My Energy Recommendations

"Studies" left a question for me on an earlier post:

On a related note for pollution. What would be your energy policy? This is Boone Pickens energy plan, which harps on Reduction of foreign oil sources by switching cars to natural gas, increase of Wind power in the midwestern plains, and increase of solar energy production. He treats certain concepts like bio-fuels as a joke. Doesn't talk about geo thermal, and doesn't even consider the possibility of getting rid of our reliance on coal burning as our biggest energy source.

He also left a link to a YouTube video on T. Boone Pickens' natural gas/vehicle fuel idea, apparently a presentation at an automobile convention in Las Vegas. The video is 41 minutes long, and I've only watched the first couple of minutes so far, but here's the link. As it happens, I had found a shorter piece earlier that lays out his plan, and have been meaning to post it. I'll come back to this in a bit.

This is a great question, and one I spend quite a it of time considering. I'm not going to try to answer it all at once; as I think about framing an answer, I find many of my idea are negative- i.e. things I think are bad ideas that we shouldn't pursue. For example:

• We shouldn't undertake a massive drilling program in the misguided belief that we can increase the supply of petroleum in the short to middle term. The expectation of cheaper oil will maintain a high level of demand over the short term, and is very unlikely to produce enough supply to meet current and projected demand over the medium to long term.


• McCain's idea of a $300 million "X Prize" for a better battery is silly. R&D is going on intensively right now to develop better batteries, and the economic payoff for a longer-lived, higher energy-density battery will be hundreds of times more than his proposed prize.


• I have very mixed feelings about nuclear, but until we bite the bullet and decide how and where we are going to deal with the spent fuel, I don't believe that fission should be dramatically increased as an energy source. I don't recommend a moratorium on new plants, but doubling our nuclear generation of electricity doesn't seem responsible.


• There is a lot of discussion about carbon sequestration, in particular, injecting CO2 into geologic reservoirs to be stored for very long time periods. I know there are what are called under-pressurized reservoirs, where the hydrostatic pressure is lower than in layers above. Many of these can be demonstrated to have been sealed for millions of years- surely a time period that would be satisfactory for storing CO2 for human ends. However, I would like to see more public discussion of potential risks of this practice, and what proportion of generated energy would be required to separate and store the gas. Would it be both safe and cost-effective? I haven't seen enough information to convince me.


• I believe we should back off corn ethanol immediately. The effects of this practice on the food market have been very disturbing, and have reverberated around the world. Unfortunately, billions of dollars have been invested in ethanol plants, and neither energy corporations nor farmers want to hear this.

However, each of the above items could be recast as strategies we could pursue:

