STOP FUNDING EVIL:

Obama’s Fake Energy Policy: Flex fuel is the solution to our reliance on foreign oil. (Robert Zubrin, 4/18/11, National Review)

This wrecking operation on our economy is being perpetuated by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), a cartel of tyrannies and kleptocracies largely hostile or indifferent to the prosperity of the industrialized West. This cartel, which controls 80 percent of the world’s commercially viable oil reserves, is currently limiting its production to 1973 levels — despite a doubling of the size of the world economy in the nearly four decades since. As a result, we and our allies are having our economies looted as oil prices go through the roof, with even worse consequences falling upon the world’s poorest. An oil impost that causes depression in the advanced world can cause starvation in the Third World.

We need to break free of the extortions of this cartel. The only way to do that is to enable our economy to run on low-cost fuels whose production does not depend on resources under OPEC’s control.

Fortunately, such a fuel is available. It’s called methanol, or wood alcohol. It’s a major chemical commodity that can currently be produced in quantity from natural gas, coal, recycled garbage, or any kind of biomass without exception. The cost of production of methanol is about $0.60 per gallon, and its current spot price is $1.20 per gallon, without any subsidy — equivalent in miles per dollar to gasoline at $2.18 per gallon. While not drinkable like ethanol, methanol lacks the carcinogens contained in gasoline, burns cleaner, and is safer to handle — in fact, windshield-wiper fluid is one-third methanol. It is also less likely to cause a dangerous fire in the event of a crash. In short, methanol is cheap, clean, safe, and readily producible from resources that are widely available both here and around the world.

The only problem is that the cars on the road today can’t use it. But this can be readily fixed.

Flex-fuel vehicles can be now be made, at an incremental cost of only about $100 per car, that can run equally well on methanol, ethanol, or gasoline, in any combination, thereby giving the consumer complete fuel choice.

Were Congress to pass a law requiring that all new cars sold in the U.S. be fully flex fueled, it would change not merely the American auto fleet, but the global auto fleet, as foreign car makers would be compelled to switch their lines over to meet the standard. Thus Japanese cars sold in Japan, China, and India would also be flex fueled, as would Korean and European cars marketed worldwide. If we make flex fuel the American standard, it will become the effectively the international standard.

MORE:
Energy Victory by Robert Zubrin

Posted by oj at April 18, 2011 4:30 PM
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