Powering the Future: A Scientist's Guide to Energy Independence

by Daniel B. Botkin

  If supplies are dwindling, why watch petroleum go up in smoke?

  On May 15, 2007, the Wall Street Journal reported that Aramco, a highly profitable state-run Saudi oil giant, had signed a huge deal with Dow Chemical. Why would the world’s largest producer of fuel oil be interested in making a deal with a chemical company? Since petroleum is an excellent base for many artificial chemicals, a large number of very popular and very profitable products—including most plastics—that most of us would be unwilling to do without are made with them. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Aramco-Dow agreement is supposed to lead in 2013 to a joint venture that will build plants to produce 7 million tons a year of these chemicals.41 And by the end of May 2008, Dow Chemical announced that it would have to raise the price of its petrochemicals 20% because of the rising price of crude oil.42 Why waste whatever petroleum we have left by burning it all up fast as fuel? Why not use alternative energy sources and save petroleum for other important purposes that use much less of it?

  Environmental effects of petroleum

  Petroleum causes pollution at every stage, from mining and recovery to refining, transporting, and using it as fuel. Drilling wells can cause direct pollution via oil spills. Drilling also often involves injecting watery liquids into the wells; later released as drilling muds, these cause their own toxic pollution.

  The notorious Exxon Valdez oil spill taught us that transporting oil by tanker ships can lead to disaster. Transporting oil by pipeline or truck can also lead to spills, because pipes break and trucks sometimes have accidents.

  Crude oil—oil as it comes out of the ground—is many chemicals mixed together, and these must be separated into gasoline, kerosene, diesel fuel, heating oil, and heavier materials. This is what a refinery does: Like a giant chemistry set, it heats crude oil and separates its chemicals according to their density. The strong odors that make passersby wrinkle their noses are petroleum chemicals that the refinery has released into the environment—chemical pollutants. Travelers nearing the end of the New Jersey Turnpike on their way to the tunnels into New York City know exactly what I’m talking about.

  These are just an indication of the potential for refineries to leak chemicals into the air, soil, and groundwater; to suffer accidental fires and breakages that produce more pollution; and to create sites that are heavily toxic for future generations.

  Effects of the Exxon Valdez Alaskan oil spill are still with us

  On March 24,1989, the tanker Exxon Valdez spilled 10.8 million gallons of crude oil into Prince Edward Sound, Alaska. Although it was not the largest spill ever, the oil slick extended over 3,000 square miles and inflicted heavy damage. The wildlife affected have been estimated to include 250,000 to 500,000 seabirds, at least 1,000 sea otters, about 12 river otters, 300 harbor seals, 250 bald eagles, and 22 killer whales.43 Nearly 19 years later, the spill still affects Alaska’s fisheries, and lawsuits over its effects include the Alaskan Eskimos’ $2.5 billion suit for damages.44 Costs of this kind are not usually counted in tallying the total costs of petroleum.

  Petroleum exploration versus conservation of endangered species

  The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is a classic example of the conflict between the search for more petroleum and the conservation of wildlife and endangered species. The refuge is in beautiful country. It was established in 1960 and expanded in 1980 to cover 19 million acres, larger than the combined area of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont (Figure 1.8, top). It is the primary breeding ground for 123,000 caribou of the Porcupine herd (named for the Porcupine River [Figure 1.8, bottom]) and is also a major wintering ground for this population.

  Figure 1.8 Map of Alaskan National Wildlife Refuges (top). Each dark area is a refuge. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the one discussed in this book, is listed as “Arctic” at the top right. Caribou within the refuge (bottom). (Courtesy of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service: http://arctic.fws.gov/caribou.htm. See also http://arctic.fws.gov/pdf/ispch.pdf)

  The refuge also contains an estimated 10 billion barrels of oil. How much of this could be recovered is uncertain—conservative estimates are about 3 billion barrels. The possibility of drilling for oil in the refuge was remote until the 21st century; the George W. Bush administration pushed for it, arguing that it would help make the United States more energy-independent. But the United States has been using about 7.5 billion barrels of oil a year, so at best all the oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would buy the U.S. less than a year’s worth of oil. At the time of this writing, neither the Obama administration nor Congress has made any decisions about drilling there.

  Here are some of the other ways that petroleum pollutes. Burning petroleum pollutes the air, creating health problems and damaging plants and wildlife. Among the primary petroleum-generated air pollutants are ozone, nitrogen oxides, and particulates. Also, pipelines and storage tanks leak. In 2001 a rifle bullet punctured the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, resulting in a small but nonetheless damaging spill. Among the good news is that although the 2002 Alaska earthquake ruptured the earth under the pipeline, the line stayed intact.

  The bottom line

  • Known petroleum sources will run out in less than 50 years (according to conventional analysis) or perhaps in 100 years or so (unconventional analysis).

  • Whatever the exact time when petroleum runs out, we have a choice: We can devote a large portion of our time, resources, and energy to seeking new oil and improving extraction efficiency, or we can seek sustainable and cleaner energy sources.

