Oil's Strategic Status

In their book, Turning Oil Into Salt, Anne Korin and Gal Luft define our problem with America's dependence on oil in a way that opens the possibility of a solution. People have identified the problem in different ways, and the way a problem is defined affects how you will solve it. Defining a problem incorrectly can produce pointless or even counterproductive "solutions."

For example, do we use too much oil? Is that the problem? Is that what leaves us economically vulnerable to OPEC? Or do we import too much oil? Is that the problem?

Our attempts to solve those problems have led nowhere because the problem we need to solve is oil's strategic status. What does that mean? In the introduction to their book, Luft and Korin write:

This book argues that the threat oil dependence presents to our national and economic security is not a function of the amount of oil we consume or import. It is a function of oil's status as a strategic commodity. Oil's strategic status stems from its virtual monopoly over fuel for transportation, which underlies the global economy and our entire way of life. Without oil, food cannot travel from farm to plate, mail cannot reach its destination, raw materials cannot reach their factories and children cannot attend their schools.

They use salt as an analogy. Salt was once a strategic commodity because it was the primary way to preserve food. It was very important to every country to have enough salt. Without a steady and secure supply of salt, food could not be preserved and widespread starvation became a real possibility. So wars were fought over the possession of salt sources, wars were lost because of a lack of salt, and colonies were established because of salt.

In 1800, Napoleon Bonaparte offered a large reward to anyone who could find another way of preserving food for armies on the march. He defined the problem correctly. He didn't call for a different form of salt or ask how we could do it with less salt or how to make our own salt from something we possess in abundance. He asked for an alternative way of preserving food. The way he defined the problem changed the world.

Within a very short span of time Nicholas Appert came up a solution — he invented the first canning process, originally using a glass container. Eventually there were many innovations in food preservation including tin cans, refrigeration, freeze-drying, and on and on. There are so many different ways to preserve food now that nobody even thinks about it. Nobody worries about salt. Nobody cares where it comes from or whether they'll have enough of it.

Salt lost its strategic status. No wars will be fought over salt any more. No economies will crash because of it.

The problem we now need to solve is oil's strategic status. Right now, 97 percent of our transportation vehicles run on nothing but oil. And since transportation is the foundation of our economy, oil has an extremely high strategic status. It is the most important commodity in the world.

But if there were many ways to fuel our vehicles, it is possible we could arrive at a place where nobody would even think about oil or would care where it comes from or whether there will be enough. Nobody would worry about it because we would have an abundance of other forms of fuel, and an abundance of other forms of transportation that might not even require fuel.

The most effective and most efficient way to reach this state and to reduce or eliminate oil's strategic status is to use technologies already available to us — to use vehicles and facilities we already have, to use car manufacturing techniques we already use, to use liquid fuel delivery systems we already have (but to increase the number of different fuels) — and to have fuels that come from different sources. That's what the Open Fuel Standard will achieve. And it will begin having a noticeable impact on oil's strategic status within three years.

We can make this happen. We don't need every person in the country to be in favor of it. We don't even need a majority. We're not voting for it; our representatives are. So we only need a lot of people — but by no means most people — to urge, cajole, convince, and persuade our representatives to co-sponsor this bill.

So what you can do is to talk to your representative and make the case for the Open Fuel Standard, and then get everyone you know to do the same. There are a growing number of people participating in this process. Let's keep up the momentum and get it done. Convince people to subscribe to our updates. Convince them to contact their representative. And convince them to convince others to do the same. Let's turn this momentum into a runaway train (that runs on biodiesel made from algae fed by CO2 exhaust from a methanol facility)!