Nothing is free in transportation What we found was that no road that we built in Texas paid for itself. None. Mike Krusee (R) Chairman Transportation Committee Texas House of Representatives Introduction: Grow Rail to Grow America
Association, before the Subcommittee On Railroads of the House Committee On Transportation And Infrastructure On The U.S. Rail Capacity Shortage, April 26 2006. NCI especially recommends it to new visitors to this site, and to its readers who are editors and journalists, because it is one of the best descriptions of the current transportation crisis in America --- and what to do about it --- that we have read. APTA President Bill Millar integrates the rail discussion into the total transportation debate, and that is how it should be. NCI strongly believes that America must learn to fund, design, and build transportation as a system, not as a collection of modes. – Ed. Chairman LaTourette, Ranking Member Brown, and members of the House Railroads Subcommittee, on behalf of the American Public Transportation Association (APTA), we thank you for this opportunity to appear before you today to discuss the U.S. Rail Capacity Crunch. We very much appreciate that the Subcommittee is taking a comprehensive view, considering both passenger and freight issues. While goods movement is critical, the emergence of America’s service economy has heightened the importance of on-time movement of people as well. America long has enjoyed the most extensive and efficient transportation system in the world. Today, other countries are catching up. Policies that support the growth of railroads - passenger and freight - are critical to America’s mobility and our ability to compete in a global economy. The critical capacity issues affecting railroads - passenger and freight - are a part of an overall crisis in transportation system capacity that also affects our airports, roadways, port facilities, and public transportation infrastructure. Such congestion is putting severe stress on America’s transportation and logistics network, which historically has given America its economic edge. Positioning for a rail renaissance The past twenty-five years has been a period of significant change for the American railroad industry. While the Staggers Act of 1980 is rightfully credited with helping the once threatened railroad industry become profitable again, it has also led to significant consolidation and downsizing of America’s railroad network. Rail freight traffic has grown in many places to the limits of capacity. What has been rational and profitable from a railroad shareholder viewpoint, has also resulted in a downscaling of America’s overall rail network. Meanwhile, over this same 25 year period commuter railroads have blossomed, and have also been a major success story. Last year, passengers took 423 million trips on our commuter railroads, a nationwide ridership increase of 2.8 percent from the year 2004. Ridership increases are being experienced by every commuter railroad in America. The Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act - A Legacy for Users (SAFETEA-LU), enacted in summer 2005, includes significant funding to expand rail systems and build new rail systems. This year, new commuter rail systems will open in Nashville and Albuquerque. New systems are in advanced stages of development in Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, Portland, Charlotte, Raleigh, and Denver. Other communities are not far behind, among them Phoenix, Ann Arbor, Austin, Atlanta, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh and Orlando. These projects will help reduce congestion and provide mobility options, integrate regional economies, and provide one of the quickest ways for individuals and families to beat the high cost of gasoline. Looking to the future, railroads - passenger and freight - are poised to play an even greater role in enabling commerce and economic growth. Earlier this year America surpassed the 300 million mark in population. In 30 more years we are projected to reach 400 million. Most of the population will be living in metropolitan areas, making our use of land and transportation corridors all the more important. A look at the Los Angeles region’s Metrolink commuter rail system provides a projection of demand anticipated for commuter rail services. Freight and passenger rail traffic in the L.A. / Orange County / Riverside corridor is expected to leap from 172 trains today to a total of 265 trains by 2010, and to a projected 390 trains per day in 2025. While America needs a transportation policy balanced on the strengths and synergies of roads, ports and rails, overall there should be a higher reliance on rail modes, which are much more efficient in terms of land and energy. Indeed, adding rail capacity is imperative also for its positive impact on parallel freeways already clogged with traffic. These urban/suburban areas have roads that are not only hopelessly congested, but roads that have already been expanded to close to their maximum capacity. Adding highway capacity in these areas is enormously expensive. For a fraction of the cost of such road construction/expansion, existing railroad rights-of-way can be reactivated / expanded / improved to accommodate traffic and reduce highway congestion for both freight and passenger movements. Tight capacity has affected commuter railroads and their riders Overcrowded trains, stations and park-and-ride lots, not to mention queues of trains waiting to pull into stations, are visible signs that existing rail infrastructure is being overburdened. Facilities that were designed for a certain level of service are now seeing passenger volumes that exceed these limits. In addition, as more trains are added to the same amount of track, scheduling and on-time performance becomes a greater challenge. Longer freight trains - as long as 21/2 miles - also make sidings hard to utilize, and makes on-time performance and shared operations more difficult. Commuter railroads have sought to maximize throughput by lengthening trains and converting fleets to double-deck cars. Systems such as CalTrain’s have also looked to creative scheduling to maximize the use of available capacity. Strategic scheduling of The Baby Bullet trains serving the San Francisco Bay Area have been a major success in this regard, increasing system ridership by over 20 percent and significantly increasing fare revenues. Confronting system bottlenecks is another key. For example, during rush hour each day, several commuter trains per minute - carrying hundreds of thousands of passengers - pass through the Northeast Corridor tunnel linking New Jersey and New York. To accomplish such an operational feat each day is a minor miracle. Planning for future growth becomes another question. On lines owned by freight railroads and shared with commuter lines, innovative ideas have been applied to enhance the compatibility of shared-track operations. A tighter scheduling of freight traffic, more compatible speeds, elevation of curves represent some of the operating practices that have been negotiated. In many places public funds have been used for capacity improvements in order to accommodate commuter rail operations. In Virginia, an agreement is in place providing for incremental increases in passenger train operating privileges as publicly financed capacity improvements are constructed to relieve bottlenecks. Other places have reported that funds invested in adding infrastructure capacity get eaten up by increased freight traffic. It is possible that we can deal with rail freight bottlenecks at the same time we address the needs for high- speed rail. Proposed high-speed rail systems such as Midwest Regional Rail Initiative will benefit freight systems and will mitigate if not eliminate bottlenecks that occur in Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Toledo, St. Paul, and St. Louis. Conversely, inaction on the freight corridor capacity issue will prolong indefinitely the process of implementing new or improved corridor services. Examples include the lengthy discussion surrounding the initial commuter line proposed for Atlanta, the multi-year investments made in the Seattle- Portland route, and many other routes that are ripe for passenger service. Strategic importance of rail corridors in built-up urban areas Historically, America’s rail corridors have been used for both freight and passenger purposes. Many corridors go back to the time when federal land-grants were awarded as incentives for railroad companies to build in developing sections of America. For a long period of time both passenger and freight services were operated by the private sector under laws governing public utilities. As passenger operations were abandoned by private railroads, services were often taken over and/or supported financially by public entities. Today, over 90 percent of commuter rail trips are on lines that are publicly owned. This includes large, long- established systems such as New York’s Long Island Rail Road and Metro North Rail Road, NJ Transit, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, and the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. Newer systems such as Florida’s Tri-Rail, the Trinity Railway Express in Texas, and soon-to-open systems in Albuquerque and Salt Lake City have opted to acquire their own rights-of-way. Chicago’s Metra system and the Metrolink system in Los Angeles own some of their lines, while using other lines owned by freight railroads. Systems including the Virginia Railway Express, Seattle’s Sounder, the Altamont Commuter Express and Nashville’s Music City Star system operate entirely on tracks owned by freight railroads. The cost and availability of suitable real estate in built-up urban environments means that growth of rail passenger service will be highly dependent on access to existing rights-of-way. It will often make sense to use existing railroad right-of-way for new commuter rail projects. As a matter of community design and good public policy, this is preferable to dislocating homeowners and businesses in the acquisition of new right-way- way. Ironically, many transit agencies typically are able to exercise eminent domain to acquire the property they need, except with railroads. When it comes to railroad right-of-way, there is no requirement for any process for taking into consideration the public interest. In 2001 several bi-partisan bills were introduced that would have created a federal process to protect the public interest and resolve disputes that arise when parties cannot agree on terms and conditions for the use of railroad right-of-way. Freight railroads would benefit from such a process. Simply put, when investments are made in freight corridors, such investments in track, signals and infrastructure benefit everyone, and also bring revenue to the railway owner. The questions should be: 1) How can the freight railroad get a fair deal for the use of its property, and 2) How can we deliver to the public critical rail passenger projects without prolonged delay or consternation? Passenger and freight railroads should grow together! How will commuter railroads be able to achieve the expected rate of growth? Certainly, it will require a partnership among communities, freight railroads and government partners. Collectively, we need to figure out ways to grow to the challenge. The American economy depends on the efficient movement of people and goods. Rail freight systems operating at full capacity and providing maximum return to shareholders is good for some, but it is not where America’s interest should stop. In Tennessee, Virginia and many other states, a lack of rail freight capacity has resulted in more truck traffic on the interstate highways causing congestion at near-crisis proportions. America needs new policies that will enable economic growth rather than hinder it.
