Leadership Profile: Sass Somekh (Part 8)
Check other articles in the series...Aside from his executive role as the President of Novellus, Sass has also been engaging in a social entrepreneur role. Here Sass discusses the issue of US dependence on foreign oil, and his mission to change that dynamic.
SM: Let us discuss your more recent work in Cleantech.
SS: In the past year I started spending more time with public policy as opposed to internal technology. Allen Greenspan testified in front of the Foreign Relations Committee in the Senate and he talked about the issue we have with the dependence on foreign oil, and that it is beginning to affect the economy. In March of 2006 two trucks exploded at the entrance gate to the biggest oil processing facility in Saudi Arabia. Had they been able to get inside and explode inside, they would have taken 5% of the world oil production out of circulation, and it would have taken a year to fix it. Japan’s economy would have collapsed.
With reference to that event, he mentioned that a successful attack could really put the whole world into recession. It would create a domino effect. The supply and demand of oil in the world is so balanced that even a small disturbance can drive oil prices to $100-$150 a gallon. The balance of supply and demand there is critical.
This dependence is an issue not only in the United States, but for the whole world. It is a risk for the security and economy of the world. We in the United States cannot just complain about the dependence on foreign oil, because we created it. We consume 25% of the oil production in the world. We are 5% or the world’s population, and we have 3% of the reserves of the oil, but we consume 25%. Every day we import 60% of our consumption; we import 12 million barrels of oil every day. Saudi Arabia produces less than what we import every day; we always think of them as the fountain of oil, but they only produce 9 million barrels a day and their production is dropping.
SM: Where does the rest come from? SS: We import a lot from Canada and other places. We import more than Saudi Arabia produces in a day. It is mind boggling to do that. Our gas mileage per car has not improved in the last 20 years. In fact, we have started buying bigger and bigger cars, so we were in denial and dreaming for the past 20 years. We bought the cars we wanted, and Detroit sold the cars because they wanted the money from them. Now, Chrysler, Ford and GM are all in trouble, but Toyota is doing well.
We also produce 25% of the global warming, and this is not even including the merchandise which is manufactured all over the world using a lot of energy, which gets shipped and sold here. The point is, we need to take action here. The first thing to do is to come up with a single page call for action. I took a great deal of information which is publicly available, nothing which I invented personally, and listed the issues associated with dependence on foreign oil, and listed some of the solution people have proposed such as using electricity for transportation, bio fuels, and so on. I formed this into a call for action for Congress to declare this as a national priority, and to support the private sector into pursuing these new technologies and so forth.
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