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Ex-NATO commander now marching for ethanol
The former Supreme Allied Commander Europe, who in the 1990s led NATO troops in their first combat action, is now taking the point of attack toward increasing the renewable fuel standard by 50 percent. Gen. Wesley Clark, U.S. Army (Ret.), is now co-chairman of Growth Energy, an organization of ethanol suppliers. In Colwich, Kan., at the headquarters of ethanol plant contractor ICM Corp. for a meeting of the board of directors, Clark told of his group's effort to petition the Environmental Protection Agency to increase the permitted blend of ethanol in gasoline from 10 to 15 percent. Security issue
Why a retired general to chair an ethanol industry group? "This is about national security," Clark said. "We are critically dependent on importing fuel. It distorts our foreign policy. We are in the Middle East, Persian Gulf and Afghanistan directly or indirectly because of the effects of 30 years of prolonged importation of oil to make up for the shortfall in domestic production. "We've gone from an exporting nation to an importing nation in the 1970s. It's gotten worse and worse to the point where today we are importing around 12 million barrels of oil a day. We are in an interconnected market and very vulnerable within it." The expectation is to grow the industry, Clark said, in order to eliminate oil imports from nations that have expressed hostilities to the U.S. "We expect E-15 to completely take the U.S. imports from a country like Venezuela out of the U.S. marketplace," Clark said. "Almost a billion barrels of oil a day could be removed from the import side, and that resource could be brought to bear in the American market, creating jobs and improving the welfare and environment for Americans. "The oil industry has subsidized the threat abroad. Our money flows over there, and their donations are going to people who want to destroy us. I hate to say it, but it's true. If we can cut off that flow of funds and move toward energy independence, we are striking a blow for American national security and freedom in this nation." Industry size If the nation wants to move toward energy independence and have a stronger national security policy in the near term, Clark added, then ethanol expansion is the way to go, since those goals can be accomplished with a different liquid fuel. "Americans drive liquid-fueled cars and trucks. That liquid fuel is ethanol," Clark said. "It's here today. It's green. It's produced by our own people on our own land. It's less carbon-intensive and cheaper than gasoline." "Ethanol is a good business for America," added Clark, who was a candidate for the Democratic Party's nomination for president in 2004. "It's about a half million jobs, $6 billion a year, and it's about to get a lot bigger because Growth Energy has petitioned EPA for a green jobs waiver." This waiver would permit the additional five-percent ethanol blend in unleaded gasoline. "This would open up the way toward a wholesale expansion of the ethanol industry," Clark said. "This could mean an additional 250,000 construction jobs and 136,000 permanent jobs as the industry expands. The tests for this expansion look positive so far. We're expecting the decision will create green jobs and an expansion of the green economy." Other needs Infrastructure problems, Clark admits, need to be addressed in any expansion of the ethanol industry. "We need things like blender pumps everywhere. We have a blender pump here in Colwich, and it looked good to me," Clark said. "We also need more flex-fuel vehicles, and we need to design vehicles that can make better use of domestically produced ethanol. We need pipelines to move ethanol across the country. "There's a lot of money to be made, but it's all about the market--a market capped without E-15. We can be energy independent in 10 years, if we just turn loose the market on this." Clark expects the EPA to make what he called "a positive decision" on the petition sometime between mid-May and mid-June. Larry Dreiling can be reached by phone at 785-628-1117, or by e-mail at ldreiling@aol.com.
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