Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells – Our Ride to the Renewable Future

For CARTER trip leader, power source

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction Confessions of a Petroleum Addict

Part One - LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF OIL

Chapter 1 - Over a Barrel

Chapter 2 - War and Grease

Chapter 3 - Road Hogs

Chapter 4 - Plastic Explosive

Chapter 5 - Cooking Oil

Chapter 6 - Chain of Fuels

Chapter 7 - Short Circuits

Part Two - GREENER PASTURES

Chapter 8 - Earth, Wind, and Fire

Chapter 9 - Autopia

Chapter 10 - City, Slicker

Chapter 11 - Fresh Greens

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

About The Author

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction Confessions of a Petroleum Addict

The trouble started on an August afternoon in a remote field in northern Ohio, miles from any town large enough to be marked on a standard road atlas. The field was empty except for scattered deciduous trees—maple, poplar, oak—thick with late-summer leaves. The ground was scrubby and parched. A nearby river rolled lazily in the summer heat. The only trace of humanity hung above the trees—an electrical cable known as the Harding-Chamberlin Line, carrying 345,000 volts of power.

By three o’clock the air temperature had risen to 90 degrees, and the cable itself had reached nearly 200 degrees Fahrenheit—roughly twice its average temperature. The aluminum core of the 3-inch-thick wire was expanding with the heat and beginning to sag.

Five hundred miles due east of that meadow I was sitting at my desk in New York City when, at 4:09 p.m., my computer suddenly shut down. The lights, music, and air-conditioning died. I heard a strange lurching sound as the elevator in my building froze with passengers trapped on board. I rushed to the window along with my officemates and was amazed to see traffic snarling to a halt up the entire length of Broadway as street signals went black. The Verizon landlines were dead and our cell phones had no signals. We hurried down eleven flights of stairs, into streets already thickening with crowds of evacuees. Storefronts, groceries, and cafés were darkened. Subway stations were emptying of travelers as word spread that the trains had no power and hundreds of people were stuck underground. It was 2003, and like most New Yorkers, we initially jumped to the same conclusion—another terrorist attack.

What had in fact happened to us, and to a majority of the residents of the metropolitan areas of New York, Newark, Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, and Toronto, was a blackout—larger than any other blackout in recorded history. One of the greatest achievements in industrial engineering, the 93,600 miles of electrical cable known as the Eastern Interconnection, had been brought to its knees. All because of unseen events in that distant Ohio meadow where an overloaded wire had drooped into high tree branches and short-circuited, triggering a massive cascade effect throughout the aging power grid.

As night fell, I walked up to Times Square to see its flashing billboards snuffed out, leaving the commercial El Dorado quaint and sheepish. I passed the main post office building and Bryant Park, where thousands of stranded commuters were sprawled in a mass slumber party, using their suit jackets and briefcases as pillows. Candlelight flickered in apartment windows, and I looked up past the walls of darkened buildings at a sky so brilliant with stars I could make out the soft haze of the Milky Way and the faint pulses of orbiting satellites.

Before-and-after satellite images of the event tell the story. In the first picture there is a thick streak of foamy white across the northeastern portion of the United States and southeastern Canada. In the second is just a scattering of faint droplets, the rest absorbed into the blackness of space. Fifty million Americans were without power.

Up to that point, I had spent most of my brief career as a journalist trying to gain a better understanding of the causes of just such events—an understanding, more broadly, of the strengths and vulnerabilities of America’s complex energy landscape. The US is, after all, both a global leader in green innovation and the world’s largest energy consumer, struggling to cope with its huge appetite for fossil fuels and their by-products. We face a tremendous industrial dilemma and an extraordinary economic opportunity to develop a clean, independent energy system that could set an example to the other industrialized nations of the world. In the calm and darkness of the twenty-four-hour blackout I began to see this bigger picture. I began to understand how little I actually did know about the changes we face, and how much I still had left to learn.

Just out of college in 1997, I had started out as a technology reporter, swept up in the exuberance of the dawning digital age—when stock prices jumped from 60¢ to $60 overnight, and business plans scrawled on cocktail napkins could get six-figure backing. I went on to write “Urban Upgrade,” a column in the Village Voice about how digital technology was transforming New York City—from Wall Street’s trading floor to the billboards of Times Square—into an intelligent, networked, high-speed metropolis.

