Extortion at the Pump
Once again, foreign powers are attempting to influence our elections.
Given that Republicans are in general more friendly to oil producers, read Saudi Arabia and Russia, OPEC+ decided to meddle in our elections by cutting oil production a month prior to our midterm elections. Cutting production should raise prices and raising prices should help Republicans in November. That’s the theory, anyway.
As was intended by our friends Vladimir Putin and the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.
This afternoon I’ve seen gas stations charging 20 cents per gallon more for their fuel while our local Sam’s Club gas station has raised prices four cents per gallon. The Democratic inflation fairy went out there and dialed up the prices before the first drop of Saudi oil reached the US.
Short term fixes are unlikely to help prices much. President Biden has released more oil from our strategic reserves and asked oil companies to show restraint. That’s funny: The CEO of Iron Mountain said the quiet part out loud, the Inflation Fairy does not exist. Prices are raised by people making decisions.
CEOs and product managers increase prices because they can. They believe that in times of inflation, inflation itself, that abstract beast out there that magically changes the prices at the pump and orders boxes with lower quantities printed on them, will provide them the cover they need to dial up the price and dial down your buying power. Newsflash: They like free-market neoliberal Republicans in office, too.
I’m dreaming when I say why don’t we take the long view for once.
The United States produced more oil than it needed pre-Covid. Drilling shut down, old wells ran out and our production capability dropped. But the supply problems during the Pandemic taught CEOs valuable lessons. Companies can produce less and charge more for it.
Reliance on foreign oil puts us in bed with unsavory characters such as Vladimir Putin, Mohammed bin Salman, and Nicholas Maduro. The world is at the mercy of characters such as the invader of Ukraine, the murderer of Jamal Khashoggi, the dictator of Venezuela because they have the black stuff. They can blackmail us, influence our elections, kill their detractors, invade, basically do whatever they want.
So what would the energy long view look like?
Renewable electricity is cheaper than fossil fuels. We could replace all of our oil and gas generated electricity with renewables, provided there was a way to store the energy for when the sun didn’t shine and the wind didn’t blow. Fortunately, energy storage exists using technologies as material-intensive as lithium batteries, which replaces one scarce resource with another, to one energy storage processes like we use here in Colorado: Pump water uphill and let it generate electricity when it flows down.
Energy storage can be as simple as using excess electricity to heat a pile of bricks with water pipes through it, then using the heat to drive turbines when the grid needs additional electricity. Fort Carson, Colorado has installed a 10 megawatt-hour flow battery, basically tanks of electrolyte, no danger of fire or explosion and pretty darned cheap.
And as a last-ditch backup, there are designs for small nuclear plants with no moving parts, no bomb-grade fissile material and waste that becomes safe after a century. They’re small so they would be less “efficient” than building a huge plant somewhere but they could power a neighborhood if the sun didn’t shine or the wind didn’t blow for an extended period.
Even the big nuclear plants are cheaper and safer than fossil fuels.
See where I’m going? The long view is independence from dictators and unsavory characters.
We could convert most of our transportation to run on electricity, provided charging facilities were available and battery technology improves. This would strand lots of assets, the tens of thousands of gas station/convenience stores across the country, the pipelines and the refineries. But it would give us cleaner air and reduced warming.
And what of those workers displaced by this? Re-educate them! Put charging stations at those convenience stores — charging takes longer than fueling so hopefully those charging at the stores would spend more money there. Retrain the oil patch workers. Here in Colorado we have more workers in renewables than in the oil patch. Make sure we don’t strand those human assets!
The long view would involve some pain in the short term. I don’t imagine that bin Salman will sit quietly and watch us reduce our consumption of his product and our need to defend his patch of sand. Or that Maduro would supply us while we sanctioned him, or that Putin will cease to blackmail Europe as long as we support Ukraine.
I don’t imagine many Liberals would object to implementing an energy independence policy based around renewables and nuclear energy. If you’re a Conservative and all of this market interference isn’t your thing (or you just want to roll coal in your dually pickup), imagine this: We could “cut production” of food to support our own farmers! Win-win!
The long view would mean we keep our resources. It would correct our balance of trade. It would employ thousands, if not millions, in our renewable and nuclear industries. The guy in the oil patch in our current political ads could avoid the mud and grime of a rig. And we could tell bin Salman to pound sand. No more American blood and treasure needs to be expended in his defense.
And if we exported the technology, we could end the use of energy as blackmail forever.
An energy-independent world would be a better world. And energy independence is currently a dream, but a dream we could achieve, with investment in long-term solutions rather than quick fixes.
