THE NEW ENERGY PROPOSALS

The proposals sent by President Nixon to Congress in January contained many of the same ideas as the 14 proposals sent in April 1973, which Congress has almost totally ignored.

Two new, or at least more specific, points concern offshore leasing and nuclear plant licensing. A speedup of federal oil and gas leasing on the continental shelves is proposed with 10 million acres to be leased annually. And about time: The continental shelves, according to the US Geological Survey, contain from 100 to 160 billion barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of gas, much of it close to the shore and less than 600 feet under the surface of the sea.

To shorten the agonizingly slow process of licensing nuclear plants, it is proposed to allow the AEC to give advance approval of "banks" of potential plant sites. This might help to counter environmental legalistic delay tactics.

Absent from the proposals is the total deregulation of oil and gas, which would work wonders for increased supplies, even in the short term. Opponents of a free market have argued that since it takes some 3 years from oil exploration to production, price hikes would not immediately increase the supply. This argument is punctured by the thousands of wells which have been abandoned not because they ran dry, but because it was no longer profitable to operate them. Since "new" and stripper well oil was deregulated last May, production has increased linearly and immediately with price. More than 350,000 US stripper wells (wells producing less than 10 b/d) have proved the point.

The energy research budget has been almost doubled, with coal related research up to $427 million, but the longrange strategy suffers from the same weakness as before: Too large a fraction is gambled on the fast liquid metal breeder, and too little is invested in fusion, the ultimate solution for clean and abundant energy.

The breeder has two advantages: For all practical purposes, it cannot run out of fuel supplies (200 years running on uranium 238, 2000 years on thorium), and experimental breeders are already working the research is needed to make the breeder commercially feasible. On the other hand, there is the intriguing possibility of bypassing the breeder altogether if fusion is achieved by the 1990's. It's a long chance, but no seasoned gambler puts all his money on a single horse. The Japanese Atomic Energy Commission's fusion subcommittee has just set 1990 as the goal for the completion of a test reactor, and there have been fresh rumors that the Russians are close to achieving fusion. Should America have a less imaginative program?

Finally, the proposals to tax "windfall" profits represent unprincipled catering to the present bloodthirsty mood of Congress, whipped up by the "everything belongs to everybody" crowd. For the billions to be invested in new energy sources, conventional or long range, the profits of the oil companies have been too small in past years; interestingly enough, the established opinion moulders always quote their profits in percentage increase over past lean years, never as a percentage on invested capital (12%). The present screams for blood need only one thing to ease the energy crunch: an engine running on envy, demagoguery, hysteria and scapegoats.