Replacing Oil with Clean Energy
Oil sure causes a lot of problems, and the United States hardly has any left, and when we invade another country to secure their oil for ourselves, we only end up blowing $132 million dollars per day to import 3 million gallons of petro fuel for our occupying army.
Hey, I’ve got a great idea! Let’s stop using oil and switch to alternative energy sources like biofuels and solar energy and wind farms! Then we can stop having to negotiate with OPEC and the troops can come home and we can build Disney Worlds on every corner with all the extra clean energy!
It seems like I’ve overheard the above paragraph, or a paraphrase, a hundred times around the watercooler. I’ve also heard it’s a pipe dream. And I’ve heard it’s a dream that will come true. So, I ask myself, what’s the truth? Can we really replace oil or not?
Oil: Some Really Good, Good Stuff
Even Alan Greenspan admitted that the Iraq War is about oil, and everybody knows it.
Everybody also knows that over 4100 soldiers have died for Iraq’s oil.
Fewer people realize — or will be honest enough to admit — that a human life has a finite value. When broken down into bodily systems and organs, you might be worth as much as $45 million. And when broken down into your basic elements, you’re only worth about $4.50. Somewhere between the two numbers lies the truth…and just for kicks, I’m going to use the average U.S. wage for 2008, and round it up: Yes, an average human life is worth $20 an hour.
Even fewer people realize what a really really really good deal oil is. Very good approximations have been calculated, and it’s very much in the ballpark to say that one barrel of oil supplies the energy/work of 10,000 hours of human labor (if this sounds somewhat fantastic, go outside, try to push a loaded 18 wheeler up a mountain, and come back; it won’t seem so far-fetched anymore).
Now, let’s bridge those two numbers: 10,000 human hours, at $20 an hour = $200,000.
So, get this…a barrel of oil is worth $200,000 worth of human labor, and right now it’s only going for $140.
And there’s 115 billion barrels underneath Iraq. And there’s 136 billion barrels of the stuff beneath Iran, too!
So, an average human life is worth 45 years * 40 hours per week * $20 per hour = almost $2 million.
Now it should no longer be a surprise what goes on during secret meetings between politicians and oil executives. When the number crunching is done, even a hundred thousand human lives (100,000 * $2 million = $200 billion) in exchange for 115 billion barrels of oil (115 billion * $140 = $16.1 Trillion) is a super fantastic deal! Cheney didn’t even have to think about it, really.
Nuclear Power Plants
Enough war talk…let’s assume we throw out the corporations and lobbyists and Cheney is tarred and feathered. Now, we’re finally going to convert from oil to all that other good clean green stuff. What’s it looking like?
The United States consumes 20 million barrels of oil per day, or 7.3 billion barrels of oil per year, or about 1.34 TeraWatts (Trillion Watts).
The largest nuclear power plants output just over 1,000 MegaWatts (Million watts), so we could totally replace our oil dependency if we built over 1000 new nuclear power plants. We’ll just split it even and put twenty in each state. I don’t think I’m alone in thinking this isn’t going to sit well, especially when sites for waste storage are bandied about. And Nuclear energy does produce waste. No, if we’re going to replace oil, lets choose a CLEAN energy this time…
Wind Power
America has plenty of land. And we have wind. What about some wind farms?
The Horse Hollow Wind Farm consists of 421 giant turbines spread over 47,000 acres in Texas. It’s the biggest wind farm on the planet. And it generates 735.5 Megawatts. With only another 1,821 wind farms as big as Hollow Wind, we can kiss oil goodbye.
Hmmm…ok, what I’m starting to realize is that replacing our daily oil habit isn’t going to be easy. But it IS doable. It’s just on the scale of another Apollo space program. Yes, 1,821 wind farms sounds insane. But really, we only need about 728,400 more giant turbines…
Modern wind turbine generators cost about $2000 per kilowatt, so to totally replace oil, we’re looking at chunking out $2.6 trillion dollars, which is only about 4 times what we’ve spent in Iraq. These wind turbines will last over 25 years and pay for themselves in the first 3 months. Sure wish we’d started building those turbines before going on a snipe hunt for WMD and sinking our economy.
