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January 24, 2007
SOTU energy reaction round-up
It would be hard to add anything to the flurry of criticisms President Bush is receiving for his unrealistic renewable and alternative fuels mandate launched in last night’s State of the Union address—even the Sierra Club’s Carl Pope is calling Twenty in Ten “magic wand stuff.”
Some common themes in the reaction to the SOTU today include comments aboutbeaming Iowans and speculation in Archer Daniels Midland stock; reading of fine print that revealed inclusion of “alternative fuels” in the mandate opens up the possibility of increased coal-to-liquids fuels and “reducing U.S. gasoline usage by 20 percent in the next 10 years” really meant 20 percent over projected, not current, gasoline use (or in other words, replacing part of the growth in gasoline use with alternative fuels); inherent contradictions between higher ethanol use and higher fuel economy; and numerous valid concerns about the environmental costs of a “corn-on-corn” energy policy.
Two things I haven’t heard much mention of:
First, the American Petroleum Institute reported this week that U.S. oil consumption and imports declined slightly in 2006, partly in response to a milder winter, higher prices, and jet fuel conservation. International Energy Agency also reported that oil consumption among OECD nations fell in 2006 for the first time in 20 years.
Secondly, the President who put switchgrass on the public radar in 2006 didn’t liven this year’s speech up with the words “biomass gasification,” but maybe he should have. Vinod Khosla of Sun Microsystems, who promoted California’s Prop. 87 gas tax and the President’s “Twenty in Ten” fuels mandate, is invested in biomass gasification through his new company, Kergy Inc. Biomass gasification is significantly different than cellulosic or grain ethanol production—beginning with the fact that capital investment costs are many times either petroleum or ethanol costs. Natural gas and coal are actually cheaper feedstocks for gasification, and the technology is hardly new: the U.S. has spent many billions of dollars on the Synthetic Liquid Fuels Program through the 1980s and, more recently, on the synfuel tax credit (supposed to expire this year), and other gasification projects. It’s not a confidence-inspiring track record, to put it lightly.
Reason's ethanol and related energy research is here.
Posted by skaidra at January 24, 2007 01:48 PM
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