Transcript for the Piece Audio version of After Oil

I?m Barbara Bogaev.

(music)

When we look at all the things that made America what it is ?. It?s fair to say that for the last hundred years or so, America has been shaped ? more than anything ? by cheap oil. But now .... there are plenty of people telling us: ?The party is over.? The cheap oil is almost gone.

SIMMONS: Ninety-eight percent of our transportation comes from oil. ... just look around at how many things we use that come from very long distances and say ?That life ends.?

BEZDEK: We?re talking about economic costs that could make the problems of the 1970s look almost trivial by comparison.

We have the tools to solve the problem. But do we have the will?

GORE: The technological answer is not a short term answer. We are going to go from point A to point B. Whether we go on a very smooth road or we have a rollercoaster ride is the only uncertainty.

Life after oil. Coming up after this hour's news"

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I'm Barbara Bogaev and this is ?After Oil? From the Purdue University College of Engineering.

CLIP ? 24 HOURS OF PROGRESS (1950)
ANNOUNCER: Each hour of the day, our oil-thirsty nation demands over 10-thousand gallons of petroleum products.

These were the good old days.

CLIP ? 24 HOURS OF PROGRESS (1950)
ANNOUNCER: While a tanker is loading in California, a barge filled with home fuel oil has just left a refinery in Louisiana.

When oil was something we controlled. When it fueled our demand, and not much else.

CLIP ? 24 HOURS OF PROGRESS (1950)
ANNOUNCER: More than any other country in the world, America is a nation on wheels. (music)

When we look at everything that?s shaped America over the years ? immigration, slavery, westward expansion ?. It?s fair to say that for the last hundred-some years America has been shaped ? more than anything ? by cheap oil. Today, it?s hard to see how we could exist without it. Cheap oil sustains our economy. It runs our lifestyle. It runs our foreign policy. In, fact, you could say.

PRES. BUSH: America is addicted to oil

MONTAGE
DINAH SHORE (singing): See the USA in your Chevrolet / America is asking you to call
FADE TO
MOVIE CLIP
ANNOUNCER: These young adults ? shopping with the same determination that led them to the suburbs in the first place ? are the going-est part of a nation on wheels! Living by the automobile! The first young adults in the age of the push button! (music)
FADE TO
CONGRESSIONAL TESTIMONY ? RICK WAGONER, CEO OF GM
WAGONER: U.S. gasoline consumption has increased by 60 percent and U.S. oil imports have increased by more than 100 percent.
FADE TO
MOVIE CLIP
ANNOUNCER: Already today, she?s used some 87 petroleum products. Including the plastic bacon wrapper and the wax of the milk carton. She?ll top 100 before the day is over.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

There was a time, of course when this wasn?t a big deal. Nothing stood in the way of America feeding this addiction for cheap oil But now .... there?s a dark cloud. There are plenty of people telling us: ?The party is over.? It?s time for the hangover to begin.

BEZDEK: People simply don?t realize the scale of the problem, and the amount of money involved.

Roger Bezdek runs an economic research firm called Management Information Services. A while back he wrote a report for the US Department of Energy. The subject is what?s-commonly-called ?Peak Oil.? The day when the world?s supply of oil peaks and then begins to decline.

BEZDEK: We?re talking about economic costs that could make the problems of the 1970s look almost trivial by comparison.

FADE IN ? LOCAL NEWS SOUND
NEWS ANCHOR: Prices here can be found a-tenth-of-a-penny away from 4 bucks a gallon.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

It?s not that the oil is going to run out. It?s just that, up to now, the oil?s been ?easy.? High-quality crude that we could find in Pennsylvania or Texas. After the peak, the REST of the oil will be ?hard.? Hard to refine ? In places where they don?t like us, or places that we have a heck of a time getting to. Remember after the hurricanes in the Gulf, when gas prices jumped to near 3-fifty-a-gallon? The ?Peak Oil? people say: Those was the good ol? days.

SIMMONS: We need to get ready for way-way higher prices and we?re gonna pay way-higher prices for way-less-quality oil.

Matt Simmons runs an international energy investment banking firm.

SIMMONS: In my adult lifetime we had two very brief periods of time when we had shortages of oil and within 90 days the price went up 3-fold.

Do the math. It adds up to businesses shuttered ?. Home that can?t be heated or cooled. Empty highways. Whole suburbs left for dead.

SIMMONS: Ninety-eight percent of our transportation comes from oil. So if we have a scarcity of transportation, then just look around at how many things we use that come from very long distances and say ?That life ends.?

FADE IN CLIP ? 24 HOURS OF PROGRESS (1950)
(music) ANNOUNCER: It seems no other people in the world want so much just to get going and have a little time. Maybe it?s just that no other people CAN get going so easily.

Now to be clear, not everyone thinks this will happen. Or that if it does, it will happen tomorrow. Joan Ogden is with the Institute Of Transportation Studies at the University of California-Davis.

OGDEN: How soon is this going to happen? I mean there are different points of view on this.

And there are plenty ? like Mike Ramage, a retired executive with Exxon-Mobil research and engineering ? who think it?s not happening at all.

RAMAGE: I don?t believe that a crisis will happen.

SIMMONS: We have almost no reliable data on any of the significant producing oil fields of how much they?re now producing. We just have some estimates of how much each produces so we?re really basically wrapped in an enigma of mystery about this whole future oil supply.

Both Simmons and Roger Bezdeck say, if you know where to look, there?s plenty of evidence to suggest the peak is coming .... and that the effects will be much different from the Energy Crisis of the 1970s. According to Dr. Jay Gore, director of Purdue University?s Energy Center, this is inevitable.

GORE: The number of people on the earth is continuing to grow. And there are predictions that the planet could reach 10 billion people.

What else could happen in a world where the population gets that big ?. And where many of those people have an expectation of living a lifestyle like ours?

GORE: We kind of start to make a list of grand challenges that such a world would face and every time you make that type of a list, you come up with Energy at the top of that list.

