Energy 2
These thoughts are in reference to an article which appeared on October 2, 2007 in the Wall Street Journal about BIOENERGY by Juan Enriquez. The article is more a review of what has been going on in various laboratories and other places as well as a wish list of things that might happen, rather than a hard, practical roadmap to seriously improving our current energy infrastructure.
What is clearly omitted from the article is a statement about the fundamental strategic priorities the USA needs to maintain to guarantee its political and economic position in the world today and during the next 30 years or so.
Only currently available and competitively priced and readily available supplies of energy can drive our economy and defense posture. Consequently, we must first of all give top priority to making sure we (the USA) adequately control our sources and delivery methods of energy generally.
Unfortunately, shortsighted, though possibly well-meaning efforts since the early 70-ies, exclusively focused on reducing damage to the environment and as a result created impossible political and regulatory strictures on our conventional energy suppliers. These strictures in turn created a stagnating energy processing and distribution system, largely dependent on uncontrollable and frequently anti-American suppliers. As a result we have not only lost control of a major portion of crude oil supplies, we have also become limited in the amount of crude we can process after it arrives. Worst of all, we have become entirely dependent on foreign countries and their government-controlled organizations to set the price of crude oil at any level they want. And they exercise that ability with barely disguised glee to suck as much money out of us as possible while making sure our economy does not implode, killing their gold spigot.
While we have enough coal for a thousand years, we have mostly made it impossible for local suppliers to produce because of the downstream difficulties at powerplants that MUST clean up their exhaust acts because our politicians and Green People demand it. Simple as that. Nice for a politician if you can create these things without having to worry about feasibility or cost. At least you can brag about it and get re-elected.
Finally, nuclear energy was condemned the same way 40 years ago and as a result we are really at the mercy of some very unpleasant foreigners when it comes to energy independence.
So instead of building lots of nuclear plants, clean coal processes and drilling a hell of a lot more oil wells from Alaska to Continental shelf etc, we buy crude from abroad and put it in a Piggy Bank, a big hole in the ground known as our strategic reserve!!! I would have preferred more little holes in the ground and each one making its own contribution to our crude oil inventory and importantly, under our own oil company's controls.
This is a long preamble to the question as to my opinion about the article but I always try to put these kind of things in a broader perspective because unless you do so you have no basis for prioritizing anything.
While there seems to be some kind of unspoken agreement that we really should become energy independent, the popular media and political world do not have the guts and possibly neither the brains to spell out what that means in practical terms.
Because of the currently inordinate length of time it takes to plan, arrange permits and sites it means that we cannot do very much about it for a number of years, say 5 to 10 years before anything would be built. Obviously, this process needs to be simpolified and in addition all other shackles under which our energy companies have been laboring for so long, will have to be essentially removed. If not, we will most certainly become a second rate country before the middle of the current century. The choice is ours.
The idea of bio-energy is not new. Modern science will be able to work out some spectacular new ideas, but it will take many years and much money to bring them to practical applications. But this cannot be done by political mandate. It is our energy companies, which know their business, that should be given the task to make us energy independent, each in his own area of advanced expertise.
Within such a mostly free-market framework, bio-energy processes will be appreciated the moment they show real promise. That's the way good things always work. It wasn't the government that decided whale oil was a bad idea, it was the early oil and gas companies that changed that.
Basically, I have no problem with Mr. Juan Enriquez' article, but it is only an idea and wish list. Unfortunately, we need a lot of time to develop some of the things he mentions, test them in terms of production costs and end use consequences before anybody can really benefit from them on a large scale. Upscaling a successful laboratory process very often doesn't quite make it in the real world. In the mean time we do need to keep things rolling more conventionally, hence the urgency to expand all methods of enlarging currently available energy sources by removing silly restrictions based on misguided fears that energy companies do not respect nature. Poppycock. But it does need a strongwilled President and a responsible Congress to do all that, notwithstanding some howling from the liberal sidelines. The protesters have no responsibility for anything except for having created a culture of political delays and misinformation that could very well create a national disaster before long.
And that brings me back to my starting point that most of the article's recommendations are purely academic if we do not first of all work with what we now have to create the independence we need to provide the time it will take to move into better energy conversion and use patterns than we currently enjoy.
