Transcript: Averting a Liquid Fuel Crisis from Peak Oil

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Energy:  A Conversation About Our National Addiction
Averting a Liquid Fuels Crisis from “Peak Oil”
 
An Inter Agency Learning Opportunity
 
Congressman Roscoe Bartlett
Dr. Robert Hirsch, SAIC
 
 Monday, April 24, 2006        6:00 to 8:30 pm
 
 
Dr. Robert Hirsch:  Good evening I’m going to talk to you
about peak oil, try to tell you what it is, why it is.  Some
people call it a theory.  It is not.  There’s a lot of things
that we know and there’s a lot of things we don’t know.  If
I’m going to do an effective job this evening you’ll walk away
from this dinner being incredibly disturbed because this
problem is enormous and it is important to every one of us.  
Let’s start with the easy stuff.  You all I think
probably understand that oil is extremely important to our
every day lives, it provides the United States over 65 percent
of our transportation needs; that’s everything, almost
everything that moves.  It’s the feedstock for a variety of
petro chemicals that are extremely important to us. 
Lubricants for most things that move come from oil and then
heating oil and some electric power.  
What I’m going to do is talk about the character of the
problem, and unfortunately I’ve got to give you a little bit
of geology, not much though, and it’s important to recognize
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at the outset for those of you who don’t have any background
in geology that geology is very different than engineering and
physics and chemistry.  I’ll talk a little bit about the
economic impacts.  I’ll talk about mitigation options that are
ready to go.  We then looked at three different scenarios of
mitigation and out of that comes a good deal of understanding.  
Okay, what are we talking about when we’re talking about
peaking.  We’re talking about a rise, we have been having a
rise in both demand and oil production, worldwide, for many
decades.  And a healthy world economy continues to need
increasing oil and that extrapolation there.  What we’re
talking about in peaking is a maximum in world production
turning over and going downward, going into decline.  That
will then lead to shortages, massive shortages world, unless
we act in time, and shortages mean very high oil prices.  
Okay, here’s the geology part of it.  The upper left hand
corner is a notional picture of what the oil production looks
like from any oil field.  We’re graphing their production
vertically in time and horizontal axis.  And what you see is
that production rises relatively quickly, reaches a peak and
then goes into decline thereafter.  That’s what happens in
every oil field.  You can twiddle that around a little bit,
you can flatten it down, you can maybe add a little bit here
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and there, but basically that’s what Mother Nature does for
us.  
So oil fields peak and regions are composed of large
numbers of oil fields.  And regions peak.  As indicated here,
I’m showing you at that point what happened in the lower 48
United States we continued to increase our production up until
1970 and then we went into irreversible decline.  And, of
course, the world is composed of a large number of regions and
so peaking will occur.  This is geological fact.  There is
simply no escaping that.
Why worry now?  Because demand is very large, I think
that you all are aware of that, and growing rapidly.  World
consumption of oil has been outstripping the additions to
reserves for over 20 years.  Oil production is past peak in 33
out of 48 of the largest oil producing countries in the world. 
In other words, peaking happens and it has been happening and
year after year more countries reach their peak and go into
decline.  We’ve got a number of people that are deeply
concerned about this, as we all should be.  We’ve looked at
mitigation, and I’ll tell you a little bit about that, it can
be done.  We’re not going to roll over and die.  We’re going
to do something about it, but mitigation because of the scale
of the problem is going to take a long time.  And in all of
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that the risks and stakes for our economy and our country and
the world are very significant.  
This is maybe the simplest single picture to show you the
kind of problem that we’re in.  What you’re looking at in the
vertical access is the net of annual additions to the world
oil reserves minus consumption.  And that’s as a function of
time.  And as you see in the 1980s, early 1980s we began to
turn the corner and we’ve been going downhill ever since. 
What we’ve been doing is basically eating our seed corn.  And
depending on who you talk to today we consume two, some people
think three or four barrels of oil for every additional barrel
that is added worldwide, worldwide, and so we’re in the
process of depleting what was there.  
It’s important to recognize as you think about this we’re
not talking about running out of oil that will take a long,
long time into the future, when you turn the corner and you go
into decline there still will be oil production for a long
time into the future.  Peaking is maximum production.  
The other thing that’s very important to recognize is
that we’re talking about a liquid fuels problem.  People like
to talk about energy crisis but we’ve got to focus on liquid
fuels because that’s where the issue is, and that’s where
we’re going to run into trouble unless we act accordingly.  
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You all recognize this I suspect, liquid fuels are
essential to the world as it exists today.  A hundred years
from now it will look different, we’ll be doing things
differently.  We have enormous investments in end use
equipment and infrastructure and everything else that goes to
providing us that liquid fuel we get at the gas station or you
put into your tanks or your ships or your airplanes.  We
cannot afford and we cannot manufacturer change overnight. 
We’ve got an enormous investment in all of that equipment,
particularly people in the Department of Defense.  You’ve got
an enormous investment in existing equipment.  You’re not
going to change that quickly, you couldn’t change that
quickly.  You’ve got to have liquid fuels for a long, long
time as you phase over to whatever else it will get to.  
At some point in the longer-term future we will have to
get to a sustainable energy future.  The thing that we’ve got
to worry about is getting from here to that point.  And that
will evolve slowly over time.  One can say that we’ve got to
have liquid fuels for a lot of things, for something like 30
years, maybe 50 years into the future.  
Okay, you know I think that we’ve had two major energy
liquid fuel petroleum crises in the United States, in the
world. One was 1973 and 1979, and Roscoe and I happen to
remember those rather well.  What happened in those relatively
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brief interruptions, they were brief interruptions, was we had
a sharp spike up in inflation, unemployment, we went into
recession and we had very high interest rates.  Those were
brief.  When we get to peaking in world oil production if we
don’t have mitigation we’ve got long term trouble that’s going
to be characterized by those and other problems.  We have
never, every faced a problem like this before.  The world has
gone from one primary energy source to another to another,
over time, and that’s been evolutionary.  This is something
where nature is going to grab us and not give us an
opportunity to evolve.  
Okay, some more on the situation.  Since 1971 world gross
domestic products, GDP as it’s called for the world, has gone
up at something like three percent per year on average and oil
demand was essential to that; it’s the life blood for economic
expansion, and it’s gone up at a percent and a half.  If we
get to the point where we haven’t mitigated and we turn into
decline in world oil production the GDP is going to decline
also.  How it’s going to be nobody knows.  I’ve talked to a
lot of economists and you can do all kinds of cases if you
like, but whatever your assumptions are that will determine
what results you get.  
When is it going to occur?  Nobody knows because we don’t
have good data and a number of folks out there don’t give us
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credible information and there is no third party that’s out
there to audit what it is that they’re telling us.  
This is a list of people from around the world that have
done various calculations in various ways to try to predict,
forecast when world oil peaking can occur, might occur.  A
number of people think, some people actually think it’s
occurred already, and that part of what we’re seeing now is a
result of that.  We don’t know.  We won’t know until after the
fact.  Other people see it within the next five years, five to
15 years, and beyond that.  This is very hard forecasting. 
It’s very difficult because of bad data and not much data and
also because it is very hard to forecast what happens with oil
and gas.  
An example is this graph showing what the Energy
Information Administration, which is arguably one of the best
forecasting organizations in the world, what they said about
North American natural gas from 2002 when they projected a
rising supply of natural gas in North America to the United
States.  Things looked good and quite reasonable, a lot of
people put in power plants based on natural gas and so forth,
and over time reality crept up, and today they’re looking at a
situation that is flat, and if we had had a cold winter we
could have had shortages and very serious problems.  This is
very hard to forecast.  Think risk and think about minimizing
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risk.  Some people that technology and price are going to bail
us out.  That happens with minerals.  But mineral geology is
very different than oil and gas geology.  
This again is a picture of what happened in the United
States, lower 48 states.  You saw the peak before.  There’s
the peak again and the decline afterwards.  What happened
after 1970 of course was the 1973 and 1979 when oil prices
jumped dramatically.  That was also a golden era of the
development of technology in the oil business, upstream part
of the oil business.  And yet it did not turn things around,
it just can’t happen.  Will it help?  Of course it will help. 
Are there things we can do?  Of course there are.  It won’t
change the picture.  
Okay, one of the questions is, are we going to have a
warning of when peaking comes?  And so one of the things that
we did was to take a look at large regions, large areas where
there are complicated basins and different types of oil
fields.  We looked at what actually happened in those
countries or regions that were not influenced by revolution or
cartel action and so forth to try to understand how things
might happen in the world. 
