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The following is an excerpt from a
new book by Robert Rapier entitledPower Plays:
Energy Options in the Age of Peak Oil. Reprinted with permission.
It wasn't as if there have
never been economic alternatives to oil. Compressed natural gas and methanol, for instance, have both been cheaper than oil on an
energy equivalent basis for many years...
The problem lies in the fact that consumers don't have the option of filling up
with methanol, ethanol, or any of the other contenders to replace
gasoline...because the transportation infrastructure is incompatible and, more
importantly, the cars on the roads are not designed to handle these fuels.
Thus, my third proposal calls for support of the Open Fuel Standard that would require that a growing
percentage of vehicles sold in the U.S. must be capable of running on fuels
other than gasoline. I am not usually a big fan of mandates, because of the potential for unintended
consequences, but in this case the additional cost to produce a vehicle that is
flex-fuel capable is reported to be between $100 and $200. This would therefore only add 0.5% to
the cost of the average new car.
The availability of more flex-fuel vehicles would remove one of the major obstacles for new fuels attempting to break
into the transportation fuel market. Currently, there is no demand for methanol
or mixed alcohols as transportation fuel primarily because the vehicles on the
roads are not entirely compatible. If more vehicles were capable of operating
on a wide variety of fuels with little added production cost, the market for
domestically produced fuels would grow.
Anne Korin and Gal Luft, in their excellent book Turning Oil Into Salt: Energy Independence Through Fuel Choice,
compare the situation today with oil to the situation with salt hundreds of
years ago. Salt held a monopoly on food preservation, and was thus an important
strategic commodity. Countries with salt mines derived wealth from their salt
exports, and sometimes wars were fought over access to salt. But eventually
salt evolved from a strategic commodity into simply a commodity, because
refrigeration broke salt's monopoly on food preservation. That is the goal of
the Open Fuel Standard: to break oil's monopoly on the
transportation system and convert it from its present status as a strategic commodity into simply a
commodity.
Robert Rapier is theChief Technology Officer for Merica International, a
renewable energy company, which is involvedin a wide variety of projects,
with a core focus on the localized use of biomass to energy for the benefit of
local populations. Rapier's whole career has been devoted to energy issues.
He's worked oncellulosic ethanol, butanol production, oil refining, natural gas production, and
gas-to-liquids. And he is the author of Power Plays.Read more about Power Plays here.
Source: http://www.openfuelstandard.org/2012/04/power-plays.html
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