Energy Independence, Cheap and Easy

Energy Independence Cheap
It’s not so much that oil is going up as much as the US dollar is going down. But that’s an economic issue more than an energy issue.
Having said that, we can solve the energy problem and relatively quickly. Like anything else, it’s a matter of supply and demand. We can increase the supply of oil by drilling, but that alone won’t make a big dent because oil is a global market. Even if we manage to pump all we need, it will still be marketed at global prices and a dropping dollar and lower global supplies will keep it expensive. If the global price of oil is $140 a barrel, and we pump enough to meet our own needs, even though we no longer import any of it, we’ve only increased the global supply perhaps about 2.5%, which would only lower the price to perhaps $135, and that’s assuming the value of the dollar doesn’t drop any further and other oil producing countries continue current production levels.
What we need is more energy, not necessarily more oil. And for long term stability and affordable fuel costs at the pump, we cannot depend on oil alone. Nor do we need to. In the short term, for say the next few decades, we don’t need to worry about getting away for using oil. We just need to get away from the need to import any oil. We currently produce more of our own than we import from any other country by far. We get more oil from the USA than we do from Saudi Arabia. In total, we import about 60% of our needed oil. It’s that 60% that we need to ween ourselves from. The other 40%, we can take our time dealing with if we need to. We can’t seriously impact the global price. Although what we produce is 40% of our use, globally our total oil consumption is only about 11% of the market. Our production represents only about 4% of the global market. If we produced ALL of our own oil starting tomorrow, that would only raise the global supply by about 2.5% which would only cause a small drop in price. Of course, we wouldn’t be sending money to the third world dictators, which is a very good thing, but we’d still be suffering at the pump, even if a little less so.
Why can’t we simply set a maximum price of say $50 a barrel on oil produced here? It’s a little complicated but only a little. Oil is sold and distributed globally for efficiency. If someone in Florida purchases a barrel of crude from a source in Alaska, the oil that goes to Florida might come from Saudi Arabia, for example. Someone in Japan who purchased a barrel from the Saudis might get their barrel from Alaska. This saves a large amount of the cost from shipping those two barrels across the continental USA from Alaska to Florida and around the African continent and or through several oceans from the mid east to Japan. If the Alaskan oil is locked in at $50 while the Saudi barrel is $150, those arrangements cannot work. That doesn’t mean we can’t remove ourselves from the global oil market, but it does mean that if we do, our own costs will jump significantly above whatever price we set on the crude due to huge losses in efficiency. We’d be far better off is we can reach the day when we are net exporters and don’t need our own oil. We can them participate in such deals for profit as brokers without using the products ourselves. Let the third world dictators pay us for the efficiency and brokering their oil to other countries.
Incidentally, we keep hearing people claiming to be environmentalists touting hydrogen as fuel as if it’s clean and rational. What they either don’t understand or don’t want you to understand is that hydrogen is inefficient, dangerous, and usually dirty, not environmentally friendly at all, at least for now. The problem is that hydrogen doesn’t exist in any but trace amounts on earth by itself. We have plenty of it, the oceans are full of it! But it’s already been burned! That’s what water is, the end product of burned (oxidized) hydrogen. It’s one oxygen atom with two hydrogen atoms bonded to it. In order to release the hydrogen, or ‘un-burn it’ so to speak, and make it available to be “burned” again, we have to use energy, like electricity. And it takes more energy to break the bonds than you get back when you burn the hydrogen again. So if you are burning hydrogen in your car, you might be patting yourself on the back for spending a fortune for a new car with few stations to fill up, because only water vapor is coming out the tail pipe. But odds are that the power used to make your fuel came from a plant burning coal or natural gas or oil, or it came from a hydroelectric plant which is clean but certainly altered the environment. And it would be cleaner and more efficient to just burn fossil fuels in your car than to burn hydrogen if the hydrogen you are burning was made from burning fossil fuels. Hydrogen has other problems as well. You can’t store it very long, the atoms are so small they leak through any container. And it’s volatile, as anyone who was aboard the Hindenburg can tell you. If we were to become a hydrogen based fuel society, we’d first have to increase energy production without hydrogen just to make the hydrogen. It’s not rational to consider hydrogen a fuel but rather an inefficient storage medium of energy generated by some other fuel.
What we need as an alternative to petroleum based fuel is a fuel, which can be made cheap, and be made quickly and safely using existing technology, and which can be used in existing automobiles. Even if someone invented a car that ran on seawater, if it costs as much as a typical new car you’d have tens of millions of drivers who couldn’t afford to throw away their old car to buy a new one. Whatever fuel we switch to has to run old cars to be viable for the next few decades. Even if hydrogen was efficient and clean to produce, it wouldn’t fit the bill. Methane (CH4, Natural Gas) does fit the bill. But like hydrogen, it takes energy to make the hydrogen used to make the CH4. Methane from landfills and drilling are fuels in their own right, but making it has the same problem as making hydrogen. But unlike hydrogen, methane is easy to store, safer, and the technology to use it to power automobiles has been in use already, nearly as long as the automobile. Somebody with a 1972 Dodge who can’t afford a new $30,000 hydrogen fuel cell car, can likely afford $50 for a methane conversion kit.
