We could use both. But until the day comes that we can find an unsubsidized, cost effective, alternative fuel (algae’s possible), drill here, drill now!
>But until the day comes that we can find an unsubsidized, cost effective, alternative fuel (algae’s possible), drill here, drill now!
Algae is not likely to every be particularly possible. Once again it’s an issue of energy density. You need a heck of a lot of land area and time to concentrate enough energy to make a fuel. Fossil fuel has used quite a bit of time to collect all the energy in it. Algae wouldn’t have that luxury.
Honestly, there are only 2 alternatives I can picture past fossil fuels. The first is hydrogen powered fuel cells (which is still fairly poor on energy density, but far better than batteries, or any of the conversion involved in biologic fuels). You just use a nuke plant to crack the hydrogen, and you have somewhat reasonable energy density. The second is someone finally getting high temperature superconductors to around 300C. At that point you can conduct useful quantities of current at room temperature and you could have everything go electric since you could store enough power to actually go some distance. Also, there would be huge savings in transmission with such a tech. Of course there could also be some pie in the sky battery breakthrough, but the superconductor breakthrough would be much better in a lot of ways.
Cost effective are the kewy words. The only way to bring our economy back is cheap energy as in Drill here, drill now.
Regardless of all the hype science is no where near cheap energy with cellulosic and/or algae. It may be economically feasible if gas is $10 a gallon but that is not cheap and the US economy will be destroyed by then.
Just because things can be accomplished in the lab does not mean they will ever be ever be economically viable. There are collateral issues not directly related to the science that prevent economic feasibility of both cellulosic and algae.
Further, the Germans had a plant producing 50 million gallon per year of ethanol from wood-based feedstock back in the 1890s. It proved not to be economically feasible back then even though they were able to achieve 50 gallons per ton.
Today some cellulosic technology companies brag about 60 gallons per ton. With such nominal improvement in yield in over 100 years do we really believe the next breakthrough to bring celullosic fuels to commercial reality is just around the corner?