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By Kelpie Wilson
Gas prices are on the rise again and news analysts are kicking it around, wondering who is being ripped off this time. But geologists, scientists and even some economists suspect that unlike other gas shortages, this one is the real thing, or at least the beginning of the real thing: production has peaked and the era of cheap oil is about to end.
The consequences of the end of oil are monumental beyond any overstatement. Without leadership at this moment, our chances of avoiding future chaos are slim. But who will provide the leadership?
President Bush showed up in California last week for Earth Day. In Sacramento, he met with representatives of the California Fuel Cell Partnership, a consortium of companies and government agencies that promotes hydrogen-powered fuel cell vehicles. Bush happily hyped the "hydrogen economy" as the ultimate solution to our oil addiction. Meanwhile, to deal with the short term gas price rise, he instructed the EPA to start dropping environmental requirements for warm weather fuel additives. We'll save a few pennies at the pump but our lungs will pay for it.
The hydrogen economy is an interesting concept. Hydrogen, the lightest element, consisting of one proton and one electron, can be dissociated from water (H2O) by applying an electrical current. The idea is to use electricity generated by nuclear plants or potentially solar and wind generators, to produce hydrogen from water. Hydrogen is most efficiently burned in fuel cells, which are basically a battery that recharges with a fuel like hydrogen or natural gas.
There are major challenges to overcome before this idea could even approach implementation. One is the complexity and cost of fuel cells which are not at all a mature technology for widespread use. Another is the problem of hydrogen storage. It takes a tremendous amount of energy to compress and cool hydrogen to a liquid state for storage in a tank. Finally there's the source of electricity for generating hydrogen: a phenomenal ramp-up of nuclear and/or renewable power generation will be required because hydrogen is not the actual source of energy. It is merely an energy carrier, a way to store energy and pack it along to keep us moving down the road.
Nearly everyone agrees that in his January SOTA, Bush did something positive by admitting that America is addicted to oil. Admitting one's addiction is the first step on the familiar 12-step addiction recovery program.
But it is only half of the first step. The other half is recognizing that we are powerless to change without turning ourselves over to a higher power, be it religious or secular. Without completing even the first step, there is no progress on the road to recovery and the addict has only freed himself to get more creative about finding the next fix while deluding himself that something has been accomplished. And so the Bush solutions to our energy addiction boil down to three expensive pipe dreams, as embodied in the 2005 Energy Bill.
The first pipe dream is that billions more in subsidies (the 2005 Energy Bill provides $5 billion in new tax breaks and government spending programs) to the giant US oil companies will increase domestic oil and gas production enough to free us from imported oil. One problem with this dream is that sucking more oil out of the ground will only dig us deeper into the global warming hole while it pollutes sensitive arctic and coastal ecosystems. Another problem is that all that money does nothing to build a permanent or even a transitional energy solution. Oil companies are reaping windfall profits with no obligation to invest them in renewable solutions.
Oil industry subsidies turn us into the equivalent of the crack whore who gives it away for free to her pimp.
The second pipe dream is the hydrogen/nuclear economy. In the Bush scheme of things, hydrogen is joined at the hip with nuclear-generated electricity. Without going into all the pitfalls of nuclear power - the safety problem, the waste storage problem, the nuclear weapons proliferation problem - just consider the scale of nuclear build-up required to replace gasoline with hydrogen.
US gasoline consumption as of March 2005 was some 320,500,000 gallons per day. Researchers at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory claim that a single Next Generation nuclear plant will be able to produce the hydrogen equivalent of 200,000 gallons of gasoline each day. At that rate, it would require
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