Revision Notes

      This second revision incorporates some late-breaking technological developments in the production of ethanol and resurrects some of my original comments regarding a "smart electrical grid" which seem to have gained recent political traction.  Throughout this article I have attempted to prioritize my recommendations to address immediate needs before long-term goals, while keeping those long-term objectives clearly in sight.  I have also tried to maintain a pragmatic grasp of the different imperatives driving our energy considerations.  As I learn of new technologies or initiatives relevant to either short-term or long-term solutions, I will try to keep this article revised to incorporate them.  For the most recent developments, however, you may wish to check out my journal entries on my home page.

      When I first posted this article in June, 2008, the price of oil was well over $120 per barrel and the prices of gasoline and diesel over $4.00 per gallon at the pumps.  By the time I posted my first revision in July, 2008, those prices had risen to over $145 per barrel and over $4.50 per gallon respectively.  While prices seem to have retreated back to June levels, I doubt anyone is foolish enough to believe we will ever again see prices at the pumps below $3.00 per gallon and are more likely to see another surge in prices in the relatively near future.

      Prologue

      In her book "Anne Frank Remembered", Miep Gies describes how the sturdy Dutch bicycles were as much a part of the Dutch cultural identity as any flag.  When the Nazis occupied Holland in WW-II, they made a point of forbidding Jews from owning bicycles as much to isolate them from Dutch society as to hinder any escape.  To BE Dutch is to ride your bike.

      We Americans are like that with our cars.  We are a mobile nation.  It's in our genetic makeup.  Ultimately, all of us came from somewhere else; all immigrants who traveled vast distances and endured many hardships along the way; asking nothing more than a fair shot at the American Dream.  For Americans to feel truly American, a private vehicle on the open road is not just a preference; it is an essential part of who we are.

      Ironic, then, that this very symbol of American freedom, our beloved automobile, should also be the iron shackle that enslaves us to the oiligarchy and the potential vehicle, if you will, of our own economic downfall.  We are the nation which put footprints on the Moon!  Certainly we can solve this crisis.  But where to start?


      A Look at American Oil Consumption

      The first step in any journey is to have a good map showing where you are and where you want to go.  Here, then, is a map of American oil consumption...

-- Approximately 7% of America's total annual oil consumption is used to heat and cool residential & business properties.
-- About 1.75% of America's annual consumption is used for rail freight and rail transport fuel.
-- A little over .75% is used for public transport and short-range official vehicles fuels.
-- About 4.5% is used for construction and farm equipment fuels.
-- Ships and aircraft account for about 9% and 16% respectively, while the petrochemical industry accounts for roughly 12%.

I will address the approximately 4% of our total annual oil consumption to produce electrical power in a later section entitled "A New Kind of Powerplant^*1".  For now, if we tally all the above uses of oil (55%), we are left with 45% - close to half - of our total annual consumption going to private and commercial vehicle fuels.  Now, here's the $64,000 question...

What percentage of America's total annual oil consumption is imported?

Answer: about 65%

      Shocking, isn't it?  Combine the 45% consumed by private and commercial road vehicles with the rail, public vehicle, and farm/construction consumption and nearly ALL our imported oil - 52% of our total annual consumption - is accounted for by ground vehicles of one form or another!  Obviously, then, transport fuels are our most pressing problem.  So, what is the solution to that problem?


      Solving the Short Term Problem

      Unfortunately, There is no "quick fix".  It took the Oiligarchy nearly a century to get us into this mess and even with emergency national programs on a scale with the Manhattan Project or Apollo Program, it's going to take at least a year or two to provide some relief.  To describe, then, the best solutions I see for our short-term needs, I'll begin with two points of information which may initially seem unrelated.

      Point #1:  Currently, there are approximately 250 Million registered vehicles on America's roads today.  Of those 250 Million vehicles, up to 8% are capable of using E85 Flex Fuel or BioDiesel just as they are.  Another 36% are capable of being retrofitted to use E85 or BioDiesel.  That means around 110 Million vehicles on the road RIGHT NOW either can use - or can be converted to use - such fuels.

