Ten Questions with Robert Zubrin
by Devilstower
Sun Apr 06, 2008 at 07:33:40 PM PDT
Robert Zubrin is best known for his daring "Mars Direct" plan, but his most recent book, Energy Victory: Winning the War on Terror by Breaking Free of Oil is set a lot closer to home. His proposal on solving America's oil addition is simple -- some critics would say too simple. Here's what Dr. Zubrin has to say.
- Your book draws a direct line between our dependence on foreign oil and the distorting effect this has on American foreign policy. Why do you think this connection isn't getting more play in the presidential campaign?
I don't know. This is the most vital issue facing the country. This year, the USA will import 5 billion barrels of oil. At $100/bbl that is $500 billion dollars taxed out of the US economy by the collection of foreign governments known as OPEC, some of whom are using it to promote terrorism directed against the United states and numerous other countries. When George Bush took office in 2001, we were paying $90 billion per year for foreign oil. So the Bush administration has effectively responded to 9-11 by increasing our financing of the enemy fivefold -- and now we are actually paying OPEC more than we are paying our own defense department (the US DOD budget this year is about $435 billion).
Not only that, but this OPEC price rigging is driving our economy into a recession. Consider this: The Congress just passed a law to take $150 billion out of the treasury to pass out to taxpayers in the hope that they will spend it and thus stimulate the economy away from falling into a recession. However, even as Congress is raiding the treasury to try to put $150 billion into our pockets, OPEC is taking $500 billion out of our pockets. That is an economic de-stimulus package three times as big as the effort Congress is paying for. We need to fight back. The response from the candidates so far has been completely inadequate.
A few weeks ago, I saw a speech John McCain gave in Texas. He proclaimed we had to break free of foreign oil, and that is why we need nuclear power. The same day, I saw Barack Obama give a speech. he said we have to break free of foreign oil, and that is why we need solar and wind power. So we are about to be entertained with a dramatic right/left debate pitting nuclear power against solar and wind power. But in fact, the US gets only 3% of its electricity from oil, so neither nuclear, solar, or wind power have anything to do with the issue of breaking us free from foreign oil. It's all pure farce. Unless these people want to continue to fail to defend the vital interests of the nation as badly as George Bush has done, they need to get serious about this issue.
- In the book, you propose a surprisingly simple solution to the oil crisis -- making all cars biofuel capable. This seems like a very easy out to what many view as a very difficult problem.
Yes, well the problem is fundamentally simple. The oil cartel has a vertical monopoly on the world's fuel supply, and that is why they can raise prices without constraint. To defeat them, what is necessary is to create fuel choice. As I explain in the book "Energy Victory," the US congress can deal the fatal blow to OPEC with a stroke of the pen, simply by passing a law requiring that all new cars sold in the USA be flex fueled -- that is able to run on any combination of alcohol or gasoline. These cars are current technology. In fact this year Detroit will be selling 24 models that have this option, and they only cost about $100 more than the same model without flex fuel capability. But they only currently comprise about 3% of the auto sales, because in most places there is no upside to owning one, as there are no alcohol fuel pumps to be found. and the reason, of course, why there are no alcohol pumps out there is that service station owners have no reason to set up such pumps while there are so few cars that can use them. But within 3 years of enactment of a flex fuel mandate we would have 50 million cars on the road in the USA capable of running on alcohol fuels, and under those conditions you would see E85 (85% ethano/15% gasoline) and M85 (85% methanol/15% gasoline) pumps popping up everywhere.
And here is the key thing: These alcohol fuel pumps would be appearing not only all across the USA, but all over the world. Because if we made it the law that to sell a car into USA it had to be flex fuel, that would make flex fuel the INTERNATIONAL standard. The Japanese, Koreans, and Europeans are not about to walk away from the American automobile market. So they would simply switch their entire production lines over to flex fuel. What that would mean is that any car being marketed in any serious way anywhere in the world would be flex fuel, and we would see hundreds of millions of them all over the globe in just a few years. This would create an open-source fuel market, that would force gasoline to compete at the pump everywhere against ethanol and methanol produced from any number of sources all over the world. This would break the vertical monopoly of the oil cartel, eliminating forever their power to raise prices without constraint. The price of oil would be forced back down to about $50/bbl, because that is where alcohol fuels become competitive, and then pushed down further as the huge non-monopoly controlled market mobilized capital into R&D to drive cost-reducing process improvements.
- A lot of calculations -- from back of the envelope to full-bore university studies -- have suggested that we can't match out fuel needs with the kind of biofuels we're producing today. Are they wrong?
We can't replace oil with corn ethanol alone. Corn ethanol has replaced 4% of our gasoline supply, which is an impressive achievement, and it might be able to replace 8%. But certainly not 100%. However corn is just one crop. Any sugar-rich or starchy crop can be used to produce ethanol using current technology. New cellulosic ethanol technology is coming on line with allow us to use currently worthless crop residues, which will vastly expand the available ethanol supply. Methanol can already be produced from all kinds of biomass without exception, as well from coal, natural gas, and recycled urban trash. There is enough crop residues in the world right now, that if they were all converted into methanol we could replace all the oil of OPEC. And in fact we probably would only have to replace about 20% of OPEC's production into order to break the cartel and send oil prices tumbling. There certainly are the resources available to do that. But we need an open fuel market to make it work.
