Deconstructing the Energy Bill

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What do I mean by glucose? The company can adapt any source of glucose. If cellulosic [materials such as switchgrass] are reliable, we can use them. In Brazil they make ethanol from sugar. We could use that. Our system is flexible. The value, at the end of the day, is that the feedstocks that are used to ultimately produce our petroleum create their biomass from CO2. Therefore, since the CO2 that would be released through the combustion of fuel ultimately comes from CO2 taken from the air, there is a smaller environmental impact than if you just dug something up from the ground and burned it. The petroleum molecule that you're making comes from a renewable source. And in terms of our dependence on foreign oil, we can make renewable petroleum in the U.S.

If it's chemically the same as petroleum, won't it have the same polluting side-effects?

If you burn a gallon of renewable petroleum and a gallon of ground-derived equivalent, the emissions would be roughly equivalent. Although because our manufactured petroleum doesn't have traces of sulfur and other compounds found in natural petroleum, it would be somewhat cleaner. But if you take the life-cycle approach and look at how much energy is used in the extraction and refining of oil, then our renewable petroleum has a much smaller environmental impact.

The LS9 vision is that its renewable petroleum could be used in our existing transportation infrastructure, sent through existing pipelines, burned in today's cars. Has that been proven?

Since the molecule is identical, there's no reason we shouldn't be able to do all those things. But we haven't done the tests yet. That's something we'll do as we get the process more efficient. So far we've validated that this can be done, but it needs to be more efficient. We see it as something that can be very competitive against oil prices, say, the equivalent of less than $50 a barrel.

How does it compare to ethanol in terms of environmental impact and fuel efficiency?

In terms of fuel efficiency, thermodynamically, if you take a gallon of ethanol and a gallon of gasoline, the gallon of ethanol has two-thirds less energy. So the molecules that we're producing, which are chemically identical to petroleum, have more energy than ethanol. In terms of a net CO2 benefit, that's hard to quantify, in part because we haven't picked an input yet. Remember, our petroleum can be made from any number of forms of glucose. You'd have a different net impact if you started with corn compared to cellulose.

So what does the bill mean for a company like LS9?

That's in part where I thought the bill was limited. When you read the biofuel portion, it requires any future fuel to be of a cellulosic source. While I understand the motivation of that, the costs on cellulosics have not come down the way that people had hoped they would. When technologies lag, it's not uncommon for other technologies to emerge and take the lead. But emerging technologies like ours didn't get much support in this bill.

So you think Washington shouldn't be in the business of mandating specific technologies.

What I'd like to see is an understanding of where we want to go—an end to our dependence on foreign oil and the use of more environmentally friendly fuels. Ethanol is one way to get there. But there are other ways.

The Washington wordsmiths named this bill the "Energy Independence & Security Act." What would an Energy Innovation Act look like?

Well, hopefully it wouldn't be 800 pages long and include a page and a half specifying the circumstances under which the U.S. Coast Guard can use incandescent lights, as there is in this bill!

Look, I do like the fact that in this bill we started to move the needle in terms of fuel efficiency. But we need to start figuring out where we need to go as a country, and what are the technologies that can help us get there. From a federal standpoint, some of these cutting-edge technologies haven't been getting the treatment they should.