EDITORIAL: Obama’s goofy green gas

President Obama says there are no “silver bullets” that can shoot down gasoline prices that have skyrocketed from $4 a gallon to $5. Nevertheless, he’s seized upon algae - his fuel of the future - as a solution. It may be inventive to turn turtle food into gas, but until turtle shells sport racing stripes, America’s drivers are likely to prefer petroleum products to power their rides. With access to boatloads of taxpayer cash, the Obama administration addresses every energy problem with a “green” solution. The Pentagon ordered the Navy to purchase 450,000 gallons of algae fuel for jet-fighter training exercises this summer. Rather than pay $4 a gallon for conventional jet fuel, though, the service must shell out $16 a gallon for green gas. In the meantime, one Navy supplier, Solazyme, has begun to steer away from biofuels and toward beauty products and nutritional supplements in order to survive. Uncle Sam sunk $22 million in stimulus cash into the San Francisco-based company to construct a biofuel factory in Louisiana. With gas prices hovering in the $3 range until the recent spike, the firm wasn’t able to turn a profit, posting a $15.6 million loss in the last quarter of 2011. Mr. Obama has poured taxpayer funds into other trendy technologies, but failures have outweighed successes so far. Colorado-based Range Fuels, which received $162 million in federal and state loans for production of cellulosic ethanol, proved a spectacular disappointment. The company built a new factory in Georgia to produce up to 100 million gallons of ethanol from wood chips. The firm didn’t produce a drop of marketable fuel before going bankrupt in January 2011...more