There is an old Italian saying that young men don't have time to plant fruit trees, only old men have time to plant fruit trees. (I think it's Italian. In any case, I'm giving them the credit - because I love Italy and I like the saying).
The point is this: young men don't have the sense to realize that the four or five years it will take for the trees to yield fruit will pass soon enough. But you need to start. If you don't, five years will pass and you will still have no fruit. Old men (that is, wise men) know that you need to think - AND ACT - in the long term.
Unfortunately for us, the President, and his liberal minions in the Senate and House, are, like the young men, in too much of a hurry about the wrong things, and unwilling to either act wise or follow the advice of the wise. For many years a wide range of people have shown that the US: 1) needs cheaper energy, 2) needs to increase its refinery capacity, and 3) can solve both those problems internally.
First, there is a super-abundance of oil and natural gas in the US - at current consumption levels literally centuries worth of these precious materials. The oil and gas present in shale and tar sands and other relatively untouched assets would allow the US to be both the largest producer and a major exporter of oil and gas in less then a decade if properly developed. And to sustain that production for at least a century and probably several centuries.
Second, we need to increase our refinery capacity - and continue to rehab our current refineries. It doesn’t matter how much oil you have if you don’t have adequate refining capacity. And refineries are expensive - one project to rehab a refinery in Texas will cost something on the order of $4 or 5 billion. That's routine. We need to expand existing refineries and build new ones. One of the central reasons gasoline and fuel oil prices fluctuate is that they are refined in the same facilities, which means the oil companies need to stop making the one and start making the other, twice a year. This leads to short-term fluctuations in stocks that cause price spikes. If you want to get rid of those price spikes you need to build more refineries. But Congress and the President keep blocking such efforts.
Now the President says 'he can't do anything right away, but we have algae, and that may work.' Here's a hint: it won't. The simple truth is that gasoline (and jet fuel) is a superb fuel because of one thing: energy density. The amount of energy that I can get out of a pound of gasoline, easily, is unmatched by anything else on the planet. We all need to remember that if we want to understand the energy issue. Bringing into the picture something that does not have the energy density of petroleum, such as algae means that you are adding cost and complexity to the economy for little return. There are a few fuels that have greater energy density then oil, the obvious one being uranium (which far exceeds petroleum). But extracting energy from uranium involves much greater complexity. That is why we don’t have nuclear reactors in our garages, but we do have gas-powered generators.
The fact of the matter is that the President can do something. And it is more than simply getting out of the way of private industry and letting bright, creative people develop the various resources here in the US. Clearly, he needs to do that. But he also needs to make it clear that he IS doing that. The price of gasoline is rising right now based on several factors: the actual supply of gasoline (again a function of total refinery capacity in the US), upward pressure on the price of crude oil from ‘hoarders’ as fear of a possible confrontation with Iran continues to permeate the market, and speculation by commodity traders who are buying oil futures as they react to those fears. By taking a position that the US is going to act now to ensure expanded long-term production of oil and gas in the US (and economically and politically it would spill over into Canada), the US would send a positive signal to the international community and would help to tamp down market speculation.
Would it produce instant oil? No. But if he acts now the first oil would in fact be flowing much sooner than he or his policy experts suspect.
About a week after the terror attacks of September 11th, 2001 I received a note from an admiral asking for ideas on what we (the intelligence community) needed to do. I responded with a fairly detailed plan (one that, truth be known, I had submitted up the chain of command nearly every year since 1991 - to resounding silence) on how to fix and/or reorganize certain elements of our intelligence effort. The response I received - which led eventually to several shouting phone calls - was that 'those are good ideas, but they would take 5 years or more to implement. We need something now.' Well, it doesn't take a clairvoyant to know where this story is headed. As of perhaps a few months ago, that is, later 2011, (I haven't really checked since before New Years - I've been busy) the problems which I had identified remain essentially ‘unfixed,’ and no serious effort is in play to address them - more than 11 years later.
It is an unfortunate truth that governments, and most political figures, cannot and will not think beyond the next election. Perhaps the President truly believes that taking moves now to increase the domestic production of oil and gas will not lead to any real change in our energy situation. If so, he is clearly not on the side of any of the experts in the field. Or perhaps he is simply playing politics, and everyone will have to suffer through a possible oil and energy crisis. As with the young men who refuse to plant the fruit tree, it doesn’t really matter why, what matters is that in the end there will be no more oil, just as there will be no fruit. Either way, it’s not the way the wise men would act.
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