According to a recent Fox/Opinion Dynamics poll, 68 percent of Americans support drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and the Gulf of Mexico, with 44 percent believing it will help “a lot.” Even most Democrats polled (56 percent) believe drilling would help the energy situation in the long-term.
In the same poll, 49 percent responded that further drilling would be the better approach to reduce U.S. “dependence” on foreign oil, compared to 35 percent who believed required conservation to be the better way.
The desire of most Americans — no matter what their party affiliation — to increase oil supplies should come as no surprise. Even with gas prices rising and Chicken Little-like speculations that we’re tapping out supplies, oil is still abundant. And though $3.00+ a gallon at the pump is hard to swallow, it is still inexpensive compared to alternative sources of energy like ethanol, solar & wind, and hydrogen technology.
Take corn-based ethanol. In the U.S., the industry currently produces 3.4 billion gallons, used mostly as an octane-boost additive in gasoline. Billions of dollars in annual federal subsidies doesn’t change the fact we don’t and — due to limitations on the amount of land, can’t — grow nearly enough corn to meet our food and energy needs.
Some experts question whether the production of ethanol even nets a positive amount of energy. Scientists David Pimentel of Cornell University and Tad Patzek of University of California Berkley found after considering energy inputs to separate, ferment, distill, and extrude the corn, that ethanol uses 29 percent more fossil fuel in its making than it yields for energy use. If the findings are true, it makes absolutely no sense for the government to spend billions of tax dollars subsidizing an entity that uses more energy than it gives off.
There might be more potential in “cellulosic biofuels” — fuel converted from plant fibers and waste material such as switch grass and wood chips — which President Bush referred to this week. Compared to corn- and sugar-based ethanol, the process of breaking down non-starch, plant material requires much less energy.
But these biofuels are prohibitively costly to produce, require massive amounts of land, and are still experimental. With conversion technology still in its infancy — including the promising but controversial genetic engineering approach to increase production per acre — how much more are we willing to spend in costly subsidies? Already, President Bush is earmarking $150 million in 2007 for biomass, almost twice the funding two years ago.
Wind and solar power have been the energy source of “the future” for over forty years. Unlike cellulose, technology for these renewables is well and fully developed. Yet in spite of years of generous federal and state subsidies and tax incentives, wind and solar have failed to make a dent in overall energy use. As a recent report by Resources for the Future concludes, “renewables failed to meet prior expectations regarding trends in the volume of future generation.”
Wind power accounts for less than one percent of total electric power capacity. Solar power generation, which can cost three to four times as much as natural gas, accounts for even less — one-tenth of one percent of all electric capacity. Yet, to cure us of our nasty oil habit, President Bush’s budget for FY 2007 would increase solar energy R&D by 78 percent.
Middle East instability and rising world oil prices may seem inextricably linked. But that’s only a small part of the picture. Higher oil prices are due largely to increased world demand, mainly from industrial giants China and India, and inadequate investment in infrastructure to meet rising demand. Even if we did rein in our consumption of oil, it would do little to affect global demand and oil prices.
What would affect oil prices here at home is increasing production. That point should be well remembered as the U.S. Senate takes up off-shore drilling legislation this week. Where technology for renewables more or less has run out of steam, new, clean, and cost-effective methods for tapping new sources of domestic oil are expanding daily.
Recently, the Energy Department announced that advanced technologies using carbon dioxide to recover oil could quadruple domestic reserves. And tapping a small section of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, using new technology that makes a much smaller environmental footprint than conventional methods, would open 10.4 billion barrels of crude, roughly the same amount we’ve imported from Saudi Arabia for a quarter of a century.
The majority of Americans are calling for more oil production here on our own turf, and someone should be listening. President Bush might call it “addiction;” others call it “rational choice.”
– Dana Joel Gattuso is a senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research in Washington, D.C.