Western Secession 6 - East vs West in Maps

The broad theme of this series of posts is that a peaceful partition of the US into at least two parts is likely in the middle sort of future (probably more than 25 years, probably less then 50).  The particular partition that I think about is East and West.  Previously, I argued that there is a natural geographic dividing line between the two: the Great Plains region, already pretty empty of people and generally getting emptier.  This post puts up a whole pile of maps in order to argue that there are fundamental differences in the situations faced by the East and the West, which will in turn lead them to want to take different paths in solving some problems.  When those differences become more important than the similarities between the regions, separation becomes a viable option.  Some of these maps have appeared in earlier posts.

Mountains.  One-third of the 48 contiguous states isn't like the other two-thirds, as shown in the relief map to the left.  From the western edge of the Great Plains to the Pacific Ocean, the terrain is dominated by
mountains.  East of the Great Plains, not nearly so much.  The highest point east of the Great Plains is only 1,400 feet higher than my house in a Denver suburb; I routinely make up that difference on "easy" hikes up into the foothills.  The difference in terrain has a number of consequences, as discussed along with the next several maps.  Map credit: U.S. Geological Survey. (Aside: I love this map.  The USGS says it's based on 12 million elevation data points extracted from their topo maps.  A 56"x36" paper version is available for $12.00.)

Settlement patterns.  The mountainous terrain dictated where people could settle (and continues to do so today).  Steep gradients mean that the rivers are generally not navigable over long distances (the Columbia being a limited exception).  Areas where agriculture is practical, and often the types of agriculture, are limited (the growing season at altitude can be remarkably short).  All of this dictates where significant numbers of people can live, summarized in the population map to the left (each white dot represents 7500 people).  In some ways, the western part of the US is more urban than the eastern part.  Not in the sense of tall buildings and small apartments, but rather that a larger majority of the people live in the urban and suburban areas of a few metro areas.  Metro areas are fewer, and much farther apart.  The spaces between metro areas are empty in a way that occurs rarely in the eastern part of the country.  Map credit: U.S. Census Bureau.

Transportation.  The map to the left shows truck freight volume by federal highway route for 2007, with thicker lines indicating more tonnage.  Just as the terrain had a large influence on where sizable cities are possible in the West, mountain ranges (and more importantly mountain passes) dictate where most of the transportation routes must run.  In some cases, the routes today are the same routes that wagon trains used when they headed out across the Great Plains headed for the West Coast.  Wyoming's South Pass is the only sane place for a busy freight route to cross the Rockies between Colorado and the Canadian border.  Implicit in this map is that a good deal of the east-west traffic involves transport between the coastal port cities and the more heavily populated East.  Rail freight volumes show a similar pattern, with the addition of a huge-volume route headed east from northwestern Wyoming.  That route carries very large shipments of Powder River Basin low-sulfur coal to eastern power plants.  Map credit: U.S. Department of Transportation.

Federal land holdings.  As a result of the settlement patterns and timing (the federal government made an enormous change in public land policy around 1900), the federal government has very large land holdings in the western states.  The cartogram to the left, where states have been resized to represent the area owned by the feds, illustrates the point.  This has made life difficult for state governments in many ways.  Policies affecting a variety of things — some not immediately obvious — can be difficult to manage when the largest landowner in the state (about 40% of the land, on average) is free to simply ignore the state law and do what it pleases.  Local resentment towards federal ownership rises and falls in cycles, and seems to be on the upswing again in recent years.  Map credit: author's own work, using a wrapper around Mark Newman's highly useful cart and interp programs.

Water.  Precipitation west of the Great Plains is very low compared to the areas on the east side.  The areas with the heaviest precipitation are, for the most part, mountain ranges or valleys between ranges where the water falls as snow in the winter.  Agriculture in the West has always been about storage and management of water.  As Mark Twain is famously credited for saying, "Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting over."  Irrigation is important even in the Pacific Northwest, which appears to be much wetter, due to seasonal variations.  During the critical growing months of July and August, Seattle and Portland are as dry or drier than Phoenix and Denver.  Phoenix and Denver get summer rainfall from thunderstorms triggered by the North American Monsoon that does not reach Oregon or Washington.  The prime irrigation example is California's Central Valley: with irrigation it is perhaps the richest farming area in the world; without irrigation, it's a semi-arid near-desert.  Map credit: Oregon Climate Service.

