Because it is a conservative solution?

The Saudis pump high quality crude out of the ground for less than $15 bbl. How can you compete with that? Certainly not by recycling Evian bottles. And a little tiny country like Qatar has so much natural gas reserves that they can hardly afford to give it away.

Regardless of the (speculation driven) high crude prices we've experienced for the last two years, supply will catch up with demand and oil prices will settle out.
Thank goodness we have savvy oil industry guys like Bush and Cheney calling the shots. We'll use up all the cheap crude from the middle east, Canada, Russia and Mexico. After their supplies are no longer economical to import, we'll tap our domestic supplies of oil, gas and coal. Our economy will still be going gangbusters, while the oil-export-dependent economies of the middle east, Russia, Canada and Mexico go belly up.

In fact, I'm pretty sure the only reason Bush is sucking up to the illegals is that he knows we benefit from the cheap oil coming from Mexico. Once Mexico's cheap oil runs out (which is likely to happen within the next 4 or 5 years) there will be a fence built between the U.S. and Mexico faster than you can say "Arriba". About 1/3 of the Mexican government's revenues come from Pemex crude sales (they supply 15% of US oil/gas imports), and Mexico's oil reserves are dwindling FAST. The Mexican federal government will collapse without those oil revenues and most of their citizens will head north to escape the ensuing economic depression. The illegal alien problem we have now is nothing compared to what will happen when Mexico's Cantarell oil field dries up.

Besides our domestic oil and gas reserves, this country has the world's largest reserves of coal (300 years worth at current consumption rates) and one of the world's largest deposits of shale oil (more oil than the total amount that will ever be pumped out of Saudi Arabia). Oil shales and GTL conversion of coal is currently economical at the equivalent of $40 bbl crude oil, so sometime within the next few years I would expect that energy costs will settle out somewhere around there. Remember, only a few short years ago, oil was only about $12 bbl.

And finally, one of these days, some clever entrepreneur will figure out a way to economically harvest the methane hydrate deposits covering the deep ocean floor off of our east and west coasts. They say there's at least another thousand year's supply of energy there.

the vast majority of ethanol is hauled in tank cars on the railroad.

the big problem with ethanol is that it sucks moisture out of any possible source (like the air) which dilutes it (you can't have much more that a couple of a percent of water in gasoline or the engine stalls.) pipe lines inject a slug of water into the line to separate the various products being transported which goes right into the ethanol.

in an industrial sense there isn't enough ethanol being shipped to really build dedicated pipe lines etc.

one single railroad car can haul the equivilent of three tank trucks.

the railroads have a method of connecting tank cars together and so when they load these trains (made up of permanently connected cars with couplers and hoses) they pump the product into one end of the train and it fills all of the cars.

(actually they cut the train into a couple of sections and make four connections in the middle, to save time in loading or unloading. loading/unloading rates are in the neighborhood of 5000 gpm or higher, the standard filling pipe in this league is 12"  [a large tank truck is 8500 gal.]) (yes martha it would fill your swiming pool in like 50 seconds)

moving a 96 car train to the loading/unloading track, connecting up the fittings and then doing the actual loading/unloading then removing the outfit back to the trainyard in actualy takes about 4 hours.

here in the los angeles area there is one "tank train" that brings crude oil from up the coast on a 20 hour cycle, has been for 30 years. there are seveal others in use about the country . the big thing about these trains is that after they have been in use for 10-15 years they tend to be replaced by pipelines.

by the way, the locomotives are diesels, however they could be electrics powered by nuc generating stations. (that was first done in the 1950's).C