If the USA decided to create a new paradigm of energy policy and lead the world by declaring war on oil could it achieve a 0 oil imports in 10 years by spending $ 2 tril to get there? If not what would the cost look like then?

Feel free to scale appropriately for any country you wish and ask the same question.


Obviously oil is still used after this in chemical industry but its for non energy related applications and the domestic reserves cover this demand.

With good policy and efficient, competent administration, absolutely.

In the real world, haha, **** no.

If this is going to be the standard for this thread, it's going to devolve into politardism real fast. More specifically, what I think would make this thread better is a fleshing out of the first position - what technologies do you think are realistic that spending that money over the next 10 years accomplishes? Does it, for example, buy extensive infrastructure for electric vehicles? Better rail connections to reduce air travel? (I'm not trying to claim these would solve the problem, just throwing out plausible connections as examples.)

I'll largely watch this one from the sidelines because I don't feel qualified to make assessments on a lot of this stuff. I'm just hoping to steer the thread in a good direction before it becomes useless, if such a thing is possible.

EDIT: One subject that I'd like to learn more about is modern nuclear power. This Wiki makes the next generation sound potentially pretty cool, but I feel like I've read elsewhere that nuclear is still very far from an economic option once all of the costs are accounted for. Maybe giant one-time subsidies like this program would change the calculus, though.

I'm not sure you can do it by spending $2 trillion.

Probably the only way to really do it over a 10 year period would be a series of escalating taxes on oil that made it increasingly financially stupid for people to use it.

If oil were effectively $150-$200/barrel alternative energy sources would be more profitable and would get developed much more quickly and researched much more aggressively.

PS: This is almost certainly politically impossible.

The other unstated thing is quality of life- The US could simply stop importing oil today (in political fantasy land), but it would really suck. Replacing 90% of US oil-as-fuel consumption with equivalent quality of life seems impossible for that amount of money. There are 250 million cars, and that leaves $8k/car, if you spend it all on cars, so.. yeah.

I gave a number that will become clear why its 2 tril eventually. We can even make it 3 tril and even 6 tril or 20 tril for 20 years and it will still be an excellent objective if met , an amazingly cheap bargain. The benefit from attaining such objective is in the tens of trillions for that timeframe for the economy and of course significant for environment and the overall prosperity of people. I understand how politically tough it is but only because politicians are idiots together with the defacto property of being corrupted and easily manipulated by money centers. But society deserves better. If a clear plan was in place with solid financial conclusions it would be easy to sell. Oil is indeed huge business and the entanglement of its price to the prosperity of an economy that heavily depends on energy is dramatic. Someone has to actively show that to the public. Rising oil prices puts the brakes in anything.

First of all it is my impression that current global crisis financially is orchestrated to a significant degree by the high oil prices and possibly the peak oil effect (although clearly political unrest and wars past 10 years in combination with extreme derivative speculation have had a negative impact on its price regardless of available reserves) . The cost of imported oil for the US is today about the equivalent of 2.6 bil barrels per year. Even if this were to drop by 50% in 10 years the oil prices worldwide would collapse , the cost to import the remaining oil would drop nicely and of course the stock markets worldwide would rally plus the focus on alternative energy technologies would stimulate massive boom in many technologies further securing a prosperous economy of significant optimism across many areas that either produce energy or their operations are affected by cheaper abundant energy. Clearly in the past 10k years every major advance in technology in human civilization has been fueled by expansion in energy usage (better expressed as expansion of available energy sources) . Why will it be any different today?

When i look at links like

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER

and the cost of only a few bil i ask myself what would be the outcome if the cost was 100 bil per year as if we really mean it and our survival depended on it . Defense alone is 800 bil per year (1.6 tril for all planet)! What if the investment was also 100 bil per year in many other areas for example biotechnology with intention to underdstand and bioengineer processes like photosynthesis (manipulate or design photosystem 2 type protein complexes with ultimate focus in creating an organism that produces H2 instead of sugars).

I also wonder what if we had a policy that every new home or every new non high energy demanding - due to its nature of operations - plant was designed to be energy self sufficient (solar panels or other ideas). What if we had converted a significant fraction of the new homes to mini energy production units where each home would easily generate 5-10KW of power and use only a fraction of it locally, exporting the rest to the network.

Then you also have all kinds of ideas regarding nuclear fission such as using Thorium vs Uranium and other proposals for new reactor designs as mentioned.

We may also try to recycle almost everything and extract energy from biomass.

Another approach would be to focus on natural gas reserves instead of oil.

Furthermore all kinds of new alternative ideas that produce for example CH4 from CO2 and solar radiation /water etc come to mind. Maybe those can be practical in some cases although they do not have a net beneficial effect on CO2 emissions.

