours of work.
When I first saw that number, I thought that can't be true; 12 people
working all year, one barrel of oil has that much energy in it? And
then I thought about that one gallon of gasoline, still cheaper than
water in the grocery store if you are buying it in little bottles, how
far that takes my Prius. Our Prius now is 47 miles per gallon averaging
over the last maybe 20,000 miles. Now, I could pull my Prius 47 miles.
That is almost all the way from here to my home in Frederick. That
would take me a long while. I would have to get come-alongs and hook to
the guardrail and so forth to pull the car. I could do it. And so I
finally said, gee, that is probably right. Every barrel of oil has the
energy equivalent of 25,000 man hours of work, 12 people working all
year for you.
As a matter of fact, I saw a statistic recently that was really
interesting. If there was no gas, oil, or coal, no nuclear, no sun, no
hydro, if the only power available was the power of human activity to
enjoy the quality of life that each of us enjoys, there would have to
be 300 people out there working. That is the amount of energy from
fossil fuels that each one of us consumes. We live as well as if there
were 300 people out there working to support our quality of life. No
wonder Hyman Rickover referred to this as a golden age.
The next chart kind of shows where we are and where we are going. All
three of these groups want to move away from fossil fuels to
alternatives, of course for very different reasons and, again, I stop
criticizing each other's premise, because what we want to do to solve
the problem as we see it is exactly the same thing: Move away from
fossil fuels to renewables. How are we going to do that?
Now, there are some finite resources that are really quite
unconventional, and we are exploiting some of them now. From the tar
sands in Canada, we are getting about 1 million barrels of oil a day.
That is with heroic efforts. They are using local gas which is
stranded, which means that it is far away from any population and,
therefore, it is cheap and so you can use it for something like this.
They have a huge tailings pond which is full of all sorts of noxious
chemicals. And the vein, if you are thinking of it as the vein, is on
top and it will soon have to duck under an overlay so they have to
exploit it in situ, and they don't know how to do that yet. They have a
shovel, which lifts 100 tons at a time. They dump it in a truck, which
hauls 400 tons. They haul it to a cooker, which cooks it until it
loosens up its stiff oil and it flows, and they add some chemicals to
it to keep it flowing when it cools down. They are getting about 1
million barrels a day, and that is 1 million out of 88 million that the
world is producing. So a bit more than 1 percent, but it is not
sustainable and they know it is not. They are going to need more oil,
they are going to run out of water by and by.
But if they could continue this exploitation, there is more potential
oil in the tar sands of Canada than there is in all of the huge oil
reserves that we showed on that map of the world that we showed
earlier. So there is a huge potential there.
{time} 1715
But remember, in any one of these things, you need to look at energy-
profit ratio, how much energy you need to put in to get out a unit of
energy. And if you are putting in more energy than you get out,
obviously you are not going to do that, and you are going to move on to
some other source.
The oil shales in our western United States, they have reserves at
least as large and maybe some larger, some believe, up in the trillions
of barrels of oil.
By the way, and we will come to the number later, but the world had
about we believe 2 trillion barrels of recoverable oil. We have
recovered about 1 trillion of those barrels. Most authorities believe
there is another trillion to be recovered. Some believe we can find
more and get more out of the present reservoirs.
But in spite of the brightest people in the world, the most
aggressive economy in the world, we have not been able to reverse our
slide down the other side of Hubbert's Peak. So when you are listening
to people speaking about a rosy future with abundant oil, remember that
the United States with all of our superiority has not been able to
reverse our slide down the other side of Hubbert's Peak.
There are a number of organizations looking at exploiting that. It is
called ``the rocks that burn'' by the Indians. When you heat it up, it
becomes oil. It is not exactly oil in the form that it is found. Can we
develop that, how quickly, how much will we get from it, we will
certainly get something from it by and by, but remember this energy-
profit ratio.
Coal. We have a lot of coal. Not as much as we thought we had. The
National Academy of Sciences took a new
[[Page 3421]]
look at that, and they said that the conventional wisdom that there was
250 years out there at current use rates, and be very careful when
someone mentions current use rates when making projections for the
future because, with growth, that time duration really shrinks.
The National Academy of Sciences now says we have something like 100
years of coal at current use rates. I have a chart that shows what that
really means in terms of energy that is available to us.
Then we have nuclear. We have three different potential sources of
nuclear energy. The one that the world is using for producing energy is
fusion, light water reactor plants. France gets about 75 to 80 percent
of their electricity from fusion. We get about 20 percent. We are much
bigger than France and so we produce more electric power than France
produces, but not so high a percentage of what we use.
Fissile uranium is a finite resource. The world will one day run out.
