Energy Expert Answers Energy Questions From Twitter

I'm Jeremiah Baumann with the U.S. Department of Energy

and today I'll be answering your questions from Twitter.

This is energy support.

[upbeat music]

So @RedSweetJones asks, dog, why is gas so high?

I'm about to throw up.

Who isn't? Let's be honest.

It's very, very high and it's kind of a big problem.

Like so many things during the pandemic

production of oil and gas plummeted because, you know,

suddenly nobody was driving anywhere

for a few months back there and then

hardly driving for almost a year, year and a half.

So oil and gas companies cut back production.

Once things started opening up, planes are flying again,

everyone's buying oil and gas again,

but because production hadn't caught up, prices went up.

And one thing that's kind of going on right now is that

oil and gas companies are making way more money

than they've ever made before on oil and gas and so

they might be not quite so inclined to increase production

that would bring prices down or do other things

that would bring prices down.

@Chris_Ashworth asks does geothermal heat mean

diverting rivers of molten lava into your home?

I am open to this idea please advise.

As much as I think we would all love

a molten river of lava side home,

geothermal heat means drilling down into the ground and

tapping into the energy of the earth.

The earth is naturally hot everywhere, basically.

They actually drill into the earth

much like they do for drilling for oil and gas and

the hot water comes up and creates steam

that can drive a turbine and generate electricity.

@PrinceySOV asks, how does electricity get to the grid

and then siphoned off to all the homes and buildings

to the end consumer?

The grid is often described

as the biggest manmade machine on the planet.

What it actually is, is a giant electrical circuit.

And it's literally a bunch of wires

connecting a power source and it's circulating around.

You can imagine each of these little stations

is a home or a business or a factory or

anything that needs electricity.

If you close the circuit breaker and it creates a loop

that lets all of these electrons

start circulating through this which is electricity.

So the national grid is actually broken up into

lots of regional and even local grids.

And the biggest grid is mostly broken into

three giant sections.

It's called the Western interconnect and

the Eastern interconnect.

And then the third one is, of course,

independent minded Texas insists on managing their own grid

off on their own with just a few connections

to the rest of us.

Then within those regions, states or regions

it gets broken down to the even more local level.

So you've probably seen in your neighborhood

or off somewhere in a field

fenced in areas that are just full of all this

clearly electrical equipment

with massive wires coming in, right?

A lot of that equipment is often what's called

step down transformers that take the power

from the massive grid

that actually runs at a different power level and

breaks it down to a lower power level for your neighborhood.

And it's all one giant loop

that has to always stay connected,

has step up transformers to take that power level

back up the other side of the circle to feed it back

to the bulk transmission grid.

@thespiritof77 asks,

but seriously do wind turbines cause cancer or jobs or both?

Okay, seriously wind turbines cause

lots and lots and lots of jobs and

economic development for counties and

income for farmers whose land they go on,

but they do not cause cancer.

Wind turbines, super cool.

They're these giant towers.

They literally spin and general electricity.

They're not without controversy.

Some people don't want them.

And some states are just going gangbusters.

Iowa is gonna soon have enough wind power

to meet its entire electricity needs.

The high plain states, the Dakotas, Kansas,

Nebraska is rapidly growing,

all these states down to Oklahoma and Texas

generate tons of tons of electricity

from wind power already.

@mikeradan asks, I am all in favor of green energy,

so this is an honest question.

While EVs themselves have zero emissions,

when you factor in the carbon emissions

from the generation of electricity,

how do they compare to cars that run on fossil fuels?

Great question.

It is still cleaner to charge your car on electricity and

drive it that way than it is to burn gasoline in the tank.

The grid is way cleaner than it was even 5 or 10 years ago.

Electric motors are so much more efficient.

You burn way less gas or coal upstream

to get enough electricity to power a car

than you do if you're trying to actually

explode gasoline right in your car

in order to get enough power to drive.

@KenRStewart asks,

Texas produces almost 2 billion barrels of oil a day.

Why do Texans have to pay so much for their gas?

Is it because big oil dictates the prices at the pumps and

not government?

State and federal governments need to step in and

deal with big oil gouging people.

