Why alternative energy is so important
 

Look at this map of "Who has the Oil". A lot of things become clear, and one of them is that it will be very tough to wean ourselves from that reality.

But if you don't look at the map, it's easier to convince yourself that the US can drill its way to energy independence!

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That map puts a lot of things in perspective.

A thought on one alternative energy: I think a grave threat is ill-considered expansion into biodiesel.
Don’t get me wrong, biodiesel per se is fine; but when land that has been used for food crops is converted into "factory acreage" to feed our energy needs rather than the world’s hunger, then something is very wrong.
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Lots of other ways to make biodiesel, Arctic. Several new strains of algae look most hopeful.

The U.S. government is already helping to fund research into alternative energy resources. My guess is that the marketplace will drive many of the changes that will need to happen in the future. E.g., when oil becomes even more expensive than it is now, the alternative sources will become more feasible. Be on the lookout for some good stocks to invest in as that happens. :)

That’s exactly my point! And using organic waste / agricultural left-overs is a good thing, too. But we are seeing some very negative developments in this field as well.

Warwick DC are starting to take everyones organic/food waste to turn it into Bio Fuel as of this April... coupled with a very comprehensive recycling program that even recycles plastic, battery's and engine oil... all picked up from your door!

good news for me :)

and it probably means that I am going to have the same standards of recycling that Arctic Stones and the rest of the 'smart' part of Europe has been enjoying for the past 20 years!

Seriously... the sooner we become less dependent on oil the better.... less pollution... and less dependance on the countries that supply it..

I am gonna pick up a few solar panels and make my own electricity ... if there is one thing we are almost guaranteed here in the UK its sun... :D

This map is highly misleading. It appears to represent only known "liquid" oil reserves.

The Athabascan tar sands, for example, a significant fraction of which is accessible even with current technology, are considered to be second only to Saudi Arabia's reserves.

This, of course, does not invalidate

I'm all for biodiesel made from sources like waste and algae that does not compete with food production and drive up the cost of corn and other foods.

If petroleum is becoming harder to obtain, or even just harder to obtain in ways that aren't politically difficult, well, it's too valuable as a raw material for us to be burning it up as fuel.

There is a very real possibility that history students of future generations will look back at the 20th and 21st centuries, shake their heads and burst out in disbelief: "They actually burned their hydrocarbon resources?!"

The problem with the tar sands, Pete, is that it's not easy to extract the oil -- a significant amount of the distillate is consumed (thus generating a large greenhouse gas emission) just to heat sand to extract more oil from the raw material, so first you burn a lot of oil, then you sell it so others can burn the rest of it. Pumping it out of a hole in the ground eliminates most of the first step.

There are significant deposits of oil shale in Colorado too, but no way to extract it has been found that comes close to breaking even.

Biofuels are being hyped right now, but we're talking about 60 billion gallons of ethanol here. Think what that'll do to food prices. At $4/bushel, it is estimated that corn-derived ethanol costs $1.70 per gallon to produce and sells for $1.85 or so. Ethanol is slightly less energetic (about 2/3, in fact) than gasoline, so more is needed.

Not only that, but the cultivation of corn also produces two other potent greenhouse gases: nitrous oxide and methane. It has been calculated that corn-derived ethanol is responsible for greenhouse-gas emissions of about 15 to 20 percent less those with gasoline, so you're getting a slight saving in terms of greenhouse-gas emissions, but not much.

The problem with biofuels derived from cellulosic materials like switchgrass is that immense quantities are required, so there's a very significant cost of moving the biomass to the producer. Moving ethanol is a problem too. Ethanol and water are mutually soluble, so you can't just bung it in a pipeline without contaminating it (you've just distilled it to get the water out of it) -- it's moved by truck or trainload.

There are certainly other technologies in the pipeline, but none of them is developed yet, so vast quantities of ethanol won't soon be replacing hydrocarbons as fuel and we won't be weaned for quite a while.

Sorry if I wasn't clear in the earlier post.

I was not intending to imply that the sands were a currently viable alternative on any significant scale, merely that the implications of the picture were misleading, since it excluded some potential sources such as the Athabascan tar sands (probably due to current economic non-viability, I would expect), while including others whose economic viability is only a little less uncertain.

