Examining Energy

Loved the lead in using the Beverly Hillbillies song (in “Bryant’s ‘Crude’ Plan,” Issue 48). The Bigger Pie Forum gang continues the assault on Kemper. Kelley William’s satire of SO & MPC in this week’s NSS is worth reading just for literary value. Like your lead, it is biting satire; kept up in Kelley’s case for half a page.

While the case against Kemper has been made pretty effectively in the Sun and BPF with facts and logic, it is the satire and parody of Mississippi residents being played as dumb yokels by SO that may turn the tide—the knock punch after the softening up.

Your story was important—excellent and troubling.

Even an old black energy guy like me cringes at the thought of mining and processing oil sands in a beautiful state like Mississippi. We don’t have fully economically viable biomass technology to replace the oil sands, but we are probably not too far away.

It would be a shame to pursue a long term commitment like oil sands when biomass will provide direct economic benefit to famers, foresters, truckers and the construction companies oil field service companies already active in Mississippi—a large consortium of powerful political interests that would be better aligned with the collective good.

It would be worth an article or more likely editorial suggesting that biomass be evaluated in lieu of oil sands. I suspect the unresolved technology challenges of biomass will be resolved before or shortly after an oil sands project clears the inevitable environmental hurdles.

Combine Cool Planet Biofuels mobile processing technology (a consortium of big sophisticated energy investors—Google, BP, Conoco, etc.) with super giant miscanthus (a biomass feedstock plant that is environmentally benign invented at Mississippi State ag department) and you are likely, in a few years, to have a better solution than mining oil sands.