[Music] (Scott Tinker) Norway. Energy so clean,
you can drink it. And that's why I'm here to look at the most successful
energy transition in the world. My name is Scott Tinker
and I study energy. And I was headed
to the Evanger hydro plant. So the easiest access
to the power plant was to tunnel through
the mountain? Yes. Yes, not the easiest
but the best altogether. The tunnel is how long? Fifteen hundred meters long. How far under the
mountain are we now? We are at 500 meters. (Scott Tinker)
When the tunnel stopped, I realized we weren't going
through the mountain. The power plant
is inside the mountain! There's nobody here. No, because normally
there's nobody here. All our stations are run
from our central in Bergen. Wow. I'm very curious about this. What's on the wall here? It's a piece of art;
a waterfall. And those are salmon on the right,
jumping up the waterfall. So, there's art
down here in this plant. Yes. That's beautiful. It looks like the end
of a cathedral. Yes. And this is an
interesting design. What is that? This is constructed to transform
the energy of the water into rotating energy in the wheel. It was an American gold-digger,
digging gold, who discovered that he could
use the energy in the water much more efficiently
if he had a cup form, and you get to use over 90%
of the energy in the water. What you see is the top
of the generator. What are the rotations? 500 revolutions per minute. 500 RPM. That's 200 tons rotating. (Scott Tinker) These generators
are connected to lakes in the mountains high above us, by a 20-mile underground
pipeline network. No huge dams, and the
environmental footprint is tiny. With technology like this, Norway now gets 99%
of its power from water. Lots and lots of water. So it's cooking
by the time it gets here. How fast? Five thousand gallons a minute? Yes. Between 4,000
and 5,000 gallons -- per second. Per second! (Scott Tinker) It took Norway
70 years to turn this nearly perfect energy source into a nearly perfect
electricity system. And what I'm trying to find out is, what will the energy
transition look like for the rest of us? And how long will it really take
to make the switch? By training, I'm a geologist. I run the Bureau
of Economic Geology. You can pick out the trail
when you get up here and look pretty close... (Scott Tinker)
I'm also a Professor at the University of Texas. Being in the field
is the best part of being a geologist. This black is actually a
hydrogen-to-carbon ratio. (Scott Tinker)
I speak around the world to governments, and industry,
and at universities, trying to build a common
understanding of energy. That's my passion. But my background
is mostly technical. I realized that
if I was going to figure out our energy transition,
I had to experience it. I needed to see
how energy is made, from coal to solar
and everything in between. It was time
to get out of the lab and back into the field. While I was packing for
my trip, I had an idea. I decided to add up
all the energy that goes into
everything in my life. Like all the clothes. Most of them are
made in a factory, then shipped around the world
to my closet. Then I ship them around with me. That's a lot of energy. Add to that, the energy to run
and to make the dozens of gadgets
that I use every day. Then add the energy
to build and power everything in our house.
The appliances, furniture, the house itself, everything. Add on the energy to run my car, and to build my
share of the roads, and to heat and cool my share
of every building I go into, like the airport. If you add up the total energy
that one person uses in a year, it comes to a gigantic number: 20 million watt hours. But the energy unit
I would use is me. Or you. One person's total
energy footprint in a year. And as I travel the world, looking at electricity
and transportation, that's how I'll measure
every energy source I visit by the number of people
it would power in a year. The first thing
I needed to understand is what we're
transitioning from. And for electricity,
that's coal. To get a better look,
I went to the Belle Ayr Mine, which makes enough energy to power 3.6 million
people per year. It's in the
Powder River Basin, the largest coal
reserve in the world. We will clear the
blast momentarily, then we're safe to mine. Is that right? In minutes. Wow. There's the coal inventory
right there. That's a big pit. The Powder River Basin
has a typical coal seam of about 100 foot thick. I mean, it's just big, thick,
black seam down here. It's unbelievable. The mine looks enormous, but the mine moves,
actually, quite a bit. We will move about 3,000 feet
a year across the landscape. Okay. So these big terraces are
excavated on the cut side, as we call it, and placed back
on the dump side. This will all be reclaimed and the original topsoil
taken from this area, will be placed right back
directly where it was taken. It's kind of hard for me
to get a feeling for scale. I mean, I see little trucks
driving around out there. They look like the little Tonkas
I used to play with. That's the largest mining
truck in the world, Scott. That's the Caterpillar 797. That's a 400-ton payload truck. This particular machine
is the largest rope shovel in the world. And the price tag? It's about $30 million dollars. Thirty million bucks. Plus the bucket
and all the accessories. Take care of it. Wow. This is amazing. That's a lot of material. To put it in perspective,
the volume of material we dig annually would be
three Panama Canals. Every year? Every year. The whole Panama Canal? The entire Panama Canal. Many people think it's
that dirty, black stuff. But, in fact, it's been powering
a good fraction of society for a couple hundred years. So there must be
some upside, right? Coal supplies about half
of the electricity generation in the U.S. And globally,
is also about half, maybe a bit more,
of the primary energy. So the world gets a lot of its
energy from coal right now. And there's a lot of coal left. There is a lot of coal left,
hundreds of years. In fact, nobody really knows, because nobody's gone exploring
for coal for many decades. Every day, we ship approximately
80,000 tons of coal. That coal that you see right
here was probably mined four to six hours ago. And how often do you
let a train through here? We do five trains a day. Wow. So it's just a steady flow. A steady flow of trains,
24 hours a day, seven days a week,
365 days a year. We ship coal on Christmas,
Christmas Eve, New Year's Eve. Somebody's always working. Somebody's always getting coal. How much coal are we looking
at in the Powder River Basin? There's literally billions
of tons of reserves. Give me a feel
for what that means in terms of just U.S. supply. The Powder River Basin
represents 50% of that. So, make sure I understand. About half of our electricity
comes from coal. Correct. And about half of that
is coming from the Powder? And half of that is coming
from right here, this quiet little community
in northeastern Wyoming. Who knew that? I think very few people
do know that. (Scott Tinker) So coal is global
and easy to produce. Is supply the only reason
we're still hooked? I followed the trains
to America's largest coal plant, which could power
900,000 people per year. All these cars have got
a rotary coupling on them, so the cars will spin
on the coupling. You watch what's going
to happen. These clamps are going to clamp
down on top of the car, then this whole dumper's going
to turn upside-down. Track and all? Track and all. These trains are running-- Around the clock. Trains run around the clock,
unloading coal around the clock, moving it to the units, making electricity
24 hours a day. So, this is awful big. Well, we've got coal coming from
the coal yard out there, going through this conveyor. That coal is going into
each corner of the boiler. Makes a big fire in the boiler, heats up water
inside the boiler. Heats up the steam,
steam turns the turbine, turbine turns the generator, generator makes
electricity for Texas. (Scott Tinker) Take a massive
global fuel supply. Combine it with fast,
simple power generation. And you get the cheapest
electricity in the world. That's why we're still hooked. So the big driver, in many ways,
is the economics. As in almost all things energy, economics really runs
the whole show. On the other hand, coal has
these external problems with it. Local air pollution,
sulfur in particular, and then the global problem
of carbon dioxide. Right. If the world is going to
continue to use a lot of coal, and do it in an environmentally
responsible way to protect the climate system, then we're going to have
to develop and deploy the carbon capture
and storage technology that's now in demonstration
mode around the world. We've got a project
we're working on with the Department of Energy
to remove carbon dioxide out of our flue gas. We're going to prove
that it can work on a coal unit. We're going to try to prove that
it is economical to scale up, so we can do a full scale unit. And then we can actually
capture the carbon and put it to good use. Gotcha. So you're going
to have another module, if you will, to remove
the CO2 from that stream before it goes into the stack. That's right. (Scott Tinker) I went to see
NRG Energy, who owns the Parish Plant, to find out if we could really
clean up coal. That's the real-time desk
with the ten screens. I noticed the board had
all your competitors. Yes. You've got, on one hand,
the coal industry saying what they are doing
now is clean coal, and I think that that violates
the truth in advertising. I actually think it's really
unfortunate that they spend a lot of advertising dollars pretending that what they're
doing now is clean coal. On the other hand, you've got the environmental
