The notion of freeing ourselves in the US from foreign oil is a bumper-sticker type slogan that may as well be as old as the original automobiles. Another popular and populist refrain of late is that we can do so by boosting domestic renewable energy and making transmission systems improvements. But US power statistics put the lie to that idea, at least in the near term.
Unlike many Third World countries, oil use in US power plants is negligible. The share of power generated from petroleum liquids of the country's net generation capacity was 1.1% for 2008 through November, according to an Energy Information Administration monthly report issued earlier this month. Therefore adding renewable energy in the power sector has little to directly do with cutting oil demand.
Also, high oil prices appeared to have dampened oil use in US power generation in 2008. The share of petroleum liquids-fired generation in terms of total Mwh in the US for 2007 was 1.19%, but for 2008 through November, the share fell to 0.75%.
The preponderance of US oil demand is for the transportation sector. Meanwhile, thanks to high prices followed by fallout in consumer confidence, total refined products use in the US last year dropped by nearly 1.2 million b/d, or 5.8%, from the 2007 average, the largest annual decline since 1980, according to the EIA Short-Term Energy Outlook released February 10.
One widely touted potential future nexus between cutting US oil demand and boosting its power supply and flexibility would center around a massive conversion of the automobile fleet to plug-in hybrid vehicles. Proponents say that prospect includes scenarios that could reduce oil use in transportation while at the same time ideally providing a form of power storage in the car batteries. Pilots and research in that area are just beginning.
Theoretically, even if such vehicles were widely available, the fleet conversion would rely on millions of individual Americans chucking the sunk costs of the vehicles they currently drive. Would there be yet another huge government bailout for that?
The changes envisioned are laudable and long overdue, but their advocates should be clear to their audience that a whole new US energy world is far from being a reality any time soon and will require enormous waves of spending on various technologies and infrastructure in the transportation and power sectors.
In the interest of full disclosure, this writer has about a year to pay off a loan on a 2006 vehicle that runs on 87-octane gasoline. I added to my carbon footprint that year by moving from Washington to Houston and buying the car. But, on the other hand, beforehand I rode the Washington metro, which is powered by electricity and half of that remains coal-fired in this country. Bottom line: if someone has an affordable way to immediately convert this vehicle to energy sources that are better for our environment and energy security, please advise. Is there a retrofitting option?
You are correct that the environmental enthusiasts pick up on ideas without researching the facts and the numbers and the costs, and it starts to be the gospel. The job of getting off foreign oil is a big one that can be composed of several small pieces At the same time people have to get realistic in allowing off shore drilling, shale oil development perhaps coal to oil conversions--if economicallt feasible. Doing it all with renewables is pie in the sky.
The country I live in--canada --used to be dependent on foreign oil until we found out how to develop the oil sands. In actuallity even though we are net oil exporters now our piplelining to eastern canada is as inadequate as is the USA pipeling to the east and this has to be corrected as well.
We also have some socialist politicians who want to shut down the oil sands to get votes--after which they would have to accept reality and maintain that source.
CNG - burn our own US natural gas for transportation. In Oklahoma, you can buy a Honda Civic GX (CNG) as cheap or cheaper than a Honda Civic LX (gasoline).
I wrote that cutting US oil demand and boosting renewables are laudable goals, but proponents should spell out the transitional costs.
I don't think the goal is to get everyone who has a car to switch over regardless of their investment.
It seems like the goal for plug-in hybrids would be to create tax incentives for people buying cars to make them want to buy those instead of traditional gas-consuming cars (which they currently have for regular hybrids which make them more competitive until they hit the tipping point in their cost to produce).
More important than individuals will be the efforts of cities to require taxis to be all hybrid, large shipping companies to use CNG or hybrids when possible, etc.
Yes, actually there is a retrofitting option for existing cars but from what I remember it is not economic to do so - you'd have to really want to make a statement rather than do it to save money.
The other side of the political coin is pushing nuclear under the argument that it leads to energy independence.
Nuclear and renewable alternatives can increase our electric capacity and get us off coal. That's it.
Whether or not you believe in global warming, we all would like to operate with the most efficient energy sources. I have read a lot from various global sources and statistics over the past year and it seems to me that getting to that energy efficiency nirvana is not going to be a piece of cake. In fact for some countries (Germany, UK for example) their lives may be full of brown outs and black outs in the next ten years as they try to get from here to there.
Oil in North America is used 2/3 for transportation. Therefore, until there is a CREDIBLE competitively priced alternative to gasoline engines that can take a family of 4 over great distances in different geographic terrain, we are going to keep buying gasoline engines. Hydrogen appears to be uneconomic for a least the next 50 years and electric has to solve battery storage problems as well as putting the requisite infrastructure in place across North America in order to service millions of automobiles - including the ability recharge those batteries quickly (the same time it takes to fill a gas tank.) Perhaps biomass is a solution, but not one that causes havoc with our food supply which corn-based ethanol did.
At this point I can only see hybrids being a credible option for the next decade but I am not sure how much of a dent they will put into overall oil demand.
As for electricity, re-newables (wind and solar) can never be anything but a back-up power source for the foreseeable future. They are intermittent and their generation costs are 3-4 times as much as electricity produced by coal and nuclear plants. Germany has spent $100 billion subsidizing wind and solar for a decade and so far wind accounts for only 6% of electricity generation and solar a measly 0.5%. What is worse, the municipality where I live has banned residential home owners from operating their own wind turbines to the chagrin of many who would like to become independent of the power grid.
Better hold on to our base power supplies unless we desire to go back to the late 1800s lifestyle.