April 24, 2008

Why One Day OPEC Could Be Buying Its Gasoline from Us

Oil is near $120 a barrel, and OPEC expresses reluctance to increase output so as to help lower prices.

But Popular Science reports on new ways to turn biomass into - not ethanol - but into actual gasoline (via Instapundit):

Researchers at UMass Amherst recently published a new method of refining hydrocarbons from cellulose, paving the way to turn wood scraps into gasoline, diesel fuel, Tupperware-anything, essentially, that's normally refined from petroleum.

..."If we can get 100 percent yield, we estimate the cost to be about a dollar per gallon," Huber says. "Right now we're at 50 percent. Can we get 100 percent? I don't know. Hopefully we'll bump those numbers up."

This process can use biomass other than corn or food products, leaving the world's food 100% available for people and other living things to eat:

Huber's work stands out as likely the first direct conversion from cellulose, opening up as potential fuel sources virtually anything that grows. Commercialization of the technology may take another five to 10 years, the researchers predict.

Developments in so-called "green hydrocarbons" arrive as ethanol continues to come under attack as expensive, inefficient and a contributor to rising food prices around the world. (More than a billion bushels of corn are diverted to ethanol production each year.) "There's certainly a lot of historical inertia for ethanol. It's gotten us off to a great start, but I can't see the country transitioning to flex-fuel," says John Regalbuto, director of the Catalysis and Biocatalysis Program at the National Science Foundation. "I almost think, long term, that we will go to plug-in hybrids. But we're still going to need diesel and jet fuel-you can't run trains or fly planes with ethanol or hydrogen."

"We already have the infrastructure in place to distribute liquid fuels," Huber says. "We're using them to power transportation vehicles today, and I think that's what we'll be using in 10 years and in 50 years. And if you want a sustainable liquid transportation fuel, biomass is the only way to go.

So the hubris of OPEC appears to be driving us to unexpected success in the development of alternative fuel sources.

And here's the kicker: what's one thing the OPEC states can never produce? Biomass. Their land is a desert. They can't grow anything there. Their old-fashioned oil deposits could become too expensive to use. It's the ultimate irony: rather than running out of oil, the oil of the OPEC states would be left in the ground, replaced by ultra-cheap gasoline produced from waste biomass.

They'd be buying their fuel from us.