Thursday, January 18, 2007

Letter to Rep. Schakowsky

I am sure many of my readers also received Rep. Schakowsky's January mailing. She brought up Energy Independence, so of course I reacted. Here's what I sent via her website, hotlinks for you in place of URLs, which disappeared when I hit the submit button. Swell.

Dear Congresswoman

I am in receipt of your January mailing, which covered many issues, and was truly disappointed by the apparent lack of knowledge displayed by you regarding the topic of Energy Independence. Had you bothered, or rather had your staff bothered, to check the facts, you would have known that energy independence is a myth. The US Senate's Energy and Natural Resources committee received that very message on 1/11/07 at a 2 hour hearing featuring expert witnesses from DOE's Energy Information Administration and the International Energy Agency.

In addition, had anyone bothered to do the math regarding the viability of biofuels as a fossil fuel alternative, s/he would have known the following:

"The entire 2004 U.S. corn and soybean crop, converted to biomass fuels, could replace about 10.41 billion gallons of petroleum (7.6 billion as ethanol and 2.81 billion as biodiesel). Petroleum is measured in 42-gallon barrels; the 10.41 billion gallon biofuel total would be equivalent to 248 million barrels of petroleum. The U.S. consumed about 7.49 billion barrels of petroleum in 2004, or about 20.5 million barrels a day. This means that the total biofuel potential of the record 2004 U.S. corn and soybean harvests would offset about 12 days of U.S. petroleum consumption, or about 3.3% of our total yearly petroleum consumption. Given that most of the U.S. corn and soybean crop is already committed to other uses, this analysis indicates that biomass-based fuels will have a negligible role in reducing U.S. petroleum consumption, which in turn underscores that replacing petroleum in the U.S. economy will be a monumental challenge."

Foregoing from The Energy Bulletin. US consumption continues to grow.

Oil is a finite resource and is rapidly depleting as we become more efficient in retrieving what is in the ground. Dr. Robert Hirsch has written, at the request of DOE, a report on the risks and mitigation of Peak Oil, which was published in Feb. 2005. The challenge is serious, and the time left to act is slipping away. At the Senate hearing, it was noted that crude oil would peak in about 10 years. The US economy utilizes 77% of the oil we consume as liquid transportation fuels, so the impact of a permanently declining supply of oil is nothing to sneeze at and requires thoughtful alternatives, as Dr. Hirsch points out in his report.

I would suggest you avail yourself of the expertise of Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md), as he is the leader of the Peak Oil Caucus and is familiar with Dr. Hirsch's work . So far as I know, he is the only Congressman who has taken up the mantle of leadership on this issue. I urge you to join with him in finding real solutions, however painful they may be, rather than propagating mythology over facts, and proposing feel-good options targeted to maximizing votes rather than maximizing the welfare of your constituents. We deserve better from you.

Sincerely

4 comments:

The North Coast said...

The 'biomass' and 'ethonal' frauds are being perpetrated by people who damn well ought to know better.

Even if the ErOEI were favorable for biomass and ethonal, which it is surely not, where will we get the farmland when it continues to be gobbled up by suburban sprawl.

The sections of the collective brain all talking to themselves and ignoring each other, as usual.
If any of our leaders were serious about reducing energy consumption and/or meeting future food needs in a future of less mechanized farming, they would make it their mission to reverse suburban planning policies that promote extreme sprawl of the one-house-with-three-cars-per-acre type.

I don't see that happening. What I see happening is a continuiation of the trend of the past 50 years, that increases the ecological footprint of a household doublefold for every move outward it makes, from city apt, to inner-suburban starter house, to outer suburban 4,000 sq foot house with double-height great room, 2 SUVs, a speed boat, on a 2-acre lot of zoyzia grass three miles from the nearest store and 50 miles from work.

Kheris said...

I have read elsewhere, and I don't have the cite in front of me, that ethanol is being subsidized at $0.51/gallon. Were it not for the subsidy, it would not be produced. An analysis of the BTUs of energy in a gallon of ethanol vs a gallon of conventional gasoline shows the ethanol to produce far fewer BTUs. I believe it was about 1/2 to 2/3 of conventional gasoline. Again, I don't have the cite but I know the info is out there.

The North Coast said...

You're correct-from what I've read from various sources, you need at least a third more ethanal to produce the same energy as a gallon of gasoline.

Ethanol looks even worse when you factor in the energy and farmland that goes into producing the necessary vegetable matter.

But the politicians know they can pretty well count on deep and broad ignorance among the general population in these matters, so they are jumping on the ethanol bandwagon to earn 'green' points with us.

Their corporate friends, including agribusiness, like it, too. Look at Blago's ethonal program that is really nothing more than a $1.2 Billion farm subsidy program.

Kheris said...

Julie -

Ethanol is being subsidized to the tune of $.51/gallon. There is a term; Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI) that applies to ethanol. The corn has to be processed and this requires natural gas (expected to peak ~10 years after oil) and water. So you are taking a signficant input of fossil fuel to create a biofuel, that has been demonstrated to have less efficiency than standard gasoline. The existence of the 10% ethanol requirement in the gas we pump is as much political as it is anything else. I posted this link to The Energy Bulletin regarding ethanol. The quote is from a letter they received. The letter writer included that data from an article submitted to the Oil and Gas Journal (subscription required) in 2005. You might want to check in with the Bulletin and with The Oil Drum, which is frequented by geologists, economists, writers like James Kunstler, regular folks like myself, and oil insiders, like Jeffrey Brown and Robert Rapier. There was a discussion about ethanol over there and comments were made about the subsidy being the only reason ethanol was being included. I'd have to reread Hirsch and others to get better cites if you need them, but the links to the reports I have found so far, which usually have additional source links, are in my posts.