Urban Farm Eviction

The idea of creating urban farms is a great way to not only produce food locally, thus minimizing transportation costs, but such farms can also provide healthy, organic food and jobs for the all people especially the poor, increase community interaction, and improve the look of the community. However for such developments to grow the will of local government to carry out and maintain such a program must be strong, because, as in the example below, if a large commercial enterprise wants to redevelop the area, the tax revenues for such a project is too inviting to a city. What's more the Supreme Court ruled in favor for redevelopment in the Kelo V. New London case where government can claim eminent domain to seize property that is considered "blighted". I'm not arguing against redevelopment per say, but I am pointing to the notion that if an urban farm is to sprout up in the area, those running it should have strong community support and some effective attorneys.

If your project gets shut down, learn from it, plan it, build another, and higher a lawyer before you begin - don't be a victim.

I'm still not convinced that Peak Oil will usher total societal collapse as theorized by many scholars and speculators, some of which are linked to this site, but it is good to get their perspective because it's very important to move away from potential calamity. To be on the safe side, let's just move away from fossil fuel consumption - soon.

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L.A.’s “Havana Experiment” Farm

March 3, 2006 1130 PST (FTW)

In L.A.’s Havana Experiment FTW told you the dramatic and compelling story of what 350 families have done over a 13-year period with a 14 acre plot of land in a depressed inner city. They are feeding themselves with organically grown and healthy produce that requires zero fossil-fuel inputs and requires virtually no transportation expense. This is being done on soil that was once paved, covered, depleted and ignored. More than anything else, this is the one area of effort most essential for America’s (and the world’s) major cities to pursue as Peak Oil takes its first deadly bites.

Two days ago the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department unceremoniously posted an eviction notice on the farm’s gate calling for the farm to be vacated by March 6th (next Monday). That would leave current crops in the ground to be plowed under by a developer’s bulldozers. The intended replacement for the farm is a warehouse intended to serve (primarily) Wal-Mart.

No one has better articulated what is at stake here than USC Professor Clara Irazábal who today in an impassioned letter to LA Mayor Antonio Villarraigosa, completed after 3 AM this morning, wrote:

The relevant question is not whether this urban farm should be preserved. This is the wrong question and one that diminishes the stature of your office and the trust we have invested in you. The question is, rather, how can we best help multiply urban farms like this one throughout Los Angeles and cities of the Americas and the world. As the era of oil inescapably comes to an end, we are going to be faced with the need, whether we like it or not, to live more compactly, thrifty, cooperatively, and in more direct connection with, and responsible for, the production of our own food. In this context, not only does the South Central Farm not constitute a backward use of land in one of the largest and more prominent and modern cities of the world. Instead, it is a model for the future (and the future is now), one that can support the survival of our growing urban civilization. Maintaining the South Central Farm, Los Angeles and you as its mayor have the unique opportunity to become world visionaries and trail breakers.

Although this posting may appear too late today to get people to show up for a hastily organized protest at the Mayor’s office, there are a number of things which must be done immediately to save this incredible experiment; an experiment that is teaching us how to save hundreds of thousands of lives: lives of poor people; lives of disenfranchised; lives of those who are not fortunate enough to move away to an already sustainable region.

The words of Mario Savio ring truer than ever. It is time to throw our bodies into the gears of the machine and grind it to a halt. Some things are worth fighting for and if anything is worth fighting for the South Central Farm is.

If you are in Southern California you can do something. If you are anywhere else, what you can do may be just as important.

In the enclosed links are a sample letter (or email) that can be sent to Mayor Villarraigoasa’s office. There are contact numbers and links for additional activism. There are also instructions on how to actually be at the farm to protest.

If a large enough hue and cry is raised from around the world to focus a laser-like beam on what is at stake here then there might be time. There might be a window for a miracle.

I am cutting off this story now because every minute’s delay in getting this up on FTW’s web site is critical. If you understand Peak oil; if you understand the miracle that is the South Central Farm; and if you are committed to preparing the world and your family for Peak Oil then I won’t have to say more.

There will be many more battles to fight. Let us fight the good fight here and now, today. Were I in LA I would be there myself, willing to and encouraging others to engage in civil disobedience, to get arrested, to stop this travesty. In a ham and eggs breakfast the chicken is involved but the pig is committed. It’s time to drop everything for a moment, as long as it takes, to struggle and to pray for the Miracle on 41st Street.

An Update From the Front

From the Industrial Biotech sector: With regard to manufacturing, DuPont is attempting to use organic substances such as corn and soybean as a replacement to petroleum products. As you know oil is used for creating plastics and other materials, but DuPont wishes to remove oil as a key ingredient. Instead they wish to break down soy molecules in attempts to create substances as moldable and as scalable as plastics.
Carpet fiber, which is also made from oil, can be created from glucose. The article below states, "DuPont is close to developing plant-based hair dyes and nail polishes that will not adhere to skin, surgical bio-glues that can stanch internal bleeding and a textile fiber made from sugar that will act and feel like cotton."

Emerging sectors such as industrial biotech and solar technology not only provide sustainable solutions, but also create jobs that can remain in house. I wonder if now would be a good time to invest in companies such as Dupont and BP - companies that are spending R&D dollars towards sustainable development?

Here is the link to the Dupont article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/28/business/28dupont.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Interview with Chevron Vice-Chairman

http://www.triplepundit.com/pages/excellent-chevron-interview-on-001745.php

Sweet Deal - For Some, "Some" Sweet Fuel

This is good. President Bush admits that America is addicted to oil and now his government is giving the oil companies free rein to drill in Federal lands. That's like a crack dealer admitting that his customers are hooked on drugs, yet opens up 5 more crack houses.

Some Americans may tolerate additional drilling if it means cheaper fuel prices; however, price relief will not materialize because, simply, demand has and will continue to outpace supply.

Local drilling is a short-term, short-cited solution to a long-term problem. This country needs to step up to the plate and lead an alternative energy Apollo project. The technology is available. Much of the tech is owned by oil companies. Existing infrastructure can accommodate new energy sources such as solar, wind and hydro-electric. We can make it stronger, faster, we can rebuild it. IT will create more jobs and boost the economy. .

If we are honored to have the Bush administration mentality 20 years from now, our elected Bush-like leader will try to convince us that they "didn't see it coming" - Like 9-11, like Katrina, like Iraq, like Cheney's peppered friend.

M

By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
New York Times

WASHINGTON, Feb. 13 The federal government is on the verge of one of the biggest giveaways of oil and gas in American history, worth an estimated $7 billion over five years.

New projections, buried in the Interior Department's just-published budget plan, anticipate that the government will let companies pump about $65 billion worth of oil and natural gas from federal territory over the next five years without paying any royalties to the government.

Based on the administration figures, the government will give up more than $7 billion in payments between now and 2011. The companies are expected to get the largess, known as royalty relief, even though the administration assumes that oil prices will remain above $50 a barrel throughout that period.

Administration officials say that the benefits are dictated by laws and regulations that date back to 1996, when energy prices were relatively low and Congress wanted to encourage more exploration and drilling in the high-cost, high-risk deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

"We need to remember the primary reason that incentives are given," said Johnnie M. Burton, director of the federal Minerals Management Service. "It's not to make more money, necessarily. It's to make more oil, more gas, because production of fuel for our nation is essential to our economy and essential to our people."

But what seemed like modest incentives 10 years ago have ballooned to levels that have alarmed even ardent supporters of the oil and gas industry, partly because of added sweeteners approved during the Clinton administration but also because of ambiguities in the law that energy companies have successfully exploited in court.

Short of imposing new taxes on the industry, there may be little Congress can do to reverse its earlier giveaways. The new projections come at a moment when President Bush and Republican leaders are on the defensive about record-high energy prices, soaring profits at major oil companies and big cuts in domestic spending.

Indeed, Mr. Bush and House Republicans are trying to kill a one-year, $5 billion windfall profits tax for oil companies that the Senate passed last fall.

Moreover, the projected largess could be just the start. Last week, Kerr-McGee Exploration and Development, a major industry player, began a brash but utterly serious court challenge that could, if it succeeds, cost the government another $28 billion in royalties over the next five years.

In what administration officials and industry executives alike view as a major test case, Kerr-McGee told the Interior Department last week that it planned to challenge one of the government's biggest limitations on royalty relief if it could not work out an acceptable deal in its favor. If Kerr-McGee is successful, administration projections indicate that about 80 percent of all oil and gas from federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico would be royalty-free.

"It's one of the greatest train robberies in the history of the world," said Representative George Miller, a California Democrat who has fought royalty concessions on oil and gas for more than a decade. "It's the gift that keeps on giving."

Republican lawmakers are also concerned about how the royalty relief program is working out.

"I don't think there is a single member of Congress who thinks you should get royalty relief at $70 a barrel" for oil, said Representative Richard W. Pombo, Republican of California and chairman of the House Resources Committee.

"It was Congress's intent," Mr. Pombo said in an interview on Friday, "that if oil was at $10 a barrel, there should be royalty relief so companies could have some kind of incentive to invest capital. But at $70 a barrel, don't expect royalty relief."

Tina Kreisher, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department, said Monday that the giveaways might turn out to be less than the basic forecasts indicate because of "certain variables."

The government does not disclose how much individual companies benefit from the incentives, and most companies refuse to disclose either how much they pay in royalties or how much they are allowed to avoid.

But the benefits are almost entirely for gas and oil produced in the Gulf of Mexico.

The biggest producers include Shell, BP, Chevron and Exxon Mobil as well as smaller independent companies like Anadarko and Devon Energy.

Executives at some companies, including Exxon Mobil, said they had already stopped claiming royalty relief because they knew market prices had exceeded the government's price triggers.

About one-quarter of all oil and gas produced in the United States comes from federal lands and federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico.

As it happens, oil and gas royalties to the government have climbed much more slowly than market prices over the last five years.

The New York Times reported last month that one major reason for the lag appeared to be a widening gap between the average sales prices that companies are reporting to the government when paying royalties and average spot market prices on the open market.

Industry executives and administration officials contend that the disparity mainly reflects different rules for defining sales prices. Administration officials also contend that the disparity is illusory, because the government's annual statistics are muddled up with big corrections from previous years.

Both House and Senate lawmakers are now investigating the issue, as is the Government Accountability Office, Congress's watchdog arm.

But the much bigger issue for the years ahead is royalty relief for deepwater drilling.

