"Don't drink the fuel!" Just in case anyone got the wrong idea from the fact that the Indianapolis 500 cars are ALL running on ethanol this year for the first time does NOT mean that it is drinkable stuff. It could have been, but "pure" ethanol is subject to federal beverage excise taxes, so they added 2% conventional petroleum gasoline, at least that is the story they are telling in the pits. You have to be a pretty seriously far gone rummy to even think about that as a beverage, and that's the point. It certainly has put a new perspective on the problems of moonshine prevention though, hasn't it? I mean everyone and their dog's uncle are being encouraged to produce ethanol as a motor fuel or fuel blending stock. How are the "revenuers" going to check that the loading dock isn't saving a barrel of the good stuff for themselves to make a monthly "vodka veekend"? I would imagine that 42 gallons of 200 "proof" ethanol would be enough to create a very large number of hangovers.

Still (no pun intended), (okay, maybe it was intended) the fact that Indy cars are now so standardized that it is mainly a test of the driving skills of the driver seems to have taken some of the excitement and much of the appeal out of this particular event from my point of view. I was never a huge Indy fan, though. I am sure that it will be the excuse for many thousands of hangovers this weekend, not only in Indianapolis, but across the country for folks gathering for the television coverage. What this all ethanol version of the race does accomplish is a great deal of very positive publicity for the E85 and the whole biofuels segment. If you can run 200+ mph racing cars on the stuff, it surely is "powerful" enough for commuter driving, right? There are still doubters, of course, and I will talk a little more about that in a few minutes.

Few of us can be said to be living up to our own standards of behavior every minute of every day; we (most of us) just try our best to do our best as much of the time as we can. I came to be an admirer of a company called Schlumberger while living and working in Calgary, Alberta, the petroleum industry capital of Canada. It had at least a little to do with the neighbor in my condo building being an employee there, and explaining to me some of what the company did (at least some of the parts that I didn't know about from the general reputation of this oil industry international giant). I have long wanted to find a way to approach them to see if they couldn't help with discovering and drilling for water. Seems like a low profit area, but the benefits of discovering water are, at least on some scales of values, far more desirable than discovering oil.

You see the reason I wanted Schlumberger to take on this sideline was that I had learned that there are reputed to be some VERY, VERY, VERY deep water deposits hidden in the rock formations of the earth's crust. I honestly don't know if they are, as I believe them to be, a secondary level of "aquifer" that catches what leaks from aquifers at more conventional depths. They may be fossil water. That is, they may be deposits of water that have been there for millions of years, and would take millions of years to replenish once siphoned off (that would be, "a bad thing"). My point, however, is that assuming that these deep water sources are renewable, it would be a very good idea to have access to them in places where there is no "ordinary" level aquifers to be accessed. That is to say, regions subject to extreme drought that brings on famine, starvation and death as happens so often in tropical regions, especially parts of Africa. It makes a lot of sense, as screaming comic Sam Kineson used to shout, "move to where the food is!" Political reality is that this is not usually possible. But many of these same regions are areas where deep water formations are at least likely to exist, and the longer term drought cycles could, at minimum, be somewhat ameliorated by having a reliable source of water sufficient for human consumption, and perhaps even enough to make crop irrigation a practical reality, thus bringing the food to where the people are instead.

Schlumberger (pronounced in the French manner, despite the German style spelling) is an oil exploration company providing especially sophisticated seismic services and analysis, so they are in the business of drilling holes all over the world (and discovering what lies deep in the geological formations below the surface). Decades ago, when I lived in Calgary, it was not uncommon for oil exploration companies to drill into "promising" dome formations only to find water instead of oil. (Admittedly this was often very salty water, but drilling a 10 or 15 thousand foot well and adding a [solar powered] desalination plant to the extraction of local water is a lot cheaper than desalination of sea water and building a pipeline several hundreds of miles long to get it where it is desperately needed.)

All of that is a long preamble to introduce my confession that despite decades of wanting to see something happen in this field of deep water wells, I personally have contributed nothing. My good news today, however is that several (fellow Canadians, as it happens) people and organizations are doing some really good work, albeit on still too tiny a scale. A few mining and exploration companies have put together a network (and a website) called "Mining for Water". These exploration companies do a lot of drilling and seismic examination of geological structures, so drilling equipment is part of their expertise. So far, their efforts have, to date, resulted in 10 participating companies which have brought clean water to some 26,000 people by creating 29 wells and 3 pipelines. Spearheading this movement is a company called Orezone a publicly traded company trying to show some degree of corporate social responsibility. That's a good start.

