Hey, I am all for drilling oil domestically anywhere it is feasable for the driller.
Ethanol has been around my region since the mid 1970’s.
I have watched local coal mines close. I have seen trainloads of coal come in from Wyoming. Recently a power plant in my region was killed by govermentalists who pulled the permission slip.
The Missouri River used to ship bargeloads of grain down to St Louis and then the Gulf. envirowackos think the pallid sturgeon is more important so they regulate the water flow so barges can’t run as often. So a bargeload of corn has to be shipped in 40 semis, on overcrowded highways, burning $5.00 diesel fuel to St Louis. Why waste that kind of energy when the same corn can be trucked 30 miles, and the farmer gets paid the same cost per bushel as he would get in St. Louis? The one thing about ethanol economics that Pimmential never acknowledges is that 90% of the money from the product stays in the local economy. With oil the money kept locally is less than 1% and the rest goes out of the regional economy to foreign places.
The one thing we have is plentiful corn and wide open spaces to plant it. Farmers decided that feeding the World for free wasn’t cutting it anymore. So we make ethanol and use the distillers grain to feed the beef. I haven’t seen any shortages of corn flakes. Ethanol don’t need battleship escorts and 200,000 soldier security forces in foreign countries. Add those costs into the price of oil. And don’t forget about the people who have died fighting to protect our foreign oil supply. To my knowledge, no soldier has made the ultimate sacrifice for ethanol.
On the other hand, we haven’t seen any energy independence from the use of ethanol and it complexifies when the answer is in simplifying. By going to the better gasoline now and then moving swiftly into the better, cheaper, cleaner, smaller refining that we can then use, combined with drilling in the areas we have foolishly forbidden and increasing the production of the total amount of oil in formations, particularly surface formations with processes better than the inefficient, environmentally destructive Stark hot water process used in Canada we can be energy independent in a few years and even be net exporters to crucial allies in Asia. In particular with regard to the mining of all the oil (as opposed to the 33-40 percent we get by conventional pumping and drilling) the government has made a complete mess by engaging in the other great subsidized boondoggle, oil shale. But complexifying and endless large subsidies, even if they create no energy independence, do create endless subsidies, and a built in lobby for not solving the problem.
If we move to the use of E II gasoline immediately we can build small, modular refinery units locally that are far cleaner and cheaper and simpler than present refineries. They can be build right at production locales and also right at consumption points. The technology for them is already being patented by Bill Talbert, the E II inventor and the Korean joint venture technology company that was formed by the Korean oil companies is interested in them since they have already gone into tar sand production here.