The anticipated title from Cambridge University Press has been released in hard-cover and is available for purchase. Edited by PESD director, David Victor, Rice professor Amy Jaffe, and PESD fellow Mark Hayes, the book sheds light on the political challenges which may accompany a shift to a natural gas-fed world.

Energy is on the front burner and will stay there, so this book has special value. Read it and learn about the topic of today and tomorrow and tomorrow.

- George P. Shultz, United States Secretary of State, 1982-1989

The coming phase of energy industry development is bringing with it the rapid globalisation of the gas business. Long term take-or-pay contracts, which align supply and demand and which formed the foundation of all successful projects in the past, are coming under pressure from liberalisation. But security of supply still depends on security of demand: this timely and authoritative study demonstrates that, if gas is to

fulfil its enormous promise as an energy source, new ways must be found to establish the confidence of both sides that secure supply will be matched by reliable demand

- Frank Chapman, CEO, BG Group plc

This is a very valuable addition to the global literature on energy issues and energy policy ... Natural Gas and Geopolitics goes deep into the global gas policy issues that affect critical US energy policy, not only looking backward but helping understand what may happen as the global natural gas market develops.

- Bill Richardson, Governor of New Mexico, United States Secretary of Energy, 1998 2001

The Brazilian government is declaring victory in its decades-long struggle to become self-sufficient in the supply of oil. The milestone is cause for celebration in a country that has long paid a high price for imported energy.

It will also reverberate here in the United States where policy-makers, too, are trying to wean the nation from costly imports, jittery markets and the foreign spigot. But we must learn the right lessons. Brazil's success came not from treating oil as an addiction but by producing even more of the stuff and by becoming even more dependent on world markets

Here in the United States, most attention to Brazil's fuel supply has focused on the country's aggressive program to replace oil with ethanol that is made by fermenting homegrown sugar. American newspapers are filled with stories about Brazil's famous "flex fuel" vehicles that make it easy to switch between ethanol and conventional gasoline.

Guided partly by Brazil's apparent success, American policy-makers are crafting new mandates for ethanol, and flex fuel vehicles are now taking shape. We have the impression that ethanol is king.

In reality, ethanol is a minor player in Brazilian energy supply. It accounts for less than one-tenth of all the country's energy liquids.

The real source of Brazil's self-sufficiency is the country's extraordinary success in producing more oil. After the 1970s oil shocks, when Brazil's fuel import bill soared, the government pushed Petrobras, the state-controlled oil company, to look asunder for new energy sources.

Petrobras delivered, especially at home, where the firm pioneered the technologies that make it possible to extract oil locked in sediments under the seabed in extremely deep water. In the middle 1970s Brazil struggled to produce just 180,000 barrels of oil per day while importing four times that amount. Today it produces about 2 million and is self-sufficient. Indeed, the current milestone of self-sufficiency arrives with the inauguration of Brazil's newest deep water platform, the "P50." When P50 reaches its full output later this year, that one platform will deliver more liquid to Brazil than the country's entire ethanol program.

Brazil's self-sufficiency offers three lessons for U.S. energy policy:

-First is that ethanol, with current technology, will do little to sever our dependence on imported energy. Today's approach involves growing a crop - sugar in Brazil, corn in the United States - and then fermenting the fruits to yield fuel. Sugar plants in Brazil's climate are a lot more efficient at converting sunlight to biomass than is corn in the Midwest, but U.S. policy nonetheless favors corn (and imposes tariffs on imported sugar) because the program is really a scheme to deliver heartland votes rather than a commercially viable fuel.

Yet, even with Brazil's favorable climate and sugar's inviting biology, ethanol is already reaching the limit. That's because the land and other resources devoted to ethanol can be put to other uses such as growing food and cash crops.

Indeed, today the Brazilian government is actually reducing the share of ethanol that must be blended into gasoline because sugar growers prefer to make even more money by selling their product as sugar on the world market rather than fermenting it into alcohol.

