Are the teabaggers forcing Boehner into putting oil subsidies on the chopping block?

In a prior post http://ca.answers.yahoo.com/question/ind... I noted that the US could meet its transport energy needs through the production of biocrude. The key issue with this path is that 30% of the land US area would be needed for energy crops. After the biomass feedstock, the next largest cost in the process is hydrogen.

I think that Obama is making a mistake reducing funding for hydrogen research. Although I doubt that hydrogen will ever be a viable transportation fuel, it is an important intermediate product for the synthesis of gasoline from biological feedstocks. Advances in producing hydrogen from renewable sources would have tremendous economic value and the research should be supported.

Meanwhile, hydrogen can be produced from natural gas or via electrolysis. In an industrial sense, the main piece of the puzzle missing for a biocrude economy is industrial plant for the pyrolysis step. I hope that Obama's plan gives support for this step.

Existing refineries can be used for making the finished product. The second issue is electricity generation. The main issue for wind and solar is that they are intermittent.

Either storage technologies need to improve or another technology such as nuclear is needed to handle the base load demand. I think that Obama is on the right track supporting both the construction of nuclear generating capacity and research into storage and transmission technologies. Edit: I am well aware that using waste is a good source of energy.

My name is on an industrial process patent to convert agricultural waste to biofuel and I have a significant shareholding in the corporation that owns the rights. The company can produce about 400,000 tonnes biofuel annually based on the process at very low cost from waste streams in MB, SK, ND, SD and MN. That is the low hanging fruit.

Very profitable, but only a tiny fraction of total demand. Incremental capacity comes at a higher cost. The switchgrass example is scalable enough to meet all of the demand.

Algae is another option. Estimates of the land area required are on the order of 30,000 km ^2 for ponds in the California desert. I have current algae experiments in progress.

We get less sun in the north, so the yields are lower. However, we have abundant water and don't have the cost of excavating ponds. The switchgrass results are public domain.

My algae results aren't. Nuclear is not a strong option due to the shortage of expertise. $18 billion will build 3 plants and I think there are enough experts around to do that.

10 plants are probably out of the question. My lab is in an Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd (AECL) facility, so I am well aware of the shortage of nuclear expertise. I did part of my PhD at AECL Chalk River, so I could go over to AECL if the terms were right.

The sooner we move onto 21st century power generation the sooner we can break away from 19th century power generation. Instead of adding unneeded CO2 to our paper thin atmosphere we could begin to deal with this problem. The sooner we can get a real wind and solar industry up and running the sooner we can put a few million Americans to work putting together a brand new, mostly decentralized power infrastructure that uses FREE fuel instead of dirty and far more expensive coal.

We have the work force...we have the industrial infrastructure...we have the money. All we need is leadership. Eisenhower gave us the National Defense Highway System.

Maybe some republican could give us the a National Defense Power System. Take away a few bucks from coal and oil? Sure...they don't need it.

Funnel the same money into wind and solar....you bet!

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.