James Woolsey: "End Oil Addiction Now"
James Woolsey wrote an interesting opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal this morning. Mr. Woolsey is a former director of the CIA, has served in four administrations, is a foreign policy expert and Rhodes Scholar. He is also dedicated to renewable energy and energy security – in short, moving away from dependence on fossil fuels. Woolsey is a venture partner with VantagePoint, chairs the Strategic Advisory Group of Paladin Capital Group and is Counsel at Goodwin Proctor specializing in alternative energy and security. There are numerous posts on this blog on Woolsey – so readers have no shortage of material on the man.
In the opinion piece, “How to End America’s Addition to Oil,” Woolsey plants the seed of urgency by reminding us that oil is now solidly above $80 per barrel, moving consistently higher over the last five quarters. “If oil reaches $125 a barrel again…then approximately half the wealth in the world…will be controlled by OPEC nations,” he says. He has been sounding the alarm for years, as have others, about the issues of oil dependence.
In testimony in front of the Senate Foreign Relations given in 2005, Woolsey stressed that changes in Middle East power could easily cut us off at the knees, and that our petroleum infrastructure is vulnerable to terrorists. We don’t have control over supply or stability of oil. And oil wealth allows dictators to control their people as well. Woolsey notes in the Wall Street piece that eight of the top nine oil exporters are dictatorships or autocrats (all except Norway).
The spread of Wahhabi doctrine plays a major role in Middle Eastern terrorist groups, who are fanatically hostile to Christians, Jews, Shi’ites, women, modern culture, etc. He emphasized this point in the Senate testimony and in other speeches and articles. In a 2007 interview, he said that Saudi Arabia made $160 billion in 2005 from oil, and they gave several billion to Wahhabis across the Islamic world. So in essence, as the major oil consumer, we are paying for and helping support enemies. (The Futurist. “Ending the Oil Era”. July-August 2007).
Renewable Energy
Clean renewable energy is important to different people for different reasons. For some, like Woolsey, green energy means that we are actively moving in the right direction for national security, lessening dependence on volatile or hostile producers. For others, supporting green energy means that the US can develop new jobs, new industries and a stronger economy. For those concerned about peak oil, green energy means moving beyond the eventual fading of fossil fuels to more renewable and sustainable sources. And yet for others, shifting to renewable energy is important because it helps clean up the environment and assuage concerns over climate change. In fact, it doesn’t matter if you support one — or all the reasons. They are all valid reasons, and taken together, vital.
While our oil has peaked and there is not enough to sustain our demand long-term with no change to our habits or policy, we do have natural gas resources. Woolsey supports T. Boone Picken’s recommendations to use natural gas for fleet vehicles and trucking.
Natural Gas and Pickens
I attended a Pickens seminar a few months back in which he was discussing his plans for natural gas and efforts in D.C. Pickens, like Woolsey, focuses on
national security and his concern about giving away wealth and power to OPEC. His efforts right now are on converting the eight million 18 wheeler trucks in the U.S. to natural gas. He points out that they cannot be moved by battery power — or even ethanol. If we require that these trucks switch to natural gas, we can cut our OPEC imports in half, he says.
He was in D.C. to discuss Senate bill 1408 and House bill 1835 (addressing this issue), and said he hopes it may pass by Memorial Day. In his down-home way, he also said (referring to the U.S. having no energy plan), “A fool with a plan beats a genius with no plan any day”.
The U.S. has failed in implementing any national energy policy or plan – a disaster that not only strengthens OPEC but weakens us. The U.S. is late to the renewable game, and we have a long way to go. China is spending and investing $12 million dollars an hour on clean energy, says John Podesta, President of the Center for American Progress. The current U.S. administration has committed some $400 million to remake a multi-trillion dollar landscape.
Woolsey and many others have for many years pointed out the problems. But in order to shift away from oil, there has to be a strong plan and support. “Drill, baby, drill” doesn’t cut it. Even if we turn to unconventional oil sources (tar sands in Canada, shale in the West, etc.), the high cost of production is a disadvantage.
OPEC, who has low costs and large reserves, may simply drop prices or increase production to undermine competitors. We can’t simply drill our way out of the oil problem long-term.
Paul Roberts wrote in his book, The End of Oil, “…American policymakers are too paralyzed to act, terrified that to change the U.S. energy patterns would threaten the nation’s economy and geopolitical status – not to mention outrage voters… The energy superpower has not only surrendered its once-awesome edge…but made it less and less likely that an effective solution…will be deployed in time.” (Paul Roberts. The End of Oil. Houghton Mifflin, 2004.)
Woolsey’s Suggestions for Immediate Energy Action
Back to Woolsey and his opinion piece – his immediate suggestions are:
1) Use new electronic modifications for internal combustion for better energy efficiency
2) Follow T. Boone Pickens’ suggestion of shifting fleet vehicles to natural
gas (of which there is an abundance in the U.S.)
