Washington We Have a Problem

The only reason we ever became addicted to oil was it was cheap and plentiful. It is no longer cheap and the Wall Street Journal is reporting that over the next few decades supplies may not keep up with demand at any price. While we’ve tinkered with bio fuels and disastrous unintended consequences for the food supply the world has been using up the real stuff faster than it can be produced. We are just now realizing that all the corn and soybeans the planet can grow won’t make up the shortage, and we’ll still have to eat. In thinking about this it’s important to understand we are talking about transportation, not electricity though the hybrid vehicles can help. Most of the petroleum we use goes to the production of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel with home heating oil coming in a distant fourth. We can address needs for electricity with nuclear power, wind and photovoltaic farms, and improved capture of waste natural gas but none of that is going to get us across town, not any time soon. As much of what used to be called the third world emerges into the modern era they are going to demand the modes of transportation that go with it. We are going to have to find fuel for them, we are going to have to find it fast, and we are going to have to find a substitute for petroleum. We really have only one alternative, coal. We have a lot of it, it’s readily accessible, and the basic technology for converting it to liquid fuels has been around at least since the 1920s. Self appointed environmentalists object because they say it’s dirty. It is but coal advocates say they can clean it up, and at a reasonable cost. The Department of Energy agrees. DOE has looked at designs they think can take the filthiest, lowest grade coal, cleanse it of pollutants, convert it to liquid fuels, and capture and store the resulting carbon dioxide. The processes work well in tests and on a commercial scale DOE estimates a cost equivalent to oil at about $55 per barrel. With current prices somewhere north of $130 and expected to go higher it’s time to stop dithering and find out if they are right. Required facilities can be brought on line in a few years, not decades. Nothing else on the horizon has that potential. Environmentalists had better get on board with this if they want a place at the table. We will do it regardless. We have no choice. We should insist on doing everything we reasonably can to protect the air but the operative word is reasonable. We can also take measures to minimize and recover from damage due to strip mining but we need that coal. In the short term we have no other way to get required transportation fuels. One other point: The United States has more than a quarter of the world’s recoverable coal reserves, far more than any other country. That coal contains more energy than all the oil in Saudi Arabia. It has the potential to turn us into a net energy exporter, reverse our trade deficits, and do more for our economy than anything since the invention of the internal combustion engine. We’ve been working on it since the Carter administration. We should have been doing more, a lot more. We need to be addressing global warming and all the other energy related issues too but this is a problem we can solve. It’s way past time we got on with it. I’m writing this while on a driving trip where I paid $4.00 for a gallon of gasoline for the first time. I don’t expect to go back to the days when I could fill up my tank without serious damage to a $20 bill but I’d like to ask my elected representatives how that happened and I don’t want to hear about greedy oil company executives. I want to know what we can do about it and why we haven’t done it already.