Bill Watt’s Blog

So, I think everyone who knows me would agree I’m a Cornucopian and that I believe we have the means to fix our current problems. As such I find it amazing that we haven’t yet fixed this oil dependence and reliance on other parts of the world for our standard of living.

Then I read articles like in this month’s Fast Company article featuring a story on Johnathan Goodwin, a co-partner of SAE Energy, who converts some of the biggest gas-guzzlers in America into some of the cleanest and most efficient cars on the road. It ain’t cheap but if he can do what he says then I have to imagine Detroit could find ways to make it market ready. We all won’t be pulling up to restaurants and asking for fry oil if they just worked with the valley and the government and got the ball moving on real solutions instead of arguing against competition from European diesel imports.

I really think you should read this article as written so I won’t pull out all the interesting sound bites but here is one section I found really interesting (since I tend to think about the execution issues involved):

“Goodwin admits all these things are true but believes the country could be weaned off gasoline in a three-step process. The first would be for Detroit to aggressively roll out diesel engines, much as Europe has already begun to do (some 50% of all European cars run diesel). In a single stroke, that would improve the nation’s mileage by as much as 40%, and, because diesel fuel is already widely available, drivers could take that step with a minimum of disruption. What’s more, given that many diesel engines can also run homegrown biodiesel, a mass conversion to diesel would help kick-start that market. (This could have geopolitical implications as well as environmental and economic ones: The Department of Transportation estimated in 2004 that if we converted merely one-third of America’s passenger cars and light trucks to diesel, we’d reduce our oil consumption by up to 1.4 million barrels of oil per day–precisely the amount we import from Saudi Arabia.)

The second step in Goodwin’s scheme would be to produce diesel-electric hybrid cars. This would double the mileage on even the biggest dieselvehicles. The third phase would be to produce electric hybrids that run in “dual fuel” mode, burning biodiesel along with hydrogen, ethanol, natural gas, or propane. This is the concept Goodwin is proving out in his turbine-enhanced H3 Hummer and in Neil Young’s Lincoln: “At that point, your mileage just goes really, really high, and your emissions are incredibly low,” he says. Since those vehicles can run on regular diesel or biodiesel–and without any alternative fuel at all, if need be–drivers wouldn’t have to worry about getting stranded on the interstate. At the same time, as more and more dual-fuel cars hit the road, they would goose demand for genuinely national ethanol, hydrogen, and biodiesel grids.”

See, this is the part that makes me crazy. Everyone is worried about the rest of the world taking our jobs. I’m from Ohio and I hear the stories about steel mills closing and the work going over seas. (I read an article last week about how international companies are growing and are expanding by buying our closed steel mills and running them more efficiently. Hmmm. Seems like there is another blog post there.)

We are a country known for our innovations and if we got off our asses, built some new technology that removed our dependence on foreign oil, especially from the Middle East where our dollars are arguably supporting folks who don’t have our best interests at heart, and if we used the new technology to create a leap forward that created a new industry then we’d be in the lead once again. I’m not even sure that it is debatable anymore that we’re in an innovation economy and trying to be protectionistic is the wrong approach.

Manufacturing can always be done by cheaper locations (funny to see China is now pricing itself out of the manual labor work as other countries seek to take the business and get China’s year over year growth rates) but you can’t really outsource innovation. In my mind our options are to be on the cutting edge or be competing with the low cost factory providers. I’d rather be in the former and create the markets that others then adopt.

Read the full article and let me know what you think.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 20th, 2007 at 10:33 AM and is filed under Sustainability, Current Events, About Me, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.