The original law, known as the Deep Water Royalty Relief Act, had bipartisan support and was intended to promote exploration and production in deep waters of the outer continental shelf.

At the time, oil and gas prices were comparatively low and few companies were interested in the high costs and high risks of drilling in water thousands of feet deep.

The law authorized the Interior Department, which leases out tens of millions of acres in the Gulf of Mexico, to forgo its normal 12 percent royalty for much of the oil and gas produced in very deep waters.

Because it take years to explore and then build the huge offshore platforms, most of the oil and gas from the new leases is just beginning to flow.

The Minerals Management Service of the Interior Department, which oversees the leases and collects the royalties, estimates that the amount of royalty-free oil will quadruple by 2011, to 112 million barrels. The volume of royalty-free natural gas is expected to climb by almost half, to about 1.2 trillion cubic feet.

Based on the government's assumptions about future prices that oil will hover at about $50 a barrel and natural gas will average about $7 per thousand cubic feet the total value of the free oil and gas over the next five years would be about $65 billion and the forgone royalties would total more than $7 billion.

Administration officials say the issue is out of their hands, adding that they opposed provisions in last year's energy bill that added new royalty relief for deep drilling in shallow waters.

"We did not think we needed any more legislation, because we already have incentives, but we obviously did not prevail," said Ms. Burton, director of the Minerals Management Service.

But the Bush administration did not put up a big fight. It strongly supported the overall energy bill, and merely noted its opposition to additional royalty relief in its official statement on the bill.

By contrast, the White House bluntly promised to veto the Senate's $60 billion tax cut bill because it contained a one-year tax of $5 billion on profits of major oil companies.

The House and Senate have yet to agree on a final tax bill.

The big issue going forward is whether companies should be exempted from paying royalties even when energy prices are at historic highs.

In general, the Interior Department has always insisted that companies would not be entitled to royalty relief if market prices for oil and gas climbed above certain trigger points.

Those trigger points currently about $35 a barrel for oil and $4 per thousand cubic feet of natural gas have been exceeded for the last several years and are likely to stay that way for the rest of the decade.

So why is the amount of royalty-free gas and oil expected to double over the next five years?

The biggest reason is that the Clinton administration, apparently worried about the continued lack of interest in new drilling, waived the price triggers for all leases awarded in 1998 and 1999.

At the same time, many oil and gas companies contend that Congress never authorized the Interior Department to set price thresholds for any deepwater leases awarded between 1996 and 2000.

The dispute has been simmering for months, with some industry executives warning the Bush administration that they would sue the government if it tried to demand royalties.

Last week, the fight broke out into the open. The Interior Department announced that 41 oil companies had improperly claimed more than $500 million in royalty relief for 2004.

Most of the companies agreed to pay up in January, but Kerr-McGee said it would fight the issue in court.

The fight is not simply about one company. Interior officials said last week that Kerr-McGee presented itself in December as a "test case" for the entire industry. It also offered a "compromise," but Interior officials rejected it and issued a formal order in January demanding that Kerr-McGee pay its back royalties.

On Feb. 6, according to administration officials, Kerr-McGee formally notified the Minerals Management Service that it would challenge its order in court.

Industry lawyers contend they have a strong case, because Congress never mentioned price thresholds when it authorized royalty relief for all deepwater leases awarded from 1996 through 2000.

"Congress offered those deepwater leases with royalty relief as an incentive," said Jonathan Hunter, a lawyer in New Orleans who represented oil companies in a similar lawsuit two years ago that knocked out another major federal restriction on royalty relief.

"The M.M.S. only has the authority that Congress gives it," Mr. Hunter said. "The legislation said that royalty relief for these leases is automatic."

If that view prevails, the government said it would lose a total of nearly $35 billion in royalties to taxpayers by 2011 about the same amount that Mr. Bush is proposing to cut from Medicare, Medicaid and child support enforcement programs over the same period.

Clinton: Climate change is the world's biggest worry

If you think about it, humans are pumping gasses into the biosphere 24 hours a day seven days a week. Factories, vehicles, and the burning of forests disperse carbon and hazardous chemicals throughout the planet. The reclamation rate of ecosystems, the rate in which nature can cleanse itself from pollutants, is in disequilibrium. That is nature does not have a large enough lufa pad to scrape off the grime we are dumping on her.

By DAN PERRY
Associated Press Writer
January 28, 2006, 2:00 PM EST


DAVOS, Switzerland -- Former U.S. President Bill Clinton told corporate chieftains and political bigwigs Saturday that climate change was the world's biggest problem _ followed by global inequality and the "apparently irreconcilable" religious and cultural differences behind terrorism.

Clinton's comments provided something a freewheeling and philosophical finale _ ahead of Sunday's formal wrap-up _ to several days of high-powered discourse on the state of the world, and the mostly admiring audience seemed to hang on his every word.

"First, I worry about climate change," Clinton said in an onstage conversation with the founder of the World Economic Forum. "It's the only thing that I believe has the power to fundamentally end the march of civilization as we know it, and make a lot of the other efforts that we're making irrelevant and impossible."

Clinton called for "a serious global effort to develop a clean energy future" to avoid the onset of another ice age.

He also said the current global system "works to aggravate rather than ameliorate inequality" between and within nations _ including in the United States, where he lamented the "growing concentration of wealth at the top," alongside stagnation for the middle classes and rising poverty.

"I don't think we've found the way to promote economic and political integration in a manner that benefits the vast majority of the people in all societies and makes them feel that they are benefited by it," he said. "Voters usually see ... issues from the prism of their own experience."
Clinton won frequent enthusiastic applause _ not a common situation at the annual gathering in the Swiss Alps _ for articulating a global vision more conciliatory and inclusive than the one many of the assembled tend to associate with U.S. politics.

People around the world "basically want to know that we're on their side, that we wish them well, that we want the best for them, that we're pulling for them," he said.

Clinton called on current world leaders to seek ways of easing the "apparently irreconcilable religious and cultural differences in the world, that are manifest most stunningly in headlines about terrorist actions but really go far beyond that."

"You really can't have a global economy or a global society or a global approach to health and other things unless there is some sense of global community."

Former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans was listening. "He's a great performer and then he's got the greatest convening power of anyone now in the world, I think, and the greatest capacity to articulate things that matter," said Evans, who now heads the International Crisis Group, a think tank.

Clinton also dispensed advice on the issues of the day.

In Iraq, he said, the United States should not "give this thing up and say it can't work," but should consider "drawing down some of our troops and reconfiguring their components, trying to increase the special forces (and) putting them in places where they're not quite as vulnerable."

Iran, he argued, must not be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, and neither economic sanctions nor "any other option" should be ruled out as ways of preventing this. But he warned there would be "an enormous political price to pay if the global community ... looked like they went to force before everything else has been exhausted."

Clinton also suggested the West should be more open to eventual dialogue with Hamas, the radical Palestinian group whose election victory stunned the world this week and clouded the prospects of any resolution to the conflict with Israel.

"One of the politically correct things in American politics ... is we just don't talk to some people that we don't like, particularly if they ever killed anybody in a way that we hate," he said. "I do think that if you've got enough self-confidence in who you are and what you believe in, you ought not to be scared to talk to anybody."

"You've got to find a way to at least open doors ... and I don't see how we can do it without more contact," he said. Hamas might "acquire a greater sense of responsibility, and as they do we have to be willing to act on that."

Klaus Schwab, the forum's founder and organizer, asked Clinton to advise the next U.S. president, noting that this person might either be married to Clinton or listening in the audience _ an apparent reference to Sen. John McCain, seated in the first row along with Microsoft's Bill Gates and other invitees.

"In this world full of culturally charged issues I think we should make it clear that Senator McCain and I are not married," Clinton joked as the audience burst into laughter.
The comment earned Clinton a slap on the back from the Arizona Republican, who fought a crowd to get to the former president after the event.

"Interesting talk," said the beaming possible 2008 presidential contender. "You got us both in trouble!"

Be Open to Possibilities

AMORY LOVINS is a physicist, economist, inventor, automobile designer, consultant to 18 heads of state, author of 29 books, and cofounder of Rocky Mountain Institute, an environmental think tank. most of all, he's a man who takes pride in saving energy. The electricity bill at his 4,000-square-foot home in Old Snowmass, Colorado, is five dollars a month, and he's convinced he can do the same for all of us. His book "Winning the Oil Endgame" shows how the united states can save as much oil as it gets from the persian gulf by 2015 and how all oil imports can be eliminated by 2040. And that's just for starters.

(Right:Lovins waters tropical plants in a hothouse that serves as a "furnace" for his home/office in Old Snowmass, Colorado, where subfreezing temperatures are common throughout the winter. Overhead windows have special coatings that let light through but reflect interior heat. The pond is home to catfish, frogs, and crayfish.)

By Cal Fussman Photography by Ben Stechschulte
DISCOVER Vol. 27 No. 02

When I give talks about energy, the audience already knows about the problems. That's not what they've come to hear. So I don't talk about problems, only solutions. But after a while, during the question period, someone in the back will get up and give a long riff about all the bad things that are happening—most of which are basically true. There's only one way I've found to deal with that. After this person calms down, I gently ask whether feeling that way makes him more effective.As René Dubos, the famous biologist, once said, "Despair is a sin."

ENERGY

I used to work for Edwin Land, the father of Polaroid photography. Land said that invention was the sudden cessation of stupidity. He also said that people who seem to have had a new idea often have just stopped having an old idea. So I suppose if I bring something unusual to this business, it's that maybe I find it easier to stop having old ideas.

I can't point to any one moment in particular from my past that made me who I am. It's been more like seeing the world through an evolving lens. Gradually, I've learned to ask different questions and look at problems from different angles than most people. I'm probably best known for having redefined the energy problem in 1976 with a Foreign Affairs article titled "Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?"Until then, the energy problem was generally considered to be: Where do we get more energy? People were preoccupied with where we could get more energy of any kind, from any sources, for any price—as if all our needs were the same. I started instead at the other end of the problem: What do we want the energy for?

You don't generally want lumps of coal or barrels of sticky black goo. You want comfort, illumination, mobility, baked bread, and so on. And for each of these end uses we should ask: How much energy, of what quality, at what scale, from what source will do the job in the cheapest way? That's now called the end-use/least-cost approach, and a lot of the work we do at Rocky Mountain Institute involves applying it to a wide range of situations. End-use/least-cost analysis begins with a simple question: What are you really trying to do? If you go to the hardware store looking for a drill, chances are what you really want is not a drill but a hole. And then there's a reason you want the hole. If you ask enough layers of "Why?"—as Taiichi Ohno, the inventor of the Toyota production system, told us—you typically get to the root of the problem.