I have no idea when that will be because I get wildly divergent
estimates when I ask people how long will it last: 10 years, 30 years,
100 years. We need an honest broker. It is hard to have a discussion
when there isn't agreement on the facts. I would like to commission the
National Academy of Sciences to help us decide on what the reserves are
and what the resources are so we can have a productive dialogue. But
even when we run out of fissile uranium, we still can get nuclear power
from what we call breeder reactors.
They have problems, and you are producing stuff that is potentially
weapons grade and you are hauling it around for enrichment, and there
are opportunities for terrorists. Then there is an end product that you
need to store away for a quarter of a million years. I understand there
are potential breakthroughs there where we can burn more of this fuel,
and we end up with a waste product which is much less radioactive with
a shorter half-life. So the storage problems are going to be reduced.
There is lot of new technology in the nuclear area, and I will tell you
that some who have been stout opponents of nuclear, when they are
considering a likely alternative in an energy-deficient world of
shivering in the dark, nuclear is looking better to them.
Nuclear fusion. That is the only energy source out there that is a
silver bullet. If we find that, we are home free. By the way, we have a
great fusion reactor. It is called the Sun. And the Sun is the source
of almost all the energy we use. It was the shining of the Sun a long
while ago that produced the plants that produced the gas, oil, and
coal. It is the shining of the Sun that produces the differential
temperatures and makes the winds blow. It is the sunshine that lifts
the water from the ocean and the plains and drops it on the mountains
and it flows down through the dams to produce hydropower. There are
only a few sources of power that don't come from the Sun: nuclear, a
trifling amount of chemical, and the tides don't come from the Sun.
By the way, there is a huge potential amount of energy in the oceans,
but it is so disbursed that it is just hard to collar it. There is an
old axiom that says that energy or power to be effective must be
concentrated. Look at the tides. The Moon lifts the oceans 2 or 3 feet.
I carry two 5-gallon buckets of water, and that is heavy. How much
energy would it take to lift the whole ocean, 75 percent of the world's
surface, 2 or 3 feet? But the problem is harnessing that energy.
But there are other potential ocean energy sources, like the ocean
thermal gradients. In the tropics, it is very warm on the surface and
very cold on the bottom. And there are several technologies for getting
energy from that temperature difference.
Then we get to the true renewables. By the way, there are many people
who don't really think it is necessary to talk about this because they
are market enthusiasts, and they will tell you that the market will
solve this problem. The market will solve this problem. You may not
like the way that the market will solve this problem because the price
of oil, unless we do something and move aggressively towards
alternatives, may go really high. I hear people telling me gas may go
to $20 or $25 a gallon in an energy-deficient world. So the market will
solve the problem, but you may not like the way the market solves the
problem.
There are two problems. One is that the resources are not infinite
and they are not available in the time in which the market would like
to have them. The second problem is that the market signals are not
timely enough.
One of the big studies done, our government, your government, has
paid for four studies. They are ignoring all of them. The first one,
the Hirsch Report, said that the world has never faced a problem like
this, and challenges us to plan for this a couple of decades ahead
because they said if you haven't started to plan for this two decades
ahead, there will be some economic consequences. If it is only a decade
ahead, there will be big economic problems. And if you wait until it is
upon you, and apparently it is, they said the world has never faced a
problem like this. There is no precedent in history.
The next chart shows those things in an interesting form. I would
like to use analogy for this chart, and that is, the young couple whose
grandparents have left them a big inheritance and they have a lavish
lifestyle where 85 percent of the money they spend comes from their
grandparents' inheritance and 15 percent is from their income. They
look at the inheritance and it is going to run out a long time before
they retire at the rate they are spending it. So they have to either
make more or spend less.
Here we are: 85 percent of all of our energy comes from coal, gas,
and petroleum, the oil. So 15 percent is left. A bit more than half of
that is nuclear electric power, and the rest is renewables. Now, some
people have it 86-14, but it is roughly 85-15. Notice the breakout here
of the renewables. In 2000, solar was 0.07 percent. So maybe it is 10
times bigger. That is still a tiny, tiny amount.
Wood. That is the timber industry and the paper industry wisely
burning what would otherwise be a waste product, filling up landfills.
Waste energy. That is a great idea, a whole lot better than putting
it in a landfill. We ought to recycle what we can productively recycle
and then burn the rest of it. And there is a great facility in
Montgomery County, and it is really a class facility. I wouldn't mind
having it next to my church. It is a great-looking building. You don't
see or smell the trash, and it is producing electricity. But that is
not a solution to our energy problem because most of the trash that
they are burning is the consequence of profligate use of fossil fuel
energy. And in a fossil fuel-deficient world, that trash stream is
going to be very much less. So for the moment that is a good idea, but
it is not a solution to our problem.
