Energy, Resources and Environment: Papers Presented at the First U.S.-China Conference on Energy, Resources and Environment, 7-12 November 1982, Beijing, China

Yuan

I

KEYNOTE ADDRESS

Outline

Chapter 1: INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION FOR EFFECTIVE UTILIZATION OF ENERGY, RESOURCES AND ENVIRONMENT

INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION FOR EFFECTIVE UTILIZATION OF ENERGY, RESOURCES AND ENVIRONMENT

Leonard Woodcock,     Dept. of Pol. Sci., The Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA

I am indeed honored to have been invited to keynote this first US-China Conference on Energy, Resources and Environment.

I had the privilege of serving my country, the United States, for almost four years in this capital and to have played a part in the final normalization of relations between our two countries in 1978.

This conference has been five years in the making and it is most appropriate that the host should be China, a nation which once led the world in intellectual and scientific matters, and which again is reaching out to greatness. Joseph Needham’s monumental study of the history of science, technology, and medicine in Chinese culture spells out the many basic discoveries in which the Chinese antedated the Europeans by centuries.

Early in the 17th century, the English scientist, Sir Francis Bacon, wrote: Printing, Gunpowder and the Compass: these three inventions have already changed the face of the entire world and the condition of things. The first is concerned with learning, the second with warfare and the third with navigation. The changes in these three areas will give rise to innumerable discoveries in other areas and no matter what empire, religion, or constellation, or human affair, no human influence will be as great as that of the discovery of these mechanisms.

Bacon was right and historians now agree that these three discoveries were essential to the transformation of European society. All, of course, had been previously invented in China a few hundred years before.

The accumulation of scientific advance led to the Industrial Revolution which spread widely on a flow of ever-cheapening energy, bringing with it the Age of Imperialism. Resurgent nationalisms following World War II curbed the Age of Imperialism, and, as nations asserted better control over their own resources, the era of low-cost energy came suddenly to an end.

This was brought vividly to the attention of the world when the oil crisis of 1973–74 brought a quadrupling of petroleum prices, a sharp shake-up in the alignment of the world economy and a sudden realization that, in fossil fuels, we were dealing with finite commodities, the most desirable of which could be exhausted within decades unless circumstances were changed.

The immediate economic impact of the oil crisis was a sharp recession in 1974–75 in the market economies. It was expected this would be accompanied by disastrous effects in the oil-importing, developing countries where much higher energy costs would overwhelm their frail economies. As it happened, there was less destabilization in the oil-importing, developing countries than in the industrial nations, with their growth rates only slightly reduced. As a matter of fact, it was the continued strong demand for imported goods by these countries which limited the depth and duration of the recession in the industrial nations. This came about because the OPEC countries sharply increased their imports of goods and services, hired many workers from other lands who sent substantial remittances home and because the world banking system successfully handled the recycling of the surplus funds. In addition, world inflation was reducing the real price of oil.

This has led to the conclusion in some important quarters that everything can work out, and that a new equilibrium can be brought about by the magic working of the unseen hand of the international market system. The second oil shock of 1979–80 brings this conclusion into grave, if not irrefutable, question. Many OPEC countries are reaching a plateau in their development efforts. The increasing debt of the oil-importing, developing countries, accompanied by a gigantic interest burden, is crushing their economies. The continued world recession is slashing other raw material prices with no help from the North-South dialogue. A new equilibrium can well be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to obtain and maintain. And always there remains the question not simply of price but of the supply of energy in usable forms, consistent with the integrity of the environment and humanity.

It now becomes clear we do not have an energy crisis but an energy problem, which, in political terms, is much more difficult to handle. A crisis can engage general attention, call forth the collective will to tackle it and the necessary sustained effort to find satisfactory solutions. A problem contains within itself a crisis, but one which is possibly over the horizon. The solutions to a problem can be more difficult to determine and can take long periods of time in achieving. The necessary sustained support for such solutions are more difficult to achieve in a political sense among the world’s leaders and peoples.

Ten years ago the United Nations held in Stockholm a landmark Conference on the Human Environment. The Chinese delegation first contributed the phrase: Of all things in the world, people are the most precious. This phrase was incorporated in the Stockholm Declaration together with the conference slogan Only One Earth. Stockholm recognized the unbreakable interdependence of the global community. Practices which endanger the human environment are no respecter of national boundaries or political systems. Acid rain created by fumes from industry can fall hundreds of kilometers away, poisoning another nation’s lakes and streams. Poor peasants desperate for farmland and fuelwood, destroy forests, leading to soil erosion, floods, drought and widespread climatic change.

The case is so obvious as to be undeniable and it appeared that Stockholm would truly herald a new beginning, whereby nations would work together cooperatively to solve common problems; not simply for each national interest, but for the common and mutual benefit.

In the decade of the Seventies, however, the Stockholm spirit soon seemed to fade. When the first oil crisis of 1973–74 made clear the existence of the world energy problem, the reaction of my country, the United States, was to declare an energy nationalism and to make Project Independence the national imperative. This effort was designed to make the United States self-sufficient in energy by 1980, a goal in which nobody believed, but indicative of the utarkic reaction brought on by the crisis.

The energy problem will not solve itself simply with the passage of time. Indeed it becomes more difficult as the time passes and the processes leading to new energy applications are delayed and not researched. Nor can it be solved by separated actions. The rich 20 percent of the world’s peoples, having three-quarters of the wealth, must work in tandem with the 80 percent who have only a quarter of the wealth. It is not a question of idealism or do-goodism, as some contemptuously say, but of an enormously complicated and interconnected problem which can only be tackled and solved on a global basis. As Stockholm declared, there is Only One Earth.