OIL

Let's start with one basic problem. Saudi Arabia has a quarter of the world's oil reserves. It is the sole swing producer with significant capacity to increase output, and therefore it controls the world price. Two-thirds of Saudi oil flows through one processing plant and two terminals that are in the crosshairs of terrorists. That stuff could go down any day for a long time. And that would presumably crash both the House of Saud and the Western economy. So for the bad guys it's a twofer. They would love to do that, and they've already had a couple of cracks at it. Now, this should make you uncomfortable. But we don't have to continue on our current path. We can go a different way.

Let's look at oil through a historic analogy. Around 1850, the biggest or second-biggest industry in America was whaling. Most buildings were lit with whale oil. But in the nine years before Edwin Drake struck oil in 1859 in Pennsylvania and made kerosene ubiquitous, at least five-sixths of the whale oil–lighting market had already been lost to competing products made from coal. This was elicited by the relatively high price of whale oil as the whales got shy and scarce.

The whalers were astounded that they ran out of customers before they ran out of whales. They didn't see this coming because they hadn't added up the competitors. Oil fields can be like this today. The United States today wrings twice as much work from each barrel of oil as it did in 1975. With even more advanced technologies, we can double oil efficiency all over again at a cost averaging $12 a barrel. We can replace the rest of our oil needs with advanced biofuels and saved natural gas at a cost averaging $18 a barrel. Combined, these two approaches average out at a cost of $15 a barrel. That's a lot cheaper than the $61 per barrel oil was the other day or even the $26 that's officially forecast for the year 2025. How much cheaper than $26 a barrel? Well, about $70 billion a year, plus a million jobs, mostly in rural and small-town America. Plus a million saved jobs now at risk, mainly in the automaking states.

We've got a choice: Either we're going to continue importing efficient cars to help replace foreign oil, or we're going to employ our own people to make efficient cars and import neither the oil nor the car—which sounds like a better idea.

WEIGHT

A modern car, after 120 years of devoted engineering effort since Gottlieb Daimler built the first gasoline-powered vehicle, uses less than 1 percent of its fuel to move the driver. How does that happen?Well, only an eighth of the fuel energy reaches the wheels. The rest of it is lost in the engine, drivetrain, and accessories, or wasted while the car is idling. Of the one-eighth that reaches the wheels, over half heats the tires on the road or the air that the car pushes aside. So only 6 percent of the original fuel energy accelerates the car. But remember, about 95 percent of the mass being accelerated is the car—not the driver. Hence, less than 1 percent of the fuel energy moves the driver. This is not very gratifying. Well, the solution is equally inherent in the basic physics I just described. Three-quarters of the fuel usage is caused by the car's weight. Every unit of energy you save at the wheels by making the car a lot lighter will save an additional seven units of fuel that you don't need to waste getting it to the wheels.

So you can get this roughly eightfold leverage (three- to fourfold in the case of a hybrid) from the wheels back to the fuel tank by starting with the physics of the car, making it lighter and with lower drag. And indeed you can make the car radically lighter. We've figured out a cost-effective way to do that so you can end up with a 66-mile-per-gallon uncompromised SUV that has half the normal weight, has a third the normal fuel use, is safer, and repays the extra cost that comes with being a hybrid in less than two years.

PLASTIC


(Right: An automotive seat bucket from Fiberforge, a company chaired by Lovins, is ultralight and ultrastrong. Carbon fibers are laid into predetermined positions and sandwiched with reinforcing nylon. The flat, tailored blank is then heated, stamped on a hot molding die, cooled, and trimmed to produce the finished part.)

Henry Ford said you don't need weight for strength. If you did need weight for strength, your bicycle helmet would be made of steel, not carbon fiber. And if you want to know how strong a very light material can be, try eating an Atlantic lobster with no tools. The auto industry needs to move toward ultralight, ultrastrong carbon-fiber composites, almost certainly using thermoplastics that flow when heated and that can be easily molded—instead of the more brittle, expensive thermosets that need chemistry, baking, or some other change to set the resin into its final hard form. Thermoplastics are incredibly tough. They can absorb 12 times as much crash energy per pound as steel. So even though your car will be only half as heavy as it was before, it will still be safer when whacked by a heavier one.

With such materials, you can decouple size from weight. You can make the car big—protected and comfortable. But it won't be heavy—hostile and inefficient. This can save oil and lives at the same time, and it turns out you can greatly improve the economics of making the car because you might have in a carbon SUV only 14 body parts—instead of 140 to 280 in a steel auto body—each needing one low-pressure die set, instead of an average of four high-pressure steel-stamping die sets in the steel body. The parts snap together precisely in the right positions for gluing, like assembling a kid's toy, so you don't need all those jigs and robots. You basically get rid of the body shop this way, and then by laying color in the mold, you get rid of the paint shop too. There go the two hardest and costliest parts of making the car.

New jobs come partly by having a vibrantly competitive car industry rather than a failing one and partly due to the logical evolution of the auto industry toward computerization. Imagine the aftermarket for improved and customized software. The industry structure would be different, but we don't think there would be a net loss of jobs. The jobs would be safer, healthier, and better distributed. And the same revolution that's coming to automaking from advanced materials also applies to anything else that moves.

HYDROGEN

Many automakers are starting to understand that whoever goes ultralight first will take the lead in the hydrogen fuel-cell race.The winning strategy will be improving the physics of the car. They still need to make a cheap, durable fuel cell. But if they can reduce the fuel cell and the hydrogen storage volume by three times, the cost reduces threefold.

That said, superefficient cars need hydrogen a lot less than hydrogen needs superefficient cars. If you have, say, an ultralight hybrid SUV burning gasoline at 66 miles per gallon, that isn't so bad—at least not compared to a similar one getting 18.5 miles per gallon on the road today.

If you then combine that with E85 fuel, which is 15 percent gasoline and 85 percent ethanol, you just got a 320-mile-per-gallon SUV because the efficiency times the biofuel saving of oil multiplies.For that matter, if every car or light truck on the road in 2025 is only as efficient as the best hybrid cars and SUVs now in the showrooms, that would save twice as much oil as we currently import from the Persian Gulf. So it's not a very ambitious goal—and it doesn't even involve making vehicles ultralight. Very efficient vehicles can get most of the same benefits without hydrogen by using today's gasoline/hybrid propulsion. However, once you have such vehicles, there is a robust business case for running them on hydrogen. Until you have those efficient vehicles, that business case is not very convincing.

I think hydrogen will be an important if not dominant energy carrier by 2050. In Winning the Oil Endgame, the comprehensive strategy we've developed at Rocky Mountain Institute for ending oil dependence, we see hydrogen as an optional add-on. It would be the most profitable and efficient way to use and save natural gas. But it's not necessary to get the country off oil at a profit; it's just icing on the cake.

ELECTRICITY

A question I ask a lot is, What's the right size for the job? I have a book called Small Is Profitable: The Hidden Economic Benefits of Making Electrical Resources the Right Size. It points out 207 benefits of distributed resources, such as solar and wind power. When I begin to describe them, you'll find them really obvious:Renewables, such as wind energy, have less financial risk from volatile fuel prices than fossil-fuel power plants because they don't need any fuel.Small resources like solar cells or wind turbines have less financial risk than giant power plants that take many years to build. Portable resources like solar panels have less financial risk than stationary power plants, because if the system evolves differently than you'd expected and you'd rather put it somewhere else, you simply stick it on a truck and move it. This is all blindingly obvious, yet it hasn't been taken into account by the utility industry while buying its half trillion dollars' worth of assets.

Here's what happened: For the first century of the electricity business, the power plants were costlier and less reliable than the grid, so it made sense to build a bunch of big power plants backing each other up through the grid. Well—surprise—over the last 20 years, power plants have become cheaper and more reliable than the grid. Ninety-nine percent of our power failures originate in the grid—mostly in distribution. So now if you want to deliver reliable, affordable electricity, you need to make it at or near the customer's location. Many people didn't notice this happening. But despite the market's not yet recognizing the benefits, the decentralized low- or no-carbon generators turn out to be greater in capacity and output than nuclear power worldwide. David already beat Goliath, but nobody noticed. The nuclear advocates frequently state that only nuclear is big and fast enough to deal with global warming. Well, five years from now the official industry forecast suggests that decentralized low- and no-carbon generators will be adding 160 times as much capacity as nuclear will add up to that year. So those who think that the decentralized generators are small, slow, and futuristic or have an unacceptable risk of not being adopted at scale in the market have some serious explaining to do.


WIND

If I could do just one thing to solve our energy problems, I would allow energy to compete fairly at honest prices regardless of which kind it is, what technology it uses, how big it is, or who owns it. If we did that, we wouldn't have an oil problem, a climate problem, or a nuclear proliferation problem. Those are all artifacts of public policies that have distorted the market into buying things it wouldn't otherwise have bought because they were turkeys.

We have more than enough cost-effective wind power just on available land in the Dakotas to meet the United States' electricity needs. We wouldn't necessarily want to do it all in two states, and there are cheaper combinations of other technologies to do the whole job, but it's an enormous resource. Germany and Spain each install over 2,000 megawatts of wind power every year. That figure exceeds the average global net addition of nuclear power every year in this decade. Denmark is now one-fifth wind powered; Germany, about a tenth.Wind power is doubling every three years worldwide and solar power every two, and not because some countries subsidize it strongly. In fact, the subsidies are being phased out slowly in Germany and rapidly in Japan because they have achieved their purpose of creating world-class industries that will be able to make it on their own.

If everything competed solely on merit, wind energy in the United States would be a lot better off. It gets subsidized less than its competitors, and its subsidies are temporary, while its competitors' are permanent. In other words, the fossil and nuclear subsidies—nuclear being the biggest—are permanent, while renewable subsidies are temporary.Congress's brief and irregular renewals of the tax credit for wind power have several times bankrupted wind-turbine manufacturers in the United States. Similar misguided policies have diminished the solar-cell industry. Half of the solar cells sold in the United States a decade ago were domestically made. Now that figure is only 8 percent.

