This may be the Year of Energy -- really

Welcome to 2006, now officially designated by this column as the Year of Energy.

Well, OK, you're right, technically every year is the Year of Energy. Without energy, we don't move, society doesn't move, the economy doesn't move. And there hardly seems to be a year in which we're not talking about energy and where it's going to come from and how we can get more of it and whether we're running out of it and how cheap or expensive it is.

But the conversation seems exponentially broader and deeper this year. A convergence of factors -- trouble in or with Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, Nigeria and Russia, the hurricanes, the emerging middle-class of consumers in China and India fueling (pun intended) significant growth in demand, concern about the extent of worldwide reserves -- have pushed energy prices up in the short term and promise to keep them there for the long haul.

That has prompted lots of official initiatives, at the federal, state and local levels, on everything from research spending to mandated use of alternatives. More important, that high price for a barrel of oil has put alternatives within hailing distance of being economically competitive, especially as more research and economies of scale drive down production costs.

Consider just two angles of how these issues are playing out locally:


Although much of the attention has been focused in these parts on biodiesel, there's considerable activity in these parts with a more established alternative fuel -- ethanol, either as an emissions-reducing additive or as a motor fuel in its own right.

Bill Gates' Cascade Investment has invested $84 million in Fresno, Calif.-based Pacific Ethanol, which plans to build five plants on the West Coast; one is already under construction in Madera County, Calif.

For several years investors have been trying to build an ethanol plant in Grant County under the name Pacific Rim Ethanol. That effort has been succeeded by a new proposal called Moses Lake Ethanol.

Terry Brewer, executive director of the Grant County Economic Development Council, says the earlier proposal called for a 40 million-gallon-a-year plant with wheat and barley as the feedstock.






The new proposal calls for a 100 million-gallon-a-year plant that uses corn. The plant would be built on a site with space for a doubling of production capacity, as well as a long rail loop to allow unit trains to bring in corn (although corn currently isn't a big Columbia Basin crop, Brewer says the region could supply a third or more of the corn needed, with the hope that the plant would provide an incentive for farmers to plant more).

The effort is being headed, Brewer says, by John McNamara, a former president of ag giant Archer Daniels Midland and now a consultant and executive of a Canadian ethanol company.

Brewer says progress is being made on the financing, permitting and engineering of the plant, and organizers hope construction will begin early this summer. "I think they'll get it done."


Most of the discussion of alternative fuels for transportation has focused, not surprisingly, on cars. Truck manufacturers such as Paccar and the railroads also have experimented with unconventional fuels such as natural gas.

All of which raises the question -- what about airplanes? Can they fly on something other than conventional petroleum- derived aviation fuel?

Dave Daggett, technology leader for energy and emissions at Boeing, says there are, in fact, alternatives available, and some of them are not just R&D ideas. Synthetic fuels can be derived from natural gas or coal (the latter a technology South Africa, he says, is still using). Those synthetics are already economically competitive with oil at $60 a barrel.

Researchers are also looking at a bio-derived fuel similar to ethanol, although there are lots of questions to be answered about such matters as energy content (less would mean less range for planes) and performance in cold temperatures.

Fuel cells to run auxiliary power units (which provide power when the plane is on the ground) are also a possibility.

We don't know yet which of these technologies will make it to the marketplace.

Aside from the issues of energy content and cost, there are huge issues of how to get these various fuels to the mass market.

Imagine pulling into a "gas station" of the future, only to be confronted with an array of pumps offering conventional gasoline, E85 (85 percent ethanol), biodiesel, clean diesel, natural gas, hydrogen in some form for fuel cells and recharging ports for electric vehicles.

We also may not know for years whether 2006 really was more of a Year of Energy than any other.

But here's one way to tell -- how long it took for that elaborate gas station of the future to be as common a neighborhood fixture as the gas-and-gulp convenience store is now.

P-I reporter Bill Virgin can be reached at 206-448-8319 or billvirgin@seattlepi.com. His column appears Tuesdays and Thursdays.