The week's news highlighted the risk of relying on hostile and/or unstable regimes for our energy :

Iraq Will Set Oilfields Ablaze If Attacked - Iraq is reinforcing defenses around its northern oilfields and troops have been ordered to set the wells ablaze if there is an invasion, according to tanker drivers just back from the region. The British SAS has been given the task of preventing the sabotage of the wells if war starts. Retreating Iraqi troops torched 600 Kuwaiti oil wells during the last Gulf War, setting fires that burned for 10 months and destroyed six million barrels of oil a day.

While some optimists may imagine a postwar Iraq would render OPEC irrelevant and slash oil prices radically, Max Boot of the Council of Foreign Relations notes:  "This seems unlikely, if the experience of Kuwait is anything to go by. While oil prices spiked before the Persian Gulf war and plummeted afterward, the long-term impact has been close to nil. Kuwait hasn't exactly been offering to fill up American sport utility vehicles free out of gratitude for being liberated. It hasn't even carried out its pledge to allow direct foreign investment in state-owned oil fields."  Beyond that, the Iraqi oil industry is in bad repair.  A study by the Council on Foreign Relations and the James A. Baker III Institute at Rice University estimated that just to restore Iraqi production to its pre-1990 level of 3.5 million barrels a day would require three years and $5 billion, in addition to an estimated $3 billion in annual operating expenses. That would increase total world production by only 1.3 percent, and might not reduce prices at all if other countries cut output or banded together to keep prices stable. Increasing Iraq's production further, while geologically possible, would require more time and tens of billions of dollars in investment.

Nigerian Oil Workers' Strike Could Halt Exports - Nigerian oil workers announced on Saturday that they would carry out an indefinite strike that could shut down crude exports from the country. The strike comes as the threat of war in Iraq and a prolonged strike in Venezuela have pushed oil prices to two-year highs. Nigeria is the fifth largest supplier of oil to the United States.  Half of Nigerian exports go to the U.S.

To implement the President's vision the fuel cell industry is working hard to reduce costs.  The primary driver of fuel cell cost is the cost of materials, specifically, the required amount of precious metals such as platinum.  As a recent RAND study notes: “the projections that fuel-cell system costs can fall to $35 to $60 per kilowatt in volume production are well grounded. Costs might be even lower if the very low platinum designs currently being investigated pan out. However, it is too early to tell if this will be the case.”  Assuming a mid-range price of $50/kw, a 50kw automotive power system would cost $2,500, comparable to the cost of an internal combustion engine.

Making fuel cell vehicles available at a mass scale requires an economically viable, safe, and plentiful supply of hydrogen containing fuel.  The U.S. holds 25% of the world's coal supply (compared to barely 3% of the world's oil reserves,) and clean coal technologies enable coal to be converted into the hydrogen carrier fuel methanol at a cost of about 40 cents a gallon.  The gasification process converts carbonaceous materials (such as coal) to syn-gas, which can be used to generate fuels, chemicals, and electricity.  Syn-gas is converted into methanol by a simple chemical reaction, as has been done at a commercial scale since 1997 at  Eastman Chemical Co.'s Integrated Coal Gasification Facility in Kingsport, TN.  Eastman  just signed an agreement with Texaco Development Corp., a wholly owned subsidiary of ChevronTexaco Corp., to provide operation, maintenance, management and technical services, as well as parts fabrication and sales for gasification plants of Texaco Development licensees.