Iran and Brazil can do it, other countries are on the way; why can't the USofA do it???

Iran and Brazil Can Do It. So Can We.

By Gal Luft
Sunday, July 6, 2008; B01



When the founding fathers declared our independence, they could not
have imagined that, 232 years later, the United States would be so
spectacularly dependent on foreign countries. It would be roughly
eight more decades before oil gushed from a well in Titusville, Pa.,
marking the beginning of the global oil economy; it took eight decades
more for the United States to become a net oil importer. But the
republic's disastrous dependence on foreign oil has increased by leaps
and bounds ever since.

In 1973, when OPEC imposed its oil embargo, U.S. oil imports composed
30 percent of our needs; today, they make up more than 60 percent,
with a growing proportion of that crude coming from the world's least
stable regions. At around $145 a barrel, the United States, by my
calculations, will spend more on imported oil this year than it will
spend on its own defense budget, and much of that money will flow into
the coffers of those who wish us ill.

Since oil dependence is so unappealing, you'd think that energy
independence would be an easy sell, especially on this Fourth of July
weekend. But in fact, very few policy ideas have been so ridiculed. A
2007 report by the National Petroleum Council, a privately funded
group that offers advice from the oil and gas industries to the
federal government, calls energy independence "unrealistic"; a recent
book, "Gusher of Lies," by Robert Bryce, a former fellow at a think
tank funded in part by energy interests, described energy independence
as a "dangerous delusion"; and a 2006 Council on Foreign Relations
task force went so far as to accuse those promoting energy
independence of "doing the nation a disservice by focusing on a goal
that is unachievable over the foreseeable future."

Ignore them. Energy independence does not mean that the United States
must be entirely self-sufficient. It simply means reducing the role of
oil in world politics -- turning it from a strategic commodity into
merely another thing to sell.

Is energy independence a pipe dream? Hardly. In the electricity
sector, the mission has already been accomplished. Remember President
Jimmy Carter in his cardigan during the oil crises of the 1970s,
urging Americans to save electricity? It took us just one decade to
wean the electricity sector from oil. Today, only 2 percent of U.S.
electricity comes from oil, according to the Energy Department. Could
we do something similar with transportation, where American cars and
trucks still gulp oil-based fuel greedily? At least four very
different countries -- dictatorships and democracies alike -- are
already making serious headway toward that goal. It's past time to pay
attention to their example.

The first country, surprisingly enough, is Iran. The Islamic republic
has lots of crude but little capacity to refine it, leaving Tehran
heavily dependent on gasoline imports. The country's blustery
president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is fully aware that this is Iran's
Achilles' heel and worries that a comprehensive gasoline embargo could
cause enough social unrest to undermine his regime.

So Ahmadinejad has launched an energy-independence program designed to
shift Iran's transportation system from gasoline to natural gas, which
Iran has plenty of. "If we can change our automobiles' fuel from
gasoline to [natural] gas during the next three-four years," he said
last July, "we won't need gasoline anymore." His plan includes a
mandate for domestic automakers to make "dual-fuel" cars that can run
on both gasoline and natural gas, a crash program to convert used
vehicles to run on natural gas and a program to convert Iranian gas
stations to serve both kinds of fuel. According to the International
Association of Natural Gas Vehicles, more than 100 conversion centers
have been built throughout the country: Iranians can drive in with
their gasoline-only cars, pay a subsidized fee equivalent to $50 and
collect their newly dual-fuelled cars several hours later.
Ahmadinejad's plan, which has been largely ignored by the West, means
that within five years or so, Iran could be virtually immune to
international sanctions.

While Iran is moving quickly toward energy independence, Brazil is
already there. It's a striking turnaround; three decades ago, the
country imported 80 percent of its oil supply. But since the 1973 Arab
oil embargo, the Brazilians have invested massively in their sugar-
based ethanol industry and created a fleet of vehicles that can run on
the resulting fuel. According to the Sugar Cane Industry Union
(Unica), 90 percent of the new cars sold this year in Brazil will be
flexible-fuel vehicles that cost an extra $100 to make but can run on
any combination of gasoline and ethanol.

Lest anyone think that can't be done in the United States, many of
those new cars are made by General Motors and Ford. All it really
takes to turn a regular car into a flex-fuel one is a fuel sensor and
a corrosion-resistant fuel line.