Economic need and sheer survival dictate this global cooperation. There is inadequate recognition in the industrial countries of the growing dependence of their domestic economies on the Third World. The United States today earns more from its exports to all the developing countries than it does from those to Western Europe, Japan and all of the non-market economies in combination. The foreign debt of the Third World, much of it derived from loans to buy oil, is reaching crushing burdens and raising critically important questions of repayment. Major defaults among nations holding these massive debts could well trigger substantial failures in the world banking system and deepen the present industrial recession into a world industrial depression of greater gravity and depth than that of the 1930s. The fruit of this well could be political breakdown and military confrontation leading to incalculable consequences.

When Dr. Shao Wen Yuan notified me of his plans for this first US-China Conference on Energy, Resources and Environment and suggested the possibility of my being keynoter, I was much attracted to the proposition. Dr. Yuan has a distinguished place in the professional community of his adopted land. He has used the engineering competence developed in the United States together with scientific principles observed during his youth in China to develop practical alternatives and more efficient ways of heating and cooling. It was an honor to work with him.

I was also gratified to be a part of an international gathering seeking to make a contribution to solutions of the global energy problem. When the oil shock of 1973–74 happened, I was president of the largest industrial labor union in North America, the United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW). The immediate impact in my small part of the world was massive disruption of the automobile and farm equipment industries, with one out of every three of our union members being thrown out of work. As I journeyed to Washington to discover the extent of the problem, I found sixty-odd agencies of the United States government dealing in part with energy problems but with little or no coordination. The extent to which this central problem had been ignored was only too obvious. As I consulted with experts in the field, both in the public and private sector, and read as widely as I could, I became convinced that here indeed was a problem of basic significance, and one for which both national and international effort of the first magnitude had to be developed. As I went around to meetings of members of the UAW to share my new knowledge, I was surprised and chagrined to be met, for the most part, with skepticism and disbelief. The general reaction was that the oil crisis was simply a conspiracy to drive up the price of oil and oil products. When indeed prices did go up and the ending of the embargo restored supply, their skepticism seemed triumphant.

By May 1977, as I made my farewell address to the delegates at my concluding convention, I spoke at length about the energy problem, particularly as impacted by the automobile in the United States. I also noted to the delegates: We have applauded the action of the President of the United States in making clear to the American people that there is a deep and abiding and ongoing crisis. Whether that crisis takes urgent form in 1985, or in the 1990s, or even as some say by the year 2020, doesn’t change things at all, because I have grandchildren living, many of you have grandchildren living now who will be in their middle years by the year 2020.

That was on the opening day of the convention. By the fifth day a lengthy resolution on Energy was presented for discussion. There was only one respondent, out of more than 2800 delegates, who urged support of the Clinch River breeder reactor plant, a controversial item to this day. Here were representatives of workers who only three years before had been victims of massive unemployment because of energy dislocations still not fully cognizant, or believing, of the problem.

So I was happy to accept Dr. Yuan’s invitation almost ten years after my own recognition of the centrality of the problem. It was sometime after my acceptance that I began to realize my amateur standing did not equip me to make a meaningful statement to a conference involving leading scholars, scientists and engineers. Fortunately, I had been associated with, and am again on the Board of Directors of the Overseas Development Council of which Robert S. McNamara is chairman. I turned to the Council and its president, John W. Sewell, for assistance. Consultations were afforded with James W. Howe, James Lee, Hans H. Landsberg, Stark Biddle and Ahmin Selassie. All relevant documents from ODC and associated institutions were made available. For what follows I am heavily, if not totally, reliant on those discussions and documents, particularly the ODC publication: Agenda 1980. Despite this, and quite obviously, none of my generous colleagues is in any way responsible for my presentation.

The world now should be entirely aware of the oil dependence of the industrial countries as well as the industrial sectors of the developing countries, and on the great uncertainty of supplies and prices in a petroleum market dominated by a few producers in an area of the world affected by great political turbulence. These difficulties are exacerbated by the possibility, if not probability, that the world’s oil resources will begin to be depleted by century’s end.

Time slips by, and the day has arrived when industry everywhere, whether in the industrial nations or the industrial sectors of the Third World, plan and work to make the transition from an overwhelming dependence on oil to greater use of more plentiful sources of energy, whether renewable or non-renewable. For the Third World, the energy problem is compartmentalized and great numbers of their people are still tied to traditional energy sources such as wood, organic wastes, and animal and human muscle power. To have a significant impact on the well-being of these people, which depends on economic growth, there must be an enormous expansion of their energy supplies. To allow that economic growth to continue requires the export of goods by them to earn the necessary foreign exchange.

Since much of the economies of the developing countries is in a pre-industrial state, the pace of energy consumption growth will be much higher than that of the developed countries. By century’s end, it has been estimated, effective demand in the developed countries, both market-economy and centrally planned, will increase by some 50 percent. In the developing countries, however, it is expected to rise at four to five times that rate. This will lead to a steadily increasing proportion of global commercial energy being needed for the Third World.

It is necessary to facilitate this rapid growth of commercial energy demand in the developing countries since so many of them are only now beginning the transition from traditional to modern energy followed by the developed countries in earlier times. The majority of people in the Third World, including many in urban areas as well as rural, still rely on traditional, non-commercial energy sources. As development accelerates in industrialization, mechanized transportation and in other ways, there is a greatly increased demand for higher-quality energy sources. Under current trends, this means a change to oil.

Development factors aside, increasing population pressures and exhaustion of non-commerical energy sources through deforestation and soil erosion make this trend a matter of human survival and, if not relieved, will put enormous pressure on dwindling global oil supplies.

