NATIONAL ENERGY RESEARCH

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 1974

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,

SUBCOMMITTEE ON THE ENVIRONMENT

OF THE COMMITTEE ON INTERIOR AND INSULAR AFFAIRS,

Washington, D.C. The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 9:55 a.m., in room 1324, Longworth House Office Building, the Honorable Morris K. Udall (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.

Mr. UDALL. The subcommittee will be in session for the further consideration of various energy research and development bills before

us.

Our first witness this morning is our distinguished colleague, the gentleman from California, Mr. Johnson. Bizz, we appreciate your presentation, and you can proceed.

STATEMENT OF HON. HAROLD T. (BIZZ) JOHNSON, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE SECOND CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA, ACCOMPANIED BY JIM T. CASEY, STAFF CONSULTANT, SUBCOMMITTEE ON WATER AND POWER RESOURCES

Mr. JOHNSON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and members of the committee.

I have with me the consultant for the Subcommittee on Water and Power Resources. He is an expert and a long-time Federal employee in the Bureau of Reclamation.

Mr. UDALL. I thought I had seen his face somewhere. He looked vaguely familiar.

Mr. JOHNSON. Mr. Casey and myself, appear here as friends of the subcommittee. We are concerned with certain aspects of the research and development efforts in the field of energy. We would like to leave our thoughts with you, and hope that they will get some consideration. If our efforts are meritorious, Mr. Casey will be willing to work with your staff to work out the amendments should the committee see fit to consider them.

Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the opportunity to discuss H.R. 11857, the proposed Nonnuclear Research and Development Act of 1973. I support legislation in this area as essential to the ability of our Nation to become less dependent on foreign sources of energy than we seem to be today. My testimony will relate to a matter not explicitly treated by the bills before the subcommittee. It is an associated problem that has not, in my opinion, been given the consideration it

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merits in this legislation, the ERDA bill which was passed by the House in December of last year, or in the pending Federal Energy Administration bill.

I am deeply concerned, Mr. Chairman, that our executive branch energy managers, in their rush for instant legislative solutions, have not considered fully-and no not comprehend-the crucial role of water and water resource development in achieving the central goals of the several measures that are working their way through Congress. Certainly you and the members of your committee realize this but I nevertheless feel that it is incumbent on me to seek to emphasize it for your hearing record.

As I read H.R. 11857 and S. 1283 the thrust of these measures is the achievement of a technology base that, if required to be used, would enable national self-sufficiency in an intermediate time frame-certainly before the end of this century. To me, this means prototype hardware constructed and operated at a level of scale that permits engineering and economic conclusions to be drawn and investment decisions to be made.

Our most visible and best known reserves of fossil energy sources are, of course, in the Western United States, an area of the Nation where this committee has considerable background and understanding of the water resource situation. I know that there are other and equally important aspects of the pending bills but, for purposes of these remarks, I am looking at the bill from the standpoint of the coals and shales in the Western States.

These resources are located geographically, to a significant extent. in two major river subbasins:

1. The Yellowstone River subbasin of the Missouri River basin: and,

2. The Upper Colorado subbasin of the Colorado River basin. Thes river systems share one common characteristic. They are "compacted streams." As the committee knows and understands, compacts are a form of superior law which, in layman's terms, means that Congress cannot unilaterally change their provisions. The consent of the State is required and, I might add, the unanimous consent of the States is required as a practical matter. This means to me that insofar as inplementing an energy program is concerned. Congress and the Execr tive should recognize at the outset that the distribution of water among and between these States is already fixed, perhaps immutab so, and any scheme that presupposes a degree of flexibility or latitud. inconsistent with the compacts is doomed to failure.