New technologies - notably "cellulosic biomass"- could breathe fresh life into ethanol and replace still more oil. Cellulosic biomass is intriguing because it cuts costs by allowing the entire plant - the cellulose in the stalks, as well as the prized grain or sugar - to be fermented into fuel.

Advocates for this technology, including President Bush in his State of the Union address, have wrongly confused the sexy promise of this new-fangled approach to making ethanol with the practical realities of fuel markets. Schemes to produce cellulosic biomass, today, work only under special circumstances and nobody has delivered the fuel at the industrial scale that would be required for the technology to become commercially viable.

-Second, we should learn that, for now, the greatest force to loosen the world's oil markets lies with oil itself. We can use oil more efficiently, as would occur with a gasoline tax or wise fuel economy standards. But we can also find ways to produce more of the stuff - as Brazil did with Petrobras.

The problem for U.S. policy-makers is that the richest veins for new production lie mainly outside the United States and beyond our direct control.

Indeed, the Brazilian government made Petrobras more efficient by putting the firm partly beyond its control as well. When the government sold part of the company on international stock exchanges, it accepted Western accounting procedures and other strictures that have given Petrobras the autonomy and accountability to its shareholders that, in turn, helped make it an efficient company.

We have a stake in seeing other countries do the same - from Algeria to Mexico to Iran and even Russia. But we must remember that Brazil did this on its own, in response to internal pressures for reform, with little leverage from foreign governments.

-Third, we should learn from Brazil not to confuse the goal of greater self-sufficiency with the illusion of independence. Even as Brazil has become self-sufficient it has also, ironically, become more dependent on world markets. That's because the Brazilian government has wisely relaxed price controls so that the prices of fuels within the country are set to the world market. Thus Brazilians see real world prices when they fill up at the pump, and the decisions about which cars to buy and how much to drive reflect real costs and benefits of the fuel they consume. That is why, even as the country becomes self-sufficient, Brazilians are working ever harder to be more frugal with oil - because the price at the pump is high and rising.

Dependence on oil is a liability that must be managed. But it is not an addiction.

Efficiency, sober policies toward modest alternatives such as ethanol, and more production - all tools of the manager, not the addict - are required. Brazil helps show the way, but only if we learn the right lessons.

George Habash, a militant and former secretary-general of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, once characterized terrorism as a "thinking man's game." Using mathematics, researchers at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) have made fighting terrorism a thinking man's game as well.

CISAC affiliate Lawrence M. Wein of the Graduate School of Business and CISAC Science Fellow Jonathan Farley are both applying mathematical models to homeland security problems, such as preventing a nuclear detonation in a major U.S. city and determining whether terrorist cells have likely been disrupted.

Wein, who teaches operations classes about different business processes used to deliver goods and services, has focused his research on bioterrorism and border issues. He has performed, he says, the first mathematical analyses of hypothetical botulism poisoning, anthrax outbreaks and smallpox infections.

"One overriding theme of my work is that all these homeland security problems are operations problems," said Wein, the Paul E. Holden Professor of Management Science. "Just as McDonald's needs to get hamburgers out in a rapid and defect-free manner, so too does the government have to get vaccines and antibiotics out and test the borders for nuclear weapons or terrorists in a rapid and defect-free manner."

In collaboration with Stephen Flynn of the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonpartisan research center, Wein recently has conducted research to improve security at U.S. borders and ports. Port security has received significant attention recently owing to the furor over Dubai Ports World's bid to manage six terminals at major U.S. harbors. The aim of Wein and Flynn's work is to prevent terrorists from bringing into the country a nuclear weaponbe it an atomic bomb or a so-called "dirty bomb," or conventional explosive packed with radioactive waste.

"Of all the problems I've studied, this is the most important because the worst-case terrorist scenario is a nuclear weapon going off in a major U.S. city and also it is the one the government has dropped the ball on the most," Wein said. "They have done a very poor job."