I would like to see some discussion for example how sensible it may be to try to capture solar radiation in a biological manner rather than the solar panel approach. Is it possible to claim failry easy that solar panels will always remain a better approach than any bioengineered alternative? Or is it possible to enjoy much larger efficiency using artificial organisms.

Of course there are many more ideas hopefully.

It seems to me that very few governments if anyone at all has proven so far particularly serious about oil independence. I am not sure i could happily use the Brazil example given the rainforest disaster . France is another.


Also personally i am not concerned at all with nuclear waste. This is a ridiculous inept way to see the problem. It is only a 100-150 year storage issue. After that we will have the reprocessing technologies to get rid of the waste safely . So all the discussion about poisoning the ground for thousands of years ir ridiculous to me as long as the storage is done very responsibly with timeframe of 100+ years during which a solution will be provided. A solution by the way that is provided exactly because of our locally aggressive approach to not allow ourselves to care about the waste more than it deserves (alas without ignoring that we have to solve it eventually). You need more energy to produce ultimately the technologies that will give you solutions on a large scale. If the cost of attaining fusion is to rapidly deploy fission on present day so be it. Fusion derived energy ultimately will allow us to reprocess and eliminate the near term problems.

Another way to think about it all in terms of energy content; 1 barrel of crude oil today at ~$100 (42 gal) produces about 20 gal gasoline and other products. The energy content of gasoline is about 133 MJ per gal . So each barrel is more or less the energy equivalent of <~5 GJ. A solar panel of 1 m^2 area properly directed to the sun vertically for say 8 h per day at 20% efficiency will take 2-3 years to capture that energy. So 2.6 bil barrels requires 8 bil m^2 of solar cells in that sense or 3% of the area of Nevada state . With say 1 mil new homes and other structures per year you can get within 10 years 8% of that energy eliminated and provided from 20m^2 per home structures (of course a lot more if you go 50-100m^2 but i felt 20m^2 in each roof properly designed is tiny alteration to geometry) . So just a policy on new homes and other large buildings can take out 10% of the problem. Add to that incentives for older homes and businesses and that rises rapidly to 30% easily just from sun and no new innovation.

I understand all these numbers probably need to be more realistically redone but you get the idea , i tried to be conservative (going to 40m^2 roofs would cover any errors on my part- apologies in advance if imissed something whiel trying to get a general idea)

Lets talk about this further. Even the decision to do something dramatic about it (like a going to the moon promise in the 60s etc) would have a dramatic beneficial effect on oil markets anyway.

Even if only 25-30% of dependence was eliminated as a result the benefit is multiplied by the effect this has on the price of oil and the byproduct innovations that come out of the effort plus the activation/stimulation of the economy itself towards projects/technologies that can then be exported at significant gain.


It is remarkable to actually sit down and calculate how much of current deficit/debt is a result of the importation of oil for the past 10 years. The US is spending effectively 260 bil $ per year at current prices. The Iraq war alone was 3 years of that cost.

I understand this thread has political tangents at surface like there is no tomorrow but in my opinion if we use science to make the arguments politics will either prove stupidly inept or attain a proper direction and motivation.

Consumers spend it on new cars as they become more cost-effective than the old cars. Given adequate infrastructure (hard problem), the rest should sort itself out. Might be most efficient to incentivize businesses to create the infrastructure for us.

Additionally it has to be shown briefly that cars are a core issue and of course airlines and overall consumer products transportation . If we were to use 250 mil cars and each one having 30mil/gal (optimistic) driving 10k mil per year (probably less as avg ) (traffic kills consumption efficiency big time also) you can easily see that with each barrel giving 20 gal roughly you need about 17 barrels per car per year or about 4 bil barrels per year just for cars (that can be very different of course if the avg used are off a lot - so a better source of data other than guessing is needed here). It does show however that alternative fuel cars is a core part of the solution.

Oil is not used typically for energy production like in the past anymore but it is also used for heating and transportation besides personal cars.

You cannot do a lot about current cars but 10-20 years is plenty of new cars and going towards very efficient technologies or electric cars is part of the solution. Increasing usage of electric fast trains (even freight trains) is another way. Going to H2 fuel or producing fuels from biomass and garbage (or natural gas) and other bioenginnered methods is another way to reproduce fuel for older conventional cars. Airlines is a main problem also.

I just wanted to point out that although i didnt mention it before the main but still tough to alter usage is in the transportation. But of course having plenty of electricity available can ultimately lead to alternative ways to create fuel or directly apply hybrid electric/fuel cars in the future mix. If you have plenty of energy you can synthesize fuels i suppose too as a solution from other means is my point.

