Since I'm taking the time to basically transcribe the talk, I'm going to take the liberty of adding my own comments-in (in italics).

It begins with an intro about Richard Branson burning 1 billion gallons of jet fuel per year (as part of his Virgin Atlantic airline) and being interested in "aggressively going after ethanol", but the guy giving the introduction said that he spoke with Branson about this "about 8 months" prior to the March 26 date of this lecture (placing that discussion about this time last year, before Branson's announcement of "Virgin Fuels" (http://www.autobloggreen.com/2006/07/28/soon-at-a-pump-near-you-virgin-fuels/1#c1807515) which Branson says is "not exactly ethanol", leading some to believe it's actually bio-butanol but at a time when Branson was investing in ethanol plants, I believe).

Now on to Khosla:
He has 130 slides but won't go over all of them. You can get details on his website.
Tradeoffs are over in favor of ethanol.
We don't need oil for cars & light trucks.
We definitely don't need hydrogen.
We don't need new car/engine designs/distribution.
Rapid changeover of automobiles is possible.
Little cost to consumers, automakers, no money from the gov't.
Cars can be switched quickly to ethanol.
Proof: Brazil went from 4% FFV to 80% in 3 years.
In less than 5 years at very little cost we can make an irreverseable change in our trajectory.
Detroit talks about how they can't do anything in less than 15 years, but in Brazil the same suppliers - GM & VW have done it and Ford has a presence there.
Brazil reduced petroleum use by 40% for cars and light trucks.
We talk about doing something by 2040 or 2050. All of us in the technology business know how ridiculous it is to forecast past about 3 to 5 years.

Forget taxes, forget subsidies, just say "what is the cost of production"?
Ethanol costs $0.75/gal, actually under $0.70 for the more efficient producers in Brazil. Add a 25% adder to that b/c you get lower mileage on the "per mile basis". Ethanol costs maybe $0.90 for a gallon equivalent of gasoline. Okay, here I have to step-in. Brazil can make ethanol much cheaper out of sugarcane rather than the corn typically used in the U.S. because the process for making ethanol from sugarcane is much less energy-intensive. Khosla seems to be using Brazil costs to manufacture ethanol, not the U.S. cost.
VW is thinking about phasing-out all of their gas-only cars in Brazil (the world's 10th-largest car market) in 2006.
Ethanol is cheaper, that's why customers are demanding it and they won't buy cars that provide both.
Ethanol has a dramatic reduction (60-80%) in greenhouse gases and other polutants. I don't know if he's figuring gross emissions (at the tailpipe) or net (after factoring how much CO2 is absorbed by the next batch of sugarcane destined to become ethanol)
Brazil saves $50 billion on oil imports. Imagine what the much larger U.S. market could save!

There are 5 million U.S. flex-fuel vehicles; 4 billion gallons ethanol supply, blending.

California has almost as many (70%) flex-fuel vehicles as diesel vehicles (the reason for this is the very small number of diesel cars which have been banned from sale here for years due to not being able to meet emissions (mainly NOx) standards. I don't know if he's counting only diesel passenger cars or also heavy-duty diesel pickups and commercial trucks). California doesn't have any E85 pumps (He's wrong on this. There is ONE E85 pump open to the public and has been for years. There are three more that are private government pumps not available to the public. He could have said "hardly any" and been right).

We have the cars and the ethanol but no distribution b/c the oil companies won't do it. It's awfully hard for the oil companies to distribute the stuff even if they wanted to since you can't pipe it through pipelines because it absorbs water (unlike gasoline or even butanol). Therefore they would have to truck or use trains to get the stuff from the mid-west where it's manufactured to the coasts where most of the fuel is consumed. This uses precious diesel fuel in addition to being prohibitively expensive)

In the U.S. a conservative estimate is that ethanol costs $0.90 per gallon to produce, $1.20 per gallon for the gasoline gallon equivalent. Gasoline costs $1.60+ per gallon to produce. He doesn't mention how much fossil fuel is necessary to produce that gallon of ethanol.

Just about any price for gas down to $35 a barrel, ethanol is cheaper cost-to-cost, no taxes, no subsidies.

Rapid increase of U.S. ethanol production (4B gal increases by 25% each year) No mention is made of how if we were to use every square acre of corn currently produced in the States (which wouldn't happen EVER anyway...) we could only supply enough ethanol for 12% of the vehicles. Or to put it another way, we could only supply enough ethanol for the existing flex-fuel vehicles already on the road. And that's IF we used all the corn exclusively for ethanol.

Cost to automakers is about $30 per car to make a regular gasoline car flex-fuel capable.

Why ethanol? Today's liquid fuel infrastructure - you can use the same tankers, the same tanks in most cases, and use today's cars.

Leverage current trends - make a FFV hybrid. I'll point out that GM already has made a FFV hybrid. The SAAB (the Swedish brand of GM) has a flex-fuel plug-in hybrid concept currently on tour of the auto show circuit (http://www.trollhattansaab.net/archives/saab_hybrid/)

We already have the infrastructure. This is not entirely true when you consider we don't have pipelines for ethanol. Gasoline, even within the U.S. is transported through pipelines frequently. They'd have to be dedicated pipelines, not shared with gasoline due to the aforementioned water-absorption problem.

Cheaper fuel, energy security - former CIA head James Woolsey is all-for ethanol, if only for the security and geopolitics view.

If you are Tom Daschle and only care about farm incomes, this is the right answer. Higher farm incomes and rural employment. They are a very important political group (i.e. "lobby") in the U.S.

NRDC and the Union of Concerned Scientists are in favor too.

Very rarely do you see the automakers, environmentalists, farm guys, and neo-conservatives all agreeing on the same thing.