Fire.  The last three maps painted a picture of a West that is sparsely settled, dry, and with large areas held by the federal government, much in the form of undeveloped national forests and wilderness areas.  That's a nice prescription for wildfires.  Fire is, in fact, a natural part of many western ecosystems.  For example, some tree species have evolved so that the heat of a fire (which burns off brush and grass that would compete with the seedlings) is required to release their seeds.  The map to the left illustrates the number of wildfires from 1980 to 2003 that covered more than 250 acres individually.  250 acres is, by western standards, a small fire.  In most recent years, at least one western wildfire has reached at least 100,000 acres.  Some have been several times that large.  Western wildfires have become much more dangerous and damaging in recent years, though, in part due to misguided fire-suppression policies on federal land during the first half of the 20th century that allowed huge amounts of fuel to accumulate.  Map credit: U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

US electric power grids.  The next few posts in this series are going to talk about electricity.  I make no bones about it — I believe that managing the transition from fossil-fuel powered electricity generation to something else, in quantities sufficient to support modern tech, is the public policy problem for the next 50 years.  The US power grid is actually three grids that are largely independent, illustrated in the map to the left.  The dividing line between the Western Interconnect and the others falls largely within the Great Plains.  That division isn't surprising.  Historically, the three grids grew out of the connections between large utilities, and the Great Plains are a wide (and expensive) barrier for long-distance high-capacity power connections to cross.  In addition, much of the Plains region is served by rural electric cooperatives rather than larger utilities.  The important point to make here is that the two large interconnects are managed separately.  Map credit: Real Energy Services blog.

Solar and onshore wind renewable energy resources.  I also believe that there will be important differences in opinion on how to solve the supply problem, divided largely along the line between the Eastern and Western Interconnects (or down the middle of the Great Plains, or between mountain and non-mountain, wet-vs-dry, or any of several other factors that all yield much the same result).  Think of it in terms of the answers to the question, "Where will the non-fossil-fuel supply of electricity come from?"  Wind and solar (and conventional hydro) are renewable sources with large potential.  The map to the left shows where good on-shore wind and solar resources occur in the US.  Basically, from the Great Plains west.  Another important east-west difference is that many of the best resources in the West are relatively close to major population centers.  This map doesn't include conventional hydroelectricity; compared to demand, the large share of undeveloped hydro also falls in the Western Interconnect.  Map credit: Recycled Energy blog, using data from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

Nuclear power plants.  The other large existing source of non-fossil source that is commonly discussed is nuclear fission (commercial fusion has been 30 years away for the last 60 years, and according to the ITER time table, still is).  The map to the left shows the location of all commercial power reactors in the US.  Fission power is very much an eastern thing.  There were never a large number of reactors in the Western Interconnect, and the number has been steadily declining: the Ft. Saint Vrain generating station in Colorado, the Trojan station in Oregon, and most recently the pair of San Onefre reactors in California have been decommissioned.  The highlighted reactor is the Columbia Generating Station located on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington, which was the subject of a recent analysis whose conclusions were quite negative.  One might think that the geographic distribution would also make the problem of storing long-lived nuclear waste largely an eastern thing, but political power has — so far — dictated that waste burial will be consigned to the West.  The overall distribution of fission plants seems unlikely to change; all of the proposed new reactors that have reached the NRC license review stages are located in the Eastern or Texas Interconnects.  Map credit:  McCullough Research's Economic Analysis of the Columbia Generating Station.

The Internet of Things

One of my friends makes an annual pilgrimage to Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show, walks tens of miles of the convention floor aisles, and sends out a sometimes serious, sometimes tongue-in-cheek review of the overall theme.  This year he reports that it's "the internet of things."  The chip makers are producing the hardware to make it cheap to embed a processor, wifi, and IP stack; the consumer companies are racing to put the hardware into everything you can imagine (and some that I certainly didn't).

Interestingly, along with his e-mail announcing this year's report, I found an article from the BBC about a smart refrigerator that had been hacked and included in a spam-bot network [1].  I suspect that this is just the beginning of the problem.  As the article notes, security is probably not high on the list of features the consumer electronics firms are working on.  After all, security is hard, it's largely invisible (except when it's annoyingly visible), and who's going to buy their smart refrigerator based on how secure it is?  Like most consumer things that have become smart, it's going to be all about screen real estate and the size of the app store.