movement saying that, "It's an oxymoron. There's no such thing." I think that there actually
is clean coal, and clean coal should be defined
by the carbon emissions. And if you can get the carbon
emissions from a coal plant down below the carbon
emissions from a gas plant, so more than 50% down then, to me, you fit the
definition of clean coal. Right. Our company got an award
to do a project down in Texas. Is that at Parish? That's at Parish. We have a grant from
the Department of Energy, around $140 million dollars
and we have to match that, so it'll be about a $300 million
dollar investment. So you see the type of
money we're talking about in terms of learning
how to capture carbon. These are
very significant dollars. (Scott Tinker)
Three hundred million dollars. To get just 2% of the CO2
at this one plant. Even as the technology improves, that means capturing
half the carbon from the world's
fleet of coal plants would cost trillions of dollars. We probably could
make coal clean. But we probably can't afford to. Coal may be the foundation
of our electricity system, but oil is what
allows us to move. And what most people want
to know about it, is price. Will oil and the fuels made
from it get too expensive? So I went to the New York
Mercantile Exchange, where every day these
traders are locked in the high stakes poker
of setting the price of oil. These are where the tens are and
these are where the ones are. So if I want to buy, I use that. If I want to sell,
I go like that. Okay. If I want to buy 25,
I buy 25. The supply and
demand components really all come together
here on the floor. All of what you're hearing
in the geopolitical arenas, all of what you're hearing in the demand side of gasoline
and the supply side of, perhaps rigs shutting down
or more rigs coming online, all of that information
gets condensed into a settlement price
at the end of the day. And that is what people use as
a benchmark to set the price, from crude oil to gasoline
to heating oil to natural gas. So everything that influences
that supply and demand, it could be a storm. It could very well be a storm. It could be a fire. It could be a catastrophe
like an earthquake. Right. What impact does oil price have
on the overall economy? It, to me, has the biggest impact
of any commodity there is. And that's why it's of such
global importance, political importance, and
down to the nuts and bolts, guy in the car, guy in the truck importance. (Scott Tinker) Oil and the
economy are intertwined. In fact, six of the last
seven global recessions were preceded by a spike
in the price of oil. And that is driven,
fundamentally, by supply and demand. So where will
future oil supply come from? Offshore is the fastest growing
production area, so I decided to go see Perdido, the deepest water platform
in the world. Perdido is a very long flight
for a helicopter, so everyone going out
first has to do HUET, Helicopter Underwater
Escape Training. And step off. Squeeze in tight. Make it hurt. (Scott Tinker) They reassured me
if my helicopter crashed, I wouldn't need any of this. Because I probably
wouldn't survive. But if you do an emergency
landing on the water and then sink, HUET teaches
you how to get out. Everybody ready? Yeah... Ready inside. Brace for impact. Brace! Brace! Brace! (Scott Tinker)
HUET was a reminder we're headed into a remote
and dangerous environment. The Perdido platform is more
than two hours from shore by helicopter. And can power
1.7 million people for a year. Chris, where are we? So right now, we're 200 miles
south of Galveston. We're on what's called a spar, and a spar is basically
a can, a floating can if you want to think about it. So the can is held down by a-- By a big weight. Okay. And it's like a buoy. It's just floating there. So this is the deepest
water platform in the world. We're in 8,000 feet of water. 8,000 feet. And we're producing
and we have the rig onboard, so we can work on
the wells as well. The spar rig,
which is straight above us, has access to 22 wells
directly beneath the spar. How long did it take
to get this facility in place? I mean, from the first time you guys decided: "Hey, some geologist like me says, 'We're gonna drill here!'" First of all,
we have to decide you're right. From the time we
purchased the lease to the time we got first
production in March was 14 years. Fourteen years? Yes. What does this cost? Several billion dollars. Several billion dollars. So this is the brains of it. This is the control room. This is where we control
the movement of the spar. Gotcha. So, we have one of our
engineers in New Orleans that we're connected to. So if we have a problem, we can actually use people from
onshore to help support us. That seems like
a pretty critical and important function, then. As the platforms we're getting to
are getting more and more remote, I think it's more critical. It's tough to get help out here
if you needed it. I mean, fresh on the minds
of people, of course, is the Deep-water
Horizon accident. Describe for us how you
see that incident and what Shell has been doing to make sure that those kinds
of things don't happen. I think it taught us all
a lesson, and what we've seen now
is a group of companies, basically, create
the tools needed so we have the
subsea equipment ready to respond
to a blowout event. Okay. Other than that, I think we
can use remote monitoring if we identify
issues or problems. You know, we can help respond
to those quickly. Right. Shell has never had an incident in any of their
deep-water fields. Knock on wood. But not just knock on wood. We take a lot of steps
to do that. You know,
a very good safety record. But it only takes one. The human element
is still there. We've got lots of really good
equipment that protects us, but if things line up
just right, terrible things can happen. So you do your best to make sure
those things don't happen. (Scott Tinker) It's true that in
60 years of offshore drilling, accidents like Horizon
have been extremely rare. But as we push into more
challenging environments, here and around the world,
the risks will increase. Future oil supply will be hard. (Scott Tinker) But supply
is just half the equation. What about demand? I went to see
the Richmond Refinery, which powers three million
people per year. Gasoline is about 50%
of what we make, and there are many different
grades of gasoline, depending upon the season
and where they're being sold. Jet fuel is the
second largest product we have. It's about 20%
of our production slate. Then diesel fuel. So mostly fuels, and certain
kinds of lubricants? Yes. We ship product over
to a marketing terminal, and the trucks that deliver
it right to gas stations will pick up from the
marketing terminal. We'll also ship
product by pipeline. It goes to the airports
around here locally, or it goes throughout
the state by pipeline. (Scott Tinker) Richmond makes
25% of the gasoline, and nearly 70% of the jet fuel
for the Bay area. It's something like a power
plant for transportation, taking the energy in oil and distributing it
through gasoline. It's not often recognized
the incredible energy that you can put into
a volume with gasoline. It has four times the energy
density of liquid hydrogen, the stuff we put into rockets. This fuel has such enormous
technical advantages that displacing it,
we have seen, is not easy. It's a miracle. Think about it. You can go 350 miles
on a tank of gasoline. Three hundred fifty miles, a whole family
in a two-ton automobile, based on a tank
that's just this big. And then, there's not even
any residue. There's no ash. It's all gone
and you fill it up again You just fill up in three
or four minutes. It's truly a miracle. Very hard to replace. The maximum size ship here
at the Richmond Long Wharf is 750,000 barrels
a day of product. Seven hundred fifty barrels. Correct. The U.S. consumes about 20-plus
million barrels of oil a day. That's correct. So you're looking
at about 1/30th of the daily consumption
of crude oil and gasoline on one tanker. Correct. Forty-five minutes of what we
consume in this country, on that big boat. Puts it into perspective,
doesn't it? That's a lot of consumption; it's amazing how much
demand there is. (Scott Tinker) And that's just
for the US. The world uses a tanker
every 13 minutes. And as population and
development increase, so will demand. Combine that
with difficult supply, and future oil
will be expensive. [Music] Around then,
I was asked to speak at an energy conference
in India. In many ways, India is more
beautiful than I had imagined. And more exotic. And more crowded. There are people everywhere,
in nearly constant motion. Vehicles of every speed,
on every road, at pretty much every hour
of the day or night. Millions of new drivers, finding new ways to fit
in too few lanes. India already makes
more cars than the US. and nearly all of them
running on oil. Thank you. It's very appropriate that
this meeting is in India. India will soon become
the largest populated country in the world. It's growing, and the demand
for energy is growing. And so, many of the
things that India does are going to lead the world
as we move forward. All of a sudden, you're creating a new middle
class in China and India. That's hundreds of millions of
people who don't yet have cars, but know what cars are
and know they want them. And so as their incomes rise, their consumption of automobiles
is going to rise and that means the world's
consumption of fossil fuels,
particularly oil is going to rise. Right. But also, their demand for
electricity is going to grow. One of the scariest
statistics I've heard in the time
I've been in this job was told to me by an
Indian energy official. He said, "You know,
we have 600 million people in this country without
access to electricity." Can you imagine providing electricity?