Results?
Feed mid-east terrorism or mid-west farmers?
Import expensive gasoline or use cheaper ethanol?
We don't import ethanol today even though it's dramatically cheaper (I believe the reason for this is because the aforementioned corn lobby keeps it that way. Ever stop to consider that we also have a sugarcane industry here in the States, mostly in the South? Why can't we throw government subsidies to those folks to make ethanol with less energy expenditure? The corn lobby.).

So we have an internationally low-priced product, oil, competing with domestic protected market with a high-price and it's still cheaper. Imagine if you opened-it-up.

Create farm jobs or mid-east oil tycoons?
Fossil fuels or green fuels?
ANWR oil rigs or "prairie grass" fields? Okay, again he's gone too far. Virtually NONE of the 4 billion barrels of ethanol being produced currently are from cellulosic ethanol (which was what he's inferring with the "prairie grass" fields comment). Most of today's ethanol is made VERY DIRTILY with fossil fuels. Look at how the heat is generated in most of the ethanol factories. Are they using biomass? No, they're usually using fossil fuels to make the corn into ethanol, not to mention the CO2 being released into the atmosphere in the process.

Gasoline cars or fuel choices?
FFVs give choice for almost no cost and add a lot.

A presentation he saw from GM three weeks ago said a hybrid for about $3000 of incremental cost may save 50 to 75 gallons of gasoline a year. A flex fuel car for $30 will save 300 gallons of gasoline.

If you hear a cost of $100 extra to manufacture a flex fuel car they include the cost of a $70 sensor they need to meet EPA requirements anyway. Because they're lobbying in Washington (how are auto companies' lobbiests "bad", but the corn lobby's lobbiests "good"?) for incentives they like to jack up that number. If they amortize all their testing and certification it adds another $10 to the cost of building a flex-fuel car.

Interest groups:
USA Automakers: less investment than hydrogen; compatible w/ hybrids. GM decided fortunately that hybrids got associated w/ Toyota and they need their branding to be flex-fuel so he suspects you will see them be very, very aggressive. In fact they've shared their 2007 model plans w/ him and they're far in excess of any regulatory reqirements. GM only uses flex-fuel vehicles to get around a CAFE loophole. They've been selling flex-fuel vehicles for years. Why is it that only 10 models of their vehicles in 2007 are flex-fuel capable? (http://www.e85fuel.com/information/general_motors.php) Of those ten vehicles, they share three engines. All but TWO of the vehicles are trucks, vans, and SUVs. If they're so into the benefits of ethanol, why is it you can only get two particular choices of Chevy cars which are ethanol-capable? Beyond that, not EVERY one of those 10 models are flex-fuel capable. You first have to see if the engine choice is FFV-capable, then you have to check your Vehicle ID number (VIN) to see what the 8th character is to determine from a chart if your car is an FFV. Doesn't matter anyway if you live outside the mid-west because you can't find a station with E85!. They're going to be very aggressive, that's why they have the livegreengoyellow.com website that they advertised during the Olympics (and the Super Bowl and every single commercial break for seemingly months...).

Agricultural interests: more income, less pressure on subsidies (yeah, like they're going to give up their subsidies...), new opportunity for ADM, Cargill, farmers' co-ops.

Environmental groups: faster and lower risk to renewable future, aligned with instead of against other interests

Oil majors: equipped to build/own ethanol "factories" and distribution, lower geopolitical risk, financial wherewithal to own ethanol infrastructure, diversification. The most advanced research on cellulosic ethanol is being funded by Shell. The CEO of BP is completely committed to biofuels.

At this point I was only 13.5 minutes into the show and I'm thoroughly bored with this guy's propaganda. He comes off as a salesman. He's got something to sell and he's going to give one side of it without addressing the detractors. He did mention there was going to be a Q&A session at the end so maybe he does address this stuff eventually, but I'm too bored to go on with this. If you're interested in his propaganda you can watch it yourself.

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Great. I had italics tags in there everywhere denoting my own personal comments but they didn't come through. So now it's tough for you to distinguish my comments from his. Sorry. I'm too lazy to go back and figure out how to fix that.

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I am making a TV show and DVD about this topic, and am seeking information from interested people.
The project is being co-ordinated through Community Television in Western Australia.
www.ctvperth.com.au

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That's a pretty good transcript of the first 13.5 minutes, but I think to draw the negative conclusion that you did from about 1/5 of the talk is probably not a fair evaluation.

I finished the presentation ,and I cam away with these thoughts:

- He isn't counting on corn ethanol to be the solution, it is switchgrass and biomass that will make it all work in the end
- He is interested in jump starting Ethanol, corn or not, because in his opinion it is the only mass-scale alternative to fossil fuel in the future
- He never talked about the 5% internal combustion engine effiency bottleneck.
- I think creen is part of his motivation, but the geopolitical and energy supply are more central to his thesis.

I think his final calucation is that a) this is the alternative energy source that's most likely to succeed quickly base on all the players incentives, the existing infrasturucter, etc, b) he's counting on technology improvement such as cellousic to make it all work in the end, and c) that while ethanol is not the ultimate green fuel, it's a heck of alot better than fossil today and waiting for hydrogen in 15 years.

I think he may be right. It's not the best solution in terms of efficency and sustanability one hopes for, but certainly it's better than the present trajectory by a long shot, and is most likely to be successful at the scale that'll make a difference.

On the other hand, personally I'm still going to get an EV or plug-in hybrid when the time comes.

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Robert Rapier has a great post exploring Vinod Khosla's
claims:

http://i-r-squared.blogspot.com/2006/07/vinod-khosla-debunked.html

James
Alternative Energy Blog

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I am making a TV show and DVD about this topic, and am seeking information from interested people.
The project is being co-ordinated through Community Television in Western Australia.
www.ctvperth.com.au

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