This is a subject that I thought about a lot in a previous career.  I have a patent for a software architecture that allowed smart devices (cable television set-top boxes specifically) to live behind a stout firewall and extend limited functionality to the Internet in a controlled manner.  Because even back then I was really afraid about the damage that could be done to the devices and that the devices could do if they were just attached transparently to the Internet.  Even with this sort of protection, having lots of relatively simple-minded devices running in my house was a scary thought.  Part of my job was finding ways to use little cracks in a firewall to implement gross security breaches.  It's amazing what you can do if you can get the right one piece of software to run on something behind the firewall.  Given enough devices behind my home's firewall, especially if some of those devices are portable and get attached to other networks occasionally, somebody is going to figure out a way to get that first piece of code in place.

On a lighter note, smarts are going to be embedded in things we wear as well.  I eagerly await reports of the first celebrity wardrobe malfunction that gets blamed on "somebody hacked the clothing."


[1] The use of a picture of a Samsung smart refrigerator should not be taken to indicate that the hacked refrigerator was a Samsung product, or that Samsung refrigerators' security is either better or worse than that of any other smart appliance.  It's just a convenient picture.

Western Secession 5 - The Great (Plains) Divide

In a previous post, I wrote about some of the ways that people have proposed partitioning the United States (in relatively large chunks; a future post will discuss why I'm not interested in proposals to carve off little pieces).  This time, I'm going to lay some groundwork for a geography-based partition that is seldom considered.  The mesh-based population cartogram shown in this post suggests the starting point.

The Great Plains region occupies portions of ten states.  In the upper map to the left, the Great Plains counties in those states are shown in white, and the remaining portions of the states in various colors.  I've intentionally left out any state boundaries within the white area in order to emphasize the point that I'm writing about a situation that is regional rather than state-based.

There have been a lot of different definitions of the Great Plains over the years [1], so it's worth saying where this one came from.  I started with the US Census Bureau's publication Population Dynamics of the Great Plains: 1950 to 2007 [2].  Then I removed seven counties from the Front Range area of Colorado and four counties from the Austin area in Texas.  I had three reasons for trimming out those 11 counties: (1) they sit on the periphery of the Plains and different standards might or might not include them; (2) they have grown enormously in population for reasons that have nothing to do with the Plains; and (3) that large population growth doesn't fit my narrative.  Sometimes there are just outliers in the data that should be excluded.

The Great Plains as shown here is a large region: somewhat smaller than Alaska but almost twice the size of Texas; 50% larger than the Pacific Coast states of California, Oregon, and Washington combined; 20% larger than the 15 Atlantic Coast states combined.  The Great Plains are also quite empty, at least so far as people go.  The lower cartogram resizes each county based on its population.  The Plains don't exactly disappear, but they become a narrow strip.  The strip is less narrow at the north and south ends, where there are large fossil-fuel deposits that have been or are being developed.  Many parts of the Plains are getting emptier as time goes on, with populations that are shrinking in absolute terms.

This is a long-term trend; the Census Bureau document mentioned above identifies a large number of counties whose population peaked more than 80 years ago.  Nor is the population situation likely to reverse itself.  Agriculture has become increasingly mechanized, requiring fewer people.  The same is true for the energy resources that occur in some parts of the Plains: it doesn't take a lot of people to extract a million tons of coal from a Wyoming surface mine, or to maintain a large wind farm, or to drill the oil wells in the Bakken area of North Dakota.  Generally speaking, the area lacks the kinds of infrastructure that would attract businesses that aren't concerned with natural resources.  In many cases, the infrastructure -- in the sense of services like medical care or education -- are declining.

In a future where distance becomes more important than it is today, the wide, empty expanse of the Great Plains is a natural dividing line between eastern and western parts of the country.  Always keep in mind the scale of things: the width of the Plains ranges from 250 to about 550 miles.  Compared to the Boston-to-Washington, DC megalopolis, the Plains have eight times the area but only one-tenth the population.  Even in a local comparison, the bulk of the Front Range population -- the large yellow bulge on the cartogram -- lives in a strip 30 miles or so wide on that portion of the Plains immediately adjacent to the Rocky Mountain foothills.

The next question to consider is "Are there important differences in the two parts of the country separated by the Great Plains?"  In the next post in this series, I'll show a variety of such differences.


[1]  There has always been some uncertainty about the dividing line between wetter, lower-altitude prairie and the drier, higher Great Plains.  Some cartographers extend the Plains much farther to the east, including parts of Minnesota and Iowa.  Some definitions also stop the Plains on the south end before they reach the Rio Grande, asserting that that area becomes so dry that it should be categorized as desert.

