Former CIA director touts biofuels
RENEW Wisconsin and other renewable energy advocates often stress the importance of developing our own sources of energy. A former CIA director agrees, according to a story by Heidi Clausen in The Country Today:
ST. PAUL, MINN. – The figure is startling: The United States borrows $320 billion a year – almost $1 billion a day – to finance its addiction to foreign oil.
Homegrown, renewable fuels are a great way to keep more of that money at home, “so we profit instead of the suicide bombers,” said R. James Woolsey, former Central Intelligence Agency director.
Net farm income in the United States last year was $80 billion, he said.
“If we can replace only one-fourth of our imports of oil at today’s prices with domestically-created fuels … that’s $80 billion. We effectively double net farm income or come close to it,” he said.
Mr. Woolsey discussed energy security Dec. 12 at the first Midwest Agriculture Energy Network Summit in St. Paul. The theme was “Midwest Energy Independence: Taking Ownership.”
The network, formed almost two years ago, includes members from Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota.
Mr. Woolsey said the rural United States is moving toward a “renewable and biomass takeover” led by Midwest farmers and rural businesses.
Although corn ethanol got the United States into the alternative-fuels business, “if we want to move more decisively away from gasoline, we need to find a way to tap into other feedstuffs,” he said.
He listed energy crops such as switchgrass and cellulosic biomass from agriculture and forest waste.
“We are not decades away from this,” he said. “I think we will do better if we look at what we are building to be a transition away from hydrocarbons and toward carbohydrates.”
Venture capital funds most ethanol development now, but it will take
significantly more than that, Mr. Woolsey said.“To take over 85 percent of the liquid fuel market in the U.S., we need a substantial share of Wall Street putting regular money … into the renewable fuels business,” he said. “Investors have to feel comfortable they won’t have their investment trashed the way $5-a-barrel oil did it in the 1980s.”
Power grid vulnerable
A lot of the U.S. energy focus is on fuels, but Mr. Woolsey said the nation’s power grid also is highly vulnerable, especially to terrorists.
When a tree branch fell on some powerlines in Ohio more than three years ago, it left a large chunk of the northeast United States and Canada in the dark.
“Within 90 seconds, 71 gigawatts had dropped offline,” he said.
That’s a good example of how easy it would be for terrorists to knock out transmission lines serving millions of people, he said.
“The problem is terrorists are smarter than trees,” he said.
Mr. Woolsey said the United States has a “continuing problem” with grid security; the grid consists of a confederation of utilities.
“A few years ago, when we decided to radically privatize and establish a national market in electricity, we tried to build on top of that confederation. It doesn’t work very well,” he said.
The way it’s set up, a terrorist attack could disable a lot of grid for a long time.
“I think that we have some opportunities here to make some of the changes that need to be made so that neither Ohio trees nor al-Qaida can take down our grid,” he said.
The challenge, Mr. Woolsey said, is that it’s getting harder to get new powerlines built. Americans have gone beyond NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) to BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything), he said.
Mr. Woolsey predicts wind and solar power – and local control of them – will be of greater importance in federal policy during the next presidential administration. An international cap and trade system for carbon is likely, he said.
“We may find ways to use wind not only as part of the grid and transmitting that electricity to other parts of the country, but also see small farms and towns using more renewables to take some of the stress off the need to expand nationwide transmission lines,” he said.
Oil beyond U.S. control
While the U.S. electrical grid presents problems, Mr. Woolsey said, “much of it is within our control” and within U.S. borders.
Fuel, however, is a much different story.
Almost all the transportation fuel used in the United States is from oil, much of it produced in unstable foreign countries. Also, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries controls the price worldwide.
Mr. Woolsey said it would be relatively easy to take several billion barrels of oil a day offline for a few years, sending prices soaring.
Until 1970, the Railroad Commission of Texas functioned similarly to OPEC, and the United States was a net exporter of oil, he said. That changed when U.S. production peaked, but demand took off.
The United States has become extremely vulnerable to price spikes and being cut off from supplies.
“The problem is OPEC is a cartel, and Saudi Arabia has the lion’s share of the world’s swing capacity,” he said.
Mr. Woolsey said renewable fuels offer the United States the most promise as a way to be more in charge of its energy future.
The U.S. electricity and transportation fuel systems have very different security problems, but Mr. Woolsey expects the two sectors to become more closely linked again.
In the 1970s, 20 percent of U.S. electricity came from oil, compared to only 2 percent today, he said.
