(Sorry about the formatting loss.... blogger doesn't "quite" preserve things as it should that come from Word....)The Honorable Senator Bill Nelson
United States Senate
Washington, DC
By Fax
Dear Sir:
I heard your response to President Bush’s “Earth Day” address today and frankly, found it abhorrent, misleading, and bombastic.
“We can’t drill our way out of this”? Uh, Mr. Nelson, with all due respect, may I present for you some facts which you can easily confirm that will immediately disabuse you of this notion?
(1) We have, on federal lands, five times the proven reserves of Saudi Arabia in the form of shale. This oil is economically recoverable at a cost of $40/bbl. With oil currently over $70/bbl, and with the sheer volume of oil available from this resource, all on US Federal Lands, we most certainly CAN “drill” our way out of this mess for quite some time. For fifty years, to put a number on it. That’s longer than either Social Security or Medicare will survive in their present forms; I’d call that a pretty good solution.
(2) We have even more oil off the coast of Florida. I understand that you are vehemently opposed to our drilling for that oil, however, this does not change the fact that it is there. Finally, there is oil in ANWR that we can recover.
If Congress passed a law that oil recovered from (1) and (2) could not be sold outside of the United States, we would guarantee our citizens a fifty year supply at projected United States use rates with a net price of approximately $1.75/gallon for the entire period! That’s an immediate 40% price cut from today’s prices, more than HALF off what the price of gas is likely to be by Memorial Day, and who knows by the end of the year!
Further, were the United States to announce such a policy tomorrow, do you really think OPEC – or anyone else – would hold their price at $75? How much oil do you think they’d sell us at $75 when we can have all we’d like to burn for the next 50 years at $40? I’m sure you can figure that one out – and what would happen to the oil market immediately were such a policy to be announced.
We could mandate that all new passenger vehicles sold in the United States be powered by diesel engines. This is important for three reasons:
- Diesels are approximately 25% more efficient than a gasoline engine, especially at part-throttle operation (where nearly all road vehicle engines spend essentially all of their life) due to the lack of a throttle plate. This lack of throttling loss inherently allows the diesel to “win” compared to a gasoline engine. Part of their advantage also comes from their higher internal operating temperatures (which, under the laws of thermodynamics, results in them being more efficient converters of chemical energy to motion.)
- Diesel fuel contains more BTUs per gallon than gasoline; ergo, for each gallon of fuel you go further.
- Diesel fuel can be produced from blue-green algae in aquaculture and seed-oil crops now, and raw biomass conversion is in development. While seed-oil crops can only provide about 5% of our fuel needs simply due to a lack of arable land, raw biomass conversion knows no such limit. When the latter becomes commercially viable (and it should be within the next 10-20 years) we can replace nearly all of our petroleum motor fuel requirements. This is particularly important because biomass-converted fuel has no net carbon dioxide emission, thereby addressing one of the major elements of concern regarding our contribution (if any) to Global Warming. Note that “fuel cells” powered by natural gas or gasified coal have the same net CO2 production as do engines burning gasoline.
This change would result in an immediate 25% reduction in the use of motor fuel and the production of CO2 from cars, simply due to the efficiency gain from diesels. As motor fuel is about half of our petroleum consumption, this would result in an honest reduction of 12.5%. Over the next 20 years it would completely remove motor vehicle net CO2 emissions as we transition to biomass-converted diesel fuel.
We can do all of this today – the only “new” technology required is perfection of raw biomass conversion to diesel, which I understand the Germans have working in the lab and expect to be able to commercialize within the decade.
If Congress was to further take over the permitting process for new refineries, guaranteeing that no more than 12 months would be required for issuance of all permits, and preempting state and local government attempts to block such construction, we could within 2-3 years eliminate the bottleneck currently present in the refinery system.
The current “boutique fuel” mess is responsible for much of today’s high prices and shortages. In particular, the Ethanol requirements are a boondoggle intended only to help a few large farm companies – principally ADM. This must be stopped immediately. Ethanol-laced gasoline not only has fewer BTUs due to Ethanol’s lower energy content, but laced fuel cannot be transported by pipeline due to corrosion problems and these problems are now showing up in both land-based and marine installations. Finally, the argument for ethanol “improved” gasoline is no longer valid with today’s computer-controlled catalyst-equipped engines, which produce vanishingly-small amounts of smog-producing chemicals even without ethanol. Proof of this can be found in the last year – after Katrina all these boutique blend requirements were lifted for the remainder of the summer. Did you see ANY reports of enhanced smog? No! Why not? Because these boutique blends are no longer necessary with today’s engines!
In short, Mr. Nelson, we have solutions to high gasoline prices available to us today.
But YOU refuse to allow US to use them.
You, as my elected Senator, are one of the reasons we currently pay $3.00 for gasoline – I just filled my little economy car, and 15 gallons cost me more than $42.00.
You can bet that I will be paying very close attention to this matter in the upcoming elections.
I’m not interested in hearing about pie-in-the-sky pipe dreams that will never work and are technologically unsound. I passed my first-semester college Physics class and understand the Laws of Thermodynamics. Attempting to “sell” me such snake-oil will only result in more of these letters published far and wide on the Internet in an attempt to educate the American People.
We have the means to solve our oil dependency and pricing problems right here, in our nation, and we are refusing to do so because of elected officials such as you!
It is my sincere hope that before the upcoming elections in November that the people of this great nation wake up and see the truth – that we are not paying $3.00/gallon for gasoline (or even more by then!) because we do not have the resources in our great nation, nor because we have not developed alternative fuels, nor because China and India are sucking up all of the world’s oil on the international market.
The truth is much simpler – and far uglier:
Our Congress, beholden to radical environmental interests and a few large farming corporations such as ADM, instead of serving the people of this nation, has both intentionally blocked recovery of oil resources that we have on federal land and mandated the use of blended fuels - both of which radically drive up the cost of those fuels and promote shortages.
It is not big oil that is ripping us off – it is YOU!
If you, and your colleagues in the House and Senate will not take note of the fact that we have solutions to this problem right here at home, perhaps our President and Vice-President, both of whom have knowledge of the oil business, will.
Or perhaps it will take a few letters such as this, circulated widely on the Internet as this one is being through my Blog, to wake up the American People – so they will finally demand that their elected representatives actually do something that will HELP them and solve this problem – an entirely reasonable request, given that the tools necessary to do so are at our disposal.