[2]  Unlike some works, in this one the authors did not include a list of which counties they had chosen.  That's a shame, given that there are FIPS (federal information processing standards) codes for every county and county-equivalent in the country, and lots of useful data indexed by FIPS code.  I generated my list after a relatively miserable afternoon spent with Figure 6 from the publication and some other information sources.

Western Secession 4 - US Partitions, Background

Proposals for partitioning the United States have a long history (including, of course, a serious attempt by a group of states to implement such a partition in 1861).  This post looks at some more contemporary suggestions that either predict a partition, or look at various cultural divisions within the US that might be considerations if someone were planning a partition.  Consider this to be background material only; my own proposal for a partition that separates 11 western states is based on different criteria.  Still, it is useful to start thinking about the premise that there are cultural differences between regions of the US, and that in a future where long-distance transportation is more constrained, those differences may matter even more than they do today.

One partition is that of Russian academic Igor Panarin, who predicted that the US would fall apart by 2010 (clearly, that hasn't happened).  Mr. Panarin's perspective was summarized by the Wall Street Journal late in 2008.  Some aspects of this partition seem peculiar to me.  He ignores obvious cultural influences: it is more likely that Arizona would align with a Mexican influence than a Chinese one.  The partition ignores some geographic considerations: Kentucky and Tennessee are on the other side of the Appalachians from the rest of Atlantic America, and the California Republican stops short of the Rocky Mountains.  Relative sizes argue against much of the whole premise.  His Central North-American Republic, which is either part of Canada or under Canadian influence, has double the current population of Canada. His Texas Republic of nine states, predicted to be either a part of Mexico or under Mexican influence, has a GDP almost triple that of Mexico [1].  Generally speaking, poor countries don't acquire or overly influence much richer ones, nor do that to territory with double their own population.

Another approach to re-partitioning the US that appears regularly is electoral maps with 50 states of approximately equal populations.  The motivation is the usual complaint that states like Vermont and Wyoming are grossly overrepresented in the US Senate.  Fundamental to such partitions is the notion that the original purposes of the House and Senate — the House represents people; the Senate represents states — is no longer relevant.  The map shown here was prepared by Neil Freeman in 2012.  Mr. Freeman is upfront that this is a work of art, not a serious proposal, but I'll criticize some aspects of it anyway.  The new state of Shiprock spans more than a thousand miles from east to west, three time zones, and multiple mountain ranges; that's a difficult situation for a state government to manage.  Another interesting case is Ogallala, which consists of the Front Range area of Colorado and a whole lot of mostly empty space.  I've written recently about how northeast Colorado would like to separate itself from the Front Range urban area; Mr. Freeman has grafted on a whole bunch of additional area that would presumably feel the same way.

A common approach is to divide the country (or continent) along perceived cultural lines.  In The Nine Nations of North America, published in 1981, Joel Garreau argued that most US state boundaries are arbitrary or based on historical accident, and that looking at the nine regions that he defines gives a better understanding of cultural and economic differences.  One of Mr. Garreau's observations is increasingly true today: for that portion of the Empty Quarter within US boundaries, water is a limiting resource.  As he put it, in most of those areas there's enough water for only one of three things: wilderness, agriculture, or industry (a synonym in my reading of the book for "cities").  He asserts that a few places could manage two of the three, but no place could support all three.  There are reasons to suspect that creating countries based on this partition would have problems.  The Breadbasket, with very large grain exports, is isolated from the Mississippi River mouth necessary for exports to the rest of the world. A number of historians have suggested that recognition of the Midwest's economic dependency on access to the Mississippi mouth was one of the motivations for Abraham Lincoln's desire to stop an independent Confederacy.

Colin Woodard criticizes some of Mr. Garreau's regions as ignoring history, and defines 11 regions of his own in American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, with some of the arguments summarized in a Tufts Magazine article.  Mr. Woodard argues that the groups of people who historically settled these regions account for the very different attitudes towards issues like violence and gun control in the US today.  More interesting is Mr. Woodard's argument that American mobility is reinforcing the divisions as people self-sort by moving to regions where the cultural attitude more closely matches their personal preferences.  That's an important idea, but one I would consider more important in the growing urban/rural divide: the differences between urban and rural areas within these regions is often greater than the differences between the regions.