Much greater attention and research needs to be given to the question of how alternative patterns of development within Third World countries could affect their production and use of energy, which could make easier their own development and have a favorable impact on the world oil economy and global growth. The move toward the production of more plentiful and renewable resources is in the common interest of all countries. This is not to be considered as a suggestion of prolonging the division of the world into have and have-not nations, whereby the developing world will be left to less desirable alternatives. Such alternatives are the future of us all. It is obvious that in the immediate production of such alternatives, the developing countries possess significant natural advantages and could lead the world into many twenty-first century energy resources.

To make this possible, plans for global energy needs must recognize the overwhelming importance of cooperative policies to help the Third World countries meet current emergency needs for essential supplies and to attain greater energy self-sufficiency in the period ahead. Many developing countries have great untapped potential for the production of oil, hydroelectric power, coal, and renewable energy. Some of these lack economic viability for a world market but are globally beneficial being developed for a local market. As these countries increase their production of oil and lessen their dependence on that source in other ways, then is it more feasible for all countries cooperatively to manage an orderly transition to a post-petroleum economy.

Experts have reported that 40 percent of the world’s prospective oil-bearing terrain is located in the non-OPEC developing countries, including in these our host country of China, but that their share of proven oil reserves, as of the beginning of this decade, was only 11.5 percent of the world’s total. Without question, this part of the world remains relatively unexplored. Some discovered oil fields in these non-OPEC developing countries are smaller than in the Middle East and more costly to develop, but they are still considerably cheaper to bring into production than fields in the market-economy industrialized countries.

More investment in the under-explored areas of the developing world could significantly increase the global supply of oil and other conventional energy. This would, of course, have to be done with full regard for national sovereignty, but finding more oil would benefit the countries where it was discovered by earning, or saving, them foreign exchange.

Basic to making the transition from oil to follow-on sources of energy is the discovery and deployment of additional primary energy sources that are more plentiful than oil and gas, such as coal and hydropower, and to research, invent, develop, test, and install technologies that can convert plentiful and renewable energy sources into usable forms of energy. Finding and deploying as rapidly as possible the most effective and least costly replacements for oil and gas is in the interest of all countries, with every replacement anywhere in the world saving oil and gas and accumulating experience that can be applied elsewhere. This reality is directly contrary to the widely-held belief that in energy the world is faced with a zero-sum game, where any change in one party’s position is seen to be another party’s loss. Confrontation is in effect a defeat of self-interest.

The stock of the world’s coal is huge but the known geographical distribution of proven reserves is very uneven, with the Soviet Union, China, and the United States possessing great concentrations of resources and current production. Developing countries, not including China, have a minor portion of the proven reserves and production. These distributions may well reflect big differences in intensity of exploration effort. There is poor knowledge of the world’s total coal resources, with little being known about Africa and South America. It is known, however, that some twenty developing countries have considerable potential coal resources for their needs and these include some of the poorest among them. To date there has not been much development of this potential because of very high capital costs of extraction, transport, and handling. In addition, its economically viable applications have been largely limited to power generation and, until recently, it has suffered from competition with much more convenient domestic and imported oil supplies. The World Coal Study of 1980 stated that Coal will have to supply between one-half and two-thirds of the additional energy needed by the world during the next 20 years, even under moderate energy growth and that to achieve this goal, world coal production will have to increase 2.5–3 times, and the world trade in steam coal will have to grow 10–15 times above 1979 levels. No entirely new technologies would seem to be needed, but technological studies need to be taken to reduce costs and adverse environmental impacts, including air pollution, acid rain, and the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

The potential for hydropower energy in developing countries is enormous. Well over 60 percent of the world’s large-scale hydropower resources is in the developing world, with only 20 percent of the world’s hydroelectric production in these countries. Although hydroelectric projects have a long life, low operating costs and no fuel costs, they have been constrained by heavy initial capital costs and power sites remote from areas of demand. Since such large-scale projects can also be integrated into multi-use development, it is anticipated that, with proper assistance, there can be a substantial expansion of hydropower production in the developing countries. China has shown the way in the development of water power in medium-sized and small installations. This is a most relevant development in countries with predominant rural populations and can be of assistance in stemming the population flow to urban centers.

The great hopes pinned on nuclear power as a source of virtually inexhaustible energy have been frustrated by serious obstacles. The Soviet Union and France, in the industrialized countries, are greatly increasing their nuclear capacities but in the remainder of the industrialized world the development of nuclear power is retarded by public concern with safety and economic issues. For most developing countries, nuclear energy is not a practical alternative at present. Much of the controversy about nuclear power stems from the fact that the fuels and technology for peaceful uses of nuclear power can be converted to weapons manufacture. In addition to the problems of cost, safety and waste disposal, for most developing countries there is also the problem of scale. The nuclear generating units now in use generate electricity in amounts too large for the delivery grids in most developing countries. If the current problems can be overcome in the industrial countries, then nuclear power could be feasible and economical in several of the larger developing countries. Practical development of smaller reactors could extend this option.

The developing countries have several natural advantages that could enable them (with the support of external investment) to move toward increasing reliance on other renewable sources of energy. For the most part, they do not have the massive investments in petroleum-oriented energy infrastructures that mark the industrial countries; many of them have more sunlight than the industrialized countries, so that solar energy is more reliable for them; and their climatic conditions permit faster growth of vegetation for firewood and biogasification. Finally, the decentralized nature of renewable energy makes it an ideal energy source for programs of small-scale rural development. Both developed and developing countries have an interest in ensuring that the research and development needed to lower the costs of these new technologies take place as rapidly as possible. Increased investment in the development of renewable energy sources in Third World countries to help them lessen or even bypass reliance on petroleum could accelerate the transition of all countries to more plentiful sources.

