From somewhere–inside the White House or the Department of Energy–President Obama is getting some pretty awful advice. It’s bad enough that he’s been persuaded that there’s a Nirvana Land of windmills and sunbeams in the future of electricity. But much more gravely in halting drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, he’s committing a fearsome folly.
If exploration and drilling in the Gulf doesn’t resume and gets caught up in punitive new rules, Obama, or his successor, will find the price of gasoline high (probably more than $5 a gallon) and military action against Iran will be proscribed.
It goes like this: After 18 months the supply of replacement oil from the Gulf dries up, due to the normal decline in production from old wells. Very soon, this loss exceeds 1 million barrels a day and begins to increase the world oil price,
World oil production today is 86.5 million barrels per day; of this, the United States gulps down an amazing 20 million barrels per day. This delicate balance, helped by the global recession, keeps the price bouncing between $70 and $80 per barrel.
Worst case is not only do we lose production in the Gulf, but any global upset–such as military action in Iran–will stress this oil production-demand balance further. Result: price rises. Political solution: none.
The folly of the Obama action is that every new hole drilled in deep water is going to be safer-than-safe.
There’s a well-known pattern: Disasters produce an aftermath of safety. The nuclear industry thought it was safe before the Three Mile Island meltdown, but it went back to the drawing board and produced new institutions for safety monitoring and study, as well as revised the very idea of defense in-depth.
The Obama caution is the danger, not the possibility of another spill.
The second energy disaster in the making is with electricity. The Obama administration has signed on to a vague idea, pushed by environmentalists and post-industrial schemers: It goes by the appropriately loose title of “alternative energy.”
In real-world terms, alternative energy can be narrowed to some solar
and wind. In fact, the only mature technology is wind. It works fine when the wind is blowing. The heat wave in the Eastern states in the past week makes the point: The wind doesn’t blow when it’s most needed.
There’s nothing wrong with wind, except that its most passionate advocates often favor it not for its own sake but for what it is not: nuclear power. Paranoia over nuclear power–always the first choice of the world’s utilities, if all things are equal–is a part of the cultural-political landscape in America.
Faced with this, the Obama administration has saddled up two horses and invited the nuclear industry to ride both as they diverge. It has thrown away the $11 billion spent on the first national nuclear-waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, even as it has offered loan guarantees for new reactors.
Coming down the pike is a surge, a really huge surge, in electricity demand as plug-in hybrid cars and pure electric cars are deployed.
The plan–if you can call it that–is that the load of new uses will be spread by “smart meters” on the “smart grid,” and this will direct or coerce consumers to charge their cars in the middle of the night.
Fat chance. If consumers were that financially or morally conscious, they’d long since have cut their electric loads and driven smaller cars.
Want to be politically unpopular? Start telling people when they can refuel their cars. That’s known around the Tea Party circuit and elsewhere as government intervention.
Do you take yours with sugar? –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
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I read your article [in The Hindu, July 9, 2010].
Yes. Mr. Barack Obama is not advised properly, just like the Indian Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh being misguided by a section of idiots in India.
Electro-coagulation is a cost-effective technology to very easily separate oil from water.
It will cut down investment and energy costs on centrifuges and may even reduce the size and the work done by the centrifuges considerably.
It is patented through a process for molecular engineering of materials and a synthesizer for achieving it.
Patents have already been granted in the U.K, Canada, India,The Philippines and rights pending in few other countries.
Hydrodrive has already put this patented process in several commercial applications including electro-coagulation that involves electron separation, movements, reorientation, rearrangement of molecules resulting in synthesized products with changed properties.
The ADNOC (Abu Dhabi National Oil Corporation ) is aware of this.
The Hydrodrive Unit used for electro-coagulation and the DETAILS can be viewed at:
http://www.hydrodrive.co.in/HYDRODRIVE%20HEAT%20PUMP%20CUM%20COALESCER.htm
Another solution for the oil spill is to store spilled oil by encircling the affected area with fenders half submerged in the sea, pump it to shore either through floating pipe/cylindrical fenders or ships to the shore for use as an emulsified fuel or for oil-water separation.
From Denys P. Leighton, New Delhi
I write in response to your NYTimes News Service-syndicated article entitled ‘Barack Obama is getting bad advice. . .’ (published in The Hindu, 9 July 2010), about oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Your article gives the impression that it is naive for President Obama–or, for that matter, any person in public or private life–to review the country’s dependence on oil and fossil fuels. On the level of both public policy and purely(?) scientific speculation, it seems, investigation of energy alternatives belongs to the ‘Nirvana Land of windmills and sunbeams’. Wind and solar power are prohibitively expensive and–you imply–will ever remain so. Use of electric/hybrid cars would only attenuate the fossil fuels problem, it is true, but is it an inexcusable curbing of liberty to have a price structure that encourages consumers to recharge their car batteries in the middle of the night? (Your reference to this ‘problem’ creates an image of sleepy men and women getting up at 1 a.m. to plug in their cars; as if there would not be timers and software to minimize this little inconvenience!). In much of your reporting on energy issues (e.g., in White House Chronicle), you bemoan the apathy of the American energy consumer, his lack of interest in where his energy comes from and how it is produced. The problem is that the energy industry is thoroughly happy with this apathy and lack of awareness; indeed, the industry cultivates it. The prevailing attitude is that oil and gas are best and that any disruption of the flow is inexcusable. Curiously–to me, at least–your writing on energy issues both deplores this attitude and reinforces it. You point out that research on non-fossil energy alternatives over the past fifty years, whether conducted by energy industry scientists, government or disinterested independent investigators, has produced plans and technologies ranging from good to bad to ugly to ridiculous; and that politics determines whether these plans are buried or carried through.
