Provisional
Truth |
Essays | June 2006 Addicted To Oil
The President recently conceded what
every driving-age American already knows: we are addicted to oil.
Some were
surprised at the President's choice of words – addiction having
so many unpleasant connotations – but what else would you call it when,
as only 5% of the world's population, we mainline nearly 25% of the
world's energy output each day, and, unchecked, our daily minimum energy
requirement will increase by half to 30 million barrels of oil per day
by 2026?
Unfortunately,
even with gasoline above $3 a gallon, energy alternatives currently are
unsatisfactory (read: unprofitable). Coal, solar, wind, water,
hydrogen, biofuels, geothermal, and nuclear all have expensive
development and production drawbacks, efficiency and pollution hurdles,
infrastructure needs or safety and security issues that make oil and gas
still the most cost-effective (read: profitable) energy
resources.
Hydrogen sounds promising but it it
doesn't gush out of the ground. It is extracted using lots of other
energy at great cost from other sources – like water – and requires an
entirely new and costly delivery and storage infrastructure for consumer
use. And whatever happened to nuclear? China and India are building
dozens of nuclear power plants as if their future depends upon them. Yet
our post-Three-Mile-Island safety concerns and our post-9/11 security
concerns have left us unwilling even to discuss nuclear power.
We need to
start now, seriously, to make existing alternatives more
cost-effective (profitable), and to research alternative energy sources
with potential we only can imagine, such as genetically engineering
bacteria to emit hydrogen (Oklahoma Gazette, Nov. 23, 2005: Alternative
Fuel Options).
We can't wait
until the next energy crisis or oil embargo. Oklahoma should make
available to government-academia-business consortiums the research
funding necessary to begin to cure our addiction.
If our state
can provide $18 million of tax credits for rocket planes, Oklahoma
should be able to support more down-to-earth research as well. After
all, comparatively few of us ever may fly into space, but
here on this planet all
of us rely on oil and gas for electricity, heat and transportation, not
to mention the extraordinary array of consumer, industrial, health and
farm products also made from petroleum derivatives.
We must, and
Oklahoma can, do something to advance our own Manhattan-Project-style
energy research, with the same sense of urgency that ended World War II,
to adequately address this addiction that truly should be considered a
primary threat to our national security.
We have
experience to guide us. Y2K turned out to be a non-event, not because it
wasn't a threat, but because business and academia and governments
around the world took it seriously enough to begin working on software
fixes years ahead of the new millennium.
So let's set a
realistic deadline, under which we Americans always seem to
excel, as with Y2K or the Manhattan Project. Let's set a 30-year agenda
with 5-year, measurable checkpoints so that by 2036 our children
and grandchildren no longer will be dependent on, at least,
imported oil. (It can be done. Brazil
is practically energy self-sufficient after a 30-year sugar-cane ethanol
project.)
These may be fightin' words here in
Oklahoma oil and gas country, especially with considerably fatter
royalty and dividend checks in the mail these days. We've been given
only fleeting glimpses of the downside of our country's petroleum
dependency in the last 30 years, but like amnesia victims, we struggle
now to remember the bad times.
Like Y2K and the Manhattan Project,
though, we can overcome such a seemingly insurmountable problem in the
next 30 years if we begin with new resolve – now – and not leave
it to our children's children.
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