SAFETEA-LU as a landmark in federal transportation policy, it remains true that in the United States about 2 percent of GNP is invested in transportation infrastructure, down from historical levels of about 21/2 percent. Many of the ideas that have been put on the table have merit. The States for Passenger Rail organization has been adamant and consistent in its call for a dedicated fund for high-speed rail projects, to be supported through tax-exempt and tax-credit bonds, as is proposed by this Committee’s Ride-21 legislation. APTA is supportive of this concept and concurs that such a fund needs to be separate and distinct from the federal Highway Trust Fund and Mass Transit Account. Continued funding and expansion of the Swift High Speed Rail Act is another important tool that can enable growth of high speed rail. The bottom line is that we need to create a favorable policy climate in which high speed rail systems can evolve and serve the mobility needs of Americans. Freight railroads have promoted the concept of investment tax credits as a partial offset for amounts of private capital reinvested in private railroad infrastructure in instances where there is a public benefit. We believe that a key public benefit should be the accommodation of passenger trains. Difficulties in operating passenger service in a freight-owned right-of-way have caused some systems to acquire their own right-of- way. I contend, however, that the co-existence of freight and passenger rail services on common trackage / rights-of-way can and must be sustained to make fully effective use of these assets, and expanded federal investment in rail must be structured in a way that ensures reasonable access at a fair price. Some rail passenger systems are developing innovative ways to calculate the “public benefit” derived from freight railroads cooperation in rail passenger services, and what the freight railroad partner should be entitled to as a result. Perhaps this is something to build on! Passenger and freight railroads should grow together! Certain rail bottlenecks in the national railroad system may require a national level effort. The CREATE and Alameda Corridor projects are examples. Consistent with earlier discussion, an additional Trans-Hudson rail tunnel would be another example of a project with critical national overtones. The Projects of National Significance program in SAFETEA-LU needs to become a place where multi-modal railroad megaprojects judged to have the most national merit can look to for appropriate funding. For this program to be effective, the timing of the review process must be in step with the strategic dealings of the project itself. Other programs offer possible assistance for addressing capacity issues. The Railroad Rehabilitation and Improvement Financing (RRIF) program is a potential source of important capital funding for both freight and passenger rail projects. Only a limited number of loans have been released under this program since it was constituted in TEA 21, and APTA urges that any remaining administrative obstacles be cleared in order to put this innovative program to use. Certainly, technology can offer solutions as well. APTA appreciates the ability of positive train control and similar technologies and its potential for enhancing safety while enabling railroad to operate at a higher level of service. An overarching issue will be to get projects done sooner. Projects that sit on the drawing board an inordinate number of years do no good for the American economy. Project sponsors who have gotten bogged down in the federal funding process or in negotiations with freight railroads are beginning to consider whether the only way to get projects done in a reasonable timeframe is to forego these partnerships. The process should be better than that. A central theme of SAFETEA-LU was to expedite program delivery. China is one country where they cannot seem to build new rail capacity fast enough. Let’s do the same in America! In regard to high-speed rail, while America watches, industrialized countries, and some not so advanced countries, are rapidly seizing on high-speed rail systems to complement their trans and intercontinental airlines and to interconnect and support their metro area transit systems. This includes the new 7,000 - 12,000 mile high-speed rail system now under construction in China. It is a plan to connect all provinces and the 30 largest cities in a national grid system that will share corridors with freight operations but have dedicated tracks for high-speed rail in dense corridors. Annual investment in Chinese high-speed passenger rail construction will be $16 to $20 billion. New signaling technology and centralized traffic control will also improve Chinese railroad capacity. High-speed rail is also making advances in Japan, France, Germany, Sweden, Italy, Spain, South Korea and Taiwan and is being adopted in Mexico and other emerging economies. On the business side, non-American firms are the primary beneficiaries of this expansion in high- speed rail capacity. German, Japanese, French and Canadian railway equipment and signaling technology suppliers are seizing on new business opportunities, while the U.S. continues to fall behind in what could be described as “The Great Railroad Building Race.” As Congress and the Administration pursue the policy goal of energy independence, our transportation policy in many ways favors our petroleum-dependent modes and not our energy efficient systems. In contrast, Europe and Japan have used high-speed rail systems to replace short-hop airlines and a significant amount of inter-city auto travel in those areas. Short-hop airlines are more petroleum intensive and polluting than a person driving an SUV, on a seat-mile basis. Finally, a key determinant in the growth of commuter and high speed rail relates to liability insurance requirements and conditions. Acts of terrorism against transit in Madrid in 2004 and in London in 2005 have raised the stakes on liability coverage. Some freight railroads are now requiring coverage of $500 million - at times as much as $700 million - a severe detriment for providing rail passenger service. One approach would be to build on the Amtrak Reform and Accountability Act of 1997, which caps passenger claims at $200 million. It would be an enormous boost to passenger rail operation if this cap could be clarified to apply to all claims. Conclusion In conclusion, America needs to grow its railroads. While some may see passenger and freight railroads as distinct and on different economic paths, I believe there are synergies that can be captured through policies that look at railroads in an inclusive way. We thank the Committee for advancing the dialogue on the future of our rail system with today’s hearing. With only a limited number of transportation corridors, strategies must include freight and passenger rail interests working together. With the completion of the interstate highway system, some have suggested that the national purpose of the federal surface transportation program has been lost. As America competes in the global economy, it is our transportation, logistics and education systems that will give us the advantage. Energy independence and emergency response are among other strategic national goals supported by an increased emphasis on rail. Congressionally created commissions will soon begin looking at these issues in depth. I look forward to working with these commissions, as well as with this Subcommittee. It is our transportation network that can make the difference for America’s position in the global economy Viewpoint: Are we building highways to oblivion? By Joe Baker, Senior Editor Back Most Americans remain in denial or only somewhat aware of the reality of peak oil, climate change and the fiction of unlimited growth. Government is doing little to dispel those notions. While the fact of finite resources is immutable, the politicians plan to build more and bigger roads, pledging hundreds of billions of dollars to expanding the interstate highway network. These massive road plans assume unlimited cheap oil, a condition that is already past. That is a trillion-dollar error that can co-opt the future of our post-carbon society. The public is focused on and concerned about $3-a-gallon gasoline, but that fixation has not resulted in any significant change in public policy. There is no political pressure to tax windfall profits, create inter-city rail networks, install solar panels on homes or to take other steps to alleviate the constriction of supplies of fossil fuels. Instead, we are promoting more suburban sprawl, more roads and more overdevelopment all dependent on cheap gasoline. An effective response to dwindling supplies of oil will take cooperative efforts from the local level all the way to the global level. What if someone suggested you dig up that prize bluegrass lawn and plant lettuce, radishes, onions and other food crops? How about if government decided to plow up the golf courses to plant corn and other crops? That’s not as nutty as it sounds. Food will be one of the primary issues of the peak oil period, particularly for large cities that are some distance from farmlands. In the not-too-distant future, those big trucks may not be rolling in at your local supermarket, and the shelves may be rather bare. We need a new transportation policy. Highway construction, which is a key part of our car culture economy, links real estate speculators, developers, road construction firms, sand and gravel mining companies, and lending institutions. Not surprisingly, in most places, these people are the bankrollers of local politicians, who make the zoning and planning decisions about building new highways and the associated development. Considering the many campaign donations by developers, take a look at the local County Board. How many members are in the real estate or legal professions or have ties to developers? Witness the strong political pressure to extend Perryville Road. Drive those cars. Witness the Sunil Puri/Dyn Cannell, LLC’s request for a special-use permit to pursue a 123-acre subdivision in Rockton township—right next