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Victory via fuel choice
Hat tip InstapunditBy Frank J. Gaffney Jr. - The last days of this session of Congress will feature, among other legislative spectacles, an effort to thrash out a bill that purports, at long last, to address what is arguably our nation's most serious single problem: energy insecurity. Unfortunately, the product seems certain to be more of a grab-bag promoting favors for special interests and pet-rocks of senior lawmakers (many of which have nothing to do with reducing our consumption of petroleum imported from unfriendly places) than a program for quickly and cost-effectively ending the main source of that insecurity, namely our addiction to oil from dangerous places. This is all the more astounding and outrageous since an option for doing just that is at hand. Call it "fuel choice." In a terrific new book titled "Energy Victory: Winning the War on Terror by Breaking Free of Oil," Robert Zubrin describes how a simple congressional directive requiring that every car sold in America be a "Flexible Fuel Vehicle" could rapidly transform our current, intolerable dependence on oil from unreliable sources. Since there are already 6 million of these FFVs on America's highways, there is no technological impediment to making this happen. Since the Big 3 U.S. auto manufacturers have already pledged to make half their models FFVs by 2012, the question is simply, could we do that and more faster? According to Mr. Zubrin, a renowned engineer and widely published author, the pacing item is official certification of the roughly 150 engines on offer to the car-buying public I guess he means types/makes of engines once equipped with sensors that allow them to burn ethanol (from a variety of vegetation, not just corn), methanol (from coal, natural gas, trash or biomass) and/or gasoline. It costs about $1 million to certify each engine. While $150 million sounds like a lot, Mr. Zubrin notes that we pay as much for imported oil in three hours. If every car sold in America were a Flexible Fuel Vehicle, within three years, 50 million cars here would be able to run on alcohol instead of gasoline. Perhaps another 100 million to 150 million such cars sold elsewhere would have that option. With that sort of potential demand, at current prices for gasoline (nearly $3 per gallon), ethanol (at comparable energy values as much as $2.25 per gallon) and methanol (at comparable energy density, $1.70 per gallon), the free market would provide these (and perhaps other) alternative fuels in large quantities. Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2008-01-02 |
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