Simmons and Bezdek say the problem is: Since the 1980s, new oil discoveries just haven?t kept up. Think about everything else in you life that runs on gasoline. Trash collection, snow removal. Or next-day package delivery.

BEZDEK: Both the military and civilian officials are very concerned with both the price, price volatility and eventually the availability of jet fuel.

And there?s more.

CLIP ? 24 HOURS OF PROGRESS (1950)
ANNOUNCER: Petroleum derivatives kill insects and plant diseases. Speed the ripening of fruit and preserve it on the way to market.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

No more of that Argentinean asparagus you like to buy at Whole Foods in January. Michael Pollan is the author of ?The Omnivore?s Dilemma,? that looks at our industrial agricultural system.

POLLAN: This whole system adds more and more fossil fuel down the line -- to process the food, to create that high-fructose corn syrup, lots of oil. To ship all that food -- it?s a national food system -- around, lots more oil. And you end up with a situation where about a fifth of our fossil fuel use is going feed ourselves.

NEWS CLIP ? RIOT IN MALAYSIA

This is a riot in Malaysia that broke out last May when people gathered to protest the high cost of gasoline. Is this what we face? Purdue?s Jay Gore says, not necessarily.

GORE: Given that it is a very important problem, given that it is a problem to which we don?t know the solution, and given that our future depends on it, those three things make it a Grand Challenge problem that the nation and the world should invest in and so I am infinitely optimistic that we will find a solution.

We DO have the technology. Or at least there?s every reason to think we will. Ernest Moniz is a Professor of Physics and Engineering Systems at MIT.

MONIZ: Frankly our strength lies in technology. And so the issue in going to alternative energy sources in general is about capturing the results of new science and new technology.

And we have more than a handful tools to get us there. As Ernie Moniz says,

MONIZ: There will not be one silver bullet. We are going to need a multiplicity of alternative technologies to meet our demand, security and environmental concerns.

MONTAGE
OGDEN: These would include things like bio-fuels
HILL: The United States has massive, massive reserves of coal.
BEZDEK: Coal to liquids, oil shale, enhanced oil recovery, heavy oil
GORE: Conservation of energy is a very important solution as well.
MONIZ: Renewables, advanced nuclear power, new ideas like capturing carbon dioxide and sequestering it underground
HAMILTON: Wind, photovoltaic panels and geo-thermal, the energy of the earth
OGDEN: It also would include hydrogen
RAMAGE: Conventional oil, non-conventional oil, coal, nuclear.

There?s not a lot of thinking at this point about which is best idea. In fact a lot of experts say there is no ?Best.? As Purdue?s Jay Gore says,

GORE: None of us know the right answer.

Partially, as MIT?s Ernie Moniz points out, that?s because it?s so tough to compete with oil.

MONIZ: Fossil fuels have an enormous energy density and are available at reasonably low cost. This is a bar we have to realize is there and is fairly high.

So no one technology ?wins.? Instead, scientists and engineers are looking for ways to marshal everything at our disposal ?. Starting with the science we have and engineering improvements where we can. The last few times we all went looking for a solution to our dependence on fossil fuels we found nuclear power. Then solar, geothermal and wind. They?re still there of course and ready for deployment. Now, though we?re going to take a look at the developments that look like the future THESE days. We start with an easy one.

BRUINS: Here we are in the Toyota motor manufacturing plant in Princeton, Indiana?
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

Nathan Bruins walks through an auto manufacturing plant that he helped engineer. And that, since it opened, he?s helped RE-engineer to make sure it saves energy.

BRUINS: We?ve replaced our 400 watt metal hyaline high beam fixtures with fluorescent 6 tube T-8 lamps. And over the past couple of years we?ve changed out almost 2,000 of these fixtures. So that?s quite a reduction right there.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

If you grew up during the Great Depression or the Energy Crisis in the 70s, your mother was probably all over you to turn off the lights when you left a room. Obviously, because it saved money. And what worked in your mother?s house works in a factory too. Or an office building. Reinhard Radermacher runs the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Energy Engineering. He says the cost ? the mortgage plus utilities ? of an energy-efficient building is exactly the same as a conventional building.

RADERMACHER: The energy consumption can be reduced by 50% at the same monthly cost.

And the changes don?t necessarily have to be all that drastic.

RADERMACHER: Energy-efficient lighting, double pane or triple-pane windows, insulation, minimizing infiltration of air into the building and things of this nature are pretty much the low hanging fruit.

CROSS-FADE TO BRUINS GIVING HIS TOUR
BRUINS: During ideal temperatures ? then we?ll bring in 100% outside air and not use our chilled water system to cool that air.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

Making changes like these not only puts more money in a building-owner?s pocket, when you consider the looming shadow of ?Peak Oil,? making these changes is also doing the world a favor. As Radermacher put it

RADERMACHER: Pushing off the Day of Doom. When we consider that alternative energy right now contributes about a few percent of the total energy consumption, if our total energy consumption was cut in half, the contribution of renewables will already be doubled what it is right now.

CROSS-FADE TO BRUINS GIVING HIS TOUR
BRUINS: Now we?re on top of the Toyota plant -- on the roof. Right now it?s a beautiful day and I wish I had my golf clubs.

The Indiana Toyota plant used to have a black roof. Last time they decided to paint it, Nathan Bruins? team did some tests. They used two different aluminum coatings and then a coat of white paint. They found that on a sunny day

BRUINS: The roof would have been close to 170 degrees. Very hot. The aluminum coatings were about 140 degrees, whereas the white coating it was just ambient temperature.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

This simple change reduced Toyota?s cooling load so much, they?re able to turn off one of their 21-hundred ton chillers during the daytime. The Sierra Club?s Dave Hamilton says, take that kind of savings and think of the impact nationwide.

HAMILTON: We could take care of the next 300 power plants we need in this country by making the way we use electricity more efficient. Every time you?re using a more-efficient light bulb, you?re taking that out of demand and putting it back in supply, just as if you dug a bunch of coal up and burned it.

The changes at the Toyota plant were made voluntarily. But a lot of the energy efficiency changes we see around us today are involuntary ? especially in homes. They?re the result of Federal rules and laws.