to the Nygren Wetland Preserve (See related stories on page A1, A5 and B5). Beloit dumped sludge containing heavy metals in the 1980s on the very land for this “Planned Community Development.” Drive those cars. Witness the huge subdivision that is being foisted on the Village of Caledonia under questionable circumstances. Drive those cars. Witness the costs and taxes Loves Park is trying to foist upon Rockford and farmers for the extension of Riverside Boulevard. Drive those cars. Witness what happened to the Ditzlers, their wetlands and a Native American historical site for the Springfield- Harrison extension at the hands of the County Board. Drive those cars. In the 1950s, the country built the interstate highway system, inspired by Hitler’s Autobahn network in Nazi Germany. That development largely happened because of a conspiracy among General Motors, Firestone Tire and Standard Oil to eradicate public transit systems in more than 100 cities. If you doubt that, go on the Internet and punch in “streetcar conspiracy” and see what comes up. There are numerous articles documenting these events. Now, we are trying to rectify that mistake. We are spending billions on new light rail and streetcar networks in cities across the country. Rockford and Winnebago County are trying to obtain rail service for this area. Had we left the rails in place, we would not be as dependent on cars and trucks today, and dealing with peak oil would be much easier. Rail transport is much more fuel efficient than automobiles. The interstate highways soon created huge areas of auto-dependent suburbs, which ringed the inner cities with development, leaving the core of the city largely neglected. In a speech in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. said: “These 40 million [poor] people are invisible because America is so affluent, so rich; because our expressways carry us away from the ghetto, we don’t see the poor.” A number of cities, including Chicago, have had campaigns to stop the construction of highways. Freeway opposition was common in the 1960s, and few new roadways were proposed. But a resurgence of such plans occurred in the 1990s, with several upgrades of the interstate system, proposed to aid in implementing the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). These plans called for new and expanded north-south truck routes to expedite traffic between Canada and Mexico, plus many other projects to benefit the highway lobby, big companies like Wal-Mart, and ever-growing suburban sprawl. That was President George H. Bush’s highway law. Mark Rabinowitz of permatopia.com, said laws were added to expand the program during the Bill Clinton administration and now in the second George W. Bush administration. The public, he said, has paid little attention, even the very groups that do not want more roads. He notes many environmental groups were fooled into focusing on proposed bike paths to accompany these highways while ignoring the majority of the funding was going for the roads. A Washington, D.C.-area bicycle group, for example, is urging its members to demand inclusion of a bicycle path with the $3 billion Inter County Connector superhighway in Maryland. This flies in the face of other environmental groups there who have spent years fighting this highly destructive project. Hopefully, the Larry Morrissey administration’s good move of planning to connect the area’s disconnected bike paths and putting bike lanes on some streets will not take the same route as Maryland’s debacle. In Portland, Ore. Interstate 84 carries six lanes of freeway traffic plus a light rail line. The traffic on the roadway, Rabinowitz said, is helping to melt the polar ice caps. but commuters have transportation options. The electricity to run the train is provided by a mix of coal, natural gas, hydropower, nuclear power and wind. We need a strong environmental challenge to centralized energy conglomerates’ plans to revive nuclear power, “clean” coal, oil drilling in wilderness areas and turning farmland and forests into production of biofuels. These things are unlikely to stop until we explode the myth that we can have unlimited, endless growth in a finite world. Sustainability refers to practices that can be continued generation after generation. We have a long way to go. Walk. Bike. Buy hybrid and E-85 vehicles. Live close to work or in the central city, and fight development that robs us of our nature and farmland. Don’t drive those cars. Editor and Publisher Frank Schier contributed to this editorial. From the May 31-June 6, 2006, issue -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 2002-2006 - The Rock River Times Copyright © 2002-2006 - The Rock River Times "There's no real reason that the public should like rail over rubber tires, but they do, and developers do, and it's a fact of life." Keith Jones Executive Director Central Arkansas Transit Authority http://www.tulsaworld.com/EmailStoryDisplay.asp?ID=060521_Bu_E1_Commu11039
By RUSSELL RAY Energy writer 5/21/2006 When I think of Tulsa's future, I see commuter trains hauling people from all directions to a downtown district brimming with storefronts and featuring a major arena. The arena is under construction, and city leaders are pushing plans to turn downtown into a thriving retail and entertainment center. What no one is talking about, however, is a commuter rail system serving Tulsa and the growing communities around it. No single project could improve the quality of life more in the Tulsa area than a comprehensive system of commuter rails. The following cities have recognized the need for better mass transit and are developing commuter rail systems for their growing populations: Charlotte, N.C.; Albuquerque, N.M.; Ogden, Utah; Nashville, Tenn.; Harrisburg, Pa.; and Austin, Texas. Tulsa County, home to more than 572,000 people, should get on board. Commuter rail, light rail and rapid bus transit are gaining support in communities nationwide. Maybe it's the deepening realization that $3 gasoline could be a permanent part of America's future. Or perhaps it's the fact that a mile of rail is cheaper to build and maintain than a mile of freeway. The benefits of a commuter rail system could be enormous. Less air pollution, less traffic and less money spent on road repair. Best of all, it could save you a lot of money. Those who commute from Broken Arrow to downtown Tulsa probably spend about $40 a week on gasoline. It would cost roughly $10 a week to take a train. That's a savings of $30 a week, or $120 a month. The Tulsa area has an advantage over other communities competing for federal funding because tracks run through the entire county in all directions. "There are tracks all over," said Bill Cartwright, general manager of Tulsa Transit. "It's like a spider web. They all end up downtown." Commuter rail for the Tulsa area was proposed in the 1980s, but the idea died after a report indicated the population wasn't big enough to support the cost of operating such a system. But a lot has changed since then. Gasoline prices have nearly tripled, and the number of people living in Jenks, Broken Arrow, Bixby and Owasso has skyrocketed. Since 1990, the populations of Jenks and Bixby have nearly doubled. During the same period, Owasso's population has more than doubled and Broken Arrow's has risen 45 percent. Ridership on Tulsa Transit buses is up 29 percent from last year, Cartwright said. "We haven't increased our service hours one bit," he said. "People just can't afford these gas prices, and they're looking for options." All classes of people are riding the bus today. White-collar workers and blue-collar workers. Accountants and custodians. People who can afford to drive to work are opting for mass transit, for either financial or moral reasons. The idea that died in the '80s, I think, would flourish today. But it will only work if people in Tulsa and the rapidly growing suburbs are willing to embrace a new lifestyle that relies less on the automobile. It would require a drastic cultural change that some say we're not ready for. The only way to find out is to start the discussion. A bare-bones feasibility study, Cartwright said, could be done for $75,000 to $100,000. "We should be looking ahead," he said. "If we're not looking forward, we're going to get caught with our shorts down." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Russell Ray 581-8380 russell.ray@tulsaworld.com Related Photos & Graphics View in Print (PDF) Format Copyright © 2006, World Publishing Co. All rights reserved. For Immediate Release, May 1, 2006 Midwest High Speed Rail Association PO Box 805877 Chicago, IL 60680 Rick Harnish Executive Director Office: 773-334-6758 www.midwesthsr.org Statement Regarding Amtrak’s 35th birthday 35 years ago today, Amtrak assumed operation of America's passenger trains nationwide, with no clear mandate from Congress. Many believe that the unspoken mandate was to provide political cover for the elimination of all intercity passenger trains. If that is true, it isn't surprising that America lost 60 percent of its passenger trains on May 1, 1971. The fuel crisis of 1973 made it difficult to kill the American passenger train altogether, but that hasn't stopped people from trying every year since. Despite the annual attacks, Amtrak has successfully maintained a core network that will be increasingly important to our economy in the years ahead. With China and India driving up the demand for oil, we have entered a much more severe and longer lasting fuel crisis. We can no longer afford the annual Amtrak funding circus. While America has dithered over pennies for Amtrak, our worldwide competitors have invested billions of dollars in highly productive, fuel-efficient railroad networks. Soon, in both Europe and China, high-speed trains will link cities as far apart as Chicago and the East Coast. As fuel costs go up, they will simply take more trips by train. We will be stuck at home, unable to afford the trip. And to make it worse, the highway trust fund is expected to be bankrupt in three short years. Simply maintaining the existing highway network will require a substantial tax increase. There will not be enough left over to grow the system. We must begin an aggressive program to expand the passenger train network nationwide and we must do it soon. Railroads carry more people at higher speeds for a fraction of the investment needed for highways. Shortened travel times, more productive travel and reduced fuel consumption come as part of the package. By investing the cost of just two tanks of gas in faster trains today, we can build a stronger economy and prepare for even higher gas prices in the future. The first step is to stop bickering about Amtrak and get to the hard work ahead: Working with freight railroads to upgrade their tracks for faster and more frequent trains, both passenger and freight. It is the only affordable option. ________________________________________________________ The Midwest High Speed Rail Association is a member-supported non-profit educational organization promoting the development of fast, frequent and dependable train service connecting the entire Midwest. Our members include business leaders, mayors and individuals that want the option of traveling by train. Rick Harnish Midwest High Speed Rail Association PO Box 805877 Chicago, IL 60680 773-334-6758 Join us at www.midwesthsr.org |
