US Vulnerability to an Oil Import Curtailment. The Oil Replacement Capability is the name of a 158-page study by the (Congressional) Office of Technology Assessment, devoted not to short-term contingencies that might be countered by the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, but by deployment of replacement technologies over five years or more following a long-lasting shortfall beginning in the mid-eighties.
Incredibly, the report does not even breathe the word nuclear, the most obvious large-scale replacement energy source, and the one that is being adopted for that very reason in the rest of the world, particularly West Europe and Japan. Removing artificial licensing roadblocks would bring tens of reactors on line within five years, but no reason for the omission is given. The advisory panel included Terry Lash, formerly of the Commoner-founded SIPI "information" center, Christopher Palmer of the National Audubon Society, and Joanna Underwood of the Washington-based misnamed INFORM center; they presumably intimidated the very few industry experts on the panel.
Even so, the report is interesting as far as it goes. Among the excluded possibilities we find fossil synthetic fuels (would take too long) and the fashionable piddle-toys
¾active solar systems, photovoltaics, wind-electric, solar-thermal, and ethanol from food processing wastes¾all of which are an "option too small for detailed consideration."In switching utilities from oil to coal, the study assumes an upper limit of 2% growth in demand, citing the notoriously high (instead of the notoriously tied-to-the past) forecasts of the utilities. This is surely too low; on the other hand, the assumption "that the permits needed for the boiler conversion can be obtained in 10 months" reflects the belief that the bureaucratic quagmire cannot be swept aside even in an emergency.
The main problem would, of course, be transportation, and here the report mumbles "improved efficiency" and "ethanol," but mainly does a lot of shoulder shrugging.
There is enough factual material and statistics in the report to justify its purchase ($5.50, US GPO Wash., DC 20402, stock no. 052-003-00963-3); but the real problem here is not technical, not even when nuclear power is included as an option.
The root problem is political, and well illustrated by the recent threat to the oil supply by mines in the Red Sea approaches to the Suez Canal. Some of these mines were of Soviet origin, and were probably planted by Libya and Iran. But apparently others were American: they came from the Shah's arsenal. More US weapons may be used to hold up the oil supply
¾perhaps by the Saudis when their feudal sheiks have been toppled by a revolution, perhaps by Jordan, which has now begun to flirt strongly with the Soviets, perhaps via the mess in Lebanon, where the US has quietly stopped insisting that Soviet vassal Syria withdraw from the country, and is instead getting tough with Israel, the only stable and Western country in the area.All of this the direct result of US policy: in 1982, the PLO was about to be destroyed and Soviet influence banned from the foreseeable future. All Reagan had to do was nothing; but he stepped in without as much as an excuse that the media, Congress, or the electorate were pressuring him.
[I will nevertheless vote for him, for he has two overriding points going for him: Mondale and Ferraro.]
|
|
Vol. 12, No. 3
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Issues Issue/No.: Vol. 12, No. 3 Date: November 29, 2004 12:56 PM Title: On your enemy's terms
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
|