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writing for godot

Keystone XL: A Distraction from More Important Matters

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Written by William F. Pickard   
Wednesday, 14 January 2015 07:38
¡ The Keystone Pipeline is a Gigantic Red Herring that Distracts Our Public from Important Energy Issues !


Y’all know about the Keystone Pipeline? It’s a whole system of pipelines to bring tar sands crude from sources in central Alberta to refineries in middle America. Portions of it already exist and have a capacity of not quite 600,000 barrels a day. The squawking you hear is about a proposed addition called the Keystone XL, which could up the throughput by about 700,000 barrels a day. Is this piddling addition really worth that much furor? After all, the US daily consumption of oil is twenty-fold that!

Tar sands crude admittedly requires more energy than light sweet crude to turn it into useful products; but only about 20% more. And that sort of inefficiency probably won’t make much difference over the long run. It’s not as if the fossil fuel we conserve today will never be burned. Chances are ALL readily recoverable fossil fuel will ultimately be burned, and while some of you readers are still alive! It’s irresistibly convenient. We know how to combust it, the technology is simple, and we don’t have to stress out striving to make politicians’ fuzzy dreams of abundant renewables come true.

RSN readers tend to be liberal-leaning. So they should focus on the following projection. Right now the developed economies consume electricity at an average rate of one kilowatt per person. Unless one wishes to tell the developing economies to get lost, Earth will need by 2050 to be generating electricity at an average rate of TEN TRILLION WATTS. That’s something like 150 billion barrels of petroleum a year, just for electricity: transportation and industrial process heating haven’t been included. At that rate, Earth’s fossil carbon resource should be pretty well used up by the end of the Twenty First Century. Barring incredibly costly carbon capture and storage, we will by then have definitive data on the hypothesis of greenhouse warming. And if we have not yet developed the needed alternative energy infrastructure, we shall be well and thoroughly scuppered during the resulting Energy Famine. Compared with the consequences of that sort of outcome, the Keystone XL is irritating-pimple class and looks a lot like a demonic distraction that keeps us from facing up to major energy problems. Like going renewable.

THIS IS WORTH GETTING EXCITED ABOUT! Not because we can’t capture enough sunshine to provide us with all power we’ll need, but because we can’t do so on demand: the sun shines only when Mother Nature wills it. So we’d better build “granaries” for sunshine. We face what is called the Intermittency Challenge: and it hasn’t been solved. Sure, hypothesized solutions exist and have for decades. But where are the full-scale replicable working demonstrations? Hypothesized solutions don’t keep the lights on when it’s dark and scary; nor do they keep the pipes from freezing on a cold winter’s night.

Remember that, on average, each cohort of a million Americans will need a billion watts; and there’ll be over three hundred such cohorts. The folks who study such things imagine that electricity storage for a day’s worth of a billion watts would cost on the order of 10 billion dollars, roughly the Keystone XL cost. Those folks could even be right. On the other hand, they could be as wrong as the ones who priced out the F-35 fighter or the anti-ballistic-missile defense system. And we’ll never know for sure until we spring for a generous assortment of full scale demonstration projects at ten billion bucks a pop. Simply figuring out how to meet the Intermittency Challenge is a way bigger hassle than the Keystone XL. Its outcome is of incomparably greater importance! And its neglect by our easily distractible Congress is a damned shame.

Our busy legislators, whose attention is preempted by lesser projects like Keystone XL, seem largely oblivious to the irritable bull elephant in the room: he’s in musth, and we gotta cope with him!

Why neither the White House under the tutelage of its science advisor John Holdren nor the Department of Energy under Ernest Moniz has scrambled to alert both the Congress and the Public to this imperative, is a matter of conjecture.


William F. Pickard, older ‘n’ dirt, is a retiree (from Washington University in Saint Louis) who specializes in energy matters. He’s pretty much clueless as to how to how the crises confronting America might be surmounted. But at least he has had the good grace not to stand for public office.

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