National Association of Railroad Passengers 900 2nd St., N.E., Suite 308 Washington, DC 20002-3557 (202) 408-8362, fax (202) 408-8287 http://www.narprail.org narp@narprail.org Facts On Occasion of Amtrak’s 35th Anniversary For Immediate Release Saturday, April 29, 2006 - #06-04 Contacts: Ross Capon (cell: 301-385-6438), David Johnson (cell 202-438-1349) Amtrak’s 35th birthday is Monday, May 1. In observing this anniversary for a resource whose importance the public increasingly recognizes, reporters are urged to consider the following facts. Ø Ridership increased in eight of the last nine years. The Fiscal 2005 level of 25.4 million is up 29% from 1996. Ø Similarly, the yield (average revenue per passenger mile) rose in ten of the last eleven years, with the FY 2005 level up 65% from the 1994 level. Amtrak is not “buying” ridership with cheap fares. Ø Northeast Corridor “endpoint” on-time performance was 90% in March and a similar level in April. The premium Acela service is largely recovered from last year’s technical problems that sidelined the train-sets from April to September. Ø Long distance trains are well-used. They accounted for 47% of Amtrak’s passenger-miles last year (a passenger-mile is one passenger carried one mile). The average long distance train carried 356 passengers per trip. Ø Long distance trains are the only intercity passenger trains in 25 states. Ø It is misleading to say “buying everyone a plane ticket is cheaper than running an Amtrak train.” Many Amtrak cities have no air service and many more have no discount air service. Also, many Americans cannot or chose not to fly. Ø Amtrak is controlling food and beverage costs. On most long-distance trains, Amtrak is revising dining car processes and reducing on-board staff; reductions began before Christmas on two routes and are scheduled to be complete before the end of May. Ø Carriers worldwide consider on-board food and beverage service as necessary to attract business, not as profit centers. They measure food losses as a percentage of ticket revenues. In a November 2005 speech, Jonathan Metcalf, Chief Operating Officer of Britain’s Great Northeastern Railway, said that food service on his trains, “probably loses [$3.5-$5.4 million US] a year. If we didn’t do food, we’d lose passengers...it’s a key reason why they travel with us…we probably would have lost [$35-$54 million US] in ticket revenue [without food service].” Ø Amtrak is doing more with fewer employees—the headcount was 24,877 at the end of September, 2001, and 18,944 at the end of February, 2006. On an “apples-to- apples” basis (excluding about 1,630 employees transferred to MBTA in 2003 and Metrolink in 2005), the headcount declined about 4,300 or 18.5%. Ø Amtrak has taken on no new debt since June 2002. From September 2002 to December 2005, Amtrak reduced its outstanding debt by $300 million. Ø The recent rise in gasoline prices reinforces Harris Poll released February 8 showing strong public support for more intercity and commuter passenger rail. Harris’s release began: “As personal travel and freight transportation grows in the future, the American public would like to see an increasing proportion of that traffic going by rail. Commuter and long-distance trains top the list of nine modes of transportation that adults would like to see ‘have an increasing share of passenger transportation.’” http: //www.harrisinteractive.com/harris%5Fpoll/index.asp?PID=638 |
ENERGY PRODUCTION AND SUPPLY -- (House of Representatives - May 16, 2006) [Page: H2618] --- The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 4, 2005, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Bartlett) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader. Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, recently our Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, made a statement that I would like to read. In this statement she said: ``We do have to do something about the energy problem. I can tell you that nothing has really taken me aback more as Secretary of State than the way that the politics of energy is, I will use the word `warping diplomacy,' around the world. We have simply got to do something about the warping now of diplomatic effort by the all-out rush for energy supply.'' Mr. Speaker, the 8th of this March was a really historic date, and it passed and really very few people knew how historic it was. It was 50 years since a report given in San Antonio, Texas, by a world-famous scientist. And I will talk about that a bit more in a few minutes. The 15th of March of this year marked one year from the date that I first came to this floor to talk about the problem that Condoleezza Rice was talking about, about the energy problem; and since that time I have been to the floor several times to talk about that. Since then, there have been two major government studies on this same topic. One of them is known as the ``Hirsch Report,'' from Robert Hirsch, who was the principal investigator for SAIC, a very large prestigious scientific engineering organization. This study was sponsored by the Department of Energy; and for several months after the report was available, it was kind of bottled up inside the agency and we were kind of asking the question, why wasn't it out on the street sooner because it really makes some very significant points. A second study was done at the request of the Army by the Corps of Engineers. And I have those two reports here. Here is the ``Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation and Risk Management.'' The project leader was Dr. Robert Hirsch. And here is that report, paid for by our Department of Energy and done by SAIC. That was dated February of 2005. A few months later, in September of 2005, a report by the Corps of Engineers, and here is a copy of that report, which just got out to the street about 3 months ago, by the way. So for a number of months this was bottled up inside the Pentagon. Both of these reports say essentially the same thing, and I would like to spend a few minutes this afternoon talking about what these two reports say. The first is a quote from the ``Energy Trends and Their Implications, U.S. Army Installations.'' And, Mr. Speaker, anywhere in this report that the Army is mentioned, you could put the United States in, or for that matter the world, and it would have the same meaning. But since they are a part of the Army and this was an Army study, they talk about the Army. This first statement: ``In general, all nonrenewable resources,'' and fossil fuels are generally perceived of as being in the time scale that we are concerned about, nonrenewable. ``In general, all nonrenewable resources follow a natural supply curve. Production increases rapidly, slows, reaches a peak, and then declines at a rapid pace similar to its initial increase. The major question for petroleum is not whether production will peak, but when. There are many estimates of recoverable petroleum reserves, giving rise to many estimates of when peak will occur and how high the peak will be. A careful review of all of the estimates leads to the conclusion that world oil production may peak within a few short years, after which it will decline. Once a peak occurs, then historic patterns of world oil demand and price cycles will cease.'' [Page: H2619] And the next is a quote from the ``Hirsch Report'': ``World oil peaking is going to happen,'' saying the same thing as the Army Corps of Engineers. And, by the way, we have no reason to believe that there was any interchange between these two groups that were doing the study. ``World oil production is going to peak. World production of conventional oil will reach a maximum and decline thereafter.'' Exactly the same thing that the Army Corps of Engineers was saying. ``That maximum is called the peak. A number of competent forecasters project peaking within a decade, others contend it will be later. Prediction of the peaking is extremely difficult because of geological complexities, measurement problems, pricing variations, demand elasticity, and political influences. Peaking will happen, but the timing is uncertain.'' ``Oil peaking presents a unique challenge,'' they say. And then this astounding statement: ``The world has never faced a problem like this.'' There is no precedent. You cannot go back in history to find a problem like this. They say: ``The world has never faced a problem like this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, `` and most of the world experts believe we do not have a decade, in fact, we may be there, ``without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary. Previous energy transitions, wood to coal and coal to oil, were gradual and evolutionary. Oil peaking will be abrupt and revolutionary.'' The next chart shows that these same data inspired 30 prominent Americans, Boyden Gray, Jim Woolsey, and Frank Gaffney, and 27 other very prominent people, among them several retired four-star generals and admirals, to write a letter to the President. In effect what they said was, Mr. President, the fact that we have only about 2 percent of the world's reserves of oil, and we use 25 percent of the world's oil and we import about two-thirds of what we use, presents a totally unacceptable national security risk. We really have to do something about that. As the chart shows here, we represent a bit less than 5 percent of the world's population, about 1 person out of 22. And we are really good at pumping our oil. We have only 2 percent of the reserves, which from that 2 percent of the reserves we are pumping 8 percent of the world's oil, which means we are pumping our wells four times faster than the average. Now, what are they talking about? As the next chart shows, this was all predicted quite awhile ago. To understand the history of this, to put it in context, we have to go back more than half a century to the 1940s and 1950s. A scientist by the name of M. King Hubbert was working for the Shell Oil Company, and he observed the pumping and the exhaustion of individual oil fields. The United States was pretty much first on the scene in any large way. At one time we were the world's largest producer of oil, and I believe the world's largest exporter of oil. And right when we were in our heyday in 1956, M. King Hubbert went to San Antonio, Texas, and gave that famous paper I referred to a few minutes ago, saying that in just 14 years, in about 1970, the United States would peak in oil production; we would reach a maximum. Shell Oil Company did not believe that was going to happen and cautioned that he would make himself a fool and them a fool for hiring him if he went to give that paper and published it. And