Local Action for a Sustainable Tomorrow

Mr. ROSCOE BARTLETT of Maryland.
http://www.energybulletin.net/40039.html

The following is an excerpt of the above speech>>

Mr. Speaker, our government has paid for four studies looking at the world energy situation, particularly at oil. Two of those studies were reported in 2005, and two of them were reported in 2007. The two in 2005 were the SAIC report known as the ``Hirsch Report,'' and then later in the year there was a report by the Army Corps of Engineers, and then in 2007 there were two reports, one of them by the Government Accountability Office and the second one by the National Petroleum Council.

They all said essentially the same thing in different words. I have here some quotes from the first one of these, and the largest one. Remember, this is now in 2005, and this is from the Hirsch Report. ``Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, & Risk Management'' was the title of their work.

World oil peaking is going to happen. By peaking, we mean that time at which the world reaches its maximum capacity for producing oil. After that time, regardless of the demand for oil and regardless of the desire to produce more oil, the world will not have the ability to ramp up in oil production to produce more oil.

World production of conventional oil will reach a maximum and decline thereafter. That maximum is called the peak. A number of confident forecasters project peaking within a decade. Others contend it will occur later. Prediction of the peaking is extremely difficult because of geological complexities, measurement problems, pricing variations, demand elasticity and political influences. Peaking will happen, but the timing is uncertain. Oil peaking presents a unique challenge.

And then they make this statement: the world has never faced a problem like this. There is no precedent in history that we can use to judge what the impact of this peaking will be. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary. Previous energy transitions, wood to coal and coal to oil, were gradual and evolutionary. Oil peaking will be abrupt and revolutionary.

The second chart has some additional quotes from this same report. The peaking of world oil production presents the U.S. and the world with an unprecedented risk-management problem. As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically. A couple of weeks ago, oil was $100 a barrel. And without timely mitigation, and there has been essentially none, without timely mitigation, the economic, social, and political costs will be unprecedented, unprecedented, meaning nothing in the past can we use as a guide to what the consequences will be.

Viable mitigation options exist on both the supply and demand sides. But to have substantial impact, they must be initiated more than a decade in advance of peaking.

Now, as we will see in a chart or two, it is very probable that peaking has already occurred. So, obviously, we can't prepare for it a decade ahead. Dealing with world oil production, peaking will be extremely complex, involve literally trillions of dollars and require many years of intense effort. This is from the SAIC, a very prestigious organization, a report paid for by our government...

...There are three groups that have common cause in a rational solution to this problem and two other problems.

The first of these three groups are those that are concerned about global warming and climate change. What they would do to ameliorate this problem is to shift from the use of fossil fuels, which are releasing CO2 which was sequestered a very long time ago, now present in oil and gas and coal, they would replace that with renewable sources where you are simply recycling the CO2...

A second group that has common cause in wanting to replace our fossil fuels with renewables are those who are concerned about our national security. The President noted that we were far too dependant on foreign oil. We have only 2 percent of the known reserves of oil in the world. We use about 25 percent of the world's oil. We import almost two-thirds of what we use. The obvious solution to that problem is to get our energy from somewhere else so that we don't have to import this oil, and the rational place to get that is from renewables.

Then there is the group of people that I am kind of representing tonight when I talk about this aspect of energy, and those are the people who believe that there is a finite amount of oil in the world and that at some point in time the world will reach that maximum capacity to produce oil. That happened in the United States, as that chart showed, in 1970. After that, no matter what we do, reasonably, no matter what we do, the production of oil will fall steadily off...

...I have one more chart, and then I've got to close very quickly because time is running out. This chart shows quality of life and how good you feel about your station in life compared to how much energy you use. How good you feel about life, how much energy you use: the United States out here using more energy than anybody else; 24 countries use less energy than we and feel better about their quality of life than we.

Now, my wife tells me I shouldn't be talking about these things because don't I remember that in ancient Greece they killed the messenger that brought bad news. I tell her this is a good-news story. The sooner we start, the easier the trip will be. I'm really exhilarated by this. There's no exhilaration like the exhilaration of meeting and overcoming a big challenge. This is a huge challenge. We have the most innovative, creative society in the world. Properly informed and properly motivated, I think we're equal to the challenge. I see this as a very challenging fun future, where we really have something we can all pull together to accomplish.

I hope we'll be back here next week, and at that time I want to spend most of the time talking about what are the potential replacements for oil, what are the potentials, and which are the most promising, and what do we need to do.