energy policy

Rather than protesting further offshore drilling, isn’t it better to channel activism towards a long-term sustainable energy strategy in national policy? Practically speaking, America’s current need for domestic oil outweighs the potential for disaster. As an oil junkie nation that’s spent the past five decades building an entire infrastructure around oil, there are frightening few options.

From Wikipedia:

The US is the largest energy consumer, ranking seventh in energy consumption per capita in the world in 2005. The majority of this energy is derived from fossil fuels: in 2005, it was estimated that 40% of the nation’s energy came from petroleum, 23% from coal, and 23% from natural gas. Nuclear power supplied 8.4% and renewable energy supplied 7.3%, which was mainly from hydroelectric dams although other renewables are included such as wind power, geothermal and solar energy.

From gravmag.com:

55-60% of US consumption is imported at a cost of $50 billion+ per year, amounting to the largest single element of our trade deficit. In 1994, US oil imports exceeded 50% of consumption for the first time. In 1999, US imports were about 11 million barrels per day, compared to our domestic production of 6 million barrels per day.

Again, I can’t agree enough with Chris Nelder on his take on US energy strategy. His piece, Another Wake-Up Call for the World’s Biggest Oil Junkie, is a must-read in its entirety, an excerpt of which is below. And if you haven’t read it yet, here is his letter to Congress on how the energy policy should look.

The eager search for a scapegoat in the wake of the Horizon disaster is a clear sign that America simply doesn’t get it.
After highly visible disasters like the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969, the Exxon Valdez spill, and now the Horizon spill, the public understands the risk of offshore oil production. What it doesn’t understand– at all– are the choices we now have to make.
Those calling for an end to offshore oil production in the U.S. apparently don’t understand that it accounts for over 30 percent of our domestic supply. They don’t understand that making offshore oil off-limits would be a double-whammy to our pocketbooks, both restricting our income and forcing us to import even more oil at ever-higher prices. They have an inkling that ethanol production is pressuring food supply, but have no concept that the non-food alternatives, like fuel from algae and cellulosic ethanol, are still puny, and a long way from being ready to scale up and replace oil.
Instead of having a rational discussion about how we’re going to manage our remaining offshore oil resources, we look to technology… as if deepwater drillships and blowout preventers and acoustic shutoff switches were the problem, rather than miraculous solutions only a dedicated junkie could love. These technologies don’t fall from the sky. Every safety measure ever invented came as the result of a lesson learned the hard way.
Instead of discussing how we’re going to break our addiction to oil, we turn to politics…as if yelling “Drill, Baby, Drill” or “Spill, Baby, Spill” even louder, or changing tack on our energy policy every four years, could amount to a solution.
All of our politically-driven energy approaches–carbon caps and trading schemes, offshore leases and moratoriums, short-term incentives for renewables, and so on–
are woefully incapable of addressing our long term problem.
It’s easy to vilify oil and its producers, and it’s politically popular to call for an end to drilling, but replacing oil is far more difficult and expensive than anyone seems to understand.

…and the political posturing and spinning begins. The majority of primaries and gubernatorial races are still ahead of us. See the schedule here for each state: http://bit.ly/dy2Avp

For one, I’m disappointed with the administration’s slow response to this crisis. I’m surprised that Obama issued a statement last Friday still supporting the expansion of offshore oil and gas production in US waters, but I agree. I’m not surprised there was not a chorus of Democrats jumping on this statement.

Here’s a nice technical blow-by-blow of the Deepwater Horizon explosion by one of the workers on the rig:

Welcome to the World of Deep-water Risk
As I’ve said before, this accident is Mother Nature’s wake-up call to everyone. Deep-water drilling is a high-stakes game. It’s not exactly a “casino,” in that there’s a heck of a lot of settled science, engineering and technology involved. But we’re sure finding out the hard way what all the risks are. And it’s becoming more and more clear how the totality of risk is a moving target. There’s geologic risk, technical risk, engineering risk, environmental risk, capital risk and market risk.
With each deep well, these risks all come together over one very tiny spot at the bottom of the ocean. So for all the oil that’s out there under deep water — and it’s a lot — the long-term calculus of risk and return is difficult to quantify.
This is big news all through the offshore industry. There are HUGE environmental issues, and certainly big political repercussions.

It’s the biggest ecological catastrophe for the US, with far-reaching ramifications across the entire economy and politics. Energy sustainability is now more than ever a hot-button political topic, and a highly emotional one especially since knowledge of the energy sector is so minimal and greenwashed. Through various energy, social and market policies over the past fifty years the US has built up every aspect of the national infrastructure around oil and solidified our dependence on it. Projections for the most viable alternatives are decades away. And now we’re watching while the rest of the world races each other to implement clean energy industries while we’re mired in bureaucracy and catering to a fickle electorate’s every caprice. Hope this tipping point for energy policy isn’t squandered yet again.

Here’s a GREAT letter to Congress by @nelderini on what our energy policy should aim for, within a global context and in light of our current energy infrastructure. Here’s an excerpt but the entire piece is not long so you should read it:

It’s time to come up with a real plan, an honest plan, to rebuild America under a new energy paradigm. One with serious, achievable 30-year and 50-year milestones that will slash our need for fossil fuels.
A plan based on facts and science, not political expediency. One that will create true, long-term wealth, prosperity, resiliency, and self-sufficiency.
We need a Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security to prepare the country for the decline of oil, not sweet lies from the EIA which completely ignore it. As Lester Brown observed, “only Sweden and Iceland actually have anything that remotely resembles a plan to effectively cope with a shrinking supply of oil.”
We want to stop spending half a trillion dollars a year for imported oil, and develop a defense strategy for the day when our imports dry up.
We need stable, simple feed-in tariffs, which have been proven successes in Germany, Japan and Spain…not complex, corruptible, ineffectual policies like cap-and-trade or cap-and-tax. And we need them for 30 years, not one.
We want solar on every rooftop, a wind turbine in every field and a micro-hydro turbine in every running stream, wherever viable resources exist. Distributed generation is resilient, and brings value to every community. Along with it, we need distributed power storage, and a smart grid with micro-islanding so we can fall back on our own resources if the grid goes down.
We want a plan to manage our resources for the long term health of our society, like Norway and Saudi Arabia have. Instead of planning to use our remaining oil and gas so we can drive in inefficient cars more cheaply, we should be planning to convert it into the renewables and efficiency gains we’ll need in the future.
We want a defensive strategy for our grid with hardening against cyber-attacks.
We need to reverse the long process of globalization and bring manufacturing back home. Instead of a society now dependent on complex, world-spanning, highly optimized supply chains, we need local resiliency, redundancy, and diversity in all the essential sectors: energy, water, food, and security.
Finally, we need energy education at all levels — from the street to the universities, from business to government employees.

will the oilspill finally generate a viable energy plan?

Oil Spill Politics and the US Energy Policy