he went anyway. Then 14 years later, right on schedule, we peaked in oil production. The smooth green curve here was the M. King Hubbert's curve. The more ragged green curve with the larger symbols is the actual production data. And you see that that peaked in 1970 and then fell off. Now, this is the lower 48. In just a moment, we will put another chart up here which shows what happens when you include the Alaskan oil finds. This is the lower 48, and this is what has happened in the lower 48. The red curve there, by the way, is the former Soviet Union, and they kind of came unglued when the Soviet Union fell apart. You see that their production did not reach the potential. They are already on the downside, by the way. They have somewhat more oil than we. They peaked a little bit later. They had a second small peak, but then it is all downhill after that. The next chart shows where our oil has come from in our country. And the rest of the U.S. and Texas, the dark blue and light blue, are what M. King Hubbert was talking about, and these are the actual data points from 1935 to now. We have added to this now the natural gas liquids and the Alaskan oil find, that big oil find in Alaska, Prudhoe Bay, Dead Horse. I have been there, at the very beginning of that 4-foot pipeline through which about a fourth of our domestic production has been flowing. That is on the downside now, by the way, and it is becoming less and less. Notice that there was just a blip and the slide down the other side of Hubbert's Peak with that big Alaska oil find. The thing on this chart, Mr. Speaker, which interests me is that little yellow there on the downside. Just a blip. A small blip. That is the famed Gulf of Mexico oil find. You may remember that. It wasn't all that many years ago we found that, and, boy, that was a lot of oil. There are now 4,000 oil wells out there in the Gulf of Mexico. And that was to save us. It just barely, barely is a ripple in our slide down the other side of Hubbert's Peak. The next chart puts this in world perspective. We have been talking about the United States, and now this takes us to the world. The big bars here are the discovery of oil, and you will notice some of that was found way back in the 1940s, some big discoveries, then the 1950s, and, boy, the 1970s and the 1980s. But notice that since 1980, the finds of oil have been ever less and less, and that is in spite of really good techniques for finding oil. We now have 3D seismic, we have computer modeling, and we have been very aggressive. You see, since about 1980, we have been finding less oil than we are using, because the consumption curve here is this solid black line. At about 1980, you see there the consumption of oil exceeded the oil that we were finding. So for that period between 1980 and now, the deficit between what we found and what we are using has been filled with reserves that we have. Worldwide, pretty big reserves. [Time: 15:45] Not much in our country because we have been pumping our oil for a long time, very aggressively. This is an interesting chart, and anyone who works with these charts knows that the area under one of these curves represents the total amount available. So if you add up all of these little bars, we made a smooth curve through the discovery here. The area under that discovery curve would represent the total amount of oil that we have discovered. Similarly, the area under the consumption curve will represent the total amount of oil that we have consumed. Now, what is very obvious is that you can't consume oil that you haven't found. So what does that mean? Now, you can have any projection for the future that you like. You can assume that we are going to do a lot of enhanced oil recovery, that we are going to find a little bit of oil, most experts believe there isn't that much left, the little bit of oil that remains and pump it very quickly. But one thing is certain: you cannot pump what you haven't found. And so ultimately the area under the consumption curve cannot be greater than the area under the discovery curve. Notice that they are suggesting in this little chart that peaking is going to be at about 2010. Some believe that it may have already occurred. The next chart is an interesting one from the Energy Information Agency, and they use a very strange, in a way, bizarre application of statistics. We have the 95 percent probability in statistics which is the most probable, and something is significant if it is the 95 percent probability. It is highly significant at 97. You can go on down with the 50 percent probability or a 5 percent probability. You can get a little sense of these probabilities when you look at the little chart they draw about a hurricane's path. You notice that for the next 24 hours it is a fairly narrow funnel, and then it gets wider and wider as they go out because of the increased uncertainty as you go out. Well, here the Energy Information Agency has drawn the oil curve, and [Page: H2620]you see that they peaked in 1970. We have been going downhill ever since. And back there, a little bit before 2000 I guess on this graph they made a projection of where we were going. Now, they are using these statistics you see at the bottom down there, the past, which is the red line, and then the 95 percent probability and the mean, which is the 50 percent. The 50 percent probability is not the mean, Mr. Speaker. If you were going to draw this chart realistically, you would have to have another green line that came as far below the yellow line as that one is above it like here, and another blue line that is down here. They are using the 50 percent probability as if it were the mean and saying that is the most probable. Of course in statistics, 95 percent probability is obviously more probable than the 50 percent probability. Well, this bizarre use of statistics results in something that the next chart will show. But just a moment on this one. Notice what has happened since they made this projection. Notice where the red line has been going. It has of course been following the 95 percent probability, although they believe that it should be following the 50 percent probability, or the green line. In other words, we should be finding more and more oil. The next chart looks at that in another way. By the way, they say here the probability, they say 95 percent is low probability. That is the highest probability. I have no idea how you get this warped statistic; 95 percent is the highest probability. The 50 percent probability is not the mean, and the lowest probability is 5 percent. Well, they mean that the lowest amount of oil you would find is a 95 percent probability. The highest amount is 5 percent. But the 5 percent could just as well be the other side of the 95 percent probability which would be really, really low. Well, here is a graph that they have drawn, and this graph points out something very interesting, the peak for the 95 percent probability, which says that the world had totally about 2,000 gigabarrels of oil. By the way, we use ``giga'' rather than billion because in England a million million is a billion. In our country it is a thousand million, which is a billion. But giga means the same thing to everybody world around, so we use gigabarrels. If we have in fact 2,000 gigabarrels total, we have used about a thousand of that, and about a thousand remains, which means that we are at this point here; and this should start sliding downhill after that. But they have imagined another thousand gigabarrels of oil to be found; and if that is true, notice that moves the peak out only to 2016. We are using oil at such a horrendous rate in the world, that even if we found 50 percent more oil than we have ever found, that moves the peak out only that far. And then they show what happens if you go out to 2037. If you have enhanced oil recovery and so forth and get that much more, look what happens. Look at the way it drops there. The next chart is an interesting one. It shows the same thing pretty much that we showed in that big oil chart that showed the discovery curve. And these are, this is the relationship of discovery to use. Notice, in about 1980 here, we started using more than we had discovered. So this curve says the same kind of thing that the previous one said, only this shows the relationship of discoveries to use. The next chart is another statement from the ``Hirsch Report,'' and I want to spend a few minutes now on these two reports because they are really very meaningful reports. I will note, Mr. Speaker, that both of these reports have come out in the past year after we gave our first discussion here a year ago, the 14th of March. This again is from the ``Hirsch Report.'' The peaking of world oil production presents the United States and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem. As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically. And without timely mitigation, the economic, social and political cost will be unprecedented. Viable mitigation options exist on both the supply and demand side, but to have substantial impact they must be initiated more than a decade in advance of peaking. Mr. Speaker, we probably do not have a decade. As a matter of fact, we may be here. Dealing with world oil production peaking will be extremely complex, involve literally trillions of dollars, and require many years of intense effort. Mr. Speaker, the question I am asking is, If this is true, and if this report was paid for by the Department of Energy, why aren't the leaders in our country telling the American people this? Now, if they didn't believe this report, just a few months later came the report from the Corps of Engineers that says essentially the same thing as we will see from some following charts. The next chart is another quote from the ``Hirsch Report'': ``We cannot conceive of any affordable government-sponsored crash program to accelerate normal replacement schedules.'' They are talking now about what will we do to make sure that there is enough oil available when we have reached peak production; what can we fill that gap with. They are saying they can't conceive of any affordable government-sponsored crash program to make this happen, so as to incorporate higher energy efficiency technologies in the privately owned transportation sectors. Significant improvements in energy efficiency will thus be inherently time consuming on the order of a decade or more. For some things like efficient automobiles, the average light trucks and cars out there, some 16 to 18 years in the fleet, the big 18-wheelers are out there 28 years. So if you are going to make any impact on efficiency in that market, you have to really wait awhile unless you think people are going to scrap their newly purchased SUV. The next chart is from the Corps of Engineers study, and this is really an interesting chart. Remember the date of this was September `05. The current price of oil is in the $45 to $57 per-barrel range and is expected to stay in that range for several years. Mr. Speaker, I