Solar Energy
And then, there’s solar energy.
When it’s operational, the 4,500 acre solar generating station coming to Southern California will have 20,000 dishes producing 500 MegaWatts of power. With just 2,380 more farms like that one…we can kiss oil goodbye.
The thing is, if we only built half the wind farms and half the solar generating stations, made solar rooftops standard, and converted all the shit coming out of Congress and the White House into natural gas and biomass fertilizer, we’d be energy independent. Instead, we’re pouring more oil into corn fields, and burning oil to harvest the corn to make ethanol…ethanol, which uses up more energy to produce than it provides, while providing the middlemen with more of our pocket change, and robbing the poor of affordable food.
If Americans can build the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Golden Gate Bridge, and the St. Louis Arch, the Hoover Dam, the Erie Canal, the Empire State Building, and the Saturn V, I have no doubt we can manage a few hundred thousand windmills in our corn patches. What I seriously doubt anymore is that we Americans can overcome the immense greed of corporations and their lobbyists long enough to make our leaders put their country above their self interest.
Read More: Oil, oil habit, replacing oil, clean energy, alternative energy sources, nuclear power, wind power, wind farms, solar energy, solar power
Related Articles
Joe a nice idea, but will not float until we stop being a selfish nation. We have a so called leader like Al Gore who doesn’t practice what he preaches. he tells us to conserve, but thinks buying carbon rights absolves him of all his sins of waste.
If we just cut our consumption of bottled water in half, cut down on speeding, and turned off those air conditioners for a few days how many millions of barrels of oil would we save on a daily basis.
Look at all that plastic packaging that you throw away on a daily basis. The smallest items come encased in ridiculessly large plastic containers as millions of barrels of oil are used to create them.
As long as we consume and waste at this pace we will never catch up, no matter what kind or how many alternative engergy sites we build.
“going on a snipe hunt for WMD”
Love it!
Before I say we are on a runaway train and we can’t stop it, I have to say I like the wind farm thing. I can’t see much negative impact. It even creates a new profession to maintain them. WindMonkies?
I have read that solar does have a negative impact. I guess it heats up the planet a bit more.
2000 Three Mile Islands? No thanks. Until we can at least neutralize the waste, not a good idea either.
I don’t think I’m old enough to know what we did before Tupperware, Saran Wrap, etc. But I have been looking at my daily trash production and am amazed at what I throw away. The quantity!!!
I do recall that my family was one of those who boycotted cheap Japanse goods. I used to boycott Chinese goods..but now I would be walking around, naked and shoeless if I boycotted them (sorry for that image folks…oh, alright…think Robert Duvall). I would have anything to sit on, anything to drink from or even any soy to put on my rice. Sidenote: BTW, Joe are you the one who told us that we are cannibals? Human hair used in soy recipe? A guess at least Chinese Barbers are recycling. Does that make you happier, Pelmo?
Pelmo, I agree we should be conserving, and I believe we are a very self-centered nation. I’m a little leary about conserving because I’ve already been burned once…when I was kid in the 70’s oil crunch we got stickers at school to put on our lightswitches at hom “Turn off/save energy” type of stuff, and recycled, and what happened? Cheap oil came along in the eighties and it was party time again, and while I recycled a drop in the bucket, the big dawgs of the world blew the savings and more. So, this time aroud, I’m a little leary of busting my own butt to conserve a few drops in the bucket until I see the big dawgs (the corporate world, government, Gore, etc.) buy into it and actually get themselves in bed with the idea themselves. I don’t like sacrificing just so the big dawgs can party harder.
We need an incentive to conserve that’s in our face, and right now the only thing that’s really in our face is higher gas. And I’m starting to think higher gas prices are a good thing if they’re a catalyst for change. If we really want to solve the plastic problem, we need to slap a tax on plastic and offer bigger monetary reward for recycling it…maybe have to pay it in Euros instead of dollars at this point, too.
