Center for Reactor Information

Future Energy Needs

By Fredric C. Olds
November 16, 1998

The standard of living that we enjoy is possible only because there is enough energy available in our economy to sustain it. The question is: How much energy does our economy demand?

This sounds like a simple, straightforward question. We might answer, “I need gasoline for my car, and heat for my house in winter, and we have to keep industry operating. And we want lights kept on in our shopping malls.”

I'd like to make the observation that energy use per capita largely determines the quality of our lives. Everything we eat, wear, and live in has energy content. So does everything we use - tools, pots and pans, make-up. So do our leisure and cultural activities, such as travel and concerts. For example:

Figure 1. Energy costs of goods and activities

In addition, schools depend on energy. Hospitals and industries are high energy users. R&D require energy. Look at any sector of our lives, and you see energy use. And for us, energy is plentiful.

But, today, we should be asking: How do we insure that we'll get all the energy we need to support our standard of living as time goes by?

Really, we do not give enough thought to the security of energy supplies. We take the supplies for granted, and especially our supplies of electricity.

Without giving much thought to it, we consider ample supplies of electricity to be an absolute right, unaware that no national policy guarantees this.

Let me backtrack for a moment to review: It may surprise you to learn that supplies of electricity as we know them have not been available for very long. The first commercial electricity was generated in 1882 in Edison's Pearl Street station in lower Manhattan.

The station's capacity was about 90 kW, and it could transmit to an area of about one-square mile. Steam engines powered the station, and it burned 10 lb. of coal per kWh generated vs. about 0.85 lb. per kWh today.

We've come a long way since then. Today no nation can compete unless it is an electric society, but only a third of the world's people have meaningful amounts of electricity in the sense of international competition.

We should keep in mind that the electricity from a 1000-mw power plant is worth the energy of 25 million manual laborers - and electricity is a thousand times more versatile.

But during the last decade or so, energy supply and use have been shaping up as a very complex matter.

Consider that since 1973 the U.S. has had no national energy policy - none at all that addresses the fact that our entire way of life is undergirded by readily available supplies of energy.

Think about your assumed right of an ample supply of electricity, which comes from various energy sources. No national energy policy protects it.

Further, deregulation has begun to break up the electric power generation industry as we know it. I believe this raises serious questions about the future security of our electricity supplies and about their costs.

Equally serious, in my opinion, the U.S. has no policy that protects our nation's energy supply position. We're in a world of six billion people in 200 countries, all competing, all striving for larger supplies of energy that will enable them to increase their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and thus raise their standards of living.

Think of it - three quarters of the world's people reside in emerging nations that generate only 10% of the world's GDP, and consume only 25% of the world's energy - most of it going for bare subsistence uses. But steadily they are gaining a larger share - most supplied by fossil fuels.

We are talking casually about greater consumption of fossil fuels by some 4 billion people who want more - and are getting it.

Points about fossil fuels, especially oil

Point 1. Oil resources are finite. The world uses huge quantities - 74 million barrels (bbl) every day (MBD) but finds only 15 MBD. The U.S. uses 25% of the world's oil.

Based on use and finds to date, oil technology advances, and growth in use by the have-not nations, current estimates are that use will peak at some 90 MBD somewhere around 2015, and then decrease. Population still will grow.

U.S. oil production peaked in 1970 - as was predicted in the 1950s - and the U.S. is the only major oil province whose production already has peaked.

Gas: There are 315,000 gas wells in the U.S. The U.S. uses 22 trillion cu. ft.(TCF) of gas per year - 10% or so of which is imported. Our gas use is expected to reach 31 TCF by 2015.

These huge oil and gas numbers are presented just to give an idea of the magnitude of energy use - and to offer the thought that supplying it is an enormous operation that should be assured better than it is today.

Now, lets look at the top producers and consumers of energy.

Figure 2a. World's major producers of primary energy — 1992

(Source: Energy Information Administration, International Energy Annual, 1992.)

Figure 2b. World's Major Consumers of primary energy — 1992

This is a measure of the world competition for access to finite energy supplies.

(Source: Energy Information Administration, International Energy Annual, 1992.)

Point 2. Fossil fuels are the base for our petrochemical technology, and are too precious to be burned and lost forever.

All of our plastics come from these hydrocarbons - everything from your credit cards to the synthetic fabrics you wear. There are eyeglasses, contact lenses, cameras, and film.

Examine the inside of your car - most from hydrocarbons. Think about house paint, floor wax, insulation, garden hoses and plastic bags; and very important, many new medicines.

About 20 years ago, Union Carbide made a list of common items made with petrochemicals for which oil is a basic raw material. There are 490 items on this list and it easily could be twice that long.

Point 3. Fossil fuels are very unequally distributed around the world. For example, 80% or more of the coal is in the U.S., the former USSR, and China.

Two thirds of the world's oil lies in five countries in the Mid-East. Of concern is cartel influence over the huge export/import business in oil.

For example, some 40-50 million Bbl of oil per day are sent from producer nations to consumer nations. The U.S. alone imports 9 M bbl of oil per day - every day - and over open sea-lanes.

