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Technology moves us forward and should be recognized
Posted by Heading Out on May 17, 2008 - 10:00am
Back at the beginning of January I changed cars, and now drive a Camry Hybrid. It came with the usual displays for mpg, where the power was flowing and such, and for a month I played with looking at the different displays and then, as with most new toys, started to ignore them. However, pulling into the garage one night just over a month ago, I switched off the engine and a little “Excellent” appeared in a hitherto un-noticed final display on the dash. Now how do I confess this? Since then my driving habits have changed - more than I would freely admit - by the wish to be praised by a machine. The commute home is under three miles, and in somewhat hilly country so this requires a little effort on my part, but more often than not I now get that little glow of satisfaction from such a sign as I enter the house, generating a feeling that I am doing my part.
Well, not completely, and in terms of the greater scheme of things not even at any level of significance. The problem that we are coming to face is much larger, and more imminent than can be solved with simple small measures. Yet by touting the gains in efficiency through use of hybrid cars, or the growth rates of the solar and wind industries, one can convey to the general public that there is a considerable amount of technical progress being made in solving what “short term inconvenience” we might face as this “peak oil thingee” comes to pass and we have to live through it. The scale of the problem is glossed over, and the inadequacy of currently proposed solutions in their impact on the overall size of the problem is lost in the debate over issues that may be resolved with additional investment and time.
One of the books that I read in the various travels that have kept me from posting over the past month or so was Robert Bryce’s Gusher of Lies. The book begins by pointing out the impracticality of targeting “energy independence” for the United States, despite the stated intentions of a succession of U.S. Presidents to lead us into a path that would do so. It then goes on to try to shoot down a number of the suggested benefits that have been suggested would occur if the U.S. could achieve energy independence, and this is (for me) the weakest section of the book, and almost tempted me to put it down since the chapter seemed somewhat contrived, but persevering through, the book got better.
But in the end it was somewhat disappointing because I think he missed the true problem in focusing so much on disproving the premise that the U.S. could ever become energy independent. To illustrate my point consider the following from the concluding chapter:
Instead of wasting billions of taxpayer dollars on false fuels like corn ethanol, the U.S. should be investing in projects that will keep America vibrant. Health care costs are soaring. Public education is faltering. Entitlement spending is out of control. America’s once-dominant technological lead in everything from computers to automobiles has largely evaporated. Transportation infrastructure is crumbling.
And so it goes. Although he has looked at the problem in some detail (the chapter on ethanol in particular), the imminence of the imbalance between energy demand and supply and the lack of preparedness that the world faces seems to have in facing up to this problem, has slipped by him. The implication, in the end, is that there are a lot more serious problems that have to be faced, and that energy independence, and by implication, the security of energy supply, is really a non-issue. Rather:
As oil prices continue their upward trend, oil demand will eventually start to slow, and the market will eventually reach an equilibrium between supply and demand.
Which presumes a relatively stable and still large supply of oil to meet this mythical balance.
The failure to recognize the problems that this equilibrium state will bring, and its unreality is not evident within many of the posts and comments posted here, yet I am not sure if even we adequately recognize the scale and absoluteness of the changes that are coming. The problems that arise in expanding out existing alternative technologies to levels that will have significant impact on supply are considerable. Some of the problems of scale will become evident as existing and new plants begin to operate for significant periods in a variety of conditions. Some of the initially posited benefits will be revealed as also having counterbalancing problems, as they have been with the developing ethanol industry.
However, in that regard it must also be said that we are too prone to accept today’s technologies as defining the capabilities of the industry, rather than looking at what might be achieved in the future with technical advances. As a minor illustration consider that while the average yield of corn per acre is 151.1 bushels/acre this has increased from an average of 84.6 bu/acre in 1988, and the record yield for 2007 was 385 bu/acre. (The web site cited also notes for those of us agronomically challenged that an acre is about the size of a football field, and that a bushel of corn is about the size and weight of a bag of dog food.) Interestingly the winner was from Virginia , with his brother in second place at 370 bu/acre. And I do seem to recall having read in a comment from the past couple of weeks that ethanol yields per bushel can be increased to around 3 gal/bushel (from the assumed 2.7).
That being said, ethanol has currently passed from the high point it reached, perhaps in 2006, to the point where now there is some debate about repealing some of the initial incentives. Which leaves a question as to which technology will be the next “energy source of the future.”
Well, while I would suggest that wind is the current favorite, it might be worth noting that not only is DARPA funding a major study into algae (but if you are not a BIG corporation don’t bother applying for money) but in the recent Time 100 most influential people in the world, the innovator in energy listed was Isaac Berzin for his work on growing algae. And in that regard I might close by suggesting that the allocation of high energy requirement for this potential fuel which Prof G referenced the other day, may perhaps depend on how you are growing and processing it. For again, technology does not stand still (grin).
Oh, and yes I did note that the second individual cited in the Time 100 Builders and Titans section was our old friend the Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources of Saudi Arabia, Ali al-Naimi
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Regarding Time citing Isaac Berzin and his work with algae as something exciting and hopeful, my own view is that anything being touted up on one of Time's 'lists' (or worse yet, People's lists) is, apriori, of suspect value and not to be taken too seriously.
Consistent with that admittedly cynical view, let us remember that Isaac Berzin's company, Green Fuel Technology, is the one which was doing work blowing power plant stack gas up through vertical plexiglas tubes filled with an algae suspension. Surely, there cannot be any serious thought on the part of anybody even halfway technically competent that such a scheme for capturing CO2 from power plants is even remotely scalable. (Try to visualize square mile upon square mile of clear plastic tubes filled with specially bred algae, or dozens of clear plastic domes the size of the Astrodome.)
To me, this is one of those things that is such a non-starter as to be capable of being dismissed 'by inspection'. Yet, venerable publications such as Time really eat this stuff up, mainly because on the surface it looks exciting and makes for good ink. The level of technical illiteracy among the journalist establishment never ceases to amaze me.
The popular mainstream media is not the place to look if you really want to know what important technological developments are taking place.
I will close this little rant by saying that I'm a firm believer in developing better technology in a wise manner, simply because technology is what humans DO and the application of technology is one of main things that seperates us from the beasts (including the higher primates of which we share most of our genes).
Surely, there cannot be any serious thought on the part of anybody even halfway technically competent that such a scheme for capturing CO2 from power plants is even remotely scalable. (Try to visualize square mile upon square mile of clear plastic tubes filled with specially bred algae, or dozens of clear plastic domes the size of the Astrodome.)
That is, indeed, the plan:
http://www.celsias.com/2007/09/04/not-just-for-sushi-anymore/
http://thefraserdomain.typepad.com/energy/2006/12/arizona_public_.html
I saw a show recently (History channel? Discovery?) that showed this plan currently under construction:
Nice links and photos. I presume the 3rd photo is an artist rendering? Anyway, read National Geographic's article on the potential for algae ethanol and was impressed by how much more fuel could potentially be produced over a year's time. It was 3,000 gallons for corn ethanol, and as much as 50,000 gallons for algae ethanol, due in great part to the speed at which algae grows year round. Most people are not aware that the oil we use is the result of millions of years of compression and heat applied to dead algae. As the oceans stagnated algae filled them, then sank to the bottom, the ocean life died due to a lack of oxygen and soil filled over those layers, techtonic plates slipped and moved and eventually all that algae ended up as oil in two distinct layers in the crust, dating back from two eras 90 and 150 million years ago.
So it would seem that if oil can be mass produced as a viable form of ethanol, our best bet is to find ways to scale up algae ethanol production. We flew back from Oklahoma to California via an airline that flew too slow and too low, but what I realized from the view was just how many empty valleys there are in Arizona, Utah and Nevada that could be used to make ethanol.
I think the process of using CO2 enriched air as a way to capture it from Coal should not be requisite to make algae ethanol. It would seem that if plain old simple air is pumped fast enough the CO2 will get converted and we should have lots of fuel, but I'm not certain of that - please illuminate me. As a result, as an investor, I have been keeping my eye on Greenfuel Tech., waiting for that right company to invest in. My understanding is Verasun has a stake in Greenfuel, so if it does take off they may be a good bet. Right now I'm taking a wait and see approach. But certainly one to watch.
