Those respected sources show that, without imported oil, the United States would completely use up ALL the known American oil reserves in slightly over FOUR years! The whole world figures to use up all the known oil supplies in 43 years, or even less if world demand keeps rapidly growing. (That oil took hundreds of millions of years to form!)

Please note that the assumed (not actually proven) reserves under Alaska which might be available by additional drilling and pipelines, is actually rather small! At the rate that the US is currently using up petroleum (around 7 billion barrels per year), it is generally believed by experts that only a few months of true benefit would (will) occur by removing all the oil under Alaska!

Somehow, logic does not seem to be applying! Politicians in TV interview shows NOW (April 2006) are insisting that by digging up Alaska for additional oil, "we may get a FULL million barrels every day from those DOMESTIC sources". Sounds good, huh? Except that (a) it would take at least TEN YEARS to actually start receiving that oil; and (b) the 7 billion barrels of oil that we currently use means 22 million barrels per day! See the strangeness? A BIG and expensive production to extract all the possible oil from under Alaska and under the oceans around it, MIGHT provide ONE million barrels per day! ONE-TWENTIETH of our CURRENT usage! Or 5%! And that is only if the optimistic opinions of oil there are true!

Other politicians and leaders brag about being able to grow American corn and then process it into Ethanol, as being the glowing solution to all the future energy needs, and the ending of dependence on imported supplies of energy. A discussion below notes that with all currently known methods of processing corn into Ethanol, MORE external (meaning imported) fuel is required in that processing than the Ethanol will eventually be able to provide! Spokespeople seem to happen to forget to mention this fact, that manufacturing Ethanol is a losing proposition! They also seem to forget to mention that we are currently (2007) using up around 1/5 of all the corn grown in the US for making Ethanol (which is already endangering the supplies of food and livestock feed from corn), to produce only around 1/40 of what we consume in our vehicles. What additional corn do they expect to grow and process into Ethanol?

Many people who have e-mailed in to criticize THIS presentation (which, I note, is all OFFICIALLY PUBLISHED figures!) instantly say that by tapping Alaskan oil, the US will be totally independent of foreign oil for many decades! Those people have been given VERY wrong information! The huge (and expensive) Aleyska Alaskan pipeline has already nearly depleted all the certainly known supplies, in around 30 years. Was that in supplying 7 billion barrels per year? No! That existing pipeline has generally been operated at near its capacity, of around a million barrels per day. In 365 days, that is 0.365 billion barrels per year. This confirms the FACT that Alaskan oil has only been supplying AROUND FIVE PERCENT of American petroleum consumption (0.365 / 7.0) and even at that, we have already used up nearly all the known oil supplies. (The oil flowing through the existing Alaska Pipeline has greatly dropped off in recent years, as wells have gone dry. In recent months, only around 0.4 million barrels had been flowing per day, prior to it being completely shut down due to massive corrosion [Aug 2006])

Update - Alaska Pipeline flow rate - December 2008 about 750,000 barrels per day.

See the reality? In the 30 years that oil has been massively pumped out of Alaska, the pipeline has NEVER had the capacity to carry even 10% of the country's needs. So if people truly think that Alaska is some sort of magical solution to the vast importation of petroleum, then they will need to build around 20 more pipelines, to CARRY IT across Alaska to Valdez! But even if they did that, where we could obtain our entire 7 billion barrels of consumption from there, even really optimistic estimates do not indicate that there is much over 7 billion barrels of oil still in the ground under Alaska. So we would use it all up in just ONE YEAR!. Actually less, because more realistic scientists believe there is only 2 or 3 billion barrels of oil still under Alaska, which we would use up in 3 or 5 months! Why doesn't anyone see how foolish it would be to invest enormous amounts of money to build more giant pipelines and to drill more oil wells? Separate from all the environmental issues! It is just a stupid idea! But all the politicians make it sound that, by permitting oil drilling in the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge, ALL our oil problems would be solved. Not even close! There are certainly people, especially the oil companies, that would/will make a fortune, but for virtually no actual benefit. It might be different if there were truly large reserves of oil under Alaska. But we have already removed much of them and burned them! It's like wanting to build an impressive gate, AFTER all the horses have escaped! But the American public has been greatly convinced that this is some kind of brilliant idea! Only for those who will make fortunes!