One thing that makes the United States

different than a lot of countries

is the government does not set the price for oil.

We don't even manage how much gets produced

or how much gets consumed,

which some governments do.

Those are usually considered

very aggressive forms of government.

We like more of a free market.

And so literally the market decides

how much we end up paying at the end of the day.

It's a global market.

We are competing at specific market places

with the entire planet, with China, with Saudi Arabia,

with Russia, with Europe, with South America,

literally everyone.

We don't tell people how much oil to produce.

There are things governments do try to do.

The House of Representatives passed a bill

to crack down on price gouging at the pump.

How do you know when the local gas station

is charging more than they should or

if they're actually just passing on costs

from what they're paying to get gasoline

from 10 steps upstream at the refiner?

So it is a really hard question

about the role of government in society.

@JohnLewi19212130 asks,

how is the strategic oil reserve going to be replenished?

The strategic petroleum reserve.

This is a huge amount of oil that is stored

in a series of caverns underground in Louisiana and Texas

that your department of energy owns and manages

as a strategic reserve.

Basically in case of emergency.

The average cavern

is deeper than the Empire State Building is tall.

This president has actually released more oil

from the future reserve than any president has before

to try to get the price of gasoline to come down.

There's literally a million barrels a day

coming outta strategic petroleum reserve

in an effort to bring gas prices down.

So we do need to replenish it.

There's a couple different ways you can do it.

One thing is we do sell the oil

when we release it from the reserve.

And so the government is getting revenue

from selling all that oil.

We'd love to turn around and use some of that revenue

to buy more oil once prices are nice and low again,

which will hopefully be a day that comes

sooner rather than later,

to fill the oil back up.

Depending on how all that plays out,

the way our funding works is that

every year Congress literally give the Department of Energy

enough money for its annual operations,

including money to go out and buy more oil

if that's what we need to do.

@RigChiq asks, nah BT dub.

How many different types of renewable energy are there?

There are five types of renewable energy;

wind, solar, hydropower, which comes from rivers,

geothermal and marine or tidal,

which comes from the movement of ocean currents.

Nationally, we're somewhere in the 20% renewable range.

Renewables are abundant and they're cheap,

so everybody's trying to build 'em fast and

we should be pushing utilities and states to

build faster everywhere.

@mostafa18369324 asks,

in your opinion what is the best renewable energy and why?

First of all, it's tempting to say solar

because it's getting super cheap and

it literally works everywhere.

Oregon known for being cloudy and rainy

could have so much more solar power than it does.

It's not as cloud and rainy as Germany and Japan

who used to be totally kicking our butts in solar power.

@FairyGray19 would like to know how does solar energy work?

Solar panels like this one here is like a tiny,

I guess it's technically a toy,

but I think it's actually a solar panel

that will actually generate electricity.

The material on this panel, which all starts with Silicon,

which is one of the most abundant elements we've got,

it's made from sand.

And when solar rays like cosmic rays

strike the material in the solar panel,

it literally excites the electrons in those atoms and

it's set up so there's little wires in there

so the electrons get channeled into wires and

then they're fed into the actual grid

to send those electrons as electricity

all the way to your home and fire your appliances.

@generalbullpoo asks,

why is crude oil so important in our lives

when we have better alternatives?

Am I just losing my mind here?

We do have better alternatives for some things.

And we've actually stopped using oil for some things.

Like if you look back in the sixties and seventies,

we're using a lot of oil to burn in power plants

to generate electricity.

There's this huge oil crisis

that you probably hear people talk about.

And we did a huge concerted effort

to get off of oil used for electricity,

but it's still everywhere.

And it's not just the places

that you most think of it, right?

Like when you fill up your car with gas,

you have a pretty good sense that came directly from oil and

you're kind of just transferring barely changed oil

into your fuel tank.

There's some uses of oil that we just

don't have that many alternatives for.

Lots of the chemicals that turn into things like plastics.

And you can just imagine all the uses of plastic

throughout the society, not just in your day to day life,

there just aren't alternatives that can make them

as cheaply and readibly right now today,

as we can by turning oil into plastics.

@Quad_Machine09 asks, so why is nuclear power bad again?

