Horace Heffner wrote on 7-9-08: Good news that oil folks are getting on the band wagon ...
---------------- http://www.pickensplan.com/theplan/ ``The T. Boone Pickens Plan America is addicted to foreign oil. It's an addiction that threatens our economy, our environment and our national security. It touches every part of our daily lives and ties our hands as a nation and a people. The addiction has worsened for decades and now it's reached a point of crisis. In 1970, we imported 24% of our oil. Today it's nearly 70% and growing. As imports grow and world prices rise, the amount of money we send to foreign nations every year is soaring. At current oil prices, we will send $700 billion dollars out of the country this year alone - that's four times the annual cost of the Iraq war. Projected over the next 10 years the cost will be $10 trillion; it will be the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of mankind. America uses a lot of oil. Every day 85 million barrels of oil are produced around the world. And 21 million of those are used here in the United States. That's 25% of the world's oil demand. Used by just 4% of the world's population ... What's the good news? The United States is the Saudi Arabia of wind power. Studies from around the world show that the Great Plains states are home to the greatest wind energy potential in the world by far. The Department of Energy reports that 20% of America's electricity can come from wind. North Dakota alone has the potential to provide power for more than a quarter of the country. Today's wind turbines stand up to 410 feet tall, with blades that stretch 148 feet in length. The blades collect the wind's kinetic energy. In one year, a 3-megawatt wind turbine produces as much energy as 12,000 barrels of imported oil. Wind power currently accounts for 48 billion kWh of electricity a year in the United States — enough to serve more than 4.5 million households. That is still only about 1% of current demand, but the potential of wind is much greater. A 2005 Stanford University study found that there is enough wind power worldwide to satisfy global demand 7 times over — even if only 20% of wind power could be captured. Building wind facilities in the corridor that stretches from the Texas panhandle to North Dakota could produce 20% of the electricity for the United States at a cost of $1 trillion. It would take another $200 billion to build the capacity to transmit that energy to cities and towns. That's a lot of money, but it's a one-time cost. And compared to the $700 billion we spend on foreign oil every year, it's a bargain. An economic revival for rural America. Developing wind power is an investment in rural America. To witness the economic promise of wind energy, look no further than Sweetwater, Texas. Sweetwater was typical of many small towns in middle-America. With a shortage of good jobs, the youth of Sweetwater were leaving in search of greater opportunities. And the town's population dropped from 12,000 to under 10,000. When a large wind power facility was built outside of town, Sweetwater experienced a revival. New economic opportunity brought the town back to life and the population has grown back up to 12,000. In the Texas panhandle, just north of Sweetwater, is the town of Pampa, where T. Boone Pickens' Mesa Power is currently building the largest wind farm in the world. At 4,000 megawatts -- the equivalent combined output of four large coal-fire plants -- the production of the completed Pampa facility will double the wind energy output of the United States. In addition to creating new construction and maintenance jobs, thousands of Americans will be employed to manufacture the turbines and blades. These are high skill jobs that pay on a scale comparable to aerospace jobs. Plus, wind turbines don't interfere with farming and grazing, so they don't threaten food production or existing local economies. A cheap new replacement for foreign oil. The Honda Civic GX Natural Gas Vehicle is the cleanest internal-combustion vehicle in the world according to the EPA. Natural gas and bio-fuels are the only domestic energy sources used for transportation. Natural gas is the cleanest transportation fuel available today. According to the California Energy Commission, critical greenhouse gas emissions from natural gas are 23% lower than diesel and 30% lower than gasoline. Natural gas vehicles (NGV) are already available and combine top performance with low emissions. The natural gas Honda Civic GX is rated as the cleanest production vehicle in the world. According to NGVAmerica, there are more than 7 million NGVs in use worldwide, but only 150,000 of those are in the United States. The EPA estimates that vehicles on the road account for 60% of carbon monoxide pollution and around one-third of hydrocarbon and nitrogen oxide emissions in the United States. As federal and state emissions laws become more stringent, many requirements will be unattainable with conventionally fueled vehicles. Since natural gas is significantly cleaner than petroleum, NGVs are increasing in popularity. The Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach recently announced that 16,800 old diesel trucks will be replaced, and half of the new vehicles will run on alternatives such as natural gas. Natural gas is significantly less expensive than gasoline or diesel. In places like Utah and Oklahoma, prices are less than $1 a gallon. To see fueling stations and costs in your area, check out cngprices.com. Natural gas is our country's second largest energy resource and a vital component of our energy supply. 