In 2005 and 2006, it became very popular for politicians to give speeches regarding spending hundreds of billions of (taxpayer) money to build a hundred new nuclear power plants. Their research staffs must not have informed them that the US closed its last Uranium mine around ten years ago, as we have already mined essentially all the Uranium under the United States. The official government data presented below shows that we imported around 92% of all the Uranium used in our nuclear power plants in 2002. It would have been higher except that we have been de-commissioning nuclear weapons and degrading the warheads into reactor fuels!

(Sorry for the Editorial comments! But even as an impassionate scientist, there are some truly foolish ideas being promoted, which have virtually no relationship to reality!)

Even if enormous amounts of oil were now discovered up there, we still have no obvious way to transport enough out to provide more than about 5% of our current needs. Yes, the newly drilled oil might be able to provide that 5% of our needs for 10 or 20 years. Is it really worth destroying a Wildlife Refuge and potentially contaminating large areas, just to provide 5% of our oil needs? No one seems to ask that question. I am not necessarily expressing an opinion here, only asking a logical question.

As a result of a vague impression of shortages of those resources, and the current necessity of importing around 63% of the oil we Americans use up, and even more in the future, politicians have recently started talking about building a lot of new nuclear plants. There are only 103 now operating, and they produce around 20% of the electricity used in the United States.

The (published) figures reprinted here show that we have already mined the vast majority of Uranium in the United States, and we now only have enough left for around 7.3 years of current usage rates in generating electricity and even that is incredibly optimistic. In 1995, the DOE (Department of Energy) official report on existing supplies of American uranium indicated that the TOTAL of the Proved Reserves and the Estimated Additional Resources, as defined in that Report, could provide a total of around 3,000 tons of U₃O₈. Given THAT number, and knowing that we use up around 28,000 tons of U₃O₈ each year, that is barely ONE MONTH'S supply!

If politicians think they want to use American taxpayer money to build a lot of new nuclear plants, maybe they should review the facts presented below. Also some other facts, from their own Government Reports! Such as that in 2002, 57.3 million pounds of nuclear ore was processed and loaded into US reactors; however only 2.34 million pounds were provided from domestic sources, with 52.7 million pounds being imported! (The remainder came from stockpiles.) 92% of the Uranium we used in 2002 was imported!

There are very good reasons for that! In 1975, published reports suggested that the United States had 581 thousand metric tons of Reasonably Assured and another 962 thousand metric tons of Estimated Additional (US ERDA Report, Jan 1977), for a total of 1,543 thousand metric tons. In 2005, that total is now 102 thousand metric tons, of which NONE is "Reasonably Assured". Note that we have already mined over 93% of all the Uranium in the United States, and 100% of that that is easily minable. And these figures are the more recent INFLATED values including more speculative sources, remembering that the DOE Report of 1995 indicated a TOTAL of 3,000 tons of economically viable U₃O₈.

In 1990, there were 39 Uranium mines operating in the US, producing 8.9 million pounds of Uranium. By the year 2000, that was down to 10 mines producing 4.0 million pounds, and by 2003, down to 6 (mines) producing 2.344 million pounds! Is that scary? Worse, the 6 "mines" are not mines at all, but operations that recover Uranium from various sources! There are NO operating Uranium mines in the US during these past several years!

Not one pound of Uranium has been mined in the US for several years, with over 92% of the Uranuim used in our nuclear powerplants being imported. Much of the rest came from de-commissioned nuclear warheads that have been degraded into fuel-grade material.

Again, the world is better off in seeming to have sufficient Uranium for around 52 years at current usage rates.