Xman, the more I read about wind power, I’m really becoming a fan of it. Next to sunlight, wind is probably the most plentiful natural energy source, and unlike solar farms, wind farms can coexist on the same land being used to grow food. The turbines pay for themselves in 3 months and have a lifetime of 25 years. No pollution, either. The only drawback is it will take a humongous number of them. Americans are good at tackling humongous tasks…I think THAT should be a challenge…maybe before we go back to the moon, we should set a goal to have half a million turbines up and running in five years…if we attacked it like the factories that revved up to produce airplanes and ammunition during WWII, we could knock it out in no time.
But again…Bush and Cheney and Exxon can’t make lots of easy money for nothing off that idea, so trash it.
A story about energy that affects us all and all we get are two measly responses. Write something pro Bush or anti Obama and the screen lights up like a Christmas tree as sides are taken and a battle ensues.
Are we that shallow, that all most people can concentrate on is one subject at a time? No wonder nothing gets accomplished anymore.
It occurs to me that confronting these sort of big-time difficult problems is to
encounter meaningful issues at every level –the deeper one digs…the subject and context is successively altered. Coming to grips in a comprehensive way, given our style of cultural dialog, is near impossible in this soundbite age.
“United States hardly has any left…”
Actually this isn’t true. There is quite a bit of oil in the South/Southwest, the Arctic, and the Gulf of Mexico. Unfortunately bureaucracy has prevented us from drilling in those areas, leading to a greater dependency on foreign oil. Right now, the oil tycoons in Dubai are investing their massive profits in alternative, renewable energy, so at this rate even when the world transitions to wind and solar power, the United States will continue to be dependent on foreign energy.
David,
“bureaucracy” has been trying to prevent the complete die off of our fisheries, which are directly impacted by “reckless” drilling practices. Think Salmon.
One other example I am personally familiar with is the “Pinedale Anticline” around Pinedale, Wyoming. Here we have ozone levels and alerts higher than major U.S. cities. Our mule deer herd is also down 40 - 60% in just the last 4 years. Winter temperatures are a low of 25 below instead of the usual 45 below of years past, so you can’t blame it on “winter kill”.
“bureaucracy” is working hard to understand the relationship we have with our enviroment, so we and the enviroment can continue to exist.
I think if you are concerned about “foreign” influence and control, you might direct your attention to our governments borrowing practices which has placed our economy under foreign control for years.
If that doesn’t do it for you, then perhaps foreign control of our manufacturing sector might concern you. How about the stampede of our service sector going offshore, which is effectively giving “control”. Might even term it a “national security” issue.
Money making opportunity: If you can find me a rig, either a derrick or a platform, I’ll pay you a handsome finders fee. Fact is, there is a world “market” in “rigs”. We are drilling as fast as we can get new rigs built, leased or purchased.
Unfortunately, that won’t solve your concern, because guess what? Oil companies can and do sell all the oil they get to “foreign” concerns.
Here’s a hint of who to blame:
There is a LOT of shale in my neck of the woods. It is now cost effective to process such shale (you can google colorado pilot shale oil processing plant). But guess who is standing in the way? Big oil lobbyists. Yep, big oil is using Washington to stunt innovation and development by a different group. Apparently, there is a lot more shale than oil….and big oil hasn’t bought it all up yet.
I’ve never seen big business come to my door and ask to help me or ask me to help them save or preserve our enviroment. But I have seen many an unpaid volunteer from enviromental organizations come to my door offering to help and asking me to help humanity. And up in my part of the country, it is a physically dangerous job to be an enviromentalist.
Somehow, I just think the motives and intents of the two groups are different.
But if you think big oil is “patriotically” or “altruistically” bringing us oil at some personal cost to themselves, then maybe those promises and propaganda will fill your tank.
I grew up in the oil business and it is obvious to me oil is killing us as it seduces us. There’s a floating island of plastic the size of Australia (and growing) in the Pacific gyre –the result of our dependency on oil and its byproducts.
Side issues get swept under the rug in the over-simplified argument, and political noise sucks up all the oxygen in the room.
It occurs to me a wise society would use the current crisis to wean itself of a technology that clearly plagues us.
