Did anyone catch this guy, Vinod Khosla on NBC Dateline, earlier this month?
Quote:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12676374/
A simple solution to pain at the pump?
Greener and cheaper, ethanol could fuel rural America — and won't feed Mideast terrorism
By Stone Phillips
Anchor
Dateline NBC
Updated: 6:40 p.m. ET May 7, 2006
.....At age 51, Vinod Khosla is one of the world’s most successful venture capitalists and a self-made multibillionaire.
He came to the U.S. from India in 1976, and over the next 25 years, is said to have created six new jobs for every day he’d been in the country. Though not a household name, Khosla was a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and renowned in business circles for his meticulous research and ability to spot the kind of innovative technology that can revolutionize an industry.
Three years ago, he turned his attention to alternative fuels.........
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12713171/
• May 11, 2006 | 9:59 a.m. ET
Is an ethanol revolution coming? (Stone Phillips, Dateline anchor)
Dateline
In Brazil, in one of the sugar cane fields that help the country produce ethanol.
Before I started working on this story, I was one of those Americans who thought ethanol was that fad fuel from the 1970's that never caught on. In fact, the ethanol industry produced 4 billion gallons of corn ethanol last year and expects to top 5 billion gallons in 2006. Much of this ethanol is being used to boost the octane rating in our gasoline. (Adding more ethanol to the blend is how premium gasoline is made.)
But the talk now is of shifting from ethanol as an additive, to ethanol as a replacement for petroleum-based fuel. And the person who may know more about the business, technology and potential of ethanol than anyone else in the country says making that shift is "brain dead simple." Vinod Khosla is a venture capitalist, a bio-medical engineer and an ethanol evangelist, who's been briefing political and business......
http://bioconversion.blogspot.com/20...khosla-on.html
Thursday, May 11, 2006
MSNBC Dateline: Vinod Khosla on Cellulosic Ethanol
............But that’s only part of it. To really make America an ethanol nation, Khosla says billions of gallons will come from something as common as prairie grass. He says it’ll be much cheaper and deliver 10 times the energy it takes to make it.
As for the expense, Khosla estimates it would cost about $15 to 20 million to offer ethanol pumps at a thousand gas stations in California.
Khosla: We need to make sure that the major oil companies don’t manipulate the price of oil enough to drive ethanol out of business.
Phillips: Do you believe oil companies would deliberately drop the price of oil?
Khosla: Absolutely. A senior executive of a major oil company came up to me and said, “Be careful.” In a very warning tone he said, “Be careful, we can drop the price of gasoline.”
|
It sounds great....ethanol from prarie grasses. The challenges will be to ramp up volume and production efficiency, and to do it while oil swings....possibly wildly....in price.
The domestic ehtanol "industry" currently produces 5 billion gallons of the fuel annually. The U.S. imports 14 million barrels, or....560 million gallons of petroleum equivalents....per day. The U.S. produces an addtional 7 million barrels, or 280 million gallons of petroleum equivalents daily.
Current U.S. annual ethanol production is equal to less than ten days of imported petroleum consumption, and less than six days of total U.S. consumption of petroleum equivalents (6 x 840 million gallons = 5.04 billion gallons.)
If oil prices were to drop below the break even point of ethanol's production costs....even for a few months...the ethanol production "ramp up" would stumble....and seed money would evaporate.....just as it did every other time that it started to make economic sense to invest heavily in production of alternative energy sources. The heaviest cost burden is always during the initial investment phase....when not enough volume and efficiency has been achieved for output to convincingly produce "payback" profits.
Private enterprise will face the ramp up risks without much help from the bankrupted federal government. Ironically, the money spent in Iraq and in doubling expenditures on the military between 2001 and 2007, would have been more wisely spent on grants and incentives to produce enough domestic alternative energy manufacturing ventures to render petroleum a less strategically and politically charged......or vital, commodity. Now....I don't see that it is possible. We will, instead, ride the paper dollar to a near zero valuation...spending it to purchase foreign oil until no foreign oil producer will accept it in exchange. The bloated, overpriced military will either use all of it's "new toys" to take the foreign energy that our country can no longer afford to buy....or it will grind to a halt and rust on the ground or tied up at the pier.
I sadly predict that a lot more blood than ethanol will flow in our future!