Unfortunately, that will take a lot more than our current political climate is capable of delivering in my view, so I have my doubts that anything sensible will be undertaken shortly. But there will be no end to people coming up with interesting ideas to produce "clean" energy, like windmills!!! Sadly, they all miss the point.
What is clearly omitted from the article is a statement about the fundamental strategic priorities the USA needs to maintain to guarantee its political and economic position in the world today and during the next 30 years or so.
Only currently available and competitively priced and readily available supplies of energy can drive our economy and defense posture. Consequently, we must first of all give top priority to making sure we (the USA) adequately control our sources and delivery methods of energy generally.
Unfortunately, shortsighted, though possibly well-meaning efforts since the early 70-ies, exclusively focused on reducing damage to the environment and as a result created impossible political and regulatory strictures on our conventional energy suppliers. These strictures in turn created a stagnating energy processing and distribution system, largely dependent on uncontrollable and frequently anti-American suppliers. As a result we have not only lost control of a major portion of crude oil supplies, we have also become limited in the amount of crude we can process after it arrives. Worst of all, we have become entirely dependent on foreign countries and their government-controlled organizations to set the price of crude oil at any level they want. And they exercise that ability with barely disguised glee to suck as much money out of us as possible while making sure our economy does not implode, killing their gold spigot.
While we have enough coal for a thousand years, we have mostly made it impossible for local suppliers to produce because of the downstream difficulties at powerplants that MUST clean up their exhaust acts because our politicians and Green People demand it. Simple as that. Nice for a politician if you can create these things without having to worry about feasibility or cost. At least you can brag about it and get re-elected.
Finally, nuclear energy was condemned the same way 40 years ago and as a result we are really at the mercy of some very unpleasant foreigners when it comes to energy independence.
So instead of building lots of nuclear plants, clean coal processes and drilling a hell of a lot more oil wells from Alaska to Continental shelf etc, we buy crude from abroad and put it in a Piggy Bank, a big hole in the ground known as our strategic reserve!!! I would have preferred more little holes in the ground and each one making its own contribution to our crude oil inventory and importantly, under our own oil company's controls.
This is a long preamble to the question as to my opinion about the article but I always try to put these kind of things in a broader perspective because unless you do so you have no basis for prioritizing anything.
While there seems to be some kind of unspoken agreement that we really should become energy independent, the popular media and political world do not have the guts and possibly neither the brains to spell out what that means in practical terms.
Because of the currently inordinate length of time it takes to plan, arrange permits and sites it means that we cannot do very much about it for a number of years, say 5 to 10 years before anything would be built. Obviously, this process needs to be simpolified and in addition all other shackles under which our energy companies have been laboring for so long, will have to be essentially removed. If not, we will most certainly become a second rate country before the middle of the current century. The choice is ours.
The idea of bio-energy is not new. Modern science will be able to work out some spectacular new ideas, but it will take many years and much money to bring them to practical applications. But this cannot be done by political mandate. It is our energy companies, which know their business, that should be given the task to make us energy independent, each in his own area of advanced expertise.
Within such a mostly free-market framework, bio-energy processes will be appreciated the moment they show real promise. That's the way good things always work. It wasn't the government that decided whale oil was a bad idea, it was the early oil and gas companies that changed that.
Basically, I have no problem with Mr. Juan Enriquez' article, but it is only an idea and wish list. Unfortunately, we need a lot of time to develop some of the things he mentions, test them in terms of production costs and end use consequences before anybody can really benefit from them on a large scale. Upscaling a successful laboratory process very often doesn't quite make it in the real world. In the mean time we do need to keep things rolling more conventionally, hence the urgency to expand all methods of enlarging currently available energy sources by removing silly restrictions based on misguided fears that energy companies do not respect nature. Poppycock. But it does need a strongwilled President and a responsible Congress to do all that, notwithstanding some howling from the liberal sidelines. The protesters have no responsibility for anything except for having created a culture of political delays and misinformation that could very well create a national disaster before long.
And that brings me back to my starting point that most of the article's recommendations are purely academic if we do not first of all work with what we now have to create the independence we need to provide the time it will take to move into better energy conversion and use patterns than we currently enjoy.
Unfortunately, that will take a lot more than our current political climate is capable of delivering in my view, so I have my doubts that anything sensible will be undertaken shortly. But there will be no end to people coming up with interesting ideas to produce "clean" energy, like windmills!!! Sadly, they all miss the point.
posted by Schaesberg at 12:38 PM