A study by Resources for the Future estimates that, in the United States, energy conservation can become quantitatively the most important energy source of all, with the same importance by the year 2000 as coal, domestic or imported petroleum, or nuclear power.

Using more efficiently all types of energy–but especially oil–is in the interest of all countries, although not necessarily in the same time period or for the same reasons. In the industrialized nations, what needs to be done is quite obvious, but the steps of implementation are sometimes slow. Although progress has been made, much more needs to be done. I vividly recall the adamant opposition of the automobile industry when, as president of the UAW, I advocated using a portion of the Federal Highway Trust Fund for the development of mass transit systems (an unsuccessful effort) and urged federal legislation to require minimum fuel efficiency standards for passenger cars, this time a successful effort. The continuing great absolute waste of energy in the industrialized countries makes the struggle for energy efficiency a moral and economic imperative.

Energy is also wasted in the developing countries but, unlike the industrialized countries, it is not a waste related to luxurious use of energy and energy-intensive goods. As a matter of fact, there is suspicion in the developing nations that the call for energy conservation is a condemnation of their people to sacrifice and even lower living standards and a device whereby the developed world seeks to ease its own problem. There is, however, great sense in more energy efficient usage since the developing countries can least afford energy waste. Much of the problem is tied to poverty: inefficient cooking equipment; older and poorly maintained cars and trucks; inefficient industrial layouts. These deficiencies can be repaired and since much new building is taking place in developing countries, energy efficient usage can be designed into them with early benefit.

Planning for the energy future must keep environmental effects clearly in the forefront. Many energy-related activities are threatening to human health, the natural environment, or the earth’s biologic and geophysical systems. There has been some Third World opposition to the environmental movement, claiming that environmental problems are products of developed countries’ economic activity. I well remember, in 1970, when the UAW hosted a pre-Stockholm enrivonmental conference and a representative of one of the developing countries asserted: We want some of that pollution or we starve. It is quite obvious now that Third World countries do have serious environmental problems, including deforestation, desertification, soil erosion, lowering water tables, polluted lakes, streams and drinking water, flooding, siltation, and serious air pollution. It should be possible to bring greater energy resources and development into being and at the same time challenge and conquer the environmental problems. For the good of all humanity, the tasks go hand in hand.

Successful adjustment over the next twenty to thirty years and more will require many new and improved technologies for energy production and conservation and for environmental protection. Americans have almost infinite faith in science and technology and their ability to get things done. The energy problem, however, is a multiplicity of problems. Research, development, and demonstration in energy is not looking for one big, quick fix. The problems are endless and cover the earth. The challenge is much greater than the United States faced in Project Apollo, in putting men on the moon. The challenge is also global, although much of the effort, perforce, is national, with most being performed in the industrialized countries. How well the whole world can make the critical transition from oil to more abundant and then renewable sources depends essentially on the success of the energy research, development, and demonstration programs.

It is fitting that this conference is meeting under the joint sponsorship of important societies in China and the United States. It highlights the fact that the base of energy research, development, and demonstration needs broadening. The developing countries, both oil-importing and oil-exporting, need to be much more involved. As James W. Howe has observed, there is an opportunity for mutual benefit if research, development and demonstration funds from developed countries were used to finance certain kinds of decentralized renewable energy research in the developing countries. Costs would be lower, with the research benefit also available to the financial backer and the particular research, development, and demonstration institutions of the developing countries would be strengthened. International cooperation could be further helped by the creation of a Global Energy Research Center as proposed by the Brandt Commission or an International Energy Institute as proposed to the UN by then US Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger.

This conference is dedicated to furthering the development of scientific and technological skills and projects to plan to tackle the energy problem. Unless the science and technology is developed, there can be no hope for a resolution of the gathering crisis. But research, development and demonstration are not done in a vacuum; it takes other commitments, capital and governmental, to make a successful effort.

At the present time, the market economies of the developed world are caught in a serious economic recession, and one hears, for the first time in forty years, talk of a possible slide into economic depression analogous to the 1930s. For the last ten years we are experiencing new cycles. Increased oil prices have led to inflationary pressures and worsened balance of payments in consumer countries, both developed and developing. Governments react by restricting demand, creating greater unemployment than in 50 years and halting economic upturns. This results in a lowered demand for energy and lowered oil prices. The inflationary pressures, however, are increasingly difficult to restrain and economies remain sluggish. A byproduct is that governmental and other commitments to research and development are ebbing and we are in danger, as the old saying goes, of eating our seed corn.

The 1980 report of the Brandt Commission gave special attention to this economic dilemma. In today’s political climate, too little attention has been given to this important international document.

Supply-side economics is now the fashion in the United States, a reflection of the increasing difficulty of managing national economic policy. This is due to the fact that national economics have become internationalized through trade, capital movements and production across borders. This means much narrower margins of action for both credit and financial policy. Keynesian demand economic policies now seem to fail in national economies, despite their success over a period of decades.

In the 1930s, the economic situation in North America and Europe was one of unused capacity, mass unemployment and deficient demand. It is true, the 1930s ended with World War II and a sidelining of the economic problem. With war’s end, however, it was widely expected there would be a return to stagnation and unemployment. War had ruined European industries and infrastructures. The structures of North America were intact, but millions were demobilized from the armed forces and the war industries. Into this void came the Marshall Plan whereby grants and loans were made for European reconstruction, with the result that unutilized capacity and labor were put to work in the United States. Although humanitarian impulses were present in this effort, it also paid off handsomely in its economic benefit and ushered in the greatest, sustained expansion of world trade that has yet been seen.

