There is something particularly perverse about so-called "national news rags" that cannot be bothered with basic mathematics and physics.

I get*****ed off when I see garbage like this advocating public policy choices that are factually bankrupt and simply won't work, and occasionally I get mad enough to write about them.

Like today's example, which is National Review:

If we are ever to get $2 gas, the power of OPEC to control oil prices needs to be broken. The United States Congress could do this with a stroke of the pen, simply by passing the bipartisan Open Fuel Standard bill (H.R. 1687). This act would effectively destroy OPEC by requiring that all new cars sold in the USA be fully flex fuel, able to run equally well on gasoline, ethanol, and — most important — methanol. This latter capability is critical because methanol can be, and is, made cheaply in large quantities from coal, natural gas, or any kind of biomass without exception. The United States has only 4 billion tons of oil reserves, but we have 270 billion tons of coal, vast amounts of natural gas, and an enormous capacity to produce biomass. By requiring that all cars sold here (and thus all cars made worldwide) be compatible with methanol, the act would force oil to compete with a fuel whose sources are not controlled by the cartel, and that we and our allies possess in abundance.

Methanol has only about half the energy per gallon as gasoline, but is 105 octane, which means it can be burned more efficiently. Taken together, these two factors make methanol’s current spot price of $1.38 per gallon roughly competitive with $2 gasoline.

Abject nonsense.

First, we have to use energy density numbers in a comparable unit.  I'll pick on Watt/hours per liter, since there are several tables available from various engineering sources for fuels denoted in this unit, and since the units are consistent we can compare directly.

Gasoline has 9,700 Wh of energy.
Ethanol has 6,100 Wh of energy.
Methanol has 4,600 Wh of energy.

This means that you need 159% as much ethanol to move a car a mile than you do gasoline, and 211% as much methanol.

The current spot price for methanol is about $1.38/gallon.^{9/18/2011 quote}  Remember, however, that this is an industrial chemical and thus (1) has no taxes included in its price and further that (2) if demand was to radically increase the price would almost-certainly go up, and probably go up a lot.

This means that on an energy-equivalent basis it would require $2.91 to move your car with methanol as far as it goes with a gallon of gasoline, right here and now, using today's demand picture for the chemical. 

The current futures price for ethanol (as of today) is $2.66, which means it would cost you $4.23 to move your car with ethanol as far as it does with gasoline, which is even more stupid.

Note that the spot RBOB price for gasoline in the futures market right now, today, is $2.79/gallon.

That is, it's cheaper to move your car using RBOB gasoline than either methanol or ethanol.

All these prices are ex-taxes, which serve to confuse people.  To compare actual costs you have to remove them from the comparison, unless of course you intend to shove the gun of the government up people's noses to get them to "choose" what you would like them to do.  That, incidentally, is where the National Review article fails - it doesn't compare against ex-tax figures for gasoline.

Finally, the National Review article claims that higher octane means the fuel is more efficient.  Nope.  All higher octane means is that it is less likely to detonate - that is, it burns slower.  (This is why a car designed for 92 octane will "ping" when fueled with 87 and older vehicles that cannot electronically adjust their ignition timing can actually be damaged.  It's also why running higher-octane fuel than your engine is designed and set up for often makes your fuel economy worse.)

Would you "break OPEC's back" by having mandatory flex-fuel vehicles?  Nope.  The price of the replacement fuels is higher - by a material amount - than it is for gasoline made from that evil imported oil.  Further, since ethanol is only 10% or so in gasoline now, and methanol has effectively zero presence in auto fuel) the fact of the matter is that this sort of mandate would do exactly nothing to change the price of gasoline, since the increase in demand that the author postulates would result from a "flex fuel" architecture would cause the price to rise due to the basic economic dynamic of supply and demand.  Nobody would buy methanol or ethanol at a higher price than gasoline, exactly as nobody in their right mind buys E-85 now, despite a large percentage of the vehicles on the road - including one of mine - being perfectly happy running on it.

I don't like OPEC any better than anyone else does, but we do nobody any good by parading bull**** hopium around as a "path to energy independence."  If we want to get serious about the latter, and we both must and can, we should be looking at using thorium as a nuclear fuel, liquid-salt reactors to obtain high temperature process heat, and then converting coal to synfuel with the primary process heat along with co-generation of electricity with the remaining BTU content from the thorium reaction.

We can replace all of the imported fuel we use for transportation without increasing our coal consumption at all over present levels.  Best of all not only do we have lots of thorium that we've "thrown away" in the ash pile of existing coal plants coal itself contains enough thorium to self-fuel the reactors on a forward-going basis as well!

That is a path that has a five hundred year expected lifetime at expected population growth rates in the United States (about 1% a year) given our proved reserves and does not require increasing existing consumption of the given resource -- including the coal -- since we're replacing the electrical generation we now do with coal at the same time we use the coal for synfuel feedstock.  As such it will not trash the existing market demand picture.  It is a technology that we know will work with the remaining engineering challenges (and there are some!) all being known quantities.  The big hurdles are political, primarily slaying the "nuke haters" -- not operational or technical.

Finally, unlike the "pie in the sky" BS run in the National Review article that path does not presume that one can obtain a free lunch - something that is never possible either in either economics or physics.