Columbia International Affairs Online: Journals

CIAO DATE: 11/2008

Fueling Innovation

The Journal of International Security Affairs

A publication of:
Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs

Volume: 15, Issue: 0 (Fall 2008)


Steven I. Paget

Abstract

Full Text

Robert Zubrin, Energy Victory: Winning the War on Terror by Breaking Free of Oil (Prometheus Books, 2007), 336 pp.

Energy independence is a concept that resonates during an election year. Independence would give America the freedom to choose between different sources of energy, while retaining more of its wealth at home. But how does the United States get there?

Robert Zubrin thinks he has the answer. His Energy Victory proposes that every new vehicle in the United States be “flex-fueled,” or able to burn alcohol-based fuels, including ethanol. The goal, according to Zubrin, is clear: to enable the United States to better combat Saudi Arabia’s oil-based influence—an influence that he believes must be broken in order to defeat global terrorism.

As for ethanol, it is one of several potential replacements for petroleum. During the first two decades of the 20th century, the supremacy of gasoline as the fuel for cars was far from certain. Detroit Electric and others built electric vehicles and Henry Ford originally intended the Model T to run on alcohol-based fuel. Hybrids and flex-fuel cars are making a comeback, and high oil prices make these alternatives more attractive. If fuel-switching should happen on a large scale, Saudi Arabia’s oil-won influence would be reduced to the scale that Australia now has by virtue of being the world’s largest coal exporter. But how possible is this?

The author is an engineer, and at his best when he turns his mind to practical energy matters. Using an analogy from bridge, he looks at the effect of four energy “trump suits,” pointing out that if oil retains its power to trump other sources of energy, the United States has the most to lose and Saudi Arabia has the most to gain. If, however, natural gas, coal, or biomass and biofuels were the dominant source of energy, the power of OPEC and specifically Saudi Arabia would be broken.

Brazil provides an example of how an ethanol flex-fuel strategy has already worked. The first Brazilian strategy of producing ethanol-only vehicles was a failure after the oil price collapse of 1986, but development of flex-fuel technology during the mid-1990s created an opportunity that has now become a mandate. All new cars in Brazil must be able to handle a fuel mix of gasoline and ethanol in any proportion, and this has allowed consumers to use whichever fuel is cheapest.

Zubrin’s plan acknowledges that food supplies cannot be turned into enough fuel to supply the United States. He therefore proposes to use America’s abundant coal supplies to supply a synthetic methanol industry. Together, Zubrin believes, ethanol and methanol are vital to American energy independence. To create consumers, he has a simple solution: American lawmakers should require all vehicles sold in the U.S. to have full flex-fuel capacity to run on ethanol, methanol or gasoline, or any mixture of the three. While no one has yet built a vehicle that can switch from ethanol to methanol to gasoline, achieving this seems to be a matter of building fuel systems that can handle methanol, the most corrosive fuel of the three, and combining this with an engine management system that can adjust to any mixture of the three fuels.

Zubrin likewise believes that biofuels could be a tool for world development. In particular, Africa could become a major player if biofuels began to replace oil. In order for this to become a reality, Zubrin proposes the U.S. drop its agricultural trade barriers, arguing that the additional product demand created by biofuels would allow both American and other farmers to benefit.

He also discusses hydrogen and nuclear power. Before writing on energy, Zubrin had written extensively on space travel, and he understands well the strengths and weaknesses of hydrogen from its use in rocketry. He argues that while hydrogen burns cleanly, its transportation and storage pose significant problems. A nuclear engineer by training, his comparison of the water-cooled reactors used in most of the world versus the graphite-based RMBK Chernobyl reactor shows how the Chernobyl disaster occurred, and why water-cooled reactors are far safer. He is also an advocate for increased fusion research; given the vast potential of fusion power, investing a few hundred million dollars per year in fusion research seems sensible. One of Zubrin’s clear and judiciously-used graphs shows how tantalizingly close fusion research has come to “ignition.” A picture, they say, is worth a thousand words, and Zubrin’s illustration makes the progress and challenges easy to understand.

There are two major weaknesses in the central premise of Energy Victory. First, Saudi Arabia will retain or even expand its market share and influence even if high-cost oil producers have been driven out of the market by ethanol. Second, finding a partial alternative to oil will do little in absolute terms to stop terrorism. Oil supplies were indeed vital during World War I and II. But the terrorists are not the Wehrmacht, and they do not need oil—or petrodollars. The historical sections of the book on oil’s strategic importance are not new to anyone who has read Daniel Yergin’s The Prize, and irrelevant to boot: al-Qaeda has no tanks and no air force, and it needed less than $1 million to launch the September 11th attacks. Indeed, some of Zubrin’s foreign-policy suggestions—such as his idea of forcing Saudi Arabia to sell its crude to the U.S. at the cost of production, for later resale at a higher price—do little to advance his core argument, and would have been better left out of the book entirely.

Whatever we might think of his foreign-policy ideas, however, Zubrin’s central suggestion that regulators require all cars sold in the U.S. to be able to handle ethanol, methanol or gasoline is realistic. Democratic candidate Barack Obama is a strong supporter of flex-fueling, and domestic U.S. automakers are already building and aggressively marketing some flex-fuel vehicles. If every new car sold in the U.S. were biofuel-ready, alcohol and petroleum could then compete at the pump. Ethanol could become part of a more resilient energy infrastructure.

At the end of the day, then, Zubrin might not change the world. But, with a bit of luck, he could just change the way America fills up.

 

Steven I. Paget is a research analyst in energy infrastructure at FirstEnergy Capital Corporation in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.