America’s Strategic Vulnerability: Vital energy questions. (McCain's energy policy pitch)

America’s dependency on foreign oil is a major strategic vulnerability for our nation. One element in al Qaeda’s war against us is to target the U.S. economy by driving up the price of oil in the hope that severe recession and higher inflation will follow. Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda terrorists have spoken many times about the need to “mount … operations accordingly” in order to hit energy supply points in the Middle East and other regions to spike oil prices. Moreover, while most of the world’s known reserves are in the Persian Gulf, oil supplies are no more secure elsewhere on the globe. In Russia and Venezuela, Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chavez have rolled back democracy and utilized oil and gas as foreign policy weapons. Nigerian supplies — our fifth-largest supplier — are endangered by internal strife. Oil’s availability is uncertain and its price at the mercy of countries where our values aren’t typically shared and our interests aren’t their first priority.

We must not leave the “lifeblood” of America’s economy in the hands of foreign cartels, or bet our future on a commodity located in countries in which authoritarians repress their people, and terrorists find their main support. Terrorists understand the seriousness of our vulnerability. A little over a year ago, a suicide attack at a major Saudi Arabian oil refinery came close to disabling its target. Had the attack succeeded, some price experts speculated that it would have driven the price of oil above $150 dollars a barrel and kept it extremely high for some time.

The flow of oil has many chokepoints — pipelines, refineries, transit routes, and terminals — most of which are outside our jurisdiction and control. Our enemies understand the effects on America of a significant disruption in supply — a crippled transportation system, gasoline too expensive for many Americans to purchase, and businesses closed. As we sacrifice blood and treasure, some of our gas dollars flow to the fanatics who build the bombs, hatch the plots and carry out attacks on our soldiers and citizens. Iran made over $45 billion from oil sales in 2005, and it is the number one state sponsor of terrorism.

The transfer of American wealth to the Middle East helps sustain the conditions on which terrorists prey. Some of the most oil-rich nations are also the most stagnant societies on earth. As long as petro-dollars flow freely to them, these regimes have little incentive to open their politics and economies so that all their people may benefit from their countries’ natural wealth. The Middle East’s example is spreading to our own hemisphere. Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez is using his country’s oil revenues to establish a dictatorship, bully his neighbors and succeed Castro as Latin America’s leading antagonist of the United States.

National security depends on energy security, which we cannot achieve if we remain so dependent on imported oil from Middle Eastern governments who support or foment, by their own inattention and inequities, the rise of terrorists or on swaggering demagogues and would be dictators in our hemisphere. Additionally, by mid-century there will be three-and-a-half billion cars worldwide — over four times the number today. As world demand for oil soars, higher prices, severe economic volatility, and heightened international tensions follow. These unpredictable forces could seriously circumscribe our future if we let them.

I’ll implement an energy plan that won’t be another grab bag of handouts, a full employment act for lobbyists, nor another round of tax breaks and other subsidies to big oil. It will recognize the fundamental truth that our oil problem is an automobile fuel problem and break the dominance of oil in our transportation sector just as we diversified away from oil use in electric power generation 30 years ago.

America’s electricity production is, for the most part, petroleum free, and the existing electric-power grid has the capacity to handle the added demand imposed by plug-in hybrid vehicles. We can add more capacity and improve its reliability in the years ahead. Nuclear energy, renewable power, and other emission-free forms of power production can expand capacity, improve local air quality and begin to address climate change. I’ll work to promote real partnerships between utilities and automakers to accelerate the deployment of plug-in hybrids.

With some of the savings from cutting subsidies for industries that can stand on their own, we can establish a national challenge to improve the cost, range, size, and weight of electric batteries for automobiles. Fifty percent of cars on the road are driven 25 miles a day or less. Affordable battery-powered vehicles, that can meet average commuter needs, could help us cut oil imports in half. The reward will be earned through merit by whoever accomplishes the task, whether it comes from a laboratory in the Department of Energy, a university, a corporation, or an enterprising young inventor who works out of his family’s garage.