  • Petroleum is one of the three most polluting energy sources (the other two are nuclear power and coal). The potential for pollution will increase as conventional oil sources run out and the world turns to the unconventional sources: tar sands, oil shales, and deep ocean drilling.

  • In an ideal world, the search for new energy sources would move away from petroleum, but so much money can be made from obtaining and selling crude oil that oil development will likely continue in the short term despite increasing pollution and increasing knowledge of its health and environmental effects.

  2. Natural gas

  Natural gas is capturing the public’s imagination, especially since many well-known people, from T. Boone Pickens to Nancy Pelosi, have praised it as the cheap, clean, and abundant fuel for the future. But new technologies for drilling for natural gas will have large environmental effects, like this sinkhole in Texas (Figure 2.1) where large amounts of water were pumped into the ground to release gas from the rocks below.

  Figure 2.1 A large tank, center, falls into a sinkhole near Daisetta, Texas. The sinkhole was caused by mining beneath the surface for natural gas. (Source: © AP Photo/KHOU-TV, Bobby Bracken)1

  Key facts

  • Almost a quarter of all energy used in the world and in the United States is provided by natural gas.

  • At current rates of use, the world’s known reserves of natural gas will last about 60–65 years, to about 2070—longer than petroleum.

  • But if the United States seeks energy independence and obtains natural gas only from within U.S. borders, our reserves will be exhausted in just 16–17 years, even at the 2006 rate of use.

  • In contrast to petroleum, natural gas has played a small role in powering vehicles. In the United States, about 20% of it is used to heat homes and about one-quarter of it to generate electricity (some of which, of course, may be used to power vehicles, especially trains). Most of the rest is used for office buildings and manufacturing.

  Is Utah leading the way to the future fueling of cars and trucks?

  It may seem surprising, but until recently natural gas was considered an unusable waste and was burned off at oil wells and refineries since it was difficult and dangerous to transport. That problem was solved by long-distance pipelines and by transporting liquefied natural gas by ship, train, and truck. Utah was the first of the 50 states to make a major push to use natural gas for automobiles, and by the end of August 2008, when gasoline was surgi
ng above $4 a gallon, the idea was a big hit. Unusual everywhere else at the time, compressed natural gas was said to be widely available for automobiles in Utah, and it was cheap, about 87 cents for enough to run a car the same distance as a gallon of gasoline.

  The idea had a lot of support—“Utah shows that the technology is here and the fuel works and the fuel is better than foreign oil,” said T. Boone Pickens, who has been promoting natural gas and pushing for a big transition from petroleum to alternative energy by using natural gas as the major intermediary. When Jon M. Huntsman Jr. was governor of Utah (he’s now the American ambassador to China), he spent $12,000 of his own money to convert the state SUVs he drove so they could run on natural gas. “We can create a model that others can look to,” he said. “Every state in America can make this a reality.”2 T. Boone Pickens’s energy plan, available on his website, states that “natural gas is our country’s second largest energy resource and a vital component of our energy supply. Ninety-eight percent of the natural gas used in the United States is from North America. But 70% of our oil is purchased from foreign nations.” It goes on to say that “domestic natural gas reserves are twice that of petroleum. And new discoveries of natural gas and ongoing development of renewable biogas are continually adding to existing reserves.”3 Congress got into the act as well, with Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, saying on “Meet the Press” that “you can have a transition with natural gas that is cheap, abundant, and clean.”

  It sounded like a good idea. But at the same time in Utah there were hints that natural gas might not be the easy panacea that Pickens, Pelosi, and Governor Huntsman were suggesting. At rush hour, stations selling the gas were finding that the pressure was running low, and sometimes people couldn’t find enough to fill more than half a tank. The supply couldn’t meet the demand—and that was when only 6,000 of the 2.7 million vehicles registered in Utah were running on natural gas. Not only was there a shortage of filling stations selling natural gas in the state, but also a car’s tank could hold only enough compressed gas to take you about half as far as a tank of gasoline.

  Still, natural gas was promoted across the country, and plans were developing rapidly to increase the number of natural-gas-powered cars through government subsidies. The New York Times reported in August 2008 that “a proposal on the ballot in California this fall would allow the state to sell $5 billion in bonds to finance rebates of $2,000 and more to buyers of natural gas vehicles. Legislation has been introduced in Congress to offer more tax credits to producers and consumers and mandate the installation of gas pumps in certain service stations, with the goal of making natural gas cars 10 percent of the nation’s vehicle fleet over the next decade.”4

  How much energy does and could natural gas provide?

  At present, natural gas provides 22% of the energy used in the United States, which makes us one of the world’s heaviest users of this form of energy. About 20% of the natural gas we use is for heating homes, and about one-quarter generates electricity (Figure 2.2). Transportation uses 28% of America’s energy, and of that 28%, hardly any—one-tenth of a percent—comes from natural gas. (Although, to make things more complicated, some of the electricity generated from natural gas powers vehicles, especially trains.)

