Add this study to the ones cited in the previous post.

American imports of oil could be eliminated by 2030, a new study by an interstate consortium asserts, if the nation turns to an aggressive program of energy efficiency and commercialization of four already-demonstrated technologies for making transportation fuels. . .

But for the strategy to work, the study said, an expansive investment of private funds would be required, with encouragement from “appropriate fiscal, regulatory, and institutional support mechanisms” for 20 years.

The study also suggested that the current push to produce ethanol from corn as a fuel supplement is largely misplaced.

"Encouragement"? Subsidies, mandates and regulations in other words. We would be wise to eliminate such encouragement in order for more sensible decisions to be made about energy, but businesses would have to have confidence that the "encouragement" would not be resumed at some point, so that they could formulate long term plans and make investments that would not be undermined by some politically inspired distortion of the economy that otherwise makes no sense.

The four technologies for producing the fuels are profitable when the price of the oil they replace is $35 to $55 a barrel, the study said.

Three are closely related. The one with the biggest potential — estimated to displace 29 percent of imported oil — is making liquid fuels from coal, using the Fischer-Tropsch method.

A second is to take the carbon dioxide created in both that process and other processes and pump it into old oil fields to push more oil to the surface, a technique called enhanced oil recovery.

A third is to use biomass, including wood and crop wastes, as feedstock for factories that make a fuel gas consisting of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. That so-called synthesis gas is the same as that made from coal in the Fischer-Tropsch method and it can then be turned into a liquid.

The fourth is production of oil from shale, a technique tried after the oil shock of 1979, but abandoned when prices fell.

Fischer-Tropsch plants could be located near coal fields, and so reduce the cost of transporting feedstocks. Producers of carbon dioxide can locate near oil fields or along existing pipe lines to them so that the CO2 can be cheaply transported to a user who will pay for it. Oil shale plants could be located near source fields too.

It's very much harder to locate syn-gas plants near biomass sources since those sources are distributed over extensive areas. There's a built in energy inefficiency in such schemes unless they are small scale and also distributed.

To some extent, the study is a platform for the states to call for a national push to use the resources found within their own borders. Several of the member states have significant coal mining operations and old oil fields that could be brought back into production with carbon dioxide flooding. And all produce biomass. But the raw materials for this approach are also present in much of the rest of the United States.

While the study does not put much support behind using corn to make ethanol, it does anticipate the production of ethanol from cellulose — the woody part of plants — in a process that has been demonstrated but not made commercially.

Such studies are less credible since they are transparent attempts to bolster regional fortunes. Even when the reasoning is sound and proposed policies make sense doubt is introduced by interest. I suppose it's inescapable, everybody needs a little yiffing, so all of these studies need to be scrutinized for bias and sometimes quite flagrant misdirection.