The challenges? That's two United States. Can you imagine
providing electricity for two United States? And they want to do it
in the next 20 to 30 years! And they'll be adding population
at the same time. And that's gonna be coal. (Scott Tinker)
In two or three decades, the energy demands of India
and China are expected to exceed those of the US and all
European countries combined. In terms of carbon emissions, the US will soon be
a minor player in this. Most of the carbon emissions
will be coming from China, India, and the developing world. We will develop
carbon sequestration, but it will be too expensive,
and they will not adopt it. This will become a point
of friction in the future, which we will not solve. And assuming the calculations
are right, we will have several degrees
of global warming-- which we will learn
to live with because there will
be no alternative. Because unless
it is really cheap and affordable, the developing world
cannot adopt it. And we can't afford
to subsidize these huge, growing nations
whose economies will soon be so much larger than ours. (Scott Tinker) Coal and oil. Electricity and transportation. Just as it did in the West, coal will power the development
of China and India. But it will not be clean. Oil demand will increase,
and so will risk. And so will price. The challenge then, is not just
to adopt alternatives, but to maintain the
benefits of oil and coal without their disadvantages. And at a price
we can all afford. Can it be done? Oil makes up
the largest portion of our energy use, so oil alternatives
were the place to start. For 30 years, the US has
been the leading producer of biofuels. Hey, Scott. Hey. Ready to take a ride? You betcha. What've you got here? Well, it's my secret. I'm going to tie it
on the tractor, and I'll show you what
we're going to do with it. Okay. You got me
a little worried. Let's put it on the dumper. All right. There you go. Let's get in. I'm going to let you drive. We may never get there. Crank it up. Watch your dog. How many gears
does this have? Oh, 16. Oh, good. I think biofuel is the
easiest thing to do because it's the
most similar to petroleum. We're used to it. And we can put it in
combustion engines, so we don't need many changes. The United States has used corn. But the problem is we've
got this big, huge plant and all you're using are
those tiny corn kernels. So you're actually
just using the food. It doesn't make sense
in many ways. Not only is it competing
with food, which raises some
moral questions, but it tends to be much
more energy intensive than other ways of
growing biomass. It tends to have a much larger
carbon footprint. And it uses many more resources,
fertilizer and other stuff. So ideally,
we want to move to a next generation
of biomass material. (Scott Tinker) In Louisiana,
they're already growing this next generation of crops. But will they be a better
feedstock than corn? Boy, this is an amazing
root system. To give you an idea
of how tall it actually is, this is a 20 foot pole. The other day I measured,
it was 18 feet. Now, how long have
these been growing? They were planted
in the middle of May. Of which year?! Of this year. May of this year? Yeah, this is Jack
and the bean stalk territory. And we're in September now. Yes. Now, what is it?
What are we looking at here? Well, it's a hybrid sorghum. It's bred especially
to make cellulose. And the cellulose is going to be
broken down into making ethanol. If we look to the future
of biofuels, we need to use
better feedstocks. We should not,
in my opinion, be using a lot of food
to produce fuel. And so, we need to learn how
to turn lignocellulose material, the structural material
of plants, into fuel. So the actual stalk. The stalk, the leaves,
the roots and so on. Right. (Scott Tinker) It seems
cellulosic crops can be very productive on
farmland and in a warm climate. But what about where
conditions aren't so ideal? New York State is not
a corn-producing state. We can produce trees quite well, and we grow a lot of the
perennial grasses quite well. So if you're looking for a
national initiative on biofuels, you need to be looking at
feedstock availability across the country, not just what we have in the
Midwest, or the Southeast, but how all parts
of the country can play in this initiative. Can I pull one? Yeah. All right. Is it pullable? They're pretty tough. Oops. It broke off. Switchgrass is just one
of a number of perennial grasses that we can grow in agriculture
across the country. And so, why not look at
different possibilities? So you're saying these kinds of
grasses can be grown in places that just don't make sense
for food crops. What we typically
call marginal land, and we've got no shortage
of marginal land in this area. which is why you see the changes
in agriculture we've seen from a lot of small dairies over the
years to a lot of land that is just sitting idle. (Scott Tinker)
So far, cellulosic crops look good high yield per acre,
on marginal land, and in different climates. But what about turning
them into fuel? What we do in this laboratory
is very much about microbiology, using microbes
to do the conversion of sugars into biofuels. So there are sugars in this
fibrous, cellulosic stuff. Yes. And you're trying
to liberate it. Exactly. The challenge, though, is how do you liberate
those sugars in a very cost effective way? Now, I can look you dead
in the eye today and tell you we can make ethanol
from cellulosic material. It's a no-brainer. We know how to do that. I can't tell you for sure that
we can do it economically. It's one thing for me to say
I can do great things here in the laboratory
with my reactors. But it's growing from this,
to that. Exactly, it's another
issue to scale this up into hundreds of thousands of
gallons, millions of gallons. So now, there are some
demonstration scale facilities, a few million gallons a year, 10 million, 15 million
gallon a year facilities. You know, in an energy sense,
very small. Right. I think this year the US
produced 25 million, 30 million gallons of ethanol
from cellulose. Okay. Compared to 10 billion
from corn ethanol. If I'm hearing you right, Dan,
one of the great challenges, as with most things energy
is scale. Just the scale of taking
a low density fuel, a crop, and converting it into
a high density liquid. For bioenergy,
scale is exactly the challenge. It's exactly the problem. And because we use so much energy, it's mind boggling how
much energy we use. And if you make it
from biomass materials, from land, you just need
huge amounts of land. I think in the end, we the world are going to decide
that biofuels are a good option, but we'll never see
biomass replace petroleum. It'll never happen. Right. (Scott Tinker)
If biofuels won't replace a large percentage of oil,
what will? Some say, compressed
natural gas, or CNG. This is natural gas, just like you'd burn
in your stove at home. Except we're going to run it
through a compressor and pump it up to 3800 pounds,
then put it in the bus. Thirty-eight thousand pounds
is a lot. Oh, yes. But that's the only way
you can get that much gas into such a small area. So it's a big engine. Does it fit in the back? Yeah. Is it different from
a diesel engine? If you look at it, you wouldn't
notice the difference. It looks just like an engine. Same thing. Just a different fuel. There you go. That's as simple as it gets,
just like on the bus. Is this the tail pipe? That's the muffler and tailpipe. And I'm standing right here
next to the emissions. Oh, yeah. Is that hurting me? No. What's coming out of there? The emissions on these things
are very low. As you can see, it's very clean. There's no smoke coming out. Yeah, I mean with a diesel,
we'd be seeing-- Well, you know,
the cleaner diesel is not as bad
as the old ones with smoke going
out the tailpipes. But still, this stuff,
you never see it. Unless something
is drastically wrong, you'll never see anything
come out of these tailpipes. I mean, we're in the room-- It isn't just
the perception. It actually is very clean fuel,
and when it burns, you just get carbon dioxide and water vapor and
that's pretty much it. You don't have all the
smoke and particulates that you see in diesel. So it's a very clean
burning energy source, and more and more
transit systems are looking to get into it. So looking at the whole system
you've got here, and you've transitioned
from fully diesel just over 20 years ago
to now fully CNG. Yes. Compare that cost-wise
and some of the pros and cons of making that change? The actual cost of the fuel
is less than diesel, and has been for
the last several years. Natural gas is cheaper per mile to operate these
buses than diesel. But the biggest issue
is the cost of getting into it. You have to have compressors
to compress the gas. So we have five
really big compressors that are running all the time. What happens is you have
a higher capital cost, but you have lower energy costs. So if you use the
vehicle a lot, then you end up making it
very attractive economically. Natural gas could be used