A president, even if he (or she) intends to keep their promises, can’t succeed in any currently discussed plan they have because they can’t get a do nothing congress to do something. The magic of my plan is that the congress is left irrelevant, they can choose to get involved or not get involved and make fools of themselves in the process. Meanwhile while we gain energy independence without them. This is done simply by declaring a national emergency of the issue and using the military infrastructure (not troops) to generate a glut of energy in the form of electricity, which would both drive down the cost of electricity and provide plenty of excess energy to be converted to cheap fuel for existing automobiles.
This is my plan that the president could use to solve the energy problem once and for all:
1) Authorize the immediate construction of 25 small fail safe nuclear power plants. Direct all revenue currently derived from fuel taxes, plus all the subsidies currently going to ethanol toward the cost of those power plants. The electricity can be used to make methane from atmospheric and other sources of CO2 and water. The methane should be our goal as the major fuel supply for automobiles in the short term future.
Let’s do the math:5,800,000 Btu x 10,000,000 barrels/day imported oil.That comes to 58,000,000,000,000 BTU per day.= 21,170,000,000,000,000 BTU per year.
That’s equivalent to:6,204,572,098,476 kilowatthours of electricity. Or roughly a little over 6 million megawatthours of electricity. Since we are talking about per year’s use, dividing that by the number of hours in a year (8760) comes to a little over 708 Megawatts operating 24/7 throughout the year on average to generate the same power we import in oil.
A typical modern nuclear plant generates about 1000 MW.
So one typical nuclear plant exceeds oil imports. But many smaller and fail safe plants operating competitively would provide more energy with far less risk of one failure or sabotage such as a terrorist attack creating chaos since only one small part of the system would be lost in the event of a failure. And it would be cheaper too as I’ll explain below.Also, since there is significant energy lost in the extraction of hydrogen from water and extracting of CO2 from the atmosphere. So we have to add that energy loss to the power needed to make the new fuel that replaces the imports. And that must also include transportation and storage costs, but most of that is also part of the same equation on the oil side.
A typical plant in a nuclear sub is about 50 MW. Two dozen of those spread out around the country, located close enough to water sources and distribution centers, would give us 1,250 MW or power, well beyond what’s needed to replace all the oil we import, and beyond the costs of making methane added to it.
As a bonus, the pants used in subs and aircraft carriers are long proven to be stable and already designed, and already in place with already made spare parts. Nothing has to be engineered or tested in a hurry to meet the goal. I only has to be constructed in already existing plants. That makes it cheaper and faster to make them.
2) Divert all funding to energy research to construction of methane plants using the Sabatier process. The nuclear power will be used to separate hydrogen and oxygen from water, and to concentrate atmospheric CO2. The Sabatier process is exothermic and does not require energy except to pump it, and yields CH4, aka natural gas. We could use hydrogen as fuel, but there are safety and storage problems with hydrogen. Natural gas has been powering vehicles for many decades, it is long proven and already available technology.
3) Divert all new federal road project funds to a three year national subsidy to convert vehicles to natural gas. It’s an old and proven technology and is actually cheaper and easier on old vehicles without fuel injection. Conversion is cheap and easy.
4) Offer the electric power and CH4 at production cost for three years to all interested businesses, even the oil companies, but only under the condition that they agree to sell at retail at no more than 50% markup. That insures them a large profit and also insures a low price to consumers. If planned and operated properly, this could result in the gasoline equivalent to 50 cents per gallon or less. We might eventually see large corporations competing with their own plants, but until they do, the CH4 market would be primarily a large collection of smaller competing companies and the market would react accordingly.
5) A 5 year ban on export of fuel. And immediate authorization of drilling in all known US oil sources. The mere announced intention and beginning to drill would drive oil prices down considerably as speculators would be betting on cheaper oil rather than higher costs. And the sooner we are no longer sending any money to third world dictators who support radical terrorist groups the better for everyone. Banning export of oil will make our own sources inefficient for the reasons I stated above. But the immediate effect would be to stabilize our own prices. Removing ourselves from the global oil market only in part like that, makes our own 40% less efficient, but stable. And only 60% of our sources will remain volatile and subject to global events and speculation.
Nuclear power is cleaner than any other source. Hydroelectric is clean, but has more dangers and far more impact on the environment. Do we want to build another Hoover Dam and flood the Grand Canyon to supply more power and water to southern California’s growing population? We are going to have to soon unless we can generate a lot of reliable power to light and cool the new houses and desalinate seawater. Wind and solar can’t provide enough and aren’t reliable enough, windmills kill birds and efficient solar panels are very unfriendly to the environment due to construction materials. Coal is cleaner today than ever before, but like oil, it’s somewhat dirty and expensive. Nuclear is the way to go. It’s clean, cheap, and safe.
Dealing with nuclear waste is trivial. We can use old technology. Just as we can take deep sea core samples from thousands off feet beneath the floor of the sea, we can likewise drop heavy armored hollow tips containing our nuclear waste into deep sea subduction zones. Even if enemies could find it they couldn’t get to it, and in a few centuries it will slowly be pushed under the earth’s crust and sink into the mantle and the heavy radioactive elements will sink to the earth’s core never to be an issue again. Problem solved, and dirt cheap, and without worries.