CLIP FROM THE 70S?

Congress mandated energy efficiency in the late 70s. As a consequence, Reinhard Radermacher says,

RADERMACHER: Household refrigerators for example cost the same as they did two or three decades ago, but have much lower energy consumption.

That?s because the new laws forced engineers at appliance companies to build to a different standard.

COMMERCIAL - Frigidaire Imperial Line (1956)
(music) ANNOUNCER: A completely separate food freezer that holds 84 pounds of frozen foods. In addition to 3 ice cube trays, there is an extra tray for frozen desserts.

It wasn?t just about styling and maximizing storage anymore. Instead, the motivation became energy-efficiency. As a result

RADERMACHER: Heat exchangers got better, compressors got better. Reliability was improved along the way

In refrigerators that meant changing from fiberglass insulation to blown foam insulation in the walls. Increasing wall thickness and figuring out only the places where they HAD to do it, so you could maintain the volume of the refrigerator. Add all that to more efficient air conditioners, more efficient furnaces and overall, much more efficient homes.

CROSS-FADE TO BRUINS GIVING HIS TOUR
BRUINS: Now we?re standing at the Utilities Building, next to the thermal storage tank. The reason we have this thermal storage tank is so that we can run chillers during our non-peak electrical usage time
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

Odd thing about this Toyota plant. For all the energy saving they do with thermal storage tanks and fluorescent light bulbs, this is also the place where they make the Toyota Tundra and the Sequoia. Two of the vehicles in the Toyota fleet with the worst gas mileage. Which brings us to an important question ? how do we engineer cars to become more efficient? Fuel economy in the United States has been essentially flat since the mid-80s. But as U-C Davis?s Joan Ogden says

OGDEN: There are technologies out there that could make another big jump in fuel economy.

Technologies, she says AND the technological know-how.

OGDEN: All during this time, car engines have actually been improving. They?ve been getting more efficient. So why haven?t the cars been getting more efficient? Well those efficiency improvements have gone into making the cars faster

CAR COMMERCIAL
Announcer: GMC. Engineered to the highest standard. Professional grade.

Just like the refrigerator engineers who focused on storage space until they were forced to focus on energy savings. Ogden says we could have cars that are 20 or 30 percent more fuel efficient if car companies took advantage of those engine improvement to improve fuel economy.

OGDEN: If we were willing to back off on the fast performance a little bit and on the big car, the weight a little bit, we could improve fuel economy quite markedly.

She says it?s time for Congress to do to cars what it did for appliances 30 years ago. More on that idea later in the show, along with a focus on new fuels that might free us from oil. When we come back. This is ?After Oil,? from the Purdue University College of Engineering. I'm Barbara Bogaev and we'll be back after a break."

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This is ?After Oil? from the Purdue University College of Engineering, I'm Barbara Bogaev. We?re looking at the tools that might help us break free of our dependence on oil. We started with the least labor-intensive solution.

MONIZ: Turning off lights

And we turn now to maybe the MOST labor intensive.

FADE IN STERN GIVING HIS TOUR
STERN: (yelling over a very loud motor) This equipment that?s in front of us is firstly is a 20,000 horsepower motor. That?s driving an 8-stage compressor.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

We?re mid-way between Bismarck and Minot, North Dakota. Just south of the Canadian border and right in the middle of nowhere. Outside it?s about 40 below zero as Fred Stern walks us through the Dakota Gasification Company?s Great Plains Syn-Fuels Plant.

FADE IN STERN GIVING HIS TOUR
STERN: All the piping you see attached to this compressor is used to take the gas from one stage of compression off to a heating exchanger for cooling
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

The Great Plains plant is involved in coal gasification. And as those words pass my lips I imagine the sound of thousands of radios turning off all over America. To paraphrase Elliot Gould in Animal House ?. the scene where he?s the English professor talking about Milton. ?. I find coal gasification probably as boring as you find coal gasification.

CROSS-FADE TO MOVIE CLIP ? ANIMAL HOUSE
GOULD: Mrs. Milton found him boring too. He?s a little bit long-winded, he doesn?t translate very well into our generation, and his jokes are terrible. [Bell rings, students rise to leave] But that doesn?t relieve you of your responsibility for this material. Now I?m waiting for reports from some of you... Listen, I?m not joking. This is my job!

And now ? coal gasification.

FADE IN STERN GIVING HIS TOUR
STERN: The coal enters the top of the building on a series of belts.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

While America may be running out of our own supplies of oil, we still have plenty of coal. Every day thousands of pounds of Lignite pour into the Dakota gasification plant where it?s turned into natural gas. Still with me? OK, then join us in the ?coal lock.?

STERN: The coal lock is a vessel that can be pressured and depressurized and it then allows coal to fall from the lock into what we call a gasifyer.

Inside the gasifyer, the coal is injected with steam and oxygen. That burns the coal and creates methane, carbon monoxide, sulfur compounds and a handful of other gasses.

STERN: We remove excess carbon dioxide, we also remove all of the various sulfur compounds. After that has taken place, we now have a gas that is primarily methane, carbon monoxide and hydrogen.

They put that gas together with a catalyst that makes the hydrogen and carbon monoxide combine to form more methane and then the whole thing goes off to a pipeline and on to Chicago and Dubuque.

STERN: Today, we have the capability of producing nearly 170 million standard cubic feet per day of product gas.

Gasification?s been around a long time. It?s how Germany powered its tanks in the Second World War. The popularity of gasification waxes and wanes, depending on the cost of natural gas. I?m talking about its popularity as a fuel. Its popularity as a topic of conversation is pretty-much fixed. It goes back and forth as a fuel because the plants are so-darn expensive to build and maintain. This place is massive. They have one room that?s big enough to store 80 cars, if you wanted to. And these days there?s another problem. Gasification plants give off massive amounts of C-O-two. And it doesn?t seem to make a lot of sense to create alternative energy that contributes to global warming. But Dakota Gasification has an ingenious solution to this problem.