I'm bothered by the shrinking size of our navy in view of this critical oil trade and the political struggles and spates of terrorism in the world today.

Point 4. Fossil fuels when burned emit so-called greenhouse gases. There is a vigorous argument between two groups of scientists over what effect, if any, these gases may be having on the world's temperature.

I tend to side with the group that says the earth's temperature may have dropped slightly over the past 19 years, not warmed.

This group uses 25,000 satellite measurements daily to plot global temperature - land and water.

Keep in mind that over the ages, the world has warmed and cooled many times. A recent example, is the Medieval Warm Epoch, AD 1100 to 1250, followed by the Little Ice Age, AD 1400 to 1750, during which Europe's growing seasons shortened and the canals in Venice froze over.

Interestingly, a couple of decades ago, some of today's global warming gurus were warning us about the coming ice ages.

The pro-warming group uses earth-bound temperature measurements - far less data than that from the satellites. Huge R&D funds keep the pro-warming researchers well nourished.

The Administration has taken the pro-warming side. You may recall Vice President Al Gore's book on the topic.

The spin-off from this is strong international pressure, spearheaded by the United Nations, to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels, and thus prevent a hypothetical warming disaster caused by greenhouse gases.

The first of six international global warming conferences took place in Rio in 1992.

The target for reduction is the energy use of the more advanced nations. These high energy users are Western Europe, Japan, and North America – especially the United States. The 3rd world nations are exempted.

The 5th conference in this global warming series took place in Kyoto in 1997 where a greenhouse gas reduction treaty was signed by the many nations, including the. U.S. The treaty calls for the U.S. to reduce its energy consumption by what might be as much as 25% by 2010.

The U.S. Senate has refused to ratify this treaty because the consequences of drastic energy reductions are not well defined, and the reductions apply just to the advanced nations.

The 6th global conference in this series was held in Buenos Aires late in 1998. Its goal was to force implementation of the Kyoto treaty.

In Buenos Aires, the U.S. proposed that the Third World adopt "voluntary" quotas which would obligate the poorer nations to take a significant role in combating global warming.

The Third World, led by China, blocked the U.S. proposal.

Unreasonable? The two largest countries in the world, China and India have 2.2 billion people - 8 times as many as the U.S. China and India have no greenhouse gas reduction quotas. The U.S. has a reduction quota of possibly as much as 25% to be achieved by the year 2010.

With China's increasing rate of energy use, it eventually will equal the U.S. in greenhouse gas emissions - but still have no reduction quota.

The U.S. is roundly criticized for its high-energy use - granted we have the largest per capita use of energy of any country in the world - but we have used it well.

With it, we have built a strong economy - whose bounty we have shared very generously with any nation in need, some not even friendly to us.

Routinely, we give billions in foreign aid, we lead in funding the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, we give technical assistance, and we have spaces in our colleges for foreign students. Our volunteers coach those nations less fortunate in matters of food, habitat, and sanitation.

And, to whom does the world turn in times of disaster - hurricane, volcano, famine, and war? And who else can afford what we give?

The proposed severe reduction in U.S. energy will leave us still high in use, but rank us somewhere below Kuwait, Singapore, and Finland.

In any case, no one can guess the consequences of foreign countries dictating our energy use.

Point 5. The final point I want to make about fossil fuels is that there is an excellent substitute for them - nuclear power - it is the ideal way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It emits none, as you know.

Strangely enough, the use of nuclear energy for power production was not even suggested in the Kyoto protocol.

Decline of nuclear power in the U.S.

In 1975, the U.S. nuclear program had 236 reactors in operation, under construction, or committed.

Today, we have only 104 in operation, with no additional plants at all envisioned - a disastrous shrinkage in the program - 236 down to 104.

There are several causes for this decline:

• Congress wrote laws suggesting or requiring zero risk, and regulators issued regulations aimed at zero risk.
• Nuclear opponents were skillful in wording their attacks on nuclear power, and in reaching the public, the media, and politicians with their messages.
• The nuclear utilities and vendors didn't realize the impacts of the zero-risk bent of Congress and regulators until it was too late. They underestimated the impact of the anti-nuclear forces, and they developed little skill in communicating their messages to the public, the media, and the politicians.

Consequences to U.S. nuclear power program

1. Average plant construction times rose from 5 years in the 1960s to 13 years in the 1970s because of constant regulatory changes and opposition.
   
   As an example of regulatory overkill, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued one new regulation every working day in the three-year period 1976-78, causing constant re-engineering, and backfitting at the plants.
   
   This was an absurd performance by an agency out of control. Costs skyrocketed. The cost of money for plant construction began to exceed the cost of the hardware.
   
2. The nuclear opposition fought siting and licensing at every step, keeping both the utilities and the vendors in court almost constantly, adding delays, and increasing costs.
   
3. Plant performance suffered. The combined load factor of all U.S. nuclear plants fell from 70% in 1976 to 54.5% in 1983. Worldwide, only the nuclear power plants in Spain and India had worse performances at that time.

For the first time in U.S. history, we could not build new units that performed better, were built in less time, and at lower cost than last year's models.