98% of the natural gas used in the United States is from North America. But 70% of our oil is purchased from foreign nations. Natural gas is one of the cleanest, safest and most useful forms of energy — residentially, commercially and industrially. The natural gas industry has existed in the United States for over 100 years and continues to grow. Domestic natural gas reserves are twice that of petroleum. And new discoveries of natural gas and ongoing development of renewable biogas are continually adding to existing reserves. While it is a cheap, effective and versatile fuel, less than 1% of natural gas is currently used for transportation. The Mechanics We currently use natural gas to produce 22% of our electricity. Harnessing the power of wind to generate electricity will give us the flexibility to shift natural gas away from electricity generation and put it to use as a transportation fuel — reducing our dependence on foreign oil by more than one-third. How do we get it done? The Pickens Plan is a bridge to the future -- a blueprint to reduce foreign oil dependence by harnessing domestic energy alternatives, and buy us time to develop even greater new technologies. Building new wind generation facilities and better utilizing our natural gas resources can replace more than one-third of our foreign oil imports in 10 years. But it will take leadership ...'' ----------------- Hi All, Despite its obvious (at least to me) insanity, the proposal to drill oil wells in ANWR and off the coasts of California and Florida seems to be riding high on a tsunami of gullibility. I think the moral of the Appointmnet in Samarra is not that one cannot escape Death, but that we can choose where to die. And thus it is important where we fight the Kondratieff Peak War of 2020 -- will we send young Americans to Central Asia to die for oil in the Kazakh War of 2020? Continuing to use petroleum is probably the most serious threat ever to American national security. So Hooray for T. Boone Pickens. If the Straits of Hormuz are closed, rock oil could be $300/barrell by Christmas 2008. Otherwise it is likely that oil will be $40/barrell by the end of the year -- just like the Tulip Bubble, the bursting of the Oil Bubble will be spectacular. But then what happens to Alternative Energy?, the 1970's all over again? Are we condemmed to an insane lemming march through history? Jack Smith ------------------- http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/environment/july-dec08/energytech_07-07.html TRANSCRIPT from The News Hour, 7-7-08 ``High Oil Costs May Advance Conservation Research Car owners have been wincing in recent months as the price of oil has shot up well over the once-unimaginable $100-per-barrel mark. But an economist at Carnegie Mellon University believes that skyrocketing oil prices are a good thing, and will lead to necessary innovations in conservation and green technologies. PAUL SOLMAN, NewsHour economics correspondent: Late 2004, at conservation conscious Carnegie Mellon University [CMU], where they looked at the giddy-high oil price of $40 a barrel as a positive. DEBORAH LANGE, engineer: ... because that's the catalyst that you need for us to put more investment into environmentally friendly solutions. PAUL SOLMAN: At CMU, they were already fielding a fleet of electric and natural gas vehicles, campus power provided by windmills, [and a] green roof on a classroom building ... LESTER LAVE: When we talked three years ago, people thought they could go about their lives the way it is. When oil hits $115 a barrel and natural gas is going up very fast, then everybody understands that we're going to need to do something. Cost of living, fueled by oil PAUL SOLMAN: "Something," like conservation, now the norm in other countries. At today's price of a barrel, even higher than the $115 of just a few weeks ago, it's a bonanza elsewhere in the world. LESTER LAVE: Denmark has half the energy consumption per capita and per dollar of GDP that we do. But if you've been to Copenhagen, you see that the Danes live pretty well. And so, if we were to adopt the efficiencies of Northern Europe and the lifestyles of Northern Europe, we could cut our energy use in half. So think about that: We could cut our energy use in half. That's our greenhouse gases; that's our oil imports; that's our use of coal. And it seems to me that's a worthy goal to strive for. PAUL SOLMAN: Back in 2004, we also visited architect Volker Hartkopf and his energy-saving Intelligent Workplace, a penthouse addition to an existing campus building. VOLKER HARTKOPF, architect: We have a very efficient building, you see. PAUL SOLMAN: Hartkopf had been cobbling together off-the-shelf technology, like glass shelves outside and W-shaped blinds inside, to