Transcript Overview of Energy in the USA

Overview of Energy in the
USA
With your host: Paul
Smith Two-time
Congressional
Candidate for Congress.
• Co-Owner of the SmithHeggumReport.com
• WWW.SmithHeggumReport.com
• Consulted by TV stations and Radio stations
across the country during the Fukishima
disaster
• Consulted on the War Powers Act for
interviews
• Civilian Advisor to the BRC on Nuclear Energy
Where are we in the U.S. in Energy
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Solar
Nuclear
Oil and Natural Gas
Wind
Ethanol
Others
What is our National Energy Plan?
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Do we have the right guys in Government?
911 commission report
Shuttle disaster report
Three Mile Island
We no longer have the luxury of relying on
politicians and appointees to adequately
understand the energy issues.
China
• China is currently constructing about 22
nuclear plants and unknown amount of
coal generation plants (up to 100). The
have stated goals to add 200 of each in
less than 30 years. Why? China has a
committee that is in charge of
growth. They have determined they will
need power to grow the economy.
Canada
• 20,000+ oil industry construction jobs are being
thrown under Obama’s 2012 campaign bus,
largely because the president needs to pump up
his sagging support among the
environmentalists.
• This is in addition to more than 150,000 oil and
coal related jobs Obama has already cost the
U.S. economy.
• The construction jobs, and the revenue from
operating the Keystone XL pipeline, will now go
to Canadian workers.
Canada
• That’s because Canadian government officials
are already moving to instead build the pipeline
from Alberta’s oil fields to new West Coast ports
near Vancouver. The likely destination point is
the port of Kitimat in British Columbia.
• Obama will delay for a study of an alternative
route for the Keystone pipeline, even though an
earlier U.S. Department of State study had
already concluded the proposed route is the
best of several alternatives. The new study will
delay any final approval two years and until after
the 2012 election, allowing Obama to boost his
support among environmentalist groups and
activists.
U.S.
• But the delay will kill any U.S. segment of the
pipeline, because the decision will spur the
development of the pipeline through Canada
instead.
• The job-killing decision was panned by GOP
legislators and business groups.
• “More than 20,000 new American jobs have just
been sacrificed in the name of political
expediency,” said a statement from Ohio Rep.
John Boehner, the Speaker of the House of
Representatives.
Obama
• “This is clearly a political decision and everyone
knows it… Politics has trumped jobs in this
decision as Obama’s stalling will enable Canada
to turn their pipeline west and ship their energy
and American jobs elsewhere,” said statement
from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
• The oil that would be pumped through the
Keystone XL pipeline would make gas cheaper
for American drivers, but worsen the
competitiveness of Obama’s pet green-tech
companies.
Keystone
Who is buying Natural Gas?
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China and Vladimir Putin
Plants, leases and land all over the world
Why?
What is the U.S. doing?
Investing our future in corn, solar and wind
Who must change the thinking?
LNG
• Liquefied Natural Gas.
• Cooled to a minus 260 degrees
Fahrenheit.
• Takes up 1/600th of the space
• Safe and does not harm the ozone layer.
• Let’s take a look at it. What is Fracking?
http://youtu.be/lB3FOJjpy7s
LNG Is it safe?
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Watch the demo
http://www.lngfacts.org/
Issues
Fueling stations
National energy policy
Environmental damages/challenges
LNG
• Aldyl-A plastic pipe that was laid pre-1973
• Cracking and turns brittle
• We cannot safely guarantee delivery of
enough natural gas in our cities at this
time
• Without spending billions to lay down new
pipe.
LNG
• PG&E is replacing 1,231 miles of defective
pipe. Legislation is being proposed.
• Pipe failed in the Aug 31st explosion in
Cupertino and the Sept 27th rupture in
Roseville
• What has this admin spent money on?
• Solar and wind. End.
LNG
• Just in the sewer replacement in
Sacramento it will take 635 years to
replace the underground pipes
• But what are the politicians working on?
• No long term planning or concern
• Time to change that!
Oil
• $600 million of the countries wealth is
transferred per day to the Middle East to
buy oil
• Jones Act: Costs the U.S. 30% more for
imported oil.
• Leases vs. permits.
• Where is most of the oil?
Oil
• The flow of petrodollars from the US has also
decimated the US foreign policy in those
countries as it relates to human rights, the war
on terrorism and nuclear issues. Here is a quote
from Condoleezza Rice testifying at the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee. “We have to do
something about the energy problem. I can
tell you that energy is…warping diplomacy
around the world. It has given extraordinary
power to some states that are using that
power in not very good ways.”
