The Rude Awakening
Laguna Beach, California
Friday, June 2, 2006 ------------------------- - Powering the Humvees of the Middle East – where is
all this energy going to come from? - Strength, power, wealth and civilization – interested
in holding on to these? - Escargot pioneers, the female psyche, Eric's
doppelganger and other unexplained mysteries...
------------------------- Eric Fry, reporting from a hotel window overlooking Laguna
Beach, California... "Are you an actor?" an American Airlines flight attendant
asked your editor yesterday, as he prepared to board a
flight to Los Angeles. "You look like somebody." "No, sorry," he replied. "I'm a nobody." "Oh," she smiled quizzically, "Well you look like
SOMEbody." Then she turned and strolled away. Since your editor rarely watches a TV show or movie that
does not feature cartoon characters, he had no idea which
"somebody" he may have resembled. Did he, perhaps, resemble one of the tall, dark and
handsome handymen on "Desperate Housewives?"...Or did he,
perhaps, resemble one of the impossibly chiseled surf dudes
on "The O.C.?"...Or did he merely resemble one of the
bland, middle-age males that populate so many Viagra
commercials? It is a mystery – one that is destined to join the long
list of mysteries great and small that perplex mankind: The
Bermuda Triangle; the female psyche; the expanse of the
universe; the appeal of Celine Dion; the impulse to prepare
(and eat) mankind's first-ever escargot; the identity of
Nicole Brown Simpson's murderer... The world is so full of unresolved mysteries that it will
scarcely notice one more. In the following column, Dan Denning explores the
mysterious world that lies beyond "Peak Oil." What fuel
source, or sources, will power the world after it has
exhausted its supplies of easily accessible crude oil? Will
the sun, the wind and the waves – along with a smattering
off bio-fuels – fill the coming energy deficit? Or will we
learn new ways to use familiar energy sources?
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-------------------------
The Newest Old Thing
By Dan Denning The United States military is preparing for a world of
disappearing oil supplies...Investors might want to pursue
a similar strategy. "The days of inexpensive, convenient, abundant energy
sources are quickly drawing to a close," Eileen Westervelt
and Donald Fournier observe in a report for the U.S. Army
Engineer Research and Development Center entitled, "Energy
Trends and Their Implications for U.S. Army Installations."
Another military author, Nadaer Elhefnawy, explores the
coming oil shortage in a poignant essay entitled, "Toward a
Long-Range Energy Security Policy." For those Rude readers
who may have neglected to read the Spring 2006 edition of
"Parameters: U.S. Army War College Quarterly," the
publication where Elhefnawy's essay appeared, please allow
us to provide a brief excerpt: "Even without taking into account related problems like the
greenhouse effect, the security problems posed by the
exhaustion of supplies of easily accessible, cheap oil and
gas are highly varied and daunting. The likely result would
be the exacerbation of familiar problems like resource
conflict, weapons proliferation, and state failure.
However, other problems are more novel, not least of all
the potential for changes in the international balance of
power based not only on which countries control the lion's
share of the world's fossil fuel supplies, but which are
most dependent on those supplies." In other words, a soaring oil price would not simply boost
the cost of cruising Humvees across the deserts of the
Middle East, it would also threaten to shift the balance of
economic and military power away from energy-deficient
countries toward energy-rich countries...many of whom
happen to be sworn enemies of the United States. Enter coal...the newest old thing. The United States
possesses a 250-year supply of this fossil fuel. By
comparison, our nation's proven oil reserves amount to less
than a 4-year supply. It was once said of coal, "With coal, we have light,
strength, power, wealth, and civilization; without coal, we
have dankness, weakness, poverty, and barbarism." We
suspect this observation will ring true again in the
future. Coal, like oil and natural gas, is a form of "solar
income." As Barbara Freese points out in her must-read
book, "Coal: A Human History." "For billions of years," Freese writes, "almost every life
form on earth depended for its existence on energy fresh
from the sun, on the 'solar income' arriving daily from
outer space or temporarily stored in living things." The ancient forests of the Earth were actually huge solar
panels. They just didn't know it. And neither did they know
the critical role they would play in powering the economies
of today. "Like living solar collectors handily dispersed all over
the planet," Freese continues, "plants capture sunshine as
it arrives and covert it into chemical energy that animals
can eat. And plants don't just convert energy, they store
it over time — holding that energy within their cells until
they decay, burn, or get eaten (or in rare but important
cases, are buried deep within the planet as a fossil
fuel.)" It takes a long time to crunch a tree into a lump of coal.
