"Potato Creek Johnny" and Energy Independence

Full Article:

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/05/americas-energy-crossroads/?hp?hp

Snippet:

"The United States use 30 trillion kilowatt-hours of energy a year, a huge amount, and much of it is imported. For nuclear power, Obama has allocated $18.5 billion for new “next generation” nuclear power plants. The United States has 104 nuclear power plants providing 8 percent of our energy. They cost between $5 and $14 billion to build. In the future, with new technology, figure the higher end. That $18.5 billion is equivalent to about two plants. And since it’s for research and development, don’t expect anything; nuclear power plants take a long time to design, site and license.

Biofuels? The Obama administration plans to meet the mandate of Bush’s 2007 U.S. Energy Independence and Security Act, to produce 36 billion gallons a year of ethanol and advanced biofuels by 2022. That’s equivalent to 1 million barrels of oil, 13 percent of our current petroleum use, 22 percent of our current imports. But Cornell Professor David Pimentel, one of the world’s experts on agriculture and environment, calculates it would take all our current corn-producing land to provide just 2 percent of the energy America uses. It would also take a huge quantity of water and phosphorus fertilizers, resources we are straining to their limits. Biofuels? Not the way to go."

"That leaves Obama’s March 31 opening of new offshore areas for oil and natural gas exploration and drilling. The largest of these, mid- and south- Atlantic coast waters and the eastern Gulf of Mexico, might provide as little as a year and a half’s replacement for our imported oil (a Mineral Management Service estimate) to as much as 14 years of imported oil (a separate Department of Interior estimate). (Such large ranges in estimates are not that unusual for minerals.) And the high estimates replace only 24 percent of America’s current total energy use.

That high estimate sounds good, but here are the problems: Nobody expects any of this oil to be available soon. Americans might see this new oil around 2030, but it would end before 2050, when, according to petroleum geologists and economists, people had better be free of dependence on petroleum, because petroleum will have become too expensive to use as a fuel. And in 2050, when the U.S. population is forecast to reach 410 million, this would provide only 18 percent of the total energy used that year if there were no change in per-capita use.

Natural gas? The newly opened offshore areas are estimated to have as much as 17 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. At our 2009 rate of use, this could provide about a year and three months of natural gas, less than a year for our 2050 population.

What can and should we do now? At present, wind and solar combined provide less than 1 percent of America’s energy. By 2050, if these are going to replace fossil fuels, they will have to account for 64 percent of our energy. To replace oil alone by 2050 means that solar and wind will have to provide 40 percent of our energy. This takes into account the growth of America’s population and assumes that per-capita energy consumption could drop by 50 percent.

Present investments by the feds in wind and solar are trivial compared to the needs. To make a major transition, we are going to have to start now and spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year, either from private sector investment or the government, or some combination. The good news is that the technology to do this exists right now to provide a successful transition. Research is needed to lower the installation (construction) costs, but the energy efficiency of existing wind and solar is great right now. America needs funds to build solar and wind facilities. R and D is always needed, but what we have right now is a great start, and the transition should not be held up by putting all the funding into R and D."