Discovering how to make hydrocarbons and carbohydrates happily cohabit
in the same fuel tank isn't all that Brazil has done; it has also
increased domestic oil production. Its efforts have not only broken
the yoke of Brazil's oil dependence but also insulated the country's
economy from the pain of the current spike in global oil prices.
Gasoline prices have nearly doubled elsewhere since 2005, but in
Brazil, they have been almost frozen. This year, more ethanol will be
sold in Brazil than gasoline. Sounds pretty good, doesn't it?

Like Brazil, China has decided to replace gasoline with alternative
fuels. But unlike the United States and Brazil, where the favorite
substitute is ethanol, China has embraced a different alcohol:
methanol. Several provinces in China already blend their gasoline with
methanol, a clear, colorless liquid also known as wood alcohol, and
scores of methanol plants are currently under construction there. The
Chinese auto industry has already begun to produce flex-fuel models
that can run on methanol. Shanxi, a province in central China that
produces much of the country's coal, has even issued stickers granting
cars that use pure methanol free passage on the province's toll roads.

The distinction between methanol and ethanol is just one letter (but
then, so is the difference between Iran and Iraq). Both biofuels
should be in our basket of options. True, ethanol packs more energy
per gallon and is less corrosive than methanol. But methanol is
cheaper and far easier to produce in bulk. While ethanol can be made
only from agricultural products such as corn and sugar cane, methanol
can be made from natural gas, coal, industrial garbage and even
recycled carbon dioxide captured from power stations' smokestacks --
an elegant way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Israel offers a fourth testament to what leadership, ingenuity and
audacity can achieve. Last year, it launched an electric-car venture
designed to turn Israel -- which obviously has some tensions with the
region's big oil producers -- into an oil-free economy. Israelis will
soon be able to replace their gasoline-fueled cars with battery-
operated ones, which they'll plug into the hundreds of thousands of
recharging points planned to be erected throughout the country.
Israeli motorists, the government hopes, will be able to swap their
batteries in a matter of minutes at dedicated stations or recharge
them at home or at work. "Oil is the greatest problem of all time --
the great polluter and promoter of terror," said Israeli President
Shimon Peres, the project's political patron. "We should get rid of
it."

For each of the four countries, knocking oil off its pedestal is no
longer a theoretical proposition but a reality in the making. But
despite the lip service our own politicians pay to the need to reduce
our oil dependence, none of the solutions offered by Iran, Brazil,
China and Israel are even under consideration in the land of the free
and the home of the brave.

Just go down the list. Natural-gas vehicles are nowhere to be seen.
Brazilian sugar-cane ethanol is barred from the country by a steep 54-
cent-per-gallon import tariff, courtesy of ethanol protectionists and
their representatives in Congress. (No tariff is imposed on imported
oil, of course.) For similar reasons, flex-fuel cars sold in the
United States are certified to run only on ethanol, keeping methanol
and other viable biofuels off the market -- even though they are
cheaper and can be made from a wealth of coal and biomass resources.
The kind of electric cars deployed in Israel have never returned to
U.S. showrooms since General Motors' mass crushing of its EV1 -- the
subject of the documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car?"

It's time to get serious. Policies such as "drill more" and "drive
smaller cars" all keep us running on petroleum. At best, they buy us a
few more years of complacency, while ensuring a much worse dependence
down the road when America's conventional oil reserves are even more
depleted -- whether or not we drill in the Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge.

The hard truth is that real energy independence can be achieved only
through fuel choice and competition. That competition cannot take
place as long as (according to the Department of Transportation) we
continue to put 16 million new cars that run only on petroleum on our
roads every year, each with an average street life of 16.8 years --
thereby locking ourselves into decades more of petroleum dependence.

So let's remember the old saying: When in a hole, stop digging. If
every new car sold in the United States were a flex-fuel vehicle and
if millions of Americans could plug in their electric cars, gasoline
would be facing fierce competition at the pump and the socket.
Moreover, our money would have migrated from Exxon to Pepco, from the
Middle East to the Midwest -- as well as to scores of poor, biomass-
producing countries in Africa, Latin America and South Asia, including
the few countries that don't yet hate our guts. This, and no other, is
the road to independence.

luft@xxxxxxxx


Gal Luft is executive director of the Institute for the Analysis of
Global Security and co-founder of the Set America Free Coalition, a
bipartisan alliance of groups promoting U.S. energy independence.

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