Uncategorized patrickmead on 09 Jul 2008 07:17 am
Just a Lot of Wind and (Natural) Gas?
I’ve been asked to comment on the Pickens Plan being touted in commercials, on the internet, and on news talk shows. Pickens has a website up with a five minute video you can watch where he explains his plan succinctly. It is, briefly, based on moving natural gas out of heating and power plants and into car fuel. Once that is done, wind power is to take natural gas’ place. This will, he asserts, reduce our dependence on foreign oil by what appears to be 20-30%.
He is being held up as proof that we can’t drill for oil and save ourselves because he’s an oil man!!! Yet, while I will not guess at his motivations, there is no question that, should his plan be put in place, Pickens would make a TON of money. You see, he is not just an oil man. He also has a lot of money in natural gas, land, and wind farm companies. As I listened to the five minute website commercial, these objections came to mind:
1. "We can’t drill our way out of this" is just wrong. We have more oil under the ground and off our shores and in our Rocky Mountain shale than the entire oilfields of every Middle East country PLUS Venezuela. China and Cuba are at this moment drilling to get our oil (they are drilling on the slant, staying outside international waters above the surface, but putting their pipes miles deep under our waters to get the oil our legislators will not let us get). To say we can’t drill our way out of this problem makes as much sense as saying we can’t eat our way out of being hungry, we can’t drink our way out of being thirsty, and we can’t study our way out of ignorance.
2. His plan only reduces our dependence on foreign oil by a minor percentage and it takes 10 years IF we can get the infrastructure in place, IF we can get past the environmentalists who are shutting down wind farms because of the increase in bird deaths and IF we can get past the Democrats who don’t want wind farms where it will obstruct their view (Kennedys, Walter Cronkite, and several other big libs have kept wind farms from going up along the shore where they can see them. It has been in court for over a decade and their pockets are deep).
3. We can treble the amount of natural gas usable in less than three years if we are allowed to build gassification plants (coal to gas) but, once again, environmentalists have a strangle hold on the Democrats, many Republicans, and all the mainstream media. This and shale oil will never be used unless a national emergency (or a series of 60’s style protest marches and riots for a decade or so, this time launched by the right and libertarians).
4. While Harry Reid likes to say coal and gas make us sick (???), we can lower the cost of a barrel of oil to $70 in six months if we start drilling. The speculators will abandon ship and oil futures will be "sell" instead of "buy." Oil execs say we can have oil online not in the ten years the media/Democrats say but, rather, two years. Besides, these are the same people who stopped us from drilling in ANWR 13 years ago and who have consistently stopped all attempts to drill, build refineries, or construct nuclear power plants over the last 40 years. Think how cheap and clean our energy would be today had progress not been thwarted by Democrats, some Republicans, and the environmentalists.
5. Wind power has proven to be elusive and unreliable. While it is a great addition to the power grid, no town, not even Sweetwater, gets the majority of its electricity from windpower and, in fact, often has to draw 100% of its power from other sources when wind fails, sometimes for weeks at a time.
6. Solar power is very usable, but it has been taken off the table by
environmentalists. A recent project and study showed that a huge amount of electricity could be reliably created in the southwest on land already set aside for that effort. The private contractors were ready to roll on it… and the Democrats and environmentalists (along with some Republicans such as McCain and Whitman) shoved through legislation to stop all development of solar energy there for at least six years so that environmentalists could study its possible impact. Yep. They won’t be happy until all of the lights go out.
There is more, but this is just a taste. Pickens is smart, but he isn’t covering all the bases on this one. We need to discuss, one day, how Carbon is used in agriculture to increase the size and fruitfulness of plants. It seems CO2 isn’t the bogey man we are told it is.
patrickmead
on 09 Jul 2008 at 7:24 am # Danny Gill
Patrick, the font changes when you go into your analysis, and the paragraphs are cut off on the right.
on 09 Jul 2008 at 8:11 am # Patrick Mead
Thanks, Danny. I think it’s fixed now. My Firefox browser and my blog software do NOT like each other. I hate going back to IE just to cut and paste, but them’s the breaks…
on 09 Jul 2008 at 8:18 am # Danny Gill
I’d encourage everyone to read “Cool It” by Bjorn Lomborg. He is a Danish economist, and he explores the cost of global warming vs. global cooling, Kyoto vs. other steps, etc. He takes the global warming models and works from them. Personally I think the man-made impact is insignificant and that we are not experiencing the warming that some say we are, but even if it is true, Lomborg brings some reality to the debate.
on 09 Jul 2008 at 9:04 am # Eric S. Mueller
I’ve always found “follow the money” to be a smart policy. There is a LOT of money to be made in “green tech.” Look at how much money people like Al Gore get for global warming speeches, books, and movies.