Additionally, within each of these States the uses to which wate may be applied are deeply rooted in the State constitutions, statutes court decisions, traditions and social values of the regions. Failure to recognize the practical limitations that this places on the flexibility and latitude to utilize water on behalf of energy programs would be a seri ous mistake for the Congress and the administration to make. What I am trying to say. Mr. Chairman, is that you cannot assume that water will be available for the purposes of this legislation simply cause you can travel around these regions and see it there in the stream and reservoirs today.

The specific technology programs set forth in the bill, such as co liquefaction, coal gasification, shale oil extraction, et cetera, are under

stood to require substantial quantities of water, particularly if they are to be utilized in plants of a scale to demonstrate their ability to impact on our energy requirements. I have made no specific analysis of the availability of uncommitted water to support a given demonstration plant for a given technology at a given location but, my general familiarity with water use and availability in the area would lead me to an educated guess. We might, at a price, accumulate enough water to support a demonstration plant or two. This price could involve purchase or condemnation of rights of present users and would certainly involve some expense in regulatory and conveyance hardware. Beyond such demonstrations, assuming their success, I foresee trouble. Utilizing this technology suggests to me numerous large installations if we decide to go for the commercial production of energy equivalent to multiple millions of barrels of petroleum per day. I do not believe the water is available in a physical sense for this kind of operation—if one ignored all legal, economic, and social constraints. This leads me to the central question which one must ask about programs of the character envisioned by H.R. 11857. It is the same question that we asked ourselves about authorizing the construction of a large-scale prototype seawater distillation desalting plant on the west coast a year or two ago. Should we spend large sums to prove that we can do something if all logic and sanity indicates that we can never do it again, at least enough times to recover our original R. & D. investment?

This leads me, Mr. Chairman, to what I hope the subcommittee will consider to be a constructive suggestion. As I said at the outset, I do support the broad underlying purposes of this legislation and I believe the bill can be amended in such a way as to make it supportable in detail as well as in principle.

I have not worked out the specific language of the amendments that would accomplish my objectives but I stand ready to work with the subcommittee, personally or through assignment of staff, to get this job done. In broad terms, I would like to see the legislation require that large-scale prototype demonstration plants, to be funded under its provisions, be conditioned on a two-tiered analysis of the water supply situation. The first tier or phase of the analysis would consist of an assessment of the physical and legal availability of the water supply needed for the demonstration plant per se. Such an analysis must, of course, consider the economics of water production; social impacts of diversion from existing uses, if any; and environmental considerations.

The second tier of the analysis would closely parallel the first except-it would assess water-associated problems expected to be encountered at an appropriate level of commercial application of the full range of technology being considered. The second assessment and its findings are an important input to the decision to go ahead with the R. & D. effort at the demonstration plant scale.

One last point, these assessments should reply on then-existing data and currenty established public institutions. I do not advocate, in any manner whatsoever, the imposition of additional layers of public water study groups. By the same token, western water resources have been inventoried endlessly and continue to be. What we need is man

agement, not new information or research, necessarily, beyond what is already contemplated by existing law in the field of water.

This, Mr. Chairman, constitutes a summary of my thoughts on this particular bill. They are not the totality of my concern with the water-related aspects of the energy question. At the proper time and in the proper forum I hope to speak out on the question of reassessing the role of hydroelectric power in this era of high priced crude oil. I am also a supporter of geothermal power R. & D. and hope that, as we move into this field under the stimulus of the energy crisis, we not lose sight of the water component of the steam and its potential value to serve us. I am also considering ways that our expertise in other programs under our jurisdiction, such as the Office of Saline Water and the Office of Water Resources Research, can be brought to bear on the solution of our energy problems. These are matters for another time and place as they do not seem to fit too well into the format of this legislation.