Bakken Oil Resrves
• 8 times as much oil as Saudi Arabia
18 times as much oil as Iraq
21 times as much oil as Kuwait
22 times as much oil as Iran
500 times as much oil as Yemen
Bakken Oil Fields
• Recent technological breakthroughs has opened
up the Bakken's massive reserves.
• We now have access of up to 500 billion barrels.
And because this is light, sweet oil…
• Those billions of barrels will cost Americans just
$16 PER BARREL!
• That's enough crude to fully fuel the American
economy for 2041 years straight.
Oil
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Platforms
Slant drilling
Jobs
Politics
Lands Commission
More politics
Oil
• The petroleum industry is responsible for
332,968 jobs in California that generate
$17 billion in wages and salaries. That’s a
huge contribution to a state that has been
losing its manufacturing and industrial
employment base and that currently has
an unemployment rate of 11.8 percent.
Oil
• For every job created by an oil company or other
business directly associated with petroleum,
another 2.5 indirect jobs are created in the
economy.
• This multiplier effect is especially pronounced in
the refining and oil production areas. For every
direct refinery job in California, another nine jobs
are created. For every job in California’s oil and
gas production fields, another 5.4 jobs are
created.
Oil
• In addition to the jobs and labor income
generated by the petroleum industry, the study
also looked at the industry’s contribution to state,
local and federal governments through taxes
and fees. Oil and natural gas companies
provided $5.7 billion in taxes and fees to the
state of California in 2009 – the last year for
which publicly available data is
available. Another $2.8 billion in taxes were
sent to the federal government.
Oil
Oil
• We now refine less oil today then we did
30 years ago.
• If we started drilling for oil here, we would
have to send it out to Mexico and Canada
to get it refined.
• Why?
Oil
• Of California sits approved lease that
would support 54 oil platforms.
• Cost of $1 billion a platform
• Currently made in S. Korea
• Estimated jobs 100,000
• Estimated revenue to the State of Ca.
• $22 billion a year.
Oil
• 97% of the U.S. transportation requires
oil. That drives about 220 million cars and
trucks annually here.
• After about 10 miles out to sea, you can’t
see a platform
• What is slant drilling?
http://youtu.be/xwAwh1QN-wQ
• Go out 8 miles
Oil
• Cuba plans to build a deep-water rig and drill for
oil in its sovereign waters 50 miles off the Florida
coast. None of the oil would flow into our
country, although the United States would
endure any environmental damage caused by a
spill.
• Right now, an enormous oil rig, manufactured in
China, is enroute to its approximate location--halfway between Key West, Florida and the
shores of communist Cuba. Drilling could begin
as early as December
Oil
Alaskan Pipeline
ANWR
ANWR
ANWR
How much Oil?
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700k barrels a day
Down from 2.2 million
Pipeline in danger of clogs and corrosion
Dismantled by law
Obama complicit with the Greens
How? Permits
What oil?
• To the west 23 million acre National
Petroleum Reserve 15 billion Barrels
• ANWR 16 billion barrels
• To the North the Beaufort and Chukchi
Seas 30 billion barrels
• Takes about 35 permits to drill.
• Enviro’s sue on every one
• Oil Co. give up.
Enviro’s Concern
ANWR Winter
Terrible for Bears
ANWR Summertime
The 2,000 Acre
Ethanol
What you are not being told
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Co2 Exemption
Water issues
Gas requirements
Fertilizer
Leaching
Octane levels
Sugar Cane
SOLAR
• "We have incurred significant net losses since
our inception, including a net loss of $114.1
million in 2007, $232.1 million in 2008 and
$119.8 million in the first nine months of fiscal
2009, and we had an accumulated deficit of
$505 million at Oct. 3, 2009," the company said
in a December 2009 filing to the SEC. "We
expect to continue to incur significant operating
and net losses and negative cash flow from
operations for the foreseeable future."
Solyndra
• $535 million loss
• Blamed lower cost China
• Blamed Europe’s end to subsidizing solar
and caused less orders to the company
• Business plan never factored in making a
profit
SOLAR
• The U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which
is in charge of making sure land is developed
for wind, solar and geo-thermal energy
development, ordered the construction of a
solar plant halted just outside the Mojave
National Preserve. Environmentalist
complained and federal officials
determined, that 162 adult tortoises would
have to be moved, and 700 juvenile tortoises
would die during construction on a 5 -acre
parcel.