don't think $70 a barrel is within the range of 45 to 57. And it has been less than a year. So what this shows is that even the experts, these people who spend a long while studying this, when they look at the picture, they didn't anticipate the extent, the seriousness of this problem. Oil prices may go significantly higher and some have predicted prices ranging up to $180 a barrel in a few years. Mr. Speaker, if that is true, why aren't the leaders of our country telling the American people this? Friends, we have got a problem ahead of us. It is not an insoluble problem; but the longer we wait, the tougher it is going to be to get through it. We really need to get started now. I don't here our leadership telling us that, Mr. Speaker. And in view of these two reports both saying essentially the same thing, I am wondering why. Another chart from the Army Corps of Engineers study: oil is the most important form of energy in the world today. I think few would deny that. In addition to transportation, and we use 70 percent of our oil in transportation, it is the feed stock from a really large petrochemical industry. We live in a plastic world. Just look around you at all the things made of plastic. Without oil, most of them wouldn't be here. Historically, no other energy source equals oil's intrinsic qualities of extractability, transportability, versatility, and cost. The qualities that enabled oil to take over from coal as the front-line energy source for the industrialized world in the middle of the 20th century are as relevant today as they were then. And another chart from this same Corps of Engineers study, over and over, Mr. Speaker, they are saying the same thing: we face a big challenge. Petroleum experts Colin Campbell, John LaHerrere, Brian Fleay, Roger Blanchard, Richard Duncan, Walter Youngquist and Albert Bartlett, no relative of mine, but you can pull up on the Web Albert Bartlett, do a Google search for Albert Bartlett and he gives the most interesting 1-hour lecture I have ever heard on energy and the exponential principle, have all estimated that a peak in conventional oil production will occur around 2005. This is 2006. The corporate executive officers, CEOs at Eni SPA Italian oil companies and ARCO have also published estimates of a peak in 2005. So the problem may already be here. The next chart shows a very interesting quote from one of the experts in [Page: H2621]this area, and this really focuses on a chart that we had just a few minutes ago. Jean LaHerrere made an assessment of the USGS report that concludes, now, USGS says that we are going to find half again the oil that we have already found. We have found about 2,000 gigabarrels, used about 1,000 of that. They say we are going to find another 1,000 gigabarrels. This is what Dr. LaHerrere says. The USGS estimate implies a fivefold increase in discovery that is over the present anemic discovery, a fivefold increase in discovery rate and reserve addition, for which no evidence is presented. Such an improvement in performance is in fact utterly implausible, given the great technological achievements of the industry over the past 20 years, the worldwide search, and the deliberate effort to find the largest remaining prospects. In other words, he is saying that we have been looking really hard with really good technique and we haven't found it for the last decade. There is just no justification to this euphemistic projection that we are going to find another 1,000 gigabarrels of oil. The next chart puts this in kind of a global and time perspective. The chart on the top shows the last 400 of 5,000 years of recorded history. And it shows the beginning of the Industrial Revolution with wood, and it did begin with wood. We were making steel with wood, with charcoal, denuded the hills of New England, carrying it to England to make steel. You can visit Little Catoctin Furnace up here in Frederick County, and we denuded the hills of Northern Frederick County to make charcoal for that little furnace there. And then we discovered coal. And on the ordinate here is quadrillion Btus. That is the amount of energy you produce. Not very much from wood down there. You see the brown. It really got six or eight times bigger with coal. And look what happened when we found oil and gas. That is the red curve there which seems to go almost straight up. This is only about a 2 percent increase. Albert Einstein said that the force of compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe which, after discovering nuclear energy he was asked, Dr. Einstein, what will be the next great force in the universe? And he said that it was the power of compound interest, which is exponential growth, of course. Notice what happened in the 1970s there, and the downturn. There really was a world recession. We used less oil, fortunately, because what was happening up until that time, Mr. Speaker, is really quite phenomenal. Every decade we were using as much oil as had been used in all of previous history. What that means is that when we used half of all the oil, only one decade of oil remained at current-use rates. Of course that is not the rate at which oil will be used. We are now about 150 years into the age of oil; 5,000 years of recorded history. That curve is now coming down. It is peaking and will be coming down. And it will come down for about another 100, 150 years. So in 200, 300 years we will have been through the age of oil. It is interesting, Mr. Speaker, to put this in this perspective: 5,000 years of recorded history, we found this incredible wealth under the ground. It really was incredible wealth. Just one barrel of this oil provides you the energy of 12 people working all year for you; 12 people working all year. You can buy that for a little more than $100, 42 gallons, a little more than $100 at the pump. [Time: 16:00] If you produce electricity with it, for less than 25 cents a day, an electric motor will do more work than a hardworking, athletic worker. Really incredible wealth. What the world should have done when we discovered this, realizing that it could not be infinite, that there just had to be an end to it, that the world is not made of oil and even if it was made of oil, there would still be an end to it by and by, but it is not made of oil; we should have stopped and said, what can we do with this incredible wealth to provide the most good for the most people for the longest time? That clearly is not what we did. As this chart shows here, we just pigged out like kids who found the cookie jar, with no thought for tomorrow. We behaved as if oil was infinite, that it would be there absolutely forever. And, of course, that could not be true. I started asking myself these questions maybe 40 years ago. I knew that oil and gas and coal could not be forever, and I asked myself what does that mean? Is it something that we need to worry about in 10 years, 100 years, 1,000 years, 1 million years? What does it mean? And a number of people have been asking themselves this question. The next chart is interesting, and it kind of simplifies this curve. By the way, this is the same curve that we saw before, the red curve going up very steeply. All we have done here is to compress the scale on the ordinate and expand the scale on the abscissa so that now we have a more gradual curve. But it is still a 2 percent growth rate. That doubles in 35 years. At the beginning of the little yellow there, which is the difference between what we would like to use, that is, the demand curve, and the supply curve, which is the blue- green curve, that is doubled at the end over there. So we know that took 35 years to get there because it doubles in 35 years. If we are there, and there should be a question mark after that because we are not dead certain, what this shows is that the shortage actually starts to occur a bit before the peak occurs, as you are breaking away from that nice, smooth curve. And, of course, there are going to be ups and downs, as we have seen in the price of oil. It is up $5 and down $4 and up another $5 and down $4, but ever up and up as we go through. We face some big challenges. What most people want to do since we are, as the President says, hooked on oil, we would like to keep that habit. We do not want to kick that habit. We would like to keep that habit. So what most people are focusing on is how do we fill the gap? The gap is that yellow. The gap is the difference between what we have and what we would like to use. And as time goes on, that gets bigger and bigger. I would like to make the argument, and we will come back to that in a few minutes, that we probably should not be trying to fill the gap, for a couple of reasons. One is that I do not think that we can fill the gap. And the second thing is that there will be a future and we do have kids and we do have grandkids, and to the extent that we are successful today in finding and pumping what oil remains, we are dooming them to an increased crisis where they are going to have less and less opportunity to live like we have lived because our incredibly lavish life-style is in large measure built on this really high-quality fossil fuel energy. The next chart shows us what we will ultimately transition to, and there is no escaping this, oil is finite. There will be a peaking. It could be now; it could be in a few years. It is not if, it is when. And there are some finite resources that we can have that we can work with, but they are finite, although they are enormous in volume. For instance, the tar sands, the Canadians would rather call them oil sands because ``tar'' does not have a good sound to it. But it is tar. It is not much better quality than the asphalt out here in the roadway, which flows with the hot sun, as you may notice. The cars sit on it and it sinks down. Put a blowtorch on it and it will really flow. The oil shales in our west and coal are all finite resources. The Canadians are aggressively pursuing the production of oil from their tar sands, or oil sands, as they like to call them. But I understand that they are using more energy from natural gas to cook that oil sand to get the oil out and more energy from natural gas than they are getting out of the oil. From a business perspective, that makes good sense because that gas up there is stranded. It is in Alberta, Canada. There are not very many people there. Gas is hard to transport, and stranded gas is very cheap. So they use a cheap gas to produce very expensive oil. It costs them about $18 a barrel, I understand, to produce it. And they are getting $70 a barrel. That is a really good dollar/profit ratio. The energy/profit ratio is less than one; so ultimately that is not sustainable, of course, using more energy in than you get out. The oil shales in our west, there have been some very glowing articles in the papers. I talked to the investigator there. He attended a conference out in Denver, Colorado a few months ago that I was at. And Shell Oil Company, [Page: H2622]it will be several years before they