That’s a lot of good food for thought. About the shale oil Xman mentioned: check out the shale oil reserves by country at this link. It’s un-flippin-believable how much more shale oil reserves the USA has than anywhere else in the world. But, I fear getting at it would also impact the environment in major ways…if not from the extraction and processing, then just in the fact that it would prolong our avoidance of switching to clean energy and sustainable living habits. As Indigobusiness said, now is the perfect time to wean ourself off oil and be done with it. We’ve been here before in the 1970s, and started down that road, but then the powers that be brought the price of oil back down and all the alternative energy plans were tossed out the window. My biggest dread is that the price of oil will come back down again, and people will forget about energy indepence again, and our vulnerability will continue for another generation of Americans to get bit by it.
Carbon is the issue, and the seas are rapidly acidifying as a result of burning carbon fuels. When the rest of the fisheries collapse, allowing jellyfish and their ilk to rule the oceans, the world will snap out of its dream of having its cake and eating it too.
That eventuality is not a joke, and it is not far off. Oceans without fish, imagine that?
So much innovation and good effort being done, but still the juggernaut tightens its grip. I can’t help but wonder when the good folk of planet Earth will get over their collective badself and be truly alarmed?
I have a German Uncle (old war vet who stayed there) and a cousin born there). I visit every couple years. They have trash cans for every kind of trash. Different glass, different metal, different plastics, different paper and then the wet stuff. Germans would not even think of not taking their cans down to the common collection point. I think it should be made a law here. Pulling weeds instead of spraying them. That would cut down on fishery harm and get people to plant more responsibly. I recall as a child helping the men in my family pour used motor oil around fence posts to keep the posts from rotting.
I have caught and speared fish with huge open sores on them. I have cut open to eat fish and found them full of worms (might be normal), We have whirling disease in trout, who knows what chemical is sprayed on a farmers field that a deer then eats when he creeps down into it in the night? I am less and less interested in eating things I catch. I could go on and on.
Here’s an idea: Start in the schools. I wonder how many school lunchrooms teach the kids to separate their trash? I bet they throw it all in one bin.
Xman I am with you, down here in Central Illinois we have a recycling container in town. I even bring all my recycables from Chicago and dump them into the container. It doesn’t take that much time to seperate items. To many people feel it’s below their dignity to do so.Like you said start them off in grammar school and work up from there.
From today’s http://www.juancole.com hopeful breakthrough.
Monday, August 04, 2008
Breakthrough on Solar Energy Storage
MIT has made a breakthrough in energy storage, one of the main obstacles to effective use of solar energy: “Inspired by the photosynthesis performed by plants, Nocera and Matthew Kanan, a postdoctoral fellow in Nocera’s lab, have developed an unprecedented process that will allow the sun’s energy to be used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gases. Later, the oxygen and hydrogen may be recombined inside a fuel cell, creating carbon-free electricity to power your house or your electric car, day or night.”
Solar is the only energy source that can hope to resolve the energy and climate crises, so this is big.
Happy Birth Day JOE!!!!!!!!!!
LOVE YOU!
Damn right, Joe!
Happy Birthday.
Just want to say I appreciate the contribution you make.
You’ve helped to open my eyes to a lot of things…and now I have to figure out to adjust all over again.
Xman
Thanks for the B-day wishes! Sorry I haven’t been posting as much lately…vacation, the day job, and the kids all ramping back up for another school year…it’s been hectic around here, and all too easy to sit back with the latest NetFlix dvd and just absorb news and books rather than unleash the writing muse; promise I’ll get back in gear soon when things settle down.
Speaking of clean energy, have you seen the Youtube video of Jack Nicholson’s hydrogen car… in 1978?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjfONpsFvyM
Pretty amazing, Lynne. Some of the comments after the video echo my thoughts, especially the one about Bush spending 15 billion in incentives to reinvent the “hydrogen” wheel.
Another film that is a real eye opener is Who Killed the Electric Car. As Jack alludes to about the Tucker auto, the problem with independently made environmentally sound and otherwise awesome personal transportation vehicles that don’t use oil is that they don’t use oil, and Big Oil owns the world, and tells presidents when and where to attack next, and they ultimately own the media and we are easily convinced that anything besides oil isn’t feasible. And oil is hard to beat, but we’re going to have to sooner or later, so why not now? The big reason is because there is still a lot of oil to sell, and the price is getting better for the seller all the time as long as they can keep conning a critical mass of folks to keep playing the oil game.