New at Reason

July 21, 2004

Fifty-seven Manhattan Projects For Energy Independence later, Ron Bailey explains why we'll never kick the foreign fuel habit.

Comments

|7.21.04 @ 5:32AM|#

Which I think is fine and dandy.

Use up all of their oil first.

Then once it starts actually getting scare (30,60,90 years from now) we'll still have ours. The price per barrel then will make what we are playing now look like chump change.

I read somewhere that they estimate that Texas still has 50% of its oil. The problem is that it is hard (therefore expensive) to get to.

|7.21.04 @ 5:35AM|#

Yes and G. W. Bush made a deal with his brother to close off drilling in one of the largest natural gas fields ( clean energy) in the country,
the Destin Dome.
Lot`s of drilling going on in Texas right now,but when OPEC drops the price down below $25 bbl. it will stop and holes will be pluged. I`ve read that well-head cost in Saudi is $3~$5 bbl.
They (OPEC) and the envirowackos got us by the short hairs.

|7.21.04 @ 5:39AM|#

Am I missing something here? Nowhere in his articles does the author explain anything. All he says is that efforts by past presidents to reduce energy independence have been ineffective.

|7.21.04 @ 5:51AM|#

If you ask my left-leaning friend, he would say that Ronald's article proves how much influence that big oil has on Reason and the Cato institute.

|7.21.04 @ 6:06AM|#

The sooner the cheap oil gets sucked out of the ground, the better off everyone will be. Once the cheap oil is gone and its cost curve intersects "alternative" energy costs we'll have a world considerably less dependent on a**holes from Arabia and m*rons from Texas.

This planet is awash in energy, just not currently as cheap as oil.

Pump hard and fast.

|7.21.04 @ 6:12AM|#

Pump hard and fast.

Too bad you weren't an energy policy advisor in the Clinton White House. You probably would have gotten his attention with proposals like that :)

|7.21.04 @ 6:33AM|#

thoreau writes: Too bad you weren't an energy policy advisor in the Clinton White House. You probably would have gotten his attention with proposals like that :)
======
I don't think he needed outside lubrication motivation :-)

|7.21.04 @ 6:38AM|#

A4TF,
Of course, then plastic will be expensive. At least it'll help provide jobs in the future working in landfills, er plastic mines.

|7.21.04 @ 6:40AM|#

Ah, the classic Hit and Run comment race to the bottom. I'm surporised nobody worked "drilling" into the inuendo.

I say go we nuclear, then use electric cars.

|7.21.04 @ 7:58AM|#

Todd writes: I say go we nuclear, then use electric cars.

Nuclear is but one of many electrical generating tactics that will figure themselves out once the cost of dead dinosaurs creeps up.

Despite the current perception of panic, oil is not going away soon and this will give more than enough to develop more efficient technologies for storing the who-knows-how-created electons.

Then there is the hydrogen possibility.

And......?

|7.21.04 @ 11:24AM|#

"...Ron Bailey explains why we'll never kick the foreign fuel habit."

Where in the article did he explain this?

A4TFan,

"I say go we nuclear, then use electric cars."

By this comment I assume you mean nuclear power plants, and not nuclear cars. There are some significant problems with nuclear power - first, there is the waste issue and second there is the insurance issue. Eletricity creation via natural gas doesn't have these problems and we aren't running out of natural gas any time soon, so natural gas - especially as it is traded in its liquid form (LNG) - will likely be the source of most electricity in the future - especially since it burns so cleanly in comparison to coal (there is very little in the way of oil-based power generation). A few years ago Daniel Yergin had a great called "The Next Prize" that discusses the promise of LNG.

As to the issue of electric cars, well, batteries are just still too damn ineffecient. A better approach over the short term is ethanol - especially in light of how we can manipulate almost any plant to make them more prone to be used in making ethanol (right now only the edible parts of corn are readily available for ethanol - but imagine if you lawn cuttings were useful for such and you could sell it to your local ethanol production facility). Ethanol is also a better solution because it would require little in the way of changing our transportation infrastructure or in the way our current vehicle fleet runs.

|7.22.04 @ 3:20AM|#

".... instead of wasting it to make alcohol."

It's only a waste to make alcohol if you don't drink it. :) (hic!)

Andrew D. Todd|7.22.04 @ 4:53AM|#

To: James Anderson Merritt (July 22, 2004 11:19 AM)

The problem with ethanol is that it is made from agricultural crops, more specifically from sugars and starches, the "baby food" of the plant kingdom. Sugar-starch-rich plants require a lot of active tending. The insects and the rodents see them as food. More biologically fit plants (conventionally called weeds) tend to drive the crop out. This again, is a political choice. Ethanol was chosen in order to make farmers happy, specifically the kind of large commercial farmer who lives on crop subsidies as much as crop sales, and who contributes money to farm-state politicians.

Methanol is a much better choice. It is just about the chemically simplest fuel which is liquid at room temperature. It is correspondingly easy to make from various inexpensive materials, such as coal or biomass (weeds, scrub brush, agricultural waste, etc), using the Hydrocarb Process. Methanol has only about half the fuel energy of gasoline, but that is not critical for most ground vehicles. A typical small car weighing 2000 lbs carries 8 gallons (50 lbs.) of gasoline to give it a range of 200-300 miles.

