By John Karoly
Chicago, IL, USA

John Karoly

With doom and gloom all around, and useless-to-harmful politicians and governments in both the US and Europe, malaise and pessimism is very much the current mood. Many have written about the ineptitude of our politicians; it would be redundant to repeat it. But it may be worthwhile to look at one aspect of the demagoguery offered up by some of our Presidential candidates and compare it to the real facts.

Presidents since Nixon have promised the United States “energy independence.” Every President in the past forty years has talked about it, but not one has done anything significant to make us independent of Middle East oil. The current crop of Presidential candidates talk about it, but have little understanding of how the energy landscape has changed in the last four decades.

The Arab oil embargo of 1973 had a number of unintended consequences, especially for those who started the embargo. Owing to the shortage of oil and gasoline and the consequential drastic price increases, the oil industry and all segments of American industry began an urgent search for other energy sources, including “alternative energy” like natural gas and nuclear power. The embargo actually started the movement toward energy conservation, while also stimulating exploration for other sources of crude oil and natural gas. Slowly, but surely, OPEC lost its grip and crude oil from other sources and countries surpassed the supply of oil from OPEC.

Talk of energy independence was and still is constant among politicians of all stripe and color. There was, however, little that they could actually do about it. They had neither the means nor the expertise to do more than appoint “energy czars” and engage in generally ineffective measures that put us on a long road to nowhere. Luckily, the “evil” energy companies continued their search for other sources of energy.

Over the decades, several key things happened: new methods were developed to increase the yield of existing sources of crude oil and, foremost, methods and technology were developed to open up vast underground fields of natural gas. Natural gas, or by its chemical name, methane, is an excellent energy source, a lot less polluting than coal. Combined with air and water, it provides the means to build any organic chemical molecule we need allowing for the development of the chemical industry by providing an excellent source of raw material that could be used in products from garments to household items to cars, etc.

Today, with our abundant domestic supply of natural gas plus our discovery of new gas and crude oil fields and our increasing use of wind power and other alternative energy sources, we are very close to energy independence from Middle East crude oil. If there were a Middle East oil embargo tomorrow, it would be a minor inconvenience to the East Coast of the US and an excuse to raise gas prices. We are importing only about 15% of our crude oil from the Middle East and much of that because we don’t have efficient means to send crude to the East coast from the Midwest. North America has all the energy sources it needs and, with appropriate energy conservation, we could be totally free of Middle East oil.

This goal, however, is hardly a significant one anymore. It makes for good, although uninformed, campaign speeches, but little else. The US, in fact, has more crude oil than Saudi Arabia. Unfortunately, it is not very accessible, but the technology for efficient recovery of this oil is ongoing. When that goal is achieved, we will have a secure crude oil supply for a very long time. The world will probably run out of crude oil sometime in the distant future as worldwide consumption will exceed supply at some point, but we are not likely to run out of natural gas for centuries.

And last, but not least, demographics are in our favor. We have controlled population growth and the space to accommodate it. In that respect, too, we are in a much better position than most countries, including China which is a superpower founded on cheap labor and upside down demographics. In reality, the negative, pessimistic outlook for this country’s future is certainly not justified. By comparison to most, our future is actually very promising.