Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells – Our Ride to the Renewable Future. Amanda Little
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Against the softness of the interminable blue seas, the Cajun Express with its landscape of iron, steel, and cement was the unmistakable mark of human enterprise, appearing as improbable—as unnatural—as a rose garden in the Mojave Desert, a Hyatt Hotel in Antarctica, or a flag planted on the moon. Here, it seemed, was another wilderness conquered.
At the end of my visit, Paul Siegele took me, via a jury-rigged elevator (a coffin-sized plastic box attached to a forklift), to the crown of the rig, a harrowing widow’s walk suspended at the top of the drill’s 250-foot scaffolding. The body of the rig below looked like the loneliest place on earth—a tiny, solitary circuit board floating in a boundless blue sea. Then, out in the distance, I spotted fleets of trawlers the size of thumbnails setting off seismic guns in search of the next big deep-sea prospect. “A decade ago, I never even dreamed we’d get here,” marveled Siegele. “And a decade from now, this moonscape could be populated with rigs as far as the eye can see.”
Though the image to me was jarring, Siegele’s scenario does seem increasingly likely. Both opponents and proponents of domestic drilling in areas such as the Gulf of Mexico and ANWR share a common conviction that it is necessary to free the United States from dependence on foreign oil. Of the 85 million barrels of petroleum consumed daily in the world, America consumes 21 million—nearly a quarter. Our net imports of petroleum are about 12 million barrels a day. Even as we invent ever smarter, more efficient buildings, appliances, and cars, and even as we develop cleaner, renewable energy sources, the transition from this prodigious oil usage to a new energy landscape will be gradual.
By any measure, America is in no position to drill its way to energy independence. Our proven domestic reserves stand at 21 billion barrels—enough, at our current levels of consumption, to meet our needs for roughly 1,000 days if we stopped importing any oil. There are another 697 million barrels in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (an emergency fuel stockpile the Department of Energy maintains in underground caverns along the Gulf Coast, to be used in the event of a sudden shortage or spike in oil prices); but that would only give us another 34 days of supply. Allowing drilling in the long-protected areas of the outer continental shelf could potentially expand reserves by 18 billion barrels—giving us at best another 860 days of supply. ANWR has an estimated 7.7 billion barrels—another 372 days. In total (and ignoring the time needed to tap and test new wells, and our limited refining capabilities), these new frontiers would give us fewer than 2,500 days of supplies—less than seven years.
Today, America is still indulging energy-lavish habits that it formed more than eighty years ago, in the domestic oil boom following World War I. And now, as the nation’s homegrown oil supplies become ever harder to come by, we are faced with tremendous costs—not just of drilling for oil at the ends of the earth, but of protecting our access to cheap and abundant supplies from overseas, particularly from the Persian Gulf. How much do we taxpayers actually pay, I wondered, to conduct U.S. diplomacy in petroleum-rich nations? What are the moral, economic, and political costs of relying on foreign producers to feed America’s oil addiction? And what, on a more practical level, does it take to fuel the military charged with protecting these supplies?
My men can eat their waist belts, but my tanks need gas.
—General George S. Patton
2 War and Grease HOW OIL BUILT AND SUSTAINS A MILITARY SUPERPOWER
In the summer of 2006, Marine Corps Major General Richard Zilmer sent the Pentagon an unusual “Priority 1” request for emergency battlefield supplies. Stationed at a temporary base in Fallujah, Zilmer was commanding a force of 30,000 troops responsible for protecting Al Anbar, the vast territory in western Iraq bordering Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria. Heavily armed insurgents were hammering the region, and Al Qaeda was quickly gathering recruits. Zilmer’s beleaguered soldiers were running low on fuel for the diesel generators powering their barracks—fuel that cooled their tents in the 115-degree weather, refrigerated and cooked their food, and kept the communication lines open. The general, however, was wary of trucking in backup supplies during a time of so much turmoil. The U.S. fuel convoys that chugged along the back roads of Iraq every day—long lines of eighteen-wheelers hauling armored vats of gas—were among the insurgents’ prime targets.
