Obama aims to cut oil imports by a third [MSNBC]:
President Barack Obama will set an ambitious goal on Wednesday to cut oil imports by a third over 10 years, focusing on energy security amid high gasoline prices that could stall the U.S. economic recovery.
… “He’ll be laying out the goal … that in a little over a decade from now we’ll reduce the amount of oil we import from the rest of the world by about a third,” a senior administration official told reporters.
Obama will lay out four areas to help reach his target of curbing U.S. dependence on foreign oil — lifting domestic energy production, encouraging the use of more natural gas in vehicles like city buses, making cars and trucks more efficient, and encouraging biofuels.
Let me begin by addressing the article itself, which commits the fundamental sin of not providing enough hard data to contextualize the news item.
According to the US Dept. of Energy’s Annual Energy Review (Table 5.1 Petroleum Overview, 1949-2009, the all-time high for both US oil consumption and oil imports occurred in 2005 (20.802 and 12.549 million barrels[1] per day, respectively, making imports 60% of consumption). Both values have since declined, no doubt in large part to the recession, with the values for the most recent year available, 2009, being 18.686 mb/d and 9.700 mb/d, or 52% of consumption from imports.
If you take 2009 as the benchmark to begin the reduction — which I would argue against given that it’s obviously not a representative year — the plan is to reduce US oil imports by 3.2 mb/d. If you want to pick something more reasonable, perhaps split the difference between the 2009 and 2005 values for imports, that’s about 11.1 mb/d of imports, implying a reduction of 3.7 mb/d.
Now, I’m aware that some people will object to my using absolute numbers of barrels, and will say that the goal will be to reduce the percentage of oil consumption that’s imported. If US consumption is reduced overall and domestic production is relatively flat or growing, then we automatically get a reduction in the share of oil that’s imported. And that neatly brings us to the proposed steps to achieve this goal:
- “lifting domestic energy production” is nothing more or less than code for: “See, Republicans? I’m one of the good guys, after all! I’ll put an oil derrick on the front lawn of the White House and alieante my own base if I think there’s any chance at all some infinitesimal sliver of you will vote for me!” OK, that could be a slight overstatement, a too narrow view of the situation. But every estimate I’ve seen of production from sources like ANWR and ultra deep water offshore fields says that there’s no chance we’ll get anywhere near an additional 3+ mb/d out of domestic production.
- “encouraging the use of more natural gas in vehicles like city buses” is an appeal to yet another would-be silver bullet. A major increase in the use of natural gas as a transportation fuel in the US would require a non-trivial infrastructure change (which includes fueling stations as well as the rolling stock of vehicles), and all it would accomplish is replacing one fossil fuel leash that we’re on with a new one. And it would be one that produces only a trivial savings in CO2 emissions per mile driven, about 25%, especially for a technology that we’d be just starting to lock into with new investments. If anything, this sounds like the White House is saying, “OK, we thought climate change was a bigger deal than peak oil, but we can’t do anything on the climate, so we’ll nibble around the edges of peak oil because the ‘energy independence’ meme plays well with voters who don’t know anything about peak oil or climate change.” Oh, you want numbers? I’ve got numbers. According to the latest edition of the National Transportation Statistics, Table 4-5, the US consumed 1,110 gallons of fuel in buses in 2008, which is just over 72,000 barrels per day or about 2% of the stated goal in import reduction.
- “making cars and trucks more efficient” sounds like it came from someone who doesn’t know how to use a calculator (or assumes you don’t). How much of an increase in fuel efficiency can we reasonably expect to see passed into law or issued as a regulation? And given the slow rate of vehicle turnover, how much of a change does that work out to over the next decade? I’ll leave this one as an exercise for the reader, with one caveat: Don’t get your hopes up.
- “encouraging biofuels” sounds like — wait, did a chill just run through the room? This one worries me the most, as it can mean quite a few different things, from corn ethanol to cellulosic ethanol to algae biodiesel to something else to “all of the above”. But again, I have a very hard time constructing a scenario in which this becomes a major contributor in such a short time frame without employing market distortions vastly bigger than those in the current US ethanol policy.
Where is the discussion of meaningful conservation? Where is the discussion of a push to use more mass transit and accelerate the electrification of transportation overall? Hell, where is the attempt to educate the public about the breadth, depth, and nature of the problems we’re facing on the sustainability front?
I know, I know — I’m looking at the world through a very selective filter. I’m imposing my view on a public policy, with little to no regard for politics, “the science of the possible”, as the cliche goes. In my defense, I would point out that this approach puts me on the side of the universe, which is infinitely indifferent to the petty concerns of the human affairs.
[1] Pop quiz: How big is a “barrel”? A: It’s 42 US gallons.