decide whether or not it is even feasible economically to get oil out of our oil shales. There is an enormous quantity there, nearly as much as the world has found, but not all recoverable. There are estimates that 800 billion barrels may be recoverable, but at what cost? What they do out there is to drill a series of holes around the periphery, and they freeze that so that the oil that they melt out in the middle will not contaminate the groundwater, and then they cook it with steam for about a year. And then after they have cooked it for about a year, heating it up, they drill a well there and they start pumping and cooking, and they do that for another year or two, and they can get meaningful amounts of oil. But the scalability of this and the economic feasibility of this are still unknown, so they are pursuing that. I would caution, Mr. Speaker, not to be too euphoric about their prospects of getting energy out of these tar sands and oil shales. There is a lot of energy there. It will be difficult to get it out economically, particularly difficult to have a meaningful energy/profit ratio getting it out. But it is there and we have to do the best we can to get it out as efficiently as we can. Then coal, you will hear we have 250 years of coal, and the next chart shows that is true. We do have 250 years of coal at current use rates, at no growth. But notice what happens when there is only 2 percent growth. Now, I think that as we have less oil, we are going to have to use coal more. Hitler ran his whole economy and his military on oil from coal. So did South Africa with the embargoes that we had there. With just 2 percent growth rate, this exponential growth has an incredible effect. This 2 percent, the 250 years shrinks to about 85 years. And for most of its uses, you cannot use coal. You are going to have to convert it to a gas or a liquid. And if you take the energy to do that, you have now shrunk it down to about 50 years. And that is only 2 percent growth. I believe we will have to increase the use of coal more than 2 percent. Now, back to this chart of the potential alternative sources: Nuclear. Nuclear produces now about 8 percent of our total energy in this country and about 20 percent of our electricity. In France it produces about 80, 85 percent of their electricity. There are three kinds of nuclear power. Two kinds of nuclear fission: the lightwater reactor and breeder reactors. We use only lightwater reactors in this country. The only breeder reactors we ever used were in producing the fuel for our nuclear missiles. The world has a limited supply. It is hard to get good numbers on that, but the world has a limited supply of fissionable uranium, and then we will have to go to breeder reactors, which, as the name implies, produce more fuel than they use. But you also buy big problems with that, transporting it around and enriching it, and some of it is weapons grade; so you have to deal with those problems if you want to go to fission with a breeder reactor. I have friends here in the Congress who were devoutly opposed to nuclear. They are bright people, and when they are considering the alternative, which may be shivering in the dark if we do not have enough electricity, now nuclear is not looking all that bad to them if the alternative is shivering in the dark. Nuclear could and maybe should grow. But in this country it is very difficult to site a plant and to build it. It may take 10 years, and I understand that the plant has to be operating maybe 20 years before you get back the amount of fossil fuel energy that went into producing the plant. Again, Mr. Speaker, on many of these things we need good numbers. It is hard to have a rational discussion when there is so much disagreement in numbers, and we really do need to enlist an honor broker so that we can agree on numbers because it is very difficult to have a rational discussion when there are such wide differences of opinion as to how much is out there of this and that. Nuclear fusion. If we can discover that, we are home free. That is what the sun does to produce all the energy we get from the sun. And we are just a tiny, tiny speck in that whole sphere around the sun and the incredible amount of energy that comes from the sun. We are home free if we get there, by the way. But I think the odds of getting there are about the same as the odds of your or my solving our personal economic problems by winning the lottery. That would be nice, but I doubt, Mr. Speaker, that you are plotting your economic future on the assumption that you are going to win the lottery, and I do not think we ought to plot our energy future on the assumption that we are going to get fusion. I support all of the money, about $250 million a year or so. Of course, it goes into fusion. I hope we get there. But, frequently, my hopes and my expectations are not the same thing. In this case I would not bet the ranch that we are going to get fusion energy. If we do, we are home free, and we need to continue to invest all the money that that technology can reasonably absorb. And now we come to the truly renewable resources. And ultimately, Mr. Speaker, after this age of oil, which will end, and when I say ``oil,'' I mean gas and coal too, which will end in about another 100, 150 years, we will be running our world on these energy sources: solar and wind and geothermal and ocean energy from tides or thermal gradients or waves. Agricultural resources, a lot of possibilities there: soy diesel, biodiesel, ethanol, methanol, biomass, cellulosic ethanol. You hear a lot of these words. Burning our waste to get energy, that is a really good idea, and we should do more of that. We need fewer landfills, and we would have a little more electricity if we did that. The last one here that I want to spend just a moment on, it says hydrogen from renewables. Today we are not making hydrogen from renewables. We are making hydrogen from natural gas. That is going to peak and be running down about the same curve that oil is running down. One thing is true, Mr. Speaker: We will always use more energy producing hydrogen than we get out of hydrogen. Unless we are going to suspend the second law of thermal dynamics, that will be true. Well, if it takes more energy to produce hydrogen, why are we even thinking about hydrogen? For two reasons: One is when you finally use it, burn it, you get only water. That is not a very polluting product. And the second reason we are really interested in hydrogen is that it is one of the better things to feed a fuel cell with if we ever get economically feasible fuel cells. A fuel cell will get more than twice the efficiency of a reciprocating engine. So even though you lose some energy when you go from electricity or coal or whatever to hydrogen, you will more than get it back in the increased efficiency of the fuel cell if we ever get to the fuel cell, if it is economically feasible. And you are certainly not polluting, you are producing only water. The next chart is an interesting look at one aspect of the agriculture, and that is the amount of energy that goes into producing a bushel of corn. On the chart we show two things: On the right is petroleum, and it shows that if you put in about 1 1/4 million Btus, you will get out 1 million. On the left-hand side, it shows a picture for ethanol, that if you put in three-fourths of a million Btus, you get out 1 million. And some people will tell you that this is pretty optimistic. In fact, Pimentel says it is actually negative. You use more energy producing ethanol than you get out of it. But if this is true, what that means is that today the way we produce ethanol, for every gallon of ethanol you burn, you are burning the equivalent of three-fourths of a gallon of fossil fuels, because that is the fossil fuel energy it took to produce ethanol. The chart at the bottom shows why this is true, and it shows all of the total energy requirements of farm inputs. [Time: 16:15] This is BTUs per bushel of corn. The energy goes into producing a bushel of corn. You notice that big, nearly half of it, that says nitrogen? Mr. Speaker, that is natural gas from which we make nitrogen fertilizer. Before we learned how to do that, all of our nitrogen fertilizer came from barnyard manures or guano. Guano is gone. If we wait another 10,000 or 20,000 years, there will be some more. But most people don't know that nitrogen fertilizer today, essentially all of it comes from natural gas, almost none of it produced in our country. Natural gas is too expensive here. It is [Page: H2623]made in other countries where gas is kind of stranded. The next chart looks at where we are. I use an analogy here which I think is very apt. We are very much like a young couple that has gotten married and their grandparents died and left them a big inheritance, and they have established a lifestyle where 85 percent of all the money they spend comes from their grandparents' inheritance and only 15 percent from their income. They look at the inheritance, and it is not going to last until they retire. So what will they do? Obviously, they have got to do one or both of two things. They either have got to spend less or make more. I use those numbers, others may use 86-14. I use those numbers because that is exactly where we are with our energy use today. Eight-five percent of all the energy we use comes from coal and oil and natural gas, and only 15 percent of it comes from some other source. Now, a bit more than half of that comes from nuclear electric power. That is 8 percent of our total energy, about 20 percent of our electricity. The rest, 7 percent, is the true renewables. Mr. Speaker, those are the things which we ultimately will transition to. Now this is a chart from 2000, and the solar and the wind and so forth would be bigger today. That is 1 percent in this chart of 7 percent. That is .07 percent. It is really in the noise level. We are four times bigger than that today at .28 percent. Big deal. It is a long, long way to go from .28 percent to go to something really meaningful as a contribution. But that is what we will be turning to increasingly in the future. Notice that on this renewable sources there, the biggest one, 46 percent, is conventional hydroelectric. That will not increase in our country. We are pretty much tapped out on that. We might go to microhydro and use little microturbines in thousands of little streams across the country without affecting the environment as much as the big ones, by the way, and get about that much more energy. But notice that solar and wind and agriculture down here, it is just alcohol fuel there; but it could be biomass, soy diesel, biodiesel and so forth, are very small amounts. Where we can get it, we ought to be getting more of geothermal. There is not much in this country. All of Iceland's energy comes from geothermal. I don't think there is a chimney in Iceland, because they don't need it. They get it all from geothermal sources. Notice the waste to energy up there, which is 8 percent. That could