The window frame of opportunity to catch the world economy before it dumps in catastrope, by way of a scaled up mass produced fuel, is still open but we must move fast. Otherwise at some threshold of price for energy the world economy will stagnate, then price of energy and economic activity will balance/stalemate at some tepid level not conducive to well being of 6.5 billion people.
Addition to my prior post: That is 3,000 gallons per acre for corn versus 50,000 gallons per acre for algae ethanol.
Corn yields perhaps 2.8 gal/bu and averages ~150 bu/acre, so you're going to see around 420 gal/acre. Anyone claiming 3000 gallons from corn is smoking something.
Credible algae claims are in the region of 5000 to 10000 gal/ac. Even 2000 would be pretty darn good for a cheap process.
I'm probably stating the obvious or asking a stupid question, but...
Corn is a solid, is it not? So you ned to add the liquid, do you not? If making ethanol is anything like brewing drinking alcohol, then you need sugar, water, yeast. So wouldn't making ethanol have an impact on the water supply?
I'm sure it takes far more water to grow the corn than to process it, but the issue of contamination from wastewater can't be ignored.
Corn yields perhaps 2.8 gal/bu and averages ~150 bu/acre, so you're going to see around 420 gal/acre. Anyone claiming 3000 gallons from corn is smoking something.
That is for oone crop. Maybe some areas can have 3 crops a year, assuming 350 bushsls/acre and 3gal/bu, that would work. But it seems to be a stretch.
BTW, How much biomass is in the cobs and stalks, compared to corn kernels?
To me it seems that there is more potential in processing the "waste".
What strain of maize can come to maturity in 120 days at that yield? With enormous amounts of water, phosphate and nitrate I suppose you can do anything, but algae seem cheaper.
Around half (maybe more if cobs are included, I haven't checked lately). A bushel of corn is 56 pounds, so 150 bu/ac is 4.2 tons. The Corn Stover Collection Project found roughly 2 tons/acre of harvestable stover, after allowing for erosion control.
The last picture with the great field of long narrow ponds in which algae are to be grown in from Solix Biofuels. On the web it is said that they are based in Boulder Colorado. But I can't find them locally here in Boulder County. They are also said to be cooperating with the New Holland Brewery in Fort Collins on a demonstration project using the CO2 from brewing beer to feed some algae. The picture is surely wishful thinking. There is no place in northern Colorado with such a wide open expanse of flat, unoccupied land, and open ponds (copied from the long gone algae project on a predecessor organization of Dept of Energy, NREL) would surely be uneconomic in our northern latitude, high elevation location.
They are also associated with Colorado State University (CSU) in Fort Collins. It has been at least a year since I saw any publicity about them locally. It appears to me that their association with the CSU is somewhat of an embarrassment to CSU.
All work on algae that I have seen, always assumes that it is necessary to feed the algae with high concentration CO2. So proposers always mention working near coal fired power plants.
An association with a brewery, in a college town, is surely a good idea for experimental work, but the growing ponds in their PR vastly out size the CO2 source of the New Holland Brewery. An algae technology that requires a fossil fuel source of high concentration CO2 seems to me not to be a post fossil fuel solution.
It depends on your definition of high. While there is some increase in yield with increased concentration, the overall levels of CO2 that are productive seem to lie below 5%, depending on which algae you are growing.
If the overall concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere ever rises to 5%, we are all dead. Dead people have no energy independence issues. Problem solved.
I was referencing the feed concentrations, and this ties into the use of CO2 extraction from the flue gas. There is no economic incentive, to do that concentration since the higher levels of CO2 in the feed would not be productive. Remember also that the off-gas from the process is oxygen.
I assumed too much. In my mind, there is only one long term source of CO2, the atmosphere. Gas wells for CO2 suffer from the same depletion problems that plague methane gas wells. Their flow slows and eventually stops. On the other hand we badly need to develop some technology that depletes CO2 from the atmosphere. CO2 atmospheric concentration is already to high.
In flue gas the push is to keep the CO2 level high because it is easier to capture at high concentration, and it needs to be captured in order to address global warming problems. In an extreme, some proposals envision burning fuel in oxygen in order to eliminate dilution by nitrogen and pollution by nitrogen oxides.
I expect that there will come a time when the only source of flue gas will be from power plants that are burning biofuels, like wood or something cellulosic like dead algae. What then? The recovery of CO2 surely cannot be 100% efficient. CO2 will gradually leak into the atmosphere. The Earth will continue to warm.
The earth will continue to warm for the next 150 years, even if we halt all fossil fuel burning tomorrow:
The solution (combined with other measures of course) is geoengineering. Many leading climate scientists now support geoengineering, including Paul Crutzen, Tom Wigley and Ken Caldeira. For example, see ALBEDO ENHANCEMENT BY STRATOSPHERIC SULFUR INJECTIONS: A CONTRIBUTION TO RESOLVE A POLICY DILEMMA?(pdf).
Sure! Because the climate system is so resilient we can just mess with it at will!
This is a very dangerous and, imho, foolish way to go. Let's just live differently and get the same results without the unknown feedbacks.
Cheers
"The (emphasis added) solution (combined with other measures of course) is geoengineering."
I strongly disagree. Geoengineering is not the solution, but a class of proposed solutions, none of which have been validated by any means excepting hype. I think nature will heal itself. It's not clear what size population of homo will remain after the healing. Geoengineering likely will have unintended consequences that will make problems much worse, and healing much slower.
The solution is geoengineering.
Sure it is 'john denver'.
Odds are your 'vision' of what geoengineering is is far different than mine - but hey - you won't be around to see the results of your plan, so why should you care?
But if only recently grown biomass is used as feedstock, all that CO2 came from the atmosphere. You only increase atmospheric CO2 if you "mine" carbon from long-term stores, such as fossil fuels, old-growth forests, peat bogs etc.
If you look at the annual cycle of the Keeling curve, you'll see it already exists: plants deplete CO2 from the atmosphere to the tune of 5-6 ppm every growing season. All we need to do is direct some of that captured CO2 to a destination other than the atmosphere, and we will create a net reduction in CO2. Easier said than done, but perhaps not all that difficult to do either.
Apparently nitrogen might be a problem. Guess we need to plant more nitrogen-fixing plants. I believe this is a feature of most sustainable farming methods, so an increase in organic farming - perhaps excepting rice due to methane production - and the use of nitrogen-fixing cover crops should help with CO2.
Being the non-scientist I am, I may well be wrong.
Cheers
"... Easier said than done, but ..."
Yes! It will be a big job to harvest a significant fraction of natural annual plant growth and sequester it somehow.
The great bulk of the biomass in a old growth forest is less than 200yr old. Growing forest and letting it reach climax and decay is not really a good idea, but it is a beginning. If at some time in the near future there is a great deal of near climax forest, the problem of scheduling the harvest and sequestering would not be so great as it would be otherwise.
Also note that the 5-6ppm annual fluctuation is the difference between northern and southern hemisphere growth/decay. The total rate of carbon capture must be somewhat larger than 5-6ppm/y.
A method for sequestration that I find appealing is turning the biomass to charcoal and burying it. (But not as soil amendment, which has recently been shown to have environmental problems. Wardle, et al. Science v320, p 629)
If the overall concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere ever rises to 5%, we are all dead. Dead people have no energy independence issues. Problem solved.
The whole point si wrong, because there is not enought carbon in the earth crust to bring CO2 concentrations avove 0.25%. (outside of limestone that does not enter carbon cycle)
Besides this being off topic, because parent post was not referring to atmospheric CO2, it is also wrong.
And if you decomposed all limestone:
We are breathing out 5%CO2 and 15%O2. Iw we were forced to re-inhale it, we could take 3 more breaths, although very unpleasant.
It atmospheric concentration of O2 stayed at 20%, even 5% CO2 would be more manageable and we would adapt to it.
If that's the plan, then what's the difference between that and a huge concentrated-solar thermal plant? They both take up lots of space, they both chiefly utilize steel and glass, they're both probably about equally expensive to implement, except one produces electricity, and one produces liquid fuels...and one is based on already proven technology, and the other is still up in the air....
