Bill Blair of Suttons Bay can see both sides of the alternative energy debate.

Blair spent his career working in the oil industry for Exxon Mobil. He ran the wastewater treatment facility at Mobil’s Joliet Oil Refinery near Joliet, Ill., one of the last “grassroots” built refineries in the United States.

Blair said while he has a bias toward the oil industry, he believes one way to alleviate the high prices everyone is paying for fuel is for the United States government to open up more areas around the county to oil drilling.

“There are known oil deposits in our country that we aren’t tapping because of opposition by environmentalist. If we could drill in those areas, we would not be dependent on foreign oil and the price of gas, diesel and heating fuels would all come down,” he said.

“There are seas of oil all around us and we can’t get at it. There is plenty of oil to last us for a long time,” Blair said.

But Blair said he also sees a need for a change in the way people and corporations use non-renewable resource.

“Opening up the existing oil deposits is one part of it. The other is making more fuel efficient vehicles,” he said.

Blair said everyone needs to look at how they use their vehicles, heat their houses, and how they can be more efficient in their uses.

While he agrees there should be more research toward finding alternative energy sources, Blair does not believe ethanol, at least corn-based ethanol, is the answer.

“Making corn-based ethanol takes up an awful lot of resources and just doesn’t produce enough product. If we were to plant every square inch of space in the United States with corn and used it only for producing ethanol, we would only have enough fuel to meet 30 percent of our demand,” Blair said. “If we continue trying to develop corn-based ethanol, we are either going to import fuel or food.”

Blair is optimistic about developing hydrogen as a reliable power source. “The problem with hydrogen is we’re still about 20 years away from having a reliable and inexpensive way to produce it,” he said.

Blair is very familiar with one reason for high gasoline prices, and believes the answer is well within our nation’s grasp. We need to build more — and more efficient — refineries.

Blair said there have been tremendous changes in the technologies and techniques used to refine oil. The process of upgrading existing facilities has been expensive, he said, but the result is plants that are able to process more gasoline from the same amount of crude oil.

“The Joliet refinery when it was built had a maximum capacity of processing 160,000 barrels of crude oil a day. Today, that same plant can process 250,000 barrels,” he said. “There is not one BTU (British Thermal Unit) wasted in our refineries these days,” Blair said.

But upgrades are expensive, with many refineries still operating with “old” technologies.

And new refineries are also needed. The problem is where to build them.

Refineries must be located near water sources, which are needed to keep machinery cool as crude oil is processed into a final product. Blair said finding large industrial sites near environmentally sensitive areas — a tag that comes with the shorelines of lakes and oceans — has been difficult, especially as regulation has increased.

“With the modern refineries, there is little to no impact on the environment in its daily operations. The only time there is any concern is if there is an accident,” he said.

For Blair the answer for the United States future energy needs is securing its own crude oil and continuing to invest research and development into viable alternative energy sources such as hydrogen, and even solar and wind power.

“We need to be completely free of our dependence on foreign oil. OPEC is controlling our gasoline and fuel prices, and really our economy. We have to get away from being controlled by people who don’t really like us,” he said.