A Comprehensive Plan for US Energy Independence

The USA must become independent of foreign oil imports, the world must halt global warming, and world economies must continue to grow.

Only the US can take the lead and can convince other nations that greenhouse gas emissions can be stopped while economies become more prosperous. Without the leadership of the US, the world will overheat irreversibly during the next fifty years. Only the US has the financial resources, the technology background, and the management skills to embark on such an ambitious program.

First of all, we must be realistic and accept a few immutable facts. Implementing a comprehensive energy plan for a large country like ours will take a long time. We must accept that the implementation of any plan will at least take twenty to thirty years.

Secondly, we must assume responsibility for the emissions we have sent into the atmosphere during one century of burning prodigious amounts of fossil fuels and of producing more than a quarter of all past greenhouse gas emissions.

Thirdly, the plan must end our dependency on all fossil fuel imports from foreign countries and must begin to terminate our indebtedness to countries that manipulate markets.

Fourth, we must demand that national energy suppliers learn to produce plentiful, affordable, and secure amounts of energy from renewable resources in return for financial support and loan guarantees.

And last but not least, we need to install technologies and infrastructures that will be capable of providing our country with abundant energy during the next several centuries.

We must understand that our efforts will require large amounts of capital. However, we will use these investments to create long lasting, profitable revenues. We will build and install plants that will, upon start-up, generate energy for as long as fifty to eighty years. During this long operating period, these plants will produce revenue streams that will pay a fair amount of interest, will return the initial investment, and will continue to generate investment income for decades to come. From engineering, to fabrication, to installation, and to operation, these plants will put millions of people into well paying jobs; jobs we will never have to export.

What do we have to do? We must build facilities that on one day in the future will allow us to end all fossil fuel combustion in our own country. Fossil fuels are mainly used in two applications; we generate electricity to light our homes, to cool buildings, to power countless appliances, machinery, and communications gear, and to produce a dazzling variety of consumer, commercial and industrial products. We also use electricity to power trains and may eventually power automobiles.

Most transportation equipment cannot use electric power. Cars, trucks, trains, ships, and airplanes most effectively use high quality, liquid fuels. Liquid fuels possess the highest energy density and can be stored aboard ships and airplanes enabling them to cross oceans.

In the past, electric power generation has been based on coal, natural gas, hydropower, and nuclear power. Coal and natural gas combustion must be halted and fossil fuel energy must be replaced with renewable energy from sunlight, wind power, marine power, and geothermal power. These much needed technologies are in their early stages of industrial introduction and will replace fossil fuel based power generation in due time.

Replacing imported petroleum with a "homegrown" substitute will be more difficult to achieve. Because we must stop all fossil fuel burning to prevent global overheating, we cannot convert coal, oil shale, or natural gas to make gasoline or diesel, which is technically quite feasible.

Instead, we must learn how to convert biomass energy into substitutes for petroleum. There are several processes that can accomplish this feat. However, the job is made more complex by the recent realization that the world does not possess sufficiently large, arable land areas for maintaining forests and for feeding an ever increasing world population.

There is only one single option for growing sufficient amounts of biologically recirculated carbon; we must grow biomass with high energy yields in arid areas with high solar irradiation, must apply novel, industrial agricultural techniques for growing and harvesting, and must produce water for irrigation on site.

These industrial plantations must be huge and must be highly mechanized. Only then will it be possible to install chemical conversion plants on site and produce a pumpable liquid feedstock for further processing in advanced oil refineries continuously.

There are huge benefits to this approach; we will have unlimited renewable fuels for our fleets of cars, trucks, trains, ships, and airplanes. Oil refineries can keep working, and the huge distribution systems for dispensing liquid fuels across the world will keep operating without changes.

Best of all, the US has plenty of arid lands for the perpetual production of plentiful and affordable liquid transportation fuels. It seems entirely possible to produce renewable biofuels and convert them into a petroleum substitute for roughly forty dollars per barrel. At that price we can continue to use our existing transportation infrastructures.

We must concentrate future energy development efforts in four technology areas; novel electric storage technologies, breeding of high energy yield plants, chemical conversion of biotic matter into petroleum substitutes, and refining of petroleum substitutes into gasoline, diesel, and jet fuels.

The USA has the means and the minds for succeeding in these endeavors. All we need is the political will to make the US more prosperous and more powerful again.