Coal seems to be the only fuel that we have in abundant quantity. Does this mean that American society will soon need to revert to that of 150 years ago, when coal powered industry?

More significantly, why are NO political leaders even mentioning any of this? Their good friends, and generous political donors, the giant companies that mine and process and sell these resources probably don't want us to get scared over such things, but shouldn't they be accountable to us? It is my hope that SOMEONE reviews these figures (and then confirms that they are accurate) and starts to try to do something. And rather that simply relying on this web-page for the data, you can find these figures on Industry and government web-pages. What could be done? Good question! But the United States seems hurtling toward a day, possibly within TEN YEARS, where there will be a crisis of every type of energy supply. How will American industry compete in the world market then? And what will happen to the high-energy-maintenance lifestyles of Americans?

Wow!

In 1975, the US used up a total of 71.1 * 10¹⁵ Btus of energy supplies, of which 20.1 * 10¹⁵ Btus was consumed to make our electricity, roughly 28% of the total.

In 1999, the US consumed a total of 96.6 * 10¹⁵ Btus of energy supplies, of which 39.4 * 10¹⁵ Btus was consumed to make our electricity, roughly 41% of the total.

Electricity consumption essentially doubled between those times, but the consumption of usage for other purposes nearly stayed the same! Traffic increased a little, but vehicles are slightly more efficient, so not much change there. Enormous numbers of factories in the US have closed down, where products are now being manufactured in China and elsewhere, so that usage has actually dropped (but for a bad reason!)

Here are the specific energy sources used to create that electricity:

We can see some interesting things from this data. The contribution from hydroelectric has stayed relatively constant, because there are really no more large rivers that can be dammed in the US. In very recent years, that contribution has started going down, because the continued massive usage has caused the water level in most reservoirs to have greatly dropped. For example, Lake Powell of the Glen Canyon Dam has been around 120 feet low for the past couple years (2004 and 2005). Lower water level means that even more water must be released to generate a constant output that is demanded (by consumers AND by Congress!) because the lower water has less potential energy to give up.

Usage of petroleum to generate electricity has greatly dropped off, a good thing! But consumption of natural gas in generating electricity nearly doubled. The US has massive amounts of coal, so it is good that the usage of coal had doubled during that period.

In 1975, nuclear power was really just getting going on a large scale, so the 1999 figures are much higher. However, SINCE 1999, the US has essentially run out of Uranium and so that has been dropping back off recently.

Note that the OTHER category, even with massive government financing, only got up to producing 2.4% of the electricity, by a total of wind, solar, biomass and geothermal facilities. Considering the enormous financial investments in such things, the performance is distressingly minor. AND is likely to never become really significant!

Why?

Because of the SCALE of the rate that we are using up all those resources. Politicians do not seem to comprehend that! Consider this: In 1999, JUST to make about 15% of our electricity, we (permanently) used up about 6,000,000,000,000 cubic feet of natural gas! That amount is hard to comprehend! It means that, every year, around 90,000 cubic feet of natural gas are used up for EVERY FAMILY in the US! For the record, even families that heat their homes with natural gas, in cold climates, generally use far less than that every year! (In 1975, the TOTAL natural gas consumption was around 19.8 * 10¹⁵ Btus, so usage for making electricity was less than 1/6 of that. In 1999, that production was nearly the same 19.9, but we had to import more than 15% additional to fill our needs!)

Important Note

In order to GET hydrogen then, we must SPEND ENERGY to dissociate water! And that process is not very energy efficient!

The point here is that "Hydrogen" cannot correctly be seen as a "natural resource" at all. It must be MANUFACTURED, by first using up some OTHER source of energy, usually electricity to dissociate water into hydrogen and oxygen.

