Tue 2 May 2006
Derek Catsam ‘93 writes on conservatives and oil.
t seems to me that drilling in Alaska and elsewhere is a stopgap. It is a temporary palliative. It is not a long-range solution. Most of the data that I have read indicates that the production we would get from Alaska and the shelf sounds more impressive than the actual impact it would have. And ultimately, it would perpetuate oil dependence. Unless we can become wholly self-sufficient with those reserves, isn’t the problem still going to be that we need oil from the Middle East and elsewhere?
Yes. The oil market is global. No single country or company can hope to control it. For most practical purposes, it does not matter if Alaska produces one gallon per day or a billion. That oil will still go on a largely free and very competitive global market. It will be sold to the highest bidder. The companies that drill and refine and transport will not care if the buyer is in the US or China. They will sell to whoever is buying.
7 Responses to “Palliative”
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The solution is nuclear power, especially the pebble bed reactors pioneered by the Chinese.
Of course, the NIMBYism espoused by many on the supposedly pro-environment left (most recently, the Kennedys fighting the wind turbines that would affect their beachfront views), coupled with fearmongering ignorance and misinformation about “radiation” (such as the ACT display about the “radiation” from DU that was polluting Baxter with misinformation in January ‘03), means that this has approximately 0% chance of happening.
If we can’t even build an oil refining plant in the US in decades, how the hell are we supposed to build nuclear power plants that will allow us to reduce our depenence on oil?
Bring back Connecticut Yankee; extend the license on Vermont Yankee; build Berkshire Yankee (to be located at the intersection of route 2 and route 7)!
“If we can’t even build an oil refining plant in the US in decades, how the hell are we supposed to build nuclear power plants that will allow us to reduce our depenence on oil?”
Yeah, and the problem gets even worse, Loweeel: if we did build more nuclear capability we’d be more like … the French. What Republican would do that in a million years? I mean, if it’s remotely French, it must be disgusting/unpractical/feminine/effete/gay. Therefore, no nuclear power for you.
06: You forgot cowardly, improvident, lazy, unhygienic, smelly, arrogant, selfish, cigarette smoking and, the English would say, syphilitic.
Sorry, ‘06 — I’m a libertarian… and I think that many Republicans would be in favor of nuclear power, at least in the abstract. Referring to DK’s later entry, I don’t remember too many Republicans being involved in “nuclear freeze” movements or agitating against nuclear power.
You’re also confusing correlation with causation. Just because the French have a high correlation with economic, social, and military failure doesn’t mean that everything France does or everything French is bad, nor that if France does it, it must be bad.
However, I must note that France does use the type of plants that are subject to meltdown, not the pebble-bed reactors. We should definitely not emulate France in that regard.
Sorry to jump in so late, and thus likely have this comment go un-noticed. Finals week here in the Permian basin, etc. etc.
I am not certain that there is A solution, though i think that much of the left (that includes myself) has to look past the anti-nukes vies of the 70s and 80s and embrace Loweel’s nuclear power idea. But I think we also ought to be looking at solar power, wind, water, and alternative fuels. It should all be on the table.
At the same time, we cannot take a kneejerk attitude that oil=evil. As someone who grew up in the northeast, I am well aware that oil may not be ideal, but it is necessary, and as such we cannot simply wash our hands of it. But weaning ourselves from dependqance needs to be in the cards, and this will take leadership froma whole host of sectors, not the least of which is politics. our leaders need to set deadlines and then make those deadlines goals that we work to achieve. We need an energy equivalent of Kennedy promising to put a man on the moon.
dc
Derek, I agree that we need to look at all of those, as well as nuclear power. The difference between this and putting a man on the moon is that there are some very basic physical laws that we just cannot get around no matter how much funding or genius we throw at it. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is THE fundamental constraint on the universe — even beyond General Relativity and QM, there is nothing that contradicts it. We can’t legislate around that constraint.
In terms of how hard the problems are to solve, meeting residential demand is the “easy” part. Many homes can be energy-sufficient with some combination of solar power/heating, bi-directional sterling engines to at least get something out of temperature gradients, and lots of insulation. Even fairly far north, it’s quite plausible for a given house to be sufficient off the grid.
The hard parts are spot demand (as typified by that proverbial moment at halftime during the Super Bowl when 10+ Million refrigerator lightbulbs go on at once, a near-instantaneous nationwide energy spike of 300MW and industrial demand), and industrial energy use.
With fossil fuels (and nuclear), it’s relatively quick and easy to bring additional capacity online to meat spot demand. For distributed sources such as wind, solar, and tidal, it’s much more difficult to bring additional generative capacity online to meet spot demand, even if the sun is shining or the wind is blowing.
Tidal generators are problematic, not only because environmentalists worry about their effect on marine life, but because they would likely be damaged by strong tides and are non-trivial to install, maintain, and repair.
Another problem with these sources is that they are not source-efficient — that is to say, you need an ENORMOUS physical outlay to provide what a MUCH smaller fossil fuel/nuclear plant could provide. E.g., solar power — you’d need to cover the entire state of New Mexico, and at that latitude at the absolute north-most, with the highest-quantum efficiency solar panels currently available (and hope it never got cloudy, that none of the panels got scratched or covered in bird shit, or broke) just to provide the power consumed by Vermont, a state not really known for its industry or heavy power use. This is not something that CAN get the order of magnitude better that it needs to even use up less space, due to quantum efficiency constraints.
I could talk about this forever, but just off the top of my head, see the following links to get a grasp of the scope of the problem, and why the commonly-cited “alternative fuels” aren’t really a practical alternative, even in combination:
http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/06/Kyoto.shtml
http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/07/Carbonemissions.shtml
http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/09/Energydependence.shtml
http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/09/Moreonenergydependence.shtml
http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/09/Morepracticalproblems.shtml
http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/09/Obscureenergysources.shtml
http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/09/Anotetothecrew.shtml
http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2003/06/Biomass.shtml
http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2003/08/Quicknon-fixes.shtml
http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2003/08/Lettersonpower.shtml
http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2004/06/Energyscalingproblems.shtml
http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2004/06/NomeansNo.shtml