Advanced BioFuels USA

by Mike Carr (The Hill/New Energy America)  … In fact, he (oil tycoon Harold Hamm) significantly undercounted the depth of the U.S. Government support for the breakthrough technologies of directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing. In addition to the incentives for private sector risk taking, DOE’s national labs had spent many years and millions of dollars to get to the point where the private sector could even begin to make money. That’s the way it’s supposed to work — the government helps take the risk early on and then shapes the market to deliver benefits to society. What Hamm misses is that America’s energy goals have changed over time. It’s not 1976. We now have the technology to deliver energy security and economic growth without compromising the world our children inherit. 

To hear the politicians aligned with the oil industry, advocates for renewables and the Green New Deal want to pull the plug on the fossil fuel party just when it’s getting going. They make it sound like they’ve just discovered vast new reserves that can finally deliver the “American energy dominance” we’ve craved since the humiliating energy crunch of the 1970s when OPEC turned off the flow and we saw how dependent we really were on hostile foreign powers. But the crisis we face today isn’t one of gasoline shortages. Today, we know the rising accumulation of CO2 threatens the planet. 

A few facts: We currently consume 12 million barrels of oil in the U.S. every day. That’s about eight Exxon Valdez supertankers every single day consumed and turned into miles traveled and products made. The transportation sector alone sees about 5 million metric tons (yes, tons of air) of heat-trapping CO2 added to our atmosphere each day that was previously locked away underground by plants and animals millions of years ago.

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When it comes to oil, that means figuring out a way to not only replace the half a barrel of oil that becomes gasoline. But we will also need to replace the products we’ve learned to make from crude oil — which make up the other half of our nation’s oil consumption.

This is where government R&D becomes a huge factor …. 

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Replacing gasoline with low carbon biofuels is important. But replacing petroleum with bio-based products for bio-plastics, bio-based chemicals, and non-gasoline fuels is also a critical step in solving climate change.  READ MORE

GREEN NEW SENSE OF URGENCY: (Politico’s Morning Energy)

Excerpts from Politico’s Morning Energy: GREEN NEW SENSE OF URGENCY: Democratic candidate for president and former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper supports the Green New Deal … in spirit. “I support the urgency of the Green New Deal,” he said Thursday. “I have come down on the side that more of a sense of urgency is required.” But that’s not to say he agrees with the timeframe laid out in the resolution, which calls for a 10-year push to decarbonize the economy. “Obviously, it’s very, very ambitious, maybe an excessively ambitious, goal. The point of this is the sense of urgency. We’ve got to go hard and fast, it’s going to take all the tools in the tool kit to get to a cleaner environment.”  READ MORE