in heavy duty vehicles, in buses and trucks
that are fleets, and you have central stations. To get your
compression done centrally. And you're sending them
out from there, like the bus station
that we visited. A bus station works very well. If you took all
of America's city bus fleets and made them
all compressed natural gas, it wouldn't have that much
of an effect. It's such a small percentage
of the total diesel that's burned in America. Really? The city buses. But a lot of trucks
out there do also. Think of that, the over-the-road
trucks, the city trucks, all of the delivery trucks. If you took all of
those vehicles and converted them to
compressed natural gas, which they could be
because they're fleets, you would have an impact. (Scott Tinker) Like biofuels, CNG
will be a valuable supplement, but it won't replace oil. Meanwhile, demand
for oil keeps growing and a lot of people
are worried we're running out. I went to see
the Canadian oil sands where plants like this could
power 340,000 people per year. Oil sands, if you could
see it in the reservoir at the temperature
it's at there in the depths, it's like a hockey puck,
it's that hard. So it makes it hard to get out. It does. And where it's very shallow,
it has been mined. But 80% of the oil sands
will need to be recovered by thermal steam methods. In the steam plant,
we're using natural gas. Think of it as
a big kettle. So natural gas is being burned,
boiling some big boilers. We keep feeding water in. We keep taking steam off. So we pump steam
into the injection wells, and you melt the oil
out of the rock. And you end up with a hot water
and oil mixture coming back. Oil and water comes
into this building where there's a multistage
separation process, to take the oil from
being about 70% water. Okay. And when it leaves here, the oil has to be less
than 1/2% water. I like to think of this as a
heavy oil or oil sands facility, but we're primarily
a water plant. To be good at this, you need to be
good at recycling, and treating and cleaning water. Compared to the days
of the large oilfields in the Middle East, yes,
it is relatively expensive. It takes about $60 to $70 dollar
intermediate crude price for the oil sands to be
economically competitive. If you just consider resources
that you might be able to get at for costs of less than,
say, $70 a barrel then we've got about
another four trillion barrels of oil left in the ground
to get out. Four trillion barrels. Four trillion, and between
now and 2030, we'll use maybe a trillion
barrels of oils at most. Once was a hockey puck
and after this building, it looks like this. Amazing. Like any natural resource, how much oil there is
to get out of the ground depends, really, on how much
you're willing to pay for it. And as the price of oil goes up, people are willing to go after
more difficult resources. (Scott Tinker)
So we're not running out. As price climbs, so will supply. It looks like the main
replacement for oil will be different
sources of oil. And as long as we have cars
that run on it, we'll be dependent on it. We've had these petroleum-based
vehicles for 100 years, and we're starting this
transition away from it. And the transition is towards
electric drive vehicles, meaning vehicles that are
propelled with an electric motor instead of a combustion engine. And so, with hybrid vehicles, we're gradually
shifting the balance between the gasoline
and the electricity. We're increasing
the electricity, and reducing the gasoline. You're weaning us. Yes, we're weaning
ourselves off of oil, slowly. We sometimes refer
to a regular hybrid as a gasoline-electric hybrid, meaning all of the energy
comes from the gasoline. With a plug-in the hybrid, now you get some of the
electricity from the grid from a plug. The way you do that is you
put a bigger battery in that will hold more
of the electricity and therefore you can replace
more of the gasoline. So basically, you can run the
vehicle in an all-electric mode more of the time. Electric motors are so efficient that the more you can
use the electric motor, the better you are in terms of reducing energy
consumption, carbon. Why not just jump to electric? The reason we're not
going there fast is because the batteries
are expensive. Okay. The big challenge today,
is we don't have the batteries at the appropriate
cost and weight to compete with the range
of our personal auto. It's just too heavy? And expensive. (Scott Tinker) So how expensive
are we talking? If I had an unlimited
car budget, could I get an electric car
that will do everything a gasoline car can do? Wow, nice design. How many batteries do you think
are in this thing? You got me. Almost 7,000 batteries. And they're all the
new lithium ion? Yes, they just look like this. That's what you'd see
in your laptop. 7,000. Right now, we're talking
a 244 mile range on these. Is that the range? That's about the range. Assuming you drive
conservatively. Highway? Highway and city, correct. That's pretty good. Yeah, and then you've got
the performance mode. I'm guessing this thing
isn't cheap. You know, base price
starts off at $109,000. And that doesn't
include options. On the other hand, we should not ignore the
advantages of electrification. First of all, it's a pretty good
performance vehicle. If you want torque,
get a battery. Now, the standard model
is going to take you from zero to 60 (100kmh)
in 3.9 seconds. 3.9? 3.9 seconds. The sports model
is going to take you from zero to 60 (100kmh)
in 3.7 seconds. There she is in all her glory
being charged up. You drive a Tesla, right? I do. I do, sometimes. Are we looking
at the future there? Well, I think the important
thing about the Tesla on the electric vehicle front, because it's an expensive sports
car with limited utility. But the importance of the
Tesla is that it demonstrates one key aspect of the
electric car introduction, and it's a very
basic aspect: fun. Whoa! Woah that's fast. (Scott Tinker) Zero to 60
in 3.7 seconds? No noise? No transmission? No gas stations? This car isn't just as good
as a regular sports car, it is better. If I had an unlimited
car budget, I'd be driving this one home. We will see a gradual
electrification, really the pace being driven by
advances in battery technology more than anything else. Okay. But most importantly,
if we're not going to get any of our transportation
energy from oil, we're going to have to get it
from somewhere else. And so where are you going
to get the extra electricity to run all those electric cars? When you go through the numbers,
it's a nontrivial 25%, 30%, 40% more electricity
we have to generate. Yes, that's huge numbers. Right. (Scott Tinker) Wow. I went to look at transportation and it pointed me back
to electricity. Where are we going to get
40% more power? Coal? Or can we successfully switch
to an alternative? [Music] Iceland sits on a
geologic hotspot allowing them to get half of
their energy from geothermal. Just briefly,
what's going on beneath us? Basically, we are
on the seafloor. The sea level is just
10 meters below us. That sea water
is heated up by steam. How hot? Two hundred degrees Centigrade. And it's those very hot waters that we tap and bring
to the surface, to create steam to feed into
the geothermal power plant. Right. Boy, it's a natural. It's quite simple. What are we seeing here? This is the
actual geothermal well. And as you can see, the pipes channel water
and steam from these wells to feed the power plant. You just drill the well, you look at it for
a couple of weeks, see what you got out of it,
and then it just flows. (Scott Tinker)
These wells feed steam to the Hellisheidi Plant,
which can power 90,000 people per year. So this is the turbine? This one. It looks like a giant
jet engine. It works completely the same,
but the other way around. So where is the generator? The generator's over there. Okay, so this is where the
electricity gets made. Yes. And it's remarkably clean. Yeah. Do you have any chemicals
in this operation? None. none at all. Just the steam and water. Water and steam. Unbelievable. What do I do with it? Well, you put it on your face. On my face? So this is natural. This is natural, yes. This is just silica from
the geothermal plant. You're going for
the whole thing. It goes under your top layer
of the skin, I understand. Is that right? Silica is a good abrasive;
that's for sure. Basically. It exfoliates you. Exfoliates you. I can't wait for the people
who used to be my friends to see this. (Scott Tinker) The most amazing
thing about the Blue Lagoon is that all of the
hot water in the spa, and even the white mud
that it's famous for, comes straight out of the
Svartsengi Power Plant. I think every 75 megawatt power
plant in the world should have a Blue Lagoon right next to it. I totally agree with you. (Scott Tinker) But geothermal
energy this powerful is dependent on the geology. California has-- we have the Geysers. And Iceland runs on geothermal. But those are places
where the earth concentrates the geothermal
