Why not just let capitalisim discover the viable processes? Government is terrible at inventing economically viable anything. Reagan did the right thing.
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well, the government funds a lot of basic research into what are initially very expensive, uneconomical processes, eg NASA, which sometimes later turn out to be quite valuable and commercially feasible, eg satellite communications satelites and weather satellites, and spy satellites.
The projects in the early 80's were quite complex, very very expensive, and hard to do. However, if they had continued, we would have had plenty of oil by now, because we were experimenting (my company only) with 7 distinct possibilites.
One of the things the government is supposed to do is provide for our national security. In terms of energy, they certainly haven't, in fact it has been royally screwed up.