So what do you feel is the most promising technology for renewable fuel at this point?
WENDER: Well, you know about ethanol. It helps but may not be a great solution. [Laughs] I mean using up corn, in this country anyway. The price of corn has doubled and is still going up, and affecting the food of a lot of people, using a lot of arable land. So ethanol people claim now that they can make it from cellulosic material, not from corn, but that’s a long way to go. What they’re doing is taking wood which is cellulosic material and gasifying it into CO and hydrogen. The government has given a company money to convert CO and hydrogen into ethanol and that would not come from corn.

You seem skeptical of that.
WENDER: I am. A lot of people are trying to convert CO and hydrogen into ethanol. The Japanese tried that many years ago. They gave that up, but it doesn’t mean it can’t happen, but it’s a tough thing to do. In the long run, the route through CO and hydrogen may work out.

Biofuels help but they are not a panacea.

If not ethanol, what is the next promising substance?
WENDER: Biomass can help— conversion to ethanol and to biodiesel. But biomass, off the top of my head, might provide perhaps only about, say, 10% of petroleum use. Biofuels help but they are not a panacea. Where do we get the other 90%? It could come from natural gas. It could come from coal, we have supposedly 200 or so years of coal, but that is considered a dirty fuel. But you know that more than half of our electricity comes from coal. So where will it come from? Any little bit helps. There’s windmills which help, solar which is promising and is coming along. And, when you look at it the other way, efficiency. If you can get 50 miles per gallon then that would solve your problem almost, more than anything else.

So there’s no silver bullet to solve our energy consumption problems?
WENDER: They all help. Windmills are coming along. They have their problems, people don’t like to have them in their backyard. A lot of people want to make fuels from coal, which you can do. We hydrogenated coal. That’s what the Germans did and they ran a whole war on it, but they really didn’t make much oil, really a pitiful amount, and they also ran the Fischer–Tropsch reaction, in other words they gasified coal and that’s what is happening in this country. People want to gasify coal. That is a much cleaner way that would clean up the CO and hydrogen and convert that to oil. The only trouble is, carbon dioxide is emitted and CO2 is a greenhouse gas. It may be possible to sequester carbon dioxide but then how do you dispose of it. One solution is to pump it into deep saline wells and a lot of research is going into that. CO2 can be used to recover more oil — pump the gas down the well.

What is the benefit of pumping it into wells? That it’s not being released into the atmosphere?
WENDER: But eventually will it be released into the atmosphere?

Carbon dioxide is the chief agent in the depletion of the ozone layer?
WENDER: I think you refer to carbon dioxide ’s role in global warming. Halogens— chlorine, et cetera— are involved in depletion of the ozone layer. One way that industry would like to go is to use IGCC, Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle. Our large coal reserves could be gasified, the carbon dioxide sequestered and pumped into saline deposits underground. So coal could be utilized without undue harm to the environment due to global warming. But sequestering carbon dioxide and then storing it forever are huge problems. IGCC plants will be built as these problems are solved. We have been doing work on the Fischer–Tropsch process to convert natural gas or coal to transportation fuels. Liquid fuels for transportation is a principal goal.

I’d like to talk to you about the Manhattan Project. Robert Oppenheimer directed the work. Did you have any interaction with him?
WENDER: Never saw him. The army sent me to Virginia Tech to await further assignment. From there I went to Chicago.

In the army?
WENDER: Yes the army sent me to Virginia Tech. I stayed there for nine months. I took courses in bacteriology since there was nothing else to do and then one day they called my name and I and eight guys were shipped to Chicago. I remember we walked into this guy’s office, we were in uniform of course, he was in civilian clothes. He said ’I’m Captain Barinowski. You guys will be holed up in a hotel, a little hotel where you will stay until you get into civilian clothes. You are not allowed out until you get your clothes and then you will be sent somewhere to work. I remember calling my mother and she said, “are you discharged?” And I said “no.” And she thought for a moment and then said, “you’re not going to be a spy are you?” I said “Mo–ther. Just send them.” Well, three of us got our clothes and we all needed haircuts so we marched to the barber. It was very funny for three young guys out of uniform to march down the street together. I had been in the army about a year at that time. We got to the barbershop and there were two barbers. The whole situation was very uncomfortable and the barber suddenly said to the two of us getting haircuts, “you guys in the army?” and we said, “why do you ask?” And he said “you’re all wearing army socks.”