energy into small locations. When you do that,
it's really worth doing. But the average geothermal
has a power density that's 10,000 times less
than the solar energy. (Scott Tinker)
So geothermal is regional, but the sun
is nearly everywhere. Could solar be the answer? REC Solar is the largest
residential installer in America. People still don't know
much about solar. It's changing, but it's still
a relatively new technology, which really came about with
having more popularity during the last three
or four years. How much of a homeowner's
decision to install solar is based on philosophy
or passion versus economics? Most decision-makers actually
go for the economic reasons. I would say 80%,
and 20% environmental reasons. Here in a neighborhood
like this, you would get an incentive
from the utility, and an in addition, you'll get a
federal investment tax credit. Sure. Typically what a homeowner
can achieve here is about an eight to ten year payback. (Scott Tinker) The average
solar array powers just 0.4 people per year, which means it'll take
several years for the savings to offset
the cost of the panels. Is it 10 to 20 years, 30 years? It depends on what you pay
for electricity today. It's all relative, isn't it? If you're in Palo Alto in the
middle of the afternoon, your photovoltaics
are cost effective. If you're in Hawaii, where there's a very
high cost of electricity, it could be cost
effective today. Sure. On the other hand, if you have
coal-based electricity, right now where you're
paying four or five cents a kilowatt hour, it may never
really be competitive. So there's not a simple answer,
but in the right place, it's here today. (Scott Tinker) It turns out
solar too is regional. It's affordable where sun, subsidies,
and electric prices are high. But where we have
all these things, can we turn solar panels
into a solar power plant? I went down the road to the
Diablo Valley College. Basically, it's a parking
lot canopy that provides shaded parking, but there's
solar on the rooftops. So the solar produces
about 50% of the campus' peak electrical demand. Why in a parking lot. I mean, usually we see
these panels up on a roof. What we found is that if you can build a
solar parking shade structure in a parking lot that has
lots of available space, you can actually drive the
economics down much better than you can on the rooftops. So how does a community college
or an educational campus afford the frontend
cost of something like this? Well, most of them don't have to
worry about the upfront cost. The campus would basically
enter into a long term power purchase agreement, at a rate that is less
than what their buying from the local utility. So they're getting those savings
from day one. And they enter into that
agreement with the utility? No, with a
financial institution that would actually
own the asset. Okay. So a bank would own the asset, and then we would
design the project, build the project through the
operation and maintenance of it on behalf of the bank, which is selling the
power to the campus for, say, 20 years, and that's where the
savings get generated. So that's a neat combination
of partnerships that are going on there. Yes, it's a great example of
public-private partnership to benefit the mission
of a college campus. (Scott Tinker)
With creative financing, and in the right places, solar plants are
a workable solution. But they're still limited by
high price and low output. This one could
power just 200 people per year. They're using a
different technology to get more out of
solar plants in Spain. Like at Solucar, which could power 1.200
people per year. We have a huge field of mirrors,
and they are continuously moving in order to track the sun and
to concentrate solar radiation onto the top of the tower. And the heat
generates the steam, that we drive to
the steam turbine in order to
generate electricity. The plants are larger and
therefore more efficient. The footprint
is smaller as well. And as you use the heat
to produce energy, the plants have what we call
thermal inertia. So they don't go on
and off the grid when the solar
resource disappears. So we can provide
the utilities or grids a more stable production. When we were leaving Solucar,
we saw this beautiful image. The light beams were converging
right in front of the tower. When you don't have
a very good day, it's sort of cloudy, what they do is they take
out part of the solar field and they put it in what they
call the waiting point, in front of the receiver. People always love that. The people who are
operating the plant, they don't like it
because it's a sign that they are not able to
produce as much as they could. (Scott Tinker) At 16,000 people
per year, Andasol uses hundreds
of mirrored troughs to turn heat into power. Oh, that is very warm. I can feel it. Yes. Hot. (Scott Tinker) The heat makes
steam to turn a generator or is stored in tanks
of molten salt to be used
later in the day. So you're storing heat,
not electrons, with concentrated solar. Storing electricity
today is not efficient. There are no known technologies
cheap enough, let's say. While storing heat is something
used in other industries. (Scott Tinker) But on the day
I was there, the troughs never swung upward
to gather heat. This plant also never got out
of the holding position. For the large utility scale
solar thermal plants, they have to be in places that have very clear
direct sunshine, not the reflected stuff, which you can get away with more
easily with photovoltaics. Obviously, there's a big room
for improvement, and we just got started. The technologies are very young. You are seeing technologies
for which there are In the case of the tower,
two towers worldwide; in the case of troughs,
a bunch of them worldwide. So there's a huge path
that we will go through in order to reduce the cost
of these technologies and improve efficiency. (Scott Tinker) As promising
as this technology appears, it's probably decades away from
being an affordable solution. We'll need some
other alternative to provide large scale power. For 40 years, Denmark has
led the world in wind, which now makes up 20%
of their electricity. Welcome to Turbine No. 4. Come on in. So what I am going to do now
is to press the "stop" button. You can have
the responsibility. Absolutely. Stopping the turbine. Oh, I can hear it. It just grinds down
very quickly. Yes. Just a few seconds. Let's climb to the top. How high are we going? It's 50 meters. How narrow do we get
at the top? Like, one and a half meter. Okay. All right. Okay. One important thing
is to use your legs. The benefits of wind are many. It produces a lot of power. Right. It's fast to install
and scalable in size. It does not produce CO2
while producing power. To Denmark, it's also a big
export commodity. So for us, there's some
additional benefits. Sure. In Denmark, we sort of invented
the modern turbine. It was built by a combination
of hard working entrepreneurs and some visionary
politicians who could see
this in the beginning, 20 or 30 years ago. And, of course,
the consumers, me -- or at that time,
my parents i guess -- had to pay the
price for wind energy. So for a while, you could say
we were paying more than we could have done, to build up this industry and to
make sure that in the future, Denmark would be reduce its
dependency on imported energy. We went from 0% of
wind penetration to 20% or 22%,
as we are approaching now. Slowly but surely. It has been a long
but concerted effort, every year, one bit at a time. Whoa! You like the view? Awesome. It's a well-known Danish concept
for wind turbines. Right. Which is just to use standard,
simple components, almost taken from the shelf. Sure. It takes care of itself. This fellow works
for 20 years or more. Very reliable. Very, very reliable. Pretty simple components. Very simple, yes. Keep it simple. (Scott Tinker) The three blade
turbine we see around the world was pioneered
and perfected here. It can be built in months
and rolled out in any number. But the turbine is only part
of the equation. The rest is the wind. And, of course, when the
wind does not blow, we generate nothing. That we guarantee. One of the problems with
wind is its intermittency. The wind doesn't blow
all the time, and so, you don't get the electricity
from wind all the time. And again, because it's hard
to store electricity, you need to figure out how
to handle that intermittency. The main idea is a combination
of different technologies. Diversification, that's what we
have done in Denmark. We have our combined
heat and power plants that are a stable baseload. Then we have our strong
interconnectors to the other countries. That's crucial. You cannot do this without
being able to exchange large amounts of electricity
across borders. Exactly. (Scott Tinker)
Denmark has made this intermittent resource
a success, but this is a country
of only 5 million people. All their turbines combined
would power just 340,000 people per year. Can we do the same thing
in a much larger country? This sort of shows you