Even "liquid" oil sources are not created equal. After all, some (probably not too many anymore) oil wells are characterized by positive pressure actually driving the oil out of the ground - all that is required is to drill the hole. As these become less productive, technological advances allow us to pump oil out. As those sources diminish, more advances allow us to force oil out by injecting material (e.g., air, water) to displace the oil, allowing even more to be extracted. I believe there are currently known deposits of liquid oil that for whatever reason are not viable for current exploitation. I have no idea where the technology has taken us to date, but I'm certain there will continue to be advances that allow us to utilize sources of oil that are not yet economically viable. Getting the last dregs of liquid oil out of a nearly exhausted field is likely to be horrendously expensive. At some point, technology (and rising prices) will make the tar sands economically viable. I would also not be surprised if the sands became economically viable long before any extraction from the depths of the Mariana trench did (if, of course, there were any oil to be discovered there:))

(Of course, the above does not consider other important issues, such as emissions, etc., which need to be addressed, as well.)

Biofuels aren't a complete solution, but they are the best option for us to move on now. Corn is not a very efficient crop for ethanol, but it seems to be the crop that is considered when calculating the cost of ethanol. The nice thing about prairie grasses is that it can be grown on land that is not viable for food crops. Hemp is also an excellent source for biofuels, able to produce not only large amounts of biomass for ethanol production, but also large amounts of seed oil that can be burned as biodiesel.

Small, local refineries would eliminate much of the need to transport the biomass and biofuels long distances.

When I was visiting relatives over Christmas, I had the opportunity to speak with one of my uncles, who is a lifelong farmer. He, as well as other farmers he knows, does produce some of his own fuel, and is experimenting with different methods. He likes biodiesel because it offers more power than petro-diesel, and reduces wear and tear on the engines, as well. He also produces hydrogen for fuel. While every option has its own strengths and weaknesses, some more pronounced than others, he has found that biofuels are cheaper than untaxed petroleum based fuels, especially when all costs are considered.

That's interesting.

What does he use the hydrogen for? Could you briefly describe how he produces it efficiently on what apparently is a relatively small scale?

A biodiesel processor has just started up business near my home. They collect used restaurant oil and turn it into fuel. They are selling commercially now and will start selling to retail customers in about a week. I'll certainly be there often. Currently we have only one other bio source in town, and they use new oil, costing about as much as petro-diesel. The bio guys are opening at $2.50/gallon, while petro is running about $3.35 around here.

I wonder how much of the price difference is in fuel taxes or lack thereof.

A modest proposal
 

How can the USA expect to wean itself away from foreign oil at those sort of bargain prices? As your national energy consumption shows, that hardly provides the inspiration required to collectively make significant energy savings.

Petrol here is running between $ 2.13 and $ 2.35 -- per liter!

What you need is European prices. May I humbly suggest a doubling of American fuel prices? That would provide inspiration -- and your petrol would still be a bargain. The extra profits could all go into a national fund to develop alternative energy technologies in a hurry. (Perhaps they could even be made patent free.)

Doesn’t that sound like a win-win situation?

Sheez, if we had your prices we would risk that lots of people would be ...driving SUVs!


;) ArcticStones
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The prices should get there, since the US can't control those who control the oil. Earlier in the thread there are people looking forward to the day when oil from shale and tar sands become economically viable as huge new reserves. But that's nothing to look forward to. Those sources can't become economically viable as part of a new era of cheap fuel, only as a new era of extremely expensive petroleum that we extract out of pure desparation, caused by not having alternatives available in sufficient volumes soon enough.

I really don't want to get into debating whether that's a good way to accomplish the "weaning" or not, but I'll give two reasons which provide at least a partial answer to why it's unlikely to happen by government mandated price increase anytime soon. I'm not saying price rises won't happen, but it will likely be due to availability (or lack thereof) issues, rather than by gov't imposed taxes.

First, and most obvious, is that every politician knows it is political suicide to even raise the issue of raising the gas tax significantly. To the best of my knowledge, no one has been elected at the national level who advocated for a major increase, and most, if not all, who did so advocate after they were elected were defeated at the next election.

The second reason is that in the US, the car has become much more of a necessity than it has in Europe. Some of the "necessity" is perception, but a substantial amount is factual.

The second reason has to do with differences in the way the US and Europe have grown and developed over many decades/centuries. (FWIW, I lived in Europe (mainly Germany) continuously for 16 years and traveled extensively, and this is just my personal opinion. I know generalizations are dangerous, but this is consistent with what I observed and learned from my interactions with the people.)

With very few exceptions, the growth of cities and the demographic movements here have not followed the basic central European models (don't know about Scandinavia, for example) which probably derive to some extent from centuries-old traditions. From the Middle Ages and long before, European cities were build to be compact, easily defensible, walled population centers. As their populations grew, so did the cities, but the trend was still to locate the expanding populations as near the city centers as possible. Further, the movement of the populations of the cities was much less than here in the US. Except for the displacements resulting from post-WWI border changes and the post-WWII East-West divisions, relatively few people pulled up stakes from ancestral homes to move from one city to a different city. (Obviously, this does not apply to the rural to urban migrations brought about by industrialization.) All of these factors tended to keep cities relatively compact.