COMPRESSOR NOISE

At the Dakota Coal Gasification plant, they don?t give off any C-O-two. They use a process that strips out the C-O-two. Then they pressurize it, with the giant compressor you?re listening to. They stick it into a pipeline, it heads north

STERN: And travels some 205 miles until it reaches the Wayburn and Mydale oil fields in southern Saskatchewan, Canada.

The Canadians use the carbon dioxide for oil recovery. They pump it into old, depleted oil fields to make more oil come out. And once it?s underground, scientists say that C-Oh-two STAYS underground pretty much forever. This is actually another new technology that?s helping in the search for alternative energy. It?s called ?C-Oh-two capture and sequestration.? Basically, you take carbon dioxide, capture it before it gets in the air and then bury it underground. This is an idea that, on the surface, sounds so silly and ? at the same time ? so obvious. It?s like something you?d hear a nine-year old suggest for a class project.

NINE YEAR OLD: Carbon dioxide causes global warming. I think you could, like put it in bags and bury it.

Yeah, it sounds goofy, and even seven or eight years ago, it was considered goofy. But not today.

BENSON: If we look at geological storage of CO2 -- if we sort of rewind the tape to 1998/2000, it was still very much a sort of a ?conceptual idea?

Sally Benson is a professor in the Energy Resources Engineering Department at Stanford University.

BENSON: Since that time there has been a tremendous amount of growth and interest in CO2 capture and storage . And there?s now actually a very large research community focusing their attention on this important issue.

There are two types of places that scientists are eyeing as the best ones to put C-Oh-Two. One is old oil and gas reservoirs.

BENSON: Those are particularly suitable sites because just by virtue of having trapped gas or oil for millions of years, we know that there?s a good seal.

The second is something called ?saline formations? which is just a fancy name for a limestone pit, where the pores in the rock are filled with water. Doctor Benson says these are popular because you can pretty much find them anywhere.

BENSON: So if you have a power plant, you?re much more likely to be close to a saline formation than you would be for example to a oil or gas reservoir.

As for how you?d do this, again ? it?s so simple a nine-year might have thought of it.

BENSON: You would drill a well.

You take a drill bit. You dig into the earth. Then you install metal casings that are cemented in to create a good seal between the casing and the natural rock. You poke holes in the bottom of the casing and the pump in the C-OH-2.

BENSON: The first thing that happens is CO2 begins to dissolve and, in some cases there are projections that after a thousand years or so, all of the CO2 would have been dissolved. So basically the CO2 becomes part of the rock itself.

The Department of Energy is testing the process now. Benson says it will become part of our arsenal soon.

MUSIC UP AND OUT
FADE IN SOUND OF PRES. BUSH AT AN ETHANOL PLANT
BUSH: Someday you?re going to be using this in your cars. A lot of people are today. But more and more are going to be using fuel from agricultural waste.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

If coal seems heavy and dirty, our next alternative energy source is the one touted by its supporters as the most clean and natural.

SOUND OF GM CEO RICK WAGONER TESTIFYING IN CONGRESS
WAGONER: If all the E85-capable vehicles on the road today ? along with those that GM, Ford and Daimler-Chrysler have already committed to produce over the next 10 years ? if they were to run on E-85, we could displace 22 billion gallons of gasoline annually.

That?s the CEO of General Motors, Rick Wagoner testifying to a House Subcommittee in March. He?s talking about ethanol. Detroit loves ethanol. The ?E-85? that Wagoner mentioned is a type of fuel that?s 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline. Ethanol is really just alcohol. And using it to fuel a car is not a new idea.

MOVIE CLIP - The American Road (1953)
ANNOUNCER: In Detroit, a man named Henry Ford, who?d left the farm and come to the city to tinker with machinery was making what he called a ?Quardracycle?
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

It was actually a popular fuel back when Henry Ford was building cars one-at-a-time. Today, 2-and-a-half percent of gasoline is mixed with it. Ethanol?s promoters say this helps cut our dependence on foreign oil and fights global warming. But there?s a problem. Here?s an oil man to tell you what it is.

PRES. BUSH: Right now, most of our ethanol is made from corn.

FADE TO ? CORN ETHANOL PROMOTIONAL MOVIE
ANNOUNCER: This renewable energy source meets the needs of automobile manufacturers, and the petroleum industry.

Problem is: things aren?t as simple as this promotional movie by the Midwest Grain Processors would suggest. First of all, Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivores? Dilemma points out

POLLAN: Every bushel of corn takes somewhere between a quarter and a third of a gallon of gasoline equivalent to grow.

And there?s another problem with corn ethanol.

PRES. BUSH: The problem is, we got a lot of hog growers who are beginning to feel the pinch as a result of high corn prices. How do you achieve your goal of less dependence on oil without breaking your farmers?

Here?s how.

FADE IN SOUND OF ARBIDGE GIVING HIS TOUR
ARBIDGE: This is what are called our small scale fermentation area.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

Mike Arbidge is a Vice President at Genencor. A company that makes enzymes for industry. Enzymes are chemicals that break things up. Genencor does a lot of work with detergent companies, for example .... figuring out new ways to get grass stains off your kid?s Levis. But lately, they?ve invested in a new area. Making ?cellulosic ethanol.? That?s ethanol from something other than corn. In this case, grass and garbage. Jack Hutner runs Genencor?s bio refinery business.

HUTNER: Cellulosic ethanol is being able to go beyond food crops like corn and wheat to waste streams like corn stover or wheat straw or wood chips.

FADE IN SOUND OF ARBIDGE GIVING HIS TOUR
ARBIDGE: (noise) OK, what we?re looking at here is a bank of over 50 20-liter fermenters
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

The process of making ethanol from crop garbage is no different from making ethanol from corn. Enzymes break down plants into simple sugars, and then the sugars are fermented in yeast to make ethanol. The problem though, is that corn breaks down a lot more efficiently than stalks and grass. So most of the work being done to bring cellulosic ethanol to market is around that ? making it break down better. Genencor?s scientists work to bio-engineer enzymes that are better at chewing up the plants. At the same time

FADE IN SOUND OF HOLBROOK GIVING HER TOUR
HOLBROOK: So here we are in one of the research and teaching greenhouses at Harvard University.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

Other scientists are working to grow plants that just break down on their own. Michelle Holbrook is a professor of Forestry at Harvard. She walks through the greenhouse on top of the Harvard biology lab and stops in front some grasses that, she says

HOLBROOK: Are good candidates for manipulating and growing for bio-energy crops.

