American energy self sufficiency has been on the forefront of our governments collective mind for years, mostly without producing any worthwhile results.\u00a0 After the Arab oil embargo of the \u201970\u2019s Jimmy Carter ginned up the Department of Energy, which now employs 170,000 bureaucrats, and has, through government efficiency, managed our production from 50% of our needs, down to 26%, all in about 30 years of hard work.<\/p>\n
Recent events have caused even the most reason starved progressive to realize that something needs to be done.\u00a0 True to form, they screech that it must be done \u2018Right Now\u2019 , before anyone has a chance to research, or understand the plan. It has finally occurred to them that we are sending an awful lot of our money to tin-pot dictators dressed as doormen at fancy New York hotels, or wearing their bedclothes.\u00a0 Makes you wonder why the most oil is under the least brains.<\/p>\n
Next, on the emergency list of the \u2018Sky-Is-Falling\u2019 crowd is climate change.\u00a0 Years ago they called it global cooling.\u00a0 Then it got to be summer in Berkley, and they changed it to global warming.\u00a0 This has been pretty well laughed out of court by anyone who ever took a science class, so now they call it Climate Change\u2026 Duuh.\u00a0 There are large groups of liberal myrmidons working overtime to blame this on George Bush.<\/p>\n
When asked to come up with some workable solutions, the democrats came up with \u2018Cap and Trade\u2019. The \u2019Cap\u2019 side of this boondoggle disproportionately punishes lower income citizens and will raise the price of energy by as much as $1700.00 per family.\u00a0 The \u2018Trade\u2019 side will allow industry to sell their carbon credits to people with money, no doubt overseas, since that\u2018s where our money is going.\u00a0 Instead of having to buy, or earn, their credits, congress has already given away 85% of the carbon credits to their friends in exchange for votes.<\/p>\n
The next big idea is sustainable energy.\u00a0 This means something that will last forever and be free. Back in my tie-dyed youth we tried all this stuff.\u00a0 We put up windmills, usually on windy days, (large wreck), and then went and sat on the porch and watched while the wind died, and free became expensive.\u00a0 Even when it worked, we barely got enough power to drive an 8-track player.<\/p>\n
Next came solar cells.\u00a0 This took a little more thinking since most of us stayed up all night and slept during the day, but, eventually somebody figured out that the sun put out a lot of energy if we could just get it to cooperate.\u00a0 Solar cells were very expensive and the most we could afford wouldn\u2019t put out enough to light a lava lamp.\u00a0 Then the sun went down.<\/p>\n
Times have changed.\u00a0 The price of solar cells has fallen, windmill technology has improved, but we are still a long way from making these things work in any meaningful way.\u00a0 Congress would like to mandate a large percent of our energy be produced this way but, at present it\u2019s a lot like king-what\u2019s-his-name commanding the tides to turn.\u00a0 There are several problems that are going to take quite a while to solve.\u00a0 Storage being one.\u00a0 The sun doesn\u2019t shine at night, when strangely enough some of us like to turn on the lights\u00a0 The wind doesn\u2019t always blow either.<\/p>\n
A very smart man, T. Boone Pickens figured out that the wind only stops one day out of 32 million in west Texas so he started building a huge wind farm to make power.\u00a0 So far, so good, until somebody realized that it was a long way to where people needed power.\u00a0 This required building huge transmission lines.\u00a0 Not only were they very expensive,\u00a0 the NIMBY lobby got their knickers in a knot, and decreed that it \u2018wouldn\u2019t happen here\u2019.\u00a0 Poor ol\u2019 T. Boone is sitting on a warehouse full of useless windmills.\u00a0 You\u2019d think it might be a good idea to build the wind farm closer to places where the power is needed.\u00a0 One such place is Cape Cod.\u00a0 Plenty of wind, and the power-hungry northeast corridor close by.\u00a0 Do you actually think the residents of Cape Cod are going to mar their view with something that will help?\u00a0 Thank Ted Kennedy for that one.<\/p>\n
All of these problems can be solved, by the application of a little common sense, and some good science, two things that seem to be in mighty short supply in Washington, lately.<\/p>\n
While we are waiting for the lights to come on in some of the dimmest bulbs on the Potomac, we still have a problem.\u00a0 Oil won\u2019t last forever, although our newest technology pushes the inevitable back every year.\u00a0 We need a \u2018bridge fuel\u2019 to tide us over.<\/p>\n
This fuel is natural gas.\u00a0 Those of us in the drilling industry have known about \u2018shale gas\u2019 for years, but it was more of an un-economic nuisance than a reliable energy source.\u00a0 In the first place shale wells didn\u2019t produce much, and depleted quickly when compared to an oil well.\u00a0 In addition, you couldn\u2019t put gas in a tank battery and haul it away by truck.\u00a0 It takes a pipeline.\u00a0 This is where free enterprise and drillers ingenuity come in.\u00a0 We now have a tremendous infrastructure of pipelines running from most of the major producing areas to the areas of highest load. We have also learned how to \u2018frac\u2019 these shales to produce much more gas.\u00a0 Natural gas is the cleanest burning hydrocarbon, and would reduce man made pollution a tremendous amount, freeing up the oil for industrial uses such a plastics, fertilizers, insecticides, and other complex industrial products, while we figure out something that will actually work in the real world, like nuclear power, but that\u2019s another story.<\/p>\n
One of the potentially productive shale plays in the United States is the Marcellus shale, which covers parts of Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York.\u00a0 The producing formation isn\u2019t all that deep, making drilling costs competitive, and it is close to a huge market, the north-east.\u00a0 This fortunate combination of circumstances makes it one of the most attractive energy bridges to self sufficiency we\u2019ve seen in years.\u00a0 Experts think that there may be enough gas in the Marcellus shale to last many years, your mileage may vary. The drillers are there, the pipelines are there, all we need is for government to get out of the way.\u00a0 Sure there are problems to be solved, such as what to do with the frac water while protecting the drinking water, but these problems can be solved.\u00a0 Not necessarily by the application of\u00a0 taxpayer money, but by the application of free enterprise.\u00a0 Show us the profit, we\u2019ll solve the problem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
American energy self sufficiency has been on the forefront of our governments collective mind for years, mostly without producing any worthwhile results.\u00a0 After the Arab oil embargo of the \u201970\u2019s Jimmy Carter ginned up the Department of Energy, which now … Continue reading