I suppose one difference might be that these algae farms wouldn't need direct sunlight in order to function. The algae could make use of diffracted light, and could function on cloudy days, or in areas with a regularly cloudy climate. So why don't we get on the stick, start throwing down concentrated-solar thermal power plants in the desert southwest, and then we can try out these algae farms in whatever other locations are left?
Barrette808 -
Thanks for the links re power plant/algae projects. I am already aware of some of these. The thing to realize is that these are purely demonstration projects. Even the one with the vertical banks of horizontal tubes, while looking pretty big, is but a small fraction of the size that would be required to accomodate even a modest size power plant.
The artist's conceptual drawing showing a power plant surrounded by what looks like several square miles of covered algae ponds is more like it in terms of what a full-scale system would look like. A square mile is almost 28 million sq ft. If it costs say $20 per sq ft to build these covered ponds (probably a lot more, but I'll be generous), then the cost of one square mile of algae pond is roughly $560 million. And this thing looks like its several square miles, so we'd already be over a $1billion, and that doesn't even include the cost of the processing facilities, or the agitators to keep the ponds from stagnating. These numbers are admittedly WAGs, but I throw them out just to try to put things into perspective.
And another consideration is that algae growth requires nutrients in the form of soluble nitrogen and phosphorus. This plant is shown to be out in the middle of nowhere, so where are the many hundreds of tons of N and P per day going to come from? Sewage effluent? So now we have to build a pipeline to transport huge volumes of sewage effluent to the algae farm. Even treated sewage contains a variety of undesireable chemical constituents and microorganisms that could easily disrupt the controlled growth of the special strains of algae.
I haven't even gotten to the problems of harvesting and dewatering the algae on a massive scale and then trying to extract the lipids in a cost-effective manner. What happens to the mass of dead algae after the lipid have been extracted? If they are returned to the algae ponds, then they also consitute a nice growth medium or a variety of microorganisms in addition to the desired algae.
While the large scale growth of algae for bio fuels may look scientifically attractive, I myself see it as a very expensive engineering nightmare.
One more comment: One oft-stated selling point for oil-from-algae schemes is that with algae for a given amount of land you can grow biomass at a rate that is an order of magnitude greater than what you can do using corn or other land crops. Well, that is a highly misleading basic of comparison because a covered algae pond will cost several orders of magnitude more than plain ol' land upon which you just plant some seeds, add fertilizer, and watch things grow. The more logical basis of comparison should be lbs per day of fuel production capacity per $million of capital investment.
I am not dumping on algae because I like ethanol (I don't), but rather because, hard as I try to visualize things, I just don't see it being very practical or cost-effective for truly large-scale applications. I think the real deal killer is the need to have totally enclosed algae bioreactors covered greenhouses to prevent contamination by unwanted low-lipid strains. If you can sustainably grown high-lipid algae in simple open ponds, then that would change the whole picture entirely.
I've got severe reservations about algae for fuel, but the most promising approach I have seen to date is vertigro:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/04/01/algae.oil/index.html
Algae: 'The ultimate in renewable energy' - CNN.com
This doesn't suffer form evaporation of unenclosed ponds or allow the specialist algae to be invaded by wild strains, and makes use of the fact that the algae only needs around 1/10th of sunlight to grow, so you can slowly rotate the tiers of algae.
Drying and providing potassium and so on would still seem to present substantial difficulties.
joule, while I agree that growing algae on this scale is almost certainly a silly idea (what effect does a hailstorm have on all your glass tubes) (or how long before your plastic tubes crumble in solar UV), there is some internal inconsistency in your post -- the "where does the NPK come from" and the "what to do with the byproducts" ideas cancel each other out. The presumptive goal of this enterprise is to pull carbon out of the air, and it should be possible to do this with a more or less fixed investment of 'P' and 'K'. Some of the 'N' could probably be recycled as well.
"The more logical basis of comparison should be lbs per day of fuel production capacity per $million of capital investment."
Definitely. That measure should be the basis of an apples-to-apples comparison with any photosynthetic energy source, and could easily be extended (converting biofuel BTUs <-> kWH) to comparisons with PV and CSP systems. It's also worth noting that any sort of $/tech comparison at present is quite distorted by the (still) relatively low price of fossil carbon.
DIYer -
Well, it is well established that for a unit dry weight of algae, x, y, and z amounts of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium will be required, respectively. Those nutrients can be supplied externally, as I had indicated in reference to sewage effluent, or perhaps they could be supplied internally by recycling some or all of the dead algae after lipid extraction, thus recycling these nutrients.
With regard to the latter approach, one must realize that when you recycle dead algae, you are not only reclycling N, P, and K, but also a much larger amount of highly biodegradable carbonaceous material. As such, you will be providing an excellent growth medium for all sorts of unwanted organisms that will compete with the desired algae and also compete for the necessary oxygen. If anything, natural microorganisms are highly opportunistic, and where there's food, water, and O2, they will thrive. You can bet on that.
It is one thing to grow pure cultures at a high rate in closely controlled sterile bioreactor vessels to produce high-value pharmaceuticals, but something else again to produce huge amounts of algae in non-sterile but covered ponds or tubes. I strongly suspect that one of the major challenges will be to maintain a stable population of the desired strains of high-lipid algae and to prevent them from getting mugged by the native boyz in the hood microorganisms.
Lots of luck.
What if you throw out the idea of maintaining some sort of control over the strains of algae. Just grow it in low tech ponds in a suitable climate (i.e. one where loss of water to evaporation isn't a problem). Then you scoop up the algae, dry it and use it a generic biomass. Perhaps you burn it for power, and/or you extract methane from it. It would seem to me that we mentally are hung up on the desire to replace liquid transportation fuel. Heck bu the time anything like this can be developed and scaled up, the present fleet of vehicles will have reached the end of their useful lives anyway.
What makes you think the plant would require so much?
The ultimate products of such a plant are alcohols, hydrocarbons and perhaps esters. These are made exclusively of C, H and O; phosphate, potash and nitrate aren't part of the product stream. You might have small K and P losses in the processing, but nothing like hundreds of tons per day. And aren't some archaebacteria nitrogen-fixers? Worse comes to worst, you make some ammonia on-site and replenish N losses that way.
Sewage is an interesting topic, because removing phosphorus is essential to keep waterways from being destroyed by algal blooms. If an algae system can scrub phosphorus (and potash) from a waste stream and recover it as e.g. dry ash in a gasifier, this would be an enormous step forward for nutrient recycling.
Dewatering is done with a centrifuge, no? Extraction can be done with a solvent, like supercritical CO2 (cheap and readily available as a byproduct of fermentation). Dead algae minus lipids are full of protein and carbohydrates. I'm sure there's something that would eat it; maybe fish? Cattle-feed supplement?
If you can feed it to terrestrial livestock, you get manure which can be digested for gas (another fuel). The digested material goes around again as algae nutrients.
I must be behind the times (not surprisingly), since everything I read about algae a while back indicated it would produce biodiesel, not ethanol. Can someone explain this?
They'll probably produce both. Corn actually produces both; distillers are trying to extract the corn oil from corn as part of the ethanol processing. The corn oil (roughly 1.5 pounds per bushel) can be made into biodiesel.
The attraction of veggie oil is that it can be separated with far less energy than it takes to distill ethanol, but algae are living things and will make carbohydrates and proteins as well. Unless there is some other use for the carbs, fermentation isn't a bad option. That gives the process two output streams, biodiesel and ethanol.
I would be loathe to be so dismissive. When the original target productivity for the algae program at NREL was set up the goal was to achieve 50 gm/sq m/day. It is this figure that is then translated into the 3,500 gal/acre/year of biodiesel. The work at the Redhawk Power Plant was able to double that rate, as an average, and increase it to 174 gm/sq m/day at peak.
While there are a number of interesting engineering challenges that have to be overcome in making algae economically viable, it is not nearly the open-and-shut case that many dismiss so easily. The economics of each part of the process are fairly tight, but the higher yields that can be achieved over those originally postulated are starting to ease those restrictions somewhat. Dr. Berzin has some rather ingenious ideas in his path forward, and I am sure there are others.
Oh, and personally I am not that dismissive of TIME's occasional lists (grin).
Heading Out -
Why .... were you once on one of TIME's list? If so, congratulations. You no doubt deserve it more than many of the people on it. I'm probably on somebody's list somewhere, but if so, I'm sure it's a list I would rather not be on.