This shows a picture for Texas, very large province it
turns out from an oil standpoint, North America, United
Kingdom and Norway.  And what you see is different
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characteristics, but before peaking, a year before peaking you
couldn’t see it was coming.  And after peaking the drops were
dramatic.  We don’t know whether the world will look like that
but we better pay attention to that kind of data.  
Okay, we looked at what can be done to mitigate the
problem.  We looked at three scenarios.  One is maybe the
usual one and that is you wait until the problem strikes and
then you do something about it.  How often do we do that in
our personal lives and otherwise.  The second one was, let’s
postulate that we get smart about peaking ten years before
hand and we begin a program in mitigation.  And the third
scenario is we start 20 years before hand. 
What we did was to look at crash program implementation. 
In other words, start in one day and do a number of things
that I will show you in a minute as fast as humanly possible
worldwide because it’s a worldwide problem; that is after all
the most optimistic case.  
Options that we looked at specifically are indicated
here.  One of the first ones that comes to mind is vehicle
fuel efficiency.  In the United States I think that we’re all
aware of the fact that we’re driving bigger and bigger cars
with more and more horsepower and so forth, and we haven’t
really paid much attention to the issue of vehicle fuel
efficiency until maybe just recently.  That’s one option,
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another is you know about the oil sands in Canada and heavy
oil in Venezuela.  That’s commercial; that’s ready to go.  
We know how to liquefy coal as has been done in South
Africa and Germany during the Second World War and so forth. 
There’s a lot of coal.  Gas to liquids is a matter of gas,
natural gas that is in remote locations around the world that
can be made into liquids also.  And then lastly we can take
particularly carbon dioxide, which a number of people worry
about, as do I, it may be causing a global warming problem,
and you can put it into the ground and get more oil out.  
Why do we pick these?  Because they are commercial or
near commercial and they’re ready to go right now; we’re not
at the end of either a short or a long R&D program.  They are
ready for implementation and the thing that jumps out in this
whole thing is implementation is the key.  
Quick picture, a lot of numbers here, sorry for that. 
This is the transportation use in 2003 of liquid fuels.  You
can see autos and light trucks represent a very large fraction
of the total.  You can also see that they have a long
lifetime, 16 and 17 years.  Heavy trucks are a user; a
significant user.  Airplanes are a much smaller user.  Heavy
trucks have lifetimes of something like 28 years and airplanes
much longer.  So we focused on autos and light vehicles.  
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Why does it take a long time?  Because there are a lot of
vehicles out there and because we produce only so many each
year and we retire a smaller number.  So our fleet continues
to grow that’s why we can’t change things over night. 
Another thing that’s important to recognize is that it
takes energy to deliver energy.  In the good old days when you
poked a hole in the ground and you saw those gushers that they
showed in Texas and so forth, basically the stuff squirted out
and we collected it, and that was easy, it didn’t take a lot
of energy to get it out.  As we go more and more offshore into
more and more difficult areas for oil, it takes more and more
energy to produce that energy.  And when you get down to gas
to liquids and heavy oil and other things it’s going to take a
significant amount of energy input to get liquid fuels out and
liquid fuels out is what we need.  
Options that we didn’t consider are listed here.  They
are nuclear, wind and solar.  They produce electric power,
which is good and important to us but it’s not going to run
our cars or fly our airplanes.  Hydrogen is not ready and it’s
not economic.  Biomass is not economic in the United States,
maybe Brazil, maybe it will be in the future.  Shale oil is
not yet commercial.  
What we did was to take a look at what could be done as
fast as humanely possible, crash program.  And what you see is
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a picture that looks like this; namely you start and there is
a delay with everything before you begin to get either savings
or liquid fuel production.  And this is something like the
pattern that one might see.  After 20 years from the beginning
of a crash program one might be able to have actual or
equivalent savings or production, about 35 million barrels a
day.  Okay?  
Let’s ask a question then, how does that fit on what
might happen worldwide.  We have to have a model for the
world.  What we did was we assumed the model for the United
States lower 48; that showed a peak and two straight lines fit
the data pretty well.  Two percent decline rate after peak,
healthy world economy would continue at something like the
same rate as before and small differences in the numbers don’t
make a big different in terms of how this comes out.  So under
those conditions a shortage would develop, and would be
something like 60 million barrels a day, 20 years after
peaking.  The other thing that you see there is that we didn’t
pick a date for peaking, because I don’t know and I don’t
think that anybody knows because the data just isn’t good
enough.  So we picked that data as zero and we looked at
starting mitigation beforehand and starting mitigation at the
time of peaking.  
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Okay, so what happens?  Let’s take that and put it into
that and see what happens.  What happens is this.  If you wait
until peaking is obvious, and you do crash programs worldwide
overnight we’ve got a significant period of time for the
forecast.  We’ve got a significant problem for a very
significant period of time.  And it doesn’t take much
scratching to see not only a recession but severe worldwide
depression in a situation like that.  
Okay, if we get smart enough and we start early, ten
years early, assuming that we have ten years then clearly
we’re going to be in much better shape, the mitigation wedge
is bigger, has more time to have impact, it pushes off the
peaking of production because of changes that occur there, but
you still have a shortage problem, and I’m sure that you can
understand what happens in the last case if we start ahead 20
years and we’re able to produce and save at the rates that we
indicated here than we can conceivably beat the problem, and
that’s basically what the next slide says.  
It says that the worst case is the one that unfortunately
we may end up living with, and that is waiting until it’s
obvious, then we’ll all be able to agree and be able to take
action.  If we start ten years early and we have the ten years
then conceivably we’d be better off.  If on the other hand, we
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start 20 years assuming we have the 20 years, then conceivably
we cannot have a problem.  
One of the things in the pattern that I showed you for
the lower 48 states was a two percent decline rate.  Two
percent occurs in some places, but in a number of places the
decline rate afterwards is of the order of eight percent, and
the Chairman of Schlumberger, who probably has better data
because they operate around the world, says that declines
after peak are something like eight percent.  If that’s the
case, and if we wait until peaking occurs to begin you’ve got
a much bigger wedge and a much, much worse problem.  
Okay, if I go back to that slide that I showed you about
the forecast we better hope that a whole bunch of these people
are wrong.  And on top of that, we’d have to start very
quickly. 
Interesting to note what the Chinese think about this. 
They have indicated they think that peaking is going to occur
around 2012 and a number of people privately from OPEC and
elsewhere in the world will tell you that they think something
like that is probably what’s going to happen.  What have the
Chinese been doing?  They have been out paying top dollar for
resource and production around the world.  They’ve been able
to outbid our international oil companies, private companies,
because they can pay more money.  
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Okay, the summary is, there was supposed to be a little
picture up in the corner there, I’m sorry about that, oil
production is not easy to understand, it is not like the
inventory that a number of you people deal with that store
owners deal with and otherwise.  There are complications here
that make it different than what we live in our every day
life, soup cans in the cupboard and other kinds of things.  So
recognize, please, that there is complication here and you’ve
got to understand it.  We don’t know when peaking will occur. 
There is no question that it will occur.  It is occurring all
over the world.  It will happen worldwide.  The timing is
uncertain.  A study like this, the one that I just described
indicates that it could happen soon, where soon is defined as
the next 20 years.  It will be primarily a liquid fuels
problem.  Longer term we can electrify a number of things. 
There’s a number of things that we won’t be able to electrify.  
But we can do other things in the longer term.  It is the
worst, first, worst is a good word too unfortunately, the
first forced energy transition the world has ever experienced
and it will result in an abrupt change in energy and the way
we live.  Mitigation technologies are available.  There are
others coming along the pike.  Longer term, as I said, we can
do other things.  And if we start early we can minimize the
economic damage.  
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Thank you.  (Applause)  Congressman Bartlett.  
Congressman Roscoe Bartlett:  I might note that there are
two studies funded by the federal government.  One is the
Hirsch Report.  You’ve got heard Dr. Hirsch summarize that for
you.  Another is one done by the Corp of Engineers.  It was
dated last September, just about what six weeks ago it finally
got out into the public.  We’re trying to find out how and why
it was contained within the Pentagon for so long.  The Corp of
Engineers study concluded just about the same things that the
Hirsch Report concluded.  
This is a recent statement from Condoleezza Rice.  “We do
have to do something about the energy problem.  I can tell you
that nothing has really taken me aback more as Secretary of
State than the way that the policies of energy is, I will use
the word warping diplomacy around the world.  We have simply
got to do something about the warping now diplomatic effort by
the all out rush for energy supply.”  It would be nice if that
statement of concern was matched with a rational policy.  
This is the reality of where we are.  We are one person
out of 22 in the world; roughly five percent of the world’s
population.  We have two percent of the known reserves of oil
in the world.  We use 25 percent of the world’s oil and we
import almost two-thirds of what we use.  
