Conservation alone is not the solution

By Patrick McBurnett
Special to the Bonanza
May 2, 2008

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The world demand for transportation fuels is increasing rapidly. Serious conservation is mandatory. We need to park the Hummers and Suburbans, car pool and reduce unnecessary trips.

Conservation alone, however, will not solve the problem. We need to mend our gluttonous ways, but we still need to produce more energy. The consequences of high demand and short supply are obvious; prices rise. Oil hit $120 per barrel recently.

We import 60 percent of our oil. Our top five oil suppliers are Canada, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Venezuela and Mexico. Only Canada is a truly reliable source, and fortunately, its output is going to increase from 1.5 million barrels a day to 3.0 million barrels a day. Currently we use about 20 million barrels per day; we import 12 million barrels a day and we are sending $500 billion a year to other countries, many run by bad people.

We are depleting our national treasury to buy oil. If we don’t conserve, drive more fuel efficient cars and develop more domestic oil sources we are headed for an economic meltdown.

There are no silver bullets and no perfect solutions. We must take the emotion out of the equation. Emotion has ruled the stampede to corn based ethanol. We are now spending billions on a solution that has unintended consequences; many environmentalists now question their previous support.

Ethanol of course is a carbon based fuel and is less energy rich than gasoline. Gasoline has 115,500 BTUs of energy/gallon while ethanol has 76,000 BTUs/gallon. Assuming the same mechanical and thermodynamic efficiency, a 20-mile per gallon car will get 13 miles per gallon burning ethanol, although higher compression ratios could improve ethanol mileage somewhat.

We only now understand water and fertilizer issues and food prices are skyrocketing. I am not saying ethanol is not part of the solution, but it is not the solution. ANWAR covers 19 million acres, of which 1.5 million acres are in the coastal plain. The likely oil rich area is about 100 miles from Prudhoe Bay. Modern drilling techniques will only disturb 2,000 acres on the coastal plain.

ANWAR oil most likely could replace our Saudi Arabian imports for 30 years, and every dollar spent will remain in the U.S. Russia and Canada are drilling in the arctic, Cuba is drilling off the coast of Florida and the Chinese are looking for oil everywhere. The Canadians are developing their massive tar sand reserves. Our western oil shale can be developed and there is more oil on our continental shelf.
We need to continue to address environmental issues and make sure these resources are developed carefully. The big oil companies are certainly no saints (they make about 30 cents per gallon profit), but if they can’t drill or build refineries, how are we to increase our domestic supplies?

Virtually everything that moves in this country moves by oil. I am confident given American ingenuity that some new unknown energy source will be developed in the future and we can eliminate our oil dependency.

Unfortunately it will take many years to replace oil and the related infrastructure even after we develop new technologies.

High oil prices will foster research for new technologies, but right now we need more domestic oil or we will soon be a poor nation.

Incline Village resident Patrick McBurnett is a graduate mechanical engineer who is President of Convergence Engineering Corp., an aerospace engineering and wind power design firm based in Gardnerville, Nev.