SOLAR
• Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar
announced plans to blanket 1,000 square
miles of land in Arizona, New Mexico,
California, Colorado, and Utah with solar
collectors.
• one million megawatt hours power 90,000
homes.
Solar Map
SOLAR
• For 1,000 square miles!
• It will generate a paltry 35, 000
megawatts of electricity and only
during the day.
• Or power a total of 3,000 homes
Issues with Solar
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Nuclear
Japan and what happened
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9.0 Earthquake
Tsunami
Electricity issues
Gen 2 plant
Believability
Future for Japan
2nd Gen Reactor
Nuclear in the USA
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All 2nd Gen
Last built in 1978
Waste issues
Transpo and storage
Safety
Future
Holding pools
How much energy?
• The splitting of one U-235 atom into two
smaller atoms releases an enormous
amount of energy - about a million electron
volts for each split atom.
• The stored energy in a pound of
"enriched" uranium is equivalent to about
a million gallons of gasoline.
Waste disposal WIPP
Waste disposal
Waste
Waste Disposal
Issues
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Political
Costs
Education
Enviro’s
Aging Plants
Thorium see next slides
Thorium
• Thorium has an energy density far greater than any other
element in the periodic table: one ton of thorium is
equivalent to 200 tons of uranium. It’s 100 % useable; it
doesn’t need processing or enriching. It’s an enormous
untapped resource.
• Thorium is more abundant than uranium, with enough
thorium deposits to power the world for many thousands of
years, and it generates much less radioactive waste when
burned in reactors. It can even be mixed with waste from
conventional reactors to burn it up.
• The main obstacle is that the nuclear industry has a huge
reactor and fuel infrastructure based on uranium and
plutonium. An enormous additional investment would be
needed to shift to thorium.
Thorium
• Weapons-grade fissionable material (233U) is
harder to retrieve clandestinely from a thorium
reactor;
• Thorium produces 10 to 10,000 times less longlived radioactive waste;
• Thorium comes out of the ground as a 100%
pure, usable isotope, which does not require
enrichment, whereas natural uranium contains
only 0.7% fissionable U-235;
• Thorium cannot sustain a nuclear chain reaction
without priming, so fission stops by default.
Politics of Nuclear Energy
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Why not Thorium?
Atomic Energy Commission
Nuclear Regulatory Commission
BRC on Nuclear Energy
Congress
Yucca Mountain
Who is building?
Wind Power
Wind Power
Wind Power
Wind Power
• Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar
dropped a bomb and said he wanted to
generate 20% of our electricity from
wind! That translates to about 186,000
50- story wind turbines which will cover the
size of the state of West Virginia and about
19,000 miles of new high voltage
transmission lines.
Wind Power… who wins?
• Stimulus Bill
• Iberdrola, one of the largest operators of
renewable energy worldwide, is based in Spain
and has received the most U.S. stimulus dollars
— $577 million. It buys some of its turbines
from another Spanish manufacturer, Gamesa,
which has a U.S. connection. Gamesa has two
facilities to manufacture turbine blades in
Pennsylvania, but the company said the market
forced it to temporarily lay off nearly 100
workers.
Wind Power
• I Interviewed Bob Gates, Chief Commercial Officer for Clipper
Turbines on 2/11/10. Here are my notes.
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• 70-75% of the cost of a wind turbine is in the manufacturing of the
turbine. 5% goes to assembly. The Non-US owners of Wind
Turbine Farms are ordering turbines from foreign companies. They
bring them to the states, finish assembling them and the US Gov’t
pays for it.
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• There is no provision for the Stimulus money to go to US companies
thereby not putting the US worker back to work, but allowing his
foreign counter-part to do so.
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• Bob said that the US Gov’t pays them a 30% profit which goes back
to the foreign turbine manufacturer.
Wind what you don’t know
Neodymium
• On the outskirts of one of China’s
most polluted cities, an old farmer
stares despairingly out across an
immense lake of bubbling toxic
waste covered in black dust. He
remembers it as fields of wheat
and corn.
Turbines
Wind Waste
Wind Secrets
• Vast fortunes are being amassed here in
Inner Mongolia; the region has more than
90 per cent of the world’s legal reserves of
rare earth metals, and specifically
Neodymium, the element needed to make
the magnets in the most striking of green
energy producers, wind turbines.