I would argue this.

Nuclear power is one of our most

important forms of electricity if only for one reason.

Right now it's the single biggest source of

carbon free electricity.

Meaning the kind of power that does not cause

global warming or climate change.

And there are real downsides to nuclear power and

they're serious, right?

Like people have heard about Chernobyl,

a massive nuclear accident.

Fukushima in Japan just a few years ago in a tsunami

had a similar problem where the nuclear reactor

went into disaster mode.

So the things you have to solve for to make sure

we have reliable and safe nuclear power

are basically the risk of accidents,

some kind of security like a terrorism attack and then

when you put this nuclear fuel into a nuclear reactor,

that, again, generates steam, that turns a turbine,

that creates electricity,

it leaves nuclear waste that itself is radioactive and

it stays radioactive for thousands of years.

So how do you store it safely?

And what most nuclear power plants do

is they keep it on site.

It stays actually in cooling ponds

until it cools down until it's a lot less dangerous and

it gets transferred into these dry tasks and

it gets stored in a secure location on site right now.

Now we'd all like to get that out of those locations and

into some more even further safe and secure locations.

And that's actually one thing

the Department of Energy's working on.

So @Kingsley54272009 asks,

on a serious note, what is natural gas?

So imagine like a swamp with a bunch of like

decomposing plant and animal matter in it.

Millions of years of sediment accumulating,

pushing all that stuff down into the earth.

As that matter decays, it gives off natural gas

or methane it's often called.

It's cheaper than coal.

And it's also cleaner than coal

when it comes to public health.

So that's literally what natural gas is.

It's also a huge source of energy in our economy.

The problem is it's not without downsides.

It still does create a fair amount of pollution,

including carbon dioxide, one of the chief gases that causes

global warming or climate change.

@mystic_raven84 asks, pardon my ignorance here mate,

but how is fracking clean energy?

Number one, what is fracking?

It's actually short for hydraulic fracturing.

It's where you drill into the ground.

You literally like inject all these fluids and chemicals

to shatter the rock underground

to fracture it and release the gas that then comes back up.

It gets called clean energy by some people

because it's a lot cleaner than coal,

but it still causes climate change,

it still causes other problems.

There's concerns about it reaching water supplies.

In some cases it's caused

actually seismic activity and earthquakes.

You know, it's probably better

if we find ways not to inject things into the ground

that are gonna contaminate groundwater,

but it's an issue that

people are gonna have to keep working on in some places

where there's fracking near populations.

@aeiluvscats asks,

someone let me know what an electric current is.

An electric current is literally just electrons

moving through a charged electrical field

inside a conductor, like a wire.

@Richard93783516 asks, thought of the day.

Can anyone tell me why the use of our rivers

for green energy never seems to be mentioned?

It's what powered the first industrial revolution

in this country.

Why don't we use them now?

Richard's right.

It did power the first industrial revolution

that was actually a slightly different form.

It was water that would turn wheels

that would actually just do the work itself.

Like you hear about grist mills

where literally the water is turning a giant thing

that's like grinding flour

or anything else that needs grinding.

Why don't we talk about it more today?

So number one, a lot of us do talk about it a lot.

It's still a very commonly used electricity source.

I think about 10% of our electricity comes from hydropower

of our 20% total that is renewable, about 10%,

half of it, is hydropower.

And they generate huge amounts of electricity.

What you do in most cases is you build a dam

that literally blocks the river and

these things that just spin,

when they spin they generate electricity and

it goes downstream after it goes through the turbines.

When you dam that river, there are some problems.

Number one, salmon, very cool animals.

They're born way up in the mountains in little tiny streams.

They migrate all the way down to the ocean.

They swim hundreds and hundreds of miles.

And then at the end of their lives,

they migrate all the way back up the river,

all the way up to the little creek,

they find the spot they were born

where they lay eggs and they die.

Unfortunately it kind of screws everything up

if they can't make that migration.

We've invented lots of technology to mitigate for that.

Fish ladders that are some dams where there's like

literally a like suction thing inside the reservoir and

shoots the salmon out back into the river below the dam.

We are still working on hydropower and

we still invest in technology that makes the dams

less harmful for fish.

