IS THERE A SAUDI PRINCE IN YOUR FUTURE?

The President is wringing his hands over our "addiction" to oil. He claims he wants to make us energy independent, especially from the Middle East.

This really has made all the Saudi princes nervous because a major revenue loss would prevent them from funding all the Wahhabi mosques in the USA which preach violence against all us "infidels." These are the same princes and Wahhabis who refuse to allow Christian churches and schools to exist in Saudi Arabia.

To pacify the Saudi princes, a high executive from Exxon-Mobil warned that the idea of American energy independence was "stupid and impossible." (King George III said the same thing about American political independence back in 1775.)

Well, if we are going to be free of princely oil, what are we going to use for fuel?

Forget natural gas. Over 47 percent of the world's reserves are controlled by Russia and Iran. How would you like to be dependent on Gasputin and Ayatollah?

Windmills are vastly overrated for America because they consume too much power and act as Cuisinarts for birds. Solar power requires too much space to replace oil, and think of all the outages we would have on cloudy days. San Francisco would shut down every afternoon as the fog rolled in.

There are three big possibilities:

• Coal is number one.

The USA has seemingly endless reserves and is rivaled only by China in quantity. The new coal- producing areas in the West have a much cleaner variety than traditional Eastern coal. The USA has several major demonstration projects geared to producing a clean-burning coal, ranging from "coal slurry" to "ultrasound" scrubbers in the stacks.

Make the coal clean, build the railroad infrastructure to get it to market, and kiss 50 Saudi princes good-bye.

• Atomic Energy is number two.

This energy form produces no air pollution and seems ideal except for three problems:

1. How to dispose of the highly dangerous waste material?

2. How do we find the money for very expensive reactors when both the government and the consumer have negative savings rates?

3. How do we overcome the "not in my back yard" syndrome?

Solve those problems and you can kiss 35 more Saudi princes good-bye.

• Ethanol is number three.

A recent University of California study compared the energy conversion yield of ethanol vs. gasoline. Ethanol yields 26 percent more energy than it takes to produce it. Gasoline, conversely, yields only 86 percent of the energy needed to produce it. This makes ethanol look very promising. Unfortunately, a gallon of ethanol contains only 66 percent as much energy as a gallon of gasoline.

When you put these numbers into an algebraic equation, it becomes obvious that there is no current energy advantage to ethanol over gasoline.

X = 126/86 x 2/3 = 1/1 = 1

Looked at another way, without government subsidy, ethanol does not become profitable until oil reaches and sustains $65 a barrel.

But ......

Brazil is producing great quantities of ethanol for home use and export. By using cane sugar as its main ingredient, Brazil finds ethanol profitable at $45 a barrel.

As the USA experiments with "cellulosic" ethanol, which uses a whole plant instead of just the corn kernel, American ingenuity can be depended upon to catch up to Brazil's ethanol lead.

And best of all, ethanol depends on the sun as its prime source of energy for growing crops. At last count, the sun was still free, which means a built-in cost advantage going in.

Solve the problems impeding ethanol and you can kiss ten or eleven more Saudi princes good-bye.

That should run us out of Saudi princes and Mideast oil dependence. As a bonus, it would give our trade balance of payments a tremendous boost, thus strengthening the dollar.

Eventually, we might elect a government which would have the courage to close down that Wahhabi mosque located just outside Washington D.C.