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Another statistic there, which is very interesting and
that is that we pump eight percent of the world’s oil.  Now if
you have only two percent and you’re pumping eight percent
that means you’re pumping four times faster than the rest of
the world.  The Corps of Engineers estimated that if we could,
and of course we cannot, but if we could make do on just our
oil, that’s all we had, it would last us what 4.3 years I
think was the number in the Corps of Engineers’ report.  It
was these numbers, by the way, that prompted Jim Woolsey who
spoke to you last time, and I think 29 or something other
prominent Americans to write a letter to the President saying,
Mr. President this represents a national security risk we have
really got to do something about.  
This is a very interesting chart.  This is the chart, as
you see the ordinate on this chart is how happy you are and
the abscissa on the chart is GNP, gross national product.  And
you see there where we are, we’re at the far, far right of
course.  And we’re pretty happy.  But notice, notice that
there are what, a dozen or so countries that use significantly
less energy than we do which are just as satisfied, some of
them more satisfied with their station in life than we are. 
So you don’t have to use as much energy as we use to feel good
about your station in life.  
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Notice over on the left you know you don’t feel very good
about your station in life unless you have a reasonable amount
of energy.  But up there at a reasonable amount of energy
there are a whole lot of people, some of them using as fourth
as much energy as we use to feel just about as good about
their position in life as we feel.  
This is a statement from the Corps of Engineers’ report. 
Petroleum experts: Campbell and Gene LeHare (phonetic) and
several others they mention there, all estimated that a peak
in conventional oil production will occur around 2005.  And
Dr. Hirsch has gone over these so I won’t repeat that.  We’re
either at peak oil or very shortly there, maybe $75-a-barrel
oil sends us a message.  
The green curve there represents the estimate made by M.
King Hubbard in 1956 when he predicted that the world would
peak in oil production in about 1970.  Shell Oil Company, yes,
U.S. oil production, oil production would peak at about 1970. 
He was only looking at the lower 48 by the way.  And we’ll see
a chart in a moment that speaks to that.  He was relegated to
the lunatic fringe and the Shell Oil Company says please don’t
embarrass yourself and us by publishing this article, but what
the 50th anniversary of that was this last 8th of March.  So the
8th of March is kind of an historic day.  
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The smooth green curve there is his estimate, the more
ragged green curve with the larger symbols are the actual data
points, and he was pretty much right on.  The red one, by the
way, is the Soviet Union, and as they fell apart they didn’t
meet their expected potential and now Russia’s going to have a
second little peak.  But they have peaked and they’re on the
way down.  
The next chart shows where we’ve gotten our oil in this
country.  And we’ve added to the lower 48 the natural gas
liquids and Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico.  And you see that
we peaked in about 1970 and with just a little blip produced
by Prudo Bay, I’ve been there, it’s a dead horse, and I’ve
seen the beginning of that four foot pipeline through which
for a number of years a fourth of our domestic production
went.  And that’s all it did took a slide down the other side
of Hubbard’s Peak.  And I’m sure you all can remember the
fabled Gulf of Mexico oil discoveries in which we were
supposed to save us, the yellow that’s all it produced.  In
the grand scheme of things it was little or more than a knit. 
Well, we’re now down to what, in the lower 48 we’re down to
under half of what we were producing in 1970, and we import
the rest of course because we continue to use more and more.  
I don’t know how many of you have seen the oil chart. 
This is a little subset of the oil chart and this is
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incredibly informative.  There are two curves here.  One does
not have a smooth curve drawn through it, but this is a
discovery, that’s the big bars there, and it shows when we
discovered it, and Dr. Hirsch had a slide which showed
essentially this, except his was looking at the difference
between supply and what we’re using. This simply shows the
available oil in the bar graph and it shows the amount which
we’re using is the solid black line going through there, and
you see that in about 1980, you remember his turned south in
1980, in 1980 we started using more oil than we had found.  So
now what we’re doing is continue to use more and more oil and
we are using up those reserves.  Notice the rate at which we
have been producing additional reserves since 1980, it’s been
down, down, down.  
Now the shaded part of the graph to the right is their
prediction of the future.  They have peaking, what in about
2010.  And by the way you can draw that consumption curve any
way you like.  You can use it now or you can use it later. 
But you can’t use what you don’t have.  And unless you think
that we’re going to get enormously additional amounts from the
ground by enhanced recovery, or that we’re going to find
enormous new stores of oil in the ground we’re pretty much
stuck.  And I think that they may be, maybe even a little
optimistic in what they think we’re going to find in the
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future, but they show a steady, it won’t be that steady of
course, it will be up and down, but if the immediate or the
last 20 years or so can predict the future that’s what the
future is.  And by the way that’s with enormously improved for
discovering oil.  We are very much better at discovering oil,
but we’re finding very much less oil.  
If you draw a curve over, around the discoveries there
will be an area under that curve.  And most of you here
understand enough about this sort of thing that you know that
the area under the use curve cannot be larger than the area
under the discovery curve.  That’s it, for oil.  Now we can
add some things to that, like liquefying coal and so forth. 
But that is it for conventional oil.  And so we have some
capability for modifying what we do from now on out.  But if
you use it now it won’t be there later.  
This is EIA projections.  Very interesting.  And I had a
course in statistics once, I don’t know how many of you have
had a course in statistics, but this is very interesting. 
They have projected here in yellow the 95 percent probability,
in the green the 50 percent probability, which they call the
mean.  Folks the 50 percent probability ain’t the mean.  It’s
the 50 percent probability.  And then they show the five
percent probability as the blue, going up into the heavens. 
And why back there in what, in about 95 or so, they had these
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three predictions and they think that we are on the 50 percent
course.  But notice by the red where it’s been going.  It’s
been following 95.  
Now you can draw these three curves there, but if you are
going to be honest when you draw that green curve at 50
percent and show it up there, you need to show another green
curve that much below the 95 percent curve, because if that 50
percent probability is going to be up there, the same
probability is going to be down in the five percent curve that
it could fall off abruptly.  The most probable amount of oil
available is represented by the 95 percent.  And somehow all
of their projections are based on the green one which they say
is the mean.  The 50 percent probability is not the mean. 
This is bizarre to use statistics that way.  And they now have
two trillion barrels of oil remaining in the world.  All of
the experts that I know believe there is roughly a trillion
barrels of oil, a thousand giga-barrels of oil remaining in
the world.  And that green thing … So remember all of their
projections are based on the assumption that 50 percent is the
mean and therefore there are two trillion barrels of oil left
in the world.  
Again from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineer study show
that now alternative fuel can currently replace oil.  That is
true.  And Dr. Hirsch talked about the alternatives.  What
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they say here we’re going to show in some additional charts,
so let me just move on.  
Oh, this is a very interesting one.  This is a
correlation between the price of oil and the price of gas. 
And no big mystery there, gas is what, roughly 70, 75 percent
more than oil, and it pretty much tracks up and down as we go
through time.  So as oil goes up gas is going to go up, oil
has gone up, gas has gone up.  
This is a very interesting curve.  This shows a two
percent increase, it’s expediential.  Albert Einstein said the
most powerful force in the universe was the power of compound
interest or expediential growth.  And here we show a two
percent expediential growth and then we show peaking growing
at two percent, and peaking sometime, maybe now, maybe a bit
in the future, but not very long in the future.  And I think
that we’re about there where it says we are here.  And notice
that the actual deficiencies occur before you peak.  So we may
have a little bit more oil, but we’re demanding a lot more oil
and so the gap between what we would like to use and what’s
available to use I think will continue to grow.  
I would like to make an argument that we shouldn’t try to
fill the gap.  First of all, I don’t think that we can fill
the gap.  Dr. Hirsch said we need to begin at least 20 years
ahead of time if we’re going to fill the gap.  But let me tell
 24
you what happens if we fill that gap, we already have climate
change and global warming from CO2 increase.  If you fill that
gap you’re going to have even more CO2 increase.  And what
you’re doing is building an infrastructure which is going to
be even more difficult to support in the future.  We now have
an infrastructure based on 84 million barrels of oil a day. 
What the heck are we going to do with an infrastructure based
on 130 or 140 million barrels of oil a day when we’re going to
have only a fraction of that in the future?  And we have a
couple of charts subsequently here that will show us that.  
This is another chart which shows that you don’t have to
use a lot of energy to be happy.  I think that you would have
a hard time convincing Californians that they aren’t as happy
as the rest of the people in the country and they use what,
about 60 percent of the energy that we use.  That’s because
California has some very stringent regulations that result in
lesser energy production.  