- Many people feel that the increasing demand for biofuels plays a major role in driving up food prices. Is this a major factor, or has the competition between food and fuel been overblown?
It's completely false. Over the past year, food prices have risen 4% internationally, while fuel prices have risen 40%. These higher fuel prices impose increased costs on both farmers and fishing fleets, as well as adding to the cost of transporting their products to market. So in fact, it is rigged up fuel prices that are driving up food prices, as well as the prices of many other types of goods.
People need to understand this: OPEC's price rigging amounts to a huge extremely regressive tax on the entire world economy. Setting oil prices at $100/bbl is harmful to the advanced industrial countries, but it is brutally destructive to the third world. It is one thing to pay $100/bbl for oil when you live in a country where the average worker makes $45,000 per year. It is quite another when you make $1000 per year. Effectively, the high oil price amounts to taking hundreds of billions of dollars away from the world's poorest people and giving it to the world's richest people.
Think about this: In 2006, Saudi Arabia, with a population of 24 million people (15% of whom work) raked in $200 billion in foreign exchange from its oil exports. In the same year, Kenya, with a population of 36 million people (the majority of whom work) earned $2.5 billion in foreign exchange in exports of all categories combined. Distributed elsewhere, the $200 billion taken by the Saudis for their overpriced oil would double the foreign exchange of 80 countries comparable to Kenya.
By switching to an open source fuel economy, we could make such redistribution possible. Instead of paying out to buy their oil from OPEC, tropical third world countries could grow their own fuel, and not only that, gain precious income by exporting ethanol to the US, Europe, and Japan, where huge markets for such produce would exist. Effectively, we could take something like a trillion dollars a year now going to the oil cartel, and redirect it to the world agricultural sector instead -- without about half going to advanced sector farmers and then other half going to the third world. This would create a huge financial engine for world development, and allow hundreds of millions of people to be lifted out of poverty. They would then become customers for our industry, and create jobs and economic growth here. Instead of selling controlly blocks of stock of our banks and media organizations to Saudi princes, we could be selling tractors to Africa. That is the way forward for achieving a just and prosperous world.
- How does timing factor into your solution? Nearly half the cars on the road are replaced in less than five years. Does is make sense to modify existing vehicles, or should we just require biofuel capability in new cars as they appear?
It's much cheaper to simply mandate that new cars include the flex fuel feature. There are modification kits for existing cars being sold in the $500 range, but no one knows which of them are any good. A government certification for such kits would be very useful in providing consumers the confidence they need to buy them.
- Do you think of biofuels as a permanent solution, or an interim solution? That is, should we implement this biofuels switch now, but place further requirements that would move our transportation toward some form of electric vehicle in the future, or can we implement the biofuel option and say "there, that's done."
The first step is to open the fuel market via a flex fuel mandate. This can be done very quickly. The next step is to make the cars more efficient by gradually transitioning to flex-fuel plug in hybrids that could get much of their motive power off the electric grid. But that will be a more gradual process.
- Though 10% ethanol fuel has been common through much of the country for over a decade, there are still few locations where you can find E85 or biodiesel blends. Would simply equipping cars to be biofuels capable be enough to encourage the availability of these fuels?
Yes, absolutely. The problem right now is lack of market. If you own a gas station, and you have three pumps, you are not going to dedicate one of them to a kind of fuel that only 3% of the cars can use. But within three years of a flex fuel mandate we would have 50 million cars that can use alcohol fuels, and under those conditions the pumps to sell to them will start appearing anywhere.
Any gas station owner can mobilize the capital to install a new pump. Any group of small town entrepreneurs can mobilize the capital to build an ethanol plant. But what they can't do is make automobiles. That's why we have to tackle this with legislation at the demand end. Once we have the market in place, all the rest will follow.
- There have been a number of studies showing wildly divergent results on the amount of energy returned by biofuels compared to the input. There's no doubt that moving to biofuels would allow us to decrease our dependence on oil, but would it actually increase our use of coal and other fuels in generating the biofuels?
Coal, might, in certain places be used for process heat for biofuel production. In other places biomass itself might be used, as it currently is in the Brazilian ethanol process. These issues could be addressed over time with regulation if increased use of coal presented a global warming concern (it might not be, if such plants were situated in places where extra CO2 produced from coal could be sequestered underground.) Solar power (for small scale plants) or even nuclear power (for large scale plants) could also be used to generate process heat without greenhouse gas emissions. In any case, the use of biofuels gives us the option to produce carbon neutral fuels which we simply won't have if we stick to petroleum.
- Right now, some independent truckers are calling for all federal and state taxes on diesel fuel be suspended. Would broader availability of biodiesel have any effect on the cost of fuel? Should we implement any additional taxes on these fuels that could be used to help steer changes in the infrastructure (such as research on new technologies, or improving rail transport)?
Alcohol fuels are not used in diesel vehicles. However, by competing against gasoline, they would force down the price of a barrel of oil, and thus diesel fuel, jet fuel, and ship bunker fuel as well.
- What about your own vehicle? Has it already been converted to run on biofuels, and do you have availability of the fuels in your area?
I'm still driving my old 1999 car, which is not flex fuel. But as soon as it gives up the ghost, I'm buying a flex fuel vehicle. There are only a few E85 stations in my area, but I think there will be more soon enough, because we are going to win this fight.
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