Power Hungry (3 page)

It's a loud, dusty, claustrophobic ballet of horsepower, hydraulics, and brute force. And it is producing what may be the U.S. economy's single most essential commodity: inexpensive energy.

Given the way the energy business is portrayed by politicians, environmental advocates, and various promoters of “green” energy, Hagan and his fellow miners, the mine, the machinery—the entire operation—should be an anachronism. We've repeatedly been told that the modern world of Google, GPS, and HD video will be powered by statuesque wind turbines and shimmering solar panels. The Cardinal Mine is a relic of the nineteenth century, not the vanguard of the twenty-first—or at least that's what the politicos, environmental activists, and promoters have been claiming.

But far from being outdated, the mine, owned by Tulsa-based Alliance Resource Partners, is among the most productive underground coal mines in the United States. The mine, the thirty-fifth largest in America, produces about 6 tons of coal per miner work-hour.
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That's about two times the national average for underground coal mines.
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Shortly before Eric Anderson, the tall, boyish-looking manager of the Cardinal Mine, took me underground, we sat in his office running through the mine's numbers. “We typically mine coal for sixteen hours every day, Monday through Friday,” said Anderson, a burly, friendly guy who got his degree in mine engineering from West Virginia University.
About one hundred employees are working underground at any given time. In 2008, the mine produced about 15,350 tons of high-sulfur bituminous coal per day, most of it burned by electric utilities within the state of Kentucky.
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As Anderson cleared maps and other papers from the table adjacent to his desk, I asked him for the heat content of the coal. His reply: about 12,500 Btu (British thermal units) per pound. I pulled out my laptop and converted the mine's output into its equivalent in barrels of oil. The numbers were surprising, even to Anderson. The mine produces the raw energy equivalent of 66,000 barrels of oil per day.
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And that number—66,000 barrels of oil equivalent—provides a useful metric for understanding what too few of the people who are preaching the glories of the green future seem to grasp: the enormous scale of our energy consumption.

On an average day, the energy output of the Cardinal Mine is nearly equal, in raw energy terms, to the daily output of
all
the solar panels and wind turbines in the United States. It's hard to imagine—and it's probably a bit painful to accept, particularly given the coal industry's lousy public image and the ongoing campaign by environmental groups to reduce coal use and carbon dioxide emissions. But it's true.

Before I demonstrate why, readers should be forewarned that this book contains a lot of numbers. Rest assured, the calculations involved are straightforward and are based on easily verifiable data. Fancy math skills are not required; you need have only a willingness to engage in basic arithmetic. But if we are going to understand our energy challenges, then we must be willing to delve into the data and fearlessly confront the numbers.

So here is the first set of numbers: In 2008, the United States produced 52,026,000 megawatt-hours of electricity from wind and 843,000 megawatt-hours from solar, for a total of 52,869,000 megawatt-hours.
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That's equivalent to about 88,300 barrels of oil per day.
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Thus, on an average day, by itself, the Cardinal Mine, which has about 400 people on its payroll, produces about 75 percent as much raw energy as all of the wind turbines and solar panels in the United States.
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Now let's be clear, the energy coming out of the mine—that 66,000 barrels of oil equivalent in the form of black rocks—is not the same as
the highly ordered electrical energy that comes out of those wind turbines and solar panels. About two-thirds of the heat energy in coal gets lost when it's burned to produce electricity. Nor does the 66,000 barrel figure reflect the mine's energy inputs. The Cardinal Mine has a big appetite for electricity, diesel fuel, water, steel rods, and cinder blocks. Therefore, the net energy produced by the mine is substantially less than 66,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day. Furthermore, that figure doesn't account for the devastation that the global coal industry inflicts on the surface of the Earth through strip mines, mountaintop removal, or the massive ash ponds at power plants. Nor do the figures account for the miners who die each year in the world's coal mines, or the pollutants—sulfur dioxide, soot, and mercury, to name just a few—that are emitted when coal is burned.

I'm not providing the numbers from the Cardinal Mine as a defense—or criticism—of coal. Instead, the 66,000 barrels of oil equivalent figure provides us with a metric—a place that land surveyors call a Point of Beginning—that allows us to begin separating the energy rhetoric from the energy reality.
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And it is important to make clear just how different rhetoric and reality can be when it comes to energy production and use, because Americans are woefully uninformed about the subject, despite the intense interest that energy and the environment have been getting over the past few years.

We use hydrocarbons—coal, oil, and natural gas—not because we like them, but because they produce lots of heat energy, from small spaces, at prices we can afford, and in the quantities that we demand. And that's the absolutely critical point. The energy business is ruthlessly policed by the Four Imperatives: power density, energy density, cost, and scale. The purpose of this book is to bring those factors alive; in doing so, to explain why the transition away from hydrocarbons will be a costly and protracted affair; and to point the way toward viable energy policies and priorities for the next few decades.

Over the past century or so, the United States has built a $14-trillion-per-year economy that's based almost entirely on cheap hydrocarbons.
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No matter how much the United States and the rest of the world may desire a move away from those fossil fuels, the transition to renewable sources of energy—and to no-carbon sources such as nuclear
power—will take most of the twenty-first century and require trillions of dollars in new investment. So, given the Four Imperatives and the stark realities posed by the long energy transition that lies ahead, what are we to do?

Sources
: Energy Information Administration, South Texas Nuclear Operating Company, and Alliance Resource Partners.