DEFENSE

A major player in our energy future will be the Pentagon. Here's why: Trailing behind every half-mile-a-gallon Abrams tank—a peerless fighting machine if you can get it there—are two unarmored fuel trucks. Guess what the bad guys shoot at?

This is a very teachable moment—when the Pentagon becomes acutely aware of the cost and the risk of delivering fuel on the battlefield. They obviously need much lighter, more agile, radically more fuel-efficient forces. A military transformation will have a much bigger payoff, in exactly the same way the Pentagon's research and development created the Internet, global positioning systems, the modern microchip industry, and advanced aero engines.

If you align military science and technology investments to capture this enormous improvement at a tactical, operational, and strategic level, guess what? You thereby transform the car, truck, and plane industries to get the country off oil, so we won't need to fight over the oil because we won't be using it. Mission unnecessary.

BANANAS

When we designed the research facilities at Rocky Mountain Institute, we didn't plan on having a banana farm inside. We're up 7,100 feet in the Rockies, and it has gotten as low as –47 degrees in the winter.We planned about 900 square feet of jungle space with five different kinds of energy collection: heat, hot air, hot water, light, and photosynthesis. The arch that holds it up has 12 different functions, but I paid for it only once. The whole building exemplifies design integration: getting multiple benefits from single expenditures. It saves about 99 percent of the normal need for space- and water-heating energy, about 90 percent of the household electricity, and half the water. All that efficiency paid for itself in 10 months—and that's with 1983 technology! Now we can do a lot better.

Anyway, we weren't planning on growing bananas here, but somebody who owed me something gave me a banana tree to settle the obligation. He said it would grow to six feet and never fruit—but he forgot to tell the tree. When it got 12-year-old horse manure, it went bananas, grew to 25 feet, put out nine crops in the first year and a half, and tried to go through the roof. Then it tried to eat the fishpond.

I was afraid of a hydraulic disaster, so we chopped it down, dug it up, and put a steel fence between what was left of the root-ball and the fishpond. But it grew back and put out another 18 crops. Eventually, a few years ago, it wore out at twice its designed life, so we took it out for good and put in a variety of young banana trees. We've also done mangoes, grapes, papayas, and passion fruit—here in the Rocky Mountains.

The tangled tale of the banana tree offers a very simple lesson: Be open to possibilities.

China Now the World’s Second Largest Auto Market

China Now the World’s Second Largest Auto Market
14 January 2006

http://www.greencarcongress.com/
Statistics from the China Automotive Industry Association (CAIA) indicate that China has surpassed Japan as the second-largest auto market in the world, behind the US.
The total number of automobiles sold in the Chinese market reached more than 5.9 million in 2005, outstripping the 5.8 million of the Japanese market. Of those, 5.76 million were produced domestically, the remainder were imports.

Sales have risen dramatically from the 2.73 million units sold in 2001. As a percentage of global sales, China now represents 8.7%, up from 4.3% in 2001. Furthermore, in 2005, China accounted for 23.2% of the total global growth.

Xu Changming, director of Information Resources Department with the State Information Center, believes that the high-speed growth of the passenger vehicles last year benefited mainly from the expansion into regional markets.

In 2005, the auto sales in the secondary regional market in the provinces of Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Shandong and Guangdong were up by about 40% while the sales in the tertiary markets of Hebei, Henan, Liaoning, Sichuan, Fujian, Guanxi, Shanxi, Yunnan and Tianjin grew by 50%.
Auto sales by domestic producers increased by 40.3% in the first 11 months of last year, nearly twice the sales growth of 21.3% per cent of Sino-foreign joint ventures. Of the domestic producers, the sales of Chery autos were close to 190,000 units, ranking the sixth among the sedan makers in the country, an increase of more than 110%.

Sales of commercial vehicles declined by 0.75%, influenced, according to CAIA, by the business cycle, rising oil prices and policy factors. The CAIA expects that the auto market will maintain a 10% to 15% growth in 2006, with sales reaching between 6.4 and 6.6 million units.

The top three automakers in China are First Automotive works (FAW), Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation and Dongfeng Motor Corporation, which sold 983,100, 917,500 and 729,000 cars in 2005 respectively.

Sales of vehicles in China from GM and its joint ventures jumped 35% in 2005 to 665,390 units. GM ended the year with an estimated market share of 11.2% in this second-largest global market.

Seeking Clean Fuel for a Nation, and a Rebirth for Small-Town Montana

Here's a way to burn coal in a clean manner; however I wonder where most of the harvestable coal is located i.e. sensitive habitat areas. Make way for Environmental Impact Reports if this solution takes flight.

By TIMOTHY EGAN

HELENA, Mont., Nov. 15 - If the vast, empty plain of eastern Montana is the Saudi Arabia of coal, then Gov. Brian Schweitzer, a prairie populist with a bolo tie and an advanced degree in soil science, may be its Lawrence.

Rarely a day goes by that he does not lash out against the "sheiks, dictators, rats and crooks" who control the world oil supply or the people he calls their political handmaidens, "the best Congress that Big Oil can buy."

Governor Schweitzer, a Democrat, has a two-fisted idea for energy independence that he carries around with him. In one fist is a shank of Montana coal, black and hard. In the other fist is a vial of nearly odorless clear liquid - a synthetic fuel that came from the coal and could run cars, jets and trucks or heat homes without contributing to global warming or setting off a major fight with environmental groups, he said.

"Smell that," Mr. Schweitzer said, thrusting his vial of fuel under the noses of interested observers here in the capital, where he works in jeans with a border collie underfoot. "You hardly smell anything. This is a clean fuel, converted from coal by a chemical process. We can produce enough of this in Montana to power every American car for decades."

Coal-to-fuel conversion, which was practiced out of necessity by pariah nations like Nazi Germany and South Africa under apartheid, has been around for more than 80 years. It is called the Fischer-Tropsch process. What is new is the technology that removes and stores the pollutants during and after the making of synthetic fuel; add to that high oil prices, which have suddenly made this form of energy alchemy feasible. The coal could be converted into gasoline or diesel, which would run cars, or into other types of fuel.

With coal reserves of about 120 billion tons, Montana has one-third of the nation's total and a tenth of the global amount. Most of it is just under the prairie grass in the depopulated ranch country of eastern Montana. Mr. Schweitzer wants to plant coal-to-fuel factories in towns that have one foot in the grave. It may not provide enough fuel to wean the West off imported oil, but it may be enough to show the rest of the country that there is another way, he said.
"This country has no energy plan, no vision for the future," said Mr. Schweitzer, who spent seven years in Saudi Arabia on irrigation projects. "We give more tax breaks and money for oil, and what do we get? Three-dollar gas and wars in the Middle East. If you want to control the destiny of this country, it's going to be with synthetic fuels."

For now, the governor's ideas are just speculative. Although several energy companies have expressed interest in building coal-to-fuel plants, no sites have been chosen or projects announced. Because it would be such a novel, financially risky undertaking, companies have been hesitant to go the next step. But Mr. Schweitzer hopes for a breakthrough, with several plants up and running within 10 years, and he says he does not need legislative approval to give the go-ahead if companies commit.

The governor has met with the president of Shell Oil, the chairman of General Electric and other captains of big energy, as well as with smaller companies that develop synthetic fuels.

"This is not a pipe dream," said Jack Holmes, the president and chief executive of Syntroleum, an Oklahoma company that has a small synthetic fuels plant and wants to build something bigger. "What's exciting about this process is you don't have to drill any wells and you don't have to build any infrastructure, and you'd be putting these plants in the heartland of America, where you really need the jobs."

Certainly jobs are a big motivating factor. Montana is a poor state and ranks last in average wages. Mr. Schweitzer, whose approval rating is near 70 percent, says thousands of good-wage jobs can be gained in towns that are dying.

He is also promoting wind energy and the use of biofuels, using oil from crops like soybeans as a blend. The governor signed a measure this year that requires Montana to get 10 percent of its energy from wind power by 2010, a goal he said would be reached within a few years. Still, the Big Sky State, with a population under a million, has fewer people than the average metro area of a midsize American city, and its influence is limited. The governor acknowledged as much.
"I'm just a soil scientist trying to get people in Washington, D.C., to take the cotton out of their ears," Mr. Schweitzer said with somewhat practiced modesty. "But if we can change the world in Montana, why not try it?"

By some estimates, the United States has enough coal to take care of its energy needs for 800 years. The new, cleaner technology stores the pollutants in the ground or processes them for other uses.

The United States imports about 13 million barrels of oil a day. To replace that oil would be a monumental undertaking, with hundreds of coal-to-fuel plants. But Mr. Schweitzer points to South Africa, where a single 50-year-old plant provides 28 percent of the nation's supplies of diesel, petrol and kerosene. But the South African plant uses old technology that does not remove the pollutants.

In this country there is a small factory in North Dakota that converts coal to natural gas. And Pennsylvania is moving forward on a plan to produce diesel from coal. Neither of these plants would come close to the scale of the plants Mr. Schweitzer is envisioning in Montana, where it would cost upward of $7 billion to build a plant that could turn out 150,000 barrels of synthetic fuel a day, for about $35 a barrel.

One surprising thing, thus far, is that many people in the environmental community have not rejected the coal-to-fuel idea out of hand. Environmentalists like the process for producing clean fuels from coal. They say the technology is there and it can be done in coal-rich empty quarters of eastern Montana, North Dakota or Wyoming.

Still, they worry about strip mining the ranch country and about whether there will be a global commitment to make synthetic fuels the clean way rather than in a dirtier way along the lines of a plan in China, where the government has joined with major global oil companies to build about a dozen coal-to-fuel plants.

"It's a very interesting moment in energy history," said Ralph Cavanagh, an energy policy expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the nation's most powerful environmental groups. "Certainly this process can be done. This is a promising direction. The question is, Are we going to do it clean?"

Because there is no federal mandate to process coal in a way that reduces the emissions that can cause global warming, Mr. Cavanagh says he fears that any new coal operations will simply add new pollutants to the atmosphere. Coal plants without the cleaning technology are the biggest source of man-made carbon dioxide, a gas that is considered a central contributor to the warming of the earth, according to many studies.

There is another problem as well. Some Montana ranchers and environmentalists who fought big coal-mining proposals in the 1970's are worried about what new mining will do to the grasslands.
"The governor's idea is a big one," said Helen Waller, a farmer who is active with the Northern Plains Resource Council, a Montana environmental group. "I'm not sure it's the best one. I don't think there's any such thing as clean coal. And even if there were, it would require a lot of productive ranchland to be ripped up."

