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If there's one topic on which Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry seems to have the vision thing, it's his goal of freeing America from her dependence on foreign oil. Last month, while delivering the weekly Democratic radio address, Kerry placed this issue to the center of his agenda. "Soaring energy prices are putting our economy at risk," he argued, and "our dependence on Middle East oil is putting our national security at risk."

Unfortunately, Kerry's solution has not quite been quite as forward-thinking as his rhetoric. He wants to provide $10 billion worth of incentives to the U.S. auto industry to encourage automakers to step up their production of advanced vehicles, ignoring the fact that Detroit has been getting similar subsidies for a decade, to little effect. And while Kerry is on the right track when he argues that the only long-term solution to our dependence on imported oil is "inventing our way out of it," his plan to move America to a hydrogen economy by 2020 doesn't go much beyond President Bush's plan for funding more research on hydrogen-powered vehicles. According to an MIT study published last year, even aggressive research is unlikely to put a viable hydrogen car on the road during the next two decades--and wouldn't even necessarily produce less carbon than today's hybrid automobiles.

But there's a way Kerry's plans--or Bush's--can live up to the rhetoric. During the past year, a pair of new technologies has emerged that, if properly nurtured, could provide the key to a broader effort to wean Americans off foreign oil, drastically reduce pollution, and help slow global warming. The first is an industrial process that may make ethanol far cheaper to produce than ever before, with the potential of making this much-maligned--and over-subsidized--biofuel economically competitive with gasoline. The second is a small, inexpensive piece of hardware that could make ethanol the basis for radically transforming our transportation infrastructure. Making these technologies yield a new product at the pump won't be easy. But they're far more promising than much of the research on which we're currently spending federal dollars and intellectual energy.

Bad gas

As far as the science books are concerned, ethanol is merely a form of alcohol, commonly produced from corn, that is mixed in with gasoline to provide transportation power. In Washington, however, the word "ethanol" immediately calls to mind billions of dollars in wasteful government subsidies and sycophantic paeans to imaginary family farmers. And for good reason. Beginning in the late 1970s, the federal government granted a tax credit at the pump for ethanol-compounded gasoline, plus an income tax credit for small ethanol producers--policies that have cost the taxpayer more than $7 billion in revenue over the last two decades, without much payoff (except to agribusiness). The ethanol industry produced 2.8 billion gallons last year, less than 3 percent of the volume of gasoline consumed by Americans. As a result, only a small fraction of gas stations actually sell ethanol-gasohol mixtures. To provide enough grain based ethanol to power the economy, notes Cornell agricultural economist David Pimentel, we'd have to use almost all of the farmland in the country just to grow the raw materials.

Worse, making ethanol is a hideous waste of energy. Traditional ethanol is made from fruit, primarily corn kernels, while the rest of the plant is either burned or plowed back into the soil. After its arrival at the ethanol refinery, the corn is mashed, producing a gooey soup. Then it is placed hi high temperature fermenters that break down the corn sugar into ethanol and water; a series of boiling and condensing processes squeezes out most of the water, leaving fuel-grade ethanol, which is essentially 199-proof vodka. All that work takes up a lot of energy--more energy, in fact, than is contained in the final product. The farming and refining process needed to produce one gallon of ethanol requires the equivalent of 1.3 gallons of gasoline. "Corn ethanol just isn't efficient and people will be left hungry if we use our croplands to grow fuel instead of food," says Pimentel. "It's just a bad idea."

As currently produced, ethanol is also more expensive than gas. Thanks to an intensive Department of Energy research program costing billions of dollars over the last three decades, scientists have determined how to make ethanol from corn as cheaply as possible and make it burn inside an engine as cleanly as possible. But the gasoline-ethanol mix for which most American cars are equipped--known as E85, because it is composed of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gas--still costs at least $2.20 per gallon. Even now, with gasoline prices at a relatively high $2 a gallon, that's no bargain.

Waste lines

Two new technologies, however, have the potential to make ethanol fuels much more practical. The first is a method for producing ethanol not from corn kernels, but from the plant's stalk, roots and leaves, known as cellulosic material. So-called cellulosic ethanol has been around for years, but breaking down the cellulose to make it fermentable was inefficient, expensive, and manufactured a fair amount of pollution. A Canadian biotechnology firm called Iogen, however, has developed a genetically-engineered microbe that processes the cellulose much more easily. (A European company, Novozymes, recently reported that it had developed a similar process.) Cellulosic ethanol made from stalks and husks still has to be fermented. But because it uses cast-off waste products of food that's already being grown, Iogen's process saves on both raw materials (depending on wholesale prices, raw corn can represent anywhere from 50 to 70 percent of the wholesale price of traditional ethanol) and energy costs.

According to estimates done by Charles J. Wyman, a Darmouth environmental engineer who has consulted for ethanol firms and is an expert in refinery technology, the new technologies could bring the price of cellulosic ethanol down to between 60 and 80 cents per gasoline-gallon-equivalent. (Because ethanol produces about a third less energy than gasoline when burned in an internal combustion engine, you need a third more ethanol than gasoline to drive the car the same distance.) And that's within the price range of refined gasoline, which runs between 25 cents per gallon drawn from Saudi oil and 75 cents per gallon for Wyoming oil. "It's getting to the point where the economic argument is just screaming at us," says Wyman. Iogen is already betting on the future: In partnership with Royal Dutch Shell, the company has begun construction on a plant that, by 2006, is expected to produce about 100 million gallons of ethanol per year.

The prospect of cheap cellulosic ethanol makes it possible to envision a very different energy landscape. Since it doesn't require fuel-intensive refining, Iogen's product would provide a net energy gain. If it becomes competitive with gasoline, we could begin substituting cellulosic ethanol for imported gas. According to an estimate by the consulting firm Burrill Co., if the waste products of all American farms were converted into cellulosic ethanol (a long-term, best-case scenario to be sure) it would provide 25 percent of all the energy needed to run our transportation system about the same percentage which we import today from Venezuela and the Persian Gulf combined. (The rest currently comes from U.S. sources, Canada, and Mexico.)

And while traditional ethanol production requires us to burn our own food, cellulosic production does not. Indeed, a number of energy crops including poplar trees and sugar beets can be grown on land unsuitable for food production. Most intriguing of all is switchgrass, a hardy North American plant that can be raised without irrigation and harvested with a low-labor process similar to mowing the lawn. in other words, it requires very little energy to bring to harvest compared with ethanol's traditional corn. According to Cornell's Pimentel, roughly 15 percent of the North American continent consists of land that is unsuitable for food farming but workable for switchgrass cultivation. Given the typical energy yield of switchgrass, a rough calculation indicates that if all that land were planted with switchgrass, we could replace every single gallon of gas consumed in the United States with a gallon of inexpensive, domestically produced, and more environmentally-friendly cellulosic ethanol.

Fuel cell growth

Burning cheap ethanol instead of gas in our cars and trucks would be a good step towards weaning our economy off Persian Gulf oil. But a second technology, could make cellulosic ethanol the basis for a viable hydrogen transportation system.