Editorial Comment

Half-baked strategy

April 1998 Vol. 219 No. 4
Editorial

Thomas R. Wright, Jr.,
Editorial Director

Half-baked strategy

In case you missed it, the U.S. Department of Energy has released its Draft Comprehensive National Energy Strategy. And you may well have missed it since DOE didn't exactly preface the announcement with ruffles and flourishes, instead opting to quietly announce hearings for public comment in Davis, Calif., Houston and Washington D.C. But more on that later — the lack of any meaningful strategy in the Strategy deserves immediate comment.

What shouldn't come as a surprise, given the environmental fixations of the U.S. president and vice president, is that the Strategy appears to have been written more for the tree huggers and greenhouse set than the energy industry. In reading the draft Strategy, we found more discussion on global warming, emissions, pollution and renewable energy than on ways to increase oil and gas exploration, drilling and production.

In what should be the most important section — ensuring against energy disruptions — the Strategy said we should stop, then reverse the decline in domestic oil production by the year 2005. But it offered no proposal for accomplishing this, other than "increased federal support for R&D in improved oil supply technology," which supposedly would "expand production while reducing environmental impacts."

Further on in the draft, we found a mention of natural gas in a subsection discussing how we can grow domestic energy production "in an environmentally responsible manner." However, it said, rather simplistically we might add, that the U.S. "will support policies to allow our natural gas supply to grow by up to 6 Tcf by 2101." Again, there was no mention of how this would be accomplished.

Another brilliant DOE idea is to "use advanced technologies to recover more oil from reservoirs without significant environmental degradation." No telling what that really means, but DOE thinks advanced exploration and recovery techniques can lead to more than 400 million bbl of additional oil production by 2005.

What wasn't said in the Strategy should upset everybody doing business in the U.S. oil industry. There was absolutely no mention (that we could find) of opening up new acreage to exploration. Nothing was said about the possibility that Alaskan lands and offshore areas could contain enormous amounts of oil and gas. Nor was any mention made of opening the U.S. left and right coasts to petroleum development — not even in an "environmentally responsible manner." Finally, we couldn't find any references to oil and gas production incentives, either in the form of reduced taxes or streamlined regulations. In short, the Strategy seemed just too dependent upon developing nebulous new technologies.

If the total absence of meaningful energy strategy mentioned above wasn't bad enough, its appears that DOE didn't want our input anyway. When DOE held the hearing in Houston, local industry representatives were purposely left off the invitation list, according to Elizabeth Moler, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Energy. In a Houston Business Journal report, she said she decided "not to notify the usual suspects" since she didn't need to hear from these experts because their voice is heard in Washington anyway.

As a result, the Houston hearing was sparsely attended (we didn't make it either — no notice), attracting only 30 people. According to the HBJ, observers included people from family centers and shelters, some school district officials, several environmentalists and two union members, plus an industry executive or two who heard about the gathering via the internet.

You can still comment, however. Download a copy of the Strategy and obtain instructions for commenting from http://www.hr.doe.gov/nesp/cnes.html.

In his latest bid to demonstrate at least some creative thinking ability, U.S. Vice President Al Gore has come up with his silliest idea yet. It seems the veep awoke somewhere around 3 a.m. with the inspiration to produce a live, around-the-clock video of the Earth that could be broadcast via the internet and television. Gore announced his boondoggle at an MIT conference on technology (of all places), saying he wanted to see it up and running by 2000.

What's more disturbing is that NASA is taking this pipe dream seriously. Administrator Daniel Goldin was quoted by the Washington Post as saying that he hopes to keep the project cost below $50 million, possibly "only" $20 million. Isn't that nice. Goldin already has assigned six people to work on the plan, and said he wants to get Congress involved within a few weeks. We can't wait to hear how that goes.

As envisioned, the live video of Earth would be transmitted from an 8-in telescope and color video camera aboard a to-be-launched spacecraft located in orbit about a million miles out. Gore wants the ground stations for the satellite to be operated by university students, which he says goes with President Clinton's goal to promote science and math.

After his pre-dawn vision, again according to the Washington Post report, Gore did about 20 minutes of research using the internet, then called Goldin to get NASA working on the idea. Based upon his past contributions, we would guess that the 20-min internet exercise probably quadrupled his normal research effort.

While no full-Earth images are available now, mosaics may be pieced together from existing satellite images to give a full view. And with the proposed "live" shot being refreshed every few minutes, one scientist was moved to say that watching the telecast would be the equivalent of watching grass grow.

FROM THE ARCHIVE