Mr. Schweitzer said the mining could be done in a way that restored the land afterward. "I call it deep farming," he said. "You take away the top eight inches of soil, remove the seam of coal, and then put the topsoil back in."

But given Montana's history of abuse by mining companies - the giant open-pit mine in Butte is the most visible legacy of a bygone era - some Montanans remain skeptical.
"I just think there's a better way that doesn't involve tearing up productive ranchland," Ms. Waller said.

Grassroots Organization Launches Renewable Energy Act of 2006

An online renewable energy advocacy group, World Oil Boycott, has launched a major drive to see sweeping legislation in 2006 that would revolutionize the US energy industry. The initiative calls for a resurrection, expansion and re-introduction of Bill S 427, introduced in the first session of 2005. The Bill is currently languishing in committee.

The group has called for the modernization of the national energy grid – in the name of promoting international peace - via dramatic renewable energy consumption requirements by all federal offices. The broad and sweeping legislation of the revised bill would lead to:

- investment to provide research in making renewable energy technologies more efficient and more affordable;
- investment to provide businesses with tax incentives to switch to consumption of 100% renewable energy derived electricity;
- investment to provide tax incentives to home owners and businesses to purchase Energy Star rated gas furnaces and heaters;
- investment of $100 tax credit to home owners who provide receipt of their purchase of twice as many fluorescent light bulbs as rooms in their homes;
- investment to rebuild the national energy grid to include superefficient transmission lines; - investment to incentivize cities to upgrade their power lines;
- investment to fund the state construction of renewable energy 'greenways' along highways, including electric car battery swap stations and renewable fuels stations;
- investment to help all the major cities transition to clean electric powered mass transit systems, with batteries charged 100% by renewable energy;
- investment to provide tax incentives to individuals and business to purchase hybrid or electric automobiles;
- investment to provide tax incentives to the automotive industry to increase the efficiency of their gasoline and diesel-powered offerings;
- investment to provide tax incentives to the trucking industry to purchase vehicles or retrofit existing vehicle with technologies that allow them meet clean air and mileage standards;
- investment to support research in capturing energy otherwise lost in manufacturing, energy production, transportation, and domestic energy consumption;
- investment to research how to transition from a dangerous and eternally polluting nuclear fission power to clean and safe domestic nuclear fusion;
- investment to build massive solar trough farms in California and Nevada to help power California's growth and relieve them of their demand of unethically artifically expensive power from Texas;
- investment to create ultraefficient high-speed rail systems between major cities;
- legislation to require the adoption of ultra-efficient construction methods during the construction of all new federal buildings, and requiring that all new federal buildings be designed as 'green buildings';
- investment to create national awareness of the renewable energy options available to energy consumers, steps that consumers can take to reduce their non-renewable resource derived energy consumption, and the urgency of our need to transition to become a renewable-energy powered country;
- investment to export our best renewable energy technology to developing countries to assist their populations in emerging from poverty and squalor into productive populations powered by our mother the earth and our father the sky;
- requirement that all federal government offices transition to eventually consume 100% renewable energy-derived electricity by 2010, or equivalent through Renewable Energy Credits;
- requirement that all light bulbs purchased by federal agencies meet efficiency standard set by fluorescent alternatives to incandescent bulbs; - investment for a national competition among cities of >100,000 people to become powered by >95 renewable energy by 2010, with the reward being that the federal government will pay the energy bill of all citizens of the first city in the year 2010-2015.
- investment to insure that New Orleans becomes one of the first truly green cities in the United States of America.

Movie Syriana Depicts Oil Reality

With the recent Peak Oil Caucus being formed in the House of Representatives, increased media attention, and now the newly released movie, Syriana, it appears that the correlation between limited oil supplies and questionable foreign policy is being illuminated.

I plan on seeing Syriana this weekend in between finals study sessions.
The review below discusses how/why Syriana is a timely movie.

Syriana and Iraq
By Mark LeVine

Critics have been hailing "Syriana," George Clooney's latest film (Written and Directed Stephen Gaghan, Academy Award winner for Best Screenplay - Traffic) by the to take on the policies of the Bush administration, as a cinematic tour de force that has "compelling real-world relevance" and is "unsettlingly close to the truth." But what is the truth "Syriana" supposedly approaches? Put briefly, the plot traces the ramifications of a bungled assassination, authorized by the CIA, of a Middle Eastern leader who decided to sign a major oil deal with China instead of an American oil company with close ties to the US Government.

Given the increasing numbers of Americans who believe the Bush administration deliberately misled the country to justify the Iraqi invasion, many film-goers will no doubt be willing to accept the film's argument that America's thirst for oil—not the threat of terrorism, and certainly not a concern for human rights—drives the country's policies in the Middle East, even when those policies violate our core ideals. But is the movie really a case of art imitating life, or does "Syriana" veer towards the kind of hyperbole and exaggeration that marred Oliver Stone's "JFK”? The evidence would seem to speak for itself. It includes:

• Newly discovered documents, reported in the Washington Post, revealing that as early as February 2001 senior executives of at least four of the country's biggest oil companies, ExxonMobil, Conoco, Shell and BP America, met with Vice President Cheney's Energy Task Force.
  
• Documents from these meetings obtained by the conservative watchdog Judicial Watch—including a map of Iraq and an accompanying list of "Iraq oil foreign suitors" revealing Iraq to have been a major topic of discussion. This is not so surprising, as that country has perhaps the world's second largest oil deposits. Indeed, the map erased all features of the country save the location of said deposits, while the list of suitors revealed that dozens of foreign companies were either in discussions over, or in direct negotiations for, rights to them.
  
• As important as what was discussed was when the meeting occurred: at precisely the moment when scientists and industry leaders began increasingly to worry that the "age of peak oil production"—when it will no longer be possible to extract enough oil from the earth to replace what we consume—was approaching faster than previously assumed, portending a potentially explosive competition for the world's remaining supplies.
  
• In such a scenario, ensuring American access to—and, where possible, leverage or even control over—the world's major oil deposits would be a natural concern for an administration umbilically tied to Big Oil, especially in the context of escalating competition with an aggressive, energy-hungry China.
  
• A 2002 report by Deutsche Bank explained the major US companies would lose if Saddam made a deal with the UN, whereas the Europeans, Russians and Chinese would come out ahead. But in a post-Saddam Iraq, the report argued, the US oil majors—specifically, according to the report, ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco, the very companies involved in the disputed meetings—could manage the country's resources.
  
• At the very moment the first Energy Task Force meetings with industry officials were held, in February 2001, the National Security Council issued a directive telling staff to cooperate with the Energy Task Force in the "melding" of new "operational policies towards rogue states" with "actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields." No place on earth was more amenable to such melding than Iraq.
  

Two and a half years after the US-led invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration continues to resist calls for a major troop withdrawal, despite the fact that most intelligence reports, and most Iraqi politicians, confirm the presence of those troops to be the main motivation for the insurgency.

With American losses and expenditures mounting daily, the threat of WMD disproved, the promise of peace and democracy seeming increasingly pollyannish, it's hard to think of many good reasons for the US to maintain a long-term presence in Iraq. Two that come to mind, however, are oil and military bases—subjects that remain largely unbroachable in polite discourse in Washington or Baghdad.

What else would constitute the "core interests" that both the Bush administration and leading democrats (most recently Sen. Joseph Biden) argue will be threatened by an American withdrawal from Iraq any time soon.

It took roughly fifty years for the CIA to admit that it organized the overthrow of Iranian President Mossadeqh when he dared to nationalize his country's oil industry. Our government also helped organize coups that put the Baath Party in power in Iraq twice, in 1963 and 1968. There's no doubt who was behind the toppling of Saddam. The question that remains, however, is: What was the real reason we invaded Iraq? On that score, "Syriana" hits closer to home than most politicians either side of the aisle would care to admit.

Mark LeVine is a Professor of Middle Eastern History at UC Irvine, and author of Why They Don't Hate Us: Lifting the Veil on the Axis of Evil (Oneworld, 2005). See www.culturejamming.org.

Peak Oil Caucus Formed in Congress

I’ve been relatively silent for a while on the Peak Oil front, but I promise I’m keeping tabs on as much as I can – the economy, real estate, metals market, international events etc. The global landscape of frenetic human activity serves as clues. I have some breathing room since the majority of my papers are out of the way and soon it will be time for finals preparation.

I've posted articles recently, but did not have a chance to send emails prompting you to check them out, so if you have time scroll down and take a peak – no pun intended, honest!

This is good news. Congress has recognized Peak Oil! This means there’s a conscious minority within that body who has recognized the crisis. Some of them probably understand it better than others, and perceive that no combination of alternative energy sources will ever allow what Dick Cheney calls “the American way of life” (assuming mass consumption and assuming continuous growth through infinite supply reservoirs) to continue. But they will educate each other and, we can hope, the rest of the House.

I had read an article claiming that we'll be screwed in our lifetime if there was not a consorted global drive towards an “Apollo Project” revolved around alternative energies. In a previous post, “Natural Gas is Yummy” (scroll down), I had described how 95% of power plants constructed in the US since the 1990s use natural gas to generate electricity – natural gas is non-renewable.

The resolution below states that: “the United States, in collaboration with other international allies, should establish an energy project with the magnitude, creativity, and sense of urgency of the `Man on the Moon' project to develop a comprehensive plan to address the challenges presented by Peak Oil.” And there it is...let's get this game on track before that fat lady sings

(Disclaimer: Fat lady references is a figure of speech and is not intended in anyway to discriminate against horizontally endowed individuals or Kripsy Cream Calendar models)

Here's the info from Congress provided by:
http://www.globalpublicmedia.com

A peak oil bill has been filed in the House of Representatives with the support of the newly formed Peak Oil Caucus, founded by Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (Rep, MD) and a number of co-sponsors. The members of the caucus are James McGovern, Vern Ehlers, Tom Udall, Mark Udall, Raul Grijalva, Wayne Gilchrest, Jim Moran, Dennis Moore.

Co-sponsors are Tom Udall, Virgil Goode, Raul Grijalva, Walter Jones, Tom Tancredo, Phil Gingrey, Randy Kuhl, Steve Israel, G.K. Butterfield, Mark Udall, Chris Van Hollen, Wayne Gilchrest, Al Wynn, John McHugh, Jim Moran, and Dennis Moore.

Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the United States, in collaboration with other international allies, should establish an energy project with the magnitude, creativity, and sense of urgency that was incorporated in the `Man on the Moon' project to address the inevitable challenges of `Peak Oil'.

IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES October 24, 2005
Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland (for himself, Mr. UDALL of New Mexico, Mr. GOODE, Mr. GRIJALVA, Mr. JONES of North Carolina, Mr. TANCREDO, Mr. GINGREY, Mr. KUHL of New York, Mr. ISRAEL, Mr. BUTTERFIELD, Mr. UDALL of Colorado, Mr. VAN HOLLEN, Mr. GILCHREST, and Mr. WYNN) submitted the following resolution; which was referred to the Committee on Energy and Commerce

________________________________________ RESOLUTION

Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the United States, in collaboration with other international allies, should establish an energy project with the magnitude, creativity, and sense of urgency that was incorporated in the `Man on the Moon' project to address the inevitable challenges of `Peak Oil'.

Whereas the United States has only 2 percent of the world's oil reserves; Whereas the United States produces 8 percent of the world's oil and consumes 25 percent of the world's oil, of which nearly 60 percent is imported from foreign countries;

Whereas developing countries around the world are increasing their demand for oil consumption at rapid rates; for example, the average consumption increase, by percentage, from 2003 to 2004 for the countries of Belarus, Kuwait, China, and Singapore was 15.9 percent;

Whereas the United States consumed more than 937,000,000 tonnes of oil in 2004, and that figure could rise in 2005 given previous projection trends;

Whereas, as fossil energy resources become depleted, new, highly efficient technologies will be required in order to sustainably tap replenishable resources;

Whereas the Shell Oil scientist M. King Hubbert accurately predicted that United States domestic production would peak in 1970, and a growing number of petroleum experts believe that the peak in the world's oil production (Peak Oil) is likely to occur in the next decade while demand continues to rise;

Whereas North American natural gas production has also peaked;

Whereas the United States is now the world's largest importer of both petroleum and natural gas;

Whereas the population of the United States is increasing by nearly 30,000,000 persons every decade;

Whereas the energy density in one barrel of oil is the equivalent of eight people working full time for one year;

Whereas affordable supplies of petroleum and natural gas are critical to national security and energy prosperity; and Whereas the United States has approximately 250 years of coal at current consumption rates, but if that consumption rate is increased by 2 percent per year, coal reserves are reduced to 75 years:

Now, therefore, be it Resolved, That it is the sense of the House of Representatives that--

(1) in order to keep energy costs affordable, curb our environmental impact, and safeguard economic prosperity, including our trade deficit, the United States must move rapidly to increase the productivity with which it uses fossil fuel, and to accelerate the transition to renewable fuels and a sustainable, clean energy economy;

and (2) the United States, in collaboration with other international allies, should establish an energy project with the magnitude, creativity, and sense of urgency of the `Man on the Moon' project to develop a comprehensive plan to address the challenges presented by Peak Oil.

No Technological Fix for Falling Oil Stocks

Nigel Wilson, Energy Writer
November 22, 2005

DECLINING production from the world's major oil fields could not be made up by technological advances or the development of new discoveries, a Swedish energy expert warned yesterday.In Perth to launch the Australian chapter of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, Professor Kjell Aleklett of Uppsala University said four fields the size of the North Sea would have to be found for oil production to meet expected world demand in 2025.

"This is just not possible," he told a meeting of transport bureaucrats.

"There is no possibility that the 65 current oil-exporting countries can lift output sufficiently to meet demand when production is declining in 54 of them."

He said 75 per cent of known world oil reserves were in Muslim countries, and the rest of the world would have to be conscious of this as supplies of traded oil tightened.

About 1 per cent of world oil fields, "mostly in desert countries", were responsible for 50 per cent of production and this trend would continue, he said.

Professor Aleklett, who heads the APSO organisation in Europe, said that the answer to closing the gap between current world demand for 85 million barrels a day and projected demand of 115 million barrels a day in 2025 "must come from something other than technology".

The APSO is an international network of scientists, mostly affiliated with European institutions and universities, that aims to determine when world production of oil and gas will peak and decline, and the consequences.

Peak oil theory, which holds that at some stage exploitation of the world's known oil reserves will be greater than the oil remaining, developed from the work of Shell geophysicist M King Hubbert in the 1950s which correctly predicted oil production in the US would decline from the 1970s, despite an upsurge in exploration.

Professor Aleklett said the world was addicted to oil.

Current knowledge of the way petroleum systems worked suggested no new big oil fields would be found, unless they were off Greenland or in Siberia, both of which posed development challenges.

He noted that despite popular prejudices, China - with 21 per cent of the world's population - accounted for only 8 per cent of world oil and gas demand.

This compared with the US - with 5 per cent of the population - which accounted for 25 per cent of consumption.

If China lifted its demand to 21 per cent of world oil production by 2030 it would need 25 million barrels a day.

This compares to current demand of just 6.3 million barrels of oil a day.

Renewed Interest Could Spark More Solar Building

The Sooner we move towards solar energy and smart building designs, the better.

ENERGY
Solar: Advocates seek governmental support

Don and Nancy Dayton aren't worried about the rapidly rising cost of heating fuels this winter.
They've paid less then $50 a month for the last two years to heat and cool, plus run all the electric appliances in their almost 2,000- square-foot, split-level home in Eldorado.
They estimate 90 percent of the heat is free -- from the sun -- with no expensive photovoltaics involved. Their almost two-decade- old house is simply designed to take advantage of solar rays and natural ventilation.

The house uses no propane or natural gas. Only occasionally does the couple use the wood stove or electric baseboard heaters. "In 18 years, we've never turned on our downstairs electric heat," Nancy Dayton said.

The Daytons think it's unfortunate that many people in a state known for sunshine will be paying high heating bills in their homes this winter when there's a better, cheaper way. "We're sold on solar," Don Dayton, a retired National Park Service administrator, said. "It's sad to see so many designers and builders get away from it. You drive around Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado, and you see so few solar-designed houses."

Passive solar building gained support following the last energy crisis in the 1970s. Federal and state tax incentives for solar helped spur construction. When fuel prices dropped in the late 1980s, the tax incentives died and so did the government support and broad interest in passive solar design. Now, as fuel prices are expected to soar over the winter, the Daytons and other solar advocates think governments and developers should pay attention again to solar-powered homes by offering tax rebates and credits.

Good design is essential to balancing winter heat with summer cool inside a passive solar home like the Daytons'. The south side of their house sports large, double-pane glass windows. Properly sized overhangs provide shade in the summer, while windows and doors on the east and west provide circulation to keep the house cool. It has no air conditioning and no windows on the north side of the house. The home's bottom level is bermed into the side of the hill, providing more insulation. The home is well insulated -- better than standards called for at the time it was built.

Short, concrete-block walls about a foot wide, known as trombe walls, are covered with dark stucco and glass windows on the outside of the home's southside lower level. The walls collect heat during winter days and slowly release it at night, much as adobe does, into the bedrooms. The house can go two days in cloudy weather before it starts to turn cold inside.

During the heyday of passive solar design in the 1970s and 1980s, Eldorado touted itself as a solar capital of the nation and it still ranked No. 1 for its number of solar homes, with more than 300, in the 2000 Census. Life magazine featured four pages of Santa Fe solar homes in 1980, highlighting the often-studied Balcomb house off Old Santa Fe Trail in the First Village subdivison.

Dayton said a large roadside billboard used to proclaim Eldorado as a solar community. "The sign came down sometime in the 1990s and builders stopped doing solar houses," Dayton recalled.

Susan Nichols, who helped design some of the original Santa Fe solar homes, said solar enjoyed strong government and industry support three decades ago. "It was just injected with potential and excitement under the Carter administration," she said. "The minute Reagan came into office and gas prices fell, that all dried up."

Nichols said solar design education also died. She and business partners, including architect and one of the early solar gurus Ed Mazria, traveled the country giving workshops to architects, designers and builders on solar. Now, few people know how to correctly design or build a good solar home, Nichols said.

Nichols said, in spite of all the warnings about oil's finite supply, the nation didn't plan ahead for the day the supply would drop and prices would rise. "We, as Americans, are not particularly far-sighted," she said from her Communico company office in Santa Fe.

Solar design isn't rocket science, say Nichols and Mazria, who wrote one of the definitive solar design books in 1979 and is currently rewriting it. "We know it can be done and we know how to do it," said Mazria, who served on Gov. Bill Richardson' Green Building Task Force.

Mazria proposed two years ago in an article titled "It's the Architecture, Stupid" in Solar Today that new buildings be required to cut energy usage by half the average usage for an area. Mazria also wrote that architecture schools needed to focus on training students in energy-efficient design. It's a proposal he's promoting today at every opportunity before architects and governments. This week he presented his proposal to Santa Fe County for trimming energy costs in residential and commercial buildings.

Technology and materials for both active and passive solar homes has improved immensely. Trial and error in the field has given solar designers loads of practical information on what works and what fails for a given building site. Computer programs allow designers and architects to create energy-efficient, passive-solar homes based on the unique challenges of each site.
What's needed now, advocates say, is renewed support from government and consumers for passive solar construction and eduction. New Mexico, with a governor who supports renewable energy and energy-efficient buildings, is positioned to lead the way.

And with many in the oil industry observers predicting a time soon when oil supplies will peak and head on a downward slide, Dayton, Mazria and others believe solar, energy-efficient buildings need renewed interest fast.

Contact Staci Matlock at 470-9843 or smatlock@sfnewmexican.com.
WANT TO KNOW MORE?
Check out the following Web sites for the latest in solar research and information:
* New Mexico Solar Energy Association:
www.nmsea.org
* U.S. Department of Energy, National Renewable Energy Laboratory:
www.nrel.gov/solar/
* Consumer Energy Design, www.consumerenergydesign.org, a good simple description of basic passive and active solar principles from the California Energy Commission.
Books and articles
* "It's the Architecture, Stupid," by Ed Mazria, download from www.mazria.com/publications.html
* The Passive Solar Energy Book, by Ed Mazria, 1979, Rodale Press. Considered the early bible for solar design.
Businesses
Santa Fe is blessed with a wealth of solar innovators, contractors and businesses with decades of experience. Check out the membership list in the New Mexico Solar Energy Assocation or the Yellow Pages.
What's it mean?
Passive solar: Refers to gaining heat and light from the sun through proper building design and natural movement of heat and air without use of mechanical systems.
Active solar: Moving air and heat from the sun by means of fans and pumps; also collection and conversion of solar rays into electricity by means of a photovoltaic system of panels, converters and batteries.
Source: The Santa Fe New Mexican

Natural Gas is Yummy

By Moe Fakih

This is a good concept Off Shore Wind Energy , but not the only solution towards taking mankind’s dependency away from fossil fuels. In order for us to meet the efficiency of oil and natural gas we will need to implement various forms of alternate energy – solar, wind, hydroelectric.