Dirty Little Wind Secrets
• Hidden out of sight behind smoke-shrouded
factory complexes in the city of Baotou, and
patrolled by platoons of security guards, lies a
five-mile wide ‘tailing’ lake. It has killed farmland
for miles around, made thousands of people ill
and put one of China’s key waterways in
jeopardy.
• This vast, hissing cauldron of chemicals is the
dumping ground for seven million tons a year of
mined rare earth after it has been doused in acid
and chemicals and processed through red-hot
furnaces to extract its components.
Wind Secrets
• At first it was just a hole in the ground,’ he says.
‘When it dried in the winter and summer, it
turned into a black crust and children would play
on it. Then one or two of them fell through and
drowned in the sludge below. Since then,
children have stayed away.’
• As more factories sprang up, the banks grew
higher, the lake grew larger and the stench and
fumes grew more overwhelming.
Villagers Su Bairen, 69, and Yan
Man Jia Hong, 74, stand on the
edge of the six-mile-wide toxic lake
in Baotou
Wind Turbines
• With the rise of alternative energy
solutions has neodymium really come to
prominence, for use in hybrid cars and
wind turbines. A direct-drive permanentmagnet generator for a top capacity wind
turbine would use 4,400lb of neodymiumbased permanent magnet material.
Ethanol
• Ethanol can’t travel in pipelines along with gasoline,
because it picks up excess water and impurities. As a
result, ethanol needs to be transported by trucks, trains,
or barges, which is more expensive and complicated
than sending it down a pipeline. As refiners switched to
ethanol this spring, the change in transport contributed to
the rise in gas prices. Some experts argue that the U. S.
doesn’t have adequate infrastructure for wide ethanol
use.
• Also, ethanol contains less energy than gas. That
means drivers have to make more frequent trips to the
pump, costing you more money to travel the same
amount of mileage. How many of you can afford to fill up
your car 2-3 times more per month?
Ethanol
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Breaks down fiberglass tanks on boats
Rusts metal tanks from the inside out
Drains into waterways
Gums up fuel injectors
Ruins engines Voids Warranties
Will be outlawed in 2012 in CA.
Mandated and subsidized
• .45 cent to oil co. for every gallon they
blend with ethanol
• ETHANOL TARIFF .54 cents and a 2.5%
ad valorem tax on imported ethanol.
Makes us more dependant on foreign oil!
• Recap: Mandated, protected by tariffs and
oil co receive subsidy.
Grain costs
• Corn a record highs
• 40% of corn crop to ethanol
• Can’t use corn ethanol for food
consumption… why
• Fertilizer
• $6 billion in costs
2012
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Ca. will have to switch to sugar cane
Tariff
Corn won’t meet the standards
2015 Sugar cane won’t meet the
standards
• What then?
The Truth 2009
• SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -Pacific Ethanol Inc., the largest West
Coast producer of ethanol, said its
subsidiaries filed for Chapter 11
bankruptcy protection Monday, the
latest in a wave of companies dragged
down by poor conditions in the U.S.
ethanol market.
Now what?
• The Sacramento, Calif.-based ethanol
producer lost $23.9 million for the period
ended March 31, compared to a net loss
of $35.2 million in the year-earlier period,
while its average sales price per gallon of
ethanol fell 28%, to $1.65 from $2.30.
They want a 15% mix!
• Earlier this month, we reported that Pacific Ethanol’s
Chapter 11 bankruptcy plan had been approved and that
its four plants would soon be out of bankruptcy. That plan
went into effect yesterday and the plants are now
officially out of bankruptcy, having been transferred to a
holding company called "New PEHC.”
• Pacific Ethanol will continue to operate the plants and
market the ethanol they produce via a fee and profitsharing arrangement. The plan has wiped $290 million in
debt and additional liabilities from Pacific Ethanol’s
balance sheet, and it has a 90-day exclusive option to
buy a 25% equity interest in New PEHC for up to $30
million in cash
Ethanol and Green Tech will…
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Be the next bubble to burst.
Europe is pulling back on subsidies
We won’t be able to afford it.
Senate passed a bill to eliminate $6 billion
in subsidies
• Congressman Wally Herger is carrying a
bill.
What can you do.
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Stay educated
Know where to find the research
Invite me or Sam to other meetings
Talk to your Congressman
Elect smart energy people
Then support them.