As I essentially said earlier, all this focus on increasing the rate of biomass production per unit of area exposed to sunlight misses a fundamental point. Area (in all except highly urbanized regions) comes relatively cheap. Physical structure, transparent plastic tubing or sheet, and process equipment does not. If you haven't priced large-diameter plexiglas tubing or sheet lately, then you're in for sticker shock. Given the price of oil and natural gas, these are not going to get any cheaper, either. All these algae schemes would use HUGE amounts.
I will go out on a limb and state that unless someone develops a way to sustainably grow high-lipid algae in open ponds and can overcome the problems associated with unwanted organisms taking over, and can cost-effectively deal with issues having to do nutrient supply and residual management, then algae for fuel will turn out to be a technological dead end. I realize that people once said the say thing with regard to the airplane, and I may eat those words someday, that's the way I currently see it.
Thanks - since I just saw someone drink an algae culture on one of the videos cited downstream, eating words may be quite tasty in this venue. As it happens I have priced plastic tubing and sheeting, and also recognize the problems of getting light into high-density cultures, which are required if the process is to become viable. However I believe that there may be engineering solutions to some of those questions.
A point in favor of algae as a biofuel is that it really doesn't need to compete with food crops for agricultural land.
What joule said. Either you do it in open concrete ponds or you'll never be able to afford the investment. Not to mention that a system consisting of miles of plastic tubing (or bags, for that matter) would run about a month before requiring maintenance.
Heading out, unless I misunderstand your figures, or you have stated them incorrectly, this whole thread is absurd. To wit,
assuming the US uses 8 billion barrels of oil a year [replacing gasoline with this bio-diesel , the amount of land required would be calculated as follow [being generous to your argument]:
8,000,000,000 * 20 / 8000 gallons/ acre per year
= 20 million acres of land, approximately 300,000 square miles.
Yeah, right.
Ah! Well see there are a couple of things wrong with your argument. The first is that I did not say that 8,000 gallons/acre/year was a maximum value, just that the current program had increased production rates over an earlier target. And the other thing is that you seem to be saying that if a solution does not solve the entire supply problem then it should not be tried. Tsk!
One problem with algal biofuels production is that the high advertised yields require levels of CO2 far in excess of what can be provided by the atmosphere. Using coal emissions as the source of this CO2 is clearly a stop gap solution which perpetuates our dependence on fossil carbon. Of course you can argue that coal is not going to go away anytime soon, so we might as well make the carbon do double duty. This idea makes sense if coal burning and algal biofuels are part of transition plan to a sustainable energy infrastructure. In my mind sustainability means decommitting from composite growth as our primary economic goal. Unfortunately I see no sign of a real movement toward sustainability in this sense. If algal biofuel were to become a big commercial success it would make coal burning doubly attractive to developing nations like China and India and thus in the manner of Jevons's Paradox help to preserve and even enhance CO2 emissions even as oil supplies decline.
None of which is to say that I am opposed to research on algal bio-fuels. But the hope that technology alone is going to save us from our current dilemma is a delusion. Far reaching social and politcal changes will be required in order to create a wealth maintaining economy as distinct from a wealth increasing economy.
Heading Out, I used the figures to be very generous, in order to demonstrate how this solution has a serious obstacle. Whatever percentage of the daily requirement algae is expected to provide will require huge amounts of land, even in a 'trivial' case [using my optimistic assumption, 10% would require >30,000 square miles or over 6 times the size of Greater Los Angeles]. IMHO, it simply isn't feasible in a country with a liberal democracy.
I am a graduate student in sustainabiltiy at ASU (undergrad ChemE). One of the projects I work on is in using photosynthetic bacteria to produce biodiesel.
http://www.biodesign.asu.edu/news/asu-launches-renewable-biofuel-researc...
Honestly, many of the criticisms of the technology are accurate. It is expensive and will likely never compete with CSP on a cost per energy basis or an energy per area basis (maximum theoretical efficiency of 9%). However, the main advantage is that it produces liquid fuels that are not easily replaced by electricity. It is difficult to run a ship, aircraft or semi on battery power. The cost will be high, but in a post peak world, so will the cost of oil. It also does not displace any food production unlike most other biofuels. Concentrated CO2 is useful, and definitely increases the growth rate, but it can be grown with just air.
At this point I think that most companies/research teams are putting too much focus on optimizing and maximizing yeild without paying enough attention to capital costs. I think as the technology matures and more people start taking a critical look at it, new and radically different strategies will be tried. Most of them will fail miserably, but the hope is that one or two of them will turn out to work well. There is still a ton of reasearch to be done and a number of technological hurddles to pass, but I do see a good deal of potential in this technology down the road. The real question will be can it be fully developed and scaled up in time to make a real difference to a peaking world?
Hi alpha,
Thanks. It's always interesting to hear firsthand experience.
re: "At this point I think that most companies/research teams are putting too much focus on optimizing and maximizing yield without paying enough attention to capital costs."
I'm curious...have you shared your concern with other people who work on your project?
The "capital costs" questions run smack into the central peak question of time (as you also say), plus long-term viability or "sustainability" I guess is the way to put it.
Do you think there is any way to broach this or anyone who wants to think about this aspect of it?
yes, my "monthly reports" are not always taken too well by the rest of my research group. I am pretty much considered the pessimist of the group. However, I have had a few different ideas that might radically reduce costs. We're just not quite to the point where we can try lots of different strategies. Once we prove it possible with our original system design I might be able to convince them to try some different strategies. I am working on a model that we can use to investigate some alternative system designs, so we'll see how the results come out.
Were you at the algae summit in SF last November? It was hosted by Wilson Sonsini and they flew in about 300 algae scientists. The big debate was open ponds vs bioreactors ,which was unresolved by the end. The scientists and business types were all asking for money but couldn't explain how they were going to solve the scale-up problem. DARPA was there announcing the $100m for $2 algal oil and they should announce the winner this summer. This is still very much a research problem. If anyone tells you other wise, have them answer the questions raised in the p. 300 report Aquatic Species Program report published by DOE in 1995.
I'm surprised that Draper is throwing another $14m at Green Fuels after the first failure, it is great to see their commitment. But I'm putting my bet on electrified transportation. The thermodynamics are not in favor of photosynthesis. Biology abhors free energy.
no, I just started my grad program in august. You are absolutely correct however about the scale up problem. I also think we're at least a good 5-10 years from seeing any commercial biodiesel from these technologies and then who knows how long to get to any meaningful scale. In 20 years, who knows? Maybe it will replace a large percentage or our fuels or maybe a lot of companies will be out of business. I'm with you on electric transport, at least for personal transport. However we will still need to deal with liquid fuels for sea and air transport.
The implication, in the end, is that there are a lot more serious problems that have to be faced, and that energy independence, and by implication, the security of energy supply, is really a non-issue.
I concur. I thought there were several weaknesses in the book. First, was the tendency to lose the plot and digress off into some of those other serious problems. Second, was downplaying the idea of Peak Oil. Third, was the rejection of gas taxes (which Bryce had previously supported). Overall, I liked the book. Bryce made a lot of strong arguments, and there were loads of interesting facts, but those weaknesses took something away from it.
Hey HO, why do exactly that “Excellent” sign turns on? That seems very nice, I wish my heart rate monitor could do the same ;)
Excellent Article, Heading Out; Thank you.
I read somewhere that Half the Scientists that have ever lived are working, TODAY;" and, I would add that they're starting from an exponentially expanding base of knowledge.
Extraodinary gains are being made, daily, on our energy systems of the future.
We're in for a "challenge," but many of the most Visionary (such as those who, first, conceived of "The Oil Drum," and brought it to fruition think that we can meet that challenge and emerge with a Cleaner Earth, and a Greater, more Rational level of existence than ever before. This is the Community that I want to be a part of.
Again, Thanks for a Note of Optimism, and for making it a little easier for those that are looking for "solutions" to go forward.
KD
If half of all scientists who have ever existed are working today then have we reached Peak Scientists? Just educating someone to a PhD level requires the spare productivity of 100,000 peasants according to Shumacher in Small is Beautiful. Having a large number of scientists does not automatically mean that their discoveries will be put into common practice. Also how many of these scientists are working in the soft (pseudo)social sciences?