As a result, enthusiasm for nuclear power waned. Thwarted at home, the U.S. vendors licensed their plant designs abroad with great success.

For example, General Electric built six of Japan's first nuclear plants, and Westinghouse built four. These 10 were completed in less than half the time it was taking the two companies to build the same plants in the U.S.

Further, these 10 Japanese/U.S. plants cost less and performed better, than their U.S. counterparts.

To digress for just a moment, it is important to observe that regulatory overkill now has spread far beyond the nuclear sector. It permeates our society, and its influence can be seen in many significant socioeconomic changes, not the least of which is the micro-management of our lives.

Here are just a few other examples to think about. Of the world's 10 largest banks, construction, and housing companies, none any longer are U.S.-based. Of the 10 largest chemical, machinery, engineering, utility, and appliance companies, only two are U.S.-based today.

The benefits of high energy use

There are numerous questions we should ask about energy use. How much do we use? What do we use it for? Where does it come from? Do we use too much? How much do we value the supply?

I pose these questions to encourage readers to be more aware of energy, and remember that our energy use largely determines the quality of our lives.

To demonstrate this point, I have used a massive data bank on the world's nations, compiled by the World Bank. Since 1974, the Bank has surveyed all the major nations of the world and compiled data for each country in some 165 categories.

These categories include population, energy use, hospitals, doctors, life expectancy, infant mortality, population growth and percent rural population, education, finance, national debt, food, fuels, manufacturing, growth of consumption, and on and on.

The Bank collects these raw data every year, tabulates them, and publishes them in a rather massive publication. I plotted the data from some of these categories against energy and found an astonishing picture.

In the 10 high-energy-use countries, the average use per person is from 164 to 490 times as high as in the 10 low-energy-use countries. See Figure 3.

This disparity is reflected in life expectancy. People in the 19 countries with the highest energy use live 50 to 75% longer than people in the 19 countries with the lowest energy use: 76-79 years for the high energy countries vs. 51 years or less for the low energy countries. See Figure 4.

Infant mortality in the lowest energy-use countries is 15 to 30 times as high in countries with the highest use. See Figure 5.

And probably most important, the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita of the top energy users is roughly from 40 to 400 times as great as it is in the lowest energy users. See Figure 6.

National GDP depends on energy use. In turn, GDP affords us the necessities we depend on, and the creature comforts that add flavor to our lives.

I want to close with a vignette about health care in a part of the world where energy use is low.

This adventure of mine took place in a remote area of China. Just for reference, one medical person - doctor or nurse - in China covers five times as many people as one medical person in the U.S., and often in poor facilities.

A couple of years ago, I took a back roads trip to the far southwest China. Starting from Hong Kong, we flew to a city called Kunming, which was the terminus of the famous Burma Road in WW II.

We struck out northwest on this road toward Burma, and in three days were approaching the outliers of the Himalayas.

We had been promised a meeting with a doctor who ministered to the people in this rather barren territory, and a few miles down a narrow dirt side road, we came to the compound of the famous doctor, Dr. Ho.

He explained to us that his medicines are the herbs, fungi, leaves, roots, and berries he gathers on periodic trips into the Jade Dragon Mountains. He keeps his medicines in bags in his storeroom.

Your vision of medical coverage may be in terms of your doctor's office, local hospitals, and neighborhood pharmacies - generally spacious, well equipped, and clean. But Dr. Ho's office, treatment room, storeroom and pharmacy - all of these combined - were about as large as a good sized living room.

As I walked through, I could see that nothing was sterile.

People come long distances to Dr. Ho - many from two days away by mule cart - because he is the closest medical hope they have.

My message: Cherish every spark of energy we get. It means our way of life and what we pass on to the generations that follow us.

Figure 3. Energy use per capita

Footnotes for Figures 3 through 6:

Data used to construct Figures 3 through 6 were taken from The World Bank's World Development Report, 1996. --The World Bank, 1818 H Street. NW, Washington, D.C. 20433

That report tabulated the World Bank's 1994 survey of 127 countries with 5.6 billion people.

As explained earlier in the text, the World Bank uses three dozen or so indicators against which it evaluates the world's countries in its annual surveys. The survey findings are tabulated in 50 or so major and minor tables, along with about 200 pages of text.

From these World Bank survey data, I selected the countries with the highest and lowest numbers, that directly reflect quality of life.

Then, I tabulated the numbers as you see them in Figures 3- 6. This is the way I used the raw data from the World Bank report, it is not how the WB used it. WB simply presents the voluminous data.

No one country always ranks at the top or bottom of any list. Rather there are clusters of consistently high ranking and low ranking countries.

Figure 4. Life expectancy at birth

People in countries with low per capita energy use live much shorter lives than do people in countries with high energy use.

Figure 5. Highest and lowest infant mortality rates (infant deaths per 1,000 births)

In countries with low per capita energy use, infant mortality rates are much higher than in countries with high per capita energy use.

Figure 6. Highest and lowest per capita income

Copyright, F.C. Olds. 11/16/98

Fredric C. Olds
Energy Communications
910 Wildwood Drive West
Prospect Heights, IL 60070

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