And if you've had a dam that's already in place,

but not dreading electricity,

we should add electricity, get some power from that dam

while it's gonna be there.

And we've actually got a whole program

at the Department of Energy

to help local utilities do exactly that.

@Myself2677 asks,

can renewable energy sources replace fossil fuels?

Renewable energy sources can replace most of fossil fuels,

but with current technology, not yet all.

Of course the wind doesn't always blow and

the sun doesn't always shine,

so when that's not happening and

you don't have geothermal or hydropower available locally,

where is your electricity gonna come from?

Well, today we get a bunch of it from batteries actually.

It's a small slug right now,

but it's growing really rapidly.

Fossil fuels can have a future in all of this too.

And they employ millions of Americans in America,

so we wanna research every option to

keep those jobs and those industries going.

So it's called carbon capture and

it literally attaches to the emissions

coming off that place that the oil or coal or gas

is being burned.

And it separates out the carbon dioxide

that otherwise cause global warming and then it literally

injects it deep underground into salt caverns.

So that's the other thing that we're working actively on

is another way to give us 24/7 100% clean power.

@Adam_Guillory asks,

imagine we all somehow get electric cars and

now need to charge them.

How does the grid support that and

not become a massive liability?

The grid goes down during a natural disaster,

people have blackouts or brownouts,

and now you're gonna like plug in millions of cars.

Not only that, we're actually trying to switch

buildings and homes from using fossil fuels for heat

to using electricity for heat,

so even more stuff plugging into this grid.

That's why we need to not just

update and modernize the grid,

but at the same time, do two things.

Number one, build out way more grid.

There's just not the grid connections to get them

to the places that need more electricity.

So just doing that is gonna help a ton.

The other kind of really cool thing here

is that a lot of these technologies, like electric vehicles,

can actually have the grid work in both ways.

Meaning the car charges

when it needs to fill up its battery,

but if it's plugged in and it doesn't need more electricity,

it's a giant battery connected to the grid.

So you can actually set it up so that

at certain times of day,

the utility can just draw a little bit of power

from thousands of vehicles.

The bottom line is we just need to build

a lot more power grid to power this new future

that's gonna have electric vehicles, electric buildings.

We're gonna try to switch as many things as we can

onto the grid, so we need more grid.

@pelhamfall asks,

I do wonder what the macroeconomic impacts would be

of a complete phase out of using gasoline for vehicles.

Like, what does OPEC do after that?

So OPEC, Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries,

dominated by Saudi Arabia, the biggest OPEC producer and

their middle Eastern allies and then countries like

Russia and Venezuela actively work with them to

jointly reduce how much oil they're selling

to drive prices up or sometimes they'll release more

when prices get too high.

The problem is, the U.S. is actually

the number one producer of oil and gas in the world and

we have millions of people who work in that industry.

So it also would affect jobs.

And that's why one big thing we try to work on is

how do you find jobs and create jobs

for people that work in oil and gas

in technologies like geothermal and

other renewable energy technologies?

So we minimize any harm to those livelihoods

at the same time that we're getting that huge economic boost

from no longer buying gasoline.

@post0341 asks, I'm still yet to hear detailed explanation

of how the Paris Accords either help or hurt

earth or economy based on technicalities of treaty.

The Paris Accords were a huge, epic, historic deal.

Literally at this point, every country is part of a

global agreement to tackle global warming and

how we're gonna reduce emissions.

And then every country has to submit its own plan

for the specific steps that we're gonna take to do it.

So the U.S. has a whole plan for this and

it breaks it down by every part of the economy.

Here's how much clean energy we're gonna build,

whether that's renewable energy

or fossil with carbon capture or nuclear.

Here's how we're gonna deploy electric vehicles.

A whole plan, a plan for five years from now,

for 10 years from now and for 2050.

And then every year all these governments meet and hash out

who's doing what and how are we getting through all this?

And how's it going?

How do we take advantage of

the clean energy getting cheaper to set higher goals?

And it's literally gonna be

the whole world working together.

Every country sitting at a table

every year for the next 40 years.

And even then we're gonna have to keep working

because climate change is that big of a problem.