Instead of using the existing approach, where U.S. Customs actively inspects a minority of containers based on information from a specialized tracking system designed to identify suspicious containers, Wein and Flynn have recommended the government use a multi-layer, passive screening system for every container entering the country. Under their system, Customs would photograph a shipping container's exterior, screen for radioactive material and collect gamma-ray images of the container's contents. If terrorists shielded a bomb with a heavy metal such as lead to hide it from radiation detectors, gamma-ray imaging would allow inspectors to see the shielding and flag the container for inspection. Wein and Flynn believe this whole process would cost about $7 per container.

"Right now about maybe 6 percent of the containers are deemed suspicious and they will go through some testing and the other 94 percent of the containers just waltz right into the country without an inspector laying an eye on them," Wein said. "What we're proposing to do is 100 percent passive testing."

Wein's earlier work addressed a different threat: bioterrorism. In 2005, Wein revealed the nation's milk supply was vulnerable--a terrorist could potentially poison 100,000 gallons of milk by sneaking a few grams of botulinum into a milk tanker. Although the government and dairy industry have collaborated to intensify the heat pasteurization formula for milk, Wein is still pushing for additional botulinum testing, which he says would cost less than 1 percent of the cost of milk.

Wein also has used math to study smallpox outbreaks, the U.S. fingerprint identification system and U.S.-Mexico border security issues. Wein's congressional testimony on the fingerprint identification system in 2004 led to a switch from a two-finger system to a 10-finger system. His 2003 research on anthrax attacks resulted in a Washington, D.C., pilot program to use the U.S. Postal Service to distribute antibiotics throughout the capital after an outbreak. Seattle is now testing a similar program.

"In Washington, D.C., now, if there is a large-scale anthrax attack, postal workers will be the first to get their Cipro and, on a voluntary basis, they will go door-to-door distributing antibiotics," Wein said.

He said the common thread throughout his research is queuing theory, or the mathematical study of waiting lines, but he also draws upon mathematical epidemiology for his smallpox studies; air dispersion models for the anthrax model; supply chain management for the milk study; probability theory for the fingerprint identification system; and models for nuclear transport and detection for his work with containers.

From tainted lactose to lattice structures

While Wein is working on improving the government's counterterrorism systems, Jonathan Farley is working to figure out when terrorist organizations have been effectively disrupted. His mathematical model is designed to help law enforcement decide how to act once they have captured or killed a terrorist or a number of terrorists in a cell.

A professor at the University of the West Indies who will chair the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science there next year, Farley is on a one-year science fellowship at CISAC. In 2003, he co-founded Phoenix Mathematical Systems Modeling Inc., a company that develops mathematical solutions to homeland security problems.

He is using lattice theory--a branch of mathematics that deals with ordered sets--to determine the probability a terrorist cell has been disrupted once some of its members have been captured or killed.

"Law enforcement has to make decisions about what resources they should allocate to target different cells," Farley said. "The model should provide them with a more rational basis for allocating their scarce resources. ... It will inform you when you're making decisions about how much time and effort and how much money you're going to spend going after a particular cell."

While at Stanford, Farley hopes to unearth the perfect structure, mathematically speaking, for a terrorist cell--or in other words, a cell structure that is most resistant to the loss of members.

"If it's possible to determine the structure of an ideal terrorist cell, you can focus on a much smaller number of possibilities, because it makes more sense to assume the adversary is going to be smart rather than stupid," Farley said.

Farley has suggested it is possible Al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations already may have figured out the perfect structure for a terror cell by trial and error.

"I don't expect Osama bin Laden to be reading lattice theory in his caves in Afghanistan," said Farley. "But if it follows from the mathematics, perhaps heuristically, the terrorists will have come to the same conclusion--that this is the best way to structure a terrorist cell."

Although Farley acknowledges his model is not a panacea for terrorism, he hopes it will help reduce guesswork that might be involved in pursuing terrorists.

"It's not that I think mathematics can solve all of these problems," Farley said. "Because it can't. But it's better to use rational means to make decisions rather than guesswork."

John B. Stafford is a science-writing intern at Stanford News Service.