in Texas what's going on. You get a relative sense
of where you are. Yeah. Which means as soon
as you take off, you're flying over 25% of
the US wind industry capacity. That's here. Basically half of US wind is
within 500 miles of here. Let's do it. I'm ready. [Music] What are we flying
over here, John? This is the Roscoe Farm. The largest wind farm
in the world. Yeah, and that's it all
back over yonder. Everywhere you can
see is turbines. We've got almost 100,000 acres
in the Roscoe Wind Farm. 100,000 acres. And about 400 landowners. And this amazing wind resource
that we've got here. Did you ever think you'd be
using the word "amazing wind"? No, we've cussed this wind
for all of our life! It destroys our crops. We have sandstorms,
it blows our soil away. And you talk about
an attitude adjustment! Now we've had a 180-degree
attitude adjustment relating to the wind. It's just been phenomenal. You really led this thing
in many ways, and I know you're
a modest person, but 4 or 5 years ago,
if I was standing right here with you, we'd be looking at
farmland and ranchland. That's right. The more I learned
about the wind industry, the more I believed that we had
the combination that we needed to build a wind farm here. It just, somebody
just needed to do it. And this is a community that's
welcoming this with open arms. Yes, yes. Nobody is saying,
"Hey, not here in my backyard, not on my farm." No, no. West Texas is an agriculturally
depressed area. It's just an economically
depressed area. And we've just had to sit here and take what
Mother Nature brings to us in the way of rainfall, and try to make a living
on this country. And it's gotten so tough that our young people
don't come back. Yeah. But now with our windmills and the opportunities here that
they're bringing, it's turned our
communities around. For the first time ever, these landlords have
an opportunity to receive a regular paycheck. [Music] Those are big boys. Wow (Scott Tinker) For the
farmers around Sweetwater, wind turbines are a
beautiful thing -- and I would tend to agree. But to get 20% of U.S.
electricity from wind would require another
200,000 of them. We could do that, but people may not want to
look at that many turbines. Wind power is
best in windy areas, but people do not tend
to live there. And so, we need to get
the electrical grid out to the wind farms
in order to be able to bring that electricity
into the cities. We found the best wind areas,
and then we came up with a plan to build transmission
out to those areas, and deliver it back to
Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin, San Antonio,
and Houston. That plan is 2,300 miles of high
capacity transmission. It's about $5 billion dollars and we're going to have it
completed by the end of 2013. What would it take
to do that nationally? Just scale it up for me
a little bit. Well, there are
two debates on this. One is who pays for it? So would we encourage,
at the federal level, a payment system
like we have today, which is everybody pays --
which is different from the way the rest of the
country does it. And then there's
the siting issue nobody wants transmission lines running through their
100-year-old family ranch. Right. It's never been the case. This is going to be
the challenge if the federal government says,
"Okay, we're going to do that. We're going to
site these lines." Are they really willing to get
down and go property by property with county judges,
county commissioners, and landowners
in siting these lines? Because that's what's required. (Scott Tinker) So to make wind
work on a grand scale, we'll first need
to figure out transmission, and then how to manage
that much intermittent power. I went to visit ERCOT, where they've been
doing exactly that. This building is natural
disaster proof. This was designed to handle
an F5 tornado, which is the biggest
tornado we anticipate. We're unique in that we have enough diesel
generators to supply all the power we need, 24 hours a day, indefinitely. 22 million people
are relying on our power. We can't have little things
like that happen. Right. Is that your grid? Yes, this is a graphical
representation of our grid, and the different lines
are the different voltages that we have in the system. If you look at a power plant, you can see the power flowing
out on the different lines. The amazing thing
about electricity is it's generated at
exactly the same pace that we use it. Isn't that a miracle? I mean, where else does supply
exactly meet demand? We take it for granted. We flip a switch,
light comes on, but actually somebody is,
in very short time intervals, dispatching different plants --
gas plants, nuclear plants,
coal plants, wind plants -- to match the
instantaneous demand. So I've got Houston,
San Antonio, Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth? That's right. And then our wind is
out here in the west, and these are some
of those big lines that we're moving out there to
connect to the West Texas wind. If you look at this chart here, this is how we actually
use electricity. You can see that at 3 o'clock
in the morning is our minimum usage, and then all day long, it increases up to
about 5 o'clock, where it peaks out, which is mainly your
air conditioning load. And then it repeats itself
day after day. Okay. And now, let's take
a look at wind. The wind output does not match
the actual energy usage. So because of this
intermittent resource, when the demand is going up
but the wind is going down, that causes us to bring on additional
conventional generation that can make up the difference between the actual
renewables output and what our demand is. Gotcha. Wind is intermittent. Yes. Solar is intermittent. So when they're going,
they're great. But you need something
you can bring up quickly to fill in that gap. Very quickly. Because we're hearing stories, particularly in these
markets like Texas where wind is a big part,
that sometimes the wind will go from several
thousand megawatts to zero in less than a minute. Okay. And gas plants can't come in
within a minute, but there are many types of
gas plants that can come on within 10 minutes. So the key
is to encourage people to build natural gas plants that work in concert
with wind and solar, and natural gas
can fill in that gap. (Scott Tinker) So
natural gas can support a growing amount
of renewables. And a technique
called hydrofracking has unlocked a huge
unconventional supply, in places like
the Barnett Shale, a field that can power
18 million people per year. These are gases that do
not flow easily out of the rock, and sometimes have to be induced
to come out, for example, by
fracturing the rock through this
hydro-fracturing process and long horizontal drilling. Hydraulic fracturing
is a way of, first, drilling a well and then
pumping down fluids, water, other chemicals,
and inducing the rock to break. And when the rock breaks, it opens up new surface area
from which the gas can flow out. Now in the United States, I think there's about 2,000
trillion cubic feet of gas. 2,000 trillion? Yes, which would be two
quadrillion cubic feet of gas, which is enormous. Or said another way, it's about
a hundred years of supply at present consumption
standards. And to imagine that you
never have to make any other discoveries
and you've got 100 years of any resource
is just extraordinary. It's inexpensive. There's so much of it that the
cost is not expected to go up in the next few decades. Right. The problem with it
is it's a fossil fuel, and so it does produce
carbon dioxide. But only half as much as coal. (Scott Tinker)
But there's a controversy surrounding fracturing,
that centers on water. Now, how much water
are you putting into a typical job like this? An average might be
about 3 million gallons. 3 million gallons
for the whole job? For the whole well. Gotcha. And how many wells
are out here on this pad? On this pad, we have 5 wells. So you do each one of those
with 3 million gallons. That's a lot of water. It's a lot of water. You pick up the paper today,
you look on the news and there are people
talking about fracturing. They're looking at it
in Washington. You put other chemicals
and kinds of things in it. There are some additives. Pumping the water down itself,
there's quite a bit of friction, so we add a little bit of gel
to it to slick it up. That makes it smoother. We put in some
corrosion inhibitor, chemicals like that
that help us. But over 99.5% of the fluid that
goes in is just water and sand. (Scott Tinker)
That does mean that there are 15.000
gallons of additives going into
each of these wells. And what people
are worried about is, will fracturing contaminate
our water supply? I went to see the agency that
regulates fracking in Texas. We have overseen the process of hydraulic fracturing
for decades now. And we're not aware
of one documented case of groundwater contamination, for example, which is the big
concern that is voiced federally and in Congress. In all the fracturing that has
