Kudos To T-Bonehead? No! A Shower Of Brickbats Instead!

I was mindin' my own business and what came on the cable channel I was watchin' (while slaving over a hot keyboard) yesterday? T-Bonehead Pickens! The ol' crook has a new scam: we're supposed to go for wind to produce electricity without disclosing that he — T-Bonehead — is building the world's biggest windfarm in Gray County, Texas. Who will benefit from wind-powered electrical power generation? Duh! On top of that, T-Bonehad wants the diversion of natural gas from electrical power generation, thanks to wind turbines, to substitute for gasoline and diesel fuel. Duh, redux! Guess who owns the biggest natural gas field in the lower 48 states? If you answered, "T-Bonehead Pickens" you would be correctomundo. So, T-Bonehead would win with wind power and he would win with natural gas. What a guy! All heart! A (real) patriot! If you believe that bull guano, I've got a bridge in Brooklyn that I'll sell you at a bargain price. An environmental site, Climate Progress, drank ½ of T-Bonehead's Kool-Aid. If this is (fair & balanced) debunking, so be it.

[x ClimateProgress.org]
Memo To T. Boone Pickens: Your Energy Plan Is Half-Brilliant, Half-Dumb
By Joseph Romm

The Phone Call — based on a true story

Major cable network: What do you think of T. Boone Pickens’ latest energy plan ?

Climate Progress: Half of it is great, the big push on wind power. Heck, even the Bush administration says wind power could be 20% of U.S. electricity. But the notion that we would use the wind power to free up natural gas in order to fuel a transition to natural gas vehicles makes no sense. Why would we go to the trouble of switching our vehicle fleet from running on one expensive fossil fuel to another expensive fossil fuel? Any freed up natural gas should be used to displace coal….

Major cable network: I was hoping you liked the whole plan. That way we could use you on the show…. You don’t have any ideas of who might like the whole thing?

Climate Progress [Long pause, crickets chirp, the wind sighs, sea levels rise a few meters]: No. The people who will like the renewables part probably won’t be thrilled about the fossil fuel part, and vice versa.

Major cable network: Thanks. I’m sure we will find some reason to use you soon.

I am thinking about working that into a screenplay about a mild-mannered blogger for a great metropolitan progressive think tank who sacrifices his chance to be on television because he refuses to endorse an inane idea. I was looking at Matt Damon to play me, especially now that he has put on a little weight.

Seriously, though, it’s great that gazillionaire TBP is talking up peak oil and joining the wind power bandwagon (see “Wind Power — A core climate solution“). And it’s great he plans to spend tens of millions of dollars pushing this idea and delivering the mesage that $15 billion dollars for the wind production tax credit is peanuts compared to the $700 billion this country is going to spend on foreign oil this year.

But if you want to displace oil, the obvious thing to do is use of the wind power to charge plug-in hybrids (see “Plug-in hybrids and electric cars — a core climate solution“), multiple models of which will be introduced into the US car market in two years. Indeed, with electric utilities controlling the charging of the plug-ins, they can make optimum use of variable windpower, which is mostly available at night time. That would be win-win-win.

The Pickens Plan, however, is based on the utterly impractical idea that “Harnessing the power of wind to generate electricity will give us the flexibility to shift natural gas away from electricity generation and put it to use as a transportation fuel.”

Uhh, never gonna happen, T. Boone. Never. The most obvious reason is the gross inefficiency of the entire plan.

Right now, “We currently use natural gas to produce 22% of our electricity.” Most of that electricity comes from gas burned in combined cycle gas turbines at an overall efficiency of up to 60%. Why in the world would the federal government — or anyone else — spend billions and billion of dollars on natural gas fueling stations and natural gas vehicles in order to burn the gas with an efficiency of 15% to 20%? Natural gas is simply too useful and expensive to squander in such a fashion.

And then there’s global warming.

It now seems clear this country will have a major effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and a price for carbon dioxide within a few years. That means all federal and private sector energy-related investments will increasingly be driven by the need to achieve reductions in carbon dioxide emissions at the lowest price.

Running cars on natural gas does NOT significantly reduce GHG emissions (esp. if there is even the tiniest leak in the whole gas delivery process). Running a car on electricity from the U.S. electric grid does reduce GHG emissions. And running a car on electricity from combined cycle gas turbines would have a far lower GHG emissions than running the car directly on natural gas — internal combustion engines are simply too damn inefficient. Of course, running a car on the wind power would eliminate vehicle admissions completely. Or using the wind power to displace coal plants would eliminate the emissions from those plants entirely.

So again, neither the federal government nor anyone else is going to spend billions and billions of dollars on natural gas fueling stations and natural gas vehicles.

A 2002 analysis of why natural gas vehicles (NGVs) didn’t catch on was published in Energy Policy, “Commercializing an Alternate Vehicle Fuel: Lessons Learned From Natural Gas For Vehicles,” (subs. req’d). The study concluded, the environmental benefits of NGVs were oversold, as were the early cost estimates for both the vehicles and the refueling stations: “Early promoters often believe that ‘prices just have to drop’ and cited what turned out to be unachievable price levels.” The study concluded, “Exaggerated claims have damaged the credibility of alternate transportation fuels, and have retarded acceptance, especially by large commercial purchasers.”

So a large-scale switch to NGVs by consumers is not going to happen no matter what T. Boone does. But he could help accelerate windpower into the marketplace and for that alone he deserves some kudos.

[Joseph Romm is the site editor of "Climate Progress." Romm is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and was acting assistant secretary of energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy during the Clinton Administration. He earned a Bachelor of Science (physics) degree in 1982 and a Ph.D. (physics) in 1987 at MIT.]

Copyright © 2008 Center for American Progress Action Fund

Get an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Reader at no cost from Google. Another free Reader is available at RSS Reader.