But again the reason "Mining for Water" came to my attention was, in spite of my personal lack of accomplishments in helping to create any deep water wells myself, I have been, for more than 2 decades now, been trying to keep tabs on the technology that might make these (very,very,very) deep water deposits accessible. Pumps for 1000 feet lifts are now common (they didn't used to be) and not terribly expensive (though they do require a fair amount of power). Similarly windmill technology has advanced too but a modern windmill that exploits low wind speeds can cost about $15,000 (and that doesn't include drilling costs for the well). All of which led me once again to rediscover "Ryan's Well". This website began with the inspiring story of a young boy (6 years old, believe it or not) who decided to raise the $75 it would take to put a pump on a well in an African village that needed it. The organization has grown to be a really significant contributor to underdeveloped region's water supplies. They have helped build 266 wells in 12 countries that now supply more than 450,000 people with clean water.

Ryan is now much older now, a 10th grade student! He has visited 19 countries being still very active in bringing the message of this crying need in so many places. (Beacause of IRS regulations, in the USA to make a tax deductible donation to Ryan's Well Foundation you need to use an American registered charity. Tides Foundation will pass along your donation to Ryan's Well Foundation and issue a tax deductible receipt. If you don't need your donation to be tax deductible, just donate directly to Ryan's Well Foundation via the web site.) (Just in case you are worried that this could be one of those internet "scam" sites, some of the other cooperating sponsors and partners of the projects are various Rotary International clubs from Cornwall, Ontario to Calcutta, India as well as the Canadian Physicians for Aid and Relief (CPAR) who also offer educational materials for grades 4-6 and high school teachers and tools for high school students to put ideas into actions.

Good news this week from Virginia Tech. Virginia Tech in cooperation with ORNL (Oak Ridge National Laboratories) and the University of Georgia announced that they have discovered a novel and, perhaps, very promising way of making hydrogen. Making hydrogen? Why do we need a new way to make hydrogen? Well, actually making hydrogen is not all that difficult, but storing it, once it has been made (either from electrolysis of water or more often in commercial circumstances from natural gas) is a problem. What makes this solution so intriguing is that it "stores" the hydrogen as water and starches (polysaccharides) until it is needed, thus rendering it safe without expensive cryogenic cooling, nor heavy and expensive high pressure vessels to contain it. The "trick" of this method is that these scientists have combined 13 enzymes not found together in any natural context, and added those to simple starch to produce the energy that separates the hydrogen from water, with a by-product of carbon dioxide. Because the starch, the water and the enzymes can be combined "on demand" a vehicle can carry a supply of each, creating hydrogen as needed, and since the carbon comes from organic (biomass in the form of starches) material no carbon is being added to the atmosphere from fossil fuel sources. Of course, at this point we don't have a lot of information on what enzymes are used or how economical the process may be because of enzyme costs, but it does sound like a very interesting model that solves a lot of the hydrogen "infrastructure" problems to making it a viable vehicle fuel. As Virginia Tech's principal researcher, assistant professor, Y.H. Percival Zhang, points out, ethanol, methanol, ammonia and other hydrocarbons require elaborate equipment and precautions, compared to starch, which you can distribute through grocery stores. The cost and complexity of the enzymes has not been revealed, so we really don't know how viable the process may be, but it certainly is an interesting pathway to safe and renewable portable energy.

I was interviewed on KOA Radio 850 (AM) in Denver this week. More particularly I was the guest of Rick Barber, the midnight maniac whose talk show program is heard in Nebraska, and even further afield than that. Reportedly he has about 1 million loyal listeners. It wasn't my first time chatting with Rick and his callers. For me, Rick is always a pleasure to visit with for an hour, especially when he calls me, but I enjoy his program occasionally when insomnia strikes too. In this case, the topic was ... forget it, there's no suspense or surprise here, the topic was biofuels and biomass. Rick tells me that gasoline prices have hit $4.09 in the Denver area this past week (actually I think he said this was the price at the pump in Aspen, Colorado). I told him that we weren't suffering quite that badly in Arizona at the moment. We can still get $3.09 per gallon regular unleaded. Rick was encouraging that perhaps this whole biofuels thing was a step in a positive direction, but at least one of his callers was eager to take a piece of me home in his bulldog bite. This gentleman was adamant that bio-based solutions were taking food out of the mouths of someone, and for those it wasn't depriving of nourishment, it was inflating the costs of everything from milk to beef, to corn and wheat by taking up either the food sources themselves, or by taking up agriculturally useful land. He made the rather good point that even on most of the so-called "marginal" land in the USA, someone is already running cattle grazing operations. Where are we going to find all this planting space?