The more I learned over time about New York’s electricity grid, the more shocked I was to discover that the torrent of pixels and megabytes newly pulsing through the city was sustained by an antiquated grid no smarter than a plumbing system—and much harder to repair. Moreover, this system was powered by the decidedly unfuturistic force of fossil fuels (specifically, coal and natural gas). I began to wonder: as cell phones, PDAs, ATMs, iPods, laptops, and flat-screen televisions proliferated, how long could this brittle grid hold up, and what kind of impact would these new pressures have on the environment?

My interest in America’s energy dependence redoubled after the events of September 11, 2001, this time focusing on a different aspect of our fossil fuel usage—the oil that powers our cars, trucks, buses, ships, and airplanes. That morning I was riding my bike over the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan when, at 8:46 a.m., I watched the North Tower of the World Trade Center explode suddenly, inexplicably, into flames. All movement—cars, bikes, pedestrians—froze. From where I stood on the crest of the bridge I saw, in the foreground, the orange plume of fire flaring skyward from the building. (It was ignited, we would soon learn, by 11,000 gallons of jet fuel from the tanks of American Airlines flight 11.) Dwarfed in the background was a dim fleck of light wavering from the Statue of Liberty. This attack and its tragic consequences would not have happened, as news coverage following the event made clear, without our presence in the Middle East—a presence closely tied to our reliance on the oil reserves heavily concentrated in that region.

The months after September 11 revealed further evidence of vulnerability and change in our energy system. Petroleum prices soared in response to the attack, as speculators feared interruptions to the flow of oil between the Middle East and the United States. Meanwhile, a group of two thousand scientists who constitute the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change came out with a landmark (and widely ignored) report declaring that global warming was accelerating faster than ever predicted—a phenomenon largely driven by our use of fossil fuels, which release carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere when burned. Then Enron, one of the world’s leading producers of electricity and natural gas, collapsed into bankruptcy amid revelations of widespread corporate fraud.

The focus of my reporting pinballed from the digital revolution to what seemed a bigger, more urgent shift—the wholesale rebuilding of our energy landscape. Fancying myself an amateur detective, I started traveling throughout the country, from Ashland, Oregon, to Tampa Bay, Florida, to write about the architects and early adopters of emerging energy technologies that could provide alternatives to fossil fuels: solar, wind, geothermal, biofuels, and hybrid-electric cars such as the Toyota Prius. I began studying and writing about the legislation that was being drafted (and blocked) to push these innovations into the mainstream. I began criticizing the federal government’s failure to take action on climate change and its unwillingness to encourage the development of clean, efficient, next-generation energy technologies.

But when the August 2003 blackout hit, I realized one major blind spot in my understanding of energy. Nothing I’d learned in my reporting had quite prepared me for the feeling of utter helplessness and paralysis that a blackout of that scale would cause. It was the first time, for me and for millions of Americans, that the story of energy was conveyed in human terms. Here I was crisscrossing the country, chasing after innovators and wagging fingers at the government, but I’d completely neglected to examine the role of energy in my own life. One morning I began with a seemingly simple task: I took a much smaller and quieter, but for me equally momentous, tour around my office. My aim was to count the things in my midst that were, in one way or another, tied to fossil fuels.

Oil, coal, and natural gas—the three most common forms of fossil fuels—were all formed over a period of millions of years from the remains of plants and animals (primarily tiny aquatic organisms) that were exposed to the combined effects of time, compression, and temperature. Oil accounts for roughly half of our nation’s total fossil fuel usage. What it provides, by and large, is movement—America’s transportation sector is almost entirely dependent on petroleum (a term used interchangeably with oil, referring to its raw, unrefined state). Petroleum is chemically complex and can be refined not just into gasoline, kerosene, and motor oil but also into the petrochemicals that are the basic building blocks of a vast range of consumer products, from plastic bags to bulletproof vests.

What petroleum doesn’t provide is electricity, which accounts for the other half of America’s fossil fuel use. Electricity generation can be broken down into three main sources: coal (about 50 percent), natural gas (20 percent), and nuclear (20 percent). Natural gas is essentially petroleum that has been slow-cooked over time into a gaseous form.

