Workers install solar panels on the roof of an Austin, Texas, home. (Ann Hermes/CSM/File)
From Christian Science Monitor:
Today’s slumping oil prices may undermine viability of alt-fuel programs – again.
Tumbling gas-pump prices make motorists smile, but not Peter Vanderzee. They remind him how falling oil costs sank his effort to unshackle the United States from Middle East oil two decades ago.
As project manager for two large alternative-energy projects under President Carter’s US Synthetic Fuels program launched in 1980, Mr. Vanderzee was pushing his team to make methanol from coal for auto fuel.
But in 1985, just as his technology was starting to produce results, oil plummeted. In today’s inflation-adjusted dollars, oil went from $53 a barrel to $28, with pump prices falling from $2.20 a gallon to $1.60. The next year, President Reagan pulled the plug on the US Synfuels program.
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