Abstract: Whatever Happened to the Energy Crisis?

By

Frank H. T. Rhodes

Amid all the apparent good news on the energy front -the declining price of petroleum products, the strong domestic production capacity, the shrinking role of imported oil, our diversifying "energy mix" - petroleum continues to be a finite resource for which there is as yet no economical, readily available, and environmentally acceptable alternative. We face a four-fold challenge.

First, we must devise better methods of petroleum exploration and production. We must extend exploration to unconventional structures and areas, from which extraction may not yet be technically feasible or economically practical, and we must devise better methods of secondary and tertiary recovery. We have yet to see a "taconite-approach" to oil and gas production.

Second, we must move ahead with the technologies that will ease the demise of the petroleum age and ensure our energy supplies in the year 2000 and beyond. Synfuel technologies, though now unfashionable, will be important elements of our long-term energy picture. They must be pursued, through research if not development, along with other long-term solutions - solar, geothermal, and nuclear energy. We cannot afford to wait until another "crisis" spurs us to action, for we are talking about ventures with at least 20- year planning horizons.

Among these long-term solutions must be conservation. Most of our present conservation has been of the easy, common-sense housekeeping variety. We now need research of a more fundamental kind - on combustion, on the thermal properties of materials, on energy-efficient processes, and on computerized energy management systems - in order to continue our progress in this area.

Third, we must ensure a supply of trained people. At the height of drilling and exploration activity in December 1981, it was estimated that the industry was short as many as 15,000 experienced petroleum and chemical engineers, geologists, and geophysicists, and that skilled manpower was perhaps the biggest obstacle to the development of synfuels. Yet at a recent Geological Society of America meeting, only three companies were recruiting geologists. We need a steady supply and reasonable prospects for trained scientists. Cyclical career prospects will destroy our future.

But we need more than this. As our conventional natural resources are depleted, our only competitive resource will be talented and superbly trained men and women, whose

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creativity and intellectual boldness will match their technological sophistication. Production-line education will not do.

Finally, we need to pursue our national energy program in a spirit of cooperation perhaps unprecedented in history. A new era of partnership between universities and industry is beginning in biotechnology, but the earth sciences are no less amenable to this kind of partnership.

Moreover, there must be a sustained and substantial role for government on both the federal and state level. We need a continuing investment in research, especially in the long-range high-risk technologies that are our best hope for abundant energy in the next century.

We shall forget at our peril that today's encouraging energy statistics are due in large measure to a world-wide recession, reduced demand, and conservation, and that they depend on the continuing stability of some rather unstable regions of the world. The need for a national energy partnership has never been more urgent.

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