Can you substantiate that "exponentially expanding base of knowledge"? I know I've said it many times before, but when I look at scientific and technological fields there are mechanisable areas where "known facts" are increasing exponentially but AFAICS we're at about the same rate of progress per scientist as any time in the last hundred years in non-mechanisable areas, with consequent effects on the base of scientific knowledge. It's not that we're not investigating and innovating but we're not doing it at an accelerating rate (from my observations of the other scientists I know, looking at the literature, etc).
I spend a large part of time when I'm not working on my proper research thinking about what the next tiny steps that could increase human researcher capacity (in the same way that scientific computer simulation, personal computers, email, internet searchability, etc, can be said to have done) and of the things I've seen or tried, almost nothing actually improves real productivity. (Although I don't like the idea of and don't use them, maybe the apparent increase in uptake of "concentration" medication by scientists will be the next one.) Another possibility is trying to significantly increase the percentage of the population working science and technology research, which might have an effect. This is not said in the spirit of pessimism but in the sense of "there's a big problem here that needs real work to crack it, and pointing at the other group of people referred to as 'scientists' and saying 'ooh, they'll solve it, surely they're uncovering exponentially more things, it says so here' isn't enough".
I'm all for optimism, but optimism comes third to (first) action and (second) accurate evidence based appraisal of a situation. And scientists don't in generally get bothered by an air of pessimism, but by real problems.
embryonic said...
"I spend a large part of time when I'm not working on my proper research thinking about what the next tiny steps that could increase human researcher capacity"
Is that really where the problem is? It seems we have research thinking going on in every area of energy production and use and climate change with people coming up with breakthrough thinking all over the world.
What we seem to be short of is the "social/cultural" base that is needed to support this work. What we need is more customers, bankers, managers and policy makers who are technically and environmentally aware. They do not have to be at Doctorate level, mind you, but simply aware of thinking through the implications of energy choices and understanding very basic math, chemistry and thermodynamics. I must say that most high school educated shop mechanics are clearer headed in these areas than almost anyone I have met in the financial community or the political power structure.
RC
I believe that it is whenever I exceed the EPA estimate, which is 33 city/34 hwy. I have got up to 41 mpg in it so far on the highway. The higher the number it seems the more Excellents pop up after I shut down. I have now reached the exalted level of 3 on one occasion.
:) :) :)
Thanks for the excellent keypost.
"forward", i suppose, but is that really what we want. Maybe maintaining stability is a better goal. Furthermore, healthcare, transportation systems etc. what do people think is the source of energy providing electricity for hospitals and asphalt for the roads? As for algae, has anyone been able to topple the pH problem? I keep having this growing feeling that technology offers band-aid solutions to a sliced jugular. In other words, were going to need more gauze....
But will it be affordable ?
Most of the current "Technology" is is a result of cheap oil which no longer exists and probably won't return.
So what we do with the ever increasing expense of fossil fuels is the question ...
burning it , and turning it into pollutants doesn't seem too wise, but maybe we will gain some new knowledge.
That's a good question. Affordable to how many? 3 billion or the current 6.5 billion, or some other population total. How robust will the economy be if algae ethanol is 12 dollars a gallon?
I have to admit that I see the glass as half full and half empty. Sometimes ideas like algae ethanol seem plausible and the glass if half full, and other times I think its too late because we started a sincere effort to make the transition too late in the oil cycle of discovery through peak and onto decline, and the glass seems half empty. Suppose we'll know soon enough just how full or not the glass is.
I have to admit that I see the glass as half full and half empty. Sometimes ideas like algae ethanol seem plausible and the glass if half full, and other times I think its too late because we started a sincere effort to make the transition too late in the oil cycle of discovery through peak and onto decline, and the glass seems half empty. Suppose we'll know soon enough just how full or not the glass is.
I don't see it as half full or half empty - merely that the glass is too big for its contents. It's not the contents that's the problem, it's the expectations and desires as embodied in the glass (sized x) that's the problem, relative to its contents (sized x/2).
Depends how much of it we need. If 80% of our transport energy needs come from electricity (at 75¢/gallon equivalent) and only 20% from $12/gal ethanol, I think we'd be doing just fine; our overall cost per gallon-equivalent would be $2.55, which is cheaper than non-subsidized prices anywhere in the world today.
Please Note: The following is not meant at all as a personal critique, rather as an advertisement for shifting attitudes in general.
_________________________
"Excellent"? Really now.. you need to DRIVE 3 measly miles?
How about a bicycle and zero energy, zero emissions, zero insurance and maintenance, zero depreciation and financing costs, much better physical and mental health from the daily exercise, low(er) medical bills, no need for fad diets, no expenses for gym fees. And perhaps... ahem... better performance?
In other words, we need to drastically change our energy profligate ways, not merely look for ways to maintain them under alternative energy schemes.
What if your hybrid said this instead, after each 3 mile trip: "Hey fool, take the bike next time and leave me in the garage". ;)
A Camry hybrid driver who lives 3 miles from work basically isn't using any gasoline, so it isn't energy wastefulness. IMO the predictions of an imminent end to auto congestion miss the fact that gasoline expenditures are minute if you commute is short-even $10 gal won't affect this driver.
Biking for six miles every day is not for everyone, and in my country is really dangerous. But some other thing captured my attention ... Camry has some 140hp (192 at peak) and has comparable fuel efficiency with my car ,which has only 75hp (and has 25mpg in city and 43mpg outside).My car is also a 4 door sedan and costs about 1/3 of the price - it's a Logan , Renaults ultra cheap model made in Romania. I wonder what a hybrid power train could do with my car and how much will cost.
What I really see here it's just phase one of technology adaptation , keeping the same powerfull big cars and improuving efficiency , but in the end all the non critical features will be discarded if we are ever to reach 100mpg vehicles , something Renault did with my car in respect of price versus performance.
In the USA right now it costs 90 cents to do this commute in your car, it would be 22 cents if your car got 100 mpg. Basically, the commute has zero gasoline expenditure, so why the obsession? Why the solution looking for a problem?
BrianT,
Unless the Camry is a plug-in hybrid, H.O. will at some time have to put sufficient gasoline in the tank and drive a suitable distance to recharge the battery pack,to allow his occasional "free ride" home.
If he is regularly making a 3 mile commute, without longer journeys, I suspect that this is the worst of all conditions to run a hybrid. The engine will barely have time to warm up, reach optimum running conditions nor have time to put a satisfactory charge back into the battery.
At the end of the day, all of the energy has to come from somewhere, and for most of us in developed countries, ultimately that means either gasoline or coal.
20: Let's say the commute is 1500 miles per annum-another 1500 for running around-I assume the battery can get charged then. So 3000 miles per annum at 40 mpg (guesstimate) is 75 gallons a year, $285-basically there is zero gasoline cost. At $15 a gallon, the cost is $1125 per year-hard for cars to disappear at these prices.
About once a week, or so, I have to make a trip that might be around 200 miles. The one thing I noticed fairly quickly is that it has about halved the number of visits that I make to the gas station. (I previously drove a Regal).
I noticed something similar when I bought the TDI. The tank holds about the same as my Taurus' did, but the range at economy cruise is close to 800 miles instead of a bit over 500.
Using a car for only a 3mile commute is horribly capital inefficient. Amortizing the cost of a car over ten years, we get say $2500/year just to pay for the capital cost of the car. This cost would dominate over fuel cost (for any fuel price that wouldn't end car culture that is). If he insists on using a car for only a small amount of travel he needs to find a really cheap car, such as the Tata Nano.
As long as people want/need cars for 3 mile commutes, the car culture will do just fine-it is the long distance suburban commuter that has the problem.
The 'Dangerous' comment applies where I live, too. My wife and I could handle the distances and the hills of a great many of our usual trips, and would be reaching our health goals more quickly too.. IF we made it home alive after every day's Dice-roll. We have to find ourselves carrying solutions, as well. The tag-along seat for our daughter can do just so much.
(Spent the morning with a sketchpad .. at the Mall of all places.. drawing a bike-cargo trailer I'm building, and a Pedal-Electric VeloTrike that will work in all weather conditions, tho' maybe not extreme ice. I might have to put a snarky voice box in it that says "MUSH, MUSH .. you can do better than that, can't you?!"