3) Force petroleum products to compete with other fuels, like biomass.
4) Require all new vehicles to be “flexible fuel, open standard.”. He points out that Brazil accomplished this in several years.
5) Electrify vehicles as much as possible (electric or hybrid plug-in). He points out that three out of four Americans travel less than 40 miles per day (the current range of our most popular battery packs) until new innovations come along.
Strike a Blow Quickly
Woolsey stressed that we need to move quickly to “strike a major blow at oil
and OPEC’s dominance” and we should adopt a portfolio approach. We need to use what we have and draw on improvements as they become practical. Teddy Roosevelt, Woolsey reminds us, improved competition by breaking up the Standard Oil cartel. He sees a parallel need to break up the OPEC cartel.
I resent the impication that we are “addicted” to oil. This is a false statement and very caustic. Oil has served us well for many years and has saved thousands if not millions of whales whose blubber used to be burned for lamp oil. The reason oil is $80 a barrel is because we have no domestic energy policy. All we do is import from pollution oriented countries who don’t care about the environment. The US could do it cheaper and cleaner, yet you environmentalists are on a mission that is actually do the opposite of what you intended!
Dude, the U.S. has around 2.2-2.5% of the worlds oil, not enough to effect world oil prices even at “full” production. Green is money, not the opposite. Spend your money here or give to people that hate you.
GOD Bless
for the Good News Solar Energy and other Renewable Energy is the Right Stuff to promote Solar Energy is growing like a non stopable weed.
From
Paul Felix Schott
SOLAR DO WORK
Putting Solar and Wind Energy to Work and Americans
Renewable Energy the Right Stuff
we will have a lot more homeless and starving if we do not but American’s To Work
and all Washington D.C. can to is cry about health care. The Welfare of American’s should be first.
Please print this story for all to read
Buy a Electric Car
Small Business Innovation Grants and Department of Transportation: Small Business Innovation Research Program. I will build a Solar Electric Car Plant. To make
( Electric / Solar ) cars. The Plant will have its roof covered with Solar Panels (PV) Powered 30 to 50% of its power will come from the Sun, and 20 to 30 % from the Wind. The Plant will make Solar / Electric Cars for anyone and will market it to everyone. We Will sell Solar Panels to cover their roofs of their homes, carports and workplaces to recharge their new Solar / Electric Car. ( All Wheel Drive )
This high quality scientific ( Solar / Electric Car ) engineered by Rocket Scientist, Electrical Engineers and Automotive Engineers will put Science, Engineering Education and Research of Green Technology to have a high potential economic payoff in New Jobs and Clean Transportation for All. That most will be able to recharge their cars at home or work. Eliminating the need to go to a gas station, when traveling to and from work or school.
And with a little help from ( UNCLE SAM / The United States Government ) and a prayer All will be able to recharge at all Are Schools that will start to have Solar Covered Parking for Electric or Solar Cars.
We are not building a car to win awards although it most likely will.This car’s contributions to protecting the Environment will be through the promotion, usage, implementation and technology development of Renewable Energies. Development technologlies will be serious engineered to the Working Class People. To make a significant change in the cost to drive. Costing thousands less. Making this car ( Solar Do Work )
The Most Cost – Efficient to Drive. On Planet Earth.
Putting Solar and Wind Energy to Work and Americans
According to the USA Department of Transpotation, The United States of America now has over 240 million registered motor vehicles on its roads. Just think if only 1 fifth of them were Electric Cars or even Electric Hybrid cars. These Cars can cut our need or eliminate the need altogether for Importing Oil. The USA can then stop oil transported overseas to us. The USA imported more then 60 percent of its Oil from overseas in 2009.
Lets Help stop this now this year not ten years down the road..
By driving Electric Cars or even Electric Hybrid cars we will cut Emissions that lead to Pollution and Global Warming. if we and the World had enough Common sense most important we would be Planting Trees, not Bulldozing a Million acres + a year. Trees make oxygen by taking the carbon dioxide out of the air. Carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) is a Greenhouse Gas produced by human activities, primarily through the combustion of fossil fuels by Transportation Vehicles.
Solar, Wind and Renewable Energy will be the Clean Energy of the very near future for homes and to recharge our electric cars and trains. SOLAR ENERGY is the fastest growing marketed goods on the Planet Earth. Freedom from the Power Grid and the Oil CEOs.
This car Solar Do Work will be
100% Built In
The United States of America
United We Stand In GOD We Trust.
If you can help I would be Grateful.
come join my team.
It will be amazingly rewarding.
putting Americans back to work.
