Alternatives and low consumption need of the hour

There is nothing more frustrating in this era of record oil prices than watching people go head-to-head over whether biofuels or reducing energy consumption is the answer to our burgeoning energy problem.

In the biofuel camp, scientists are trying to make everything from soybeans to fast-growing grasses into biodiesel and ethanol.

Meanwhile, proponents of energy reduction maintain that worldwide food production can't keep up with our growing population as-is, much less if food crops were used to make alternative fuels.

I was especially irked when the two groups were at loggerheads during a panel discussion at UC Berkeley this weekend. What they should have been doing was admitting that "yes, biofuels created from food crops are already causing upward price pressure on foodstuff, but also acknowledging that just cutting back on how much power we consume isn't going to solve the problem either." Record oil and gas prices over the past few years have lit a fire under the peak oil issue, and prompted everyone to talk about what we are going to use to power everything from industry to cars in the years after we run out of fossil fuels.

Now, I'm not saying we're at peak oil now. In fact, I think we're still a few years away from that point. But discussion now is a must if we don't want to really feel the pinch down the road.

Biofuels are starting to move in interesting directions, with algae grown in stagnant water for gas and inedible weeds being processed into ethanol. There is no question that we're going to need to move away from the use of corn and sugar cane and towards fast-growing, high-yield inedible grasses. But as the world population continues to grow, demand for farmland is only going to be increasing as urban and suburban spread eats into those same fertile areas.

So, we need to be using less fuel generally to keep demand, and use of farmland, to a minimum. Now everything from public transportation to high-mileage cars and even low-wattage bulbs come into play. Even if you are planning some nuclear reactors - like the ones the UAE has in the works - reducing power consumption is only going to pay off in the long run.

Properly insulated buildings and windows can keep the heat in Northern climes and the hot air out closer to the equator. That translates to less energy spent running heaters or air conditioners.

It makes no sense to me why I should be in one camp or the other. On this issue, I'm quite proud to be a fence-sitter, with one foot on each side.

I don't care how much energy we learn to conserve, we are never going to get consumption down to zero. And at some point, we're going to increasingly rely on alternative fuel sources to power cars, run desalinisation plants and to heat and cool homes and businesses.

We're also going to have to figure out how to start growing our fuel without pushing whole countries into starvation. But until we get these alternatives up and running, we're going to have to get smarter about how we extract oil and gas.

Everything from directional drilling to access untapped oil reserves in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to shipping Qatar's gas around the world on brand new mega-tankers is going to be put into play to keep the world running while we get biofuels out of the testing stages and into large-scale production.

Sadly, infighting between researchers, energy companies and interest groups about whose solution is the "right" one is only going to slow the process down.

- The writer is a freelance journalist based in Alaska, USA.