BY PATRICK GUINANE, Times of Northwest Indiana
pguinane@nwitimes.com
WEST LAFAYETTE | From biofuels to clean coal and more efficient cars, the nation must work swiftly to patch together a range of solutions to meet American's growing energy needs, researchers, industry executives and lawmakers said Tuesday at Purdue University's Energy Security Summit
Unfortunately, despite the terrorist attacks of 2001, conflicts in the Middle East, destructive hurricanes at home and gas prices hovering around $3 a gallon, the country still hasn't agreed upon a comprehensive energy policy, U.S. Sen. Dick Lugar, R-Ind., complained to the packed auditorium
"This leads one to the sobering conclusion that a disaster capable of sufficiently energizing public opinion and our political structures will have to be something worse than the collective maladies I just mentioned -- perhaps extreme enough to push the price of oil to triple digits and set in motion a worldwide economic downturn," said Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "None of us want to experience this or any of the nightmare scenarios that await us. It is time to summon the political will to overcome the energy stalemate."
Lugar laid out steps to move the country toward energy independence, including:
* Requiring that almost every new car is capable of running on E85 (85 percent ethanol/15 percent gasoline
* Ensuring that at least 25 percent of the nation's filling stations sell E85 (currently only about 900 of 170,000 sell E85)
* Requiring that all gasoline nationwide be blended with at least 10 percent ethanol (Illinois recently passed such a law)
* Clearing bureaucratic hurdles for clean-coal technology and cellulosic ethanol -- which uses crop waste, switch grass, etc., instead of corn and soybeans.
Gov. Mitch Daniels, one of several lawmakers to attend the summit, announced the state will shift its economic strategy toward cellulosic ethanol production. In Daniels' first two years, the state used $50 million in economic incentives to spur construction of a dozen corn-based ethanol plants that are expected to produce 1.3 billion gallons of the fuel each year.
Lugar said the U.S. Department of Energy thus far has stymied cellulosic ethanol investment with bureaucratic entanglements, but he is optimistic that will change. Purdue researchers, meanwhile, are studying ways to break down corns stalks and other non-feed stocks for use in energy production.
Michael Ladisch, Purdue professor of agricultural and biological engineering, said the university is using genomics and microbiology to engineer corn varieties that produce the most energy with the least amount of costly inputs, including fertilizer and pesticide.
Ari Geertsema, a professor at the University of Kentucky's Center for Applied Science, said similar promise can be found in coal liquefication, a technology that holds promise for the high-sulfur coal that rests beneath southern Illinois and southwestern Indiana. The technology, which separates harmful carbon dioxide emissions but requires a permanent storage space for the gas -- such as underground mines, can be used to produce diesel fuel. Indiana also is partnering with Illinois in the hopes of landing a similar federally funded project known as FuturGen, which would gasify coal to produce electricity.
Researchers seem to agree that there is a market for all these myriad technologies, especially given that the country now imports 60 percent of its oil. The United States consumes more energy and more energy per-capita than any other nation and researchers suggest that, by 2030 and perhaps before, the world market no longer will be able to support American energy needs.
What's more, research suggest that the U.S. spends $300 million a year on military and other support for foreign oil interests. That, says Wallace Tyner, a Purdue agricultural economics professor, adds up to a cost of at least $1.70 per gallon that American don't see posted on the pump.