conserve both light and heat. VOLKER HARTKOPF: This is a dynamic facade which now allows me in the summertime to reduce my heat gain and gives me good day-lighting control during the swing periods, as well as, of course, in the wintertime. PAUL SOLMAN: Look, he pointed out, two-thirds of all our energy goes to light and ventilate buildings. Worse still, 95 percent of the energy in the original fuel is lost along the way: burning it, transmitting it, using it inefficiently. Hartkopf's goal back then was the building as power plant, a structure that actually produces more energy that it consumes. We left him, something of a Don Quixote on wheels. Today, he may still look quixotic, but he sounds as down-to-earth as, well, Sancho Panza with a German accent. VOLKER HARTKOPF: You know, we have very simple rules. First, you conserve. You don't run a half-loaded dishwasher, for instance, or you don't let your heat get out of the wall, if you can insulate it, right? Second, you then add to that a passive system that gives you more sunlight when you need it and less sunlight when you don't want it because of overheating, shading, light redirection, simple things we talked about last time, right? Building as power plant PAUL SOLMAN: Right. And now it's worth three times as much to us to listen. And not just us. The U.N. has since made Hartkopf the first chairman of its new think-tank on sustainable building. He's put up government buildings in China. Al Gore has come calling. And today, Hartkopf is more excited than ever about a new solar experiment, a parabolic mirror solar reflector that focuses sunlight to heat liquid running inside a glass pipe. VOLKER HARTKOPF: Inside the glass is a vacuum, and inside the vacuum is another pipe, which is highly absorbent. And through that highly absorbent pipe runs liquid. That liquid gets heated up to 180 degrees centigrade. PAUL SOLMAN: By? Because the sun... VOLKER HARTKOPF: By the sunlight. PAUL SOLMAN: ... is bouncing off this parabolic mirror. VOLKER HARTKOPF: Right, and focuses on this pipe. PAUL SOLMAN: Something called an absorption chiller then converts the hot liquid into cold air for air conditioning, most needed when the sun is strongest. So there's a mechanical... VOLKER HARTKOPF: Chemical, mechanical process. PAUL SOLMAN: OK. VOLKER HARTKOPF: Simple. And it has another major benefit. It actually does not pollute the environment, because there is no refrigerant that is dangerous that could be released by the equipment and do an ozone depletion or some other environmental damage. PAUL SOLMAN: Nothing wasted, energy gained. In fact, because of technology like this, the Intelligent Workplace consumes only one-tenth the energy it did just two years ago. As energy generation moves from fossil fuels to alternatives, the efficiencies will be even greater. VOLKER HARTKOPF: And now you begin to export energy from your building, so every building becomes a power plant. Innovation, child of high oil price PAUL SOLMAN: No pipe dream, Hartkopf insists, as long as the price of fossil fuels stays up. Right now, OPEC -- and especially Saudi Arabia -- are playing along. But what if the price begins to droop? What if speculators then sour on oil as quickly as they became sweet on it? What if the price drops by two-thirds, as it did after it last peaked and conservation was last big news in the 1970s? ... PAUL SOLMAN: Will promising projects peter out, as so many did back then? LESTER LAVE: If you go back, the price of oil was down to $10 a barrel in 1998, so less than 10 years ago it was that low. So the price of oil has been cycling up and down. PAUL SOLMAN: A low price would, of course, be good news for motorists, truckers, those who heat their homes with oil. But Lave thinks even a small price drop, like the gas tax holiday now being proposed in Washington and around the country, would send a dangerous signal. LESTER LAVE: We ought to use more gasoline. We ought to import more oil. We ought to send more dollars to the Middle East. I think that's crazy. PAUL SOLMAN: Lave is among the growing number of economists calling for a floor to the price of oil, beneath which it could not fall. And how would it work? LESTER LAVE: Well, one of the things that you could do is you could just have a tax on imported oil, so that, whenever imported oil fell below a level, then this tax would kick in, so that, for example, if the oil ever did fall to $10 a barrel, then you could have a tax which would bring it up to, say, $50 a barrel. A price floor could protect change PAUL SOLMAN: This idea has been around since the '70s. We heard it not long ago from biofuels venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, inspired in part by an ominous encounter he had at an energy conference years back. VINOD KHOSLA, co-founder, Sun Microsystems: I was recently at a conference where one of the senior executives of a major national oil company from Saudi Arabia, Aramco, came up to me and said, "Be careful." It was almost a warning. He said, "Be careful, because if biofuels are successful, we will drop the price of oil." PAUL SOLMAN: At the time we interviewed Khosla -- March 2006 -- oil was approaching $70 a barrel. He proposed a tax to kick in if oil fell below $40. Today those numbers seem ridiculously cheap, a price floor even at $70 politically feasible as never before. LESTER LAVE: The problem is that everybody has agreed that we should be doing things. But as long as energy is cheap, we don't do them. And so we have to have the stimulus of a high price to do it ...'' ----------------- http://www.thecuttingedgenews.com/index.php?article=616 ARTICLE from Cutting Edge, 7-7-08, by Gal Luft ``Kicking Our Oil Addiction If Iran and Brazil Can Do It, So Can We When the founding fathers declared our independence, they could not have imagined that, 232 years later, the United States would be so spectacularly dependent on foreign countries. It would be roughly eight more decades before oil gushed from a well in Titusville, Pennsylvania, marking the beginning of the global oil economy; it took eight decades more for the United States to become a net oil importer. But the republic's disastrous dependence on foreign oil has increased by leaps and bounds ever since. In 1973, when OPEC imposed its oil embargo, U.S. oil imports composed 30 percent of our needs; today, they make up more than 60 percent, with a growing proportion of that crude coming from the world's least stable regions. At around $145 a barrel, the United States, by my calculations, will spend more on imported oil this year than it will spend on its own defense budget, and much of that money will flow into the coffers of those who wish us ill. Since oil dependence is so unappealing, you'd think that energy independence would be an easy sell, especially on this Fourth of July weekend. But in fact, very few policy ideas have been so ridiculed. A 2007 report by the National Petroleum Council, a privately funded group that offers advice from the oil and gas industries to the federal government, calls energy independence "unrealistic"; a recent book, "Gusher of Lies," by Robert Bryce, a former fellow at a think tank funded in part by energy interests, described energy independence as a "dangerous delusion" ... Is energy independence a pipe dream? Hardly. In the electricity sector, the mission has already been accomplished. Remember President Jimmy Carter in his cardigan during the oil crises of the 1970s, urging Americans to save electricity? It took us just one decade to wean the electricity sector from oil. Today, only 2 percent of U.S. electricity comes from oil, according to the Energy Department. Could we do something similar with transportation, where American cars and trucks still gulp oil-based fuel greedily? At least four very different countries -- dictatorships and democracies alike -- are already making serious headway toward that goal. It's past time to pay attention to their example. The first country, surprisingly enough, is Iran. The Islamic republic has lots of crude but little capacity to refine it, leaving Tehran heavily dependent on gasoline imports. The country's blustery president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is fully aware that this is Iran's Achilles' heel and worries that a comprehensive gasoline embargo could cause enough social unrest to undermine his regime. So Ahmadinejad has launched an energy-independence program designed to shift Iran's transportation system from gasoline to natural gas, which Iran has plenty of. "If we can change our automobiles' fuel from gasoline to [natural] gas during the next three-four years," he said last July, "we won't need gasoline anymore." His plan includes a mandate for domestic automakers to make "dual-fuel" cars that can run on both gasoline and natural gas, a crash program to convert used vehicles to run on natural gas and a program to convert Iranian gas stations to serve both kinds of fuel. According to the International Association of Natural Gas Vehicles, more than 100 conversion centers have been built throughout the country: Iranians can drive in with their gasoline-only cars, pay a subsidized fee equivalent to $50 and collect their newly dual-fuelled cars several hours later. Ahmadinejad's plan, which has been largely ignored by the West, means that within five years or so, Iran could be virtually immune to international sanctions. While Iran is moving quickly toward energy independence, Brazil is already there. It's a striking turnaround; three decades ago, the country imported 80 percent of its oil supply. But since the 1973 Arab oil embargo, the Brazilians have invested massively in their sugar-based ethanol industry and created a fleet of vehicles that can run on the resulting fuel. According to the Sugar Cane Industry Union (Unica), 90 percent of the new cars sold this year in Brazil will be flexible-fuel vehicles that cost an extra $100 to make but can run on any combination of gasoline and ethanol. Lest anyone think that can't be done in the United States, many of those new cars are made by General Motors and Ford. All it really takes to turn a regular car into a flex-fuel one is a fuel sensor and a corrosion-resistant fuel line. Discovering how to make hydrocarbons and carbohydrates happily cohabit in the same fuel tank isn't all that Brazil has done; it