08-04-2008
An American soldier in Iraq was recently asked by a reporter what he would like to say to his fellow Americans back home. "Use less oil," he said.
He is right. The best strategy right now is to move away from petroleum as fast as is feasible.
The U.S. presently imports about six million barrels of oil per day from OPEC countries alone, such as Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Nigeria, and Venezuela.
These energy supplies are either potentially unstable and located in countries that want to use a lot more of their own oil and export less to us (Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Nigeria), or are outright unfriendly to the U.S. (Venezuela).
About 60 percent of all the oil that is used in the U.S (more than 20 million barrels per day), derives from outside of our borders, including from non-OPEC countries such as Canada.
This includes oil imported from Mexico (our second largest exporter), whose large oil complex, Cantarell, is in precipitous decline.
The worst thing that could happen right now is for petroleum prices to decline to the levels that make oil a "bargain" again, as if oil had no real value, except for profligate burning.
All of the recent trends that pricier oil has spawned: the explosion of research in renewable energy (solar, wind, geothermal, hydropower, and biomass); the increase in demand for hybrids and smaller cars; as well as the decrease in the number of miles driven, would be diminished, thus slowing the transition away from petroleum.
The world's burgeoning thirst for oil is likely to absorb any extra petroleum that would be extracted several years in the future by say, drilling offshore in the U.S.
For example, the demand for oil is expected to increase by 900,000 barrels on an annual basis this year. Then continue at that pace during the years ahead. That's above what we already consumed in 2007.
This requires finding anew every year the equivalent of Quatar's oil output, at a time when the vast majority of the world's biggest oil fields are in rapid decline.
We should take to heart the viewpoints of those who have been sent overseas to protect a highly tenuous energy supply.
08-01-2008
Switzerland has enacted a law that pays organizations and people to generate renewable energy.
This makes a huge amount of sense, because it promotes a faster move away from diminishing fossil fuels, and helps the ordinary consumer, for example, pay for the installation of expensive PV solar or wind power.
Depending on the type of renewable energy, the law will pay about 0.75 Swiss Francs (the equivalent of about $0.75) for each kilowatt hour (kWh) that these systems generate.
The payment contracts will last from 20 to 25 years, and include photovoltaic solar, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal, and biomass.
In Europe, they call it a "feed-in tariff" law. The program is generous in that it pays systems for generating electricity in a clean and local manner, not just for the kilowatt hours that are sold back to the utility (usually a rare event, except for the PV systems that are installed in the desert).
My system would have generated the equivalent of about $2,250 last year. This would provide an incentive to give more serious consideration to expanding the system.
It is important to subsidize renewable energy, because relatively new technologies cannot compete on price with established, traditionally subsidized, and depleting fossil fuels. It also takes years to decades to shift regions into new forms of energy generation. In other words, the faster we increase our renewables portfolio, the better.