That question brings us to the other purpose of this book: to debunk some of the energy myths that have come to dominate our political discussions and to lay out the best “no-regrets” energy policy for the United States and the rest of the world. Analysts have coined the term “no regrets” to describe policies that benefit the economy while also reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. After explaining why so many of the “green” technologies now being promoted simply won't work, I will look at the sources that can provide large amounts of energy while also benefiting the economy and the environment.

Of course, there's tremendous political appeal in “green jobs,” a “green collar economy,” and in what U.S. President Barack Obama calls a “new energy future.”
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We've repeatedly been told that if we embrace
those ideas, provide more subsidies to politically favored businesses, and launch more government-funded energy research programs, then we would resolve a host of problems, including carbon dioxide emissions, global climate change, dependence on oil imports, terrorism, peak oil, wars in the Persian Gulf, and air pollution. Furthermore, we're told that by embracing “green” energy we would also revive our struggling economy, because doing so would produce more of those vaunted “green jobs.”

These claims ignore the hard realities posed by the Four Imperatives. It may be fashionable to promote wind, solar, and biofuels, but those sources fail when it comes to power density. We want energy sources that produce lots of power (which is measured in horsepower or watts) from small amounts of real estate. And that's the key problem with wind, solar, and biofuels: They require huge amounts of land to generate meaningful amounts of power. And although the farm lobby loves biofuels such as corn ethanol, that fuel fails on two counts: power density and energy density. Corn ethanol production requires vast swaths of land, and the fuel that it produces is inferior to gasoline because it is corrosive, it is hydrophilic (meaning it loves water, and adding water to your motor fuel is not a good idea), and it contains just two-thirds of gasoline's heat content.

I'll discuss the Four Imperatives throughout this book, but for now, suffice it to say that power density and energy density are directly related to the other two imperatives: cost and scale. If a source has low power density, it invariably has higher costs, which makes it difficult for that source to scale up and provide large amounts of energy at reasonable prices.

Despite these realities, the deluge of feel-good chatter about “green” energy has bamboozled the American public and U.S. politicians into believing that we can easily quit using hydrocarbons and move on to something else that's cleaner, greener, and, in theory, cheaper. The hard truth is that we must make decisions about how to proceed on energy very carefully, because America simply cannot afford to waste any more money on programs that fail to meet the Four Imperatives. And that's particularly true now. The economy is weak, millions of Americans are unemployed, and record numbers of homes are in foreclosure. We've already wasted plenty of cash—and time—on the corn ethanol scam and
other boondoggles. Congressional mandates forcing motorists to buy ethanol-blended gasoline were supposed to reduce America's dependence on foreign oil and bring energy independence to the United States. Instead, these measures only worsened air quality, increased food costs, damaged untold numbers of engines, and slashed the amount of grain available in the global marketplace.
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People in the United States and around the world are hungry for power. They want it for their cars, motorcycles, and lawnmowers, and they want it for their flat-screen TVs, mobile phones, computers, and Cuisinarts. They want power because power drives those devices and in doing so creates wealth and increases personal happiness. And although this book will expose many of the myths about “green” energy, it will deliver some good news about America's situation. It will demonstrate that the smartest, most forward-looking U.S. energy policy can be summed up in one acronym: “N2N”—natural gas to nuclear.

Natural gas and nuclear power are the fuels of the future because they have high power density, are relatively low cost, and can provide the enormous quantities of energy we need. In addition, they produce lower carbon-dioxide emissions than oil and coal and almost zero air pollution. N2N means using natural gas in the near term as we transition to nuclear power over the long term.

N2N will work because the United States sits atop gargantuan natural gas resources. Over the past few years, the U.S. natural gas industry has developed technologies that wring natural gas from shale beds. Thanks to those technological breakthroughs in the production of what the industry calls “unconventional gas,” estimates of U.S. gas resources are larger than they've ever been before. How large? U.S. gas resources are thought to contain the energy equivalent of more than 350 billion barrels of crude oil, or roughly as much as the known oil reserves of Saudi Arabia and Venezuela combined.

Of course, much of that gas won't be produced, because of its cost or its distance from pipelines. Nevertheless, the revolution in shale gas production, along with continuing discoveries of offshore gas deposits and drilling success for onshore conventional gas, has led gas analysts to increase their estimates not only of U.S. gas resources but of global gas resources as well. In November 2009, the International Energy Agency
(IEA) estimated that recoverable global gas resources now total about 30,000 trillion cubic feet.
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At current global rates of consumption, that's enough to last for 280 years.
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Though natural gas offers enormous near-term potential, our long-term energy plans must include nuclear—and before going further, let me be clear about where I stand on nuclear power: If you are anti–carbon dioxide and anti-nuclear, you are pro-blackout.

There is no other low- or no-carbon form of electricity generation that can provide relatively large amounts of new power generation at a relatively agreeable cost and do so relatively soon. And the key word in that sentence is “relatively.” There is no question that nuclear power will be expensive. It will also require substantial governmental involvement if it is to be safe and affordable. And though nuclear power has big up-front costs, particularly in comparison with several other forms of electricity generation, it also provides the essential always-on power that our society demands. It is the only existing source that offers a long-term, large-scale, zero-emissions alternative to coal- and natural-gas-fired power generation. Obama understands this—or at least he appears to. In an April 2009 speech in Prague, he said, “We must harness the power of nuclear energy on behalf of our efforts to combat climate change.”
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