Even if some dreamer imagines that hydrogen would someday provide 20,000,000,000,000,000 Btu that is now supplied to us each year by natural gas, they need to give some thought to the fact that at least four times that amount of energy needs to be used in first getting the hydrogen. In other words, Hydrogen CANNOT be any ENERGY SOLUTION for the future. Instead, it should be looked at as a higher-tech version of a battery, which also requires some external source of electric power to charge it up. Battery-powered or hydrogen-powered vehicles might sound really exciting to the public and to politicians, but that is only because they have not yet thought through the ENTIRE picture, specifically of WHERE that source energy would come from!

So, sadly, the future will NOT be able to rely on either hydrogen or batteries to solve long-term problems. In a short-term, sure, they will look very impressive to reporters and car-buyers! But, in the bigger view, they are a poor idea, and a waste of a lot of effort that really needs to be directed more to actually finding solutions!

So, what I see as the saddest aspect of this whole mess is that we could have greatly improved things at least 30 years ago! There are relatively easy ways to improve the 13% delivery up to nearly 50% delivery, so we would only have to be using up around 1/4 of the precious resources we now do in making the same amount of electricity. The hurdle is that the equipment to do that is very expensive! Utilities have never wanted to have to make such massive investments, because they have never needed to or been forced to do so. The most obvious improvement is to simply stop dumping enormous amounts of heat with cooling towers and the like, and instead, using some more expensive "low pressure" steam turbines to remove much of the heat from that otherwise wasted heat.

YOU may already be using a similar technology! Home central furnaces around 1960 were around 60% efficient, with the rest of the heat going up the chimney. By 1980, better heat exchangers and designs had gotten that up to around 80%. But then a new technology was introduced (actually, an OLD technology, but first applied to home furnaces!), the concept of a condensing furnace. Such furnaces do not even need a conventional chimney, but simply a plastic PVC pipe. Millions of homes already have these high-efficiency furnaces, which have around 97% or 98% efficiency.

THAT general idea could be applied to electric powerplants! And, even after the Utility had squeezed out every bit of electricity they could create, the low-grade heat could even then be used in many ways. For example, at least one electric powerplant in Germany has been providing free-heating for hundreds of nearby homes!

As to distribution electric lines, it may be possible to put thermal insulation around each wire, to reduce losses. This is done when such lines have to run in underground conduits, so the technology already exists.

There are certainly MANY solutions. But people have to start addressing the RIGHT questions, in order to find them!

Around 1981, I mentioned to some fellow Physicists these ideas regarding greatly improving the thermal efficiency of electric power generation and distribution. I was laughed at, and told that I was being very foolish for thinking about such things! I eventually realized that they simply assumed that the Designers of such equipment had already made everything as efficient as it should be! They were wrong in that assumption!

The Existing Energy Resources

There are two important considerations to note in this data. Using the 2004 data, note that the United States has 29.4 billion barrels of proven reserves, and that we are currently using oil up at 6.873 billion barrels per year. This indicates that, without any imported oil, we would use up all of the proven reserves in just 4.28 years! FOUR YEARS usage is all we have, ever!

The other is the same thing for the world. The world proven reserves are 1188.6 billion barrels, and that the world is currently using oil up at 27.613 billion barrels per year. This indicates that, even if future use does not increase in China and the other developing countries, all of the known oil reserves in the world will be used up, gone, in just 43 years! However, looking at the amazingly rapid increase in consumption in China, India, South Korea, and many other developing countries, it seems clear that worldwide consumption of oil will certainly soon double, meaning that worldwide supplies may not last much beyond 20 years from now!

As a personal observation, with the total United States oil supply only being 2.5% of the world's total, and the fact that current US consumption would use all US oil up in only four years or so, I wonder about the actual benefit of building more billion dollar pipelines across Alaska to try to remove more of the oil up there faster! Would the entire effort actually provide more than a few additional months of our National usage? (Sorry for the editorial-like observation!)