  Figure 2.2 U.S. uses of natural gas in 2008. Vehicle use was only 0.1%. (Source: Energy Information Administration, Natural Gas Annual 2008 [August 2009])

  Could natural gas really power as many as 10% of all U.S. vehicles within ten years? Or could the beginning of problems with the natural gas supply for automobiles in Utah be a hint as to what the future might bring for all of us? I began to look into the numbers about natural gas, as I had done for all other forms of energy, and here’s what I found.

  To learn about natural gas’s potential, I contacted Ray Boswell, manager of Methane Hydrate R&D Programs, U.S. Department of Energy, National Energy Technology Laboratory, in Morgantown, West Virginia.5 He provided the basic information shown in Figure 2.3, which in turn enabled me to make the calculations in Figure 2.4. The shocking result is that with U.S. natural gas independence—that is, using only natural gas obtained within U.S. borders—even at the 2006 rate of use, the readily available gas within the United States would be exhausted in one year; that plus what is called “technically recoverable” would be gone in less than a decade; and what is termed “unknown but probable” would last about a century.

  Figure 2.3 America’s natural gas resources, in trillions of cubic feet. (Source: Ray Boswell, U. S. Department of Energy)

  Figure 2.4 How long would U.S. natural gas last? This graph shows projected years remaining for “readily available,” “technically recoverable,” and “unknown but probable” natural gas reserves and resources at 2006 rates of use. (Source: Ray Boswell, U. S. Department of Energy)

  Suppose we went all the way with the suggestion by T. Boone Pickens, Nancy Pelosi, and Governor Huntsman, and suddenly, tomorrow, all automobiles and light trucks were able to run on natural gas. As we discuss later (see the chapter on transporting ourselves and our stuff), of all transportation methods, cars and light trucks are the biggest petroleum guzzlers, using 63% of transportation energy in the U.S. This change would increase the total percentage of energy provided by natural gas to just under 40%, our nation’s “readily recoverable” plus “technically feasible” supplies would last less than 6 years, and the “unknown but probable” resources alone would get us another 8 years. Note that this continues to assume that all other use will remain at 2006 levels. (Use will most likely rise with the growth of America’s population, but could in fact decline with increased efficiency of cars and light trucks and an increasing number of electric vehicles whose energy comes from sources other than natural gas.)

  In July 2009, the Department of Energy announced that the estimated U.S. gas reserves in the category “marginal gas: targets for accelerated technology” were 35% larger than previously estimated.6

  Also in 2009, the Potential Gas Committee issued a report that categorized natural gas somewhat differently and did not include the Department of Energy’s “unknown but probable” (Figure 2.5).

  Figure 2.5 Another estimate of U.S. natural gas reserves, 2008.

  We can also calculate how many years U.S. natural gas reserves would last based on the Potential Gas Committee’s estimates and the use at 2006 rates with the addition of providing fuel for all cars and light trucks (Figure 2.6). The result is a total of 11 years before the U.S. runs out of natural gas.

  Figure 2.6 Years remaining of U.S. natural gas, using PGC 2008 estimates and assuming that use is at 2006 rates and that all cars and light trucks use only natural gas.

  The take-home story is that an energy-independent America could fuel its cars and trucks only with natural gas for less than 20 years, unless we consider the most speculative and environmentally destructive natural gas sources. I am not a petroleum geologist, or a geologist of any kind, so I cannot tell you how good the chances are that the “unknown but probable” is actually out there. My correspondence with Ray Boswell and others suggests, however, that the chances are good, and that if we are willing to take a risk, we might enjoy natural-gas energy independence for as long as a century. This would require sizable upscaling of exploration for this fuel, and the question is not simply whether we want to take this risk for 80–100 years of energy independence but whether we have to take this risk. What about the environmental effects of natural gas? It is the cleanest fossil fuel, but is it the completely clean fuel that is being suggested?

  World use of natural gas

  Worldwide use and availability of natural gas are much the same as in the United States. Natural gas provides 26% of the energy used worldwide, slightly more than the 24% provided by coal but only about two-thirds the amount provided by oil. And at present rates of use around the world, recoverable natural gas will last about 60–65 years, according to the U.S. Energy Information Agency (see Figures 2.7 and 2.8).

  Figure 2.7 Worldwide per
-capita consumption of natural gas in tons per person. The U.S. and Canada are among the greatest per-capita users of natural gas. (U.S. EIA. International Energy Annual 2006)

  Figure 2.8 World reserves of natural gas as of January 1, 2009. (Source: U.S. Energy Information Agency. Redrawn by DBB 31 Jan 10.)7

  Global use of natural gas equals about 30 trillion kilowatt-hours a year. By comparison, Hoover Dam generates 4 billion kilowatt-hours a year, so the total world use of natural gas equals the energy produced by 7,500 Hoover Dams. The United States uses 6,463 billion kilowatt-hours per year from natural gas, which equals the energy from 1,615 Hoover Dams. (This is also equal to the energy in 5 billion tons of coal, which we discuss in the next chapter.)

  Hope in the deep seas

  In addition to the conventional sources of natural gas, several unconventional sources may provide large amounts of gas fuels. These sources are gas hydrates, coal-bed methane, and shale-bed methane. As I understand it, these possible sources are part of the “unknown but probable” resources but may even exceed those estimates.