Source: CITRIS
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbR0EPWgkEI
Date: 01/10/2010
Event: Professor Richard Muller at i4Energy seminar, 2010: Part 4
Credit: CITRIS
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Richard Muller: A few things about energy. These are the world's coal resources. You can see the big peak here of Saudi Arabia. The king of coal. Surprising here is number two, which is Canada. But if you go back two years ago, it looked like this. See that? Why is that? That's a cost of $60 a barrel to extract the Canadian oil. So when the price of oil gets below 60, they lose money on it, and so... Their resources - if you think there's something called... Anyway, it's... oops.
Okay, let's add in, now, natural gas. This is very important. This is crucially important. Most people in the United States do not know the current situation on natural gas. You need to know this.
Here's what happens when you enter natural gas on the same units - barrels of oil equivalent. U.S. has huge fossil fuel reserves in the form of natural gas. It didn't, twenty years ago. This is something called shale gas. And it was gas that's unassociated with oil. It's in our shales. The methods of extraction have been developed in recent decades; now it can come out economical. This is a huge issue in the United States. And it's going to be in headlines. And I predict in the United States we're going to switch over many of our automobiles to natural gas. Certainly our trucks and our buses, because they have big - lots of room in them. We have enormous reserves of natural gas. We're running out of oil but not natural gas. Most automobiles can be converted to natural gas very quickly.
I want to leave time for questions. So let me drop - use the same graph but different scale, because now I'd like to add on coal. So now we add on coal - there's coal. We have huge reserves of coal. We are the Saudi Arabia of coal. Here's the problem. Who else has coal, besides us? Russia. China. Australia, who sells to China. And India. The developing world has huge supplies of coal, and coal is dirt cheap. China is building one new gigawatt - read "big" - coal-burning capacity every week, over 58 years - 72 years ago. This is why their emissions are shooting up. And it's cheap. If we're going to get down to do alternative energy, it will work only if alternative energy is dirt cheap, too. That's a problem.
Add in our oil shales, by the way... And here we have the oil shales. And nobody's exploiting them. Why? Because there's so much natural gas and coal. And this doesn't even include the methane hydrates under the sea, which I believe are recoverable. So we're not going to run out of fossil fuels. Only liquid fossil fuels.
We have a problem. And there are two problems in the United States. One of them is global warming. The other is liquid fuel security. Liquid fuel being fuel we can put in our cars - that's what we're running out of. We're not running out of energy. We're running out of energy we can put in our cars.
We can turn coal into liquid fuel - called the Fischer-Tropsch process. Here's some prices. Coal is dirt cheap, per kilowatt-hour of heat. look at that - 0.6, compared to 0.9. Natural gas is very cheap too - look at that, compared to gasoline, which is 9 cents, ten times as expensive. This is why the automobiles in Paris - I mean, yeah, Paris, but also in San Francisco - half of their taxis are natural gas.
Okay. I want to finish up, to get questions. So let me just go through the - oh - batteries, by the way. Also are cheap, to the extent that you get to use electricity. But then you have to replace the batteries. If you're wealthy, you can afford a plug-in Prius, where you replace the batteries every three years. You wind up saving $2,000 in gasoline and it only costs you $10,000 to replace the batteries. A Tesla Roadster - batteries are guaranteed for 100,000 miles. They will sell them to you at a loss of $40,000. It's a very expensive car to drive.
Energy conservation. That's my photograph of Notre Dame in Paris. Energy conservation is essential, because it turns out... Well, I'm going to go over this quickly. You probably know a lot about energy conservation. It turns out that the most wasteful, in terms of per-dollar production are China, Russia and India. Very wasteful. The United States is down here. We actually produce very little carbon dioxide per dollar of economy.
Nuclear - I'm very upbeat on nuclear. That's represented by this slide. I've done my own - there are lots of reasons for why nuclear is having a renaissance. Nuclear waste is something I've analysed in detail myself. I've talked to the experts. There really is not a nuclear waste problem. You don't have to come up with a technical solution for nuclear waste - we know how to solve nuclear waste. It's not a problem, but Harry Reid can scare the people of Nevada about being a waste dump place, so... So that's what he's doing. There are new nuclear reactors that are really, really very nice.
So let me just finish up. The U.S. needs liquid energy security. Lots of ways to do that. If it isn't profitable it isn't sustainable. Wind - I'm a real enthusiast for wind, but I sure wish that the money that was put on - the stimulus money had gone on to creating an electric grid. That's what we need, more than anything else. So we can get this cheap wind energy from the Mid West. Solar is dropping - oh, this is wind power growing, growing very rapidly. Solar power - solar cells, the price of solar cells is dropping so rapidly that pretty soon the solar cells will be free and the cost of solar power will be installation and maintenance. And, by the way, installation and maintenance is far cheaper in a developing country than it is in the United States.
Carbon sequestration is a great idea - trouble is, it's expensive. Geothermal? The flux of energy coming from the Earth is known. It is 10,000 times smaller than the flux of energy at midday. It's 3,000 times smaller than the average flux hitting the surface of the Earth. That means geothermal, as a sustainable technology, does make sense if you can get the cost to be 3,000 times lower per square metre than the cost of solar. I'm not a fan of geothermal.
Global warming will come from the developing world. These are the first slides where I'm actually reading them to you, unfortunately. No blame. Not good enough to set an example if they can't afford to follow that example. Subsidised clean is not sustainable. Despite that, I'm in favour of the political statement of AB 32. If it isn't profitable, it's not sustainable. If it isn't profitable, it doesn't even address the CO2 issue. And the obvious solution to the liquid energy solution [?] is natural gas. I believe we're entering into [?] a natural gas economy. And I'll end there and take questions. So... Thank you very much for your... Thank you.
[Audience applause].