Before the oil runs out: the search for alternatives

• Oil shale. Extensive deposits - perhaps 2 trillion barrels of hydrocarbons - lie in America's Rocky Mountain West, mostly in Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah. Difficulties in extracting and refining the hydrocarbon have frustrated earlier efforts. But if oil prices remain at recent levels, oil-shale deposits will become more attractive as conventional deposits in North America play out. Already, the US government has begun to get "expressions of interest" from oil companies about oil-shale deposits on public lands, according to congressional testimony in April by Tom Lonnie, an official with the US Department of the Interior.

• Extra heavy oil. Located in deposits around the world, extra heavy oil, like tar sands, is costly to process, but it could eventually become an important resource. There are hundreds of billions of barrels that could be produced.

• Coal. East and West, the US has plentiful supplies of coal that meet about 20 percent of US energy needs, primarily to generate electricity. Coal is rich in carbon, which provides lots of energy, but it gives off a greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, that many researchers argue is causing global warming.

All these alternatives to conventional petroleum have serious problems. The hydrocarbons in extra heavy oil and tar sands have been compared to what is left of crude oil after the valuable elements like gasoline and diesel fuel are removed. Heavy oils and tar sands are thought to have once been conventional oils from which the lighter, more valuable elements either evaporated or were washed away by water.

Heavy hydrocarbons are thick, black, and full of contaminants. To make them usable as transportation fuels, they must be cleaned (by removing sulfur, heavy metals, and carbon) and enriched with inputs of hydrogen from another source, such as natural gas. Yet after processing, they make a quality product.

All these alternative hydrocarbons also have a problem with excessive carbon content. Considerable federal research is under way to keep the carbon, which becomes CO2 after it is burned, from reaching the atmosphere. One way is to inject it into the ground, either into oil wells, which increases output of petroleum, or into huge underground formations where it can be stored indefinitely and not damage the environment.

Skeptics abound, especially in places like Parachute, Colo., which saw the 1970s boom in alternative fuels go bust during the 1980s. The small community lost 2,500 jobs after Exxon closed its oil-shale project there in 1982. Today's energy boom is "organized chaos," the town's mayor, John Loschke, told the Associated Press. But "we're better prepared. It's 25 years later and we've got infrastructure."

Environmentalists and conservationists are also wary, because they would prefer greater efforts on renewable sources of energy. But the best-known alternatives, such as wind energy and solar power, are difficult to incorporate into a car or plane and still be commercially feasible.

Nevertheless, inventors and some companies are hard at work on everything from plug-in hybrid cars to engines that run on hydrogen or saw grass (see stories at left and on previous page). It's not clear which of these technologies, if any, will win out.

What looks clear, experts say, is that the continuing growth of demand for gasoline will not come from the West but from developing nations, especially China and India. In fact, oil demand in the US and Europe should begin to decline well before 2030, according to the ExxonMobil study, even while global demand continues to rise about 1.5 percent a year during the same period.

This suggests that developed nations, which inaugurated the oil era 150 years ago and kept it going with imported oil, will pioneer the alternatives as oil begins to run out.

"We have in the pipeline, in 10 to 15 years, a portfolio of [coal] technologies with near-zero emissions," says Scott Klara, deputy director of coal-based projects for the US Department of Energy. "We don't know when oil [output] will peak, but it will peak, and when that time comes, more people than ever will be looking at coal."

• Last of three articles.

Page: 1 | 2