This should even make Al Gore’s Magic CO2 religion’s followers happy. Since the CO2 being released to the atmosphere was pumped from the atmosphere, there’s no net emissions. It’s CO2 neutral. In fact, it’s far less a problem in that regard than electric cars, most of which would be charged currently on power generated by burning coal.

More data for the interested:

One 42 gallon barrel of oil produces 20 gallons of gasoline, plus many other products such as kerosene, etc. Let’s ignore the other products for now and concentrate on the gasoline which is our problem at hand.
10 million x 20 gallons = 200 million gallons of gas from imported oil.
Barrel = 42 U.S. gallons = 5,800,000 Btu

1 Gallon = 124,000 Btu (rounded to nearest 1000)

Let’s compare the amount of energy we can get from various sources (in calories):

gallon of gasoline 1.3×10**8
AA battery 10**3
standard cubic foot of natural gas (SCF)1.1×10**6
candy bar 106
barrel of crude oil (contains 42 gallons)6.1×10**9
pound of coal1.6 x 10**7
pound of gasoline2.2 x 10**7
pound of oil2.4 x 10**7
pound of Uranium-2353.7 x 10**13
ton of coal3.2 x 10**10
ton of Uranium-2357.4 x 10**16
Or if you prefer BTUs:

1 barrel(42 gallons) of crude oil = 5,800,000 BTU
1 gallon of gasoline = 124,000 BTU
1 gallon of diesel fuel = 139,000 BTU
1 gallon of heating oil = 139,000 BTU
1 barrel of residual fuel oil = 6,287,000 BTU
1 cubic foot of natural gas = 1,031 BTU
1 gallon of propane = 91,000 BTU
1 short ton of coal = 20,754,000 BTU
1 kilowatthour of electricity = 3,412 BTU
1 pound uranium = 24,675,887,096,774,193,548 BTU
We use 5,800,000 Btu x 10,000,000 barrels/day imported oil.

That comes to 58,000,000,000,000 BTU per day.

= 21,170,000,000,000,000 BTU per year.

One pound of uranium is equal to OVER 400 THOUSAND TIMES the fuel we import per day. That one pound of uranium exceeds the energy we would import for the NEXT THOUSAND YEARS at the current rate. And without any drilling, without pollution, without even the CO2.