> HOME > GREEN
Obama's Choice to Head U.S. Department of Energy Is a Big Proponent of Biofuels
By SCOTT DOGGETT December 11, 2008
Comments (0)
By John O'Dell and Scott Doggett
Steven Chu, President-elect Barack Obama's choice to head the Energy Department, has been a strong advocate of alternative fuels and a vociferous opponent of fossil fuels -- foreign oil in particular -- for years.
Most recently, the scientific interests of the 60-year-old Nobel laureate and director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have centered on energy and finding ways to replace fossil fuels with other energy sources such as biofuels from plants.
But Chu seems to be at odds with Obama on the role of corn-based ethanol in America's future. The domestic ethanol industry had a huge friend in Obama for most of the past year, while Chu has never been a friend to corn-ethanol producers.
On a segment on PBS' The News Hour last year, Chu said "corn, at best, is a transition crop, but very quickly we want to transition away from corn to a grass that requires far less land for the amount of fuel, far less fertilizer, far less water."
Chu sees tremendous promise in other biofuels, particularly biofuels that would propel automobiles. In an interview with an Australian radio personality last year, he said transportation fuel is the most valuable form of energy we have -- even when that fuel is electricity.
"If you had an electric plug-in hybrid, how much would it cost to plug that car in and run around for 100 miles? It's something at the level of one-quarter the cost of filling up with gasoline," he said, which makes electric-powered cars sound much more economical than gas-powered.
But, he said, "electricity is pretty expensive compared to natural gas. If you heat your home with electricity versus natural gas ... well, you shouldn't be heating your home with electricity because there's a factor of two or three difference.
"And so you go down this pecking order and you realize that putting energy into a gas tank is very costly, and in fact the United States in 2005 spent roughly $250 billion importing fossil fuel into the United States. Let me put that into perspective: We had a deficit of $750 billion, it's a huge deficit, and if you compare that to the deficit it's one-third. So the need to get an alternate supply of transportation fuel is very pressing."
That's where biofuels come in.
"Somewhere between one-third of all gasoline to all of all gasoline can be replaced by biomass grown in the United States on excess land. This does not mean mowing down forests and pristine forests," he said. "This is excess agricultural capacity, and so that's what gets everybody excited."
One of Chu's more interesting ideas is development of an "artificial plant" that would mimic nature and convert water to hydrogen and oxygen naturally while scrubbing carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
He floated the idea in a speech he gave in September 2007 at a Meeting of the Minds session in Oakland.
The event's organizer, San Francisco-based Urban Age Institute, has provided Green Car Advisor with a 57-minute video of Chu's speech, which focused on alternative transportation fuels, and the question-and-answer session with the audience that followed.
The artificial plant idea comes up in a segment that starts 30 minutes and 35 seconds into the video (for those of you who don't want to listen to the rest - although we suggest you do).
In his speech, Chu also expresses hopes for development of cellulosic ethanol and powerful batteries that can handle the deep discharge cycles demanded of an electric vehicle battery pack.
He starts his Meeting of the Minds speech with a short and depressing look at our dwindling water supplies, and seems to say, 9 minutes and 51 seconds into his talk, that he's not a big fan of hydrogen as a transportation fuel unless we can use nuclear energy or other carbon-neutral energy sources to break the hydrogen atoms out of water, a process that requires a tremendous amount of electricity.
The natural gas and coal that we now use to produce most of the nation's electricity, he says, "have a very high carbon emission, in fact, it would be higher than burning gasoline."
Scott Doggett: is an AutoObserver.com Associate Editor.
You might also like:
Dreams Count, Size Doesn't
China Appears Poised To Dump Support For EVs
Doors Open This Week On New-Look Tokyo Motor Show
Rear-Seat Passengers Say No to Seatbelts
2012 Honda CR-V Concept Reveals Sculpted Update
LinkWithin
LEAVE A COMMENT
Click here to comment on this entry.
COMMENTARY MENU
VIDEO
FILTER BY AUTHOR:
JEREMY ANWYL
MICHELLE KREBS
JOHN O'DELL
LACEY PLACHE
PAUL SEREDYNSKI
BILL VISNIC
GUEST AUTHORS
Featured Video
EDITORS
Editor-in-Chief of AutoObserver.com and
Senior Analyst of Edmunds.com
Michelle Krebs
Email|Twitter
Analyst and Senior Editor
Bill Visnic
Email|Twitter
Senior Editor
Paul Seredynski
Email
Senior Editor of AutoObserver.com
John O'Dell
Email
Associate Editor of AutoObserver.com
Scott Doggett
Email
No comments:
Post a Comment