When The Oil Is Gone

(Please click on the title for a reading aloud by the author.)

My childhood friend Christopher and I used to dream about when there would be no more oil. We reasoned Ferraris would be dirt cheap without it and we’d each get one to have on display in our living rooms. Though the basic question of how we would get around never crossed our minds (we had our feet after all).

Today, as we come to terms with supplies of oil getting used up, all the while with demand increasing we’re looking down the road and wondering what’s next? Manufacturers have flirted with hydrogen powered cars, but given the inefficiencies of producing that fuel they’ve quickly become has-beens. Electricity has found its way into the transportation marketplace, but where’s all the juice going to come from? Coal will only prolong the agony and solar and wind are no match – so far – for the wallop packed in gasoline.

As an aside, I’ve been rooting for the end of the automobile altogether and going back to donkeys. A trip to town might take three days but all of life would be more simple and quiet. It’s a wake up and smell the coffee and alas, manure, perspective.

Enter Stewart Prager Ph.D., director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and contributor of a recent New York Times op-ed piece, “How Seawater Can Power the World.” Dr. Prager and his associates (and peers around the world) believe they have the silver bullet: nuclear fusion. In short, by combining the nuclei of two cousins of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium - both abundant in sea water – voila, you get heat. Make some steam and the rest is history. There are considerable technical challenges to this process but it has been achieved on relatively small scale in the lab. Environmental impact is miniscule compared to burning fossil fuels or nuclear fission, the process used today in nuclear power plants. According to Prager, bringing fusion to a reactor scale will take time and dollars. About twenty years and 30 billion, respectively.

Given that we of the United States spend over four billion a day on energy, the dollar part of the equation is small. Nonetheless our “leaders” are hesitant to foot the bill. Private money then? The Walton sibs for example could get together for lunch and after dessert each cut a check for 7 ½ billion and nary feel the pinch. Rob, John, Jim and Alice, are you listening? In the mean time while I am not holding my breath, Ferrari is developing hybrid electric vehicles so it looks like my living room won’t be graced with one any time soon. Of course if we run out of deuterium and tritium the once desirable Italian cars may at last become cheap. The price of performance donkeys however, will go through the roof.

Gordon Bunker

See http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/11/opinion/11Prager.html, and http://www.pppl.gov for more information.