The whole world now faces a similar situation: unutilized capacity and labor in the industrial nations and enormous needs in the developing world. The developing countries must have tens of billions of dollars for their most pressing needs. These funds are wanted for national development programs, exploitation of new mineral and energy resources and debt relief. The poverty belts of Africa and Asia need aid to feed and strengthen their people to hope to have future growth.

The Brandt Commission argues that it is in the enlightened self-interest of the rich countries, in the developed world and in OPEC, to lead in this endeavor. The trend, unfortunately, is the other way. The nations within OECD now contribute 0.3 percent of of Gross National Product for foreign aid, less than half the percentage of ten years ago; and the rate is falling. This is particularly true in the United States, certainly when economic aid is separated from military aid. It is argued: how can one expect political support for foreign aid from individuals who themselves are in economic distress. The fact is, studies show that for each dollar the US contributes to multilateral development institutions, its GNP increases by three dollars through additional sales of US products.

We need a new vision and a new faith to turn around our worsening situation. The times are indeed ready for what Claude Cheysson, now France’s foreign minister, has called a global New Deal. This conference is an example of enlightened, international cooperation. The physical resources are present in abundance throughout the world. Science and technology are ready to move. Surely we can find the political will for nations to cooperate, one with another, for the mutual benefit of all. A world of abundance for all peoples could be the reward.

II

PLENARY LECTURES

Outline

Chapter 2: RENEWABLE FUELS FOR THE FUTURE

Chapter 3: STRATEGIES IN FOSSIL FUEL TECHNOLOGY: MULTIPLE OPTIONS FOR UNPREDICTED FUTURES

Chapter 4: AN OVERVIEW OF ENERGY ALTERNATIVES AND RELATED RESOURCE AND ENVIRONMENT ISSUES IN THE UNITED STATES

Chapter 5: WATER AND OTHER NATURAL ENERGY

Chapter 6: ENERGY TRANSITION IN THE UNITED STATES

RENEWABLE FUELS FOR THE FUTURE

MELVIN CALVIN,     Department of Chemistry and Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720

That we will require renewable fuels for the future seems an almost obligatory need. This will be largely due not only to the exhaustion of our existing clean hydrocarbon and possibly gas reserves, but to the almost intractable air pollution problem which the combustion of fossil carbon to carbon dioxide produces. The most immediate source of renewable fuel is of course the annually growing plants themselves. Some of these produce hydrocarbon directly and may be economic. In the more distant future the mechanisms by which the plant captures solar quanta and converts them into stable chemical form may be useful in devising totally synthetic devices that will do a similar thing.

INTRODUCTION

Most of our energy is in the form of fossilized photosynthesis, and the most convenient form of that energy is actually liquid or gas. A little less than ten years ago we were put on the alert for oil supplies, and it turns out that today at least a little less than 50% of our oil requirements comes from domestic U.S. sources, and this source is going to continue to drop. These oil and gas supplies are getting more and more difficult to find. There are several ways to measure how much oil there is available. The price is not really a measure of availability. I sought some other way to measure that availability. One way is to measure the barrels of oil that you can find per foot of well drilled (Fig. 1) plotted as a function of time. The number of barrels of oil achieved per foot of well drilled has been dropping steadily since 1945. This says that the cost of finding the oil is constantly increasing. The effort could be expressed in terms of how many energy units are required to find a barrel of oil, i.e., energy costs for drilling and extracting the oil.(1) Quite clearly when the cost of finding a barrel of oil in energy units reaches the energy content of the barrel of oil itself, or surpasses it as is predicted for the year 2000, this procedure will no longer be energy economic. Therefore, we have to find alternative sources, and there is no question but that will happen within the next 20 years. In fact, in some places it has already happened. That means we have not more than 20 years to find another way of fulfilling the need for liquid fuel: portable highly concentrated chemical fuel.

Fig. 1 Energy gains and costs for high and low drilling intensity (Hall, 1981)

THE CARBON DIOXIDE PROBLEM: RESULT OF INCREASED FOSSIL FUEL CONSUMPTION

Most of the limits I have spoken of are for liquid fuel. We have, of course, a very large supply of carbon in the form of coal. Fossil fuel to be sure, which is still accessible to us in this country, and there are those who suggest that all we have to do is to learn the technology of converting that carbon (coal) into a more convenient form, such as liquid or gas. There is a cost in doing that, not merely a large dollar cost, but a cost in the production of carcinogenic materials from the coal and, what perhaps is even more significant, an effect on climatic parameters which could result in overall change throughout the world. The very reasons that we left coal in the first place are still with us, namely, acid rain having its origin in the industrial areas of the United States, the carcinogens which are emitted from coal burning power plants (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons which are well established carcinogens), and, of course, the solid ash. All three of those can be eliminated from the stacks at a dollar cost. However, there is one effect which is irreversible if coal is burned. No matter which way the coal is burned the act of getting the energy from the coal necessitates the conversion of the carbon of coal into carbon dioxide, and there is no way to avoid that if you get the energy out of the coal. This happens, of course, when you burn oil as well but the difference is that when you burn oil for every one atom of carbon burned, you burn two atoms of hydrogen. When you are burning coal, for every one atom of carbon, you burn less than one atom of hydrogen. That means that for every unit that is generated when coal is burned, almost twice as many tons of carbon dioxide are generated as when oil is burned.