• We should continue exploring for accessible oil and drilling when the environmental impact is considered acceptable. This is sort of weasely: risk some might find acceptable might not be considered so by others. The fact is we will continue using petroleum, even if we find plentiful alternative energy sources. It's used in plastics, biochemicals (pharmaceuticals, pesticides, etc.), construction (asphalt, blacktop, tar paper, etc.), and many other non-energy applications. It is central to our lifestyles. As I discussed in an earlier post, the process of exploration is time- and capitol-intensive. It is unlikely private interests would invest in exploring in an area unless they know they will be granted drilling rights when and if they find a promising target. In other words, unless we open up (for example) the California and Florida coasts for drilling, no one is going to invest the hundreds of millions or billions it takes to find out if there are likely petroleum resources present. I am against opening ANWR (as an aside, I've been spelling this ANWAR, which is how it pronounced. The correct initialism stands for Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.), but I think we should consider opening coastal waters for drilling. I would prefer to undertake intensive exploration, but as I say, that just won't happen if drilling rights don't come with the package. The message that has to be emphasized with this is two-fold: first, this potential oil won't be in the pipe for a decade or more, and second, even when it is in the pipe, it will likely not amount to a very large flow compared to our current rate of consumption.
• I believe that the free market can deal with a lot of problems, but it has an ability to externalize real costs (e.g., dumping CO2 out a chimney costs a coal-fired electricity plant next to nothing, but it costs human society as a whole a great deal over time) This, in my view, is where government has the right and responsibility to intervene and regulate to impose realistic costs. In the case of more efficient batteries, market forces are clearly pushing industry to invest in research; I don't feel that government intervention through subsidies or "X Prizes" is called for. In the case of fusion power, the Holy Grail of energy, I feel our government should be more supportive. (There's a good discussion of fission vs. fusion here, and I posted a longish comment that is relevant to this post). Generally speaking, where the free market recognizes incentives to pursue potential energy sources, the government should stand back- to the extent that costs are being properly counted- and where the potential payoff is too speculative for the market to invest, but there is good reason to suppose there will be a payoff over the long run, the government should provide incentives/subsidies to encourage pursuing them. To provide two more examples, I do not think the government should be subsidizing big oil. I do think we should be providing tax credits to home and land owners for buying small-scale wind or solar installations. If and when solar and wind become competitive or even cheaper than commercial sources, such tax credits should be terminated.
• Nuclear has real potential. One strategy, which we have been half-heartedly pursuing since roughly 1980, is to take the spent fuel and store it over geologic time deeply buried in the ground. If we are to continue with this approach, we need to quit screwing around and do it. The vast holding ponds at our nation's nuclear reactors are very dangerous, and we need to lock them up, the sooner the better. Another approach to dealing with the waste is reprocessing; this is the route France has taken. No nation generates a larger proportion of its electricity from nuclear than France. Fission creates a toxic mash of many elements, some radioactive, some not. This "mash" can be chemically separated into its constituents, which can then be routed into different paths or uses. Of the radioactive isotopes, many are short-lived. (I'll take cobalt-60 as the outer edge of "short-lived;" with a half-life of about five years, only 0.1% would be present after 50 years. Others would effectively be gone within months to a decade) The short-lived isotopes are the most intensely radioactive- if you think about it, this makes sense. If you have a mole (6.02 X 10^23) of atoms with a half-life of a year, 3.01X 10^23 will break down and give off energy in that year. If the half-life is 10,000 years, it will take 10,000 times longer for the same number of atoms to break down and give off energy. Hence, short-lived isotopes are much more intensely radioactive than long-lived isotopes. But they go away fast; long-lived isotopes remain dangerous, on human scales, effectively forever. The most problematic product of reprocessing is plutonium, which of course is the material of choice for fission bombs. Now I'm not positive about this, and I'll do some looking around to make certain, but I believe plutonium functions fine as nuclear fuel itself. We don't have to use it for weapons. We can "burn" it to heat and light our homes. Reprocessing also recovers unfissioned uranium 235. In spent fuel, a significant portion of the U-235 is unused; it seems wasteful to simply shove it in a hole and forget about it. So to summarize, reprocessing separates waste components. Short-lived isotopes with no commercial value can be sequestered on site; within a decade or few, they will have broken down. Plutonium and recovered U-235 can be fed back into the energy generation stream. Long-lived isotopes with no commercial uses will still need to go to some long-term storage facility- and so we return to Yucca Mountain. Either certify it and open it, or find an alternative. The drawbacks of reprocessing are 1) it's a technically demanding, dangerous undertaking. Remember this waste is intensely radioactive. 2) Security issues: back to plutonium- at both the reprocessing plant and in transit to a plutonium reactor, this material needs to be protected and guarded intensely. The difficult part of making an atomic bomb is getting the material. That is not to say assembling the device is trivial, but compared to concentrating either the U-235 or plutonium, my understanding is that engineering the bomb is a minor difficulty. 3) Reprocessing nuclear waste is currently forbidden by law in this country, I believe due to drawback #2. 4) As I pointed out above, current technology still leaves a certain amount of material that needs to be buried and stored for many millenia. Reprocessing will not remove the need for a Yucca Mountain or its equivalent, just reduce the necessary size or increase its functional lifetime. The answer to Studies' original question, "What would I do?" would include looking very carefully at fuel waste reprocessing, with a slow move toward more fission power for electricity.
• The US has been called the Saudi Arabia of coal; we have enough to last us centuries. The issue of global climate change throws a money wrench into this option. I would like to see more discussion of strategies for locking up carbon in one form or another to keep it out of the atmosphere. This probably deserves a post of its own because there are many different approaches, each of which has its own drawbacks, limitations and benefits.
• Sugar cane ethanol is about seven times more efficient than corn in terms of ethanol per acre; the problem here is that the US does not have much land with a climate appropriate for sugar cane. We should end the tariff (intended to protect US corn interests) on sugar ethanol from Brazil. Cellulosic alcohol, derived from the digestion and breakdown of cellulose (the structural component of woody plant material), could take advantage of marginal croplands poorly suited for producing food. This is not a mature technology, and I think subsidizing research to push it faster is a good idea. We can't afford- more generally, the world can't afford- for us to use food to run our cars.

Some other positive actions would include

• Demand higher efficiencies for CAFE standards- the recent regulations passed this spring were pathetic in terms of their ambitions.
• Get our national rail system up to modern standards, both in terms of passenger and freight. In the east, it would be far more efficient and less expensive to travel on the order of 500 miles or less by rail than by plane if we had modern high-speed passenger rail. The west coast corridor (LA, SF, Portland, Seattle) seems a little problematic to me, but I think there's potential there. The amount of cross country freight traveling by truck is insane. Most of the distance should be covered by rail, with local delivery by truck.
• Promotion of small-scale co-generation. Individual home and land owners should be encouraged to invest in small-scale electrical generation (roof-top solar, wind, hydropower if they have a stream with some drop), and electrical utilities should be required to buy excess for distribution to the grid (I believe they are under current law, but this is another item I need to check before I state that it's so unequivocally). Individually generated sources are not going to be sufficient to cover everyone's needs all the time, but they can supplement the grid. During poor periods, the user will buy from the grid. During good periods the grid can buy from the user. The problem here is the high initial investment, which could be somewhat offset by tax credits.
• Individual awareness and decision-making. Even though I have this listed last, I think it's probably the most important one of all. Think about the energy choices you make. Turn off lights. Switch to CF bulbs (I bought my first one nearly five years ago, it averages 6 hours a day and it still hasn't burnt out). Put on thermal underwear and wear a sweater during the winter, and turn down your thermostat. Invest the extra few thousand in that hybrid. Combine car chores to save miles. Use the SUV only for full family outings. The problem I see all the time is that people use resources so mindlessly- they just don't think about it. Well, think about it. A national leader has a pulpit from which he can try to convince the American people to consider their energy decisions, but aside from Gore, very few have chosen to do so. Carter gets ridiculed to this day for saying we all need to sacrifice a little comfort for energy security, and that we need to think more carefully about the way we consume energy. After all, weren't the 80's and 90's flush with energy? Well, yes. And now we're in a worse situation than we were in the late seventies, and our addiction is more intense than ever. If we had taken Carter seriously, we wouldn't be having this discussion now.

Now this is not an exhaustive list. There are lots of little things I haven't hit here. And overall, I don't think there's any one or two big strategies that will get us through this current situation; I think that a lot of little energy sources, and a lot of little energy savings, will be the path toward weaning ourselves from the current over-dependence on previously under-priced monolithic energy sources. But these are some of the larger-stroke items that I think are a move in the right direction.