Holbrook is working with molecular biologists and agronomists at Purdue to grow the perfect ethanol grass. It?s not easy. Remember that the way ethanol happens is: Plants are broken down and the material that?s left over is fermented. The problem is this: You can engineer a plant with a cell wall that breaks down easily when it?s dead. But if you do, that plant won?t be able to suck up any water when it?s alive. So a plant with a strong stem ? it gets water, but you can?t ferment it. A plant with a weak stem ? you COULD ferment it, if it would just live long enough. But it can?t.

HOLBROOK: That?s where our research comes in.

Holbrook and her team are working to create grass that?s strong enough to stand up, but weak enough to break down.

FADE IN SOUND OF ARBIDGE GIVING HIS TOUR
ARBIDGE: What you see here is a small-scale reactor. This is a 20-liter reactor.

Back at Genencor, the search goes on for more effective enzymes. From a business standpoint, the company is feeling like this cellulosic ethanol thing might be a large piece of the future.

CLIP ? IT?S A WONDERFUL LIFE
SAM WAINWRIGHT ON THE PHONE: This is the biggest thing since radio, and I?m letting you in on the ground floor.

They?ve taken a matching grant from the State of New York and put up 20 million dollars of their own money to build a cellulosic ethanol plant in Rochester.

CLIP ? IT?S A WONDERFUL LIFE
GEORGE: Rochester? Well, why Rochester?
SAM?S VOICE: Well, why not? Can you think of anything better?

ARBIDGE: If you were to say petroleum cost $50/barrel -- which is where we are today and moving upward ? ethanol becomes a very reasonable substitute.

When you think about it, ethanol?s really only a half-step. If we?re going to become energy independent, shouldn?t there be a way to drive without using gasoline at all?

CLIP - FORD PROMOTIONAL MOVIE
ANNOUNCER: The high series drive power train can deliver the equivalent of 41 miles to a gallon. Of course, there aren?t any gallons because there?s no gasoline! Ah, the beauty of it all.
FADE TO
IJAZ: The under-hood of this vehicle which is the Ford Edge is fundamentally empty.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

This is the vehicle that Ford, at least, is hoping will get us there.

IJAZ: The vehicle that we?re standing next to is a running prototype.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

Mujeeb Ijaz is a vehicle engineering manager at Ford. He?s at the auto show in Washington, DC showing off what he calls a hybrid-hybrid ? an S-U-V that runs on electricity and hydrogen.

IJAZ: The vehicle runs in battery-electric mode only for the first 25 miles.

The car runs on a battery powered by lithium ion ? like the battery in your laptop. Only this one?s about the size of one of those coolers you take to the beach. Up near the front rear-view mirror there?s a socket like you?d find on an electric lawn mower. If you charge it overnight and then you charge it at work it?ll take you 50 miles. Ijaz says most Americans drive 30 miles a day round-trip.

IJAZ: Customers DO want them, but they don?t want to pay for them. If I look at that situation I have to come to the conclusion that the vehicle has to have a greater customer benefit than simply being an environmental solution.

Ford is hoping that benefit will be the money you save at the gas pump. An S-U-V this size gets around 19 miles-a-gallon. If gas is 3 dollars, that?s 190 dollars a month. If you commute in the electric S-U-V, it?s 46 dollars a month. So are you excited? Want to run out and buy one? More on that later. Ford?s not the only company with a plug-in concept car.

TAPE - HYBRID CAR PRESENTATION AT THE WHITE HOUSE
TECHNICIAN: So this car is a hybrid vehicle. It?ll run a little bit on battery and a lot on gas. It gets about 45 miles a gallon as a hybrid.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

This is a modified Toyota Prius being demonstrated at the White House. It?s been converted to a plug-in car. And if you still want a plug-in, but you?re concerned that these cars are ugly ? by the way, they are ? you can try this instead.

NEWS TAPE - PCMAG.COM
(pounding music) REPORTER: This is the Tesla Roadster. A 100% digital, electric car under development in a 170-person start up just south of San Francisco.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

The Tesla looks like any other super-expensive sports car. Only when you start it up there?s no roar like a Ferrari. Instead, you hear ? nothing.

NEWS TAPE - PCMAG.COM
REPORTER: It?s literally 100% electric.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

At this stage, the auto companies seem to be looking at electric batteries as a half-way measure. Batteries just don?t have the life yet to go more than 25 miles. Now former Exxon-Mobil Vice President Mike Ramage says there MIGHT be more progress going on than we know about

RAMAGE: It might be moving faster than we all know in the open.

He says GM, Honda and Toyota are spending a tremendous amount of money and time

RAMAGE: And they wouldn?t do it unless they were really making progress.

But right now the battery is seen as a way to give you a little freedom, but mostly to get you back and forth to a filling station. So let?s take a look now at ? once you GET to the filling station ? what you might be putting in your tank.

SOUND ? SHELL HYDROGEN STATION IN DC
TOUR GUIDE: Welcome to the Shell Benning Road visitors center and hydrogen gas station.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

One thing you could fill it up with is hydrogen. Believe it or not, there are actually hydrogen gas stations that are open around the country. Most are in California. This one ? run by Shell ? is in Washington, DC.

SOUND ? SHELL HYDROGEN STATION IN DC
TOUR GUIDE: We have an agreement with General Motors.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

A number of companies are working on hydrogen cars. You heard about Ford?s. GM?s CEO told Congress that his company is building 100 of them, to run in DC, California and New York. Now, the way a hydrogen car works ? it?s a little complicated. So I?m gonna use a tried-and-true public radio method for explaining something complicated.

