Technology and the Environment

Description: Khosla talks about reducing the impact of oil.

Question: What are the promising environmental technologies?

Transcript: When it comes to oil replacement, we should talk about oil.  And then we can talk about coal.  The   . . .  There is only one feed stock that’s available in enough scale to replace oil, and that’s biomass.  So all our focus should be on the feed stock and getting a large number of miles driven per every acre of land.  Those are the fundamentals.  That means more gallons of fuel per acre of land and more efficiency in the cars that use them.  So both are important.  Both are technology problems.  And when it comes to that, there’s probably 20 good efforts on the way that I know of – a dozen that we funded ourselves – all using different technologies, different technical approaches, pathways, whatever you want to call them; but they all rely on eventually going to biomass feed stocks and producing some liquid fuel that replaces gasoline, whether it’s ethanol, or butanol, or some next generation fuel.  We’ve even looked at producing diesel and gasoline directly from biomass.

Recorded on: 9/26/07