Former CIA Director urges development of alternative fuels at

Journal Record, The (Oklahoma City), Oct 4, 2006 by Brian Brus

The United States' international energy network, which relies heavily on Middle East petroleum, is dangerously vulnerable to disruption and America must begin shifting to the development of alternative fuels immediately, former CIA Director James Woolsey said Tuesday.

And because so much of the U.S. military's attention now is in the Middle East, he said, "This long war on terror is the only war the United States has ever fought - except the Civil War - in which we pay for both sides. This is not a good long-term strategy."

Woolsey was keynote speaker Tuesday at the Governor's Conference on Biofuels at the University of Oklahoma. He and others told a crowd of more than 500 agriculture, business, science and government leaders that farmers and ranchers are the cornerstone of a quickly emerging and powerful biofuel industry.

Other speakers included John Ferrell of the office of biomass programs at the U.S. Energy Department; Thomas Dorr, undersecretary for rural development at the U.S. Agriculture Department; and Cynthia Riley, technology manager of the biomass program at the National Renewable Research Laboratory.

OU President David Boren also presented the new Henry L. Bellmon Award to Bellmon, a former governor and U.S. senator, for his early promotion of agricultural biofuel development.

Woolsey, a Tulsa native, served as director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 1993-1995 and is chairman of the advisory boards of the Clean Fuels Foundation and the New Uses Council. He also is a managing director of the Homeland Security Fund of Paladin Capital Group.

Woolsey said the recent focus on developing hydrogen energy cells as a primary vehicle fuel source was "really dumb" for various reasons, including the loss of energy in the conversion process, the dangerous nature of the material, and the fact that it would require a massive overhaul of the transportation infrastructure.

Instead, he said, the country would be better off almost immediately and in the long-term if more emphasis were placed on commercial production of cellulosic, or biomass, ethanol and electric hybrid automobile engineering.

Woolsey told a U.S. Senate Committee on Energy in March that just four years ago "the need to reduce radically our reliance on oil was not clear to many, and in any case the path of doing so seemed a long and difficult one. Today both assumptions are being undermined."

He told attendees at the OU event, "We need to realize how much leverage we could have within our own economy - by beginning to shift to produce this transportation fuel and other materials that are derived from oil."

If the country replaced even a quarter of its imported oil with domestically produced fuel, he said, "we would double net farm income in the United States. - If we could replace half of that imported oil, we would triple farm income."

Ray Huhnke, professor of biosystems and agricultural engineering at Oklahoma State University, said an OSU research team also plans to release data at the conference identifying which energy- producing crops have the strongest potential in Oklahoma's environment, on a county-by-county basis. The information should help identify the best types of and locations for biofuel refineries in the state, he said. Those so-called biorefineries convert plant cellulose into ethanol.

The event concludes at 3:15 p.m. today with a series of panels.