Breakthroughs in high-tech materials can also greatly improve fuel efficiency in the transportation sector. We can provide fuel options and improve the fuel efficiency of our vehicle fleet by making them out of high tech materials, which will improve their strength and safety. We are doing that very thing right now to beat our foreign competitors in the aerospace industry.

Alcohol fuels made from corn, sugar, switch grass, and many other sources, as well as fuel cells, biodiesel derived from waste products, natural gas, and other technologies are all promising and available alternatives to oil. I won’t support subsidizing every alternative, or endorse tariffs that restrict the healthy competition which stimulates innovation and lowers costs. But I’ll encourage the development of infrastructure and market growth necessary for these products to compete, and I’ll let consumers choose the winners. I’ve never known an American entrepreneur worthy of the name who wouldn’t rather compete for sales than subsidies.

Energy efficiency by using improved technology and practicing sensible habits in our homes, businesses and automobiles is also a big part of the answer, and is something we can achieve right now. New advances will make conservation an ever more important part of the solution. Improved light bulbs can use much less energy; and smart-grid technology can help homeowners and businesses lower their energy use.

There is much we can do to increase and diversify our own oil production in ways that protect the environment using advanced technologies, including those that use and bury carbon dioxide, those that recover the oil below the wells we have already drilled, and those that tap oil, natural gas, and shale economically with minimal environmental impact.

The United States has coal reserves more abundant than Saudi Arabia’s oil reserves. We found a way to cut down acid-rain pollutants from burning coal, and we can find a way to use our coal resources without emitting excessive greenhouse gases.

We have in use today, a zero-emission energy that could provide electricity for millions more homes and businesses than it currently does. Yet it has been over 25 years since a nuclear-power plant has been constructed. The barriers to nuclear energy are political not technological. We’ve let the fears of 30 years ago, and an endless political squabble over the storage of nuclear spent fuel make it virtually impossible to build a single new plant that produces a form of energy that is safe and non-polluting. If France can produce 80-percent of its electricity with nuclear power, why can’t we? Is France a more secure, advanced, and innovative country than we are? Are France’s scientists and entrepreneurs more capable than we are? I need no answer to that rhetorical question. I know my country well enough to know otherwise.

I want to improve and make permanent the research and development tax credit. I want to spend less money on government bureaucracies, and, where the private sector isn’t moving out of regulatory fear, to form the partnerships necessary to build demonstration models of promising new technologies such as advanced nuclear power plants, coal gasification, carbon capture, and storage and renewable power, so that we can take maximum advantage of our most abundant resources. And I’ll make it a national mission to develop a catalyst capable of breaking down carbon dioxide into useful chemical building blocks, and rendering it a new source of revenue and opportunity.

I also believe that strengthening our energy security goes hand-in-hand with addressing global climate change, which I believe is real with human activity contributing to the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. I have joined with Joe Lieberman to pursue a market-based, cap-and-trade system to achieve appropriate limits on greenhouse gas emissions as efficiently and effectively as possible. I will ensure that such a system is harnessed as a means of diversifying the nation’s energy mix, which in turn will make us less dependent on foreign oil, and will place America at the forefront in the development of the energy and environmental protection technologies the world will demand for many years to come. I will also ensure that these efforts meet several key tests, including protecting consumers and the economy, preventing other countries from dodging their responsibilities, promoting the development and deployment of advanced technology, and prioritizing the America’s economic, environmental, and national-security interests.

America competes in a global economy where innovation and entrepreneurship are the pillars of prosperity. The competition is stiff and the stakes are high. We have the opportunity to apply America’s technological supremacy to capture the export markets for advanced energy technologies, reaping the capital investment and good jobs it will provide. Our innovators, scientists, entrepreneurs, and workers have the knowledge, resources and drive to lead the way on energy security, as we have in so many other world-changing advancements. The race has always been to the swift, and America must be first to the market, with innovations that meet mankind’s growing energy and environmental needs.