Mr. Chairman, we tried to bring this matter to the attention of the Congress when the ERDA bill cleared the House of Representatives. We placed a statement in the record at that time, trying to point up a problem that should be resolved. Just as I have stated here today, I think that our service on this Interior Committee since I have been here in Congress, tells us that we have a severe water problem throughout the western part of the United States. If we are going into a largescale development of the coal and shale resources we find in the area that I described, we are certainly going to have to get into the water picture. There is no reason to think that we have a supply of water waiting for these fairly large prototype operations. Even to service the prototypes with their requirements of water is going to be a massive job. Thereafter to develop the coal, to develop the shale deposits into oil, to generate electricity in the immediate area, or some distance from the source of the basic energy, you are going to have to have large amounts of process water as well as cooling water.

So, I think we do have a very real problem. And I just hope that somewhere in this legislation that you are considering that this is recognized. Mr. Casey, who has a long history and background with the water problems of the West, would be willing to work with your staff on amendments to point this up, if and when your good committee marks up this bill, and offers it to the full committee and then to the House. I know the bill will have to be perfected. It will have to be passed by the full House of Representatives. Hopefully we can perfect a good bill and we get the show on the road.

I do appreciate this opportunity to come here. I have not been feeling too good for the last month or two. I hope to be feeling better so that we can put a little more time into some of these problems, if I ever get all of my problems solved physically. We are now willing to answer any questions that any of the members might have concerning the problem that we have tried to address ourselves to.

Mr. UDALL. Well, we are all in your debt, and Mr. Casey's, for calling our attention to this very important problem, and I, for one, hope that the great subcommittee you chair will give us the benefit of its thinking and that you will make a major contribution to the consideration of this important legislation.

I think our foresight and vision and wisdom is really going to be tested here in these next few years, and you put your finger on some of the real points of concern to me. We seem to be rushing headlong into all of these coal conversion techniques. There is a theory around that this is going to be the answer; we are going to gasify coal, and we are going to have huge new plants that turn coal into petroleum. And I see already, just in these 2 days of hearings, two major problems. First, the one you have raised, that even if we have the technology, and even if we can solve the strip mining problems to get the coal, we simply do not have the water to go into these massive coal liquefaction and coal gasification processes that are being bandied about. Second, we raised the question in these hearings, of the Ford energy project, and David Freeman, who worked on that, raised a question about the desirability of a national policy which takes this coal and wastes a third of it. We waste a third of the energy when we convert it to oil or gas, even if we had the water. You would have to ask yourself the question: Is that a desirable policy?

I have a third concern that is related to the one you have raised, and that concerns large-scale oil shale development. The Colorado River, that you know perhaps better than any Member of Congress except for Admiral Hosmer, has been fought over and battled over all of these years more than any water in the world. And if we go into these large-scale oil shale aboveground operations, moving massive amounts of earth, processing this shale in a way that increases the volume and having to go around finding places to put it, then I wonder how those of us down at the end of the Colorado River are going to be making out who have the drainage and the seepage off of these massive oil shale diggings filtering down in a river that is already so salty that the Mexican Government has raised very serious questions with us. So I personally do want to work with you and Mr. Casey as we draft this legislation to make sure that we look ahead on this water situation and that we do not rush into some major programs that we do not have the hydrologic base for, as you have pointed out. I think this is a very valuable piece of testimony, and Î personally

thank you for it.

Mr. Hosmer.

Mr. HOSMER. Well, I want to thank our colleague too, for pointing out a very important problem. And as we know, in the upper Colorado and lower Colorado area, we are allocating not water, but deficits. About the only water that anybody has left up there is in Wyoming. They are probably entitled to use what quantity of it they want. But I wonder, Mr. Johnson, if in your mind, there is a question of whether that water should be permitted to be used for, say, some experimentation, prototype development in liquefaction and areas like that, or whether there is another alternate, higher and better use for it, and that at this time we should require that the higher and better alternate be adopted?

Mr. JOHNSON. I think we all realize the fact that all the readily available water is pretty much spoken for. So we do have to consider the priorities. When we go into a prototype development in these areas, we are going to have to look to a source of water, and the minute we get into that, we get into the States' rights situationwho owns the water? And how do you deal with this, that, and the