Nor was it surprising that I was "beating the drum" for waste material feedstock during the discussions. Sure beats "hunting" for oil reserves. We know where the municipal waste and sewage is. (Sorry Schlumberger, no seismic exploration required at the moment.) As I pointed out to this gentleman, though, it would also be interesting and potentially very worth the trouble to "harvest" the "Red Tide" in the Gulf of Mexico that is reportedly severely damaging if not ruining the shrimping in the region. "Red Tide" is a form of algae. While it is not the most productive form of algae in terms of the lipid (oil) content, Australian experiments have shown pretty much any random collection of "wild" algae can be processed into biodiesel. And algae can double in volume in as little as 24 hours. Now it is true that if we planted almost every available acre of agricultural land in the USA in corn, we still couldn't replace all the petroleum we use with ethanol. On the other hand, algae is "estimated" to produce something like 50 to 100 times as much fuel per acre as corn, or nearly any other potential biofuel crop. GreenStar (more on them in a moment) says: "Algae can produce 50 to 100 times more oil per acre than oil crops (i.e. oil from soybean, corn, cotton, hemp, euphorbia, mustard seed, sesame, safflower, rice, tung oil tree, sunflower, peanuts, rapeseed, olives, jojoba, jatropha, coconut, palm oil, Chinese tallow, etc.). " (I'm not sure that is true of jatropha curcas, but then I know some things they don't.) That kind of yield from carefully selected species of algae should be easy to achieve if you can harvest half of the crop on any given acre 100 times in a 210 day growing season (which assumes a "seed" amount of about 10% of intended yield).

Strangely, one of the most popular and well known algae-to-biofuel company uses carefully controlled growing tubes to cultivate the stuff (while bubbling through the carbon monoxide and dioxide from power plant combustion -- presumably coal based combustion). Rick Barber's caller seemed to think that coal gasification was 'good enough' for a solution, especially because it didn't take away any agricultural land. The combination of coal gasification and carbon recycling using algae does make coal somewhat more palatable, but it is still pumping fossil carbon into the atmosphere to join the already circulating carbon in the environment. That, it seems to me, is not likely a "solution" to anything except coal's bad public image. The other thing about the Greenfuel Technologies Inc.'s containers for cultivating algae on sunlight and smokestack carbon emissions is that they are about the most expensive way you could possibly conceive of for growing the stuff. An updated (possibly) version of their "concept" MAY be found in an article on CNET that claims they are now describing 100 acres of algae "ponds" as being the size to suit a 100 megawatt power plant, presumably meaning a coal-breathing-dragon-type power generating plant. Better than spewing carbon directly, but as I said, it still is adding fossil carbon to the current environment which most scientists would agree is not as desirable as using the stuff in circulation already.

GreenStar is the company I mentioned last week who are doing a nice job on their publicity material, at least in terms of the media production values. (That's NOT a typographical error, GreenStar is not the same company as GreenFuel Technologies.) Greenstar's video is really impressive. However they originally announced that they had a deal to sell 90 biodiesel processing units to South Africa back in November of 2006 and they are just now (well, actually in early May, I believe) getting around to getting some more serious publicity. Are we suffering from an "apartheid hangover" in terms of a bias against seeing South Africa doing well? The sale was to De Beers Fuel Limited (DBFL) of South Africa (not related to De Beers diamond folks, it is just a fairly common South African name, I gather). After the first one was shipped in November of 2006 the deal was increased to 90 units, so that's when the deal was announced in November. Talk about the power of volume buying? That means that since the announced value of the 90 unit deal was $10.8 million, each unit was sold for just $120,000. That sounds to me like bargain pricing.

Have you got a half hour to spare? How about a half hour to learn about the respect that a comedy show has earned in the world of serious journalism? I often don't feel I have a whole "spare" half hour in a day, but I came across a link in a blog (called "ybiofuels" to a segment of the PBS Show Bill Moyers Journal in which he interviews Jon Stewart of Comedy Central's hit show, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. I took the whole 33 minutes out of my day to watch and listen, because the introduction in the blog said that Mr. Stewart had offered a particularly insightful analysis of what goes on in Washington in general, and of recent events in particular. Bill Moyers (or his staff who wrote the note next to the video on the web site) says that Jon Stewart's "THE DAILY SHOW since 1999, about how faking the news can reveal more of the truth than all of the Sunday-morning talk shows put together."(As any regular reader of this column knows, my wife and I are serious fans of George Stephanopolous' This Week Sunday morning show, so I consider Moyers' remark to be very high praise indeed.) So, if you can spare a few minutes, [if not now, add this to your browser's "favorites" and view it when you find the time,] take a look!