been done in Texas so far? Those wells up to the Barnett, you drill down about
7,500 - 8,000 feet. So there are over 1.5 miles
of shales and sandstones that protect the near-surface
groundwater from contamination. There have been a number
of confirmed instances, as well as a number of alleged
but unconfirmed instances, where natural gas drilling has negatively impacted
groundwater supplies. But to the best of my knowledge
none of those confirmed examples were related to a hydraulic
fracturing operation. And, in fact, most of the risks
occur at the surface, rather than downhole. So if I understand you right,
you don't know of any cases where the actual
hydrofrack process caused problems at the surface, but it's things related
to the hydrofracking that are done at the surface
that could cause issues if they're not done properly. We can have fluids that
are spilled at the surface. Waste can be spilled
as they leave a lease. Pits for the temporary storage
of fluids and waste can leak. Hydraulic fracturing potentially
is a problem, but in my mind it's one
of the least risky aspects of a natural gas operation. Congress is moving towards requiring more supervision over
these fracturing processes. It is certainly not
clear to me today that there have been
major consequences. But I think this is an
area where what we need is good, objective
measurements analysis, and then whatever
measures are required for environmental
protection will be taken. There are certainly many
other deposits of shale gas and tight gas that other
countries can access. Look, natural gas
is much cleaner than coal, and I think this technology is
becoming a real game changer as we think about a low
carbon energy future. (Scott Tinker) It seems the risk
is not so much with fracking, but with handling
the wastewater. Hopefully, gas producers
and regulators can resolve these issues so we can have access
to this abundant resource. In other parts of the world, conventional natural gas
supplies are growing too. How far off the shore are we? Well, you see
that platform up there? Way out there in the distance
on the horizon? Yes, sir. That's an Iranian platform. We're right on the border here. This is where all the ships
line up to get out the straits. There's a tremendous
amount of gas. The problem is
that because it's a gas, if it's not close to the people
who want to use it, it tends to be expensive
to move it. The gas is piped
into Ras Laffan, processed and made into LNG, and then shipped
all over the world. In LNG, we turn the natural gas
into a liquid, we freeze it basically,
so that it turns into a liquid, and then we can put it in a ship
and move it across the ocean. Qatar was sitting on this
resource, which is the North field, for many years. It was discovered in 1976. So there was a vision in Qatar
why couldn't we make this natural gas economical? Right. Qatar in the last 10 years has
grown from zero production to about 30%
of the world market, and the only way we can
make it economical is if we build very
large scale plants. (Scott Tinker) This
one plant is so large it could power 18.5 million
people per year. On the shipping side, we're now building what
we call the Q-max ships, and the Q-max is
250,000 meters. 250,000 cubic meters. Yes. On one ship? On one ship. So, this is gigantic. Gigantic. So, the ship is being
loaded now, and then you have water falling
down the side of the ship. Yes, we call that
a water curtain. This protects the ship's hull
from any spills because, as you know, this liquid is
minus 163 degrees Celsius. And if it touches the hull,
it will make the hull crack. How do you keep the LNG cool
once it is loaded? The ship has very huge
insulation boxes which can keep the temperature
inside the tanks steady. So this is a giant thermos. Yes. A giant cooler. It never looses heat. Unbelievable. We consider this a pipeline
in the sea, these ships. Exactly. They are as good as a pipeline. In fact, they are more reliable. They do not have to go through
the geopolitics, crossing countries
and those problems, some of the issues which we
have seen last year. It's a very secure supply. We may eventually
see a world market in natural gas develop
as it has for oil, and that would give a lot more
diversity of supply. (Scott Tinker) Low carbon,
low price, and the ability to backup wind
and solar mean that natural gas will likely be a vital part
of our energy transition. But there's one more
huge energy source that I hadn't looked
into yet, nuclear. This plant could power
1 million people per year. You can see the barriers here, now you're going right along the
protected area of the plant. Quite a bit of concrete measures
that were taken after 9/11. (Scott Tinker)
But since Fukushima, people are worried
that nuclear isn't safe. Comanche Peak is just
150 miles from my house, and I needed to get
a better look. So we're getting a peek
inside here. That's where the equipment
all comes in, and one of the things that's
nice about this view is that you can see the
thickness of the concrete, of the walls for containment. But what you don't see
there is the rebar, and it's rebar throughout that
concrete going all the way up. It's 2-1/2 inch rebar. Like my arm. That's correct,
basically like your arm. What happens if something flies
into this structure, like an airplane? Well, you know, there would be
damage to the outside structure, of course. But the equipment inside
would be protected. We're in tornado country. What happens if...? These structures are designed
for the worst case tornadoes. We're talking about
300 mile an hour hitting directly
at this equipment. The structure
would be protected. Three hundred mile an hour? Three hundred mile an hour, yes. Scott, we just entered the
radiation controlled area. And one of the things you
were given was a dosimeter to measure your radiation. What you'll note is that
it's reading 0.0 millirems. Okay. And it'll continue
to monitor you throughout your stay in here. Gotcha. So, for example, I've been working in the
nuclear industry for 28 years, and I've picked up between
200 to 300 millirems throughout the 28 years. For the whole time? The whole time, yes. And that, you said, was the
normal background radiation for a year for a person. Per year, per person,
that's correct. These are huge generators. Absolutely. There are four of them,
two per unit. So you only need one
during an emergency, but again,
from a redundancy standpoint, we have a backup. They're running on diesel. They run on diesel fuel oil. The tank is located underground, a little different than
what Fukushima had, and we also have
a day tank of fuel oil that's located above
the generators. And one of these generators
can run the critical equipment. It would run all the
equipment necessary to keep protecting
that core and that fuel. They're not running now. What are we hearing? Ventilation. You'd know when it's running. What you see here is the Unit
two spent fuel pool. You see Unit two containment. That's the containment with the four
and a half foot thick concrete with rebar located there. So you remove these spent
fuel rods underwater. Correct. Water keeps it cool. That's correct. So I'm wanting to check my... Check your dosimeter. It would be
the right thing to do. Let's see. Zero-point-zero. That's correct. That's what I would expect. That's less than I would get
if I'd been outside all day. You could stand here
for the next hour and be reading
zero-point-zero, yes. The dangers of nuclear power-- Although they're real, are less than the dangers of
not having sufficient energy, with all the problems
that brings. They're less than
the dangers of coal. They are looking desperately
for natural gas, but all fossil fuels
produce carbon dioxide and the world is
seriously worried about increasing even further the carbon dioxide
in the atmosphere. So everything has its dangers. And as we begin
to appreciate that, we realize that
nuclear looks better. Yeah. But there are other things, getting the nuclear reactor
to be less expensive. A nuclear reactor,
unlike a coal plant, the fuel doesn't cost much. I mentioned a tenth of a cent
to get a kilowatt hour. The expense is upfront. You know,
when you build a nuclear plant, you need to put down,
say, $5 or $6 billion dollars just to build the plant
and get it running. For how big a facility? Say for a one gigawatt
electrical plant, about $6 billion dollars. So you have to put down
all that money up front, and then you're relying
on the revenue stream from the electricity
you generate over the next 30 or 40 years, in order to become
economically profitable. But if you look at technologies
to generate electricity that can operate at scale,
that have low emissions, and are available now,
not 20 or 30 years from now, nuclear comes up
awfully high on the list. In fact, it's very hard to see how the world is going to
meet its emissions goals without a significant
fraction of nuclear energy. (Scott Tinker)
So what would a system with more nuclear
energy look like? Since France has
no coal, no oil, they decided that there