grow. Instead of putting it in a landfill, there is a very nice plant up here in Montgomery County they will be happy to show you through. It is really a very handsome plant, and they are burning waste up there to produce electricity. Just a word of caution about energy from agriculture. We must keep two realities in mind. The first is that we must feed the world. Tonight, about 20 percent of the world will go to bed hungry, obviously not in this country. And we have to maintain our top soils. If you don't have top soils, you will not feed the world. Now, if we would live lower on the food chain, if we ate the corn and the soybeans instead of the pig or the chicken or the cow that eat the corn and soybeans, we would have between 10 and 20 times as many calories to eat, because that is about the ratio. They say one pound of grain to three pounds of pig or chicken, but that is dry grain and wet pig and you can only eat about half of the pig. When you get down to the true ratio of dry to dry matter, it is about 10 to one for the steer. By the way, milk and eggs are very much more economically produced and really higher-quality proteins. When it comes to things like cellulosic ethanol and biomass and so forth, be careful that we aren't using so much of that that we are mining our top soils of an essential element called humus. Humus is what gives tilts to the soil. It is why top soil is different than subsoil. It holds water; it holds the nutrients. If you take all of that out, you no longer have top soil. We can get some energy from agriculture, but it will not fill the gap between what will be available and what we would like to use. The next chart is a really interesting one. This shows on an interesting scale, this is how good you feel about your station in life on the ordinate here. Then the absyssa is how much energy you use. Notice where we are. We are way over there in the far right. We use more energy than any other society in the world. You know, notice you can't feel very good about your station in life until you have used a meaningful amount of energy, but it is striking that this is all relative. China is up here. China feels really good about where they are. Notice how little energy the average man uses, so they are better off today than yesterday, so they feel good about it. They are improving. What I want to point out on this chart, you don't have to use the amount of energy we use to feel good about your position in life. There are about a dozen countries over there that use less energy than we. Everybody above that line uses less energy than we and feels better about their station in life than we feel. We have lots of potential to use less energy and feel good. The next chart shows a really interesting one on energy efficiency. There may not be this kind of opportunity everywhere, but on the left here is a usual incandescent bulb. If you are brooding chickens, you use a light bulb. It is not light you want; it is heat. But notice that 90 percent of all the energy that comes out of that incandescent bulb, that is what is up here, I am looking up at them, Mr. Speaker, 90 percent of the energy that comes out of that is heat. Now, if you go to a fluorescent, you have these little screw in fluorescents now, and notice, by the way, the green here is the same amount of light every time. Notice that you use demonstrably less energy, four times less energy. A 13-watt little spiral bulb will give you as much light as a 60-watt bulb. These fluorescents are very efficient. Now notice what happens with a light-emitting diode. Notice that the amount of heat produced in a light-emitting diode is only about one-tenth of the light you get. No wonder much of new technology is moving to diodes. The next chart is an interesting one from our country, and this shows the energy used per capita electricity consumption in California and the U.S.A. Remember several years ago they had some blackouts and brownouts in California, and we were predicting massive rolling brownouts or blackouts the following year. It did not happen. The reason it didn't happen is because the Californians, without anybody telling them they had to, voluntarily reduced their consumption of electricity by 11 percent. And notice, the average Californian uses about, what, about 65 percent of electricity as the average in the rest of our country. It would be hard to argue that Californians don't live as well as we. The next chart is a very interesting picture. We don't want to go there, and unless we do something meaningful to address this coming energy crisis, we could do what the Easter Islanders did. They had a good thing going for them there. They fished the oceans and the fish was there for the taking. To make their boats, they cut down the trees. And the trees weren't growing as fast as the boats they were making, and they cut down more and more trees, and ultimately they cut down the last tree. And when those boats rotted and they could no longer fish, their society started deteriorating. When they were finally discovered, they were down to eating rats and living in caves and eating each other. They had a civilization before that which could indulge in such things as these very large sculptures that you see here. What they did was to mine a nonrecoverable resource, and they had no fallback. They had no alternative to fall back on. The next chart shows kind of where we are and where we need to go. So far, Mr. Speaker, it may not be obvious that we have a really bright future ahead of us, but I think we do. We have some big challenges here. Challenges and opportunities are two faces of the same thing, and I would like to think of them as opportunities. I think that what we need to address this problem is the equivalent of a program that embodies the total commitment of World War II. I lived through that war. There were no automobiles [Page: H2624]made in, what, '43, '44 and '45. There was gas rationing. I can't remember people grumbling about the gas rationing. Everybody had a victory garden who could. They were encouraged to do that. It was the patriotic thing to do. We started daylight savings time so you could have some time after work in the evening to work on your victory garden. Everybody saved their household grease. I am still not quite sure what they did with that, but we took it to a central repository. The point is everybody was involved. It was the last time in our country that everybody has really been involved, and we need a program that involves everybody. We also need a program that kind of has the technology focus of putting a man on the Moon, because there are some really big technology challenges here. Thirdly, this program needs to have the kind of urgency that we had in the Manhattan Project, because time is really of the essence here. We don't have the luxury of a leisurely approach to solving this problem. There will be an increasing deficit of oil in the world and in our country; but I will tell you, Mr. Speaker, I think the biggest deficit today is leadership, both here and in the world. With so many experts, and these two studies, and again I go back to the two studies, here they are, paid for by our government, saying that we are at or nearly at peak oil and pointing to the dire consequences if you haven't prepared for that, I don't see our leaders in our country or in the world standing up and telling their citizens that we face this problem. This chart shows what we need to do. The first thing we need to do is to buy some time. How do we buy time? Right now there is no surplus energy available to invest in alternatives, like building a nuclear power plant, like finding a really good way to make ethanol, to make a whole lot more solar panels, to make a whole lot more wind machines. By the way, wind machines are producing electricity at 2.5 cents a kilowatt hour. That is very competitive. If we can have a very aggressive conservation program that you can do quickly, we can free up some oil, which buys us some time so that we can invest in these alternatives. Then we need to use this wisely. Somehow we need an entity which is making judgments as to what is the best uses of the limited resources of both time and energy that we will have. By the way, Mr. Speaker, we need to invest three things to get these alternatives. We need money and we need energy and we need time. Of course, in this Congress, we never worry about money, we just borrow that from our kids and our grandkids without their approval. But we can't borrow time from them, and we can't borrow energy from them. Thinking about our children and grandchildren, Mr. Speaker, I would just like to make an argument that there is a moral dimension to the challenge we face. To the extent that we are able to go out there and get these remaining resources to fill the gap, to continue life as we know it, we are going to be denying our children and our grandchildren access to these energy sources. Right now, we are telling them although we cannot do it, we cannot even come close to running our government on current revenue, not only will they have to run their government on current revenues, they will have to pay back all the money we borrowed from their generation. I am having a moral problem with going out there with the techniques that we have to get this gas and oil and coal, the little that remains, more quickly. We will certainly be denying our children the opportunity to do that. Somehow we have to have an organization which makes decisions. We have only limited time. We have only limited energy. How will we invest it? What is the wisest way to invest it? There are many benefits that can come from this. One of the benefits, Mr. Speaker, I can imagine Americans going to bed in the evening feeling really good about the contribution they have made that day to this problem. This shouldn't be viewed as a problem; this should be viewed as a challenge. Life is really easy in our country. Most people don't have to really stretch to do well. I think that our people would marshal. We have the most creative, innovative society in the world; and if our people only knew that there was this problem, I think that all of our energy, our creativity, our innovation could be marshaled to address this. We have no alternative but to be a role model. We use a fourth of all the world's energy. We are a role model. We need to be a good role model for this transition. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time, with the realization that if every American is challenged to address this problem, that there is a way out, we will have a bright future. But the later we start, the more difficult that transformation will be. We should have started a decade ago. We can't turn back the hands of time, but we can from now on do what we should have been doing in the past. END.. |
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| Click here to watch Oklahoma Horizons' segment on the Heartland Flyer. A project of the Oklahoma Chamber of Commerce. Originally aired Sept 18, 2005 |