I was flying into San Diego this Monday evening, and I was amazed by how the San Gabriel basin and San Diego county looked on a clear night 20,000 miles up. If a 17th century pirate were in my seat he would see thousands of torch lights ablaze. Resources such as wood, fuel, and perhaps metal would be implemented to sustain constant illumination.

So what energy source feeds these glowing cities today? Have you ever considered how we have such an infinite amount of energy to power our hot water heaters, lights, and computers? In order for our power plants to generate energy, they also need an energy input. In the 1970s and 1980s, most electric power plants were fueled by coal or nuclear power. In 2000, some 23,453 megawatts (MW) of new electric capacity was added in the U.S. and almost 95 percent of this, or 22,238 MW, was fueled by natural gas. (Source: American Gas Association)

There appears to be enough natural gas in the world to supply our system in the short term, but perhaps alternate forms of energy should replace natural gas since the former is also used to feed the planet’s 6.5 billion people.

Crop plants assemble carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen into proteins that are essential both to plant growth and to the diets of humans and other animals. Of those four elements, nitrogen is the one that's too often in short supply. If you see yellowish, stunted crops, whether they're in an Indiana cornfield or an Indonesian rice paddy, it's likely that you can blame it on a lack of nitrogen.

Stan Cox, senior scientist at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, wrote, “A world of 6.4 billion people, on the way to 9 billion or more, needs more protein than the planet's croplands can generate from biologically provided nitrogen. Our species has become as physically dependent on industrially produced nitrogen fertilizer as it is on soil, sunshine and water. And that means we're hooked on natural gas.”

Perhaps we should save natural gas for food production and use other sources to power our refrigerators? Cox later writes, “Vaclav Smil, distinguished professor at the University of Manitoba and author of the 2004 book Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch and the Transformation of World Food Production, has demonstrated the global food system's startling degree of dependence on nitrogen fertilization. Using simple math -- the kind you can do in your head if there's no calculator handy -- Smil showed that 40 percent of the protein in human bodies, planet-wide, would not exist without the application of synthetic nitrogen to crops during most of the 20th century.”

That means that without the use of industrially produced nitrogen fertilizer, about 2.5 billion people out of today's world population of 6.2 billion simply could never have existed. This also means that if there is a long-term disruption in the natural gas supply, people will starve.

The momentum of past population growth is expected to add two to four billion people to the world's population by 2050, even with concerted efforts to rein in growth. Almost all of the increase will occur in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. That will double the demand for nitrogen fertilizer in those regions, and by that time, says Cox, “60 percent of their inhabitants will depend existentially (in the literal sense, not the philosophical one) on natural gas-derived nitrogen fertilizer.”

Aside:

Some say human population is exceeding earth’s carrying capacity. There is not enough, water, fish, timber, steel, oil etc. to sustain human consumption. In nature when a species experience a population explosion, it is only able to last as long as the environment permits. Usually famine or disease will minimize the numbers in order for the ecosystem to return to a state of equilibrium. Should nature run its course in terms of human population or should we continue to beat nature with ingenuity?

Here are some fun facts about natural gas:
http://www.pge.com/microsite/safety_esw_ngsw/ngsw/more/facts.html

Time Magazine Finally Covers Peak Oil

By Shepherd Bliss

Time magazine became the most recent mainstream publication to finally give detailed coverage to Peak Oil. Its Oct. 31 twelve-page spread on “The Future of Energy” follows major articles in USA Today, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle and other big city dailies in recent months. They finally mention the coming Peak Oil that many geologists have been warning us about for years. Such articles appear after two major groundbreaking cover articles on oil by National Geographic, the first in the summer of 2004.

The October Esquire offered a two-page “Five Minute Guide: Oil,” which begins with the question “What’s ‘peak oil’?” Time’s lead article “How to Kick the Oil Habit” by Michael D. Lemonick runs four illustrated pages. Its only highlighted quotation is from Richard Heinberg, author of The Party’s Over:Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Society: “Price signals come much too late, and we will endure a tremendous amount of hardship that could have been averted if we’d acted sooner.” The article’s sub-head recommends that people “get ready for the withdrawal symptoms.”

In his two recent books on energy descent and in public speaking in the US, Europe, Africa, and Latin America, Heinberg describes how rising gasoline prices indicate the deeper and potentially devastating reality that the globe is running out of the petroleum that fuels contemporary societies.

Three major news events apparently stimulated the Time articles: 1) gasoline prices that “are roughly 25% higher than they were a year ago,” 2) “last week('s) 2005 Tokyo Motor Show,” where “carmakers practically ran over one another promoting their versions (of hybrid cars) in attempts to catch up with Honda and Toyota,” and 3) Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Time notes, “A hurricane like Katrina or Rita or last year’s Ivan could trigger a shortage by putting even a few of the remaining U.S.-based refineries out of business for a few weeks.”

Time quotes oil optimist Daniel Yergin, author of The Prize in 1991 and chairman of the Cambridge Energy Research Associates, as saying, “There’s a lot of technological innovation kind of bubbling that really has captured the imagination and obsession of a lot of people.” But Time writer Lemonick wonders, “Are we moving fast enough?” Energy investment banker Matthew Simmons responds to Yergin’s familiar argument that this is the fifth or sixth time that the world has run out of oil. Simmons, who doubts that Saudi Arabia has the petroleum reserves that it claims, argues, “This is a shortage where demand actually exceeds supply. A confluence of trends has made oil shortages inevitable, not optional.

One is the unexpectedly rapid expansion of India’s and China’s energy needs.” Amory Lovins, director of the Rocky Mountain Institute, adds, according to Time, that “oil companies, worried that these changes could leave them behind, are starting to think of themselves instead as broad-based energy companies.” Lovins says that “Shell and BP are already headed in that direction.” Shell has apparently become the largest seller of biofuels and is buying up solar panels.

Time’s spread, in fact, includes two familiar full-page BP ads, where the former British Petroleum corporation has re-positioned itself as “Beyond Petroleum.” These ads reveal the interlock of today’s mainstream media profiting from its promotion of such corporations. By placing the ads next to its allegedly objective news stories, Time mixes advertising and news, which journalism students are taught should have a “firewall” between them. One BP ad advocates that “It’s Time To Go on a Low-Carbon Diet.”

This ad advances natural gas, solar, and hydrogen as the appropriate substitutes for oil. The other ad highlights the assertion that “Natural gas is the clean bridge to renewable energy,” noting that, “Today natural gas makes up more than half of BP’s energy production.” One could almost think that BP is earth-friendly, rather than profit-oriented, polluting, and climate-changing. Various authors concerned with energy decline have documented how the combined energy from the proposed replacements for today’s cheap oil will not provide nearly the quantity of energy that we now derive from petroleum. Julian Darley of the Post Carbon Institute, for example, wrote the book High Noon for Natural Gas: The New Energy Crisis. It “looks at the coming shortage of natural gas in North America.” In both The Party’s Over and Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World, Heinberg refutes BP’s claim that natural gas, solar, and hydrogen will be able to provide the extensive energy that petroleum currently does, even when combined with other energy sources.

Consequently, demand for an increased use of the highly-polluting and climate-changing coal and for more use of the dangerous and expensive nuclear power are beginning to grow. Two separate, contrasting half-page viewpoints appear in Time: “It’s the End of Oil” by retired Princeton professor Kenneth Deffeyes and “Oil is Here to Stay” by Peter Huber, co-author of the new book The Bottomless Well. “World oil production is about to reach a peak and go into its final decline,” scientist Deffeyes contends. “The ‘Peak Oil’ theory fits nicely on a cocktail napkin,” counters the dismissive Huber. “Nonsense. Technology and politics -- not geology -- determine how much we pump and what it costs.” Huber contends that ample oil can be extracted by drilling in Alaska and off the shores of California and Florida, as well as in the tar sands of Canada and Venezuela.

Demands for such drilling -- in spite of their extensive environmental damage to the Earth and contributions to global warming -- are already increasing as the oil supply decreases, while the demand for oil products heightens. “It may be that the developments are coming too late to allow a smooth transition to the post-petroleum era,” Time writer Lemonick notes in a paragraph on Heinberg’s ideas. Heinberg contends that “all these things need an enormous lead time.” Lemonick concludes, “As consumers, we need time to make adjustments -- often very expensive ones -- to the new technologies.” Well-illustrated and helpful articles on “How Green Can We Get?,” “7 Cool New Ideas,” and “How to Save $$$ Now” complete Time's coverage. Time reports how people can “save your green by going green.”

It adds its voice to the chorus recommending that people slow down their cars, downgrade from premium gas, tune up and go hybrid. During the same week of Time’s coverage Big Oil reported its highest quarterly earnings ever and the highest profits of any corporation in history. The combined profits of ExxonMobil, Shell and Chevron for the third quarter were $29 billion. Exxon/Mobil profits are up 79% and Shell’s are up 68% from last year. ExxonMobil’s third quarter net income alone is enough to cover all Social Security benefit payments for three months or to fund military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan for more than two months.

Perhaps there is a relationship between Big Oil and those wars? ExxonMobil sales for this quarter are already over $100 billion -- the highest in corporate history. ConocoPhillips, the nation’s third largest integrated oil and gas company, reported third-quarter profits surged 89%. This is in spite of hurricanes ravaging the heart of the nation’s oil industry in the Gulf Coast. Big Oil seems to profit from even disasters and turn them into opportunities. Yet Big Oil cried poverty last summer and its congressional allies added billions in tax breaks to its energy bill, not for customers, but for corporations.