In recent years, in the last 20–30 years, we have burned relatively little coal compared to the oil. Nevertheless, the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere has been rising continuously (Fig. 2). The carbon dioxide level rises in the winter and falls in the summer, but it never falls back all the way each summer. There is not enough green vegetation on the surface of the earth to take it all up, and the ocean doesn’t dissolve it fast enough. The result is that every year we are left with a little more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than we had the year before. In fact, the carbon dioxide level is rising faster now than it was 15 years ago. We can actually go back with our date to the 19th century by measuring the carbon-14 content of tree rings that were laid down at that time. By measuring the carbon-14 concentration in the tree rings it is possible to find out what the carbon dioxide level was a hundred years ago. We find that the carbon dioxide level in 1880 instead of being 330 ppm, which it is now, was 290 ppm. In one hundred years the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen about 15%, but note now that half of that rise has occurred in the last 20 years. The concentration is rising more rapidly now than it did the first 80 years.

Fig. 2 Carbon dioxide concentration at Muano Loa (thru 1980)

If we go back to burning coal (either directly or by converting it to liquid, gas, etc.) as has been suggested on the scale that we are now generating Btu from petroleum or natural gas, you can be confident that the carbon dioxide concentration would increase even more rapidly. Why should this make a difference? The answer lies in the physical properties of carbon dioxide, which is a colorless gas, transparent to visible light, that is, the sunshine can come right through it. The visible light comes down to the earth’s surface, and on the earth’s surface ultimately all of the light is converted into heat. That heat is reradiated into outer space. Therein lies the difficulty. As the heat tries to escape through the atmosphere, the blanket of carbon dioxide through which the sunshine came as visible light, will not permit its escape as infrared light. The effect of the carbon dioxide, barring any other effects, is an increase in the earth’s temperature and the consequences of that warming could be very severe.

Already there has been an increase in the carbon dioxide concentration in the last 100 years. Are there any early warning signs? Can we measure the increase in temperature which that 15% increase in carbon dioxide concentration would result, by almost any meterological model, in only a very small change in the average temperature of the earth’s surface. The numbers that have been estimated for a global average temperature rise is somewhere in the 0.5 degree range, which is almost within the noise of the measurement, and so it is very difficult to know whether we have already detected that rise.(2,3) There have been two other early warnings that have been found. One, is a decrease in the Antarctic ice, which has been measured by various naval research vessels of the United States, Soviet Union and Great Britain. The consequence of the melting of a substantial piece of the South polar icecap would be a rise in sea level. Here, again, just in the last few weeks, a paper was published in which the sea level changes over the last 100 years have been recorded and it has been claimed that the sea level rise over the period 1880–1950 has been about 1 mm per year and that from 1950–1980 the rise has been roughly twice that, 2 mm per year, suggesting that here is another early warning measurement of the warming effect of the carbon dioxide.(4)

The moment of inertia of that South Polar icecap with respect to rotation of the earth is quite small, and if that material from the icecap is distributed out to the seas, to the equator for example, the moment of inertia of that same mass will be larger, and that should slow down the rotation of the earth, a quantity that can be measured to a high degree of accuracy.

We have now three quite separate early warning signals that the carbon dioxide effect is there. The fact of this increase, an experimentally observable global increase is unambiguous, and the consequences require an increasing global temperature. The microclimates at various parts of the earth are going to change, areas which have been suitable for agriculture will become unsuitable, areas which are unsuitable for agriculture today, say nearer the north and south poles, may become suitable, and I doubt very much whether the human race can adjust to such macroscopic changes in agricultural production even in two generations. This could be a very serious problem, and I think there are only two ways to avoid it, and one is not to burn coal especially, or even oil shale, and the other one is to catch all the carbon dioxide that comes out of the industrial/utility stacks, which may be a hopeless task, make dry ice out of it and drop it into the oceans, where it won’t return. To take all of the carbon dioxide out of the stacks of power plants, convert it to dry ice and drop it in the ocean would be a stupendous task technically and very, very expensive, of the order of $300/barrel oil equivalent. At that price, we can grow oil in green plants.

HYDROCARBONS FROM PLANTS AND TREES

Let me remind you that all fossil energy was originally made by the green plant cells of 300 million years ago by photosynthetic processes. The plant caught the quanta from the sun, took the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, and with water, made sugars, proteins, hydrocarbons and other products, which were deposited, covered with mud and gradually formed such things as petroleum. We must now learn how to harvest the reduced carbon that is produced annually be green plants. To do this we need to choose plants that reduce the carbon dioxide all the way to hydrocarbon, (5) rather than stopping at carbohydrate. The second alternative is to learn how the plants perform photosynthesis, and then mimic the green plant photosynthetic process and build a machine (device) that will do this; in other words, splitting the water molecule into hydrogen and oxygen.

We realized when we began this work that most plants store the sunshine not as oil (hydrocarbons), but rather store that energy as carbohydrate. Some plants do store their energy in the form of hydrocarbons and the rubber tree is the best example. The original site of the rubber tree (Hevea brasiliensis) was in Brazil. If we could find plants that would make oil directly and grow in a more broadly based climate than the rubber trees, that would be a very useful thing.