Here in the US, there was rarely a good reason to build the cities (i.e., not small frontier towns) as compact, easily defensible population centers; hence, there were much less historical/traditional pressures to maintain compactness. Throughout the entire history of the US, population movement has almost been a national imperative - there has generally been no societal disapproval associated with moving from one location to another, thus there is a much reduced sense of roots/ancestral homes here in the US than in Europe. It seems that one result is that Americans tended to move away from city centers (expanding the geographic extent of the city) when they found conditions not to their liking, while Europeans tend to have been less inclined to move to suburbs out of a desire to remain in familial environs and also because more effective governments than here seem to have made greater efforts to prevent deterioration of city centers in the first place, thus resulting in a lesser tendency of cities to sprawl.

All this leads to consequences. The more compact nature of European cities allows for much more efficient public transit which reduces the "need" of owning personal transportation for urban dwellers, and also for suburban dwellers, since the suburbs tend to be closer to the central city. With very few exceptions, the sprawl of US cities makes efficient public transit an extremely complex problem which few cities have been able to solve. Only rarely did I encounter a German that lived more than 15-20 minutes from work via public transit, while here in the US, commutes of a half-hour or an hour or more are not unusual at all. In my own situation, my one-way commute to my last job was a little over an hour by car; by public transit, it was nearly three hours.

The "sabotaging" of public transit in many cities by the auto & oil & other industries is historical fact that needs no belaboring here. Nevertheless, this also contributes to making the car a "necessity", rather than a "nice-to-have" luxury in many, if not most, large cities. To the best of my knowledge, the auto & oil industries of Europe have never had the political clout to derail (no pun intended) public transit there.

When one leaves the cities, one also finds significant differences. The US railroads have never been government entities (although when the gov't has taken over parts of their operation, they have generally failed to provide good service). Since the profit margins of passenger hauling were low compared to freight, the passenger services of the railroads have been allowed to atrophy to minimal levels, making train travel generally a poor option over most routes. Contrast this with the gov't owned/subsidized systems in Europe: for example, TGV in France, the DB in Germany are comparatively modern, efficient, and rapid means of transportation between cities.

One must also consider the differences in scale. For the most part, a train trip between European cities is measured in hours, and there are very few significant cities and towns that are not served by passenger trains. Thus, most Europeans can travel relatively easily from city to city and can not legitimately consider a car a necessity for normal life. In the US, passenger rail travel between all but the largest cities is measured in many days, and very many smaller cities/towns have very limited or no passenger service at all. This fact, coupled with the greater tendency of American families to have dispersed as discussed in an earlier paragraph, makes a car an essential element in maintaining familial contacts. (Obviously, air travel is one alternative to inter-city travels, but it is generally less desirable than all but the least efficient cars on a passenger-mile basis.)

All this barely scratches the surface of why driving is considered a necessity by most Americans and not quite so much by Europeans. However, I'm sure you're bored by reading this and besides, my fingers are getting tired.

The bottom line is that not driving a car because of expensive gas (or not owning a car at all) has a smaller impact on the average European than on the average American. This is not to say that the European likes it or is not inconvenienced by it, but he is less likely to find it a major, life-altering situation if high gas costs force him to curtail his driving. For a large fraction of Americans, it means the inability to earn a living, as there is no viable way of getting to/from work and home. In addition, there is also the intangible, but still important, factor of the freedom allowed by a car-centric lifestyle which Americans have gotten used to over the years (but which Europeans have not developed to the same extent) which is difficult to overcome quickly.

Therefore, any significant curtailment of driving will require as a precursor that there be major infrastructural improvements nationwide in the areas of public transit (both urban and inter-city) if the US economy is not to suffer major dislocations. In addition, the lifestyle changes that will result are likely to be traumatic to many.

Every serious discussion needs at least one person who has views that are way out in left field.

First, the most critical point. As was stated earlier, using corn for ethanol has unintended consequences on the prices of those products made from corn (as well as land use). In short, using corn to produce fuel could double the price of bar-b-que and moonshine. The South would spin into a recession the likes of which we haven't seen since Hoover and the great drought. Use crab grass or pig manure... we have plenty of that.

Government doubling the price of gas as an incentive to reduce consumption is political suicide for very good reason. Given we lack a public transportation system, low income people would be put out of work, followed by a major recession, followed by massive social welfare costs, followed by rebellion (political at least). Meanwhile, the well to do will continue to drive the SUVs (you don't see the poor driving them).