Wind. Wind is the most rapidly growing alternative today. The leading
country in that is Denmark. They produce electricity at a cent and a
half a kilowatt hour. We can do it here for 2.5 or so cents a kilowatt
hour.
Conventional hydro. We are tapped out on that, probably. Some believe
we can get as much hydro from what is called microhydro. It is much
less environmentally threatening, small devices in streams to produce
electricity.
Alcohol fuel. I have just a moment to spend on that. The National
Academy of Sciences says that if we turn all of our corn into ethanol,
all of it, and discount it for fossil fuel input, that it would
displace 2.4 percent of our gasoline. This is not Roscoe Bartlett
saying that; this is the National Academy of Sciences. They noted if
you tuned up your car and put air in the tires, you could save as much
energy as you would get from all of our corn converted to ethanol. We
haven't converted it all, but the amount that we have converted has
doubled the price of corn. And our farmers diverted land from wheat and
soybeans to corn, and there was an increased demand for wheat and
soybeans, so now the price of all three, for these major foods, for
poor people around the world is up.
In fact, a member of the United Nations said what we had innocently
[[Page 3422]]
done, inadvertently done, unintended consequences, was a crime against
humanity because now three of the basic four foodstuffs in the world,
rice, corn, wheat and soybeans, have increased in price because we had
this government-subsidized corn ethanol program.
We will get something from biomass, from cellulosic ethanol,
something from corn. But Hyman Rickover cautioned wisely in his speech
51 years ago, you should be careful eating your food. He also said you
should be careful you don't burn up the fertility of your soil by
removing the organic material which produces what we call tilth, which
is what makes the difference between topsoil and subsoil. It holds
nutrients and water. We will get something from these. I think now
there is an irrational exuberance, as was said about the market a few
years ago. We will get something, but it is not a silver bullet. It
will not be a huge amount. And we use so much oil, it will barely make
a dent in it.
Geothermal. That is true geothermal, tapping the molten core of the
Earth. That is one source of energy that didn't come from the Sun. We
need to exploit that more. That is not tying your air conditioner, your
heat pump to ground temperature, which is a great idea. In the
summertime to cool your house, you are trying to heat up that 100-
degree air outside. It is easier to heat up the ground at 56 degrees.
In the winter, you are doing the opposite.
The next chart looks at coal. This assumes 250 years. If you grow
only 2 percent, and I think we will need to dip into our coal more than
2 percent, if we have less and less oil, it shrinks to 85 years. If you
use some of the energy from the coal to produce a gas or a liquid, and
it is not fair to make the comparison if you don't, then it shrinks to
50 years.
Now another interesting phenomenon here, which is unavoidable, we are
going to have to share that with the world because if we use the oil
that we produce from coal, then the oil we might have used someone else
will use. So in effect you are sharing it with the world. So now 12
divided by 4, we use a fourth of the oil, is 12.5 years. It is even
less if it is only 100 years, maybe 6 years or so.
The next chart is a great example of efficiency. This shows producing
light from the incandescent bulb, the fluorescent, and the light-
emitting diode. The green on the top is the light. It is the same in
all of these. The blue is the energy. And notice that the incandescent
bulb is a better heater than light source. I brood my chickens with
that.
Notice the light-emitting diode. If you have an LED flashlight, you
will forget when you put batteries in it, and we need to move to these
kinds of technologies.
I have one final chart to end this discussion with. There are two
major entities in the world that follow the production and consumption
of oil, and they make assumptions about the future. I wouldn't pay much
attention to their assumptions about the future because they have been
consistently wrong, but they are very good at charting what we have
used.
This is the EIA, the Energy Information Administration, a part of our
Department of Energy; and it is the IEA, the International Energy
Association, this is a part of the United Nations. This is a group that
has been following what has been going on in Iran. Both of them have
been tracking what we have been using in oil, and these are their
lives.
{time} 1730
And these are their lines. And notice, for about the last 3 years, 30
months or more, they're essentially flat. And during that time, that's
just about the time that I have been coming here to the floor. It'll be
3 years the 14th day of March that I made my first speech on the floor
here relative to this subject. And during that time, oil has doubled in
price. Here we are at about $50 a barrel. And there we are up there at,
well, off the chart now, above $100 a barrel.
In the few moments remaining to us, I'd like to look at a couple of
charts. This is a very recent statement, January 22, by the CEO of
Shell Oil. By the year 2100, the world's energy system will be
radically different from today. Boy, will it. The world's current
predicament limits our maneuvering room. We are experiencing a step
change in the growth of energy demand. And Shell estimates that after
2015, supplies of easy to access oil and gas will no longer keep up
with demand. He's saying it's going to peak about then.
Mr. Speaker, I would like to close by saying again that this is an
enormously invigorating challenge. America's up to this challenge. What
we need is the leadership necessary to make this happen.
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