has also increased domestic oil production. Its efforts have not only broken the yoke of Brazil's oil dependence but also insulated the country's economy from the pain of the current spike in global oil prices. Gasoline prices have nearly doubled elsewhere since 2005, but in Brazil, they have been almost frozen. This year, more ethanol will be sold in Brazil than gasoline. Sounds pretty good, doesn't it? Like Brazil, China has decided to replace gasoline with alternative fuels. But unlike the United States and Brazil, where the favorite substitute is ethanol, China has embraced a different alcohol: methanol. Several provinces in China already blend their gasoline with methanol, a clear, colorless liquid also known as wood alcohol, and scores of methanol plants are currently under construction there. The Chinese auto industry has already begun to produce flex-fuel models that can run on methanol. Shanxi, a province in central China that produces much of the country's coal, has even issued stickers granting cars that use pure methanol free passage on the province's toll roads. The distinction between methanol and ethanol is just one letter (but then, so is the difference between Iran and Iraq). Both biofuels should be in our basket of options. True, ethanol packs more energy per gallon and is less corrosive than methanol. But methanol is cheaper and far easier to produce in bulk. While ethanol can be made only from agricultural products such as corn and sugar cane, methanol can be made from natural gas, coal, industrial garbage and even recycled carbon dioxide captured from power stations' smokestacks -- an elegant way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Israel offers a fourth testament to what leadership, ingenuity and audacity can achieve. Last year, it launched an electric-car venture designed to turn Israel -- which obviously has some tensions with the region's big oil producers -- into an oil-free economy. Israelis will soon be able to replace their gasoline-fueled cars with battery-operated ones, which they'll plug into the hundreds of thousands of recharging points planned to be erected throughout the country. Israeli motorists, the government hopes, will be able to swap their batteries in a matter of minutes at dedicated stations or recharge them at home or at work. "Oil is the greatest problem of all time -- the great polluter and promoter of terror," said Israeli President Shimon Peres, the project's political patron. "We should get rid of it." For each of the four countries, knocking oil off its pedestal is no longer a theoretical proposition but a reality in the making. But despite the lip service our own politicians pay to the need to reduce our oil dependence, none of the solutions offered by Iran, Brazil, China and Israel are even under consideration in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Just go down the list. Natural-gas vehicles are nowhere to be seen. Brazilian sugar-cane ethanol is barred from the country by a steep 54-cent-per-gallon import tariff, courtesy of ethanol protectionists and their representatives in Congress. (No tariff is imposed on imported oil, of course.) For similar reasons, flex-fuel cars sold in the United States are certified to run only on ethanol, keeping methanol and other viable biofuels off the market -- even though they are cheaper and can be made from a wealth of coal and biomass resources. The kind of electric cars deployed in Israel have never returned to U.S. showrooms since General Motors' mass crushing of its EV1 -- the subject of the documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car?" It's time to get serious. Policies such as "drill more" and "drive smaller cars" all keep us running on petroleum. At best, they buy us a few more years of complacency, while ensuring a much worse dependence down the road when America's conventional oil reserves are even more depleted -- whether or not we drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The hard truth is that real energy independence can be achieved only through fuel choice and competition. That competition cannot take place as long as (according to the Department of Transportation) we continue to put 16 million new cars that run only on petroleum on our roads every year, each with an average street life of 16.8 years -- thereby locking ourselves into decades more of petroleum dependence. So let's remember the old saying: When in a hole, stop digging. If every new car sold in the United States were a flex-fuel vehicle and if millions of Americans could plug in their electric cars, gasoline would be facing fierce competition at the pump and the socket. Moreover, our money would have migrated from Exxon to Pepco, from the Middle East to the Midwest -- as well as to scores of poor, biomass-producing countries in Africa, Latin America and South Asia, including the few countries that don't yet hate our guts. This, and no other, is the road to independence. Gal Luft is executive director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security and co-founder of the Set America Free Coalition, a bipartisan alliance of groups promoting U.S. energy independence.''
