Fuel Freedom co-founder and chairman Yossie Hollander and board of directors member John Hofmeister appeared on Sean Hannity’s radio show on Wednesday, April 18, to promote domestically produced natural gas as a way to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
Seriously, if we made all our fuel in America we could create not just thousands, but potentially millions of jobs. What gives? Read more →
In our quest for energy independence, we’ve run across quite a few different terms with abbreviations. So many, in fact, sometimes it’s hard to keep track. That’s why we’ve decided to organize them all in one place. Read up, bookmark the page, and become an expert.
The United States has been observing Festivus for 18 years now, and this antidote to holiday crassness is vital as ever. As Frank Costanza so aptly described one of its central pillars (in “The Strike,” the episode of “Seinfeld” that originally aired on Dec. 18, 1997):
“The tradition of Festivus begins with the Airing of Grievances. I got a lotta problems with you people! Now you’re gonna hear about ’em!”
Almost a decade ago, oil magnate T. Boone Pickens set forth the “Pickens Plan,” which was supposed to end our reliance on imported oil. At the time, it wasn’t a bad idea. We were importing more than half our oil and were at the mercy of OPEC. Read more →
We have a lot of natural gas here in America. I mean A LOT. More than we know what to do with. So much, that North Dakota alone is burning off $1.2 billion worth of it each year.
Today at the Los Angeles Auto Show I got a chance to test-drive the newest green cars on the market. Most of the ones I tried out were electric, but a CNG/gasoline hybrid made an appearance, as did Toyota’s new hydrogen fuel cell vehicle, the Mirai. Read more →
Americans love their freedom to choose. Someone invents something, and competitors rush in with their own similar products to fight for a market that didn’t exist before.
This is what Tesla has done with the electric vehicle: The Model S is making cold-eyed journalists swoon, and the next few months are huge: The company will soon release its eagerly awaited crossover SUV, the Model X, followed by its more-eagerly awaited “affordable” sedan, the Model 3.
But Tesla shouldn’t get too comfortable, because the established auto-makers want to steal some of its quiet, zero-emission thunder with EVs of their own: In the past week, Toyota unveiled the new Prius, trying to assure everyone it can be cool as well as get 10 percent more miles out of a battery charge; Edmunds gave its blessing for the 2016 Chevy Volt; there was a possible sighting of the 2016 Nissan Leaf, the best-selling EV in the U.S.; and there were rumors that Mercedes-Benz is working on an electric car than has a range of 311 miles.
It’s a basic rule of economics: Competitive markets are good for consumers. Which is why drivers should be demanding fuel choice as well.
Gasoline is cheap now, but it doesn’t take much to cause a price spike: The threat of a supply constriction overseas; a refinery going down (and staying down, in California’s case); output quotas in OPEC nations. Anything can cause volatility in the global market. Businesses don’t like uncertainty, and it’s bad for consumers as well.
The only way to reduce the cost structure of fuels over the long term is to create fuel choice, something the United States has never known. To quote former Shell Oil president John Hofmeister: “We will never get past the volatility of oil until we get to alternatives to oil.”
We’re not advocating an end to fossil fuels. We just want fuel choice: Ethanol, methanol, CNG, LNG, biodiesel, hydrogen and, yes, electric batteries. Anything that reduces our dependence on oil is good for America.
If gasoline, the same fuel we’ve been stuck with for more than a century, is the superior fuel for vehicles, let it compete with other choices at the pump. If oil companies don’t want competition, what are they afraid of?
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Just in time for the Fourth of July weekend: Our very own John Hofmeister speaking words of wisdom about the need for the United States to wean itself off oil as its dominant transportation fuel.
“It’s incumbent upon the United States of America to become more oil independent,” Hofmeister said at a security conference in Israel in June. “Because it still relies on nearly 7 million barrels a day of imports, and in a nation that uses 18 and a half to 19 million barrels of oil per day, the loss or the risk of 7 million barrels a day of imports puts that nation at about two-thirds of independence, and that’s not enough for the world’s largest economy.
“So there remains an interdependence, until the U.S. can find independence, and it has every right and every responsibility to pursue independence. As does every other nation.”
Watch Hofmeister’s full talk at the Herzliya Conference in Tel Aviv:
Hofmeister knows of what he speaks: He was the president of Shell Oil Co., the American subsidiary of oil giant Royal Dutch Shell, from 2005 to 2008. The author of “Why We Hate the Oil Companies” now travels the world talking about the need for alternatives to oil. He’s not only on the board of directors and advisors at Fuel Freedom, he founded a nonprofit called Citizens for Affordable Energy.
