American Energy. Walter A. Rosenbaum
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availability may vary because of differing assumptions concerning future market demand. Chapter 3, concerning petroleum and natural gas, illustrates how predictions about a future natural gas “boom” depend, in good measure, upon whether the environmental impact of rapidly developing fracking technology that extracts natural gas from oil shale will be environmentally and economically acceptable.
Estimates of energy reserves and resources constantly change as new sources are discovered, older ones depleted, and economic or technological conditions alter. Consider the example of petroleum production. The rising price of domestic petroleum after 2000, for instance, made extraction of petroleum from the oil shale—previously considered too expensive to produce in quantity—now attractive to petroleum producers and refiners. Stated differently, with the right combination of technological innovation, market price, and anticipated demand, an energy resource can become a reserve.
National Security
It is a measure of the impact of domestic energy management upon national security that discussions of US energy policy are now commonly framed as “energy security.” In the years since the energy shocks of the 1970s, national security has become increasingly vulnerable in all important senses—military, diplomatic, economic, political—to alterations in global energy markets. Slowly, very reluctantly, most American policymakers have accepted the reality that this vulnerability is likely to continue for decades, perhaps permanently.56 Since 2010, however, the US boom in fossil fuel fracking, discussed in chapters 3 and 7, has prompted many experts to suggest that a new era of energy independence with its implied improvement in national security may be imminent. Others aren’t so sure. In any case, any issue concerning US energy development will sooner or later involve a discussion of the national security implications.
In an effort to buffer the future impact of sudden imported petroleum shortfalls, the United States in 1975 created the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) located in salt domes along the Gulf of Mexico. The SPR, the world’s largest emergency petroleum reserve, containing as much as 727 million barrels of crude oil, could provide, at best, several months of crude oil to meet a heavy domestic demand. Despite these and other measures to diminish the security risks posed to the United States by sudden adverse international energy events, the United States remains intricately embedded in the global energy system. Thus, exposed to the impact of global energy disturbances, practically all significant domestic energy policies, and their modification, compel domestic national policymakers to conceive the issues in the framework of national security.
What Follows: American Energy in Transformation
This chapter is a prelude to chapters that explore the unfolding transformations in the sources of American energy, together with the politics, and policy challenges emerging with this transformation. Institutions, actors, and themes inherent to energy policymaking, which constitute this prelude, will reappear in different combinations throughout these succeeding chapters.
The design of the succeeding chapters, each involving a different energy source, is similar. Each discussion includes these sections:
The Energy Source: Its Significance and Changing Status
Policy Prologue: Currently Important Resource Policies
Contending Issues: The Flashpoints of Current ControversyPolicy AlternativesThe Play of Politics: Issue ActivistsVenues: National, State, Global
In two of the following chapters, the discussion focuses upon the nation’s primary sources of carbon fuels, petroleum, and natural gas (chapter 3) and coal (chapter 4). The subsequent narrative (chapter 5) concerns the continuing policy controversy over the future of domestic nuclear power. The final chapters concern electric power, renewables, and conservation (chapter 6) and the global policy arena (chapter 7).
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