      Point #2:  According to the latest figures publicly available from the Environmental Protection Agency, America generated nearly 250 Million Tons of municipal solid waste in 2005 alone.  We can safely assume incrementally higher figures for the last three years.

      Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could convert all that garbage from toxic landfills to fuel for our cars?  Well, we CAN; cleanly, efficiently, NOW.  Fulcrum Bio-Energy is building a $120 million facility near Reno, Nevada to transform nearly 90,000 tons per year of municipal solid waste into approximately 10.5 million gallons of ethanol per year.  Other projects are in final development and will be announced in the next year or so.

      The "Plasma Enhanced Melter" process (PEM) at the core of these new plants is a conversion process, NOT an incineration process, which dramatically cuts down on any harmful emissions.  It is also one of several breakthrough technologies directly resulting from the fusion power research of Dr. Dan Cohn of the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center.  Dr. Cohn is one of the co-founders of Integrated Environmental Technologies, LLC, which has licensed the PEM and related technologies to be used in Reno's Sierra BioFuels plant.

      In my original article, as well as in the first revision, I had recommended Congress provide major subsidies and tax incentives to build vertical biomass farms immediately adjacent to a nationwide network of Ethanol and BioDiesel plants; as close to demand as possible to cut transport costs.  While I continue to support building vertical farms near urban centers for BioDiesel and food production, there now seems little need for biomass to convert to ethanol when millions of tons of garbage are just sitting there waiting to be "harvested".

      For our IMMEDIATE gasoline crisis, it seems logical for our Congress to provide major subsidies and tax incentives to companies like Fulcrum Bio-Energy to build PEM conversion plants, while also providing incentives to build vertical biomass farms and BioDiesel plants.  It also seems logical for our Congress to provide the same sort of legislative stimulus given to Hummer owners, to assist car and truck owners to retrofit existing vehicles for E85 FlexFuel and BioDiesel, or to purchase new FlexFuel and BioDiesel vehicles over the next two years.  I'll explain the need for that two year sunset provision shortly.

      Several people have emailed me recently to ask why I seem so gung-ho about FlexFuel and BioDiesel when Natural Gas produces significantly less greenhouse gases and Hydrogen fuel cells no greenhouse gases at all. This is a fair question which would be difficult to answer if environmental impact was the sole consideration in what, I will reiterate, is a short-term solution.  There are economic factors involved as well which cannot be ignored if the solution is to be successful.

      Any short-term solution to our vehicle fuels crisis should have, as a key criterion for consideration, extant and ubiquitous distribution infrastructures to allow for rapid adoption.  Generally, short-term solutions should be viewed as transitional or "bridge" solutions which will eventually be replaced by more permanent or at least long-term solutions.  In that context, it would be difficult for both distributors and consumers of vehicle fuels, to justify the expenses involved in retrofitting millions of vehicles and tens of thousands of stations to support Natural Gas or Hydrogen fuels when - in the long run - they are as intrinsically obsolete as even FlexFuel and BioDiesel will eventually become.  For now, there are significant numbers of FlexFuel and BioDiesel vehicles already in service as well as a large and growing nationwide network of fueling stations for vehicles designed (or retrofitted) for those fuels.

      As much as I loathe agreeing with T. Boone Pickens - a kingpin of the energy cartel - on anything, I have to acknowledge that the natural gas elements of his "Pickens Plan" can contribute to easing our short-term fuel needs (if predominantly for fleet vehicles and long-haul trucking).  Again, the economics of conversion just don't add up for private vehicle owners or station operators, but they are favorable for companies providing natural gas fueling hubs, owned and operated by those same companies to fuel their own fleets of trucks, cars, or equipment.