[1] Consider also the Department of Defense's 2010 Joint Operating Environment document, which identifies one of the potential risks to be planned for as Mexico becoming a failed state unable to manage its own affairs.

Moving Pollution About

Some time back, the Wall Street Journal ran a Bjorn Lomborg opinion piece about electric cars.  Lomborg is an academic and activist who founded the Copenhagen Consensus, an organization dedicated to improving global welfare and the use of cost-benefit analysis to determine the most important problems to address, and the best methods to use.  Lomborg has been attacked by many climate scientists for his position that global warming is happening and is man-caused, but is not among the most critical issues the planet faces.  In the WSJ piece, Lomborg argues that because battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) may not be as low-carbon as many people believe, government subsidies for them are bad policy.

Timothy Taylor at the Conversable Economist points us to the original research piece (PDF) on which Lomborg bases his argument.  One of the big caveats in the article is that the source of electricity has a very large effect on how much carbon is emitted to power a BEV.  Electricity generated from coal is, rather obviously, among the worst sources in terms of carbon.  An electric vehicle operating in Ohio is largely coal-powered; one running in Idaho, OTOH, runs largely on low-carbon hydro power.  Tim also makes a point that had occurred to me while reading Lomborg's piece: there are considerations other than just how much carbon is emitted over a vehicle's total life cycle.

As it turns out, I agree with Lomborg in general that there are things we should be spending money on first with respect to energy use patterns.  In the transportation arena, electrified light rail in metro areas and moving long-haul freight out of diesel trucks onto much more efficient diesel trains are two of them (and electric freight trains might be even better).  These are areas where the federal government should have a significant role in undoing the enormous shift of transport to roads since World War II, just as it had a significant role in supporting that shift to roads in the first place [1].  Those are changes that should be applied broadly. There can be, however, local and regional reasons for supporting BEVs that make sense now.  They're just not necessarily reasons having to do with CO2 [2].

CO2 is a long-lived pollutant and the atmosphere does an excellent job of mixing it uniformly across the planet.  But CO2 isn't the only pollutant.  A BEV powered by coal-fired electricity still has the potential to accomplish two important local goals: space- and time-shifting of the non-CO2 pollution.  The space-shifting is pretty obvious: a gasoline-powered car being driven downtown emits its ozone precursors downtown; a BEV's emissions occur at a coal-fired plant well away from the city center.  That can have an enormous effect on the quality of the air in the crowded parts of the region.  It may also make it easier to reduce emissions of ozone precursors such as nitrous oxides, because it's easier to install and maintain pollution controls on the single power plant than on 100,000 cars.

Southern California is a good example of long-range space-shifting.  Electric cars charged in Los Angeles emit very little pollution in Los Angeles.  But they emit a lot of CO2 (and smaller amounts of other things) from the coal-fired plants in Arizona and Utah that generate a significant fraction of Los Angeles' electricity. The Intermountain Power Plant in Delta, Utah (shown here) is a 1.9 GW coal-fired generating station that is one of the largest emitters of nitrogen oxides (a serious smog precursor) in the western United States.  80% of Intermountain's output is delivered directly to the LA grid over a point-to-point high-voltage direct current transmission line.

The benefits of time-shifting might not be quite so obvious.  It seems a safe assumption that most BEV charging, at least in the near future, will occur overnight at the owner's home.  Electricity is very much an on-demand thing, so the pollution created by that charging also occurs overnight.  Stretching the pollution emission out over a longer period of time may be beneficial. Some areas may experience an additional benefit.  I live in the Denver metro area.  While the region has made enormous strides in cleaning up the infamous Brown Cloud, early-morning winter temperature inversions (coinciding with the morning rush hour) can trap pollutants close to the ground and create ozone and other problems.  Shifting the pollution creation temporally out of the rush hour offers a benefit in addition to shifting it spatially out of downtown.  


[1] Anecdotes are not data, but... I drive across parts of Colorado, Wyoming, and Nebraska on the Interstate Highway System at least once a year.  I-80 in western Nebraska and eastern Wyoming is, in practice, an expensive and poorly run railroad with big trucks acting as inefficient single-car trains.

[2] And yes, I know that this entire post takes a very parochial view.  From a pure global cost-benefit perspective, the US (along with Japan and Western Europe) ought to spend enormous amounts of money solving problems in poorer parts of the world.  Adding clean electric generating capacity to the grid in Pakistan, for example, would produce much larger global benefits than cleaning up a power plant in the US.  But that sort of trade-off is unlikely to be made on any meaningful scale, because most of the people who live in developed countries aren't that interested in solving global problems.

