An Optimistic Christmas

Merry Christmas –and I mean it.  I’d like to give you something for this holiday, and it is something that I usually have in short supply –optimism.

This optimisn comes from one of the most cynical cases of mismanagement that I have seen in my adult lifetime.  I’m optimistic because there is a chance we can escape from decades of past mismanagement.

The mismanagement started as a hare-brained scheme from unelected, then-acting-Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller (remember him?!)  Rockefeller came up with an expensive energy scheme he called a $100 billion energy corporation.  This white elephant, in Rockefeller’s mind, would solve the problem of energy independence and be good for the economy.

Because of this scheme and other ideas of Rockefeller’s (going all the way back to the way he insulted Barry Goldwater during the 1964 Republican presidential primaries), Rockefeller withdrew from the 1976 race.  He wouldn’t be a candidate for Vice President.  He was out of the picture.  The unelected, acting-president, Gerald Ford, picked another candidate as running mate, Kansas Senator Bob Dole.  They lost to Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale.

Most people don’t know this, but Jimmy Carter was a Naval Academy graduate who worked under Admiral Rickover (himself the perfectionist who built a nuclear powered submarine fleet for the US Navy – the first successful use of nuclear power for sea-going service in the world).  Carter was an engineer.  As president, he resurrected Rockefeller’s $100 billion energy corporation as a new federal agency – the Department of Energy.

The original mission of the Department of Energy was to insure energy independence for the U.S.A.  Within a matter of months, under Secretary James Schlesinger (himself a previous Secretary of Defense), this new department had come up with a detailed plan to achieve that energy independence.  The plan was to build nuclear power plants amid America’s coal fields (especially the huge strip mining fields in the western states).  The heat from the nuclear fission would cook the coal into a hot, pressurized slush that could be chemically converted into natural gas and synthetic fuels (gasoline and diesel) for transportation.  This represents a cleaner, non-coal-burning improvement over the process of burning coal in order to heat other coal into pressurized slush and then synthetic fuel called the Fischer Tropsch process, an ingenious chemical procedure used by Germany to fuel their tanks and planes during World War II and by South Africa to survive the economic sanctions imposed on it because of apartheid.

America has enough coal to produce synthetic fuel for hundreds of years.  In spite of this, Schlesinger’s plan was never implemented.  By the 1980’s, the Department of Energy had become a joke.  Its real work had become to act as the research arm of the Department of Defense.  President Reagan tried to kill the Energy Department, but Democrats on Capitol Hill denied him this option.

By the 1990’s, not only was the U.S.A. continuing to move away from energy independence, but the nation had begun the tedious process of getting into resource wars in the Middle East (Iraq 1991, Iraq 2003 and now Iraq 2014).  As a veteran of an undeclared war we promised not to win [Vietnam], I’m very cynical about this turn of events, especially since we had a workable solution to the energy problem under Schlesinger in the 1970’s.

And then there came wise men bearing gifts in the form of fracking, an inevitable improvement over conventional oil drilling.

And now there come even wiser men bearing an improved form of oil drilling that uses pressurized carbon dioxide to increase yield from a well.  A lot of that carbon dioxide is left in the well to sequester it.  The world does not produce enough carbon dioxide to satisfy the demand of this improved process.  But we can get the carbon dioxide needed for this extraction process if we take it from the burning of coal in coal fired electricity generating power plants!

I’m optimistic about this.  Here’s a long explanation that is worth looking into:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/next-shale-revolution_821866.html