      The same economics would apply to Hydrogen fuel-cell conversions.  If you've visited some of the links provided above for the "PEM", you know that this technology can produce Hydrogen from solid waste just as easily as Ethanol; perhaps easier.  However, as a SHORT-TERM solution to our immediate vehicle fuel crisis, Hydrogen, like natural gas, makes sense only for companies which can recover the conversion costs of vehicles and centralized fueling hubs over time.

      While some additional incentives may be appropriate for both natural gas and hydrogen fuel-cell conversions, existing incentives already provide compelling economic justification for fleet vehicle and equipment companies to make such conversions.  The greatest short-term "bang for the buck" will be in offering private vehicle owners, individual station operators, and FlexFuel/BioDiesel producers significant incentives to rapidly expand adoption of those alternative fuels over the next two years.  Again, I've specified a two year sunset.  Why?


      Part One of the Long-Term Solution: A New Kind of Car

      Two years from now, a truly 21^st Century, mass production car will be rolling off the General Motors assembly lines and into showrooms across America.  The Chevy "Volt" will be fast, clean, quiet, and (if our government does things right), priced to move.  I'm not making a sales pitch for GM here.  GM is, after all, the company which brought us the Hummer and has consistently demonstrated an almost pathological resistance to innovation.  Which only makes the Volt that much more amazing.  The car is pure innovation.

      What makes GM's car unique is that unlike most current gas/electric hybrids, the Volt's gas engine is not directly connected to the powertrain (transmission, drive-shaft, axles, wheels).  The small, FlexFuel (E85) engine is little more than a generator to replenish the batteries when driving beyond the base 40 mile range of a full charge.  This engine gives the car a total range of a little over 400 miles on a full battery charge and a full fuel tank of about 6-7 gallons.  GM engineers are also looking at an equally small BioDiesel engine as an option.

      While the Volt and similar plug-in hybrids won't allow us to break completely free of oil as a transport fuel, over a five to ten year period, we could see a reduction of that 45% of total annual consumption to something more like 18%.  With E85 FlexFuel and BioDiesel becoming more prevalent, that figure might fall even further to around 11-13% of total consumption.

      Obviously, as such primarily electric or fully electric vehicles become more prevalent, they will impose ever increasing demands on our aging electrical grid.  You may be wondering at this point what efforts may be necessary to accomodate those vehicles.  You're not alone.


      Part Two of the Long-Term Solution: A New Kind of Power Grid

      Again, General Motors is amazingly out in front on this question.  Joel Makower, writing for Greenbiz.com, describes a series of meetings between GM and 30 members of the Electric Power Research Institute.  While the question of capactity was obviously central to those meetings, they also addressed such issues as standardized connections, smart charging, mobile billing, and myriad other details.

      Converting our nation's ground transportation from primarily internal combustion driven to electrically driven is going to require a LOT of electricity; many TeraWatts of electricity.  We will need a system that can readily handle a 30% increase in load within five years, with a flexible enough architecture to handle a 60-70% increase within 15 years.

      One of the major shortcomings of electricity as a power source is its transient nature.  Fossil fuels and radioactive materials can be stored for long periods of time and lose little of their potential energy.  Electricity, once generated, must often be used immediately, or just go to waste.  Today's battery technologies can sequester some of that energy for later use, but most batteries are still quite expensive and require time to charge; time which simply may not be sufficient to effectively capture short spikes of excess power.  A key element, therefore, of an advanced electrical grid would be an economic means of RAPIDLY STORING large amounts of excess energy whenever and for however short a duration such peaks may occur.

      Once more, I diverge from my original suggestion of building UltraCapacitor "farms" at locations throughout the nation close to high-demand centers such as industrial parks, steel mills, etc. as a solution to the electrical storage issue.  I still believe that SuperCapacitors and UltraCapacitors hold great promise in solving that problem.  Unlike batteries, "SuperCaps" and "UltraCaps" pose significantly less threat to our environment, last longer, charge and discharge faster, and can actually provide much higher power densities.  Batteries, however, can provide the sort of deep-storage capacity yet to be realized with capacitors.