Gime 20 and we'll talk.

Here is some interesting consumption data by sector of trasportation;

http://www.bts.gov/publications/nati...ble_04_05.html

Here is a list of consumption of oil by county ;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...il_consumption


And a list of oil production by country;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...oil_production

Also energy consumption per capita by country


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...ion_per_capita

A very important list of total energy by production and consumption that is further illuminating what is going on

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_...ion_by_country

Finally a list by energy intensity ie consumption per unit of gdp

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...ergy_intensity

Im not sure this would work.

The saudi's can afford to produce oil at 50 cents a gallon and probably still make a killing.

I dont see this ever taking off because of that. But thats more of a political argument.

Well, combined with "careful" facilitation of alternative energy sources, it wouldn't hurt.

I meant the government could tax oil at: tax rate = $200 per barrel - market price of barrel of oil. This would set the price of oil at $200 per barrel.

It could certainly be done.

At least for 2 years until everyone in congress who voted for it got defeated in their reelection bid...

Well they most likely will get defeated because a O% import of petroleum would have incredible ramifications on the other non-energy related applications of petro as well. Plastics, oils, petrochemicals, etc. would all be greatly affected and the cost of such substances would reach astronomical levels. I don't think this could ever be attained, but closing in that number towards 0% would be an accomplishment. Taxing at such high rates would also be looked upon as asinine. The only possible solution is to give people as many alternative energy options as possible (both in cost effectiveness and green friendly perspectives), to lower the demand of oil. As long as there is demand, no amount of government intervention or policy will ever eliminate the presence of oil.

First of all, sorry it you guys already know everything I say, and sorry for bad english.
I was wondering myself about this a couple of days ago and just saw this thread.
Here's my thought/prediction:

For the next ten years, it's impossible I think. But we can reduce it.

As said above, we will still need oil for plastics etc, but in terms of energy use there are some ways.

The most important thing to start with is to make all cars electric cars. I do think almost all new cars will be electric cars in 15 years or so, this must be realistic. A lot of progress is being made.
As for biofuel, I've done some calculations last year. If every car in Belgium(where I live) would drive on biofuel, we would need so much grane(or whatever it's made of) that the space needed would be 1.5 times Belgium. And obv you can't grow the same grane on the same place for too many years so it will be even more.
Also, and maybe the most important thing, it produces as much CO2 as normal fuel so we don't gain anything regarding that.

So say all cars have electric motors, we still have to produce the electricity. There are a few important problems with the electricity net:
1) It's very hard to store electricity. The only real way to do it atm is by pumping water up in a higher lake during the night and during the peaktimes you let it go down into a lower lake and use the hydropower.
An alternative is to use supercapacities, but right now they can't store enough ainec. But this might become usefull in the future, let's hope so.
2) The cables of the electricy net can handle only a certain amount of current, otherwise they'll melt.

This means that we can never ever rely 100% on solar pannels and wind mills, because in a night without wind we'd have 0 electricty, and we can't store it when we collect it during the day.

It also means we can't only use nuclear power, because a nuclear plant takes a lot of time to put on or off, and it's only really effective if hold on for a long time. So we can't handle the swings in electricy use.
However, nuclear power is the best way of producing energy we have right now. It's reliable, it's safe (don't let the Japan stuff fool you) and it's good for the enviroment because there is almost now CO2 produced. The only problem is the nuclear waste, but we're at a stage where we can handle that perfect and relative it's not that much of waste.

So we need the oil/gas/coal plants to cover the fluctuations in energy use, because they can be shut on and off without much problems. However, we can try to reduce this to a mininum by using as much renewable energy as possible.

An other option, but I suppose u guys will know that for sure is if we're able to melt cores (not sure if this is the way to say it in english). This should be as good as the current nuclear power, but without the waste. However it takes more energy to get the cores on the right heat etc then the energy we can get out of it. Scientist have been saying they'l find a breaktrhough in 10-20 years, but they've been saying this for 40ish years.

Imo, the most important things to focus on right now are making cars electric, get more out of renewable sources, and try to find a way to store energy.
And keep nuclear plants open !

The practical difficulties are:

-People (and politicians) are scared of nuclear energy
-Renewable energy is insanely expensive for what it is, and solar pannels don't last long enough
-It will take a long time before everybody drives a electric car, even if they would only sell them from now.


Also something to think about, don't expect this to be cheaper as fuel. All the renewable energy is going to cost a lot, and we will feel this.
People then usually tell me you should just reload your car during night times when it's cheaper, but if everybody does this the energy use during night will be insane and it will not be cheap at all.