Despite their many different applications, fossil fuels have a common purpose. My Merriam-Webster dictionary defines energy as “the ability to do work,” and fossil fuels have been doing America’s industrial work for more than a century. When I refer to America’s “energy landscape,” I’m talking about the whole picture—the combination of oil, coal, and natural gas that feeds the intricate organism of modern society. That feeds our own lives—my own life, as I realized that morning while conducting my amateur fossil fuel audit.

Since nearly all plastics, polymers, inks, paints, fertilizers, and pesticides are made from petrochemicals, and all products are delivered to market by trucks, trains, ships, and airplanes, there was virtually nothing in my office—my body included—that wasn’t there because of fossil fuels.

There I sat at a desk made of Formica (a plastic), wearing a sweatshirt made of fleece (a polymer) over yoga pants made from Lycra (ditto), sipping coffee shipped from Zimbabwe, eating an apple trucked from Washington, surrounded by walls covered with oil-derived paints, jotting notes in petroleum-derived ink, typing words on a petrochemical keyboard into a computer powered by coal plants. Even the supposedly guilt-free wholegrain cereal I had for breakfast and the veggie burger I ate for lunch came from crops treated with oil-derived fertilizers. My purse yielded another trove of specimens: capsules of Extra-Strength Tylenol made from acetaminophen (a substance, like many commercial pain relievers, that is refined from petroleum); glossy magazines and a packet of photographs printed with petrochemicals; mascara, lip balm, eyeliner, and perfume that, like most cosmetics, have key components derived from oil.

I had understood this intellectually before—that the energy landscape encompasses not just our endless acres of oil fields, coal mines, gas stations, and highways, as well as the vast network of copper wires that feeds electricity to our homes and offices. It’s also the cornfields in America’s heartland, the battlefields of Iraq, and the medical labs that produce penicillin, novocaine, chemotherapy drugs, and many other treatments and cures. It’s the cosmetics shelves and glossy magazine racks in our drugstores. It’s the constantly humming, behind-the-scenes network of ships, planes, trains, and trucks that transport products to our store shelves. It’s even our own bodies, which we routinely drape in synthetic fabrics like spandex and nylon, and feed with crops that were fertilized by fossil fuels.

What I hadn’t fully managed to grasp was the intimate and invisible omnipresence of fossil fuels in my own life—the plastic sutures that stitched up my split lip when I was seven, the photographic CAT scan images that evaluated my concussion after an accident when I was twenty-seven. Once I connected the dots between so many seemingly disparate elements of my life—my car, my clothes, my e-mail, my makeup, my burger, even my health—I saw an energy landscape far more vast and complex than I’d ever imagined.

I also realized that this thing I’d thought was a four-letter word (oil) was actually the source of many creature comforts I use and love—and many survival tools I need. It seemed almost miraculous. Never had I so fully grasped the immense versatility of fossil fuels on a personal level and their greater relevance in the economy at large.

Energy, I realized that morning, is everything. It’s life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness—and our very survival. But if fossil fuels are a part of everything we do, how do we go about removing them from the picture? How can we kick America’s addiction to fossil fuels, given its sheer magnitude? And what will our success or failure in transforming our energy landscape mean to the world at large?

What I’d been chasing ever since my first efforts at reporting, as I tried to make sense of the power grid, September 11, the 2003 blackout, and the role of fossil fuels in daily life, was connections—the ways in which energy connects us all, beyond our homes, our cities, our state and national borders. Energy is the thread from which our modern lives dangle, but it is an invisible thread—pumped through underwater oil pipelines, coursing through unseen cables in remote meadows, and tucked away in basement fuse boxes, just as the veins are hidden beneath our skin.

It is common knowledge now that America’s energy-dependent economy is facing radical change. We are in the midst of economic, geopolitical, and environmental turmoil—a triple threat that is deeply rooted in our use of fossil fuels. Many countries face these issues, but Americans stand to lose more than the people of any other nation given our formidable appetite for energy. Last year, we used roughly 25 barrels of oil per person; Europeans, by comparison, used 17, and the citizens of Japan used just 14.