U.S. crude prices closed at $56.96 a barrel Wednesday, down $2.51 or 4 percent, the biggest one-day drop since April 8. Compare that to last summer, when the price was above $100. But the market remains volatile, and Hofmeister said having oil at an affordable price long-term is necessary for national security.
“If you’re not taking care of yourself, no one else will,” Hofmeister said. “And so nations should look to their security — not just to their defense forces, but to their energy supplies — which in the United States, is why I’m almost entirely focused now on transitioning natural gas to transportation fuels, as well as biofuels, as well as electricity for transportation. Because the future of oil is simply limited. We’re not running out. It won’t disappear. But it simply won’t be available at this price for an indefinite future.”
Hofmeister expanded on another of his major themes: that natural gas, which is cheap and plentiful in the United States, could help the U.S. and other nations reduce oil consumption. Natural gas is used as a fuel in its gaseous, compressed form — as CNG and LNG — and it can also be processed into liquid alcohol fuel, ethanol or methanol.
“Over the next decade, nations like the United States, or like Israel, or like much of Europe if not the whole of Europe, that are not transitioning at least a third of their oil demand away from oil and toward natural gas will only look back in regret.”
(Photo credit: Poet Biorefining plant in Macon, Missouri. From FarmProgress.com)
You can thank Hernando de Soto for bacon and pork chops.
The Spanish explorer gets credit for introducing the pig to America, having brought 13 of them to Tampa Bay, Florida, in 1539. By the time of de Soto’s death, three years later, that passel of piggies had grown to more than 700. Yes, pigs grow quickly. They also poop, 24 hours a day, in great quantities.
That manure can be transformed into fuel for vehicles. So even though we’ve let all that pig poop — and cow poop, for that matter — go to waste all these centuries, more of it is being processed to extract methane, the principal component of natural gas.
All over the country, this renewable form of methane is being collected and fed into the nation’s natural-gas pipelines, and then transported to fueling stations to be used as compressed natural gas (CNG) and liquefied natural gas (LNG). The fuel is not only much cheaper than petroleum-based vehicle fuels, it burns cleaner: It contains about 23 percent less in greenhouse-gas emissions than diesel and 30 percent less than gasoline. Capturing all that methane instead of letting it float away from farms is also important, since the gas is more than 20 times worse for the environment than carbon dioxide.
There are some 191 renewable-methane projects on farms in the United States. These farms use anaerobic digesters, which involve storing the manure in tanks or ponds. The fecal matter, as well as food scraps and other farm waste, is broken down into smaller molecules, and the material usually is covered, to help elevate the temperature inside. That allows anaerobic bacteria (which don’t take in oxygen) to go to work on them. Methane is made as a result, and machines vacuum off the gas, cleanse it of impurities (like CO2) and ship it off to be used as fuel.
A renewable-methane plant outside of Memphis run by Clean Energy Fuels.
Livestock is uniquely suited to be a renewable fuel source, because cows and pigs are prolific producers of manure. According to the USDA, dairy cows account for about 80 pounds per day (per 1,000 pounds of animal weight). The equivalent in hogs accounts for 63.1 pounds per day.
At Circle Four Farms near Milford, Utah (about halfway between Salt Lake City and Las Vegas), a million and a half hogs are raised and taken to market each year. It’s the largest pig farm in the western United States, and every day those hogs produce a million gallons of manure.
Three years ago, a Provo firm called Alpental Energy Partners, which finances alternative-energy projects, noticed the potential of the massive farm. (How could one not notice? The odor from the facility can be smelled for miles.) Alpental built anaerobic digesters that turn all that poop into electricity that powers more than 3,000 homes in a town hundreds of miles away.
Such a project could easily provide the same benefits, but for drivers of cars, trucks and SUVs that run on natural gas, which also happens to be a “feedstock” for alcohol fuels that can run in flex-fuel vehicles.
Paul Stephan, managing partner at Alpental, said various incentives, including carbon credits and investment tax credits, which enhanced the revenue stream from the pig project. But those were complicated to secure. “If we didn’t have one of those [revenue] attributes, it would probably be more profitable for us to sell it as transportation fuel,” he said. “I think if I was going to go look at doing another project in the United States off of pig manure and methane, I’d probably sell it as transportation fuel.”
