Stickin' it to the Oil Companies a Reality?

Dateline NBC reports on May 7th that the end of dependence on foreign oil could be well in sight, and the end of these exorbitant gas prices as well.

I'm complaining about the gas prices all of the time, and I live in an agricultural state, where the gas is 20 cents cheaper a gallon than in good ol' Chicagoland for mid-grade, because it's 10% ethanol. All those vegetable products produce enough sugars that could be fermented and used to run cars instead of petroleum products. There has long been an assertion among conspiracy theorists that "the Man" is working with the oil companies and car companies to keep gas mileage down and prices high. I'm sure something like that really does exist; however, the President has to put gas in his car too, and so he was quoted on April 25th saying, “Ethanol will replace gasoline consumption. Ethanol is good for the whole country.” Whether Big Oil will see it the same way is another matter, although it is interesting that in the last three years BP has relabeled itself as an energy company, not just an oil company, and is doing research into alternate and renewable energy sources.

The Dateline report focused on Brazil, who last month announced that it no longer has to import oil from anywhere, but is now self-sustaining. That is mainly due to ethanol, which is being produced from harvests of its sugarcane fields. Brazil has been committed to ethanol for 30 years now, and 90 days from now every car sold there will be a flex-fuel model, meaning it can run on either gasoline or ethanol. The Dateline report mainly consists of an interview with Vinod Khosla, a self-made multibillionaire who was a founder of Sun Microsystems, and is himself a biomedical engineer. He's spent the last three years working on alternative fuels, and says that he could envision the United States eliminating its dependence on foreign oil by switching to ethanol inside of five years. He admits that the gas mileage is slightly less with ethanol (read very slightly), but adds that the price could be more like 70 cents to a dollar a gallon, since production costs are so little and there would be no import taxes.

Best of all, it's far more environmentally conscious. It's a renewable resource, that in fact is nontoxic (Khosla sampled the byproduct straight from the production tank), and can be produced from almost any plant that is fermentable, since ethanol production facilities are in essence just big moonshine stills. Khosla asks us to imagine ethanol plants next to paper mills and orange juice factories, taking the leftover byproduct and turning it into usable fuel.

Sustainability. I can't wait. Maybe we will turn into an environmentally responsible nation...after the next election, of course.