Conservation is a band aid at best... it just buys time before we reach the finite cap on available resources. Conversation will not reduce the price. We are dealing with a cartel that has the ability to set the world price. Even if we could achieve a level of production that meets our domestic needs, that would not affect the price because our oil would also be sold on the world market where the price is still set by the cartel. The cartel will move to protect their income stream... if we reduce consumption, they'll raise the unit price and the poor consumers are back where they started.

Our electric power generation and natural gas companies operate on a very high fixed cost. If conservation should reduce their income to the point they cannot cover their fixed cost plus a little profit, then they have no alternative but to raise the unit price, too. Again, the consumer is right back where he started.... we have to give the beast its due.

At its core, I believe the real issue is our national security as well as that of the free world. We need to be energy independent enough to delete oil production and distribution as one of our vital national interests.... vital as in something we might go to war to protect.

I've seen people who couldn't afford to put down a 3% deposit on a house for $90,000 (a couple of years ago, when getting credit was easy) but they were driving a Ford Explorer. Drive into any poor neighborhood today and you'll see more SUVs than economy cars.

Conservation isn't 100% of the answer, but it's a big part. More than half the vehicles on the road in the US are SUVs. Twenty years ago, it was about 10%. That means that 40% are probably using two to three times as much gas as they could be using. That's a huge number.

If conservation isn't the answer, then drilling certainly isn't. See the map.

So what is the answer? How about significant tax incentives based on fuel efficiency and use of alternative fuels? Removing tax incentives for purchasing SUVs? And why do oil companies that make billions of dollars per week in profits still get tax breaks?

I think that's a great point! It also bears re-iterating that prices for fuel in Europe are more expensive because it's taxed more to fuel (in large part) their social programs, which consume a higher percentage of their governments' budgets than in the U.S. I'm not introducing debate as to whether that's a good thing or bad, but merely pointing out that this is why they pay so high a price. There's also a sense in which these higher fuel prices in Europe discourage car-ownership and encourage more dependence on government programs -- both of which go against Americans' traditional emphasis on self-reliance.

iampete's post was a good review of the differences between the US and Europe, and in many ways an even better review of why Canada is even more dependent on automobiles -- Canada is substantially less densely populated than the USA (roughly 33 million), and because there's a lot of land available, urban sprawl is the norm and in most places and public transportation to suburbia is fairly minimal.

Further, though, cities really don't have conservation in mind, no matter what they say. One of the main feeder streets near where I live has 6 streetlights in a busy mile of its length, and those lights are not coordinated in any way. Result: it is darned near impossible to move through that strip without being caught by one light to get on from the side, and one or two of the en route lights to get out and thus spend several minutes idling to get beyond the zone. The city is full of such examples. The lights are rarely set to recognize rush hours either. City traffic engineers simply don't think about those things.

What I can't figure out, though, is why Canadians seem to be so tolerant of such high taxation on their gas. Were the US gov't to tax gasoline at Canadian rates, they'd have a revolution (well, probably not literally) on their hands.

NovaScotian, I'm interested in hearing your take on the matter.

Exactly so. What I was suggesting is that anything we do around the edges in the 2, 5 or even 10 percent range will not reduce prices and will not make us energy independent. They will still have us by the throat.

It's time for a Manhattan Project/Man on the Moon style effort. If we need to build a whole new national infrastructure to support a new technology, then we need to be about doing that. Otherwise, our grand kids and great grand kids will be facing the same issues decades from now.

We can survive without plentiful and cheap energy (we're doing that now), but why would we want to? I think we owe it to the next generation to at least undertake a massive effort to see what the options are... perhaps a technology we don't yet know exists.

Yes we do owe it to the next generation, and it would be good for our economy now as well!

Free, universal health care consumes about 40% of the budget of most provinces, a large percentage of that cost incurred in the treatment of an aging population. Young folks drive much more than retirees do, so in part, that fuel tax makes the young pay for the health care of the old.

Further, Canada is a spread-out place as I mentioned. 80% of the population of Canada lives in a 100-mile wide band along the US border -- it's a string-bean country like Chile for all practical purposes, laid out East-West instead of North-South. At the same time, a 400-mile diameter circle centered somewhere around Niagara Falls (as I recall) encloses more than half the population of Canada and this region of the country is where a great deal of the distribution of goods to the fringes originates, so roads are long and important. A chunk of the federal part of that money funds the highway system and keeping it open in the winter.

Thanks, that explains a lot. I wasn't aware that those tax monies were considered as general gov't revenue in Canada.

Here in the US, the theory (definitely not universal practice though) at the federal level and many, if not most, states is that gas taxes are to be used in support of the transportation infrastructure only, and not as general gov't revenue. When gas taxes are raised (or proposed to be raised) people tend to resist passionately because they see little prospect for commensurate improvement of this infrastructure that the taxes are "supposed" to be paying for.