Answering great challenges is nothing new to America. It’s what we do. We built the rockets that took us to the moon — not because it was easy, but because it was hard. We’ve sent space probes into the distant reaches of the universe. We harnessed nuclear energy, mapped the human genome, created the Internet, and pioneered integrated circuits that consolidate the computing power of the Apollo spacecraft onto a barely visible silicon chip. If we can do all this, we can surely solve our oil-dependence problem, and strengthen our security.

— John McCain is the senior United States senator from Arizona. He is currently running for the Republican presidential nomination.

Nothing new here. What I want to see is Anwar opened up, drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, and anywhere else there’s oil to be had at reasonable cost. I’d also like to see windmills all over the place, especially in Teddy’s backyard. These are proven technologies that can be implemented with the stroke of a pen. If Congress were serious about this issue, they would have released those resources ages ago.

Here is a major barf alert.

“... nor another round of tax breaks and other subsidies to big oil.”

Big oil should be called small oil. Big oil only controls 5% of the world’s reserves. We need to allow small oil to explore and drill in ANWR, the outer bank, and other locations. Many of these locations have large reserves of oil and natural gas. We also need new refinery capacity.

I strongly question his assertion that the grid has sufficient capacity.

“America’s electricity production is, for the most part, petroleum free, and the existing electric-power grid has the capacity to handle the added demand imposed by plug-in hybrid vehicles.”

We would need a huge investment in new power plants and transmission capacity to support widespread usage of plug-in hybrids. The current emphasis on wind, solar, and conservation will never get us to these levels. Since disposing of CO2 from coal plants is totally unproven (at best), the only option is nuclear. He does make a strong statement about nuclear so there is at least one cheer.

There actually are a few things that can get on-line fairly quickly:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1Rax3IWc40

http://www.startech.net/plasma.html

This is a waste-to-energy system that takes all kinds of organic waste, with inorganics mixed in, and converts it first to its elemental atoms (in the plasma torch) then through co-generation by heat reclamation and using the resulting gas (syngas, a mixture of carbon monoxide and elemental hydrogen) as fuel to drive an electric generation station. The initial input of energy is quite high (to form the plasma torch) but once the system is being fed and running, it is possible to produce as much as four times the electricity needed to initiate and maintain the plasma torch. This excess electricity is then available to send into the electric grid. The other product is a sort of silicate slag, which is drawn off in molten form, much as the slag from a blast furnace, and may be used as an aggregate in concrete, brick-making or road-building.

Think of it. Energy supply and building material, all from the clean disposal of accumulating piles of trash. This process may be used to clean contaminated sites, recycle otherwise unmanageable potential pollution problems, or even eliminate many of the other recycling methods now in use (including ocean dumping). And by the way, it is not necessary to dry the waste first, unlike simple incineration.

One thing it WON’T work on is radioactive waste. But the principle could even be applied to some forms of low-grade nuclear waste, using it to concentrate and capture some of the stray isotopes.

I strongly question his assertion that the grid has sufficient capacity.

This assertion is indeed totally wrong. The grid's a mess.

And yes, his "Big Oil" and "greenhouse gas" phrases are annoying to say the least. But the strategy of modernizing the electric grid and generation assets including nukes, and moving towards an electric-dominated transport sector is sound.

Wind power is expensive and unreliable. The mandates and subsidies are pushing the costs even higher. Wind power needs lots of backup capacity, usually natural gas generated power. Natural gas is also an expensive source of power. Give some reasonable constraints and let the market decide on the energy mix. Windmills everywhere is just your judgment (flawed in my estimation) substituting for market decisions. The Dims want to control investment decisions in the energy industry. Do you want to control energy investments, also?

You don't know as much as you think you know about wind energy and your last statement is sadly manipulative.

I didn’t see any mention of geothermal. Geothermal has the smallest footprint of all the alternative electrical generation methods.

