Energy strategy: converting U.S. car park to hybrids should be priority one.

• Author: Frodl, Michael G.
• Position: Energy

Reducing personal vehicle demand for gasoline is the quickest and most effective way to cut our consumption of crude oil, and by extension, make our nation more secure.

Hybrid vehicles could be one of the best available options to achieve this goal.

In recent years, the more imaginative solution has been fuel cells: the powering of vehicles by burning hydrogen so as to release energy with water as a byproduct. It's "clean," and therefore appealing, but only if you look at the tail pipe emissions. Despite tremendous investments of taxpayer and industry money into fuel cell powered personal vehicles during the past 20 years, the technology is simply not ready yet. It's still not industrially scalable or commercially competitive with existing alternatives.

What about compressed natural gas cars and propane cars by extension? There are enough buses in Washington and other big cities driving around on "clean" natural gas, but the simple fact is that for personal vehicles, natural gas is still considerably more expensive than gasoline refined from crude. Natural or not, gas is a fossil fuel, despite the belief of some politicians on Capitol Hill.

Then there's also the safety concern. Careful observers will note that the CNG buses have humps on their roofs. That's not for aesthetics, but for safety reasons. That's where the CNG tanks are held, safely away from points of possible collision with other vehicles, poles or buildings. Personal cars need to find ways to shield their CNG tank from collision, puncture and catastrophic explosion. And then the infrastructure is not available. How many gas stations can individual car owners pull up and refill on CNG? So that's an alternative vehicle option still on the drawing boards.

Last but not least, there's been a lot of talk about coal-to-liquids providing synthetic gasoline. The Fischer-Tropsch technique for converting coal into synthetic petroleum-based fuel, be it synthetic oil, gasoline, or natural gas, has been around since the 1920s. It provided much of the German military's fuel in World War II and helped South Africa ride out the embargo. It has the selling point of being clean gasoline--nitrates and sulfurs are filtered out in the process. It also has the advantages of being cheap. A barrel of synthetic oil made for perhaps under $50 today.

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But its production also consumes a lot of water and emits a lot of C[O.sub.2] in the process. So synthetic oil hurts the environment, despite its burning more cleanly, even more than real crude does. Once you tack on environmental controls and carbon capture on a barrel of synthetic fuel, you have added about another $20. That makes it a much more risky proposition when the price of crude drops below $100. Add on the need to sequester or bury the carbon and the price shoots up even further.

Carbon-to-liquids still makes sense for the U.S. Air Force as an alternative fuel, but only if the base production costs can be driven down through scale by adding civil aviation to the potential demand. The use of CTL in aviation can serve as the best platform, given its large built-in profit margins, to develop CO2 capture and related technologies that can be passed on to other fossil fuel industries, including older coal-burning power plants. On the other hand, for personal vehicles, CTL...