Why is the U.S. still dependent on foreign oil?
We’re producing more crude and our cars are more efficient, yet we still import millions of barrels of foreign oil per day. What’s going on?
Posts
Fuel choice lost
Picture this.
You’re driving down the road and you notice your tank is almost empty — time to fill up. Read more →
The perverse connection between oil and women’s rights
Saudi Arabia. United Arab Emirates. Iran. Iraq. Kuwait. Nigeria. Qatar.
That may look like a list of seven random countries, but they all have something sinister in common. Namely, being generally awful places for women to live. Read more →
Yes, America is, in fact, addicted to oil
In a recent piece for Forbes, petroleum economics analyst Michael Lynch claimed that America’s addiction to oil is a “myth.” He contends that “Americans consumers have ample choices” when it comes to transportation fuels, and that our relationship with oil is no different than our relationship with “food, housing, and clothing” or “cement or steel.”
General: Dependence on oil a ‘serious’ national security threat
With gasoline prices at five-year lows, it’s easy to lose sight of the realities of U.S. dependence on oil. We’re still beholden to other nations for much of our supply; we still have to expend much energy and resources defending the free flow of oil around the world; and we still need the long-term solution of alternative fuels to keep prices low.
One person who’s done a lot of thinking about this is retired U.S. Air Force Gen. Ronald Keys, who lays out the argument for reducing our consumption of oil in a guest piece for The Hill. Keys, who spent 40 years in the Air Force (and flew combat missions in Vietnam), is now chairman of the Military Advisory Board at the CNA Corporation, a nonprofit military research group.
Keys writes:
Our nation’s over dependence on oil is a serious threat to our national security—militarily, diplomatically, and economically. It limits our ability to act on the world stage and increases the likelihood that we will send Americans in uniform into harm’s way. It leaves us open to impacts from wildly gyrating prices …
And:
Importing less oil will loosen the bonds that tie us to regimes that don’t always have our nation’s best interests at heart. That will make it easier for the United States to act in its own national interest on the world stage, and make it less likely that we will have to send troops to defend the free flow of oil.
And:
Oil prices will always fluctuate, but the need to cut our nation’s oil dependency will endure. This need doesn’t get any less urgent just because pump prices tick downwards for a while.
PUMP – How, When and Why to End Our Oil Reliance
PUMP is an eye-opening documentary that tells the story of America’s addiction to oil, from its corporate conspiracy beginnings to its current monopoly today, and explains clearly and simply how we can end it and finally win choice at the pump. This film is well researched and easy to understand. The directors, Joshua and Rebecca Tickell won a Sundance award for their 2008 documentary Fuel.
Read more at: Working Mother
PUMP – Special Screening with Q&A presented by Fuel Freedom Foundation
The Frida Cinema in Santa Ana is proud to bring you an eye-opening investigation into the United States’ problematic love affair with fossil fuels. Husband and wife team Joshua and Rebecca Harrell Tickell’s Pump is an exciting presentation of both long- and short-term solutions to our nation’s current oil addiction. The film seeks to explore what real individuals can do to make necessary change in their communities, approaching issues from the level of real human beings.
Budweiser trades Clydesdales for natural gas
The famous Clydesdales that have hauled Budweiser’s barrels of beer since the 19th century are finally being replaced by 21st century compressed natural gas-driven vehicles.
Well, it isn’t quite that simple. There’s been an 80-year interval between the 19th and 21st centuries, when Budweiser’s trucks ran on gasoline and diesel fuel. But for 66 trucks at Budweiser’s Houston brewery, the 53-foot trailers loaded with 50,000 pounds are now going to be hauled by trailers running on compressed natural gas.
Anheuser-Busch actually has plans to convert its entire fleet to natural gas, according to James Sembrot, senior transportation director. “It’s significant that A-B feels comfortable swapping for an entire fleet that runs on CNG,” Christopher Helman wrote in Forbes. According to Sembrot, “the intention of shifting to natgas…is to reduce carbon emissions and fuel costs, while doing something green(ish).”
“The Houston brewery is among the biggest of the 14 that A-B operates nationwide. The closest breweries to this one are in Fort Collins, Colo., and St. Louis. Each truck rolls virtually around the clock — traveling in an average of 140,000 miles in a single year hauling beer to wholesalers. They move 17 million barrels of beer each year.” That’s a lot of beer running on natural gas.
Actually, it’s not Anheuser-Busch that is taking the initiative on Budweiser. The natural gas vehicles are being made available through Ryder, the nation’s largest trucking company since merging with Budget Truck Rental in 2002. Budget now has 2,800 businesses and 132,000 trucks around the country. Although only a small percentage run on natural gas, the company is dedicated to converting its fleet with all due dispatch, and the savings may prove to be extraordinary. According to Helman, “Sembrot tells me that the old trucks were getting 6.2 miles per gallon of diesel and running 140,000 miles per year. That equates to 1.45 million gallons of diesel to go 9.2 million miles. At about $3.80 per gallon, that’s roughly $5.5 million in total diesel costs per year. If they save about 30 percent per ‘gallon equivalent’ when buying CNG, that’s a savings of about $1.65 million per year.” That’s a lot of money save for switching to natural gas.