Texas and much of the West is chock full of abandoned oil and gas wells that have been declared ‘depleted’. They would be useful as starting point for geothermal drilling, however. Many of them already are deep enough to have bottom hole temperatures high enough to run binary geothermal electrical generators. Drilling is by far the largest expense in a geothermal plant and these abandoned wells represent “free” holes.

The Feds could streamline the process of lifting regulatory and environmental hurdles to encourage the owners of those wells to use them for geothermal generation. A binary geothermal plant is a sealed system, with water circulating through an injection well and back up through another well, then heating a refrigerant to drive a turbine. No soil contamination, no high water use requirement, no corrosion of the turbine, just 24/7 power.

Please inform me. I would like to see references that the subsidies and mandates are not driving the costs higher. I would also like to see references that solar and wind power are not 2 to 3 times more costly than coal plants. I have read studies indicating that both wind and solar plant construction has increased in cost substantially in recent years, at least in part due to the mandates.

I am not sure what you mean by manipulative. In a debate setting, one person can ask a question to another person. I am not sure if your statement about windmills everywhere involves private capital at risk without subsidies or mandates for windmills everywhere.

I have no problem with private investments in any technology. It is the subsidies and mandates that I oppose. Now there are many subsidies and mandates for wind and solar. These subsidies appear permanent.

Your first statement was that windpower is expensive and unreliable. I take exception to both statements. If you had said that wind power is more expensive than coal power than your statement would have been true. As far as unreliable that is not true at all. Wind patterns are pretty well understood so there is not a lot of mystery as to how much power a wind farm will make in a year.

Wind power is unreliable compared to coal. Although you can make good predictions about the total amount of wind power produced, there is considerable variability. In addition, wind power may not produce power during peak periods. If you weight the cost of power by its intensity of usage, wind power is much more expensive. Here is a Wiki statement about wind’s reliability:

Depending on location, wind farms may produce nearly full power output only about 28% of the time, whereas a base-loaded coal-fired station runs at full output more than 85% of the time.

As far as cost, there is considerable debate about the costs to include. Proponents for wind power try to load costs on coal power such as health care for minors. These subsidies are political payback and not part of coal’s cost. Here are external costs that are not factored into the cost of wind power: scenery impairment, noise, property value losses, the need for massive infrastructure investment to transport electricity from remote wind farms, and the provision of backup power to alleviate intermittency problems associated with wind power.

I want an end to subsidies and mandates. Wind has enjoyed subsidies for 15 years. Now there are extensive mandates that are warping the market for power even more.

Now your statements are getting more accurate. Still the term unreliable implies that wind power won't work when it is windy. The correct term would be unavailable. Peaks power demands don't match midwest wind power availablity curves very well, especially in the summer, but they do match offshore wind availability curves very well.

Depending on location, wind farms may produce nearly full power output only about 28% of the time, whereas a base-loaded coal-fired station runs at full output more than 85% of the time.

Here you have misinterpreted the concept of nameplate power vs power factor. When it says that the power factor of a windfarm is 28 percent of nameplate power this is not saying that windmills produce 100 percent power 28 percent of the time. It says that if you average out the total power produced over a year vs the theoretical max the ratio is 28 percent. Windfarms very very seldom produce max power. When they are going to produce zero or max, it us usually known a day or two in advance.

I do not disagree with your assessment. Overall, wind power is a good niche source. In some locations, it can become more than a niche source. Without subsidies and mandates, wind power will find its proper role in the energy portfolio.

The subsidies and mandates are trying to make wind and solar into major players over the entire energy portfolio. I believe that the subsidies and mandates will lead to much higher energy costs over the long term.

The dims are trying to direct energy investments so that an industry is beholden to them. The dims can brag about job creation and energy production by their industry. Often the unseen is more important than the seen. Over the long run, higher energy costs will lead to less economic growth and less competitive production of goods and services in this country. The dims will find a scapegoat when that occurs.

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