A Glimpse into America’s Energy Future?

“Not since the Arab oil embargo of the early 1970s have the times been more propitious for a major shift in the way America uses energy,” writes the New York Times Robert B. Semple, Jr.

Semple offers a fascinating series of observations about emerging renewable energy technologies that ultimately may wean the United States off foreign energy dependence.

• Developing these technologies into a practical form will require public and private money “and, particularly in the United States, a sense of urgency and a great deal of political will.”

• Change will not come quickly. After all, the current energy delivery infrastructure is a lumbering elephant that was constructed at great cost and that has not changed significantly for decades.

• Roughly $720 million flows out of the country every day to support our oil addition.

• There are many ideas out there but only a comparative few will help us in the short-term --- the sorts of things Mark Hall, an Alabama Cooperative Extension regional agent specializing in bioenergy education, aptly described as “bridge technologies.”

• America already has made impressive strides toward becoming more energy efficient. The United States now uses 47 percent less energy per dollar of economic output than it did 3 decades ago, amounting to savings of about $1 billion a day.

• The full adoption of energy efficient vehicles, buildings and industries could shrink projected U.S. oil revenues by as much as half by 2025. We wouldn’t even need renewable fuels to do this.

• Corn ethanol is competitive with gasoline in the United States, as long as the price of oil is at $45 or above. In terms of energy independence, this is good news, because this price is far below the current oil price.

• The problem is that there simply is not enough corn ethanol to address our energy needs. By one estimate, for example, devoting the entire U.S. corn crop to ethanol production in 2005 --- an impossible goal in every respect --- would offset less than one-sixth of the nation’s gasoline consumption.

• This is precisely the reason why many energy experts are touting the merits of cellulosic ethanol, which offers several advantages over conventional ethanol. Cellulosic crops can be grown specifically for energy, and their energy output is five times more than the energy required to produce it.

• Hydrogen may prove to be another good renewable energy source, though the big challenge remains developing economical ways to make it. There’s also the added challenge of storing it, transporting it to a nationwide network of filling stations and, of course, building those filling stations.

• More nuclear power plants will be an inevitable outcome of our push for energy independence. Why? Because many people are not convinced that global warming can be addressed without them.

• We will be stuck with coal as an energy source for a very long time. Consequently, our challenge will be finding ways to deal with the carbon dioxide produced from burning coal. One option is to sequester it underground.

• Solar energy remains especially popular among environmentalists. One option would involve building a massive photovoltaic cell generating station of approximately 90 square miles somewhere in the western United States. The energy generated from this station could meet the country’s entire peak demand, assuming that a way is found to distribute it evenly.

• The bad news is that complete energy independence is still light years away, and it may even prove to be unattainable in the long run. The good news is that some degree of energy self-sufficiency is inevitable. In fact, it’s already become a central theme of the nation’s political discourse.

Posted by Jim Langcuster at October 11, 2006 03:35 PM | TrackBack