The President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology plans to complete by March a report providing the White House with a roadmap to reduce US oil imports, Floyd Kvamme, co-chairman of the panel, said at a meeting the week of Jan 9.

PCAST on Jan 10 gathered information from the Energy Department and two venture capitalists to help it determine how advanced energy technologies can be used to shift the country's energy balance toward alternative fuels.

Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, became the latest in Washington to advocate that biofuels may hold the answer to cutting US oil imports.

"What you hear from me may seem implausible," he said before arguing that ethanol could replace oil imports in three to five years if the federal government mandated that most cars be made fuel-flexible -- able to run on gasoline or a combination of gasoline and ethanol -- and provided automakers with financial aid to retool their manufacturing operations. In addition, he said, the government should remove a tax on ethanol imports; require E85 fuel (85% ethanol, 15% gasoline) in at least 30% of gas stations; and help finance the first five large ethanol refineries. The thrust of his proposal is embodied in a bill sponsored in November by a bipartisan group of 10 senators.

To promote greater use of ethanol, the Energy Policy Act that Congress enacted last summer required production of 7.5-bil gallons of ethanol by 2012. It also authorized the Energy Department to provide financial assistance to the first large-scale ethanol plant.

"We don't need oil for cars and light trucks," Khosla maintained. "We don't need hydrogen. We don't need new car engines. We don't new energy alternatives."

Ethanol is the most practical alternative to gasoline because it can be used in today's cars and flow through the existing fuel-distribution system, he said.

Brazil is a role model for ethanol adoption, Khosla noted. The Latin American country began developing its ethanol industry after the 1973 Arab oil embargo, and now no longer needs to import crude. Ethanol there is made almost exclusively from native sugar cane.

Now is the time for an ethanol conversion in this country because of the current economics of oil, Khosla said. "High oil prices accommodate the start-up cost of ethanol," he said. "At $35 per barrel, it can be competitive with oil, with no new technologies." US oil prices on Jan 13 were just below $64/bbl at press time.

The US produces 4-bil gallons of ethanol from corn annually, a figure that could grow as high as 12-bil gallons, Under Secretary of Energy David Garman said. Cellulosic ethanol -- which can be made out of agricultural plant wastes, sugar cane and switchgrass -- would be needed to go beyond that level, he said.