This had been a growing problem since the Pentagon had begun staging its 2003 invasion of Iraq. In one particularly brutal incident, on April 9, 2004—a year to the day after Saddam Hussein’s statue was toppled in Baghdad’s Firdos Square—an American convoy of twenty-six vehicles delivering fuel to Baghdad International Airport came under fire. The mile-long convoy was transporting roughly 125,000 gallons of jet fuel to support U.S. military operations. At approximately 10:30 a.m., a large group of insurgents hidden in the grass alongside the Abu Ghraib Expressway launched its assault. Homemade bombs planted along the road began to detonate, blasting shrapnel into the sides of the trucks. Insurgents stormed the convoy with a fusillade of machine gun fire so relentless that the siding of some supply vehicles gave in. The trucks “looked like water-sprinkler systems wetting down the pavement, which was slick with the oily diesel fuel,” wrote Thomas Hamill, a convoy driver who survived the assaults. “The trucks slid through like hogs on ice.” Amid the chaos, insurgents launched rocket-propelled grenades and several trucks exploded, shooting flames 200 feet into the air. Truck drivers had to abandon their vehicles and escape by foot. A prolonged gun battle ensued. Only a handful of the fuel tankers made it to safety—the others were left burned and leaking on the highway, their valuable cargo looted by insurgents and civilians.
KBR (formerly Kellogg Brown & Root), then a Halliburton subsidiary and one of the companies contracted to oversee fuel supplies distribution for the U.S. military, was forced to suspend convoys around Baghdad in the days thereafter. But there were bigger losses. Two U.S. soldiers and six truck drivers had died in the ambush. Another soldier—Army Pfc. Keith Matthew Maupin, age twenty, of Batavia, Ohio—was taken hostage and later executed. Thomas Hamill, a KBR employee, was also kidnapped, but managed to flee his captors after twenty-four days. “We had a duty to deliver fuel to our troops,” Hamill recounted in his memoir Escape in Iraq. “There was no time to worry about what might happen or about things beyond our control.” In total, at least nine lives were claimed as a result of the ambush.
There were many more such attacks: between the summer of 2005 and the time of Zilmer’s memo in 2006, there were some 280 reported attacks on supply convoys. In the twelve months that followed, there were over 850. Many though not all of these ambushes targeted fuel convoys. (Fuel and water represent 70 percent of all cargo carried by supply convoys in Iraq.) The insurgents were carrying out a century-old battle strategy: starve an army of fuel, and it will be immobilized. Fuel is the lifeblood of mechanized warfare. Each day in Iraq, the U.S. military uses a staggering 1.5 million gallons of fuel to power the tanks, fighter jets, Black Hawks, Humvees, hospitals, and base camps on the front lines of war. Energy supplies on the battlefield give American soldiers a huge advantage in communications, agility, and firepower. But the loss of life that April morning was a grim reminder of the hidden costs of fueling combat.
Major General Zilmer’s memo, dated July 25, 2006, presented the Pentagon with an unprecedented request: “a self-sustainable energy solution,” including “solar panels and wind turbines.” This was the first time a frontline commander had formally requested renewable energy backup in battle. Without alternative power sources, the memo continued, U.S. forces “will remain unnecessarily exposed” and will “continue to accrue preventable…serious and grave casualties.” Put in civilian-speak: too many of Zilmer’s troops were dying in fuel convoys, and the relentless gasoline demands of the diesel generators were partly to blame.
“By reducing the need for [petroleum] at our outlying bases, we can decrease the frequency of logistics convoys on the road, thereby reducing the danger to our marines, soldiers, and sailors,” the request stated. “Without this solution, personnel loss rates are likely to continue at their current rate. Continued casualty accumulation exhibits potential to jeopardize mission success.” Renewable