You know I like to end on a positive note, but today is going to be an exception. I saved this for last because I want you to think about this later. The Democratic Party has betrayed the public that put them in power via the last election. The November 2006 election results were clearly a mandate to change the course of American involvement in Iraq, and in particular to put an end to American forces being involved in combat there. Democrats should have taken the moral high ground of acting upon the mandate we gave them and used their Constitutional power to choke off unlimited funding for President Bush's war. They should have, as many have suggested, simply kept sending funding bills to the President containing deadlines for withdrawal. They knew he would stand firm in his promise to veto all bills containing a date specific deadline, but if all 100 Senators, and 435 Members of the House of Representatives (or at least a voting majority of them, even if not a sufficient majority to override a veto) kept sending the President a bill that effectively provided the funds asked for, sufficient for the needs of the troops, but not collapsing to the will of the petulant President, they could be called persons of principal. Catch phrases that accuse anti-war sentiments and actions as being unsupportive of the troops are being used by Republican Party members to bolster their political careers at the expense of the lives of members of the US Armed Forces. The best way to support our troops is to remove them from the midst of the Iraq civil war. I do not question that American foreign policy and military action created the opportunity for a civil war by destabilizing the country. Removing a tyrannical dictator from power can do that. Are we responsible for helping the country rebuilding the damage our attacks did to their country? I think we are, but I also think that they owe us a safe stable environment in which to carry out such rebuilding. We should withdraw entirely from the country until they can do so. But that is NOT what the Democratic Party wants. They want to stage the withdrawal too close to the next elections to get blamed for whatever aftermath may occur when American (let's not try to fool anyone by calling them "coalition") forces do withdraw. They are sacrificing the lives of our troops on the chance of winning the White House and more seats in the next election. They hope that their strategy is indirect enough to go un-noticed by the electorate as they dodge blame. I am not impressed with the overall intelligence of the average American voter, but I am pretty sure that I am not alone in seeing beyond today to the deeper, and far less admirable political strategy of postponing the end of American combat involvement in Iraq.

We cannot "win" a war in which we have not taken sides. We have not declared war on the Sunnis, the Kurds or the Shia. We want them all to live in peace and harmony. If we step out of the way, I expect that we will see them implement something close to Senator Joe Biden's suggested plan to create a confederation of 3 separate states that accommodate these three main factions and guarantee mutual respect for minority rights within each others' states. This does assume that these factions in Iraq have sufficiently developed intelligence and social skills to be able to carry out a reconciliation on their own. That may be expecting a lot since most of the discord among them is based on religious affronts that happened hundreds of years ago. Nor can we ignore that the eye-for-an-eye revenge tradition in the middle east is so widespread and accepted form of everyday violence that it makes urban gang activity in America look like a bunch of pacifists. Tribal loyalty is much more common than any sense of nationalism. We have seen plenty of instances where hundreds of years are insufficient to reconcile deep seated religious hatred, from Ireland to the Balkans. However, I see no reason why we should stand as scapegoats for all the violent impulses of roving bands of murderers. We dragged them (kicking and screaming, as far as I know) into a situation where they have a national constitution that guarantees equal rights for all religious and ethnic persuasions in hopes that they would not form an unbridled theocratic state like their neighbors in Iran. Now, let us step aside and give them a chance to live up to those ideals, or founder in their own petty squabbles.

If you'd like to buy one of these stickers (not from me, and I make no money on them) just email me to find out where on the net you can buy these and many other products with this slogan

As Bill Maher keeps saying, those who predict more dire consequences of our leaving than if we stay are the same people who have incorrectly predicted the opposite of every step of this situation since the very beginning of American involvement. Indeed, as Republican candidate, Ron Paul, said on Maher's Real Time final episode of this season on HBO on Friday night, the very idea that we are hated for our freedom is preposterous. America has created enemies in the middle east by support of Israel (which most of us agree is necessary, and not about to be reversed), but also by interference in Afghanistan (supporting and arming Bin Laden and friends to eject the Russians), supporting Saddam Hussein and his friends in Iraq's war with Iran, installing the Shah of Iran as "our guy" in 1953 and subsequently making Iran the most heavily armed country in the middle east, and as Bin Laden stated himself, stationing troops in and support of the monarchy in Saudi Arabia. "They hate us for our freedom" fits well on a bumper sticker. It is what political strategists can sell, especially given the jingoistic climate the Whitehouse and Republicans have so carefully cultivated since 2001. It has nothing to do with the reality of the reasons we have engendered so much animosity among millions of people living there. If we continue to accept these absurd oversimplifications from Washington, we will have very little hope of ever understanding what the problem really is, much less what to do to solve the situation.

love (and peace, please)

Stafford "Doc" Williamson