SPACEY MUSIC
-Hi I?m Jad.
-And I?m Bob.
-So Bob (rustles papers) ? uh ? how DOES a hydrogen car work?
-Well I wanted to know that too.
-Me too.
-Me too.
-And so I asked someone.
-My name is Joan Ogden.
-Joan Ogden. She says a hydrogen car is fueled by
-True love
-It?s what?
-It?s really -- you know -- in some ways -- a matter of true love
-True love?
-A matter of true love
-That?s right. A hydrogen car is fueled by love.

CHEESY MUSIC

See, there?s hydrogen and oxygen on opposite sides of an electrolyte membrane.

OGDEN: And these things want to get together so much

But the hydrogen can?t go through the membrane. Well, the proton of the hydrogen can go through the membrane but not the electron.

OGDEN: So what does the electron do? You make an external circuit; you put your motor on that

The electron runs the circuit ? it runs the car ? and then you let it through the membrane and you?re left with water and heat. Got it? OK, kill the cheesy music.

MUSIC STOPS

A great thing about hydrogen .... you can make it out of pretty-much anything.

AGRAWAL: So whether you have natural gas or you have coal or you have a fossil fuel or you have solar energy or you nuclear you can always get hydrogen.

Rakesh Agrawal is a professor of Chemical Engineering at Purdue.

AGRAWAL: So hydrogen in some sense is like electricity.

Today, he says, we make it in large amounts. Large enough to fuel whole fleets of cars and trucks. And that?s nice, but that hydrogen station in Washington

SOUND FROM THE HYDROGEN STATION

They only have one. In the whole city. A big question is: How do you get hydrogen to as many places as there are gasoline stations today? Mike Ramage, the retired Exxon-Mobil engineer says there are a few options. It could be ? like they do here ? fleets of trucks that ship the hydrogen, the same way we ship gasoline today.

RAMAGE: It could mean pipelines. It could also mean, in the short term building small hydrogen generation units at filling stations.

FADE TO LOMAX GIVING HIS TOUR
(Sound of drilling) LOMAX: We?re out on the plant floor and you can see -- this is one our small, 2,000 cubic feet-per-hour hydrogen plants being put together.

Frank Lomax is one step ahead of ya?. He runs a company called H-Two-Gen in Alexandria, Virginia. Their main product is a reactor that takes natural gas, combines it with steam, and makes another gas that has hydrogen in it. The machine purifies the gas

LOMAX: And then send the hydrogen to the customer

With the H-Two-Gen reactor, you don?t need to build any new pipelines to get the hydrogen to the filling station.

LOMAX: Basically you take the pipe that?s bringing the natural gas for them to heat the service station and you would just branch a line off and feed this.

No refueling trucks. So none of their emissions. None of the risk of all that truck transport. Mike Ramage has seen the H-Two-Gen machine.

RAMAGE: I think that they?ve done a great job of developing those small devices. It?s just very impressive.

FADE TO LOMAX GIVING HIS TOUR
LOMAX: Well this is the HGM 10,000 and it looks a lot bigger than the smaller plant.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

Today H-Two-Gen sells its generators to companies that need hydrogen to make windshields or hydrogenated vegetable oil. But their ultimate aim is to fuel cars.

LOMAX: The smaller plant is good for about 20 cars a day, or 3 busses, this plant is five time more.

The H-Two-Gen process does give off some C-Oh-two. But Mike Ramage points out that that when you compare the C-Oh-two involved in hydrogen cars to what we?re pumping out today, it?s no contest.

RAMAGE: If you turn around and told the world today that you could drive all fuel-cell vehicles with natural gas-derived hydrogen and your CO2 emissions would be cut by 2/3, you think they?d all say ?Yes?? Yes, they would.

So there?s our suite of alternative energy solutions. Just in time to stave off the oil peak, if it comes. Are you hopeful yet? Or are you asking, ?OK this is all great, but why can?t I use any of it today?? We?ll explain that when we come back. This is ?After Oil,? from the Purdue University College of Engineering. I'm Barbara Bogaev.

----------------------------------------------------
This is After Oil from the Purdue University College of Engineering, I'm Barbara Bogaev. If we believe predictions we?ve heard in this program, then it?s reasonable to say that every time we drive, we?re being chased by the specter of ?Peak Oil.? And the question of what-do-we-do-from-now-until-the-oil-runs-out? We?ve just heard about six different ideas. But you have to ask: Sure they sound great, but are they real, or are they hype? And regardless ? With a crisis looming, how long will it take to put these ideas in place? Purdue University?s Jay Gore says,

GORE: The technological answer is not a short term answer. We are going to go from point A to point B. Whether we go on a very smooth road or we have a rollercoaster ride is the only uncertainty.

He?s confident. But the track record is not that great.

CLIP - A IS FOR ATOM (1953)
ANNOUNCER: Nuclear power in locomotives, submarines, ships and even very large airplanes may all-but-revolutionize future transpiration on land, sea and air.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

TAYLOR: If you go back to the 1950s, we were told by proponents that nuclear power would be ?too cheap to meter? with just a little bit of government support

Jerry Taylor is Director of Natural Resource Studies at the Cato Institute.

TAYLOR: It?s still about the most expensive source of electricity on the power grid if you look at not only operating, but capitol cost. We were told in the 50s and 60s and 70s as well that getting oil out of coal would be the next great thing. And despite 10s of billions of dollars being thrown into that technology it still is far away from being commercially viable today.

Same with solar, wind and all the energy alternatives we?ve heard about this hour. Each has its own, unique problems. They can probably be beaten. But they can?t be ignored.

FADE IN STERN GIVING HIS TOUR
STERN: (yelling over a very loud motor) This equipment that?s in front of us is firstly is a 20,000 horsepower motor. That?s driving an 8-stage compressor.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

As we mentioned earlier, coal gasification plants are monumentally expensive to build. The Dakota Gasification plant went on-line in 1984. Immediately after, according to Daryl Hill, a spokesman for the company that owns the plant

HILL: The price of natural gas dropped dramatically beyond all expectations.