The Lord’s Little Helper
Paul Felix Schott
Solar Do Work
solardowork@yahoo.com
May i Please have Your reply on this
Patriotic Americans
Thank You and GOD Bless
I believe that Jim Woolsey’s energy scenario as stated is essentially correct: (a) unless usage of petroleum and its derivative products are somehow throttled-back over the next 10 – 20 years, there will be intensified conflicts, military and economic, over remaining global oil supplies; and (b) if an arrray of alternative ‘green’ energy technologies are not rapidly developed in parallel to help reduce the demand-pressures on oil & gas, and if world GDP economic growth continues at even a modest pace (especially in India and China) over the next 5 – 10 years, the overall price of energy will inevitably rise to levels vastly higher than anything in prior experience. Truly a sobering possibility.
Interestingly, in the array of new ‘green’ energy technologies quietly developing ‘under the media radar’, there is a little-known collection of only recently understood physical phenomena called low energy nuclear reactions (LENRs) that hold great promise if they can be successfully commercialized in the near future.
In particular, LENR technology offers the possibility of potentially developing orders-of-magnitude less expensive, infinitely safer, environmentally and biologically friendly portable distributed power generation systems that can release CO2-free nuclear binding energy at costs vastly lower than today’s uranium fission or even future hoped-for fusion reactors. Most importantly, LENRS are clean and truly ‘green.’
Low energy nuclear reactions are a truly ‘green’ nuclear energy source: no emissions of deadly gamma radiation or dangerous energetic neutrons, and no production of environmentally hazardous, long-lived radioactive wastes. Unlike fission processes, it uses hydrogen and inexpensive stable elements for ‘fuel.’ LENRs are not well known; there is presently little or no public coverage of them in the media, scientific press, or in the majority of ‘premier’ scientific journals.
Present commercial U-235 fission reactors and future D-T fusion reactors are based on what physicists call the ‘strong interaction.’ Unlike fission and fusion, LENRs primarily involve the ‘weak interaction’ — they produce stable, nonpolluting transmutation products (i.e., new elements) and release clean, carbon-free nuclear binding energy in the form of infrared heat. Importantly, LENRs are not ‘weak’ energetically — some of them can actually release more nuclear energy than D-T fusion reactions at comparatively modest temperatures and pressures. LENRs are fundamentally different from fusion and heavy element fission processes.
Given an absence of radiation shielding requirements and nuclear waste cleanup issues, LENRs could be enormously less expensive than existing fission and future hoped-for fusion power generation technologies. Unlike fission, LENRs’ unique ‘green’ attributes should allow them to scale downward. That key characteristic may enable development of energy-dense, long lived, cost-effective systems that scale from small, battery-like devices, to distributed home heating and power generation units, mobile vehicular power sources, all the way up to stationary Megawatt-class power plants.
In fact, if high-volume manufacturing can be achieved, over the long term LENR-based distributed power generation has the potential to eventually become cheaper than coal (see a ‘plain English’ nontechnical January 2009 I-SiS article, “LENRs replacing coal for distributed democratized power.” I-SiS is a London, UK-based environmental group that conducted technical due diligence in 2007 and has since endorsed LENRs as a truly ‘green’ nuclear energy technology. Virtually unknown in the US, I-SiS is relatively well known in Canada, Europe, and Asia.
A nontechnical document was recently uploaded to the public SlideShare.net website in the form of an MS-Word file: http://www.slideshare.net/lewisglarsen/cfakepathlattice-energy-llc-white-paper-excerptapril-12-2010 This file is a ~15 page ‘plain English’ excerpt from a 62-page nonpublic Lattice White Paper that outlines Lattice’s strategic ‘view from 50,000 feet’ of the overall macroeconomic and geopolitical landscape of the present energy dilemma, how LENRs might fit into a societal portfolio of carbon-free ‘green’ energy technologies (assuming that LENRs can be commercialized), and what all this might mean over the long-run.
Quoting from the white paper, “The Gordian knot facing humanity is not that our world will ever run-out of energy per se in the foreseeable future. Between global coal reserves and electromagnetic energy in the form of photons streaming from the sun there is more than enough energy to be had for whatever purpose. Energy availability, in the broadest possible sense, is not the Gordian knot …[it] is that worldwide consumers of energy need to have technologically usable, reasonably priced energy delivered to the right place at exactly the right time in forms that are environmentally benign and readily compatible with sustainable, long-term global economic growth.”