That’s why we went to Brazil about 8 years ago, where we collected soil samples and examined many different plant species in the Amazon region. The most interesting thing was that we found many other plants belonging to the same family as the Hevea, the family Euphorbiaeceae, but we also found that the Brazilians were growing enormous amounts of sugar cane, and producing from the molasses, left over after the crystalline sugar was extracted, alcohol by fermentation. The Brazilians were, even in 1974, considering using that alcohol, a liquid fuel, as an additive for their gasoline engines and as a replacement for hydrocarbons. In 1975 the decision was made by the Brazilian government to go into the proalcohol program, that is, make alcohol directly from sugar juice and use it as fuel for machines. In 1974 the production of alcohol from sugar cane in Brazil was 400 million liters, and by 1981 it was 4 billion liters. The Brazilians accomplished this by changing their harvesting procedures for sugar cane and also by building autonomous alcohol distilleries which were not part of the sugar industry at all. There were many members of the family Euphorbiaeceae, such as the genus Euphorbia, which has about 2000 species, which can grow in almost every climate, so we focused on Euphorbias. They will grow as small plants or large trees. Very early, we focused on the one that Mrs. Calvin had in the garden for quite another reason; because it turns out that this plant, Euphorbia lathyris, is known as the gopher plant and is used for pest control. This one is easy to grow and is the one that was used in our experimental plantings at the University for the acquisition of agronomic data as well as the development of processing information and analytical data. The petroleum plantation at U.C. Davis is shown in Fig. 3. The plants are harvested by cutting, and are dried in the field; after drying the entire plant is extracted with hexane, the hexane is evaporated using steam generated by burning the residues. The processing sequence to recover terpenoids and sugars from Euphorbia lathyris has been developed (Fig. 4), with the result that from 1000 dry tons of plant material it is possible to get a yield of 8 tons of oil, and after the oil is removed, another extraction is performed and there is a further 200 tons of sugar. The energy in the 200 tons of sugar can be harvested as 100 tons of alcohol, which is almost as much as the oil originally extracted. The major products, then, are 8 tons of oil and 100 tons of alcohol from 1000 dry tons of E. lathyris. What is left over is the lignocellulose (bagasse) which is used to recover the solvent from the extraction process, and there is still about 200 tons of excess bagasse which can be used to distill or purify the alcohol. The whole process is self-contained, the only gross energy input being the sunshine which is needed to grow the 1000 dry tons, on about 20,000 acres. This comes out to be roughly 6 barrels of oil/acre/year and 6 barrels of alcohol/acre/year, and that is using plants that have not been genetically selected or improved in any way. With that kind of starting material you can be sure that a few years of plant selection can easily double the yield.(6,7)

Fig. 3 E. lathyris, Davis, showing irrigation effect on plant size

Fig. 4 Conceptual processing sequence to recover terpenoids and sugars from E. lathyris

When the oil from plants such as Euphorbia lathyris is subjected to catalytic cracking procedures it produces the usual suite of materials, very desirable ones indeed which are made today by cracking the naptha distillate of crude oil: ethylene, porpylene, toluene, xylene, nonaromatics, small alkanes and fuel oil.(8)

The Puerto Ricans also have an energy problem, and they are developing a means of growing sugar cane for more than just rum production and have developed what they call an energy cane, a cane which produces two or three times more dry matter per acre than ordinary sugar cane and the same amount of sugar per acre.(9) The new energy cane has a huge mass of fiber which can be used to fuel power plants as a source of electricity.

Different kinds of plants, of course, produce differing amounts of biomass. Figure 5 compares four different kinds of plants as energy sources in different parts of the world. In terms of energy in liquid fuel in Btu/acre/year/inch of water the Euphorbia lathyris is really one of the best plants we have found, that is, a total of 1.6 MBtu liquid fuel. When both the oil and alcohol are put together, there is no question that E. lathyris is twice as good as the other three crops with which it is compared.(10)

Fig. 5 Comparison of energy yields for different crops

What other kinds of plant resources can we find? The E. lathyris. It must be planted each year and cut, and most of the material that is in that plant (minerals) are removed from the soil and must be replaced. When you disturb the soil there is a certain amount of loss in terms of washing away, and there will be further depletion, even in marginal areas, if no organic matter is returned to the soil on a regular basis. Therefore, I hesitate to recommend this type of crop indefinitely, even for the next hundred years.

OTHER HYDROCARBON-PRODUCING PLANTS

What I would like to find is a tree, like the rubber tree or maple tree, which can be tapped for the removal of only the desired product; that sounds like a wild dream, except there is such a tree in Brazil. The oil of the tree was analyzed (it has been previously analyzed by others) (11) by our laboratory in Berkeley, (6) and a couple of years later we went to the Ducke Forest in Manaus and saw these diesel-oil producing trees.(Fig. 6) A 2–4 cm hole is drilled into the trunk of the tree and a tube inserted. A bucket is placed under the tube to catch the oil as it drips down. This is done twice each year, and the material can be used directly, either as a component in pharmaceuticals, or other uses by the natives in Brazil, or put directly into a car, without any modification whatsoever. The components of that oil are shown in Fig. 7 which is a gas chromatogram of the oil, (11) and there are 24 easily recognized components and they all have 15 carbon atoms/molecule, all made from the same starting material, farnesyl pyrophosphate, which is, in turn, made from isoprene, a five-carbon unit. The question is whether it would be possible to grow a tree which would produce this type of material in the United States. This tree, Copaifera multujuga, is a tropical tree, and we have seen species of this genus as far north as Puerto Rico. Perhaps it could be grown in southern Florida, but I am unaware if any are growing on the continental United States.