The people who owned the plant asked the government for price supports

HILL: And the DOE said, ?No, we will not do that? and the consortium members said, ?This plant is yours.?

The government ran the plant for a while before they sold it to Hill?s company. The plant cost 2 billion dollars to build. Hill says

HILL: We bought it for 85 million dollars

The other problem: the North Dakota plant is near an oil field. So they HAVE a place to put their C-Oh-two. But if you build a gasification plant that?s not near an oil field? You?re going to have to capture that C-oh-two and sequester it. According to MIT?s Ernie Moniz, the scale of that capture and sequestration is massive.

MONIZ: If you take one fairly typical utility-scale plant, that plant with the CO2 captured for a 50 year life time would require the sequestration of about a billion barrels of compressed CO2.

And that?s just one gasification plant and one C-oh-two reservoir. If you built enough plants to make us energy independent, he says, you?d need thousands. Again, not insurmountable, but a tough problem. And we?ll have to start addressing it now if we want to solve it. Or let?s look at efficiency. Remember, Joan Ogden said about cars,

OGDEN: Right away -- what we could do -- is to implement energy efficiency standards

Specifically, Corporate Average Fuel Economy or ?CAF? standards.

GETTELFINGER: The UAW would be deeply concerned about the economic feasibility of any proposals to mandate significantly higher vehicle efficiency standards.

That?s the president of the United Auto Workers, Ron Gettelfinger

GETTELFINGER: The imposition of stringent increases in vehicle efficiency standards could lead to calamitous results.

And he has company.

MULALLY: When the CAFE law was passed in the 1970s, the goal was to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Frankly that didn?t work.

That was the chairman of Ford, Alan Mulally. And here?s the head of
G-M, Rick Wagoner

WAGONER: A 4% per year CAF? increase would be extraordinarily expensive and technologically challenging to implement.

Face it. We like to drive our big, fancy cars.

MONTAGE OF PEOPLE AT GAS STATIONS
MAN 1: I love my car ?cause it?s a nice sports car. All the women love it. And I love it
MAN 2: I have an SUV at home and I?m gonna drive it because I like it.

Remember Joan Ogden?s challenge?

OGDEN: If we were willing to back off on the fast performance a little bit and on the big car, we could improve fuel economy quite markedly.

We could. But will we? That problem?s not technological, it?s personal. We can only solve it if we have the will.

FADE IN SOUND OF PRES. BUSH AT AN ETHANOL PLANT
BUSH: Someday you?re going to be using this in your cars.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

Well, maybe. But just like the problem with efficiency, the principal roadblock to cellulosic ethanol also isn?t technological. David Morris is with the Institute for Local Self Reliance. After Congress wrote the Energy Policy Act in 2005, he took a close look at the section dealing with Cellulosic ethanol. Congress knew we couldn?t rely on corn for all our ethanol. So the bill mandates that the US produce 250 million gallons of ethanol from grass and weeds by 2013. But at the very last second, before the bill was passed, Morris says,

MORRIS: There was a alternative definition of cellulosic ethanol that was added.

Get this: the wording was changed so that you can qualify as producing cellulosic ethanol even if you never make a DROP. They changed the law so that a factory making corn ethanol could qualify as cellulosic ethanol. The way they did it is complicated

MORRIS: It defined the term ?Cellulosic Ethanol? in a way that defies common sense.

It?s based ? believe it or not ? on the way the refinery is heated. But the bill is now law and this change, Morris says,

MORRIS: Literally subverted the primary purpose of that entire section

Corn ethanol is easy to make because there are so many people harvesting corn and delivering it to ethanol refineries. But cellulosic ethanol is new. There?s practically NO one out harvesting switch grass. This law would have created incentives to build that infrastructure of people farming and harvesting cellulose. But as of right now that?s out. The law will have to be changed. Again, that will take political will. So what about Hydrogen? Mike Ramage ? impressed as he was with the H-two-Gen hydrogen generators says,

RAMAGE: I?m not an advocate of hydrogen.

The problem he sees ? and others see it too ? is not with hydrogen production, but with making a hydrogen car. According to Ford engineer Mujeeb Ijaz, all the popular alternative fuels have one thing in common. They need space on a vehicle.

IJAZ: The largest space of all of these fuels is for hydrogen.

And bulkiness is only part of it. Joan Ogden says there?s also trouble with the guts of the fuel cell. Those membranes that keep the wayward lovers, hydrogen and oxygen apart from each other.

OGDEN: You have to make these things very good at conducting protons, you don?t want losses; so part of it is getting a membrane that works well that way. And also is a low-cost material.

Right now they use platinum. So much for low-cost. Another problem is durability. As Mike Ramage says,

RAMAGE: Will it last 5,000 hours, which is how much driving time you expect out of an internal combustion engine?

At this point, no one is sure. You take all this together and Ernie Moniz says

MONIZ: Hydrogen, as an alternative transportation fuel is quite some ways away.

Instead, he says, we have to look somewhere else.

MONIZ: Plug-in hybrids are one example of such a technology.

CLIP - FORD PROMOTIONAL MOVIE
ANNOUNCER: Of course, there aren?t any gallons because there?s no gasoline! Ah, the beauty of it all.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

So, remember a while back when I asked if you wanted to buy the Ford plug-in S-U-V? Well, that?s gonna be a little tough. Our producer found out why direct from the horse?s mouth.

PAUL: How many of these are there?
IJAZ: One.
PAUL: And how much did it cost to build it?
IJAZ: The total, including people, was around 2 million dollars.

Too steep? Well there?s always a Tesla.

NEWS TAPE - PCMAG.COM
(pounding music) REPORTER: This is the Tesla Roadster.
FADE AND LEAVE UNDER

According to Forbes Magazine, ?fully loaded ? a Tesla roadster will set you back one-hundred-thousand dollars.? At the time that article was written, in March 350 people had put down deposits.