Now even Republicans in Congress are considering measures to respond to the public’s increasing criticism of Big Oil at a time when parts of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida are still reeling from recent hurricanes. Representatives of the industry’s American Petroleum Institute keep assuring Congress and the public that prices will return to pre-hurricane levels. Peak Oil theorists doubt that this will happen, contending that prices will continue to go mainly up, as they bounce around in the increasingly unstable energy industry. Heinberg’s next appearances on Peak Oil include speaking on November 5 at San Francisco’s Green Festival, where around 25,000 people are expected to hear over 100 speakers on environmental issues at the two-day annual event.

Heinberg and eco-philosopher Joanna Macy will speak for an hour. Half a dozen other speakers will address Peak Oil during the weekend, including activists from Willits in Northern California, who advocate “re-localization” as the solution to energy descent. Heinberg has also been invited to be one of four speakers (including Prince Charles of Wales, who will deliver the keynote address) at a by-invitation-only meeting in San Francisco in early November.

Other invited participants include oil industry executives as well as other prominent business and government leaders. Dr. Shepherd Bliss has been a professor of Communication for the last two years at the University of Hawai’i at Hilo. He is currently moving to a farm in Sonoma County, Northern California, mainly because of how Peak Oil will probably strand the isolated, oil-dependent Hawaiian islands. He can be reached at: sb3@pon.net.

Doubts Raised on Saudi Vow for More Oil

Stories on oil (extraction, refining, supply challenges) are getting more ink these days. This NY Times article confirms what has been discussed on this site and others, that, at the very least the Saudis are having a problem keeping up with global demand, and secondly, the issue of depleting oil reserves is a reality.

It’s up to the people to spur a sense of urgency, but it is up to the market to encourage people to act. That is, once we get hit in the pocket book, questions will start being raised. But at that point it will be too late.

We’re hooked on oil.

Doubts Raised on Saudi Vow for More Oil
By JEFF GERTH

WASHINGTON, Oct. 26 - Last spring, the White House publicly embraced plans by Saudi Arabia to increase its oil production capacity significantly. But privately, some officials and others advising the government are skeptical about some of those Saudi forecasts.
The United States relies on a few producers to maintain enough spare capacity to keep prices and markets stable, even during war or disaster. As oil prices have climbed over the last few years amid surging demand and tight supplies, the Bush administration has looked to the Persian Gulf countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, to pump extra oil.

But doubts about Saudi Arabia's assurances of how much it can expand capacity - and for how long - have been raised in a secret intelligence report and in a separate analysis by a leading government oil adviser, according to a federal government official and the oil expert.
If those skeptical assessments are correct, the administration's hopes of increasing supplies would become still more difficult to fulfill. Washington's expectations about oil production from Iraq and the United Arab Emirates have proved overly optimistic, and the White House has failed to heed advice about both those countries from industry and government specialists, according to documents and interviews.

The challenges facing the Bush administration on energy come as oil companies are set to report record profits resulting from soaring prices for oil and natural gas. Exxon Mobil, the world's largest private oil company, is expected Thursday to announce a quarterly profit exceeding $8.5 billion, more than companies like Intel and Time Warner earn in a full year.

Asked about the profits on Wednesday, the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, said "the government and the private sector have a role to play" in restoring the vital infrastructure damaged by the hurricanes this year along the Gulf of Mexico and over Florida. Gasoline prices spiked after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, straining oil markets already tight because of the uncommonly low levels of spare capacity.

But when it comes to oil supply, American companies are limited: the countries that control most of the world's oil keep out private producers. So whatever the political repercussions from high energy costs, the administration has had little choice but to rely on the promises by Saudi Arabia, the world's largest exporter, that it would continue to be the market's linchpin.
"There's always been this tenet on the American side," said Nawaf Obaid, a consultant to Saudi Arabia on energy security, "that the Saudis knew what they were doing and rightfully so."
But a senior intelligence official, who insisted on remaining anonymous because he was not permitted to speak publicly on the issue, said that the Saudi plans to increase production by nearly 14 percent in the next four years were not enough to meet global demand. Even the Energy Information Administration recently scaled back its expectations of how much more oil the Saudis could pump in 20 years.

To be sure, as Mr. McClellan said Wednesday, there is more to President Bush's energy policy than seeking to ensure surplus capacity. The administration has called for increasing domestic production and refineries, development of alternative and renewable fuels, expanding nuclear energy and, recently, greater conservation. Still, the Persian Gulf countries are seen as crucial in moderating future prices.

During the 2000 presidential campaign, when high gasoline prices were an issue, Mr. Bush pledged to do a better job of influencing Persian Gulf producers to pump more oil.
Early on, the administration was mostly interested in whether the Saudis would produce more oil during the anticipated conflict in Iraq. Long before the war began, Saudi spare capacity - roughly three million barrels a day above the seven million barrels being pumped daily in 2002 - seemed adequate.

Productive capacity depends on the amount of oil in the ground as well as the infrastructure required to drill, process, store and transport the oil. In addition, increasing capacity is very costly and time-consuming.

"The long-term capacity was not considered a problem," said Robert W. Jordan, the American ambassador to Riyadh from 2001 to 2003. The Saudis, he added, "never expressed any concern about the need to expand."

"Nor did we, or at least me, engage them on this topic," he said.

In April 2002, when President Bush met Crown Prince Abdullah, now the Saudi king, the focus was not on oil but on Israeli-Palestinian matters, according to Mr. Jordan. The United States did not press the capacity issue because, even two years later, Saudi officials were publicly expressing confidence that there was no need over the next five years to add capacity.

Going to 12 million or 15 million barrels a day was possible, though, because the country had an estimated 150 billion barrels above the 260 billion in proven reserves, Nansen G. Saleri, a senior Saudi oil executive, said at an oil conference in Washington in February 2004.

Soon, though, rising demand from Asia made the need to invest in new production "a front-burner issue," according to Spencer Abraham, energy secretary in the president's first term. By May 2004, under pressure from the United States and other consumers, the Saudis promised to pump more oil. Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil company, was planning to increase capacity to 12.5 million barrels a day by 2009.

Before long, Ali al-Naimi, the oil minister, and Saudi oil executives were saying that the country could add 200 billion barrels - from existing fields and yet-to-be-discovered resources - to its reserves, enabling production of 15 million barrels a day for 50 years or perhaps longer.
Just before meeting with Prince Abdullah in April, President Bush said he wanted "a straight answer" about how much extra oil the Saudis could pump.

At that session in Texas, the prince reaffirmed the previously announced expansion plans. Saudi Arabia's capacity now stands at about 11 million barrels a day. The Saudis pump about 9.5 million barrels, leaving a cushion of about 1.5 million barrels, mostly of heavier grades not very usable in the West. There is virtually no other global spare capacity.

Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, told reporters after the meeting that the Saudi program was "a very good plan because it addresses the underlying issue you have when you talk about price, which is an issue of availability of oil and availability of capacity."
But there are doubts about the Saudi assertions about how much oil they have. Data about reserves is tightly guarded, and the Saudis dismiss skeptics as uninformed.

But they do not dismiss Edward O. Price Jr., the former head of exploration for Saudi Aramco and an adviser to the United States government on Persian Gulf oil during both Iraq wars. He questioned future reliance on Saudi capacity in an article in The New York Times last year and wanted to know from his former colleagues how they reached their estimate of more than 150 billion barrels of extra oil. Twenty years ago, a detailed study by geologists from four large American oil companies then in partnership with Aramco found little in the way of undiscovered oil resources, he said.

Mr. Saleri, who manages Saudi reservoirs, met with Mr. Price in the United States last year. Saudi Aramco officials declined to respond to questions about the meeting. But Mr. Price said in an interview that Mr. Saleri told him that the basis for the higher oil figures was a global study in 2000 by the United States Geological Survey estimating Saudi Arabia's undiscovered resources at 87 billion barrels.

Mr. Price said he responded that the estimates "by the U.S.G.S. had no credibility and far exceeded the detailed studies by the old Aramco team." The Aramco study, unlike the survey estimate, involved detailed field work.

Questions about Saudi Arabia's long-term estimates were also raised last year in a report by the National Intelligence Council, an advisory panel that produces the government's most authoritative intelligence estimates, according to a government official who insisted on not being identified because the report was classified.

In addition to Saudi Arabia, the Bush administration has viewed the United Arab Emirates as a supplier with excess capacity. In 2001, the emirates planned to increase capacity to 3 million barrels a day by 2005 from 2.5 million barrels a day then. But capacity has not grown in four years, which one administration official attributes to a lack of urgency by emirates officials and a lack of high-level attention by American officials.

An energy policy report by Vice President Dick Cheney in May 2001 recommended that the president actively support initiatives in Persian Gulf nations allowing foreign investment that could lead to increased production. The United Arab Emirates was cited as one of the few countries that could increase its oil-production capacity.

A status report on Mr. Cheney's task force, released in January by the Energy Department, said administration officials moved to carry out the recommendation in four countries. The U.A.E. was not among them, however, and the president was not mentioned in the report.

When Mr. Bush spoke after the Iraq war with Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahayan, the emirates' ruler until his death late last year, he discussed security and Iraq, not oil investment issues, according to a Western diplomat, who spoke on condition of not being identified because of the sensitive nature of discussions between heads of state. A White House spokesman declined to comment.

Since the status report in January, the emirates announced that they would increase capacity to 2.7 million barrels a day by 2006, and long-stalled negotiations with Exxon Mobil to develop an offshore field began moving to completion. But the country's capacity remains at 2.5 million barrels a day, with nothing in reserve, according to the Energy Information Administration.
In Iraq, too, the Bush administration's hopes have been disappointed. The removal of Saddam Hussein in 2003 changed Iraq from a pariah into a possible backstop for global oil markets. Soon after the invasion, top administration officials were bullish about Iraq's production: they said it would exceed the prewar level of 2.5 million barrels a day and reach 3 million barrels by the end of 2003 or late 2004.

But a report in July by the Government Accountability Office found that Iraqi production had declined since late 2004 to 2.1 million barrels a day from 2.5 million barrels, despite White House legislative requests for almost $3 billion to restore the oil industry there to its prewar abilities.

An important reason for the decline, the report found, was improper management of the reservoirs. Gary Edson, then a deputy national security adviser, was told two years ago that Iraqi production would drop, not increase, according to an outside report presented to him.
A White House spokesman, Frederick Jones, declined to discuss the report. But, according to Wayne Kelley, a petroleum engineer who wrote the report and discussed it with Mr. Edson in November 2003, the message fell on deaf ears.