"A critical part of homeland security is energy independence,"
President Bush speaking to reporters on October 11, 2001, urging the Senate to act on his energy plan.

Americans have been hearing similar arguments from presidents for nearly 30 years.

At the height of the 1973 OPEC oil embargo, for example, President Nixon launched "Project Independence," which he promised would free us of foreign imports by 1980. In 1979, after the fall of the Shah of Iran shut down much of that country's oil production, President Carter pledged that the United States would cut its imports in half by 1990, if Congress passed his "Energy Security Act."

Like the current occupant of the White House, presidents Nixon and Carter bet that the oil industry, with sufficient access to resources and big federal subsidies, could close most of the gap between domestic production and the nation's growing energy demand.

Nixon shepherded the Trans-Alaska Pipeline through Congress to bring recently discovered Prudhoe Bay oil to the lower 48 states.

Carter decontrolled most domestic oil prices and won $20 billion in subsidies for oil companies to create a "synthetic fuels" industry capable of supplying a quarter of U.S. oil from unconventional sources like oil shale and tar sands in the Rockies.

None of these efforts boosted U.S. production in any meaningful way. Despite the opening of more and more public lands to leasing and huge federal subsidies, domestic oil production has remained basically flat since 1960, varying by about 15% up or down from 10 million barrels a day. The reason is simple: America has used more oil than any other country over the last century, and we have only 2.7% of the world's remaining oil reserves.

Production from Prudhoe Bay peaked in 1987, and the resource is now approaching exhaustion¹, while President Carter's synthetic fuels industry amounts to one small, struggling, unprofitable plant. At the same time, U.S. oil demand has skyrocketed, and the imported share of our oil consumption has climbed from 36% in President Nixon's day to 54% today.

President Bush, an oilman himself, knows perfectly well that "energy independence" over the next decade, achieved through drilling and subsidies, is nothing more than rhetoric. His own energy plan outlines elaborate initiatives to diversify sources of U.S. oil imports, including a major effort to develop supplies in the Central Asian countries bordering on Afghanistan, among them Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. Those initiatives were developed because Department of Energy projections show U.S. oil imports growing by nearly one-third by 2020, even if the President's proposals for increasing domestic oil production, including drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), were to be approved by Congress. And even with feverish efforts to diversify, the largest share of new imports will come from the Persian Gulf, nearly doubling our dependence on the region from 2.4 million to 4.7 million barrels a day over the next two decades.

September 11 forever changed many things in America, and our failed national energy policy should be one of them. The Bush plan might have seemed workable to some last spring, but it's simply too timid now. The status quo-more drilling here, increased subsidies there, while we resign ourselves to growing oil imports-will not suffice. The long-term security risks of continued heavy dependency on the Persian Gulf, and the possibility of added reliance on Central Asia, are just too great. The only way for the U.S. to achieve true energy "security" is by beginning to wean our economy from such heavy reliance on oil.

There is a way out of this predicament, but it will require strong and visionary leadership to inspire the American people, and it will require a long-term commitment to seeing the job through.

Nearly 70% of U.S. oil consumption is currently used for transportation, and much of the increased consumption projected for the future would go there, too. The immediate priority must be to head off growth in demand. This is achievable by two simple steps:

• Encouraging Americans to keep their engines tuned up and their tires properly inflated. This would cut U.S. oil consumption by a million barrels a day; and



• Increasing federal fuel economy standards for cars and trucks to 40 miles per gallon by 2010. This would eliminate the projected growth in U.S. oil imports by that date. (U.S. auto companies have already committed to meeting this standard for cars exported to Europe by 2010.)

In the long run, however, new automotive technologies that will allow us to drive our cars and trucks on dramatically less gasoline and to use other fuels, as well, are the best answers. We must re-engineer the automobile.

Fortunately, we are already on the cusp of a revolution in automobile technology that is the equivalent of the computer and telecommunications technology of the past 20 years. Toyota and Honda have six-month waiting lists in the U.S. to purchase their new hybrid electric models that get over 50 miles per gallon using a conventional engine combined with battery power; Ford will introduce its own version of this technology in 2003 with the new Escape model. Fuel cell technology, which replaces the internal combustion engine, will be incorporated in some models of American-made Fords and DahmlerChryslers in the 2004 model year. Singapore is already retooling its fuel delivery infrastructure to dispense hydrogen fuel by 2004.

"We think that in 20 years the internal combustion engine could be obsolete."
Koh Kim Wah, President, BP Singapore
Reuters, October 23, 2001²

"If we really decided that we wanted a clean hydrogen economy, we could have it by 2010."
U.S. National Renewable Energy Researcher
April 2001³

America should commit itself to leading and accelerating the adoption of this new technology by:

• Increasing fuel economy standards further for cars and trucks to 55 miles per gallon by 2020. This would convert the fleet of automobiles sold in the United States from conventional gasoline powered internal combustion engines largely to gasoline-electric hybrids 20 years from now.



• Initiating a "Manhattan Project" to develop fuel cell technology to speed commercialization at economically viable prices.



• Creating government funding to construct the fuel delivery infrastructure necessary to ensure that hydrogen and other alternative fuels are as readily available by the year 2030 as gasoline is today.

Over the next two decades, replacing internal combustion gasoline engines with fuel cells can benefit developing countries as well, significantly reducing the worldwide growth in demand for oil, and providing developing nations the opportunity to avoid oil dependence on oil through more environmentally favorable transportation technologies.

Seeing beyond our exclusive reliance on oil for the vast majority of our transportation needs is critical to reducing global warming pollution in the U.S. and worldwide. It is essential to prevent the projected exponential growth in global warming pollution from developing countries. Greenhouse gas emissions from developing countries are estimated to increase by 114% by 2020 due in large part to the transportation sector in those countries.⁴

Through history, America has demonstrated its ability to use innovation in response to new challenges. The urgent need for energy security in a rapidly changing world cannot be met with yesterday's solutions-strategies that have failed to deliver on promises of energy self-reliance made by four presidents over the course of 30 years. New technologies, not false promises of producing more oil from domestic sources, can secure our energy independence and free us from economic dependence on the Middle East and the Persian Gulf.

Forward to Chapter II: Oil and National Security

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Footnotes:

1. Mull, Charles G. and Ellen E. Harris, "Western Arctic Energy Project," Alaska Geosurvey News, Vol. 2, No. 2, June 1998 (http://wwwdggs.dnr.state.ak.us/download/9806news.pdf).

2. "BP to Build Singapore Stations for Hydrogen Cars." Reuters, October 23, 2001.

3. Philip Ball, "Power Cells Get Warm." Nature Science Update, April 19, 2001.

4. Energy Information Administration, International Energy Outlook 2000
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/ieo/tbla9_a16.html#a11.

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