Well, what will we do?  Where will we go?  We have some
finite resources tar sands, oil shales, and coal, and we need
to husband those and use them.  Then we have nuclear.  We now
produce 20 percent of our electricity from nuclear, eight
percent of our total energy; that could and maybe should grow. 
I have friends in the Congress who have been devotedly anti-
nuclear, but they are bright people.  And when they’re
 25
considering the alternative and that is shivering in the dark
they are now rethinking nuclear.  Nuclear of course there are
three different kinds of nuclear power; one is fission, the
light water reactor, which is what we use in our country.  I
get quite different estimates of how much fission remain in
the world, but it’s not forever, not by a long shot.  It may
be 20, 30, 40 years or so fission, at current use rates.  And
be careful about these projections at what use rate, at
current use rates.  If we increase the use of uranium it’s
going to last even a shorter time than that.  
So we will be moving, as France has already to some
extent, to the breeder reactor which as the name implies
produces fuel more than it uses.  But then you buy some
problems with transporting and enriching and providing the
stuff from which nuclear weapons can be made.  
And then, of course, fusion.  Now if you believe that
we’re going to solve our energy problems with fusion you
probably believe that you’re going to solve your personal
economic problems by winning the lottery.  We have I think
about the same probability of solving our energy future with
fusion.  That doesn’t keep me from supporting fusion research. 
I happily vote for all the money that we can put into that. 
I’d like to put more than the roughly $250 million a year in,
because I’ll tell you if we don’t get to fusion the future is
 26
not all that bright. We’re home free if we get to fusion. 
It’s the only thing that I know of in the whole energy arena
where you’re home free.  If we can go to fusion we’re home
free.  
And the renewable resources: solar, wind, hydropower,
geothermal, ocean energy.  An incredible amount of energy in
the ocean.  The moon lifts the whole darn ocean what two feet? 
I carry two five gallon buckets of water, they’re heavy.  Can
you imagine of lifting the whole darn ocean two feet?  But we
haven’t had much success in harnessing that energy, have we?  
And then agriculture: soy, bio-diesel, ethanol, methanol,
biomass.  And a little later we’ll have a couple of additional
words to say about agriculture.  
And then waste energy.  We’re getting a fair amount of
energy of waste energy.  There’s a plant up in Dickerson,
Maryland they’d be happy to have you come visit; my wife went
with her women’s group the other day, and Dr. Darnell and I
have been there.  Very interesting facility.  I’d be happy to
have it next to my church.  It looks like an office building. 
They haul their trash in in containers, you don’t even see it
on trucks and trains, and they dump it in a big bin there. 
Have a claw that picks it up and dumps it to watch it to see
that there’s nothing evil in it, like a propane cylinder that
you don’t want to dump in the fire.  Nothing evil in it, they
 27
pick it up and drop it over into the fire.  And they’re
producing a meaningful amount of electricity from that.  
Then hydrogen from renewables, because ultimately we will
get our hydrogen from renewables.  Hydrogen, of course, is not
an energy source.  We will always use more energy producing
hydrogen than we get out of hydrogen or we’ll have to suspend
the second law of thermodynamics, and if we can do that, we
can suspend the law of gravity and then we’re really home
free, aren’t we?  
So hydrogen is not an energy source.  We will always use
more energy producing it then we get out of it.  So why talk
about hydrogen?  Because when you burn it it is pretty much
pollution free, you get only water.  And because you can use
it in a fuel cell, by and by when we get economically produced
fuel cells, to get at least twice the efficiency out of the
fuel cell than you get out of a reciprocating engine.  But
hydrogen is the smallest element we know; those molecules
really want to get apart, so if you’re going to put them close
together they resist you and you have to have a big, thick
shell, a lot of pressure.  And you can liquefy it, but it’s
frightfully cold and you have to have a lot of insulation and
you will gas off more at night than you run in your car if
you’re not careful, if you’re using it in your car.  
 28
The experts that I’ve talked to lately believe that the
only way to store the hydrogen if it’s going to become a part
of a meaningful infrastructure is in solid state, that’s a
battery.  So I asked them is a hydrogen battery inherently
going to be more efficient than an electron battery, which is
a battery we have now?  They really didn’t have a good answer
to that but they said they would go back and look.  Hydrogen
is in many senses a cruel hoax; there are many people who are
led to believe that this hydrogen economy into which we put a
billion and a half, what a couple of State of the Union
messages ago, that that’s going to get us home free.  It will
not.  It’s one of the things that we ought to be doing, but it
is not a solution.  
This top chart is really a very interesting one.  And
this is one that I thought about for a long time, probably 40
years ago I started thinking about these things, maybe it’s
the scientist in me.  You know the moon isn’t made out of blue
cheese and the earth isn’t made out of oil.  And so I asked
myself what does that mean?  Obviously it’s not infinite; it’s
finite.  What are we talking about, ten years, 100 years, a
thousand years, a million years?  It obviously is finite.  So
I started asking myself that question.  
This looks at only a relatively few years, about 400
years of 5,000 years of recorded history.  For a very long
 29
time we limped along using very little energy; it’s down there
in the noise level before we entered the Industrial Revolution
with wood, and we had what about a half a billion to a billion
people worldwide.  And then we discovered the Industrial
Revolution and wood and the hills of northern Frederick County
were denuded to feed little Catoctin furnace there.  There are
now more mountains, more forest on the mountains in New
Hampshire than there was at the Revolutionary War because
they’d carried all that charcoal to England to produce steel
there.  But look what happened when we found coal.  
And then really look what happened when we found gas and
oil, it just took off, expediential, look at that increase. 
Notice what happened in 1970.  And by the way, if 1970 hadn’t
happened and we hadn’t incepted to efficiency up until the
Carter years every decade we used as much oil as had been used
in all of previous history.  Now what does that mean?  That
means that when you used half of all the oil in the world, how
much is left?  Ten years.  We’re better than that now, it’s
something like 30, 40 years, but it’s not going to be steady
stay, it’s not going to go where we are now 30, 40 years and
fall off.  It’s going to be as Dr. Hirsch pointed out in his
graph, it’s going to be down and out very gradually.  
Well, the thing that impressed me here was that in 5,000
years of recorded history the age of oil is going to be just a
 30
blip.  What then?  We’re about half way through the age of
oil, about 100, 150 years, another 150 years we’ll be through,
essentially through the age of oil, gas and coal.  Now there
will always be some remaining, with a lot of effort and a high
price, there will always be some oil remaining, but what will
the world be like?  We now have grown from about a billion
people or less, between six and seven billion.  How many
people do you think the world can feed in steady state?  
Let me give you just a little example of the challenge we
face.  The energy density of these fossil fuels is just
incredible, absolutely incredible.  One barrel of oil, the
refined product of which you can buy for what, about 120
couple dollars, 130 dollars, 42 gallons, three dollars a
gallon.  That will buy you the work output of 12 strong men
working all year for you.  That’s the energy equivalent in a
barrel of oil.  If you have some trouble getting your mind
around that imagine how far a gallon of diesel fuel or
gasoline … by the way still cheaper than water in the grocery
store if you buy it in the little bottles, right, about the
price of milk.  
Think how far that carries your SUV, maybe ten miles.  I
have one that’s parked and the licenses are off of it and I
have no insurance on it.  I drive a Prius that would take me
51 miles.  How long would it take me to pull my Prius 51
 31
miles?  With a come along and a hooking onto the guardrail and
trees by the side, I could do that, but it would take me a
very long time.  It may be somewhat humbling, but if you go
out and work really hard in your yard all day this coming
weekend I will get more work out of an electric motor with
less than 25 cents worth of electricity.  Now it may be
somewhat humbling to recognize that you’re worth less than 25
cents a day in terms of fossil fuels. But that’s where we are
and that’s the quality of this cheap slave that we’ve had for
this long.  
You know our great grandchildren are going to look back
and ask how could the monsters have done that?  When we found
this incredible wealth under the ground we should have stopped
and said gee, what are we going to do with this so we can get
the most good for the most people for the longest time?  That
is not what we did, like kids who found the cookie jar we just
pigged out.  And now we’re planning to continue pigging out by
filling the gap.  Even if you could fill the gap I do not
think that you can fill the gap, but even if you could fill
the gap why would you want to?  Why would you want to produce
more CO2 and more climate change?  Why would you want to build
an even bigger infrastructure that’s going to give you a
bigger fall later?  If you are climbing a hill, and you know
that what’s going to happen on the other side of the hill
 32
you’re going to fall off a cliff, the higher you climb the
further you fall.  Why would you want to do that?  
