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Time to turn to algae-based fuel
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| Parent(s) |
Candidate
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| Contributor | RP |
| Last Edited | RP Jun 01, 2010 11:32am |
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| Category | Op-Ed by Candidate |
| Author | HARRY TEAGUE |
| News Date | Tuesday, June 1, 2010 05:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | As an oilman, I’ve been talking about America’s energy future with folks for more than 30 years. And I’ve continued that conversation since I was sworn into Congress.
Five resources are required to turn algae into fuel: sunlight, brackish or salt water, desert or other marginal land, carbon dioxide and algae. We have plenty of all five and too much of one — carbon dioxide. But through photosynthesis, we can take carbon dioxide pollution out of the atmosphere and convert it into algae-based gasoline and fuel.
Breakthroughs in the laboratory and in pilot-scale engineering have brought estimates for commercial-scale production costs down in range of today’s conventional fuels. With the resources so abundant, potential production volumes are staggering — in the tens of billions of gallons per year.
So what’s the holdup? Congress.
It turns out there are two immediate barriers to raising capital for commercial-scale production of algae-based fuel.
The first is a quirk in our tax code that provides tax incentives for cellulosic biofuel production but not for other advanced technology feedstock — meaning algae.
The second is our nation’s renewable fuel standard, which mandates that, by 2022, 16 billion gallons of our annual fuel demand must be satisfied by cellulosic fuel — but algae don’t qualify and receive no benefit from the RFS.
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