The USA uses 24.89% of the world's production of petroleum while producing only 8.53%. This means that we have a constant shortage of 16.36% of the world's production, which must be provided by imports from other countries. Then look at the list to see which countries are "friendly" to the USA. We can certainly count on Canada, but they only have about 1.18% of excess production that they do not need themselves. We tremendously rely on the nearly 3% excess from Mexico, the over 3% excess from Venezuela and about a half percent excess from Colombia. It may be optimistic that those countries are friends to the USA! Their governments now seem averse to US foreign policies and it seems likely that any of those three might easily suddenly decide to sell instead to China if that country offers a far better price! But we are noting that these near neighbors and potentially reliable friends only CAN provide around half of our current shortfall. The result is that we have immense dependence on a very few countries in the Mid-East, specifically Saudi Arabia and UAE and Kuwait, which between them produce an excess of around 17%. Our dependence on those three specific countries is enormous! If Saddam had been able to keep and hold Kuwait in 1991, it would have been a petroleum-supply nightmare for the USA. That war in 1991 was promoted as enabling the Kuwaiti people to remain free, but the US had far more important financial reasons for needing to do it. If the large number of extremist Wahhabi Muslims in Saudi Arabia should decide to attack the few hundred members of the Saudi Royal Family and exterminate them, and start running Saudi Arabia, the US figures to have a crisis that it cannot overcome! The Wahhabis would not likely sell a drop of petroleum to the US, and they would certainly find other customers such as China. It is possible that in a single day, the greatest available supply of imported petroleum to the US could terminate, causing economic consequences that are beyond imagination. When people talk about terrorists doing another 9/11/01, they may be worrying about small potatoes! By simply doing a coup in Saudi Arabia, and ending that supply of petroleum to us, they could clearly do a thousand times more damage to us than the reality of 9/11/01 did.

Our leaders seem to spend their time worrying about the wrong questions! Each Congressman and Senator has a Staff of around 400 people (which we taxpayers pay for, of course). What do those people do? Shouldn't they be able to find this published information? Shouldn't at least a few of that city of employees be able to see the dark consequences of decisions that are only half-thought-through?

As a result of all this, we necessarily rely on potentially unstable governments such as Nigeria as suppliers of petroleum. It is very scary!

Ethanol

First, yes, Ethanol actually has most of the benefits that are attributed to it. The most significant disadvantage regarding actual vehicles is that Ethanol has long been known to melt/destroy rubber seals like O-rings in automotive fuel systems. So nearly all older vehicles cannot use Ethanol or even the standard modern gasoline which contains maybe 10% Ethanol, without having damage.

But overall, this still sounds wonderful. In fact, if kept as a "hobby-level" fuel, it would be great. But that is not how it is promoted!

The primary reason why Ethanol has been promoted so heavily is because it is a product that is made from corn, and from the USA. Currently (2007), roughly 20% of all corn grown in the USA is used up for producing Ethanol. Before Ethanol, that corn was used as food for people and for livestock, toward our National food supply. There are already great concerns that even that 20% reduction of available corn for food uses is endangering our food supply. As long as weather is good, we may be fine, but if there are any weather anomalies where crops are damaged or destroyed, there may be immediate food supply crises. With no obvious solution except to start importing food and corn!

That 20% of the entire National corn crop used to create Ethanol generates around 5 billion gallons of Ethanol. This might sound like a lot, but it is not when compared to our usage of gasoline. A simple way that we can see this is to note that there are presently 140 million drivers in the US, and the average driver drives 12,000 miles per year. For that mileage, the average driver buys a little over 600 gallons of gasoline per year. So, between all those drivers, (multiplying) we see that about 84 billion gallons of gasoline are used up by private drivers each year. If we add in the many large trucks and the millions of smaller trucks, and railroads and airliners and taxis and all the rest, government figures show that roughly 200 billion gallons of gasoline or diesel are used each year in the USA.

The 5 billion gallons of Ethanol currently made from 1/5 of all the corn crop is therefore only about 1/40 of the actual consumption!

Could we rely on Ethanol much more than we already are? It is hard to see how! Unless we stop raising livestock (no steaks and no milk???) and eating corn products, we cannot give up many more percent of the corn crop to being used to make Ethanol. We are already about at the maximum that is possible.

