Dr. Steve Koonin - The Switch Interview

- Oil is mostly useful for transportation. It has a phenomenally high energy density. It is relatively easy to handle. It's available and so we really use oil most importantly to power transportation. - Then it's used for other things too that a lot people may not understand or even recognize. - Sure petrochemicals. I mean a lot of the plastics, synthetic fabrics, other things of that sort certainly come from oil. It is used unfortunately for electrical power still in the world. Decreasing fraction in the U.S. but globally still used for that. And that's not a very effective use of oil. - Right, right, and even some heating. - And heating of course in this country in the Northeast particularly there's heating going on. - So how much oil do we have left? - How much oil there is to get out of the ground depends really on how much you're willing to pay for it. And as the price of oil goes up people are willing to go after more difficult resources. If you just consider resources that you might be able to get at for costs of less than say $70 a barrel then we've got about another four trillion barrels of oil left in the ground to get out. - Four trillion. - Four trillion, and between now and 2030 we'll use maybe a trillion barrels of oil at most. So there are at least a century of easily available oil still in the ground. - So where is the oil located? - Most of the the conventional oil is found in either the Middle East. There's a good deal in Russia. The OPEC countries control roughly 60 to 70 percent of the conventional reserves. The conventional oil we could get out of the ground economically. The balance of the conventional reserves are spread around. The U.S. produces about 6 million barrels a day, roughly a third of what we use, a bit more. South America there's quite a bit there. Vast new finds for Brazil for example. Up in the Arctic we certainly know about the North Slope of Alaska. There is plenty of oil in the ground whether it's easily recoverable or more difficult. I would not worry about the world running out of oil. There are many other more important things to worry about. - Right, right. So we're not going to run out of oil, we're gonna transition out of oil. - If things proceed as one might imagine, it may get more difficult to recover oil, the price will go up and at some point other technologies become relevant and important and we will switch. - Sure. - The question really is can we arrange the switch with enough foresight so that it becomes a gradual rather than a disruptive transition. - Right. - For transportation you have to ask what are the alternatives? So right now we have internal combustion engines, they can be improved greatly through existing or imagined technologies at relatively little cost. So flex fuel vehicles which can run not only on gasoline but also biofuel ethanol are one step to start to make a transition. Beyond that we can start, and we're starting to hybridize the fleet, so that we have some combination of electric and gasoline driven technology. With all the energy though derived from gasoline. Beyond that we can imagine plug-in hybrids. Those draw part of their energy from the electrical grid and the other part they get from gasoline. And then finally in the end we can have battery electric vehicles. My expectation is that we will see a gradual electrification. Really the pace being driven by advances in battery technology other than anything else. - Okay. - Batteries are a wonderful idea in principle, the problem is making them a technical reality. There are many demands on a battery for a vehicle that are really quite a challenge to meet. We need to be able to pack a lot of energy into a relatively small volume and mass. We need to be able to charge and discharge the battery many times. The battery needs to be insensitive to the temperatures. We need to run vehicles at zero degrees, and we need to run them at 120 degrees. It needs to be recyclable et cetera, et cetera. So many challenges we don't have them yet. The government is putting a lot of money into the development and commercialization of batteries because they can be used along this whole chain from hybrids through to battery vehicles, but we're not there yet. My own sense is that the ultimate future if you like in this country is probably a plug-in vehicle and not a full battery electric vehicle. In part because of the extra range that the plug-in gives you. And in addition if we're not gonna get any of our transportation energy from oil we're gonna have to get it from somewhere else. And so where are you gonna get the extra electricity to run all those electric cars? The great demand centers are of course where the people are. That is in the U.S. in Europe and in Asia. And at least the U.S. and Asia and China are endowed with enormous amounts of coal. And people have said as you know, the U.S. is sometimes called the Saudi Arabia of coal. - Right. China in 2008 built a coal power plant every week. What are the implications of that? - So China is enormously dependent and increasingly so on coal. The implications of that dependence are most importantly the local air pollution that arises from their indiscriminate use of coal. The other problem of course is that the coal produces CO2 if burned in a conventional manner. And consequently adds to the threat of the climate system from greenhouse gases. If the world is gonna continue to use a lot of coal and do it in an environmentally responsible way to protect the climate system, then we're gonna have to develop and deploy the carbon capture and storage technology. We're talking about several million tons a year of carbon dioxide from a large power plant. We can do it technically, capture the carbon inject it under the ground and expect that it will stay there for many centuries. We have demonstrated all the pieces. We have demonstrated their integrations at pretty small-scale. We now need to demonstrate them at fully commercial scale. But most importantly we need to refine the technology and bring down its cost because right now it's much more expensive to practice carbon capture and storage than to simply release the carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. - Is China gonna be able to participate with all their coal? - You know I think the Chinese are more than willing to participate and even take an active role but they're looking for the U.S. lead and they're also looking for a lot of leadership from the developed world in developing these technologies to let them continue to pursue a developing path while at the same time reducing greenhouse gas emissions. - So the big driver really in many ways is the economics? - As in almost all things energy, economics really runs the whole show. - What are some of the benefits at coal? we talked a lot about some of their challenges but we use it must have some good. - One is that it can be found around the world, and so it's local. The U.S. does not import any significant amount of coal. China imports a bit of coal but mostly its domestic, it's here now. The second is it's readily extractable. It doesn't involve an awful lot of cost or effort to extract it. And the third is we know how to use it and it's there in great quantities. - So do you see it as part of our global world for a while, realistically? - I think realistically as in almost all things associated with energy, things don't change that rapidly. Even with a concerted effort it takes decades to change things. And yes I think coal consumption certainly in the U.S. is gonna be going down over the next decade or two. It's not gonna be a precipitous decline. - Why do those transitions take so long? Why can't we just turn on a switch and change? - Well consider the fact that it takes five or six years to build a big power plant. And that power plant lasts for 40 or 50 years. And so we have this very large stock of built up capital equipment that's gonna take a long time to replace unless we somehow do it in a tremendous crash program. You know another-- - So there's an infrastructure piece? - There's an infrastructure piece so that's one reason. - Okay. - Just on the infrastructure again the