To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine (30 page)

America has roughly 27 percent of the world’s coal supply, the most of any nation. We have 1.5 times as much as Russia, which has the second largest reserves, and twice as much as China. Our reserves can last us for another 200-250 years, and that estimate assumes zero technological innovation over the next two centuries. Furthermore, Alaska may hold more coal than the entire lower forty-eight states combined.

America unquestionably has tremendous potential for a coal-based energy supply whose development would create thousands of new jobs and cut the cost of electricity. But in order to realize that opportunity, we must use coal in a smart, environmentally responsible way.

Encouraging coal power also means developing and expanding clean coal technologies, including carbon sequestration, gasification, and conversion to liquid fuels. These may sound like pie-in-the-sky concepts, but several of these technologies are already available. For example, carbon capture technology is taking root around the world, and America has several demonstration plants in West Virginia, Ohio, Alabama, Washington, and Kentucky.
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Even the U.S. Department of Energy had a carbon capture demonstration project in Mattoon, Illinois, known as FutureGen. Were it not for bureaucratic delays that effectively stopped the project, the United States would today have the finest clean coal demonstration project in the world. It’s now being restarted, but only after we lost ground to the Chinese, who have an aggressive clean coal program.

For decades in west Texas, oil companies have been using carbon dioxide to extract more oil from older fields in a process known as enhanced oil recovery, or EOR. The carbon used in this process is then locked into air tight underground basins, taking carbon out of the air and giving us more American energy.

Gasification, which breaks down coal into its basic chemical elements while producing electricity, is used commercially in the United States and abroad. Allowing for easier capture of carbon dioxide, many gasifiers also can produce hydrogen, which in turn could be used to develop new fleets of hydrogen vehicles. Our own Department of Energy also has a coal gasification research and development program.

Converting coal to liquid fuels (CTL) would lessen our dependence on foreign oil for our vehicles. Rather than burning coal as in a traditional plant, CTL technology either gasifies or liquefies coal, and the product can then substitute for oil. South Africa has used this technology to fuel many of its vehicles for decades.

Although coal provides half of our electricity and is a big reason why so many Americans have reliable and affordable power, it is vilified by radical environmentalists. However, shutting down coal plants, as they often advocate, would not solve any substantial environmental problems, but it
would
literally turn off the lights on millions of Americans and drive millions of jobs abroad.

Nevertheless, the crusade against coal continues. Consider these examples:

Rather than attacking the coal industry through regulation and taxation, a more sensible approach would encourage coal operations through innovative technologies including carbon sequestration and even gasification. Rather than limiting the supply of American energy, we can expand it while also encouraging technological breakthroughs among our brightest scientists and engineers.

Today, America gets about 20 percent of its electricity from our 104 nuclear power plants, which provide massive amounts of around-the-clock, safe, pollution-free power. According to the Nuclear Energy Institute, we are going to need at least thirty-five more nuclear plants just to meet the projected increase in electricity demand by 2030.

This is a bold challenge, as the United States has not licensed and built a new nuclear plant since the 1970s. But, once again, the problem is not the energy companies. Instead, government regulation and frivolous lawsuits are stifling construction of new plants.

If we value affordable, clean, and reliable energy, then nuclear power must be part of the solution. Wind and solar are clean forms of energy, but they are not yet affordable solutions, nor are they reliable, as the sun is not always shining and the wind is not always blowing. To have reliable base load electricity, nuclear power, along with coal, must be a major supplier for the next generation or even longer.

Despite the horror stories, nuclear power is incredibly safe. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission closely monitors each plant to guarantee all operations meet the highest standards, including worker safety. From 2000 to 2007, the average accident rate for workers in nuclear plants was miniscule—less than 0.2 accidents per 200,000 workers.

As for radiation, the National Cancer Institute determined that nuclear plant workers do not face an elevated risk of dying from cancer. Ideological extremists who oppose nuclear power would have us believe that anyone living near a nuclear plant faces enormous health risks from plant radiation. But if the workers themselves do not face elevated risks, why would residents living miles away?

In fact, nuclear plants are so well-designed that, for people living near the plant, only about 1 percent of their radiation exposure comes from the plant. The rest comes from the sun and from naturally occurring radiation in the environment.