Back to our alternatives.  This is all there is.  Now we
have some finite resources up there, the tar sands and the oil
shales, and in Canada they are now producing a million barrels
of oil of a day.  In five years working real hard they’ll
produce two million barrels a day.  And in ten years they’ll
produce three million barrels a day.  That’s a net increase
compared to what the world would like to use.  And I’m told
that they are using more energy from natural gas to produce
the oils than they’re getting out of it.  It costs about $18 a
barrel to produce it, they’re getting $75 a barrel yesterday,
that’s a lot of profit.  Dollar profit ratio looks really
good.  But at the end using precious natural gas, by the way
which makes all of our nitrogen fertilizer, using that to
produce oil is going to look really dumb.  The energy profit
ratio which is the profit ratio that you really need to be
looking at is less than nothing in producing Canadian oil.  
Our oil shales … Shell Oil Company has gone out there,
they’ve drilled a bunch of holes out there in Colorado, they
have frozen this big vessel, a frozen diver, this vessel, then
they’ve cooked it inside for a year and then they start
sucking oil and they cook for another year, and they get a
meaningful amount of oil out.  But how scaleable is this? 
 33
They tell you not to worry about this because there’s a
trillion barrels of oil out there in our oil shales out in the
West.  You know that oil is little better quality than the
black top road you drove in on.  If you cook that that will
flow too.  And that’s what they’re doing there.  
Have you seen a picture of what they do up there in
Canada? They have a scoop that has a hundred tons in the scoop
and they put four of them in a truck that holds 400 tons and
they take it and cook it to get the oil.  And then to make it
flow they have to mix it with some other chemicals to keep it
fluid.  They can be recycled I understand so that could go on
for a long time.  
Coal.  We have a chart in a few minutes that deals with
coal so I’ll come back to that.  
But once we’ve gone through the finite resources, they
are there and we must husband them and use them wisely because
when they’re gone, then it’s gone.  And then you’re stuck with
nuclear and the renewable resources that we listed below.  
This is the quality of these fossil fuels.  And you see
the incredible energy density in these fossil fuels and how
porous some of the energy densities are.  I think the next
chart may show this.  Yes, this is a really interesting way of
depicting it.  And we have on the ordinate here energy profit
ratio, how much energy you put in for how much energy you get
 34
out, and on the abysses we have economic effectiveness and
transport, how useful it is.  And you see that where you want
to be, of course, is way up in the upper right hand corner,
Garward (phonetic) and a few other oil fields in the East are
there.  There ain’t nothing in our country there, you see
where we are way down below there.  We’re now coming down
preciously, we’re coming down very near zero down there.  In
other words, it cost almost as much to get the oil out as
we’re getting for the oil in terms of energy profit ratio. 
And you noticed where you some other things fall in this
chart, so any alternative that you’re looking at you got to
put on this chart.  And you want it to be as near the upper
right as you can.  
Coal, I mentioned coal, and they will tell you don’t
worry about energy, we have 500 years of coal left in this
country, that’s from our current textbooks that have rewritten
history; in very large ways this is just one of them.  The
truth is there is about 250 years of coal at current use
rates.  Be very careful with those current use rate because
that’s true, 250 years at current use rates, but if you
increase the use of coal only two percent exponentially you
shrink to 85 years.  If you now use some of the energy from
coal to make a gas or a liquid of it you’re now down to about
50 years.  Now that’s meaningful, but we need to husband that,
 35
it’s only a two percent increase.  With the energy shortages
that we’re going to have we’re going to use coal at a whole
lot greater rate than just two percent increase.  
I’m old enough to remember coal oil lamps.  I don’t know
how many of you can remember that, but it was the first thing
that replaced whale oil.  And long after you were calling them
kerosene lamps I was calling them coal oil lamps because
that’s what we produced the first oil from for our lamps. 
And, of course, what Hitler ran his military and his country
on, because we wouldn’t give him access to oil.  So we can do
that, but you know there’s only 50 years left when you convert
it to oil or a liquid.
Agriculture and ethanol.  I’m sure you are very familiar
with the studies, Pimental and others who believed that there
is precious little energy profit ratio from ethanol the way
that we’re producing it.  I’m sure we can do a better job of
producing it that way and after you produce the ethanol you
still have all the fat and all the protein left.  And by the
way if you want to use agriculture for energy maybe you ought
to consider eating the corn and the soybeans instead of the
pig and the chicken and the cow that ate the corn and the
soybeans.  The farmers will brag that their energy conversion
ratio for pigs and chickens is three to one, three pounds of
corn and one pound of pig.  But remember the corn is about 90
 36
percent dry matter, the pig is 70 percent water and you can’t
eat his bones.  
So the real ratio is probably ten to one.  For steers
it’s more like 20 to one.  If you want to eat animal products,
milk is enormously more efficiently produced, and eggs are
enormously more efficiently produced.  And by the way the best
quality protein we have is milk protein.  If you use young
rats, and it’s maybe not very complimentary to know that rats
have a dietary requirement more like ours than any other
animal, but if you use young rats in growth studies you will
find that they grow fastest on milk protein.  If you assign a
value of 100 to that eggs come in at about 96 and the meats
from there on down.  That shouldn’t be strange, because milk
was designed by God or nature however you think it got there
to permit young animals to grow very rapidly.  And, of course,
an egg in three weeks set under a hen, and you’ve got a
chicken.  So it’s no surprise I think that these should be
very high quality protein.  If we’re going to free up any
energy to invest in the alternatives we’re going to have to do
something like living lower on the food scale, on the food
pyramid.  
Oh, a very interesting chart.  This shows on the right
the energy we get out of petroleum products and you don’t all
get it in your car, it costs you about what, 20 percent of the
 37
energy you get to haul it and refine it, pump it and put it in
your car and so forth.  Over on the left, and this is a fairly
optimistic one, Pimental will tell you that it’s wildly
optimistic, this is the energy you get out of ethanol.  We
will do better, and I’m sure we can get some energy out of
ethanol.  But let me caution that the energy profit ratio for
ethanol will never be enormous.  We have got to feed the
world.  Tonight about a fifth of the world will go to bed
hungry.  And be careful about wanting to rob your top soils of
humus, like switch grass.  I suspect this year’s switch grass
is growing because last year’s switch grass died and is
fertilizing it.  
So I am not all that optimistic. We’ve got to use
agriculture, get some energy from agriculture, but we’re not
going to satisfy the world’s growing thirst for energy from
agriculture.  Unless you think that our topsoil is increasing
in quantity and quality, and I don’t know of anybody who
believes that, then you need to be very careful about the kind
of estimate you make into how much energy we’re going to get
from our topsoil, because what makes topsoil topsoil is
organic material.  And that’s what you want to take off and
burn or ferment or do whatever you’re going to do with it to
get energy from it.  
 38
The bottom chart there is really an interesting one. 
This shows the energy that goes into producing a bushel of
corn.  You’re probably too far back to read it but that purple
on the right, nearly half of it that’s natural gas, from the
nitrogen fertilizers, made almost none in our country by the
way, because natural gas is too expensive here, it’s almost
all made overseas now.  Natural gas is not as transportable as
oil and so some places it may be very expensive where there is
little and you need a lot of it, very cheap other places where
there’s a lot of it and you don’t have much demand for it. 
And all those other little pieces of the pie there are where
oil comes into producing corn.  
In a very real sense, when you eat food you’re eating
fossil fuels.  And if you really look at all the energy that
goes into producing a bushel of corn, like the energy it took
to make the tractor and the tires on the tractor.  Six gallons
of oil in every automobile tire, you get some sense that’s
probably true when you light one on fire and see what happens
to it, don’t you? 
By the way before we learned to make nitrogen fertilizer
from natural gas the only source of nitrogen fertilizer was
barnyard manure and guano.  The guano is gone.  That was a
major industry, the birds and bats have been dropping that
 39
stuff for tons of thousands of years and we got it all, it’s
not there any more.  
Last time I was at Grand Canyon there was a rusty cable
going into a cave in the wall of the canyon where they had had
a little thing on there hauling guano out of a bat cave in the
walls of the Grand Canyon.  
How are we going to grow crops minus gas?  Of course gas
is not magic.  But you may wonder why your lawn is greener
after a thunderstorm.  We used to call it poor man’s
fertilizer it’s because the lightening converts to nitrogen to
a form that can be carried down by the rain into the soil. 
You will not get as green a lawn by watering as you will get
from a thunderstorm.  
Solar, wind, hydropower, geothermal.  The next chart is a
really interesting one.  And the analogy that I use here is
imagine a young family that those grandparents have died and
left them a big inheritance, and so they’ve established a
fairly lavish lifestyle where 85 percent of all the money they
spend comes from their grandparents’ inheritance and only 15
percent from their income.  And they look at how old they are
and their health and the grandparents’ inheritance is going to
be gone before they retire, so obviously they got to do
something, either they got to what earn or spend less.  I use
the 85/15, some will use 86/14 because that’s where we are, 85
 40
percent of all the energy we use comes from fossil fuels. 
