Hello, I'm Dr. Sam Shelton, we're continuing here with
Energy 101 and today we're going to talk about a topic that is in the press a lot.
It particularly gets in the press in the political season, but energy
independence. Energy independence has been discussed.
And every president since President Nixon in the US has declared that they want to
make the US energy independent, energy independent.
and, unfortunately, by all, almost any way you want to measure it.
We haven't made any signifigant headway in that direction.
Even though it's stated to be a high priority.
So what do we mean by energy independence.
What is it? That's one of the, one of the big problems is you can define it in many
ways, is energy independence just crude oil.
We consider only crude oil and look at what percent of our crude oil we import,
or do we assume oil and natural gas liquids, as we talked about last time,
which are classified as petroleum. Do we talk about Petroleum as a whole?
And, add, by adding oil and natural gas liquids together, and look at what
percent of those quantities do we import. Or in some cases people have even shown
numbers adding and making equivalent oil, Petroleum.
Gas, natural gas and coal. so there's alot of ways you can assume
it. this, the definition of independence and
dependence so we'll look at some of those today, but, this is part 1 of, of a 2
part, section I'll do on energy independence.
And what does it mean and, and what do we have to do to get there? so first we,
let's look at them individually so we won't get, get buried in the weeds
through so quickly. Let's look at the individual different
fuels because all fuels are not created equal.
it looks, starting at the At the bottom. If you look at crude oil.
This is a bar chart. And the first along the X axis.
These are horizontal bars. And the bar is the length indicates the
energy that we get from each of those fuels.
Crude oil is on the bottom, and. What we see that we get we use that much
energy, which is about 35 giga BTUs, or a quad, sometimes it called.
what we mean by giga is 10 ^ 15. 10^15 BTU's is 1 Giga BTU or quad,
sometimes it's called. But we use 35 giga BTU's in a year.
This was for 2011. And the red part shows what percent of
that is imported, and the blue part what we produce.
And so, you can see that we import in, more than we produce just plain crude
oil, and let's get our terminology straight here.
Crude oil is the same as oil, and sometimes but I like to add crude to it
when I can, to specify that we are really talking about oil as it comes out of the
ground. And Versus oil, that's motor oil for
lubrication and some of those other, other uses for oil by itself that is, if
we refer to as oil, even though we refined it.
let's move up one then, look at natural gas.
As we've looked at these fuels before We saw that most of the natural gas we
produce, we only import about 15% and that's shown as about 25 giga BTU's total
and about 15% of that we import and we noted before that most of that import
right there Comes from Canada. And we feel a little more comfortable
about importing from Can-, Canada, from a security viewpoint.
But, it still has an economic impact. That's money that's flowing out of this
country. That, if it were in this country, it
could create jobs and create infrastructure.
And create. a lot, add a lot to our economy.
but we, our total use as we saw before for natural gas in energy units is less
than oil. it's down about 25.
Next, we talked about Natural gas liquids.
And natural gas liquids, remember, are the liquids that can be separated from
the natural gas, by pressurize them, the gas, and liquiefy em, such as propane and
butane. So the natural gas liquids, are down
around four. Quad of giga BTU's.
Or 4 quads. And essentially, all of that, we produce
ourselves. We import a negative amount.
There is a sliver of red right here, if you look at it very closely.
And then we have coal. Coal is the only fuel that any.
Significant quantity at all we export. And here the, the red part of the bar is
over on the left hand side and is a negative number, so rather than import it
we are exporting that much coal. And the total coal that we use then Is
the blue, and we produce that ourselves. And we, we produce about 21 giga BTU's.
And but that is not a fuel that we worry about from an energy independence,
because we actually are exporting a little bit.
China is buying more and more coal from us Which the coal community obviously
likes in the coal industry because of the jobs in the economy, that economic growth
that it brings. that counters a little bit some of the
decrease in coal production and coal use because of global warming and other
environmental issues. Renewable energy.
And that, the renewable energy is one
that includes a lot of different things. the biggest one being hydroelectricity.
And, but it also includes ethanol, which we talked about last time.
I believe. And wind energy, solar energy which is
really a negligent amount but ethanol and, and biomass is what we, it was
ethanol get classified as, and hydro from dams, hydroelectricity.
So that's renewable and so when we add all those up and say, well.
Of our total energy that we use which is about 120 Giga BTU's, 120 Giga BTU's is
what we use. you sum all of these up, all of these 5
different fuel resources or energy resources that we.
That we use in order to supply the energy that we want daily to drive our cars and
to heat our homes, etc. Then we come up with 120 and you can see
theres a smaller percentage here, because obviously we're adding fuel, most of
which we produce here at home to the crude oil.
So that brings the. The fraction that we are importing of our
total energy. But that's, that's way misleading because
that's assuming all fuels can be treated equally and as I've already mentioned all
energy is not created equal. that's the first rule you know, that is.
Crude oil is about 16 dollars a million BTU's.
And natural gas is about 3 to 4 dollars a million BTU's.
So why would anyone use oil at all if they were equivalent.
We'd just use natural gas. But in fact, there are some
characteristics that prevent us from doing that.
So. Why are we so interested in oil? Well,
you've seen this chart before, briefly. But I just want to point it out again.
Is that, the problem is, is that, that our, our, transportation system is driven
by oil. And.
That is a issue. And one, but, because all this is oil.
Everything except ethanol, which is a renewable biomass.
And why are we running a transportation system on oil, rather than.
Other cheaper fuels and fuels we produce here at home well has to do with the
characteristics of the fuel and converting that fuel into the type of
energy form that, that our society wants. So that's the reason for our focus on
oil. And as you've already seen we import
about 60% of our oil if we just consider crude oil only.
However about a third of that oil, as we saw, comes from Canada that we're less
worried about. From a trend view point we've seen this,
but when we looked at the import sect module, it was coming down some.
We were at about 65%, and now we're at 60%.
So there's a small trend there. in the last three or four years it,
that's bringing down our percent of oil imports.
And you can see there've been some other periods that have, the same thing has
happened. out here and we can talk about that later
but there, there's good reasons why they went down when they did.
So that's the trend and the oil imports that we've already mentioned, most of
them come from, not most of them but our biggest importer is Canada and Mexico and
they're from North America. So that's some of the topics on from the
big picture on energy independence and we'll talk about it in more detail in
Part 2 next time. Thank you.