Given the extent to which the foreign policy of the United States has come to be driven by energy, it is only reasonable that the following departments should be funded by excise taxes on energy: Defense, State, Homeland Security, Transportation, Energy, Agriculture, and Interior. To do otherwise is to stack the deck in favor of Middle-East oil with a massive subsidy. Once you correct for this subsidy, replacing it with excise taxes as a kind of user fee, energy problems will mostly go away.

Petroleum is a fairly scarce mineral. Any good-sized area which has effective rule of law, civil government, etc., tends to use up its own oil in local economic development. Texas is a good example of this. If the Persian Gulf oil were under India instead, India would not export very much, but would concentrate on turning it into fertilizer and plastics, feedstocks to its own economy. The result is that when you go looking for oil to import, you inevitably wind up looking at failed states. Under those circumstances, your oil supply can never be much better than your military power.

|7.22.04 @ 7:14AM|#

Elliot Spitzer, the NY Attorney General, is leading an 8 state lawsuit against the Midwest's 5 largest coal-powered energy producers. The novel theory is that they have caused the global warming that is so clearly raping New York State. (Clearly, the 160 or so inches of snow Syracuse receives most winters isn't enough...)

Were I leading one of these power companies, I think I'd borrow a page from Ms. Rand, and speak to others in the industry about shutting down the coal powered plans. Given that the leaders of the suit are the same morons who are blocking the construction of cleaner nuke plants, and given that the grid is now operating at near capacity, with little surplus, it would be a devastating blow. Brownouts, anyone? Let Mr. Spitzer, an elected official, explain to his freezing constituents about how a negligible bit of (speculative) global warming from Ohio is killing them; and why electricity now costs $1/Kw/hr.

|7.22.04 @ 8:41AM|#

Gary Gunnels,
People may realize how minor the problem of nuclear waste is if an LNG ship burns while in port. If you think a few tons of kerosene did a lot of damage in NYC, imagine what 33 million gallons of LNG can do - 1945 Dresden without the planes. In 1944, in Cleveland, an accident involving less than 10,000 gallons of LNG resulted in 128 deaths and total devastation of a 30 acre area. The Cleveland disaster doesn't mean that nuclear power is preferable to LNG, but it does show that LNG has risks of its own - risks much more serious than radioactive waste leaking from a container far underground in the middle of nowhere.

By the way, War Eagle.

johnl|7.22.04 @ 9:15AM|#

Why not just use water as a source of energy? Xogen has stated that "There is more energy in a gallon of water than in a gallon of gasoline." Genesis World Energy is introducing a device that will provide all the energy a home needs for 20 years, all from 20 gallons of water.

No. I wouldn't make up quotes like that. That would be cheating. Visit the blog for more.

|7.22.04 @ 9:26AM|#

Fuel cells...someday

|7.22.04 @ 9:55AM|#

Maybe we could plant the nuclear waste in Saudi Arabia.

|7.22.04 @ 11:16AM|#

Energy independence = walking.

James Anderson Merritt|7.22.04 @ 11:19AM|#

As far as I have ever read or learned, ethanol production is overwhelmingly a net energy sink. That is, we consume more energy producing the ethanol than we get back by burning it. All along the steps of production and distribution, energy is fed into the process, and whence comes that additional energy? By the combustion of fossil fuels, for the most part. Now, we could probably come up with more fuel-efficient ways of producing ethanol, and we could certainly find ways to make more use of energy sources, such as nuclear and solar, in replacement of the dead dinos. But in the latter case, were we able to generate so much energy from other sources, we could and should probably find a more efficient way to transport and store that energy, instead of wasting it to make alcohol.

Andrew D. Todd|7.22.04 @ 12:39PM|#

Well, it's like this. The gasoline car and the concrete/asphalt road were historically designed as part of a system, and one might add the gas station. You cannot just try to plug in an electric battery in place of a gas tank. That won't work very well. What you have to do is to set up a new system around the strengths and weaknesses of electricity.

The proven method of electric transportation involves a road with electrical contacts built in. This is the method used by electric trains, streetcars, and even trolley buses. Alternatively, you can use magnetic induction, building coils into the roadway. Now, to get full utilization out of your expensive electric roadway, you have to put in a lot of automatic controls so that the vehicles can travel close together and at comparatively high speed. In the interests of compatibility with existing automobiles, some kind of piggyback system is probably a good idea. You can design a carrier vehicle to run at, say, 200 mph. The last wheel-driven land-speed-record cars achieved 400 mph, so half of that would probably be feasible. The passenger-carrying car has a reasonable sized internal battery, for use off of the main high-speed routes which are electrified. Cornell Aeronautical Laboratories drew up a prospectus for this system, back in the 1960's.

The other way to go is the horse and stagecoach system. The stagecoach was based around rapidly interchangeable "power units." Livery stables were spaced out according to the limits of the horses' endurance, typically about ten miles at ten miles an hour. The railroads took the system over for steam locomotives, which operated over 100 mile districts. Now, to apply this to an electric car, the simplest way to go is to have a small trailer carrying batteries (or an engine-generator and a tank of gas, where appropriate). Build an electric power cable into the hitch, so that the trailer can feed power to the wheels, and recharge the car's internal battery. Instead of a gas station pumping gas, it would exchange trailers, and recharge them at leisure.

The periodic electric car proposals have failed, in essence, because they were meant to fail. They were empty political gestures, nothing more. Given the way automobiles and roads are produced, just ante-ing costs at least twenty billion dollars in things like tool-and-die work, with a view to producing tens of millions of units. That is the nature of the mass-production system. Nothing like that amount of money was ever put on the table for electric cars in whatever form.