Chron.com | We can't � and shouldn't� quit cold turkey, but we can manage our oil addiction

We can't — and shouldn't— quit cold turkey, but we can manage our oil addiction


By ERIC PETERS


The chronic drunk at your neighborhood saloon has a better chance of ending his addiction to the demon sauce than America has of eliminating it dependence on oil.

But that's not all bad. Unlike the ailing alcoholic who may save his life by joining AA and going cold turkey, America can moderate its use of oil by increasing fuel economy mandates for motor vehicles and generating more of its electricity from nuclear energy and coal-fired power plants.

Media pundits can prattle on about freeing ourselves from petroleum, but they are peddling buncombe designed to sell books, titillate college audiences and guarantee future appearances on cable talk shows.

President Bush made headlines in his January State of the Union speech by shunning such recent causes célèbres as Social Security and health-care reform and declaring energy independence as his great goal for 2006.

After signing an Energy Policy Act last August that wisely encouraged more domestic drilling for oil and natural gas, Bush did a policy about-face at the State of the Union by tagging America as a nation of oil addicts who need to end their bad habits.

To that end, he pledged a 22 percent increase in funding to pursue a laundry list of alternative energy sources like wind and solar power, biomass and hydrogen fuel cells.

The president even touted producing billions of barrels of fuel from Switchgrass, a scrub plant with a spreading root system that flourishes in marshes, lake shores and meadows.

Llewellyn King, the editor of Energy Daily, the industry's bible, noted that the reference to Switchgrass produced "an eerie echo" of Jimmy Carter's Synthetic Fuel Corp., an $80 billion boondoggle whose promise to make methanol from coal ended in utter ruin.

Such panaceas still inspire trust in the eco-faithful and their friends among tax-and-spend politicians, even though they have a long track record of being outrageously expensive and grossly ineffective.

But the fact is that we've been trying to develop Switchgrass fuel — or, as Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman prefers to call it, "cellulosic ethanol" — for three decades, to no avail. That also holds true for wind, solar, hydrogen and fusion. Dry holes all, but never so dry that Congress won't continue pouring additional billions down them.

Truth to be told, oil and natural gas aren't really evil addictions at all; they are essential ingredients that ensure a robust, growing and healthy economy.

With terror spreading from the Middle East into Nigeria and an increasingly ruthless and anti-American dictator consolidating power in Venezuela, it makes sense to be more aggressive in tapping our own vast petroleum reserves.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration says there are about 232.5 trillion cubic feet and 36.9 billion barrels of oil in currently restricted areas of the Gulf of Mexico and the Straits of Florida, and many times those amounts in the Outer Continental Shelf, 200 miles off our Atlantic coastline.

The Department of Energy, in a recent series of reports that drew scant media attention, says advanced oil recovery technology and techniques can quadruple the amount of recoverable oil in the United States — eventually adding 430 billion new barrels to the nation's reserves. Those projections don't encompass hundreds of billions of barrels more that can be extracted from Canada's vast tar sands and Colorado's huge oil shale deposits.

While the doomsayers constantly shout that the world is running out of oil, all of the available evidence indicates it is awash in this appropriately named "black gold." There's hardly any need to break an addiction that doesn't exist. The addiction we really need to break is that of listening to the "can't do" negativity that permeates so much of TV, radio and the print media these days.

Peters is an automotive columnist for The Army Times and AOL.online.