Western Secession 3 - The World Gets Bigger

In my last secession post, I argued that in 25 years time, the availability of liquid hydrocarbon fuels will have decreased significantly, and it will be clear that the decline is going to continue.  This time, I want to talk about what some of the consequences of that decline are likely to be.  As I've mentioned before, I'm not one of the people who believes it means the end of civilization as we know it.  Perhaps the best summary phrase is one that I used in the title: the world gets bigger.  What I mean by that is that it will take more time, and be more expensive, to move goods and people over specified distances.  In some cases, the time factor may be as important as the expense.  This aspect of the future will have effects on multiple scales.

The largest scale is global.  Where I expect the biggest impacts to occur involve air transportation.  Moving large tonnage by ships is extremely efficient, particularly if the ships don't go too fast.  Air travel, or rapid ocean travel, will become much more expensive.  This will hit the US military's ability to project force on a global basis very hard.  The 2010 Joint Operating Environment document, published by the US Department of Defense, identifies shortages of liquid hydrocarbons as one of the significant risks to the US ability to project force, perhaps by as early as 2020.  That document builds a more indirect case, arguing that oil shortages would depress the US economy to a degree that would require large cuts in defense spending.

Significantly higher air travel costs will reduce personal contact between Americans and the rest of the world -- if the cost to fly to Paris doubles, fewer Americans will take vacations or educational trips to Paris (and fewer Parisians visit America).  Combined with a reduced global military role, America will become less engaged with the rest of the world.  There has always been an isolationist streak in America, a reluctance to become involved in military problems in Europe or Asia.  A Pew Research Center poll that came out earlier this month found that 52% of Americans now believe "the U.S. should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own."  This is an historic high since Pew began asking the question in 1964.

The second scale is continental.  The United States is a very large country.  Travel between different regions will decline as air travel costs increase.  The alternative to air travel that is often put forward is high-speed rail.  Assuming that a train could average 200 MPH, the time from Los Angeles to New York is about 13.5 hours, plus time for intermediate stops: much longer than the current flight time.  A more fundamental argument against even the availability of high-speed rail is the cost of building out the infrastructure.  California's proposed HSR line from San Diego to San Francisco currently has an estimated price tag of $70 billion; no one believes that it can actually be built for that; the cost of a national HSR system for the US would run into the trillions of dollars.  More pronounced regional identities will begin to emerge as personal contact between the regions declines [1].

The third scale is local.  One of the "local" effects that will exacerbate the problem of reduced availability of gasoline and diesel for many people is the likelihood of allocation measures (rationing is such a nasty word).  Some amount of fuel will be reserved in some fashion for particular users, such as farmers and commercial fishermen.  While the United Kingdom doesn't reserve fuel for farmers, it does have a special category of fuel (red diesel) that can only be used in specific applications and is taxed at much lower rates, making it more affordable.  Rationing by price is still rationing.

The cost of personal transportation is going to increase.  The use of mass transit is going to increase [2], which typically takes a greater investment of time for any particular trip.  I don't believe that personal transportation will go away, but I do believe that 25 years out, the vehicles will be undergoing dramatic changes.  Small vehicles like the MIT electric city car shown here will not be unusual.  I believe that electricity is going to win the battle for personal transportation.  Battery technology is already good enough to give the city car a range that meets 90% of the needs of a urban/suburban drivers, a large efforts will be put into maintaining reliable sources of electricity (a subject for future pieces).  That's a pretty good summary of my position on car purchases in that time frame: drivers will buy cars that meet 90% of their needs, rather than buying cars that meet their extreme cases (eg, 500 miles to Grandma's, hauling the entire little league team to Dairy Queen).

To summarize the "world gets bigger" situation...  Less US engagement with the rest of the world.  Less engagement between multiple regions of the US.  And a greater focus on local and regional problems (and solutions) as people's view of the world changes.


[1] In later posts, I will explore a variety of distinctions that I think already exist between the West and the rest of the country.

[2] One of the western distinctions worth mentioning in this transportation-related post is that every major metropolitan area in my West (Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming) is at least studying light rail.  All of them except Las Vegas are at some stage of building a light rail system.

