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Is America Addicted to Oil?
TEd TRipp,
North Andover Taxpayers Association
 This
past January, President Bush in his State of the Union
Address said, “America is addicted to oil.” The
news media quickly picked up the phrase and for days
these five words were all you read about in the
newspapers. You wouldn’t know that the president
mentioned anything else in his speech except for the
country’s “oil addiction.”
What made this so newsworthy? After all, we have known
for decades that the country has been dependent on
imported oil and that we consume more oil than any other
nation in the world.
The president’s phrase was notable because it
contained the word “addicted.” This is a very
strong word and is usually associated with the abuse of
legal or illegal drugs. Addiction to heroin, cocaine, or
even nicotine, are harmful concepts that many are
painfully familiar with. By using this word, President
Bush seemed to imply that our use of petroleum products
is somehow bad or evil – to be avoided at all costs.
And by extension we should feel guilty when using them.
The president did a disservice to the American people by
phrasing our energy import problems in this manner. As a
former oil man, he should have known better.
America and its citizens are not addicted to oil by any
reasonable or responsible definition of the word. We do
use a lot of oil – there is no doubt about that
– but we use oil because it is simply the most
convenient, most efficient and most desirable energy
source available. As an MIT professor of chemical
engineering once lectured a group of industry
representatives, “Oil is the Gold Standard of our
energy sources.”
Then he explained what he meant. Oil, because it’s a
liquid, is easy to transport and handle, and can be
readily converted into useful work through combustion.
This is eminently applicable to automobile engines and
home heating systems. In addition, the carbon content of
oil means that, gallon for gallon, oil has more inherent
energy available than natural gas or hydrogen. This
latter point is most important when examining gas mileage
using alternative energy sources. A gallon of gasoline
will simply give you more mileage than most other fuels.
Let’s look at a gallon of natural gas. Since this
energy source is in a gaseous state, to turn it into a
liquid and maintain it in liquid form requires cryogenic
cooling. An alternative would be to use high-pressure
cylinders of the gas. Neither of these is convenient for
the consumer and both modes are expensive as well as
requiring special equipment. It is not surprising that
over the past several decades where natural gas has been
proposed for cars and trucks, just a small number have
been built. Only where you have stationary sites
available such as homes and power plants, does natural
gas seem to have found its place.
Hydrogen is a little different than natural gas. It is a
clean fuel — which is its attraction — but it
has less inherent energy per gallon than gasoline. It is
also difficult to store. You can pressurize it, or
cryogenically cool it, or use some high-tech absorption
storage technology on metal surfaces, but none of these
are easy or consumer friendly. The real problem with
hydrogen today, however, is that it takes more energy to
produce than one gets from using it – even in fuel
cells.
And there is no solution to this problem in the near
future.
What about coal?
Coal is one of our oldest energy sources. Why not use it
to heat water into steam and make steam powered
automobiles? The reasons are many. Coal has a high energy
content, but it also contains a lot of pollutants that
are expensive and difficult to remove.
Mining coal is dangerous and costs numerous lives every
year. Coal is a solid and requires special handling and
transport equipment. Steam is under pressure and requires
heavy boilers and pistons – not good attributes for
mobile transportation. It turns out that coal is best
used in electric power plants that are on dedicated sites
containing extensive and bulky pollution control
equipment.
Several times in the past, due to necessity, coal has
been converted into oil. The Germans did it in World War
II when they had an excess of coal and a lack of oil. The
South Africans also did it during apartheid when the
world would not sell them oil. Oil generated from coal
costs more than oil from the ground, so it has not
generally been economically viable where alternatives are
present.
This brings us back to oil from oil wells. It is
convenient to extract; it is easy to handle and
transport; it is readily combustible; it is minimally
polluting; and it is still economically priced. In short,
we use a lot of oil and oil byproducts because they are
the best and most economic energy sources for a wide
variety of applications.
As a practical decision, Americans would be crazy not to
use oil as the preferred energy source for many uses.
This is not addiction to oil; it is just the rational
choice of an informed citizenry.
The government should stop trying to make us feel guilty
about using this important and efficient resource.
Ted Tripp is an International Consultant
in high-tech manu-facturing methods. He has BS and MS
degrees in Chemical Engineering from MIT. You can reach
him at tripp@gis.net.
*Send your questions comments to ValleyPatriot@aol.com
The May, 2006 Edition of
the Valley Patriot
The Valley Patriot is a Monthly
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All Contents (C) 2006, Valley Patriot, Inc.
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Lawrence, Dracut, Tewksbury and Lowell.
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