are no other solution than to go full nuclear. So nuclear energy
was born out of necessity. Period. And so in about 25 years, France went from almost
no nuclear energy to now about 80% of electricity
is made out of nuclear energy. The safety record of
the French nuclear system has been impeccable. France has the cheapest price
of electricity in Europe and the CO2 footprint
of France is minimal now. So the advantages
are tremendous. And one of the reasons there is
so much acceptance in France of nuclear energy is that
we can tell the public that we have a solution
for waste management. (Scott Tinker) Their solution
is recycling, which they do at La Hague, a plant that could power
17 million people per year. Here, spent fuel from
France, Japan, Germany, and other countries
is reprocessed into new fuel. And you can see now,
the first step of the process. The fuel rods are moving
out of the cask. He's lifting the whole thing. Very slowly. Very slowly, as you can see on
this control screen. How many of those
do you do every day? It's one cask per day. One cask per day? Yes One of these fuel assemblies
is producing electricity for 25,000 people. Inside, you have 96%
of material that we can reuse to produce new fuel. This is very interesting. So 96% of the fuel is reusable. Why isn't that being done
all over the world? Because they have fresh uranium,
a reserve of fresh uranium. But lots of countries are
interested in recycling now because we can reduce
the volume of waste. And because we can have
a reserve of energy, and we know now that we will
have a problem in the future with reserves of energy
in general. So this is
a giant swimming pool? Yes. But you don't swim. And how deep is the water? The depth of the water
is around 10 meters. 10 meters. And that acts as
a big cooling system. I'm looking at basket,
after basket, after basket. How many baskets
are stored here? We have 19,000 fuel assemblies
stored here. 19,000? Yes. That's a uranium mine. Yes, it's something like that. It represents six months of
oil production of Saudi Arabia. This facility, the uranium
here represents the equivalent of 6 months oil production
of Saudi Arabia? Yes, exactly. It's a real reserve of energy. In the used fuel,
you have 95% of the uranium, 1% of plutonium,
and 4% only of fission products which are the final waste. So we vitrify them,
put them in containers, then in this interim storage. Each French person is producing
five grams of fission products, vitrified waste, per year. Per year. So this is the equivalent
of a 20-cent Euro coin. So that's the fission waste
for one person, for one year. Yes. In this room, we have 400 pits, 400? 400 pits. and we have
three rooms like this. 1,200 holes, and two holes
is 1 million people, so you're looking at 600 million
people of waste equivalent. Six hundred million people
in three rooms this size. So it's a very elegant solution to recycle and reuse the
uranium and plutonium, and just separate out those few
things that are not usable. (Scott Tinker) Even more than
zero emissions, it's this astonishing
concentration of energy, far greater than any
other power source, that's nuclear's
biggest benefit. But that's also why it must be
handled with care. [music] So what have I learned
after 2 years in the field? That the switch needs
to happen first in the way we understand
and use energy. If we look at today,
the foundational energies, the energies that built
our modern economy, are oil -- transportation --
and coal -- electricity. What the plot shows is that
the higher the price goes, there's more oil. The reserve is dependent
on price. There's another seven
to eight trillion barrels of oil out there at
the right price, or oil equivalents. So let's look
at the alternatives, what are our options
to oil and coal, these foundational energies? If we go back to our graph now,
we've looked at solar, wind, geothermal. They're putting solar panels
as coverings to parking lots. It's hot and there are
no trees let's use it. For alternatives scale is the
big one getting enough volume to begin to make a
substantive replacement. How about hydro? Norway is phenomenal. Turbines under the mountain. You don't even know
they're there. The water accelerates
down the hill, flows out into the top
of a fjord. It's perfect. Beautiful, clean energy and if we all had
topography like Norway and renewable rainfall,
we'd be finished. [Laughter] So you're getting the picture
here that nothing's perfect. No energy source
is without some challenges. So what does this mean
for our energy future? You can see oil, it was
50% just 30 years ago and it's down to 34% today. Coal, 29% today. Natural gas, 23% and climbing. Nuclear, 5% and climbing. Hydro, 6% and declining. And the renewables,
biomass, biofuels, geothermal, wind and solar
combined around 2% today and will rise substantially
out into the future. But it still doesn't tell us
about the transition. Where does that start to happen? If we combine our
foundational fuels, oil and coal, those move up and
slowly decline in the future. If you combine renewables
with hydro, you see they move up, but not
enough to be primary sources. The intermittency challenge
is too great and until that's solved, there'll be great
regional supplements. And finally if we combine
nuclear and natural gas, they sit in the middle today and
are growing out into the future, and approaching
the foundational energies. But we still don't see that
crossover point. Until we combine nuclear and
natural gas with the renewables. And now we see
some 50 years out, the crossover between
foundational energies and energies of the future. It's not going to be easy. Natural gas will nearly have
to double, and it can. Nuclear reactors,
we'll have to build nearly three times as
many as exist today. And renewables go up five-fold. Can we be certain we can meet
this challenge and how can we do that? Well, the easiest way,
the best way, is the energy that we don't use. That will reduce these multiples
natural gas, nuclear, renewables will go down. It would mean 200 fewer
nuclear reactors. It would mean
100,000 less wind turbines. We could meet that
50-year crossover with less
infrastructure required. As I've traveled the world,
I've come to realize that, in fact, there's a tremendous
role that each of us plays in efficiency, in changing
our energy behavior. What you do and what I do are the most important part
of our energy future. (Scott Tinker) Do you remember
how I added up my energy use? Well, I decided to
subtract from it. We're going to spray the radiant
barrier on your decking. Because that's where
all the heat's coming in. Right, exactly. The world uses 40%
of its energy in buildings. You can insulate your house. That's got a short payback time
and reaps great energy benefits. Put in a better hot water
heater, for example. Check the windows, the leaks
in the doors and so on. These are relatively simple and
largely cost effective things that the individual
consumer can do. And they'll matter? And they do make a difference
at the individual level. Of course,
if everybody does them, they'll have an impact at scale. Hey, how you doing? Finished product. It looks a little different
from the one we had before, that's for sure. How's it going out here? Great. Pretty close. A few more hinges,
and we'll be ready to go. That's a lot of lights. You can see that
little curlicue inside. Are you ready? Ah, here they come. (Scott Tinker) We got onboard
at the Bureau too, with our own
solar parking canopy. Now, these things may
not be for everyone -- but they don't have to be. The important thing is to change
the way we think about energy, so we can change
the way we use it. Just by doing a whole
lot of simple things, mostly paying attention, turning things off when
we didn't really use them, I was able to reduce the
electricity use at our house by almost 40%. Each of us could live
just as comfortable lives, but use less energy. It directly correlates. It's a really simple
relationship. Use less, emit less. Yes. These are steps
that save money, they save energy,
they save emissions, they're good for the climate,
they're good for security, they're good for
your pocketbook. So that's the place to start. So any way you slice it,
energy efficiency is good, and that's what we recommend
any government focus on first. Then letting a democratic
society make its choices based on the information
available to it. And I'm confident that the
citizens in our countries, and the citizens in countries
like China and India, will make the right choices if
they have the right information. (Scott Tinker) Energy powers
our lives. We are the end users. And that gives us a remarkable
amount of control. We just need to do
something about it, in a way that makes sense
for each of us. So when I found out our
neighborhood allowed golf carts, we got one, for errands
and taking the kids to school. And it's powered by a battery. It's certainly not a Tesla,
but it's a good start. [music]
Boring. Stopped at 10 minutes