They will not last forever.  For liquid fuels we’re probably
peaking about now.  
Okay, the 15 percent which is not to fossil fuels, about
eight percent of that is nuclear, I’m sorry, 20 percent of our
electricity, but eight percent of our total energy.  That
could and should grow, I think.  There are obviously problems
with nuclear, but I think that there are also problems with
shivering in the dark.  And I mentioned my colleagues are
rethinking that. 
But now you look at the true renewables.  This is 2000. 
Things have changed.  The solar energy business is growing at
about 30 percent a year.  It’s four times bigger.  In 2000 it
was one percent of seven percent, that’s what .07 percent of
the total?  So now it’s four times bigger, .28 percent, big
deal.  And I’m a solar enthusiast.  I have a place in the
mountains of West Virginia we’re totally solar, I’m a big fan
of solar, but you know it’s now in the noise level.
Wood, that’s not the mountain hillbilly, that’s the
timber and paper industry wisely using what would otherwise go
to the landfill.  And that can grow a little bit, not all that
much.  Waste to energy eight percent.  And that could and
should grow.  That’s a whole lot better than putting it in the
landfills, I think.  
 41
Wind, again, about the same, .07 percent in 2000, it’s
bigger now.  Can produce electricity at 2 and a half cents a
kilowatt hour.  That’s very, very competitive.  
Conventional hydro, we’ve probably peaked out in that in
our country.  We can maybe get as much energy from micro hydro
without serious environmental impact, but that means a lot, a
lot of little micro turbans.  
And then the agricultural at the bottom down there, which
was one percent.  Still in the noise level.  And I would
caution don’t be overly optimistic about how much we’ll get
from agriculture if you still want to feed approximately seven
billion people in the world.  
And then geothermal.  That really could grow where you’re
close enough to the molten core of the earth to tap into that. 
By the way that’s not the thing that you’re air conditioning
guy will come in for, he calls it geothermal where he ties his
heat dissipation to ground water rather than the air, the
geothermal I’m talking about is where you’re tapped into the
molten core of the earth.  
Well, that’s all we’ve got.  That’s all we got.  What
will we do?  What I think we need to do is to recognize the
problem and I think that the solution is going to be some
combination of the kind of breath of participation that we had
in World War Two where everybody was involved.  Some of you, a
 42
few of you, not many of you are old enough to remember World
War Two.  Everybody involved, everybody had a victory garden. 
Everybody saved their kitchen grease and carried it to a
central repository.  We need a program that has the breadth of
participation of World War Two that has the commitment to
technology of putting a man on the moon and the intensity of
the Manhattan Project.  
And absent that folks, it’s going to be a very bumpy
ride.  It’s going to be a bumpy ride even if we do that,
because as Dr. Hirsch pointed out we should have started what
15, 20 years ago?  Now we have blown, we have blown 26 years. 
We knew darn well in 1980 that M. King Hubbard was right about
the United States because we’re already ten years down the
other side of Hubbard’s peak.  He predicted the world would be
peaking about now.  If he was right about the United States
why shouldn’t there have been some concern that he maybe, just
maybe would be right about the world.  I don’t know, is it
that people just don’t like to think about uncomfortable
things?  
To me this is a big challenge.  Meeting challenges and
overcoming them is very satisfying.  People who just play and
have no reason to live don’t live all that long, they get fat
and die soon.  You may have noticed that.  I think that we
 43
really need, I think Americans will respond very well to this
challenge if, in fact, they’re challenged.  
The Chinese, Dr. Hirsch mentioned the Chinese.  The
symbols here show where the Chinese have been.  They are
scouring the world for oil.  There are two imperatives that
drive the Chinese, and if you have these in mind you will be
better able to interpret what they’re doing I think.  One of
them is Taiwan.  If Taiwan declares their independence and we
interfere they will nuke us as the general said.  Why would
they do that?  It’s because they see their empire unraveling
the way the Soviet empire had unraveled.  If Taiwan can
declare its independence so can Tibet and Mongolia and who
knows who else, and they see their empire totally unraveling.  
So that’s one imperative that drives them, but a bigger
imperative that drives them is energy.  They’re scouring the
world for oil.  Not only will they your oil they’ll build you
a soccer stadium if you need it.  Now have bought all the
excess oil output from the Canadian tar sands, for instance. 
They almost bought Unical in our country.  
And in addition to that they are now aggressively
building a blue water navy.  We have the only blue water navy
in the world.  And the Chinese have looked at it and said hey,
the United States could cut off our oil supply.  Last year
they launched 14 submarines, we launched one.  They are
 44
aggressively building a blue water navy and they are all over
the world buying oil. 
And what we close with is an analogy to the Apollo 13,
and we are very much in the situation they are we have some
resources available to us, we have a very narrow window of
opportunity, if we don’t do the right things at the right
time.  And over on the right there you see the things we need
to do.  The first thing that we need to do is a very
aggressive program on conservation to free up some energy.  We
need to do invest three things in alternatives.  
The first thing we won’t worry about that’s money. 
Congress doesn’t worry about money; we just borrow it from our
kids and our grandkids without asking their permission.  But
we can’t borrow time and we can’t borrow energy from our
grandkids.  And we have no energy to invest in alternative. 
If we did energy wouldn’t be oil wouldn’t be $75 a barrel.  So
we’ve got to buy some time and buy some energy, by an
aggressive program of conservation and then make very wise
choices.  If you go down the right there you see the kinds of
things that any rational people would do when they face this
problem.  
Thank you very much for inviting us.  We’re glad to be
here with you this evening.  
(Applause)  
 45
Moderator:  I certainly want to thank both speakers.  I
know that they certainly captivated me and I’m sure they
captivated all of you as well.  We have some time for
questions and we have three volunteers in the audience with
microphones if you just sort of wave and catch their attention
and we’ll see if we can get a microphone over to you and you
can address your question to either or both of our speakers. 
Questions, please.  If you just state your name and your
affiliation that would help us out.  
Dan Bednars:  Yes, I’m Dan Bednars.  I’m a health care
consultant from Pittsburgh. I’d like to thank Dr. Hirsch and
Dr. Bartlett.  I’m in public health and in health care, and I
just want to say that, especially Congressman Bartlett’s
presentation is the kind of education a few of us are trying
to do in public health because it has obvious implications for
it.  That’s one comment. 
Another comment is that I was speaking with many people
at the university about these issues and there is a great
divergence.  It’s kind of bimodal.  The largest mode is people
say that there is not a problem, because I talked to my
economist buddy down the hall and he says that everything is
hunky dory and the smaller one is people have an opinion such
as Congressman Bartlett.  So I just wanted to say that I think
my main reason for being here from public health is we have to
 46
assume the worst case.  And because if we are near peak public
health is one of the very negative repercussions, the health
care system will suffer greatly, especially with hospitals
being such entropy intensive entities.  
Moderator:  Do you care to comment?
Congressman Roscoe Bartlett:  When they asked Matt
Simmons who was the President’s personal energy advisor and
the CEO of maybe the largest energy investment bank in the
world about this worst case he said you don’t want to go
there.  Worse case is World War Three with tens of millions of
people dead.  Dr. DeFay (phonetic) said that the least bad
outcome is a hard landing with a deep worldwide recession or
depression, some say it may make the 30s look like good times. 
But if you don’t like that try the four horsemen of the
apocalypse, war, famine, pestilence and death.  
And a namesake of mine, older and wiser than I, Dr.
Albert Bartlett, Professor Emeritus, University of Colorado
gives a most interesting, you can find him on the web, please
pull him up and look, he gives the most interesting one-hour
lecture I’ve ever heard.  Would you agree?  He’s incredible. 
He’s given it 1,600 times.  He’s a star.  You know pull it up
and listen to it.  And he does this exponential thing he says
the biggest failure of the industrialized world is its failure
to understand the exponential function.  And then he goes
 47
through a fascinating hour of where he presents these
problems.  
Moderator:  Other questions?  
Adam Sarvin:  Hi, I’m Adam Sarvin, and I’m a reporter
with Inside Washington.  This is mostly for Mr. Bartlett,
although Dr. Hirsch you can answer if you’d like.  I was
wondering mostly how do you see the Energy Policy Act?  What
are its successes and failures in addressing this so far?  And
apart from just informing people what kind of legislation do
you think might be necessary in the future?  
