Oil Spill Q&A — Why Utopia Isn't an Option
ENTERPRISE BLOG
By Kenneth P. Green on Energy and Environment
Like most energy policy researchers, I've been speaking to a lot of reporters lately about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill now threatening the Gulf Coast. My colleague, Steve Hayward, has also been busy opining on the subject. Most of the reporters are asking the same questions:
Q) Will this new oil spill slow down or stop the expansion of offshore drilling?
A) Yes, it'll slow it down, but not forever. There's no superior alternative transportation fuel to petroleum, and the world has a mighty thirst for transportation fuels. Good replacements are decades away. Bad replacements, such as ethanol are available, but we'd be foolish to use them—they have environmental impacts worse than petroleum, and there is already serious push back against those fuels by environmentalists.
Q) How will this affect the Obama administration's plan to allow more offshore oil exploration and development?
A) Not very much, since the Obama administration has not shown much sincerity in any of their energy announcements. They're pro-nuke, but they shut Yucca Mountain down, leaving the waste question in limbo. They're pro-natural gas, but, well, they think we need to slow down development so they can "study" fraccing (the technology producing massive quantities of domestic natural gas) until they're absolutely sure it's safe, or until they're out of office, whichever comes first.
Q) Isn't this the "perfect storm" for big oil? Isn't this a huge gift to environmentalists who oppose oil production?
A) Yes, and no. It's certainly a black eye for British Petroleum, which some have called "Beyond Probity" for their shameless (and insincere) pandering to environmentalists with their "Beyond Petroleum" campaign. And yes, environmental activists have to see this as a rhetorical gift, though one hopes they're aghast at the environmental impact this will have, as I am. But this "perfect storm" isn't going to fix the underlying economic calculus that politicians face when gasoline prices approach $4.00 per gallon, which some analysts expect to happen in the relatively near term. This spill may be Scylla, but high gasoline prices are Charybdis.
Q) Will this stimulate the search for a replacement for oil?
A) Not much. There is already a great deal of research going on, looking for replacements for gasoline and oil, but it's not easy for us to conjure up a replacement for a substance that nature spent millions of years cooking up for us. Though environmentalists hate petroleum (and it does have its downsides, certainly), the fact is, petroleum is a wonder-goop. Not only does it make an incredibly energy-dense fuel, it's chock full of useful chemicals we can't get anywhere else. Alternatives, such as crop-based biofuels, are proving to be a bad bet economically and environmentally, not to mention ethically: biofuels displace food-crop growth, raising the cost of food, and increasing starvation in developing countries. The ethanol industry talks about cellulosic ethanol as the answer, but cellulosic ethanol has been 10 years away for 40 years now, and guess what? It's still 10 years away. And, some scientific research suggests that even cellulosic ethanol would put such a bounty on land as to cause massive ecosystem consumption and destruction. There's some hope for fuel from algae, but, as yet, that's all it is—hope. Some people want us to make methanol from coal or natural gas, which may be feasible, but most cars can't run on the stuff, gas stations don't have pumps and tanks for it, and so on. It's locked in chicken-and-eggville. And we can only use it if we don't care about possibly increasing greenhouse gas emissions.
Q) What about electric cars? Won't this stimulate the move to electric cars?
A) Probably not, because electric vehicles still lack the abilities consumers want; they're still more costly than gasoline powered vehicles; they face their own infrastructure problems (such as a lack of charging stations); and they create their own environmental problems (batteries are not environmentally benign. Heavy metals, anyone?). Besides, people are still driving 20-year-old cars, so the rate that battery vehicles could penetrate the market would have an insignificant impact on oil consumption for several decades.
Bottom line? There's no fuel or energy type without both benefits and liabilities. And we're an energy civilization: we're not going back to the caves, and we're not switching over to bicycles, as much as some bicycle nuts (like our present Secretary of Transportation, Ray Lahood) would like us to.
So, unless John Galt pops up with his energy gizmo, or the aliens bring us that perfect, free energy source, we have to make choices, deal with trade-offs, fix up damages as we go (pricing that into the cost of the energy source), and move on. Utopia isn't an option. |