Western Secession 2 - Liquid Hydocarbons

Liquid hydrocarbons as a means of energy storage are pretty amazing. They have high energy density — enough to make 14-hour non-stop intercontinental air flights possible. They are easy to handle — liquid at normal temperatures and pressures, easy to pump, and so forth. They're relatively safe — despite the energy content, the typical suburban garage has not only several gallons in their cars, but a gallon or two stored in a plastic container for lawn mowers and such. Combined with the ease of extracting sufficient quantities to meet global demand from naturally-occurring reservoirs over the last 100 years, it is unsurprising that liquid hydrocarbons became the transportation (and traction) fuel of choice for the last century.

I support a view of the future with declining oil availability. Granted, for almost as long as people have been pumping petroleum from the ground, there have been predictions that we will run out.  In 1883, Pennsylvania geologists were warning that Pennsylvania's oil fields were being rapidly depleted and there was "no reasonable ground" to expect large new discoveries. They were wrong about that, of course. Petroleum resources far larger than those of Pennsylvania were found in California and Texas and (much later) Alaska within the US, as well as numerous places globally such as the Middle East, Russia, and the North Sea. Nevertheless, there are reasons to believe in the declining availability of affordable petroleum in our future.

It is well established that production from individual oil fields eventually peaks and then declines. Replacing the oil output from a declining field requires finding and developing new fields. For example, US oil production peaked around 1971 when the great East Texas fields went into decline. Overall production increased somewhat when the Prudhoe Bay field in Alaska came online, but the total began to decline again once the decline in older fields exceeded the output in Alaska. The same thing is happening now with shale oil. The figure to the left is the Energy Information Agency's most recent forecast [1] for US shale oil production. The early ramp-on is fast enough to more than offset declines in older, more mature fields. But once the growth in shale oil production begins to level off in another three to five years, US total production will resume its decline.

For decades, US consumer demand for petroleum has exceeded US production. The difference has been made up by imports. An aspect of oil imports that doesn't get discussed enough is that it's a trade: the US can't import any more oil than the collective exporting countries are willing to provide. Three trends outside the US suggest that there will be much less oil available for the US to import in 25 years than there is today.  First, countries that used to be exporters have suffered through exactly the sort of decline the US has seen and been forced to start importing oil to meet their own consumer demand.  Second, countries that are still exporters don't have as much left to export because their internal demand is increasing faster than they can increase production. Third, developing countries that are oil importers are getting richer. The marginal value of an additional barrel of crude in China is higher than the marginal value of an additional barrel in the US, so China (among others) can offer higher prices for the declining oil available from the exporting countries.


Indonesia is a classic example of the first two points.  While their production remained relatively constant from 1975 to 2000, their exports declined as domestic demand increases.  By 2003, they became a net oil importer.  In 2009, they realized that they would likely never be an oil exporter again, and withdrew from OPEC.  It seems unlikely that there will be many new countries added to the list of oil exporters. The fundamental problem is that oil exploration today is occurring in areas where it is much more difficult and expensive to extract the petroleum: ultra-deep water (1,500 meters or more), tar sands, tight formations, etc. Offsetting production decline from today's mature fields requires finding the equivalent of another Saudi Arabia (exports around 7.5 million barrels per day) every few years. The world is an increasingly explored place, at least in terms of commercially-scaled oil reservoirs that are cheap and easy to produce; there simply isn't going to be an ongoing stream of new Saudi Arabias.

Finally, there are the alternatives to naturally-occurring petroleum: synthetics and such.  Processes for making gasoline and diesel from coal and natural gas have been known for a long time.  Cars can be modified to run on compressed natural gas.  Many writers give reasons that we shouldn't use synthetics: for example, that coal-to-gasoline results in much larger releases of carbon dioxide than production of gasoline from crude oil.  However, my argument is that the US can't switch to heavy use of synthetics because doing so would require enormous capital expenditures that the country is ill-prepared to make.  As a result, in 25 or so years the US will have a lot less liquid hydrocarbon fuel available to it.  In the next post, I'll discuss what I see as the probable consequences of that.

[1]  Many analysts think that the EIA's forecast is overly optimistic in the out years. The fundamental complaint leveled at the EIA is that it assumes either (a) producers don't run out of reasonably good places to continue drilling within individual formations such as the Bakken; or (b) decline rates of individual wells in such formations won't follow the pattern in the historical data we have now accumulated.  A simple example of the alternative, in which drilling stops and individual well declines follow the current experience, is shown here.