The Third Challenge: Creating a Coastal States Energy Sector
by George Sterzinger (Renewable Energy Policy Project/Dissent Magazine) …Advanced biofuels in particular have the potential to change the coastal economies for the better. In 2005 and in 2007 Congress committed to providing 20 percent of transportation fuels, or 36 billion gallons per year, from advanced biofuels by 2022. These fuels are produced from cellulose, the backbone of plants found in everything from straw to algae to wood chips. Because they are completely domestic, their production increases energy security. Of equal importance, they emit no CO2.
The Gulf states have some of the best biomass resources in the country: wood, sugar cane waste, and rice hulls. Gulf residents have underutilized these resources, but with the right technologies, they could turn these substances into billions of gallons of advanced biofuels. Their production would create jobs by increasing demand for harvesting feedstock, plant construction, the ongoing operation and maintenance of plants, and scientific research to continually advance the technologies that produce these fuels.
…It could work for the coastal states as a kind of twenty-first century Tennessee Valley Authority. The federal government could form a regional development group with the mission of leveraging the best private technologies to bring advanced biofuels to a reliable, cost-effective production in the region. This group would posses a portfolio of valuable assets it could use to engage the best of private industry and innovation in the field. The development group would pursue and fund a roadmap of innovation and development to scale up production and drive down costs of the best technologies. A combination of BP penalties and direct federal appropriation at $1 billion per year for five years could fund this effort.
This is not a research project. This is a systematic effort to buy-down the cost of innovation and make new, breakthrough technologies commercially viable. READ MORE and MORE
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