But it’s not just Budweiser and Ryder and a few forward-looking companies that are pushing ahead with natural-gas vehicles. The whole state of Texas seems to have gotten the bug. The Lone Star State now has 106 CNG filling stations, the most in the country. Forty are them are open to the public, while the others are fleet vehicles where vehicles from Anheuser-Busch and Ryder can fill up. Actually, far ahead of these innovators are FedEx and UPS, which have not converted their fleets for many years. And hovering in the background is T. Boone Pickens and his “hydrogen highway,” which is installing huge natural gas depots at key truck stops along the Interstate system. Much of this is aimed at Texas and the first complete link has joined San Diego to Austin in a seamless string of stations that will allow tractor-trailers to make the whole trip on natural gas.
All this has done wonders for Texas tax collections. At the start of the year, the Texas Controller’ Office was anticipating revenues less than $ million from excise taxes. Yet by July 31, 2014, collections were 220 times of that anticipated, and the Texas Controller’s office had collected $2,178,199. “These collections are more than double the estimated amount,” said David Porter, Texas Railroad Commissioner. “At 15 cents per gallon equivalent, $2 of motor fuels tax equals sales of 14,521,326 gallon equivalents of natural gas.”
Texas may be famous for fracking and producing more oil than Iraq, but they do not hesitate to look for new uses for gas and oil as well.
Photo by by Paul Keleher from Mass, US.
Edwin Black: Kick our deadly oil addiction
ISIS has bolstered its forces within recent months, and it has financed this expansion with $10 to $20 million per week in illicit oil sales from as many as 70 captured oil wells
Natural gas vehicles take the halfway route
In the early 1990s, California tried to force the introduction of electric cars by requiring that auto companies produce a zero-emissions vehicle in order to remain in the state. The result was Chevrolet’s EV1, which everyone agreed was the best electrical vehicle that could be built at the time. Owners loved them, but somehow the effort didn’t take off.
The infrastructure simply wasn’t in place. The car only had a 70-mile range and drivers spent much of their time worrying about their next charge. Many EV1s ended up on the lots of rental agencies where they attracted little attention. All this, of course, was interpreted by some people as the fault of the oil companies and the auto industry, which didn’t push the case hard enough. The award-winning documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car?” made this argument.
Then three years later, Toyota introduced the Prius, a gas-electric hybrid that gave drivers some breathing room. It was a spectacular success. By not trying to make the technological transition in one giant leap, the Prius introduced drivers to the advantages of electric propulsion without asking them to sacrifice anything in terms of a nerve-wracking search for a refill. In fact, when Toyota brought out the Prius it deliberately left off a home charger so that buyers would not associate it with the failed EV1. Not until several years later did the company release a plug-in hybrid. In both cases, the Prius has been the most successful of all hybrids.
Natural gas vehicles seem determined to avoid the same mistake. This year both Ford and General Motors are releasing commercial NGVs in their light-truck and sedan lines. But they are taking care to make them bi-fuel vehicles that run on both gasoline and natural gas, although they are expensive. (Both companies have been making tri-fuel — gasoline, ethanol and CNG — for many years in Brazil.) First out of the box will be the immensely popular Chevrolet Silverado and the GMC Sierra, both full-sized pickups that sold 480,000 and 184,000 last year, respectively, the highest sales mark since 2007. GM is offering bi-fuel versions for every cabin configuration. The 2015 model will offer a 16-gallon gasoline tank and a 17-gallon-equivalent compressed natural gas tank. When both are filled, the truck will have a remarkable range of 650 miles.
Along with that, GM will be releasing a bi-fuel Chevrolet Impala to introduce ordinary drivers to the advantages of natural gas. The Impala will feature an 18.5-gallon gasoline tank and a 7.7-GGE CNG tank. The result will be a 500-mile range.
Not to be outdone, Ford has already introduced a bi-fuel version of the immensely successful F-150 half-ton pickup truck. Released only last November, the company managed to sell 15,000 vehicles across eight models in 2013. That beat 2012 sales by 25 percent. When combined with its conventional gas tank, the CNG boost gives the F-150 an astounding 700-mile range, beating the Silverado by 100 miles. Unfortunately, the price differential for all these NGV models will be about $10,000.
But motorists could see a 2-3-year payback if the price gap between gasoline and its natural gas equivalent holds up. Right now it has settled around $1.50 gap per gallon and has remained there for almost five years. Give motorists the opportunity to save almost half the price on a gallon of gas is bound to make the new bi-fuel models more attractive.
Other developments are also moving in the direction of a transition to natural gas for high mileage vehicles. In 2012, ARPA-E, the federal government’s program for advanced energy research, awarded $2.3 million to GE Global Research, Chart Industries and the University of Missouri to design a gas refueling station for homeowners. GE already makes a $5,000 medium-sized refueling kit for commercial businesses called “CNG in a Box” that takes gas out of the utility pipes and compresses it for fleet vehicles. The target price for the scaled-down homeowner version is $500. The consortium has set a release date for later this year, at which point we’ll find out if they’ve been successful. The launching of such a cheap conversion system that would allow homeowners to tap the natural gas pipes in their house to refuel their cars would revolutionize the whole NGV effort.
Of course there’s always another possibility — converting our abundant natural gas supplies to ethanol or methanol that would fit right into our current gasoline delivery system. Switching to liquids would not require a new on-board gas tank but would simply involve adjusting existing engines so they could run on a variety of liquids — the “flex-fuel” system. Giving motorists the widest variety of choices would let them experiment with different strategies without having to make a giant leap over some technological chasm. That’s what California learned twenty years ago when it tried to rush the introduction of the electric car and the lesson still holds good today.
