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The War on Terror: The Energy Front
By James WoolseyThe following speech was given as part of Restoration Weekend 2006, at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix, Feb. 23-26, 2006 -- The Editors. Key points at end of speech: Now, what might one do? The President has, over the course of the last week or two, been mentioning two alternatives time and again and I think hes right on those. The only thing I would say is that I think he is focused entirely on research and development and these are fields in which the Wright Brothers have already flown. What we really need is not so much invention, but some type of encouragement one way or another to have things move into the market quickly. One possibility is cellulosic ethanol. The word cellulosic is important because it means making ethanol not from corn, which has to be cultivated and fertilized and is expensive to grow and so forth. But rather, as the President mentioned, from things such as switch grass, which is a variety of prairie grass. Or, for that matter, kudzu or corn cobs or any other waste agricultural products. Whats new is that people have now succeeded in inventing genetically modified microorganisms that can take the place of the enzymes that break cellulose down in cows stomachs every day and turn it into sugar that the cows live on. Its doing that with genetically modified biocatalysts and fermenting the different types of sugar there with genetically modified yeast. That is now being done commercially by a company called Iogen in Canada with Shell Oil backing it. It does not need to be invented. It needs help to be moved promptly into the marketplace into E8585% ethanol. But it does not need to be invented. The same is true of the other way to use inexpensive fuels that the Presidents been talking about, which is plug-in hybrids. A plug-in hybrid is a hybrid electric vehicle which, of course, goes back and forth between electric power and gasoline, while the batterys being charged by the deceleration and by the use of the gasoline motor. My Prius gets about 50 miles to the gallon: a little worse on the road, a little better in town. It likes start/stop driving. Hybrid gasoline electrics are fine, but what is really interesting is if you can increase the capacity of the battery by about a factor of 6, and today thats about a $6-7,000 cost, but it ought to be less as time goes on and batteries get cheaper. But if you increase the capacity of the battery, lets say, in a Prius by a factor of 6, plug it in overnight, top it up fully and then drive for 20-25 miles as an electric car on your overnight power before the hybrid back-and-forth feature cuts in, you turn that 50-mile-a-gallon Prius into about a 125-mile gallon of petroleum-based fuel Prius. By the way, in most of the country, the average cost of off-peak nighttime electric power is 2-4 cents a kilowatt hour which is the rough equivalent of 25-50 cent a gallon gasoline. So if you have two cars, one kind of stays around the neighborhood and drives less than 25 miles a day, while the other maybe goes on long commutes. The one that goes on long commutes will be getting about a 125 miles per gallon of petroleum as it goes. The one that goes around the neighborhood and around town may go to the gasoline station once every six months or so because its running on off-peak overnight power the rest of the time. Again, the Wright Brothers have already flown. This has been invented. Its being assembled in kits to modify cars in California beginning next month. People will lose some of their warranties and different car companies are wringing their hands and theres much Sturm und Drang. But it is not something that needs to be invented. If you have 125-mile-per-gallon, because its a plug-in hybrid car and it is running on 85 percent ethanol and only 15 percent gasoline, you have something in the ballpark of a 500-mile-per-gallon car with existing technology. You want to get the Wahhabis attention, thats the way to do it. Thank you. Posted by: ed 2006-05-02 |
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