Obstacles to The Energy Revolution
This post deals with the bureaucratic obstacles that will delay The Energy Revolution. More importantly these delays will no doubt increase the economic cost of the revolution and heighten the reduction of standard of living that will occur while we are undergoing this process. Under existing procedures it could easily take 10-15 years to build a major energy facility. To transition through the revolution it will required to build thousands of such facilities. Other countries could build such facilities in much less time, with far less bureaucratic obstacles and less concern for impact on the environment. This would result in further requirements for costly imports, rather than us becoming an exporter of products for which we have abundant natural resources.
The ideas and suggestions put forth in this post may not be popular in some camps. The urgency of aggressively resolving the problems that will occur during The Energy Revolution cannot be emphasized too much, we are facing a revolution with possible consequence as great as a war and it must be treated as such. If we do not our society may have to revert to a lifestyle more typical of 19th century agrarian communities. Is that what you want?
I must credit Hirsch, p46 for all of the ideas put forth in this post.
"Not-in-my-back-yard" (NIMBY) and "build-absolutely-nothing-anywhere-near-anything" (BANANA) attitudes have become standard obstacles for any large construction project. The siting process for such projects is a nightmare to builders because the opponents, who certainly have the right to be heard, can drag out this process almost indefinitely. Hirsch uses the example of the permitting process for small distributed energy systems requiring 18 steps, requiring approval from four federal agencies, 11 state government agencies and 11 local government agencies. "For the U.S. to attain a lower level of dependence on liquid fuel imports after the advent of world oil peaking, a major paradigm shift will be required in the current approach to the construction of capital-intensive energy facilities. Federal and state governments will have to adopt legislation allowing the acceleration of the development of substitute fuel projects from the current decade time-scales."
In his summary and concluding remarks he states: "Intervention by governments will be required, because the economic and social implications of oil peaking would otherwise be chaotic. ..... Expediency may require major changes to existing administrative and regulatory procedures such as length environmental review and length public environment."
Despite all the negative aspects of oil peaking, many opportunities could also arise. Quoting from Hirsch "The U.S. could emerge as the world's largest producer of substituted liquid fuels, if it were to undertake a massive program to construct substitute fuel production facilities on a timely basis." Because we have the world's largest coal reserves, combined with our financial and technological resources we have the basis to implement such a program. The major powers in the far east also have the ability to build and operate such facilities, but they lack the coal to sustain such an operation over a very long time frame. We could end up having to import substitute fuels as well as our share of the remaining conventional oil resources.
This the last of seven major posts that serve as an overview for The Energy Revolution. I hope they are of benefit to some. All of these posts can be found by selecting the overview category. Future posts will examine details of the technology involved and news events tin the energy field.
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"As a retired engineer with a strong interest in energy I began researching the subject of peak oil and found the subject much more contoversial than I had anticipated. I wanted to share the results of my research, which led to this blog. The Energy Blog is designed to be a place where all energy topics are presented and form the basis for discussion. I hope that this site can eventually be a useful reference for those that wish to find information about the energy revolution."
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