Fig. 6 Copaifera multijuga, Manaus, showing diesel oil from bung

Fig. 7 Chromatogram of Copaiba oil (Wenninger, Yates & Dolinsky, 1967)

There are several other oils which can be harvested from trees, but the oil from the Copaiba has the best characteristics as a fuel and raw material. Euphorbia lathyris oil is black and sticky in a way similar to crude oil. The diesel tree oil is a yellow oil, and the one common in the Amazon is C. multijuga. Another oil, marmeleiro, again from Brazil, is obtained by steam distilling the dry plant (bush or small tree), a Croton (another Euphorbia), and the oil is mostly composed of C10 rather than C15 as in the Copaiba oil. Jojoba, a different family, produces a seed oil, an ester, not a hydrocarbon. Another Brazilian seed oil is also important, Andiroba oil, which is a lipid. Finally there is an oil from a seedpod, Pittosporum undulatum, which grows very widely in California. The seed is in a fruit about the size of a kumquat, with small seeds inside. The oil from the Pittosporum is in the seedpod itself, i.e., from the fruit, and that is almost entirely terpenoid in character. The oil from the C. multijuga is clean when it comes out of the tree and is all C15 in composition. It is about the right volatility for a diesel engine. It may go directly into an automobile engine. There are several species of the Copaifera and they all produce a similar material. The closest thing to the Copaiba oil is the oil from the P. undulatum here in the United States, but it would not be an edible oil, it is a hydrocarbon, more like turpentine than like the soybean oil.

We learned about Pittosporum as a possible plant candidate because someone in the Philippines sent us some Pittosporum resiniferum seeds (petroleum nuts), which has fairly large seeds, which are sometimes tied to the end of a stick and lit, and used for a torch. The oil of the P. resiniferum is mostly myrcene (40%) and pinene (38%), with a little nonane (3%) and heptane (5%).(12)

GENETIC ENGINEERING FOR HYDROCARBONS

I would like to discuss the biosynthetic route to terpenes (Fig. 8 & 9), with IPP (isopentenyl pyrophosphate), and dimethylallylprophophate (DMAPP) which come together to make a C10 compound, etc. The black oil from E. lathyris goes as far as farnesyl pyrophosphate and then doubles up to squalene, losing both pyrophosphate groups, so the chain stops growing, cyclizes, and stops at the C30, and is the source of triterpenes. The oil in the Copaifera multijuga is made by cyclizing the C15 farnesyl pyrophosphate to form all the sesquiterpenes. In the Pittosporum, the reaction stops at C10, monoterpenes. There are small amounts of C20 and C40 in all the oils.

Figs. 8 & 9 Terpenoid biosynthesis

We would like to be able to stop the reaction in the plant at this point, i.e., find a species of plant(s) that would make terpenoid compounds only, particularly sesquiterpenes, which are the most valuable compounds from the point of view of end products.(6,7) This seems to require a single gene transfer. If it were possible to remove the gene from the Copaifera tree which provides the cyclic C15 component, and shut it off this way, perhaps we could have the E. lathyris producing the diesel oil-like material similar to that obtained from the C. multijuga, for example. This could be done by genetic engineering (Fig. 10). The enzyme could be removed from the Copaifera and partially sequenced from this polynucleotide probe would be built to extract the gene DNA for the enzyme. The DNA for that enzyme would go into a suitable plasmid vector. The plasmid could be inserted into a selected plant cell, such as one from E. lathyris, and the cell, in turn, could be used as the basis for the whole plant. The seedlings of the Copaifera species grown in the laboratory could be used as a source of the enzyme to be inserted into the E. lathyris. We are now learning to grow E. lathyris as single cells in tissue culture, and the leaf shoots generated from the callus are shown in Fig. 11. The callus is a mass of undifferentiated cells made from single protoplasts. The leaflets from the callus show that we are now on the way to regrowing the E. lathyris plant from single cells.

Fig. 10 Manmade evolution (genetic engineering)

Fig. 11 E. lathyris shoots from leaf protoplast, MCL

ARTIFICIAL PHOTOSYNTHESIS

We will now take a few minutes to discuss the other route to alternative energy sources, that is, to use the knowledge of the green plant quantum conversion apparatus to try and build a totally synthetic device for solar energy conversion.(13) The green plant uses the chloroplast (Fig. 12) to convert the quanta into chemical energy, depending on the laminar structure of the membrane. The two sides of the membrane in the chloroplast seem to perform two quantum acts, one quantum is absorbed on one side, taking an electron away from water to make oxygen and that electron is raised to some mediate level from which it falls, making ATP on the way. The electron then is raised by a second quantum to a still higher level so that it can produce molecular hydrogen under proper circumstances. The electron can now be used to reduce the carbon dioxide and then go on to sugar, hydrocarbons, proteins, etc. If some plants do not receive carbon dioxide the electron at this point will come off as molecular hydrogen. We propose to construct a membrane synthetically. The electron would pass from water on the inside of the membrane out to the other side, with proper sensitizers and catalysts on both sides. Our first effort is to demonstrate that we can photochemically transfer an electron across a membrane which separates the oxidation product from the reduction product. The manganese on one side of the membrane helps to generate the oxygen, through the first quantum act; it then falls part way back down and there is the second quantum act, with the acceptor on the other side, an iron-sulfur compound, where finally it is possible to generate hydrogen. The scheme for photosensitized electron transfer across a lipid vesicle wall has been worked out (Fig. 13). The two curved lines represent the two membrane surfaces, made of phospholipid; and we put onto that membrane a sensitizer on both sides, and when we shine light on the sensitizer, it becomes an excited state which can hand an electron to the water soluble acceptor (HV+2), which becomes reduced, and the sensitizer on the outside of the vesicle membrane is oxidized. We then have the sensitizer on the outside in a different valence state than the sensitizer on the inside of the vesicle. This is followed by an isoelectronic exchange reaction, producing ruthenium+3 on the inside and ruthenium+2 on the outside. The ruthenium+3 is a very interesting oxidizing agent, which with a catalyst, can oxidize water, to generate oxygen. Our first experiments were done with an irreversible donor (EDTA) which regenerates the ruthenium+2 on the inside of the