So when President Bush and NASCAR and politicians keep insisting that America can become "self-sufficient" by building and selling vehicles that can run on E-85 (85% Ethanol as compared to the common current 10%), they seem to be ignorant of where that Ethanol would come from! Sure, there is plenty of Ethanol for NASCAR races, but such things are actually misleading the American public into thinking that there is no problem, or that technology has SOLVED the future energy supply problems! It is absolutely untrue, and what I would define as a lie, because the people promoting such statements KNOW that they are not true!

There is yet another tremendous disadvantage to using Ethanol! Virtually no one seems willing to admit that the PROCESSING of corn into Ethanol is VERY energy intensive! By any known method, it always takes MORE external fuel (which is invariably petroleum or natural gas based!) to make Ethanol than the end fuel contains! Making Ethanol is a losing proposition! (Have you ever heard anyone admit that fact?) So, the actual fact is that the production of Ethanol is not only using up 20% of the entire corn crop of all US farmers, but also requiring more additional imported oil and natural gas than it could ever replace!

Do such things ever make you wonder how competent our leaders are?

It also makes one wonder exactly when anyone is going to realize that this Ethanol adventure has been a really stupid idea! Our government has provided the (taxpayer) money to nearly entirely finance everything related to Ethanol, so businesses have had very little to lose. (Our politicians see that Brazil has accomplished getting most of their vehicles to run on Brazil-grown-corn Ethanol, but Brazil has far fewer vehicles than we do and they have very large croplands that are not needed for feeding cattle, so it works pretty well in that country. As to why politicians assume that it will work in the USA is pretty hard to fathom!)

You may have also realized that, where the US used to be a huge provider of food for starving people in many countries, the fact that we now have deleted 20% of the corn from availability as food has greatly affected that. You may have noticed that representatives of NGOs (non-governmental organizations, such as Charities) have been making a lot of noise over this situation, but as long as the American government thinks that Ethanol is going to solve all the energy problems, they are not going to change their current course!

As an update note to this discussion on Ethanol, in April 2007, it was announced that massive numbers of American farmers have converted from growing crops like wheat to growing corn, because the demand for Ethanol had recently doubled the crop value of corn. It is predicted that in 2008, fully 1/3 of all grain crops grown in the USA will be corn, primarily to be converted into Ethanol. News reports also have noted that dairy cattle will have less and more expensive corn to eat in the future, meaning that there will be less and more expensive milk and milk products to eat. With less wheat being planted, there will be less wheat for processing into bread and bread products, again reducing supplies and increasing the grocery prices for us. Large numbers of types of food figure to rapidly get far more expensive for all of us at the grocery store, and nearly completely this is occurring because of this sad adventure in trying to solve energy supply problems with producing Ethanol. At least, if someone was going to try something like this, it would have been nice if they decided to try something that had a more realistic possibility of being useful!

The Earth's Rotation as a Source for Energy
Waste Nuclear Power For Making Electricity And Heat?
The Physics of Efficiency In Electric Power Plants
Individual Ways of Reducing Your Energy Usage
Methods of Storing Energy for Later
How Much Energy Comes From the Sun? And Why is there Global Warming?
How does the Sun create so much energy?
Inventions Which Might Help Deal With Coming Energy Catastrophes
An Invention to Efficiently Make Electricity from Solar
Enormous Heating of the Atmosphere by the Alaska Pipeline
Air Conditioning without Huge Electric Bills and without Freon
A Method of Storing Summer Heat to (Nearly) Entirely Heat a House all Winter
An Extremely Highly-Efficient (and Fast, 200.0 mph) Transportation System for People and Products
The Sophisticated Woodstove I Invented in 1973

The Physics of Wood as a Heating Fuel
Why is the North Pole Heating Faster than the rest of the Earth?
A Possible way to greatly reduce Aerodynamic Drag of Airplanes

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