      Consider, then, a growing population of plug-in electric and electric hybrid vehicles combining the best qualities of ultracaps and batteries into a new sort of energy storage medium?  Plug those millions of vehicles into a truly smart electrical grid and you have the equivalent energy storage capacity of my original UltraCap farms suggestion, without needing to build those farms.

      Efficient and intelligent delivery of huge amounts of electricity is one thing... generating it is another.  Windmills and solar arrays are rapidly evolving as viable sources of energy, but our nation would literally need to be carpeted from coast to coast with windmills and solar arrays to generate the industrial levels of power required by a 21^st Century Nation.


      Short-Term Solutions to Our Electrical Energy Needs

      So, where do we currently get our industrial levels of electrical energy from?  2005 data at the Edison Electric Institute tells us:

-- 49.7% of our nation's electricity was generated from coal.
-- Nuclear FISSION reactors (I'll clarify that distinction shortly) produced 19.3%.
-- Natural gas supplied 18.7%.
-- Hydropower provided 6.5% of the supply.
-- Fuel Oil accounted for 3.0% of our electrical power.
-- Biomass produced 1.6% while other renewable resources, such as geothermal, solar, and wind, provided the remaining 1.2% of the supply.

      As a short-term solution to both a growing electricity demand and reduction of our fuel oil consumption for power production from 3% to 0%, I see little choice but to expand both coal-fired and nuclear fission production.  For the long haul, however, these are not solutions.  They are suicide.

      Coal, while relatively abundant, is an environmental nightmare; regardless of the spin energy lobbyists put on "the clean coal initiative".  It's extraction devastates our land, as its use devastates our air and water.  If global warming has a poster-child, it's coal.

      The "nuclear option", at present, means building new fission reactors at an alarmingly breakneck pace.  Alarming, because such reactors cannot have ANY mistakes.  Even if such plants are built quickly, with zero defects, and in quantities sufficient to match demand, let me just mention the year 9500 AD.  That's 7,500 years from now; a period of time FAR longer than recorded human history.  It is also the amount of time necessary for the TONS of spent fuel rods and other radioactive waste from fission powerplants to cease being LETHALLY radioactive.

      Think for a moment how much has happened in the last 7,500 years and you'll get some sense of the collosal hubris of our government assuring us they can safeguard this stuff at Yucca Flats for that long.  7,500 years ago, simple agriculture was just getting started in the Nile valley and along the Euphrates.  Ancient Sumer had yet to exist and the pyramids were still about 2,400 years in the future!  Now here's the kicker... 7,500 years is a CONSERVATIVE estimate on the deadliness of this stuff.  Depending on storage density and quantity, the real figure could be in excess of 10,000 years!

      So, if coal and nuclear fission are both - quite literally - dead ends for America, what IS the long-term solution?


      Part Three of the Long-Term Solution: A New Kind of Powerplant^*1

      Nuclear FUSION Power harnesses the reaction that takes place in our sun to generate energy.  A fusion reaction "fuses" atoms of lighter elements like Hydrogen into atoms of heavier elements like Helium.  Fusion reactions can only occur in an environment of unimaginable heat and pressure; a superhot, superdense, stew known as a "plasma".  This plasma can be used to bombard a surrounding jacket of lithium with neutrons to, in turn, heat water to drive steam turbines, or might be passed through a magnetic harness to generate electricity directly.

      Existing nuclear FISSION reactors are more like the original atomic bomb.  They rely on the "fission" (or splitting) of extremely heavy elements like uranium with many-layered shells of electrons (much like the layers of an onion).  When placed in close proximity to each other, atoms of such elements bang their outer electron shells together and some of the electrons are knocked free.  These in turn bang into other shells, knocking more electrons free.  With each collision, radiation and heat are generated, making the unstable atoms even more unstable.  This is known as a "chain-reaction".

