Former CIA Director James Woolsey on Refueling our Vehicles

Agree!!!!!!

I guess every little bit helps. But, didn’t President Bush blessed and put into the new energy law a couple of years ago on having corn based ethanol based flex cars? The problems is that corn based ethanol is three times less efficient (and therefore more expensive) than Brazil’s sugarcane based ethanol, because the corn plant contains much less sugar than the sugarcane plant. Only the corn nuggets can be used, which are a very small part of the corn plant, while the whole of the sugarcane plant has sugar. Brazil is using 50 percent sugarcane ethanol mixed with 50 percent gasoline. Brazil also expanded greatly their domestic offshore oil production to become self sufficient using a combination of domestically grown sugarcane based ethanol, and of domestically produced oil. Ethanol produces more water than gasoline shortening the life of engines and pipes of cars when used in high concentrations. Since corn based ethanol is too expensive (specially without government subsides,) there was a proposal to grow sugarcane at the most southern states of the US with the proper warm and wet climate. It is uncertain whether growing sugarcane on a massive scale is practical in the US.

What the video proposes seem more national defense oriented for the situation when foreign oil importing (specially from the Middle East, or from South America) is disrupted due to international politics or war. However, most US imported oil comes from Canada, Mexico, and Venezuela with about just less than a million barrels imported from Saudi Arabia. Canada has a lot of oil both in conventional oil fields, tar sands, and shale oil that can be extracted with the new frac/horizontal drilling technology. Its conventional oil fields are probably past peak production. Tar sand and frac/horizontal none conventional oil is somewhat more expensive than most OPEC oil to produce. Canada is relatively closed to Asia, so that they may decide to sell to Asia rather than to the US if the Asians decides to bit more for the Canadian oil. Existing Mexican oil field productions are depleting at a rapid pace. Venezuela is unfriendly to US oil interests, although it still needs to sell its oil to the US for the immediate future. Thus, the plan in the article seems to be protecting the cutoff of the million barrel/day Saudi oil import.

The most effective ways to eliminate importing of oil are probably:

(1) Laws for very high gasoline milage cars and SUV’s,

This will force the car manufacturers to produce cars that uses much less oil by either down sizing, using light weight steel and composites, even more efficient engines, transmissions, tires, and car profiles, flex fuel, electric cars, and other novel mechanisms like acceleration boosters. Without such a law, there is low incentive for car designers to make drastic improvements to fuel efficiency. Most CEO’s of major car manufacturing companies are marketing salesman rather than engineers, and they place fuel efficiency at the highest priority unless forced to by law.

(2) Convert all oil heating of buildings and houses to natural gas (including shale-natural-gas from frac/horizontal drilling) with government low to no interest loans,

Interest free loans to convert home oil heating to natural gas can be paid back from a percentage of savings over time.

(3) Possibly growing sugarcane on a massive scale in southern US,

Brazil is very successful using 50 percent sugarcane ethanol to get off of importing oil, because sugarcane ethanol is economically practicable. It is uncertain whether the US can grow sugarcane on a massive scale at a low price.

(4) R/D to massively lower the cost of frac/horizontal drilling technology,

The beauty of shale oil is that the shale layer is massive and essentially everywhere in the shale oil region, rather than convention oil that only exists in relatively small and scattered “concentration” pools formed by the underground rock formations. Thus, it is almost a hundred percent sure that a drill will “hit” oil (in the shale oil layer) versus a lot of “dry” holes in conventional oil drilling. The down side is that shale oil is not concentrated in huge “pools,” and it takes about six million dollars to drill a single frac/horizontal oil well that produces 300 to 2000 barrels of oil per day (for the first year.) A conventional oil well cost less as it does not have the mile long horizontal extension that needs up to 20 stages of frac, and a conventional well can produce 6,000 to 30,000 barrels per day if a large oil pool is struck. Thus, there needs to be many times more expensive frac/horizontal wells to be drilled to produce the equivalent amount of oil by conventional drilling. It is estimated that current frac/horizontal drilling technology only get about no more than 3 percent of the oil from the underground oil-shale layers. Thus, there is a need to do R/D (with government support) do lower the cost of frac/horizontal drilling, and to increase the percentage of oil extraction for the oil-shale using , for example, robotic drills, spider web coverage, improved and cheaper frac methods.

(5) Build electric charging “on the fly” systems on major highways to recharge electric cars that are in motion using overhead electric lines, or buried under the roadway electric power rails.

People are talking about flex fuels so they can keep driving gas guzzlers as always . We are scatterbrains when it comes to energy issues.. with everyone pulling in all directions!! Some of the directions are ignored because it is simply free … People are doing all they can to make money without any care about solving the real energy problems.. like shortages.. People are offering up red herrings to keep us from really solving any problems…