POUNDING MUSIC STOPS

Another problem ?and it?s a big one ? most of these technologies ? some would say NONE of these technologies can exist, let alone prosper ? without significant help from the government. Jerry Taylor, the free marketer at the libertarian Cato Institute says

TAYLOR: It might very well be that absent government support it doesn?t make any sense to invest in this area. I mean, after all, if a technology has commercial promise it doesn?t need a dime of taxpayer help.

MORRIS: That?s absolutely false. There isn?t anything remotely true about that statement.

That?s David Morris of the Institute for Local Self Reliance.

MORRIS: It?s just nonsense to think that the marketplace somehow can bring these new technologies in all on its own. The books are cooked when it comes to renewables vs. non-renewables.

He says right now we just don?t calculate the REAL cost of our gasoline. As Jack Hutner of Genencor says,

HUTNER: There are no such things as Free Markets in energy because of the impact of defending the sea lanes.

As H-two-Gen?s Frank Lomax calculates it,

LOMAX: Just one year of this war in Iraq would have paid for an entire hydrogen infrastructure and subsidized the production of the cars.

No one?s talking about spending that much money. Mike Ramage says that?s not the solution. Instead, he says, the government should put money into fundamental research -- the kind that a company can?t see itself making a profit off of in a short-enough term.

RAMAGE: The DOE can fund not only the national labs, but they can fund venture capitol people, they can fund academics and they can also even fund -- maybe on a co-share basis -- what goes into the larger companies. But there has to be a clear end-point. Eventually the free market has to dictate.

MUSIC SHIFTS

After a recent State of the Union Address, Roger Bezdek?s company produced a study for the Southern States Energy Board where they looked at just what it would take to eliminate US dependence on foreign oil by 2030.

BEZDEK: You need 5 million barrels a day from coal-to-liquids. You need three million from oil shale, you need 5 million from biomass, and so forth. Whether those are achievable, technologically or financially or politically is another question.

That?s sobering. But it?s not hopeless. That?s because Bezdek?s calculation makes a common mistake. Mike Ramage says, analysts who only look at the here-and-now ?

RAMAGE: Tend to look at technology in its current state. And not to look at where technology might be. And being the R & D person that I am, and always have been, I believe that you have to look at both.

There are breakthroughs out there. Ernie Moniz says: Big ones.

MONIZ: When you look at the surprises we are almost certainly going to continue seeing with new science and new technology, yes I feel optimistic on the technology side.

Those surprises will come, he says, from scientists and engineers who can re-imagine the way we make energy -- doing it in ways we haven't even THOUGHT of yet. Ideas like this

AGRAWAL: All the carbon atoms in the coal is converted to carbon monoxide and not carbon dioxide.

That's Purdue Chemical Engineering professor Rakesh Agrawal. He's talking about an idea he's working on that would triple the amount of fuel we get from coal AND from grass and garbage. ? And do it with NO C-Oh-2.

AGRAWAL: So all that carbon dioxide sequestration that people talk about will disappear basically.

As we said, the Big Changes will come from re-imagining. In this case, re-imagining today?s coal gasification process which, Agrawal says is inefficient.

AGRAWAL: If there were 100 atoms -- like 100 units of carbon in coal, you?ll end up with only like 40 units as the final liquid fuel.

You get 40 units of fuel and the other 60 go into the atmosphere as C-Oh-2. Same with crop waste.

AGRAWAL: Nearly 1/3 shows up as liquid fuel and 2/3 goes back to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.

This new process, which he?s published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, gets you triple the fuel. If you?re working with coal, you start with hydrogen, which -- remember -- you can make from anything. So you make it from sunlight or wind.

AGRAWAL: And then we use that hydrogen and take every atom of carbon which is in the coal and substitute the hydrogen on those carbon atoms and form the liquid fuel.

Working with crop waste ? or as he calls it ?bio mass? ? you take hydrogen from the sun

AGRAWAL: And then react that with bio mass, so that every carbon atom which comes in the bio mass is converted to liquid fuel.

The efficiency and the carbon-free nature of the hydrogen makes this a win-win. More energy from the same amount of stuff and no C-Oh-2. When will we see this?

AGRAWAL: In the next 5 to 10 years we should be able to build these -- start building the prototype plants.

This solution, like others we?ve heard about ? it WILL come. Though maybe slower than we want. This isn?t a quick fix ? one of those miracles you hear about on the evening news and then never see. And according to Professor Jay Gore that?s OK. It?s important not to look for the quick fix. Becoming energy independent is a problem that?s going to take longer than the quarterly cycles that Wall Street and our political system usually work with. And Gore says they?re not just technology problems either.

GORE: It is a social, political, economic challenge and social, political and economic preparations are going to be as necessary as science and technology preparations.

Gore says, to get there we must have

GORE: A systematic program or systematic plan that tells how we are going to navigate from now ?til the future where we have multiple resources -- multiple sources of energy to rely on.

And will we get there? And will we get there in time?

GORE: I am very confident that we will; as human beings we will find a solution.

America has always responded well to a crisis. But, thinking about "Peak Oil" -- considering the magnitude, the devastation it could cause to our lives and lifestyles ..... Considering all of that, the question becomes: Can we act BEFORE the crisis? To protect everything we take for granted today .... and keep it going in a world After Oil? We HAVE the tools. But do we have the will? Do we have the determination? Do we have .... the energy?

MUSIC UP AND ENDS
------------------------------------------------------------
CREDITS

After Oil was written and produced by Richard Paul. It was edited by Richard Miles. Our remote engineers were Walter Dixon, Steve Sergeant, Marlis Schmidt, Kenton McDonald, Joey Jones, Philip Graitcer and Brad Linder. The interview with Michael Pollan is courtesy of ?Fresh Air with Terry Gross,? produced in Philadelphia by WHYY and distributed by National Public Radio. Archival footage came from the Prelinger Archive, part of the internet archive at archive-dot-org. This program has been a production of the Purdue University College of Engineering and the Energy Center at Purdue's Discovery Park. Discovery Park is Purdue University's hub for interdisciplinary research. Pursuing solutions to the grand challenges of our time. On the web at DiscoveryPark.Purdue.edu. I?m Barbara Bogaev.

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