I always look forward to the end of January to hear what the President has to say on energy policy in the annual State of the Union address. It is interesting to hear the way the data will be spun, and to learn the stated administration’s goals for the coming year. This year’s speech included quite a long discussion of the past year’s energy developments and the goals for the coming years. President Obama discussed the trends I mentioned in my last post: more domestic energy production, less imported oil. He also talked about the importance of addressing climate change, which he calls “a fact,” through emissions reductions at (primarily coal) power plants. Importantly, he also emphasizes the importance of energy consumption reductions, specifically through the CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards, which reduce the average fuel consumption of the passenger cars and light duty trucks fleet.
There were a number of omissions that stuck out to me during the energy-focused portion of his speech. During his discussion of the importance of improved energy efficiency, he failed to mention that the U.S. is consistently the highest consumer of energy on a per-capita basis, with only a couple of other countries coming even close to our consumption. I suppose this would not fit in well with the narrative of America as the greatest nation on earth, but I think it’s an important fact to acknowledge. This ties in with his statements on climate change. He says that the U.S. has “reduced our total carbon pollution more than any other nation on Earth”. This isn’t exactly a fair statement without acknowledging that we are still one of the largest emitters of CO2, particularly on a per-capita basis. It’s also interesting that he discussed the importance of a “cleaner energy economy” just minutes after talking about ramping up domestic oil production, but I will get to that.

President Obama also failed to mention one of the biggest pieces of energy news so far this year: the contamination of the drinking water supply in West Virginia as a direct result of the coal industry. For about a week (and more for some citizens), 300,000 West Virginians lost access to water in their homes after a chemical that is used to process coal leaked into the water supply upstream. (A good commentary on the situation from National Geographic can be found here.) While domestic sources of energy can be beneficial to the economy, we must also consider the environmental, social, and health impacts of using these resources.

On that note, I found the President’s commentary on domestic oil production to be somewhat misleading. He is technically correct when he states we are currently producing more oil domestically than we are importing, but it’s important to remember that we still import just less than half of our consumption. Additionally, the definition of “oil production” in a lot of these calculations has changed to include all liquid fuels. These liquid fuels include biofuels (which are currently dominated by corn-to-ethanol production, a fuel that has its own set of environmental and social concerns), natural gas liquids, and coal- and gas-to-liquids production (albeit a small portion). It is misleading to lump all of these together in one category when each has it’s own concerns for use. For example, ethanol has been shown to have a very low net energy, meaning that it takes almost as much energy in the form of petroleum products to produce the energy-equivalent amount of ethanol. If the energy used to produce the ethanol comes from imported fuels, then we have gained little.

In addition, a lot of the oil we produce domestically, as I discussed in my last post, comes from sources that are harder to get, such as offshore and tight shale sources. This means a higher energetic and monetary cost to production. I am not sure if we’ll actually be able to “keep driving down oil imports and what we pay at the pump” using these sources of energy, as the President seems to hope.

Overall, I think that the message of President Obama was positive regarding energy policy. It is important to acknowledge climate change and take steps towards a low-carbon energy economy. It is also necessary to look to the future of both fossil and renewable energy resources, as both are important components of our energy future. And, as the President states, natural gas (done correctly and safely) does have the potential to act as the bridge fuel between our current carbon-heavy, fossil-based energy economy and a future of low-carbon, renewable fuel. I just hope that the President and Congress spend this year working on policy that works towards that new future.

[Quotes taken from the Washington Post transcript of the speech]