HO,
Remember of course that it's not actually a machine that's congratulating you. You're just getting a high score on Lunar Lander. People programmed the conditions for 'Excellent', and you achieved them. Good work! Thanks for the topic.
Bob
drawing a bike-cargo trailer I'm building
http://bikecart.pedalpeople.com/
http://www.instructables.com/id/SEK54Z6F6S98MVG/
I also do not like to criticize people for their choices. All of you hybrid folks out there need to look hard at the economics of these cars. Call the parts department and price in the cost(Today) for your battery bank and you will start to wonder why you bought the thing in the first place.
Hi hugho,
From what I understand, the Prius (and Camery?) drive batteries are covered by a 10 year/100,000 mile warranty (15 year/150,000 mile in California). I've also read that many of the Prius taxis used in Victoria and Vancouver, B.C. have passed the 200,000 and 250,000 mile mark and there hasn't been a single reported battery problem.
Considering that unleaded gasoline in Vancouver sells for $1.32 a litre ($5.00/U.S. gallon), it's not hard to see why taxi drivers would prefer a hybrid.
See: http://autos.canada.com/green/story.html?id=7385385b-732d-4ac6-8513-8289...
Cheers,
Paul
For hybrids, you could get an equal life span using inexpensive lead/acid capacitor combinations:
http://www.csiro.au/news/UltraBattery.html
UltraBattery sets new standard for HEVs (Media Release)
There is some difficulties getting them into cars at the moment, as most makers are pretty wedded to lithium, but my guess is that a Chinese manufacturer will be the first to break away - after the Olympics I think that China will move to address rising energy costs, and decrease the subsidy.
Chinese manufacturers currently use lead/acid in a lot of their millions of electric bikes and scooters, and I think some would give lead/acid and capacitor combinations a go.
The reason that they last so long is that they reduce deep discharge, a killer for lead/acid batteries.
Being that the lifetime of the batteries has not been a problem, the real issue, from a bean counter perspective is, is the combination of fuel savings times the cost of fuel, greater than the additional capital expense of the hybrid vehicle. If the buyer doesn't intend to put on enough miles per year, the hybrid is more costly. If fuel and operational maintainance were the only issues, hybrids would be covered with high efficiency solar panels.
Hi EoS,
I haven't looked at this closely, but isn't depreciation the single biggest expense for owners? And don't hybrids hold their value better than other vehicles? At a time of rapidly rising fuel costs and when demand for these vehicles often exceeds supply (and therefore little or no discounting that would in turn depress resale value), I'd expect hybrid owners to do quite well overall.
Cheers,
Paul
The warranty on the Prius batteries is amazing. And there are Priuses with 200k miles on them now. Very very reliable and long-lived cars.
However, they indeed do NOT make sense unless you have to drive a LOT.
I have a bike, and at one time earlier in my life did cycle. However my office is located some distance from the main campus and the need to move quantities of stuff around on occasion, as well as to get somewhere relatively fast has stopped me using it. (Though I kept a jar and had about half-way paid for the bike in saved gas money at the time I stopped).
It has, of course, nothing to do with the fact that the first thing I faced every morning was a relatively steep hill that led up to the main highway into town.
If we can die by a thousand cuts, perhaps we can live by a thousand bandaids. Excellence CAN be measured one commute at a time, Grasshopper.
...more often than not I now get that little glow of satisfaction...
You want that glow to be a lot brighter? Bicycle. It'll take you 15 minutes to cruise three miles. You will feel stronger within two weeks. And... it's cheaper than the gym and the doctor.
That is curious. I'm no saint or anything, but I would like to know why he'd drop $25,000(?) on a car for a 3 mile commute. A trip to eBay and $5,000 could have fetched a GEM NEV if that was the purpose of the vehicle.
In a typical year I might drive 10-15,000 miles, my work requires a significant amount of travel off-campus.
Ah. I figured there had to be some reason for it.
This is why I think people are going to hang on to personal motorized transport as long as they can - it's just too damn handy. I think it caught some people off guard though (me, obviously), with the vagueness of your introduction. It sounded like you just wanted the car for a 3 mile commute - and for a prominent figure on a prominent Peak-Oil website to buy a new car, hybrid or not, for a 3 mile commute raises red flags. Those fuel mileage numbers are excellent for the large size of the car. My CRX Si I generally coax around 40mpg mixed usage (mainly back roads) out of and steady-state 60mph highway mileage is around 43mpg. The Camry has about double the horsepower with both guns blazing, and three more seats and an unknown amount more cargo volume (but that little CRX will swallow a surprising amount of stuff).
I agree, technology can be a big help in solving our problems.
But with the politicians going off spending our valuable research dollars on things like corn ethanol and biodiesel which are long term dead ends in my opinion, I don't have too much hope some days.
The fact that with corn ethanol only 1/10 of 1% of all the solar energy impinging on an acre of ground ends up in the ethanol produced from the corn grown on that acre plus all the other energy inputs to produce the ethanol make it not too desirable.
I would still like to see more (Federal?) researh dollars going into improving the effieiency of building solar thermal power plants and using the electricity generated by them to convert CO2 and H2O into synthetic gasoline and synthetic diesel fuel which could be transported and distributed using our existing infrastructure. No proof or URLs unfortunately, but I do believe that this basic chemical process can be made a lot more efficient than biological processes - And more scalable. And all the technology to do it (inefficiently?) exists today!
But the bottom line still remains that if we do not find some way to stop the continued growth in human population and begin to significantly reduce it we are still going to hit the wall of limits to growth?
Expanding into space to acquire raw materials and export hazardous manufacturing processes (and excess population?) to protect our tiny jewel of the galaxy is probably our only hope for survival as a species beyond the next major cataclysmic event on this planet.
The bewildering assortment of proposals, including corn ethanol, jatropha, algae, and a new hydrogen storage method most days is not cause for optimism. More people addressing the problem just produce more unscalable schemes. As i've pointed out before, Nate Lewis has broadly dismissed most possibilities by means of order-of-magnitude arguments.
To paraphrase the Monty Python skit, the future energy menu is solar, solar, solar, solar, wind, solar, nuclear and solar. Yet the coverage and funding is "fair and balanced", and has even been legitimized by the Socolow wedge treatment.
What part of 500 MW from 4500 acres is so hard to grasp? The record corn harvest you cite would produce 4500 acres * 385 bushels/acre * 3 gals/bushel * 3.78 L/gal * 21.1 MJ/L / (6 hours sun per day * 3600 sec/hr * 365) = 52.6 MW, not counting the miserable efficiency with which ethanol is used, vs electricity. Since solar is 10x more efficient than biofuels, why don't we hear 10x more about it?
No constituency!
Ie.. No farmers or giant corporate ag companies make a living off of solar. Too many political constitutants lose if Solar wins so politicians don't/won't support solar?
Given the low EROEI for corn to ethanol, it would probably be better use of the energy to burn the corn and the cobs directly in a coal fired power plant, and run a fleet of EVs.
How many kWh electricity will an acre of corn generate if you follow that route?
2020
In re. burning corn, I read (in WSJ, I think) about a community near Washington, DC. These people do group buying of fuel for home heating. They use pellet stoves for burning fuel, but the preferred fuel is kernel corn! not sawdust pellets. It is very cheap. Storage containers are readily available. There are plenty of feed stores where it can be purchased, etc.
Lower Heating Value of shelled corn = 6810BTU/lb
http://energy.cas.psu.edu/energycontent.html
385 bushels per acre, 56 lbs per bushel
Before deducting fertiliser BTU, diesel and other agricultural losses - estimated at 59,765BTU/bushel
http://www.ethanol-gec.org/corn_eth.htm
This leaves net 321595 BTU/bushel
1 acre corn = 123.81075 MBTU or 36286 kWh
Average coal fired power plant efficiency = 30%
kWhe from 1 acre corn = 10885 kWhe.
Assume lousy electric pick-up truck uses 0.66 kWh/mile
Range on electricity = 16,492 miles per acre corn
Assume lousy ethanol FFV pick-up truck does 14 mpg and 2.8 gallons ethanol per bushel
Range on 1 acre of corn =(385 x 2.8)x 14 =15092 miles/acre corn.
