Thursday, February 26, 2009

Energy Independence vs. Energy Diversity

President Obama laid out the goal of energy independence in his State of the Union address. Americans have been saying that we need this since the 1970's.

I believe energy independence is not a realistic goal. Energy diversity is a much more attainable goal and achieves the same results. We don't need to produce all of our energy ourselves. We just need to diversify our energy sources to dilute pricing/political power in any specific energy area such as oil.

For all our fears about importing oil from the Middle East, we only import about 10% of our oil from the Middle East or about 2 million barrels a day out of 20 million barrels of oil a day that the U.S. needs. We're already producing 668,000 barrels a day of ethanol. What if we could get that up to 2 million barrels a day and replace the oil from the Middle East. I don't think we need to replace Middle East oil, just keep pressure on the market with diversity.

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