Nevertheless, we are reminded as frequently by ExxonMobil commercials as we are by White House officials and eco-activists that our nation has begun the shift away from ancient energy sources toward cleaner, homegrown sources of power and fuel. We regularly hear menacing threats and utopian promises—on the one hand, global warming is well on its way to producing irreversible coastal floods and mega-drought, and we are in the throes of an “energy crisis”; on the other, we are in “an era of change,” heading toward a “green revolution.” We are told that the global recession we’ve faced in recent years is an opportunity to reengineer our industries and infrastructure with green technology. “We will rebuild, we will recover,” President Obama has said, “and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before.” He has vowed to “lay a new foundation for economic growth by beginning a new era of energy exploration in America.” We are promised a future in which solar panels will glitter across rooftops, wind turbines will whirl across prairies, super-efficient cars will glide silently along our roads, and new clean industries will provide millions of jobs to a “green-collar” workforce that will repair our aging infrastructure and revive our struggling economy.

For most of us, however, America’s energy landscape still feels like distant and impersonal terrain. We wonder how those grand threats and promises will translate into action. Very little reporting tells America’s energy story in human terms. Very little paints America’s love affair with energy in broad strokes—portraying our roles as a global energy consumer, polluter and innovator. Books on energy tend to be dense and technical; they often examine the economic, scientific, and political aspects of energy, but they rarely explain what these changes mean in our lives in the most practical, personal sense. They complain about the mess we’re in, but few explain how we got ourselves here and, in simple terms, how we can climb our way out.

The father of a friend of mine, who is now a successful businessman, defined his approach to problem solving in terms he learned through a painful experience as a boy growing up on a farm in Ohio. When a cow gets stuck in a ditch, first you have to get the cow out of the ditch. Second, you have to figure out how the cow got into the ditch. Third, you have to figure out how to stop the cow from getting into the ditch in the future.

I want, like a majority of citizens of the industrialized world, to get myself out of the ditch of fossil fuel dependence. But to do it right, I—and we—need to understand the roots of the problem, to understand how, during the twentieth century, fossil fuels became so thoroughly woven into the fabric of our lives. We need to recognize what our options are going forward—how America as a whole could build an actual, factual “green” future, free from fossil fuels, changing the way people live not only at home, but worldwide.

This book searches America’s past for clues to understand our global future. It tracks the meteoric growth of our superpower thanks to fossil fuels. It describes how cheap fuel and electricity built our sprawling cities, unequalled military might, and major industries—from automobiles and agriculture to plastics and computing—and seeped into the fibers of our daily lives. It examines how the oil and coal that built us up now threaten our ruin, tainted as they are with political strife and corruption, and pollutants that kindle environmental chaos. It also looks forward—to the transfusion of clean and renewable power sources that are beginning to course through the copper veins and combustion-engine heart of our nation.

The story of America is, in sum, the story of a power trip; to understand it, I had to go on my own. In January 2007, I set out to explore the most extreme frontiers of our energy landscape—from its deepest wells to its tallest towers. I wanted to pull at the threads of connection between fossil fuels and everyday American life and see what places they led me to, however strange or unexpected. They led me, as it turned out, to some very strange spots, from deep-sea oil rigs to Kansas cornfields, NASCAR tracks to high-priced plastic surgeons, dank city manholes to Texas wind farms, Pentagon offices to my local produce aisle.

I saw places where the old energy system is flaming out and the new system—smart, efficient, whisper-quiet, and high-performance—is sparking to life. I interviewed architects of the oil-guzzling twentieth-century economy—great and innovative in their own right—and pioneers of tomorrow’s new machine.

My goal as I describe this journey is not to cast judgment on what has gone wrong in America’s energy landscape—as I have said, I’m guilty myself of buying into and even relishing it. Instead, I want simply to understand this landscape, and to celebrate its successes for all their unintended consequences. It was, after all, American ingenuity that led us down the path of fossil fuel dependence. So I set out to discover how that same ingenuity can change our future course. The following pages are a chronicle of both journeys through the fast-changing energy frontier—America’s, and my own.

One

LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF OIL

The Story of the American Century

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