Producing ethanol from corn requires net BTU input per gallon for milling, distillation etc.
Producing electricity from corn in thermal power plant yields net thermal output of approx 212,500 BTU/bushel.
2020.
I always wonder why too...we don't hear 10x more about X or Y. When I read this sometime back about alage...I thought...well..hmmmm....but, no idea if it is getting any serious attention. This fella seems to think it will scale just fine:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/04/01/algae.oil/
The thing is we've got the corn ethanol, NOW (500,000 bbls/day, today - 900,000 bbls/day in a couple of years.)
Also, if I'm not mistaken, the Chevy Volt will have a flex-fuel back-up.
Guys, in the Long Run, the best solution for the individual application will win. In the meantime, we'll just throw a few dollars at everything, and see what "shakes out."
That's the problem. If we throw a few dollars at everything, we can't throw a lot of dollars at the few technologies with real promise. Ethanol will have been an expensive and time-wasting detour before it is abandoned, as will hydrogen fuel cells.
There is an "emperor's new clothes" kind of momentum once prominent people buy in to a particular solution. It is no longer possible to admit that the idea was a mistake. Officers of public companies can in fact be sued for saying such a thing, and politicians can never be wrong, period.
I think there should be more public discussion of what exactly the requirements are. How many people will we commit to supporting at what level of per capita energy consumption? How much land, water, manpower can we afford to allocate to energy production? Is it a completely closed-loop technolgy? Where do the raw materials come from, and how are they recycled? etc..
Ethanol is a great distraction. That means the 99% of the population that can't or won't do even a crude back of the envelope calculation can be lulled by the marketing. Auto companies love ethanol, because it is a cheap form of greenwashing, as well as a way to fool the prospective buyer about the possible unavailability of fuel for his purchase. Oil companies (should) love it, because it distracts the public from peak oil & climate change, so they can get on with profiting from the large -and growing supply/demand mismatch for their product. Farmers, love it because it raises the price of their products.
I think Hydrogen, is used in a similar way. As well as fuel cell cars. They sound great on paper, and make great geewiz TV footage. The fact that they are unlikely to ever become practical solutions is lost.
I got an email from a government official indicating that conversion of grain to ethanol is not economical; losing money. This is based on the fact that the process is subsidized by the tax payer and that grain ethanol gets fewer miles per gallon. When it was first combined with gasoline many reported it decreased their gas mileage. This government official went on to praise the pollution control aspects of ethanol. There were other processes and chemicals availble to reduce ozone.
There is no known profitable algae to fuel conversion plant. People who switch to unprofitable procedures drive up the price of fuels.
The Japanese have warned their people that they may need to switch to rice and potatoes.
http://www.pr-inside.com/japan-gov-t-warns-low-food-self-sufficiency-r59...
Meat requires too much grain feed.
Some claimed there is no shortage of food or oil. If this were so, we might see prices of both falling. Demand for fuel rose faster than supply. The amount of grain produced per acre on average is rising less quickly than various governments' demands for corn/soybeans to be used in biofuels. Northern California is forecast to have water shortages this year. This does not bode well for those who need rapid expansion of agricultural produce as farms and livestock operations required water inputs.
There is some good news about wheat. With increased plantings some are expecting bumper crops and the price of wheat fell 40% recently:
http://www.suntimes.com/business/roeder/955747,CST-FIN-curious18.article
There is yet concern about a wheat fungus that is spreading.
Corn deficits might be likely as corn plantings are down 7% this year to make up for a soybean oil shortage. The United States and Canada continue to need more corn in order to meet ethanol mandates. Fertilizer costs were up more than 100% in a year. The rate of grain price increases over the past two years since the 2005 EPact ethanol requirements were made law cannot be sustained for any great length of time without causing major damage to the world's economies. Canada will require ten percent ethanol blending due in 2010. This is likely to pressure corn stocks further. Places as far away as Myanmar have required the use of biofuels with or without concerns about profitability and sustainability.
In the long, or even medium term, all signs seem to point to the US having energy independence thrust upon it. Aggregate world petroleum exports will peak (if they have not already) sooner than production peaks. Availability of natural gas exports to the US market seem at least problematic as Canadian production peaks, LNG seems to be experiencing growing pains, and pipelines from the known new resources to other parts of the world are being built (eg, from the Caspian fields to China). Countries where significant biofuel production is possible seem likely to consume it domestically. Moving enormous amounts of electrical energy to North America from other continents seems impractical, even if there were other regions with large amounts available for export. Imported fissionables may be available, but probably not at the scale required by the current US once-through enriched uranium fuel cycle (disregarding the political problems of a large-scale reactor construction program).
The meaningful discussions, then, should be about what sort of "energy independent" future we can have, and how we get there.
"Back at the beginning of January I changed cars, and now drive a Camry Hybrid."
Great, now all we have to do is get everyone to buy a hybrid and we can save the world a billion times.
"GREENSUMPTION"
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=greensumption&hl=en&sitesearch=
Technology got us into this mess in the first place. Well to be fair it was tech + capitalism = the most efficient methode to rape the planet.
Cheers!
souper-
Agreed- capitalism goes, or we go. Even with free energy (a delusion), with a superstition based economic system like capitalism, the planet would be destroyed, as it needs to grow to survive.
The last two humans on earth would have one exploiting the other to get the best surplus value on the others labor.
Do you have any more information on this DARPA funded project into algae? I would be thrilled to see more details as I am looking into the economics and engineering of such systems.
The original program was defined here and this was supplemented in a second solicitation last year. It seems as though they are seeking a single, or very limited number of players. Personally I think that this is a mistake, given that, as the discussion above is starting to point out, there are a fair number of hurdles that have to be crossed to make this viable. I would have liked to see more players brought in to address them all, but that is the way that the program appears to be structured.
ASU partnered with UOP in response to the original solicitation I believe. The partners were:
Interesting, is there any timeline for results? There seem to be a number of firms (Greenfuel, GS Cleantech, Aquaflow Bionomics, to name a few) who all seem fairly close to being able to report real productivity data in the next year or two. It's very frustrating that there is so little work being done to help small-scale growers and potential manufacturers.
I can imagine it being a fairly interesting business strategy to provide the gasification and fischer-tropsch reactors to convert biomass into fuel, separate from the biomass generation. This seems to be the route GS Cleantech is going, although they're working on the growing side as well.
I looked at the solicitation. A little over half way down in the doc. I found this paragraph:
This appears to say that they are not restricting this solicitation to 'friends of the military brass'. Perhaps it is true.
I particularly like the last sentence. I wonder in what sense an irresponsible offerer can be nevertheless 'qualified'? Perhaps by knowing someone influential? Or, maybe, I hope, by presenting a really good idea?
Energy Independence for the USA *IS* Possible
But not by increasing supply.
The MI T21 model run (paid for by ASPO) with "just" a maximum push for renewable energy coupled with electrified rail resulted in a 62% reduction in oil use (and a 50% reduction in CO2 and the largest GDP of any alternative).
Add a push for bicycling (we could not figure out a way to model that) and we could get quite close to the likely future US oil production (with oil @ $300+/barrel in current $).
Knock down GDP a bit and we could reduce oil demand even more.
Best Hopes,
Alan
Hi Alan,
Any chance you could write this (The MI modelling, etc.) up as an article - or did I miss it already?
"The implication, in the end, is that there are a lot more serious problems that have to be faced, and that energy independence, and by implication, the security of energy supply, is really a non-issue."
Same argument Lomborg uses to ignore AGW.
"There are other global challenges to address this century like the battle against AIDS, malaria, malnutrition and poverty," he told AFP...."Reducing CO2 emissions will not make the world a better place to live," he said, insisting that "even if we do achieve the fixed (emission reduction) objectives, we will only slow global warming by two years by the end of the century."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20071205/sc_afp/unclimatewarmingdenmark_0712......
That twit doesn't see the link between AGW and the other problems (disease and poverty) that he invokes. When agriculture starts to be stressed by pathologically variable weather driven by the changing energetics of the atmosphere and oceans we'll all be sorry we dithered and listened to cranks with obvious agendas.
The issue of whether we cab produce enough liquid energy for Americans and Europeans to maintain motor cars etc is unlikely. What we should consider is how we can maintain a viable civilisation using lower energy inputs. It will not be business as usual.