      Fission reactors use a controlled chain-reaction with fuel rods of such elements just close enough together to sustain a low-level reaction, but not so close as to create a "critical mass" and allow a runaway reaction to take place.  The heat generated by this controlled chain-reaction is absorbed by a surrounding jacket of water and the resulting steam is used to drive turbines to generate electricity.

      Current fission powerplants must employ active measures to cool and keep fuel rods apart to avoid a runaway chain reaction.  Fusion powerplants, by contrast, would need to employ active measures to sustain the dense, hot, fusion plasma.  If controls in a current fission powerplant are accidently (or intentionally) disabled, a meltdown or even explosion could occur.  If controls were disabled in a fusion powerplant, the reaction would simply stop.

      In both types of powerplants, high levels of radiation are produced while in operation, but once the reaction ends in a fusion plant, those high levels rapidly dissipate and the only by-product of that reaction is Helium; a gas we use in party balloons and to make our voices sound like chipmunks.  As detailed earlier, our current fission powerplants produce waste by-products which remain deadly for a time longer than recorded Human history and which have National Security implications beyond simply safeguarding this material for public health reasons.  Those National Security concerns come in the form of transuranics; a class of highly unstable radioactive isotopes which include, among other goodies, Plutonium.

      Considering all the benefits of nuclear fusion power over conventional fission power, you may wonder why we still don't have a viable fusion powerplant?  Certainly, the technological challenges are daunting, but as you can see from the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) and Lawrence Livermore Lab's National Ignition Facility (NIF), progress is being made.  To understand why we're being told it will take 30 years or more, you need only scroll up to the previous chapter and read off the top three providers of electrical power today.


      Epilogue

      Energy is at the core of every major issue facing America today.  Our economy, our security, our environment, our way of life, ALL depend on the choices we make as a people and our resolve to see those choices through the minefield of vested interests opposing us.  In 1961, our President challenged us to dream the impossible; to put Americans on the Moon and return those daring souls safely back to Earth and to do so within a decade.  Well, we DID it!  In the process, the Lunar Program spawned thousands of new American industries; generating many tens of thousands of good-paying American jobs.  I see a comprehensive national energy program stimulating similar innovation, industry, and meaningful employment.

      Regarding American security, the equation couldn't be simpler:  American dependence on foreign oil = American dollars paying for that oil = those dollars funneled to terrorists = those terrorists buying weapons to kill Americans.  Our greatest security, as well as the solutions to our energy predicament, will NOT be found in "Gas Tax Holiday" sound-bites, nor in the energy cartels propaganda exhorting us to let them drill more holes in America.  As detailed above, our solutions must embrace fundamental shifts in how we generate, store, and use energy.  Our greatest energy resource is not what lies beneath our feet, but what lies between our ears and the sooner we apply that resource to wean ourselves off of foreign oil, the safer and more prosperous our nation will be.

      We have the technology and the American ingenuity to start NOW.  All we lack is the political leadership and in this election year, that is TOTALLY up to US. We can let our Senators and Representatives know THEIR lives and their livelihoods are on the line along with ours, or we can just fade into the history books with a whimper in the dark.

      Few of the proposals I've made are wasteful.  Vertical farms can gradually be retasked for urban food production as electric vehicles become more ubiquitous.  Ethanol plants can be profitably employed for a wide variety of alternative applications.  As for BioDiesel plants, who doesn't like fried foods?  Even contemporary oil refineries will continue to be essential to the petrochemicals we rely on in innumerable ways.  The ONLY elements with intrinsic obsolescence are the coal and nuclear fission powerplants.

      Fusion powerplants may be down the road a bit, but when they're available, they will dovetail perfectly into a 21^st Century power infrastructure.  I believe we can make fusion power a reality within a decade, but even if it takes 30 years of lobbyist-sponsored foot dragging, fusion power IS coming.  The European Union, Russia, South Korea, Japan, India, and China are are all aggresively funding fusion research.  If we are to remain a 21^st Century nation, we dare do nothing less.