Congressman Roscoe Bartlett:  Because I think it’s so
important that the American people understand the breadth and
the gravity of this problem and because we do a major bill
like the energy bill only every five or six or seven years, I
voted against that energy bill, because I thought that if
that’s all that we did in the next five or six or seven years
woe be unto us.  So I voted against that bill.  I’m very
pleased that the President said that we’re hooked on oil.  I
just think that the problem that we face is absolutely
enormous compared to the program that is envisioned by that
energy bill and by current statements of administration
people.  
There are two studies that the government has paid for,
the Hirsch Report and the Corp of Engineers.  And the
 48
government really hasn’t claimed ownership of either one of
those.  I think they’re think kind of like the patient whose
doctor just told them Sam you got about two months to live,
and Sam says if it’s all the same to you doc I’d like a second
opinion.  And I think that they just didn’t want to hear this
and they’re asking for a second opinion.  Would you agree with
me?  
Dr. Hirsch:  No comment.  (Laughter)  As far as the
Energy Policy Act was concerned the clean, safe answer to that
particular bill is that it was not fashioned thinking about
peak oil.  
Congressman Roscoe Bartlett:  It absolutely was not, and
if that’s all we do we will never, every get there.  
Michael Shank:  Dr. Hirsch and Dr. Bartlett thank you
both for coming here to speak tonight.  Dr. Bartlett, I want
to thank you for promoting solar in the houses that you built,
that I learned from your press secretary and supporting the
Prius and supporting vegetarianism and the three to one ratio
or the ten to one ratio.  And thank you, Mitsy and Steve and
others for hosting this forum and this network.  
I’m Michael Shank.  I’m with Citizens for Global
Solutions, we’re a political action committee and we lobby the
Hill on good foreign policy and so this kind of fits into that
paradigm.  A couple of months ago I was working with
 49
Congressman Gilchrist, Congressman Bartlett I know you two are
good friends, and the U.S. Conference of Mayors was in town
and Congressman Gilchrist was headlining, he was giving a
speech, hosted by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, on the
Mayor’s Climate and Protection Agreement, which you may or may
not have heard about, but 200 mayors have come together
because President Bush is not moving on Kyoto.  Two hundred
mayors and more have come together to say what can we do to
meet or beat Kyoto protocols for our city?  So that’s lowering
CO2 emissions to levels below 1990 and other various
activities.  
In that process Congressman Gilchrist is meeting the
mayor of Seattle who inaugurated the initiative, the mayor of
Austin, the mayor of Salt Lake City who are having these
incredible success track records in reducing CO2 emissions,
and he said I want to get you guys to the Hill.  Your message
needs to be heard on the hill.  
So there are initiatives like that, Mayor’s Climate
Protection Agreement and Urban Environmental Accord, things
like that.  What can Congress do … I guess this is my question
… what can Congress do to support these local initiatives that
have sprung up because they see the administration not moving
forward on things like climate change, Kyoto and what not? 
 50
Congressman Roscoe Bartlett: A lot can be done locally
and you know we need to be involved at every level, at
national.  I notice your poll from your last meeting that your
people were primarily focused, you know let the government do
it, but you know there’s really a lot of very important things
that you can do.  I’m a very conservative Republican, but I
run as a Republican, after I’m elected I try to be an
American.  And I think that you can be … well, my wife says
that somehow conservative and conservation come from common
roots and there ought to be some relationship there.  
And the other day I was watching a talking heads’
program, and there was a Democrat consultant there and a
Republican consultant there and I was embarrassed.  The
Democrat consultant was talking about conservation, and the
Republican came on and said, let’s quit talking about this
conservation stuff, that’s not what makes the economy grow. 
We’re a nation of consumers.  How can we grow the economy if
we’re conserving all this stuff?  We got to consume.  If
that’s the philosophy that may have worked.  If you have
infinite resources, that will work.  Friends we do not have
infinite resources as far as fossil fuel energy is concerned. 
I’m a conservative, but I try not to be an idiot.  
(Laughter) 
Moderator:  No comment again, Dr. Hirsch?  
 51
Dr. Hirsch:  Solar is a wonderful idea.  I headed the
solar program in the Energy, Research and Development
Administration and took a look at a couple of these
technologies and I said by golly if we could make these work
it would be terrific.  There is a problem with the number of
the solar technologies, like photo voltaics.  It doesn’t work
at night and it doesn’t work when it’s cloudy.  And you need
power all the time.  My oldest son has a house down in
Venezuela and he put in a solar panel system with a battery,
and when I was there to visit him earlier this year it was
cloudy and we looked at the meter and there was no energy
coming in.  
You’ve got to be very careful about these things, they
can help, but they are very complicated.  Wind is a wonderful
idea, but it doesn’t blow at the same velocity at the time and
the power output is something like the cube of the velocity. 
And we require these lights and our computers to stay on on a
steady basis.  Are there contributions there?  Yes.  Can more
research help to make things happen?  Yes.  Let’s do it. But
let’s not put all of our eggs in that basket. 
William Clark:  Hi, Dr. Bartlett and Dr. Hirsch, thank
you for coming.  I’m William Clark, I’m an information
security analyst at Argosy (phonetic).  My question is really
for Dr. Hirsch. I read your report last year, and it was
 52
probably one of the important documents that I read in 2005,
along with Matthew Simmons’ book on Saudi Arabia.  And my
question is can you elaborate a little bit on the crash action
program that you talk about regarding mitigation because you
say global mega projects, mega change at “the fastest possible
human rate.”  And you say also in the report that it will
require trillions of dollars and the government will have to
take an initiative on a timely basis.  
So my question to you is the only time in the last 100
years that we’ve had a crash action program was probably 1942
to 1945 in this country during World War Two and my older
uncle he remembers rationing fuel and how they couldn’t get
nylon and rubber was rationed and copper was rationed and they
had victory gardens and everything.  So the whole, you know 60
percent of the entire workforce was really involved for three
years in the war effort and what you’re advocating it sounds
like to me is that 60 percent of the U.S. population has to
work on this for about 20 years in order to do it.  And I
think that’s probably right.  But I would like for you to
elaborate on on what exactly crash action program is,
regarding these five technologies, but are you advocating,
which I think you are, and I would probably agree, that we
need a World War Two effort for probably 10 to 20 years in
 53
order to mitigate this and reduce the amount of suffering that
we will have otherwise.  Thank you.  
Dr. Hirsch:  What we did was to do a study based on a
number of different scenarios, assumptions to see what the
answers would be.  And we did the crash program case because
it’s the best that’s possible.  We did our best estimates, we
had other people look at it, help us with estimates and so
forth.  And nobody has disagreed materially with what’s
involved and most people agree that the envelope is probably
correct in terms of what you can do and how fast you can do
it.  We did that in order to show what is possible, what could
be done.  We stayed away from policy.  
We cannot and did not, and I do not see how something
like that is possible without government action basically
providing the investment climate and urging industries that
are able to contribute to do it on the most rapid basis.  I
don’t see how you’re going to do it otherwise.  I happen to
under normal conditions believe in free markets, I think that
free markets are wonderful and have done wonderful things,
they’ve got to be regulated to some degree and so forth, but I
think that we need to have the government generally stay out
of fiddling with the details to the economy.  
In this particular case the problem is so big it is going
to be so hard, the requirements are going to be so extreme,
 54
the government is going to have to provide the envelope in
which industry and people and all of us can make a difference.  
Congressman Roscoe Bartlett:  You might have noted that
all of the mitigation sources that Dr. Hirsch talked about
were either enhanced recovery or unconventional sources.  They
are all finite.  And again my question is do we really want to
do that even if we could, because all you’re doing is creating
an even bigger infrastructure with even more people with an
even more difficult problem to solve once you’ve run out, and
we will run out of those unconventional sources and the
enhanced oil that we can get by this enhanced recovery.  Then
what will you do facing an even bigger problem?  
See, I just don’t think we ought to try to fill the gap. 
I think that we will be lucky more than lucky if we can stay
where we are energy wise now, reduce our demand for it so we
have something to invest in alternatives because now we have
nothing to invest in alternatives and then to program
something.  Because in the future when fossil fuels are gone
we will not be able to continue our lifestyle at this energy
level.  In wild dreams there is almost nobody that I know of
who believes that we can get this amount of energy
consistently from non fossil fuel sources.  Do you know of
anybody, Dr. Hirsch?  
 55
Dr. Hirsch:  I want to disagree and agree with you sir,
if I may, all right?  Because he’s right longer term there’s
no question that you’re right.  The problem is you’ve got to
get from here to there.  And we’ve got to do something in the
interim and that was part of the point that I was trying to
make, we’ve got to do something for a while, but you’re
exactly right if we use it all up it will be gone.  
