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American presidents are afflicted with incurable Attention Deficit Disorder when it comes to determining what energy fad to go with next in order to reduce our energy dependency on the increasingly volatile Middle East. President Bush jumped from favoring fuel cells and, until it became apparent that the technology was decades away from viability, to ethanol, until diverting corn into gas tanks proved not so terrific for food prices.
President Obama has also been erratic, jumping around from solar and, until he discovered that you have to perform some due diligence before throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at companies, to electric cars whose batteries are more than half the cost of the vehicles and take up more trunk space than a Soprano victim, to high-speed rail, politically embarrassing because California’s $33 billion (and counting) delusional project to connect Los Angeles and San Francisco will, instead, connect avocado farms with beet growers in the rural Central Valley (huh?), to natural gas vehicles (see the State of the Union address).
Reducing dependence on bad-guy oil is difficult. Short-term, popular panacea programs won’t do it. But they sound good in the telling. It makes it appear that the government is actually doing something about a very real problem.
Obama now wants to rev up research on ways to use natural gas in vehicles. He hopes to create a transportation market for natural gas, which is abundant in the United States and pouring out of the ground in unprecedented amounts, making this relatively clean fossil fuel dirt cheap.
An admirable goal if it were not so utterly unrealistic. While it is not difficult to use natural gas in automobile engines, the problem is that you cannot store enough of it in a gas tank to get you anywhere. Travel a few miles and, presto, you have to fill up. Absent a natural gas infrastructure — filling stations are as rare as truth-telling Republican presidential candidates — this notion is going nowhere for a very long time.
Moreover, while natural gas coming out of the ground is cheap, turning it into a liquid fuel dense enough to power a vehicle from home to somewhere beyond the grocery store is hugely expensive. The government’s Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA-E) is about to announce a research competition for developing a cheaper way to turn the gas into an energy dense liquid fuel that could get you to Grandma’s house without having to stop 10 times to refill your tank (assuming, of course, there were 10 natural gas stations along the way).
American presidents are afflicted with incurable Attention Deficit Disorder when it comes to determining what energy fad to go with next in order to reduce our energy dependency on the increasingly volatile Middle East. President Bush jumped from favoring fuel cells and, until it became apparent that the technology was decades away from viability, to ethanol, until diverting corn into gas tanks proved not so terrific for food prices.
President Obama has also been erratic, jumping around from solar and, until he discovered that you have to perform some due diligence before throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at companies, to electric cars whose batteries are more than half the cost of the vehicles and take up more trunk space than a Soprano victim, to high-speed rail, politically embarrassing because California’s $33 billion (and counting) delusional project to connect Los Angeles and San Francisco will, instead, connect avocado farms with beet growers in the rural Central Valley (huh?), to natural gas vehicles (see the State of the Union address).
Reducing dependence on bad-guy oil is difficult. Short-term, popular panacea programs won’t do it. But they sound good in the telling. It makes it appear that the government is actually doing something about a very real problem.
Obama now wants to rev up research on ways to use natural gas in vehicles. He hopes to create a transportation market for natural gas, which is abundant in the United States and pouring out of the ground in unprecedented amounts, making this relatively clean fossil fuel dirt cheap.
An admirable goal if it were not so utterly unrealistic. While it is not difficult to use natural gas in automobile engines, the problem is that you cannot store enough of it in a gas tank to get you anywhere. Travel a few miles and, presto, you have to fill up. Absent a natural gas infrastructure — filling stations are as rare as truth-telling Republican presidential candidates — this notion is going nowhere for a very long time.
Moreover, while natural gas coming out of the ground is cheap, turning it into a liquid fuel dense enough to power a vehicle from home to somewhere beyond the grocery store is hugely expensive. The government’s Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA-E) is about to announce a research competition for developing a cheaper way to turn the gas into an energy dense liquid fuel that could get you to Grandma’s house without having to stop 10 times to refill your tank (assuming, of course, there were 10 natural gas stations along the way).
Other countries are much farther along in developing a natural gas transportation economy. That shows that it can be done. The difference is that the successful nations began slowly and stuck with it through changes of government and ideological shifts in the body politic. That is definitely not the American way.
My money is on this latest, sudden switcheroo in American energy policy being just another short-term fad, soon to be lost in the schizophrenic flailing that has typified U.S. energy policy for more than 30 years, since Ronald Reagan dismantled the Ford-Carter long-term energy plan that was actually working to reduce our ruinous addiction to foreign oil.
Your guess is as good as mine as to what new fad will be announced in next year’s State of the Union address.
“Rants” is a series of political and social observations written by part-time Canandaigua resident and Canandaigua Academy graduate Richard Hermann.
