Posted on behalf of Jeff Tollefson:
Like many recent meetings on energy policy, the National Academies’ Summit on America’s Energy Future, in Washington this week, felt a bit like an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting for newcomers. Everybody has taken the first step and acknowledged the problem, but there is plenty of confusion regarding the next 11 steps. The challenge is that nobody can open up a little book to figure it out.
The nation’s first energy secretary, the iconic James Schlesinger, set the tone early on with a grim analysis lightened only by a healthy dose of dark humour. He rattled off a host of frightening statistics (to meet projected oil demand in the next couple of decades, we would need to develop the equivalent of nine Saudi Arabias), while outlining a new generation of geopolitical issues surrounding the rise of China and the resurgence of Russia. And then there’s global warming.
On that, Schlesinger compared people to frogs who are perfectly happy to sit in a pot of water as it is brought to a boil – so long as this process proceeds slowly. “We are watching the water being heated very slowly,” he said. “The reality is that the public has to be hit on the head with a two-by-four.” Negotiating the political and technological roadblocks to engineering a sustainable global economy will be tricky, Schlesinger said. “I only take comfort from the belief that the handwriting on the wall is a forgery."
Separately, Schlumberger vice president Rodney Nelson, who also handles carbon management at the National Petroleum Council, put up two pie charts — a smaller one showing current energy consumption and a larger one showing the council’s projections for 2030. “One thing people notice is that nothing is changing,” he said, referring to the dominance of fossil fuels in both charts. “That is and isn’t true. The pie is getting bigger.”
He and others hammered on the technical difficulty of developing viable technologies, training a new energy workforce (more than half of the current generation will be eligible to retire in a decade), putting new infrastructure in place and allowing them to propagate through the economy. All of this can be done, for a price, but the question is how fast. On this point, there appears to be no clear answer.
Corn ethanol was the butt of plenty a joke at the meeting, but sugarcane ethanol got a boost from the convivial Jose Goldemberg, environment secretary for the state of Sao Paulo, which produces most of the ethanol in Brazil. Goldemberg questioned studies linking biofuels with deforestation in Brazil and suggested that biofuels are poised to grow, sustainably, in the coming decade. He then called on the United States to eliminate its 51-cent tariff on foreign ethanol.
He acknowledged that in such a scenario the US would merely be trading one energy dependence for another, then paused for a moment. “Well, I would point out that the Middle East and the Caribbean are very different places,” he said, drawing laughter and applause.
Of course the problem with projections, whether for oil or ethanol or anything else, is that they are necessarily based on current economics. Although politicians took a beating for generally pandering to the public with false promises of lower gasoline prices, there was nonetheless optimism that Washington has finally embarked on a legislative process that will, if done correctly, change the game entirely.