Congressman Roscoe Bartlett:  And the more successful we
are for the short term the bigger problem we produce for
ourselves in the long term.  And I would just like to tighten
the belt a little more short term so that I am not so starved
and unhappy longer term, because the more successful we are
now at filing the gap the less energy is going to be available
later on.  Right?  I have kids and grandkids, I want them … I
ran for Congress by the way because I didn’t think that they
were going to grow up in the same kind of country that I grew
up in.  We have too darn much, government taxes too much and
regulates too much.  And I’m an obvious failure because it’s
even worse now than when I went in, but not because of my
votes.  
(Laughter) 
Dr. Hirsch:  Longer term we do have nuclear there, as you
pointed out there are breeder reactors.  There are all kinds
of things that one can do.  It turns out there’s an enormous
 56
amount of uranium in sea water and the Japanese are developing
processes to reasonably economically take that uranium out.  
I headed the fusion program for a number of years in the
government and it’s a very hard problem and it’s not going in
a practical direction, so effectively we’re going to have
start over on fusion at some point.  I hope fusion will work. 
I hope it will work.  But right now we don’t have solid
evidence that it will happen.  
Moderator:  We have time for just a couple of more
questions.  
Peter Garrison:  Peter Garrison, Future Concepts.  You
both have highlighted some of the problems with terrestrial,
solar and also the long range hope for fusion.  I’m wondering
if either of you might have some thoughts on space solar
satellites which were investigated in the 70s by NASA?  
Dr. Hirsch:  I was involved and had management
responsibility for what was called the solar program in those
days and a fellow from, I forget the company in Boston, Peter
Glaser had the idea for the solar satellite system.  And the
idea very simply is to put a large array of photovoltaics,
solar cells into synchronistic orbit and have that energy then
be converted to microwaves, very high frequencies and beamed
down to the ground, and it would work 23 hours a day.  One
hour you’ve got a problem because of the interception of solar
 57
energy by the earth.  It’s an interesting idea.  We used to
talk about it in terms of frying the ducks and geese that
would fly into micro wave beam in a large area that would have
to be utilized to intercept the energy and then what might
happen with anything tilting that thing in the wrong direction
and so forth.  
There are probably ways of working with the problem.  It
may still be a good idea.  I don’t think that we ought to
leave anything that’s reasonably sensible out of equation.  We
ought to be looking into things like that, but we need to do
it realistically, and I think you mentioned the amount of
energy goes into making solar cells take a very long time to
get a payback so you’ve got to look seriously at the problem.  
Congressman Roscoe Bartlett:  In all these things you
have to look at the energy profit ratio, how much energy are
you getting compared to how much you get out.  Dollar profit
ratio can be very attractive.  But the energy profit ratio is
really at the end of the day what you need to be looking at.  
Jan Lamberg:  I’m Jan Lamberg with Culture Change.  I
have a question for Congress Bartlett and Dr. Hirsch.  But
first I’d like to invite everybody to the Petroleum conference
on May 6th in Washington, D.C. at the All Soul’s Church
Unitarian. It’s all on Petroclass.org.  My question for you
both is what is the effect of the market on the effects of the
 58
oil when the gap between supply and demand becomes apparent? 
That doesn’t seem to be factored into studies.  
Dr. Hirsch:  Well, there are a lot of problems with what
it is that we’re talking about here.  And hopefully what you
and I have done helps to outline some of those problems and
what we need to do near term and longer term and what our
choices are and so forth.  You talk about the market, the free
market I think in many cases works very well.  When somebody
stands up though and finally admits that we have a problem
with peak oil in the world, is the President going to do that,
is the head of Exxon going to do that, somebody significant
who people will believe, the next day the stock markets around
the world are going to go into a nose dive, because it’s going
to scare the hell out of people.  
Okay?  And companies are going to cut back in terms of
what it is they do and who they hire and their business plans
are going to be scaled back and just the announcement is
likely to have a major impact on our economy.  Maybe that’s
one of the reasons people aren’t standing up and talking about
it.  Think about what happened in 1973 the Saudis announced
that they were cutting back on oil, within a matter of days
there were oil shortages here.  But it takes a long time for
oil to get from there to here and from various places.  So the
system in fact can have a lot of oil in it but people
 59
panicked, and they ran to fill up their tanks to top off, they
sucked basically the system not dry, but way down and the
result was gas lines and problems for a long time.  People
will react, it’s part of the problem and it’s …
Congressman Roscoe Bartlett:  I talked to Secretary
Rumsfeld about the energy problem, he said, I guess the market
will fix that, when oil is more expensive people will use less
and they’ll look for alternatives.  That’s true.  People will
do that.  But the market is neither omission nor omnipotent. 
And for the market to work you must assume infinite resources. 
We do not in this case have infinite resources; the market
will not fix this problem.  There is nothing the market can do
to fix this problem.  I don’t think there’s anything at this
late stage Dr. Hirsch that we can do to avoid a fairly bumpy
ride to transition.  And rest assured that we will ultimately
transition from fossil fuels to renewables, geology will
require it.  And the sooner we set about making that
transition in a rational way the less bumpy the road will be.  
By the way I’m really very optimistic about … I think
with proper leadership that the American people would really
respond to this.  We have the most creative, innovative
culture in the world, and I think that Americans would respond
to this.  I think that when you went to bed at night and you
had lit half way that day using less energy you could feel
 60
really good about it.  And I think that we have incredibly
bright young people.  They need to stop playing computer games
and you know start focusing their attention on these problems
and I think they would.  But we really need in this country,
desperately need is leadership.  And I think that we can avoid
the stock market crash if we properly articulate it.  But
we’re going to have the stock market crash if we don’t
articulate it, don’t do something about it, because there will
come a day when there simply will not be enough energy to turn
the wheels of Congress, and then the market will crash, and
all kinds of consequences with that.  
What do you think we will do when we recognize as a
country that there’s not going to be enough energy there for
our future?  By the way if we don’t grow we die because our
whole financial structure is based on growth. The Federal
Reserve prints money.  They then loan it to somebody and
charge them interest for it.  Think about that, the only way
you can pay that interest unless you want Joe to go bankrupt
so you can have some of his resources, the only way you’re
going to pay that interest is to have the economy grow, right? 
So we have a whole financial structure based on the necessity
of growth.  We’re going to have to restructure that.  It just
will not grow forever.  It’s just that simple.  And I’m not an
economist I just don’t think that I’m all that stupid.  
 61
(Laughter) 
Moderator:  One more question, just one more, that’s it.  
Martin Oval:  Thank you for coming.  My name is Martin
Oval, I’m not representing anyone in particular other than I’m
an Arlington County citizen, and I’ve worked with my
Congressman a little bit to put on some energy town meetings
in Arlington and my question I guess is sociological, we kind
of got into it the last few questions, but I’m fascinated by
why we not only can’t now but why we haven’t been able to
grasp this problem and do something about it.  Twenty-six
years is the figure you gave, 24 years ago I had to register
for the draft and my compatriots at Colorado State, and I were
talking basically the things in this room at that point.  It’s
not been a secret, it’s just that we don’t seem to be able to
take this, assimilate it and do something about it.  So what
do we do to clear that hump actually? 
Dr. Hirsch:  Well, you ask a difficult question.  Peak
oil has been around for a long time, you mention King
Hubbard’s work and so forth and the success that he had and
what it is that he did.  A number of people down through the
years have forecast the peaking of oil and time came and went
and nothing happened.  And so it’s like the story of the boy
that cried wolf.  This time around I have no question in my
mind that it is different. In the years past you didn’t have
 62
33 out of 48 countries that are passed their production peak. 
You didn’t have serious questions about what the Middle East
really has.  You didn’t have questions like how overnight
their reserves doubled when they changed their quota system. 
Big oil wasn’t automatically or magically created overnight. 
There are people that have their own axes to grind in all of
this, there are other people I know a number of good
geologists who are just optimistic because you have to be
optimistic to be a loyal geologist.  (Laughter)  
Boy, you have never seen people put so much money into
their reputations on line.  And in the days when I was in the
upstream part of the business at Atlantic Richfield we were
very happy when we were hitting on 15 percent … 15 percent of
our prospects.  That says 85 percent were wrong.  You got to
be an optimistic to keep going in a situation like that.  
Congressman Roscoe Bartlett:  That little parable of the
wolf at the end of the day, you know at the end of the parable
the wolf did come and he ate the sheep and the people.  
(Laughter) 
Dr. Hirsch:  On that note.  
(Laughter) 
Moderator:  Please thank our guests for being with us
tonight.  
(Applause)  (End of file) 

File Attachment: 

042406 Transcript.pdf