Folks we have all been dancing around the May Pole on the subject of government subsidies. You know and I know that we conservatives tend to call all subsidies irresponsible and wasteful, but this is a lazy attitude.
In fact some subsidies are wildly irresponsible but some are not.
How many of you have heard of Methane Hydrate? That’s what I figured.
China knows about it, and so does India, S. Korea and Taiwan and they are subsidizing research into it to the tune of millions of dollars. China built a research ship just to investigate it.
Folks no private company can take the risk to research Methane Hydrate and develop it into a viable fuel, too many dollars for the R and D and it may never pay back one dime. No board of directors would dare risk their stockholders’ money that way. On the other hand some very smart people think it could well mean more recoverable energy than all the coal, natural gas and oil deposits on earth combined and the strategic importance of being ahead on the development could make or destroy nations.
Another high risk development that is being subsidized is green algae fed by the CO2 from such sources as coal power plants. Our Kansas Governor vetoed two coal power plants last summer that were going to be built using green algae to eat up the CO2 discharge and to supply a second source of energy. They say that some varieties of algae contain 50 percent oil, and this is before the plant breeders have their day at selective breeding.
Select varieties of corn are also being bred up to yield more ethanol per bushel and much work is going on in the subsidized State Ag colleges under grants for the purpose.
In time much of the corn and green algae grown in this country will be under contract to big companies like Cargill and ADM using proprietary strains developed by them, just as many hogs, chickens, turkeys and eggs are grown now, but till then the research will go on in Ag colleges under federal grants.
Yes some corn will still be used for taco shells, too much maybe as Mexican farmers are worried the US will export so much cheap corn to Mexico that it will bankrupt all the Mexican farmers, who are much less efficient at growing corn than American farmers.
Of course our government subsidizes research in worthy fields; always has and always will and liberals and conservatives alike vote for it. Sure it is a prime vehicle for pure pork barrel, but not always folks, not always.
Folks here is a link for Methane Hydrate, and yes both links are biased assuming global warming. Folks you just have to read the good and discard the bad in all these sources.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0%2C1518%2C523178%2C00.html
Link for Green Algae, one of many green algae fuel related links;
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15287313/
The people that know little and talk much think of the entire alternative energy field as being ethanol. In fact there are hundreds if not thousands of alternative energies now being developed that combined will depose King Oil.
Many of these will be niche uses, wave and tidal power making drinking water from sea water for instance. All are being researched right now by our subsidized state colleges and using grants from many sources public and private. Many of these students will eventually start their own companies using the research they did in college, and whole new industries and new fortunes will result.
It is the American way.
So does the United States; the Department of Energy publishes a quarterly newsletter on the topic, called 'Fire in the Ice', available online in PDF format. The United States has poured well over a hundred million into exploring this technology, with another 90 million for the next two years. Japan and Canada have a joint testbed production facility in Canada which is supposed to provide a proof in concept of recovering methane hydrates from the permafrost, but that's not usually mentioned, as this doesn't fit within the environmentalists ideals and likely will demonstrate that it will take more energy to extract the methane than you get from the methane itself.
China didn't build a ship, they contracted with an exploration company which conducted the core samples; South Korea did, however, make a dedicated core testing ship, though the majority of it's use is for probing their offshore natural gas resources. Through publicly funded universities, NOAA, various government agencies, and cooperation from the US Navy, the claim could easily be made that we've more than twenty exploration ships in our 'national inventory.' When you count exploration ships owned by US companies or their subsidiaries, we've closer to seventy of them.
Total investment from public sources into seafloor methane hydrate research now exceeds two billion worldwide, and total amount of methane extracted is less than the energy contained in a gallon of gasoline. But there are thousands employed who depend upon it remaining in the hands of government investment, including three full time employees at the National Energy Technology Laboratory. The focus of their efforts have turned from harvesting and extracting methane hydrates to the.. This is hard to type with a straight face. Their present investigative efforts are in the possible release of methane hydrates into the global environment and the impact on the global carbon footprint. Also of concern is the impact on 'sensitive deep ocean environments.' Finally, the 'China Syndrome' of ocean floor based methane hydrate recovery - a deep sea slide causing a wide spread tsunami triggered by a cascade release of methane hydrates as a result of harvesting methane hydrates.
Yup, that's right, we're paying millions not to figure out how to get methane up from the seafloor, but how much of that methane might be 'spilled' into the environment and how it will impact the deep ocean floor where virtually nothing can ever survive.
This is why government subsidies are awful. We pay for one goal - develop the technology to get this ice based natural gas extracted and delivered for commercial use - and we get instead - build the opposition documents that will prevent this from ever being an economically viable source and create the documents that will be used by environmentalists to ban US companies from ever participating in it.