Woolsey champions ethanol

By KELLY HEARN/United Press International

WASHINGTON -- The United States should lessen its strategically perilous dependence on Middle East petroleum by promoting processing technologies that could render fuel from agricultural wastes, grasses and indigenous crops, former CIA director James Woolsey told a panel of lawmakers.

"We have to realize that the United States' fuel and energy distribution and transmission systems will almost certainly be subject to attack," Woolsey said. "We ought to always be looking at ways to decentralize and make more flexible and less fragile our energy-distribution network."

Woolsey, who testified before the House energy subcommittee, said that means, in part, relying on renewable fuels and alternative energy for transportation, which accounts for roughly 60 percent of U.S. oil demand.

The former CIA director, who has recently suggested that Iraq is behind the terrorist assaults on America, said the United States' dependence on foreign oil, and particularly the world's dependence on oil from the Middle East is "bad and getting worse."

"The Middle East, outside of Israel and Turkey (which have no oil producing capacity) is composed of pathological predators or vulnerable autocrats," he said. "This is not a recipe for long-term stability."

Renewable and alternative fuel credits are needed to spur consumer acceptance, he said, and "one major untapped resource is waste of all sorts, (especially) agricultural waste from packing plants and pig farms. There are technologies that can turn them into energy."

Those technologies could create so-called cellulosic ethanol, a kind of fuel that could be created from virtually any plant or plant product. Past attempts to manufacture ethanol using corn have not taken hold in the consumer market because ultimately the fuel has cost more than the wholesale price of gasoline.

Woolsey said so-called Flexible Fuel Vehicles or FFVs that can use up to 85 percent ethanol are already available and in widespread use in some counties, particularly Brazil.

"All it requires to make a FFV is a chip in the fuel system and a different kind of plastic in the fuel line," he said.

The former spymaster told lawmakers that world petroleum production will begin to turn downward "sometime between 2010 and 2030. And as each year goes on, our dependence on the Middle East is going to get greater and greater."

Well over two-thirds of the world's remaining oil reserves are in the Middle East, he said.

Woolsey pointed out the environmental allure of ethanol as well.

"Remember that biomass ethanol doesn't come from the Middle East and it doesn't contribute to global warming," he said.

Woolsey said that every $1 billion of oil imports that is replaced by domestically produced ethanol creates 10,000 to 20,000 American jobs.

He told lawmakers past energy saving efforts have wrongly fixated on boosting gas mileage.

"If you are doing something good with the fuel you don't care if you are getting twenty or twenty five miles per gallon because it's fuel you don't mind burning," he said. "We need to rethink the notion of what we are trying to do."

Woolsey said he thinks America should drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and save it for emergency needs. He cautioned, however, that officials would first need to lessen the vulnerability of the Alaskan pipeline, which was recently punctured by a hunter's rifle.

Woolsey, quoting environmental author Hunter Lovins, said the pipeline is so vulnerable "it is like a 900-mile piece of Chapstick."

America's oil companies should not feel threatened by ethanol, he said, because their oil refineries would likely be the places it gets produced.