I think it’s very irresponsible to suggest that the present petroleum energy system, founded on the ‘advanced’ thinking of more than one hundred years ago, forms the only responsible and realistic basis for the future, and that short-term and long-term benefits will result simply from adjusting this system in little ways. In fact, the global fossil-energy regime has been created by the actions of governments and by forced consumer choices (not those emerging from ‘free market’ interactions). It has proved to be an incredibly destructive, wasteful and expensive ‘way of life’ that the human population (not just the American population) can ill afford. As for research and development of alternative energy sources and technologies, even if we were to continue spending billions of dollars on them per year, it’s still cheaper than living with ‘(energy) business as usual’. . . Your contention that it’s bad policy for President Obama to try to achieve some measure of independence for America from fossil fuels appears itself to be an expression of the short-sightedness you deplore in the average consumer and voter. The President will no doubt take a political whacking for restricting oil extraction on the Gulf of Mexico, but I’m encouraged that he appears to see this is a risk worth taking.
Sir, I am Ramadasu from India and I read your article on “Barack Obama is getting bad advice” in The Hindu, which is a sarcastic yet a serious one. I hope to read more of your articles.
Oh My God!! Americans might pay $US1.32 a litre for gas?!?
Typical piece of self-centred American comment. Gas prices in Australia are currently at that level. In the UK, they are close to double that already. Your article is a dopefest of short-term hysteria. What do you care that worldwide, oil will be double or triple these prices in ten years anyway, whether the Gulf is locked up or not? This is the eventide of the Oil Age, pal, and your fooling yourself if you think you can prolong it. If you had a quarter of a brain, you’d be screaming for increased fuel taxes to finance a surge in R&D for renewable sources of energy.
From: Lance Lessels
I appreciate your concern for a prospective oil shortage and the risk of soaring oil prices in the United States of America as per your article in The Age, Melbourne, Australia, 10 July 2010. You make strong and possible quite correct argument that the price of petrol in America may rise to $US1.30 a litre. The current cost of petrol in Europe is generally double, in most cases more so, with few exceptions to those in USA. You also note the daily global oil production and usage and that the USA gulps approximately one quarter of the daily oil production. Would it not be in Americas and the world’s best interest if the USA which contains just under 4.6% of the world’s population became more morally responsible with regard to consumption of finite resources and even drove smaller cars or paid higher prices for petrol?
I appreciate that Australia is not doing great things with regard to environmental management but the price of petrol here in Australia is in the approximate area of AU$1.30 (+/- US$1.04) per litre.
Exchange rate used AU$1 = US$0.80
From: entropy
I’ve been expecting peak oil for some time, am moving from SF to Monterey area.
Why did I pick Monterey? It’s walkable and bikeable for 90+% of needs. We will have a car, and old Mercedes that gets 30mph and can run on biodiesel, if need be. The world has had plenty of warning, like 30+ years.
No one should be whining when, for once, American citizens are asked to sacrifice in the “war on terror”. Personally, I think virtually every war this country has fought since WWII has been unnecessary.
I think it will be totally tragic if young Iranians die defending the crooked nut jobs that run the place. That is what will make me
sad, not $5 gasoline.
But imagine a nuclear-armed Iran, imagine that the president decides it’s time to finish Israel once and for all. Millions of Israeli and Iranian dead, for good measure they nuke Saudi and Iraqi oil facilities as well.
How will our precious soccer moms ever get the kids to practice? Back in the old days we walked or biked to soccer practice…
From: David Rothfield
I read your article under the heading Obama’s caution risks soaring prices, published in The Age newspaper in Australia on Saturday, July 10.
Whilst some of what you say is persuasive, I think your reference to ‘wind’ as ‘the only mature technology’ is misleading.
You seem to ignore what some see as the most promising of mature renewable energy technologies, namely solar-thermal.
Solar thermal was proven by the U.S. Department of Energy in conjunction with Lockheed Martin between 1996 and 1999. Plants currently under construction, both in California and in Spain will be capable of storing thermal energy for up to 15 hours, operating at full capacity. Spain is on track to generate 42% of its electricity from renewables by 2020.
Prof. Mark Jacobson of Stanford University wrote a report, published in Scientific American setting out how the entire world, (given the will) can shift to clean, renewable energy within 20 years. You can download that report at: http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/sad1109Jaco5p.indd.pdf
From: David Rothfield
I read your article under the heading Obama’s caution risks soaring prices, published in The Age newspaper in Australia on Saturday, July 10.
Whilst some of what you say is persuasive, I think your reference to ‘wind’ as ‘the only mature technology’ is misleading.
You seem to ignore what some see as the most promising of mature renewable energy technologies, namely solar-thermal.
Solar thermal was proven by the U.S. Department of Energy in conjunction with Lockheed Martin between 1996 and 1999. Plants currently under construction, both in California and in Spain will be capable of storing thermal energy for up to 15 hours, operating at full capacity. Spain is on track to generate 42% of its electricity from renewables by 2020.
Prof. Mark Jacobson of Stanford University wrote a report, published in Scientific American setting out how the entire world, (given the will) can shift to clean, renewable energy within 20 years. You can download that report at: http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/sad1109Jaco5p.indd.pdf