Countries worldwide rely on nuclear power because it’s safe and it’s more reliable than any other form of clean energy. Since the 1970s, Japan has built dozens of new plants, and France has built even more. In fact, the French get 75 percent of their energy from nuclear power. If the United States matched that percentage, we would pump 2.2 billion fewer tons of CO
₂
into the atmosphere every year.

And the future of nuclear power will be even safer, more affordable, and more reliable. Companies such as Hyperion Power Generation, Babcock & Wilcox, and NuScale, Inc., are developing smaller reactors that could fit in a large meeting room. These advanced small modular reactors (or ASMRs) could power 25,000 homes each, while requiring a fraction of the initial capital costs of a big nuclear plant.

These reactors could also be exported to developing countries that struggle to find reliable sources of electricity. Countries across the globe, including Japan and South Africa, are developing this technology, and our own Department of Energy has recognized its potential.

Our American energy policy must encourage all forms of nuclear power. As with any other product, if the government stifles innovation of modular reactors, America will not produce them, which means fewer exports and fewer American jobs.

Contrary to what proponents of new energy taxes would have us believe, those of us who favor more American energy are not opposed to renewables such as wind and solar power. In fact, these technologies must be part of any real American energy plan to achieve energy independence.

Although we currently get less than 1 percent of our electricity from wind power, it has enormous potential. One study from Stanford University found that North America has the greatest potential for wind power in the entire world, due primarily to the powerful breezes
around the Great Lakes and on the coasts. This clean, renewable energy has no carbon emissions.

Solar power also has great potential. The American southwest already has numerous solar projects, as well as proposals for new ones. Meanwhile, advances in solar panel technology are allowing many homebuilders to generate their own electricity by placing panels on their roofs. In fact, the southwest has so much sunlight that if companies constructed a series of solar plants covering 100 square miles, those plants could generate as much electricity as all the fossil fuel-fired plants in America.
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Over the past decade, companies from around the world have begun investing in solar projects, many of them in the United States, as they recognize the possibility for a booming market in solar technology.

While solar and wind are intermittent technologies that cannot produce energy twenty-four hours per day like a coal plant or nuclear reactor, they will be an essential part of our energy future. But their development requires us to rethink many aspects of our current system, including litigation reform.

Here’s an example why: a recently proposed wind project in West Virginia would have been another big step toward making wind power more affordable and the technology even more efficient. But environmental groups sued the developer, Beech Ridge Energy, claiming the project would harm bats. The judge, Roger W. Titus, sided with the environmental groups and ruled against responsible American energy development, killing the plan for more than 120 wind turbines.
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Similarly, in California, solar power company BrightSource Energy proposed building in the Mojave Desert three solar plants with enough energy to power 142,000 homes, a project that would generate billions of dollars in revenue. The site was perfect, as the Mojave has powerful sunlight every day, and the proposed site
already has transmission lines. Predictably, radical environmental groups are trying to block the plan, citing the alleged impact on an estimated twenty-five desert tortoises.
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If we cannot develop a major solar power project in the middle of the desert, then where can we?

Many of these environmental groups are the same ones pushing for devastating new energy taxes like cap and trade, claiming economic punishment will spur investment in environmentally virtuous solar and wind technologies.

But their lawsuits against the very solutions they propose reveal their real motives. They are not interested in getting energy from alternative sources. Opposing nearly any form of economic development, they aim to use government regulation and litigation to punish Americans who use energy.

Biofuels are best thought of as an organic use of solar power. Instead of man-made solar arrays, corn and other plants (and algae) provide a biological factory for converting solar power into usable energy.

Biofuels offer America an opportunity to use our unrivaled agricultural skills to create pure American energy. In 2007 we produced over 6 billion gallons of ethanol, a number we can expect to rise in the future as technology improves and the biofuels themselves become more efficient.

The projected explosion in corn yields per acre guarantee there will be enormous increases in potential biofuel production (especially ethanol) in the next two decades. In fact, without the growth in biofuel yields, the American grain farmer will drown in a glut of production, and farm incomes will collapse.