Energy security: It takes more than drilling
By R. James Woolsey, Amory B. Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins
SNOWMASS, COLO. - THE savagery of Sept. 11 confirmed that both
Mideast oil dependence and fragile infrastructure threaten national
security. Replacing Mideast oil is vital, but not by substituting equally
or more vulnerable domestic sources.
Domestic energy systems aren't secure unless they're designed to
make large-scale failures impossible and local failures benign. Today
the opposite is true: The United States' extraordinarily concentrated
energy flows invite and reward devastating attack.
Two decades ago, two of us authored and
one wrote the foreword to a Pentagon study
called Brittle Power: Energy Strategy for
National Security. It found - and little has
changed since - that a handful of people
could shut down three-quarters of the oil and
gas supplies to the Eastern states (without
leaving Louisiana), cut the power to any
major city, or kill millions by crashing an
airliner into a nuclear power plant. Expanding
centralized and vulnerable energy systems
didn't protect national security then, and it
won't now.
Energy security starts with using less
energy far more efficiently to do the same
tasks. The next step is to obtain more
energy from sources that are inherently
invulnerable because they're dispersed,
diverse, and increasingly renewable.
Meanwhile, we must not increase reliance
on existing vulnerable systems. This
strategy doesn't cost more; indeed, it's
already winning in the marketplace.
Oil fuels 97 percent of US mobility. Relying
for 13 percent of US oil supply on the
pathological predators and vulnerable
autocrats of the Mideast - home of at least
two-thirds of the world's reserves - is a
tragedy waiting to happen. We need not just
another crude-oil source, but also an
inherently secure supply chain delivering
useful transportation fuels all the way to
customers - then using those fuels
productively so we need less. Alternatives can supply a bigger share,
and stockpiles last longer.
Efficiency is the first and cheapest rapid-deployment energy
resource. In 2000, America used 40 percent less energy and 49
percent less oil to produce each dollar of GDP than in 1975. Those
savings are now the nation's largest "source" - five times domestic
oil output. Most were achieved in just six years, from 1979 to 1985,
when gross domestic product grew 16 percent, total oil use fell 15
percent, and Gulf imports fell 87 percent.
Modern efficiency technologies can put another $300 billion a year
back into Americans' pockets. Just a 2.7-m.p.g. better light-vehicle
fleet could save as much petroleum as we import from the Persian
Gulf.
Saving oil is the fastest way to blunt OPEC's market power, beat
down prices, and expand invulnerable sources' share of energy
supply. Billions of dollars in annual military fuel-saving opportunities
just found by the Defense Science Board would also let US armed
forces fight more effectively far from home.
New ways to supply fuel from renewable sources can be secure, fast,
and competitive. Urban, industrial, farm, and forest wastes and
soil-replenishing crops, such as prairie grass, can yield clean
transportation fuels, electricity, fertilizer, and substitutes for
petrochemicals. Done right, this can also improve topsoil, enhance
farmers' income, preserve rural culture, and stabilize the climate.
Producing such biofuels locally bypasses vulnerable pipelines,
employs Americans, and keeps dollars at home. Hydrogen fuel cells
based on natural gas (but without using more) or renewable energy
could also save about $1 trillion of investment for transportation fuel
infrastructure in the next 40 years while displacing oil promptly,
securely, profitably - and in the long run, almost completely.
Drilling for more oil in the United States might be a useful but limited
step, since the US uses 25 percent of the world's oil but owns only 3
percent. New domestic oil is generally costly and far from customers.
Of the some 4 million oil wells drilled since the 1860s, 3 million have
been drilled in the lower 48. Alaska has been less exploited, so the
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge might yield oil - albeit, says the US
Geological Survey, uneconomically, a decade off, and briefly cutting
imports by only up to 5 percentage points.
But the real show-stopper is national security. Delivering that oil by
its only route, the 800-mile-long Trans-Alaska Pipeline System
(TAPS), would make TAPS the fattest energy-terrorist target in the
country - Uncle Sam's "Kick Me" sign.
TAPS is frighteningly insecure. It's largely accessible to attackers,
but often unrepairable in winter. If key pumping stations or facilities at
either end were disabled, at least the above-ground half of 9 million
barrels of hot oil could congeal in one winter week into the world's
biggest Chapstik.
The Army has found TAPS indefensible. It has already been
sabotaged, incompetently bombed twice, and shot at more than 50
times. Last Oct. 4, a drunk shut it down with one rifle shot.
In 1999, a disgruntled engineer's sophisticated plot to blow up three
critical points with 14 bombs, then profit from oil futures trading, was
thwarted by luck. He was an amiable bungler compared with the
Sept. 11 attackers. Connect the dots: Doubling and prolonging
dependence on TAPS hardly seems a prudent centerpiece for what
advocates whimsically called the Homeland Energy Security Bill.
Reliance both on Mideast oil and on vulnerable domestic energy
infrastructure such as TAPS imperils the security of the US and its
friends.
Both sources of vulnerability are unnecessary and uneconomic. They
should be countered by the cheapest mix of two secure options:
efficiency gains and distributed domestic supply alternatives. Then,
adding the power of markets to the ingenuity of industry, we can
move promptly toward an energy system that terrorists can't shut off
- and a durable foundation for an America that would no longer be a
brittle power.
o R. James Woolsey, an attorney, was Director of Central Intelligence
1993 to 1995. The Lovinses, who lead the nonprofit Rocky Mountain
Institute, have long advised major oil companies and the Energy and
Defense Departments. For more information on this subject, go to
www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid533.php and www.nepinitiative.org. |
