Pump Prices Just a Drop in the Bucket of Fuel Woes
Lots of motorists are ticked off that refinery outages in California have pushed the price of gasoline to $2.20 or more a gallon. But if they understood the real cloud hanging over our energy future, their anger would rightly give way to a different emotion: fear.
People, of course, have heard all this before, and many dismiss it as Chicken Little rhetoric. The prospect of running out of oil is always a vague threat in the distance; it sounds bad, but it never seems to get any closer to becoming reality.
Despite price run-ups, like the one Californians are now experiencing, “people are told there is plenty of oil around,” notes David Goodstein, a physics professor and vice provost of Caltech in Pasadena. “They don’t perceive a crisis.”
This time, though, Goodstein believes they well should.
In a new book called “Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil” (W.W. Norton), Goodstein looks at the history of oil exploration and finds that 2 trillion barrels is as high as proven reserves have ever gotten.
We have run through almost half of that total today, he says, and are no longer replacing all that we consume through new discoveries and development.
“The world,” Goodstein writes, “will soon start to run out of conventionally produced, cheap oil.”
In November, the International Energy Agency projected that it would cost about $16 trillion to meet projected energy demand during the next 20 years -- far more than had been spent in previous decades. Indeed, big investments will be needed even to maintain, much less increase, output from places such as Saudi Arabia.
“When producing energy becomes extremely capital intensive or energy intensive -- using more energy in processes like liquefying natural gas to get less out -- you’re already fighting a losing game,” Goodstein says.
“Civilization as we know it will not survive,” he adds, in an unabashedly dire tone, “unless we can find a way to live without fossil fuels.”
The challenge -- and it’s no small one -- is to create a sufficient amount of carbon-free fuel from solar energy or nuclear power.
One of Goodstein’s Caltech colleagues, chemistry professor Nathan S. Lewis, has calculated the total energy used in the world today, coming up with a grand total of 13 trillion watts consumed annually. That figure, he expects, will rise to 28 trillion watts in the next 40 years or so as the world’s population increases from 6 billion to 10 billion.
Given this booming level of demand, Lewis says, it’s quite possible that continuing to rely on fossil fuels would be folly -- even if we weren’t running out. The reason: There’s a real question as to whether the atmosphere could withstand the release of so much carbon dioxide.
“We don’t know absolutely whether higher levels of CO2 will make the global temperature go up 1 or 2 or 4 degrees and make the oceans rise,” Lewis says. “But we should buy insurance against the risk.”
Some already are endeavoring to do just that, looking to go well beyond the gas-and-electric hybrid cars that are available on the market today.
S. David Freeman, former chairman of the California Power Authority, last year joined Hydrogen Car Co. in Los Angeles, aiming to replace the gasoline tanks on automobiles and trucks with hydrogen tanks. The trick, though, will be to do this in a way that doesn’t use a bunch of fossil fuel in the production process.
“We can make hydrogen-powered cars today,” Freeman says, “but we understand that we must make the hydrogen from renewable energy, such as solar power.”
It is an extraordinarily arduous task. After all, Lewis points out, “nature created all the fuels we have hundreds of millions of years ago.” The reason our fuels are so cheap, even at $2 a gallon, is that we only extract and burn the carbon; we don’t create it.
Some alternatives, meanwhile, are all but nonstarters. Trying to forge ahead with nuclear power on a huge scale would present tremendous political and public relations headaches. What’s more, it’s doubtful that the scale could ever be huge enough. Based on present technology, 10,000 facilities would have to be built to meet our energy needs later this century -- “or a new plant every other day,” Lewis says with a smile.
What this all boils down to, he says, is that solar power is the only renewable resource “that has enough terrestrial energy potential to satisfy” the needs for carbon-free fuel by 2050.
And yet to have the affordable energy economy we all want, the price of solar fuel must be brought down to a level comparable to today’s gasoline. Currently, Lewis says, it costs 25 times as much. Photovoltaic cells, which we see in panels on rooftops, work fine. But today’s photovoltaic materials are too expensive to produce in any kind of massive quantity.
What is needed, Lewis says, is a fuel product “like solar paint for your house that can cheaply convert solar energy to heat or cool.” Getting there will require large, long-term research projects, costing $10 billion or more annually. The bomb-building Manhattan Project is held out as a model.
Yet as formidable as all this is, the Caltech scientists are actually quite optimistic in the end.
“The laws of physics and chemistry do not say this cannot be done,” Lewis asserts.
“There are huge technical problems to be solved,” Goodstein says, “but most of the scientific principles are well understood, and human beings are very good at solving technical problems.”
We all had better hope so. Or $2 gasoline will look like a big-time bargain.
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James Flanigan can be reached at jim.flanigan@latimes.com. Read previous columns at latimes.com/flanigan.