I read yesterday about an interesting theory called “rock oil”, which was apparently developed in the 50’s by Russian and Ukrainian scientists. The theory is that rather than being the remains of dead dinosaurs covered by miles of rocks, oil is produced naturally deep within the Earth’s crust. I need to do a lot more reading on the subject, but it’s interesting. If there’s any truth to it, that wouldn’t be the first time my high school textbooks turned out to be wrong.
on 09 Jul 2008 at 9:10 am # Russel Wilkinson
Other concerns around natural gas revolve around the amount of “our” reserves versus the reserves of other countries. We rank 6th in the world and our reserves are 1/4 that of Qatar and Iran and 1/10 that of Russia. Canada and Mexico, the largest and third largest exporters of oil to the US, are 19th and not ranked, respectively, in natural gas reserves. Combine this with the fact that it’s extremely challenging to transport natural gas overseas and we are effectively limiting ourselves to our own natural gas supplies. Which wouldn’t be bad if we could stretch those by tapping our own oil reserves. Why don’t we see protests over Canada’s drilling in ANWR type areas? Are their caribou and polar bears less sensitive than ours?
The DOE under George Bush’s guidance has been attempting to build out a clean coal plant project (http://www.fossil.energy.gov/programs/powersystems/futuregen/) but funding was pulled recently by congress (according to what I’ve read so please correct me if I’m wrong) after a site for the first plant had already been chosen. We have 1/4 of the world’s coal supplies right under our own feet. To quote one analyst I heard, we are the Saudi Arabia of coal!
on 09 Jul 2008 at 9:41 am # Patrick Mead
It is well understood that less than 10% of all greenhouse gases are produced by humans. One of the environmentalists’ agendas is to reduce our consumption of animal products thereby eliminating most cattle, pigs, etc.
on 09 Jul 2008 at 9:42 am # Patrick Mead
Eric, that’s been around awhile and I don’t think it’s complete nonsense. We know that we can make oil in a lab with vegetable matter, heat, water, and pressure. Why can’t the earth do the same thing?
on 09 Jul 2008 at 9:43 am # Patrick Mead
When Clinton was in the pockets of the Indonesians, he removed the vast majority of our cleanest coal from being mined. By an executive order he created a national park over it, over the objections of the state governors the park affected. Unless and until we get a president willing to override that order, we cannot access most of our coal.
on 10 Jul 2008 at 9:03 am # Kyle Parker
Hey, lets not give Boone Pickens a hard time…he’s using his hard earned money to build a football stadium down here at Oklahoma State.
The thing that gets me most about global warming is that “Environmentalists” base their claims on weather data that is at most 100 years old. The earth is much older than that, (even thousands of years is much older) and I’m pretty certain has gone through several climate changes. How do they know this isn’t just a cycle?
on 10 Jul 2008 at 9:40 am # cg
I’m still waiting for environmentalists to explain why record high temps for nearly every state in the country were achieved before the automobile revolution — considering that accurate weather records have been kept since the 1880’s, and most of these record high temps occured before the 1940’s and remain unbroken to this day. http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0001416.html
Hmmmm…
Why do our leaders refuse to use the common sense God gave us?
on 14 Jul 2008 at 9:07 pm # Eric
The problem is that there has not been a major oil discovery in over 30 years. Somebody is going to have to find oil very fast. At the same time we have to learn to conserve and gear way from large automobiles. Hybrids are the intermediate step to perhaps the real solution which is Hydrogen. This will take time, but we must continue to fund alternatives as well as drilling in the interim, but with the realization at some point hydrocarbons must be replaced as the main source of energy that sustains us.
on 14 Jul 2008 at 9:10 pm # Eric
I could be wrong but,I believe this has been done in South Africa for decades by a company called Sasol. The Germans invented this process back in the 1940’s I believe.
on 02 Aug 2008 at 7:03 pm # Sensible Environmentalist
CG,
Single day temperature records can’t be taken seriously to prove climate patterns. Be careful with the commen sense accusation because there are climate figures going back many years, which you obviously refuse to acknowledge.
on 03 Aug 2008 at 7:42 pm # Ron Cutsinger
I agree completely, Patrick. Let’s drill, build more nuclear plants, make better use of natural gas and coal, and in the mean time explore alternative forms of energy even if it means funding a massive effort on the scale of the manhattan project or the race to the moon. If our do nothing congress would take action this could be solved in short order.