But the carboniferous (coal-bearing) period of the
Paleozoic Era was around 300–360 million years ago. Mother
Nature works long hours. And if her work seems tedious, we
can at least be thankful that the end result has produced
so much energy. But using millions of years of the stored energy of the sun
— energy essentially locked in the great plants and forests
of previous geologic ages — is a fairly new thing for human
beings. It's only in the last several hundred years that
we've been burning what the Earth took millions of years to
produce...and this geologic dowry is depleting rapidly.
Here's what the Army's Engineer Research and Development
Center concludes: "The days of inexpensive, convenient, abundant energy
sources are quickly drawing to a close. Domestic natural
gas production peaked in 1973. The proved domestic reserve
lifetime for natural gas at current consumption rates is
about 8.4 years. The proved world reserve lifetime for
natural gas is about 40 years, but will follow a
traditional rise to a peak at about 2035 and then a rapid
decline. Domestic oil production peaked in 1970 and
continues to decline. Proved domestic reserve lifetime for
oil is about 3.4 years. World oil production is at or near
its peak and current world demand exceeds the supply. Saudi
Arabia is considered the bellwether nation for oil
production and has not increased production since April
2003. After peak production, supply no longer meets demand,
prices and competition increase. World proved reserve
lifetime for oil is about 41 years, most of this at a
declining availability. Our current throwaway nuclear cycle
uses up the world reserve of low-cost uranium in about 20
years. We will see significant depletion of Earth's finite
resources in this century." But coal remains very plentiful...relatively speaking. At
current rates of consumption, the U.S. possesses a 250-year
supply. You could say that the United States is the Saudi
Arabia of coal, which is one very good reason why we will
devise ever-more-ingenious ways to utilize it. Of course, the downsides to coal are obvious from a
strategic and environmental perspective. Strategically,
coal is still a hydrocarbon. Using it to generate electric
power doesn't eliminate our dependency on fossil fuel. But
it does give us time to find either renewable alternatives
and/or "the next big thing" in energy generation...whatever
that may be. Environmentally, coal produces mercury, sulfur dioxide,
nitrous oxide, and carbon dioxide. The mercury causes birth
defects. The sulfur and nitrous dioxide cause lung and
respiratory ailments. And it's possible that carbon dioxide
is accelerating the natural cycle of changes in the Earth's
climate. It's true that some of the new processes in coal
gasification and liquefaction remove coal's most
detrimental byproducts. But in nearly every new clean-coal
process, there is still the issue of what to do with carbon
dioxide. One solution has been to ship it to oil companies
to inject back into the ground for storage. Even if that
begins to happen, it's likely that carbon dioxide emissions
will increase with new coal-fired plants. But all of these
issues may take a back seat to a simple question: Can using
more coal help us use less foreign oil? If the alternative to exploiting the nation's coal
resources is an open-ended military engagement in the
Middle East, I suspect there's going to be a lot of support
for developing the only significant energy resource America
still possesses. The benefits of coal, such as they are,
are simply too good (and too convenient) for the country's
economic and political leadership NOT to embrace. Next
Tuesday, we'll examine additional aspects of the coming
"coal rush" and suggest one way to capitalize on it. [Joel's Note: The dilemmas facing the modern man are many
and varied. From cases of mistaken identity to world energy
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