Fascinating stuff. I’ll look into this, and I encourage you to post more on the subject in the future. – Craig
If you support solar, wind or biomass to lessen our dependence on Middle East oil or lower CO2 emissions, then you couldn’t possibly be doing any meaningful research on the subject. If you take the blinders off and look at numbers and physics instead of dreams, it’s very apparent what will work. Any kind of ethanol is a scam and uses 5 times the water and emits twice the CO2 of the equivalent in gasoline. Solar and wind eat up huge amounts of land and their utilization is so low and intermittent, that the same capacity of hydrocarbon burning plants have to be on standby and they have to be of the less efficient variety. Most supporters of these expensive, loser technologies, usually have a financial motive and even though they realize that they are scams, the government subsidies are just too attractive to be truthful. Read Robert Bryce’s book “Power Hungry” or go to his website. He is no one’s hack and he is not invested in any particular technology or sector. He relies on numbers not dreams.
I’m familiar with Robert Bryce, but I simply point out that his viewpoint on this subject is “fringe” at best. I know many of the scientists working on clean energy, climate change, peak oil, ocean acidification, etc. — personally. The idea that these people are intellectually dishonest and acting out of greed is totally preposterous.
JIm, Check with the varius Grid operatiors around the world who are integrating wind and solar and I think you may change your facts. Is Bryce dvocating business as usual? Continued subsidization of oil and nuclear which are five times more subsidized then alternaties. check out china’s big push into electric vehicles and alternitives. there needs to be multiple solutions and advances in PV , wind, biomass, geothermal, fuel cells and maybe nuclear are making them good answers in an energy generation portfolio.
Solar Energy is the fastest growing Industry in the World and has
more then Doubled last year alone. Home owners World Wide are covering there roofs.
Solar Energy is not just for Industry or large Corporate
Businesses and as you say the rich and extravagant.
Cities and Governments all over Earth are covering there building
carports at train stations and work places. The rate of return for
Solar Panels is good and the Industry Leading
Warranty is at 25 Years. Most spend more then that on cars in that time.
Solar Energy is Environmentally Friendly and Very Efficient. Soon Electric Vehicles will outnumber those that need oil to drive down a highway or road.
Electric cars and Vehicles will be Recharging from Solar, Wind and Renewable Energy.
Happy to say in a very short time the need for black gold OIL will
come to a end for most.
Our Homes will get Energy from the Sun and wind and charge Batteries or to be used to split ground water into Hydrogen and Oxygen gases. Then put into tanks in the carport or yard and a Hydrogen Generator will produce energy similar to a gas, oil or diesel generator when needed. Like at Night or when there is no wind or sunlight.
The United States, Germany and China all have for years worked on a Hydrogen Electric Vehicles. Knowing Solar Energy will make them affordable. i have driven them all.
In what seams like paradise Hawaii would be a better place to get
more out of a Solar Energy Systems. You are closer to the sun in Hawaii. Most Places on Earth are Good for Solar Energy and if not Solar then Wind and Renewable Energy.
Contractors, Architects and other Building Professionals Around the Globe are Building more with Solar Energy Systems in there plans.
To Help with the output of a Solar Energy Systems or more info you can call or e mail one of the many Solar Energy Business in the United States i am sure they will be more then happy to help or work with you. Or go to one of the Government sites or
Centers like…
Information on the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Research, Education, Training, and Certification Activities at the Florida Solar Energy Center, FSEC.
My Good Noble friend Bill Young is the Senior Research Engineer for Photovoltaics
at FSEC and in my eyes one of the best Solar Energy Scientist in the World truly
a blessing to have worked for years with Mr. William Young the Goodwill Ambassador
for Solar Energy.
The Lord’s Little Helper
Paul Felix Schott
solardowork@yahoo.com
Solar Energy, Renewables Surpassed Nuclear Power this July 4 2011
Great news this July 4, 2011
Indepence From Oil is coming
Thanks to Solar Energy, Renewables Surpassed Nuclear Output this year July 4, 2011 and will surpass oil very soon this coming year if not it will the next for sure.
Vice-President and General Manager of a OIL Refinery in Lake Charles Louisiana pleaded guilty to Federal Charges of the Clean Air Act today in front of US District Judge Richard T. Haik
The Lord’s Little Helper
Paul Felix Schott
solardowork@yahoo.com
News From the Pentagon Clean Fuel Energy From the Sun July 19, 2011
In Hawaii The Department of Defense will start to cover its Military Family Housing with Solar Energy. This will greatly help stop the need for Oil in the Hawaii Islands. This is just the start to the D.O.D. reducing its 4 billion dollar need for Dirty Energy. From now on the D.O.D. will look to Renewable Energy, Clean Energy. The Hawaiian Islands will see the Largest Solar covered homes and housing Roofs in the World 6,000 units. Thanks to William Lynn Deputy Secretary of the Defense and Steven Chu Secretary of Energy and to many others. The D.O.D. has some 300,000 building the day will come when all will be powered by Clean Energy. i can not thank all that made this happen enough.
GOD Bless
United We Stand In GOD We Will Always Trust
Story By
The Lord’s Little Helper
Paul Felix Schott