Energy secretary: Use tech to diversify energy supply

WASHINGTON — Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman told an energy conference here yesterday that the nation must diversify its energy supply.

Technology is the key to solving the country’s most pressing energy challenges, Bodman said.

The Bush administration favors putting the private sector in the lead. Already, he said, private investment in the development of clean energy has taken off.

He acknowledged the need to cut greenhouse gas emissions. While the country will be dependent on fossil fuels to supply its energy needs for decades, reducing the dependence on foreign energy should include renewable energy sources such as wind and solar, biofuels and clean-coal technologies, Bodman said.

Bodman spoke at an energy conference sponsored by his department’s Energy Information Administration. The two-day event drew roughly 1,600 participants from 45 countries to the Washington Convention Center.

The event’s opening speakers included the first U.S. energy secretary, James Schlesinger, and Daniel Yergin, a prize-winning author on energy issues and head of Cambridge Energy Research Associates.

Yergin observed that even before the 1973 Arab oil embargo an energy crisis was brewing for America. It was a big shift for a nation that had produced 6 billion of the 7 billion barrels of oil used by the Allies during World War II.

A constant since the embargo has been suspicion and doubt about the oil markets, a preoccupation with energy security, a focus on efficiency and a striving for alternative sources, he said.

“Energy can no longer be taken for granted,“ Yergin said. Meeting the energy requirements of a $14 trillion economy is a challenging job.

Schlesinger, appointed to the job by President Jimmy Carter, said that until recently the country has had an easy time with energy because it was blessed with an abundance of natural resources.

By the 1960s, however, the United States’ capacity to meet its needs was gone, and an unsuspecting nation was caught off guard by the Arab oil embargo in 1973. At the time, most of the U.S. public did not know the country imported any oil, said Schlesinger, who also served as head of the CIA and as secretary of defense.

The country’s first energy plan was developed in 1973. But by 1980 the country’s dependence on foreign oil had grown by 60 percent and today it is over 300 percent beyond 1973 levels, Schlesinger said.

In the past few years, in what has become a global market, oil supply has had difficulty keeping up with demand, Schlesinger said. In 2004, the world saw the first demand-driven increase in the price of oil that did not involve an interruption in supply, he said.

“At some point in the days ahead we will face a constraint in oil production. . . . We had better be prepared,“ Schlesinger said.