This means in terms of transportation probably using railways, canals and coastal shipping. Possibly airships. We might be able to use motoised bycycles an limited trucking provided we have the resources to maintain roading.
Fuel will come for these from multiple sources. Ships for example can use sail, steam, solar, wave energy and liquid fuel.
Liquid fuel may be produced by algae, solar based destructive distillation of wood or cellulosic ethanol/diesel.
The key point is that energy use will be limited. The present system of road based transport may not be sustainable as roading requires substantial inputs for maintenance.
In view of the time lags between discovery and adoption of new technology , not to mention energy/infastructure costs in terms of resources, we should be thinking about what is sustainable in terms ofpresent technological solutions. If others come along then we will have a higher standard of living and are maintainable well and good.
Wen need to move towards a technocratic society, the rules are changing.
Technology may move us forward. But only wisdom can tell us which way to steer.
See: http://questioneverything.typepad.com/ for a view of wise decision making.
George
I'm not sure what to make of this post. What point is Heading Out trying to make?
It's true that the enormity of our problems is rarely seen in posts here. Often, they concentrate on a specific aspect of the energy squeeze, with the implicit assumption that if we can only get that technology working and scaled up, that would be the end of our problems.
The point about energy independence is also an important one. For the lifestyles attained or aspired to, if a country the size of the US cannot attain energy independence, then neither can the world, since it is the aspiration of the developing countries to acquire a similar lifestyle. Is this likely to be recognised by enough people, soon enough?
But then Heading Out implies that technology can save us. At least that's the implication I get, from the reference to the doubling of corn yields in 20 years, or the hint that ethanol production can be made 11% more efficient. Then there is the promise of algae.
So is Heading Out implying that technological improvements can solve all of our problems? If not, what is the point of this post? Until the world accepts that we must live within the long term limits of nature, there will be no solution.
I occasionally tie more than one post together, and thereby create a thread, as it were. Currently this is intended to be a pre-cursor in some ways to the next post, though it should stand on its own.
The point I make about technology is that it is an evolving story and that todays snapshot of where we are is not necessarily going to be valid tomorrow.
On the other hand I am not convinced that we have either the will or the time to find the technical answers that we need.
By the way, what do you mean by "the long term limits of nature?"
Hi HO,
Thank you and I have a similar puzzlement over all - similar to sofistek's query. Perhaps your last question has a key that might help,
re: "By the way, what do you mean by "the long term limits of nature?"
I don't know what he/she means, exactly, but perhaps he/she means "Finite planet v. infinite growth", "limits to growth", limits to all "resources" - ? Or, "Overshoot"?
Perhaps could be re-phrased as "long-term limits of nature to provide for the unlimited population growth and resource consumption of humans". (?)
Just guessing.
There's something about what you write that seems not to take this into account, is perhaps one way to say it.
Of course technology will keep changing (providing we have the energy to keep science and technology vibrant) but unless technology can enable us to live within the means of this planet, then any amount of technology will be to little avail.
What I mean by long term limits is along the lines of what Aniya wrote. Of course, those limits are always there but we will be revealed at different time intervals. Long term, it is unsustainable to use any resource beyond its renewal rate, just as it is unsustainable to continue to damage the environment that sustains us.
Is that an invitation to write "Sustainability revisited"?
I don't recall reading the article one you linked to but I was talking more about the comments that trail after an article is posted. Admittedly, I only scanned your article, but it follows the same line - if we could find a solution to our energy problem then we won't hit any other limits and everything is sweet (the last bit is implied by omission).
I can't recall who mentioned this the first time I heard it but he said that all of the sunlight energy absorbed by all of the plant life in the USA (yes, all of the plant life) every year is less than the energy expended by transport, in a year. Biomass isn't a solution to enabling economic growth to continue (as that would take ever more biomass), nor is it sustainable, since nutrients and carbon are lost from the soils. However, this takes us into a whole new area, than HO's article. Essentially, I'd like to understand why Richard Heinberg distillation of sustainability principles is wrong (in essence, rather than because he didn't use quite the right words) and, if not, how does any solution stack up against those axioms?
"Technology should be recognized and can move us forward"
Wow, great article, did I come to the right website?
I read the post and do not see where technology moves us forward. The post is badly written and rambling. The technologies that TOD editors have been proposing will consume more fossil fuel energy than they produce. This post is your own personal belief that some technofix will solve Peak Oil problems. You are misinforming those who read this website. The technofix du jours that appear on TOD are like the newspaper articles that come up with hydrogen or some oil discover in Brazil that will save us. Even if this Rube Goldberg crap worked, there is neither the time nor the capital to implement it. This post reconfirms the notion that TOD should be renamed TSP, the solar panel, or perhaps the TDJ for technofix du jour. If TOD is to be taken seriously these types of vapid posts should be avoided.
Hi Cliff,
I'm glad to see you're around, as I'm wondering if any chance you could answer questions I asked earlier,(over yonder), namely, http://anz.theoildrum.com/node/3988#comment-344560. ?
Otherwise,
re: "The technologies that TOD editors have been proposing will consume more fossil fuel energy than they produce."
If you could re-write this as a question, then it would be up to HO to address how it is that this technology would *not* consume more FF than it would produce.
Case in point, the only poster (so far) who talks directly about his/her own experience, says that insufficient attention is being paid to capital costs.
I'm concerned that without this specificity, it's easy to interpret what you say as a personal criticism, as opposed to a constructive criticism.
If the increase from 84 bushels/acre to 151 was accompanied by a greater increase in the use of energy, BFD. If not, that's progress, I guess.
Actually, Nano, it was done using Less Energy. Corn farmers are going, more, and more to "no-till," "low-till" cultivation. They're not, necessarily, using more fertilizer, either. They ARE using GPS to tell them "where" to fertilize, and sophisticated programs to tell them when, and what to put down.
The Main thing, though, is the seeds. It's ALL about gene-splicing. 200 bu/acre within the next ten years is very likely.
Then, there's mileage. It's all about the computer. You ain't seen nothin, yet.
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2008/05/test-of-music-e.html#more
Folks, I believe in electricity/batteries, also. BUT, we Will need Liquid Fuel, and the Engines to burn it for many years. It's ALL important.
Interesting article.
I'm waiting for people to catch on to plugin serial hybrids. Three or four years ago plugin hybrids were a widely ridiculed fringe concept, though I noticed EngineerPoet talking about them. Then after another 18 months everyone came around to the concept.
Eventually I think people will get serial hybrids as well.
The idea, for the uninitiated, is that you have an electric car with a fairly powerful electic motor and a small battery pack that can handle a range of 20-50km. You also have a small, very efficient engine, possibly a diesel, that does nothing except generate electricity for that battery pack. It isnt connected to the drive train, it's just an onboard generator. So it doesn't need any grunt.
Once battery charge drops a bit, the engine switches on and generates electricity at a constant rate, regardless of whether the car is moving or paused. So it can can run at optimum revs the whole time.
Mining trucks and diesel-electric locomotoves are serial hybrids - the diesel generates power for an electric motor, it doesn't actually connect to the drive train. This is 100 year old technology, first used in ships and submarines. The first diesel-electric train was built in 1920.
A serial hybrid car could have a lightweight 500cc 4-cylinder engine simliar to those currently used in motorcycles- it doesn't need enough power to move the car because it is just an onboard generator. The electric motor moves the car, the job of the FF engine is to convert petroleum into electricity as efficiently as possible.
This is a low cost technology invented before any of us were born, it can be done today, and provides a useful way to mitigate the effects of fuel shortage on the downslope.
The most obvious use would be diesel-electric trucks for food transport.
I have my doubts about serial hybrids. One of the links below discusses my complaints better than I can (and also refutes my complains better than I would like). However, if you think of a serial hybrid as "an electric car with a range extender", then you probably have the right idea about pluses and minuses.
The range extender part probably won't be particularly good--my suspicion is that a serial hybrid running from the "range extender" part will give less miles per gallon than a similarly sized conventional car.
Still, it'd be good when running from grid-charged battery (especially if the grid is <28% fossil fuels, like here in Ontario).
The two examples you give (mining machinery and diesel-electric locomotives) both require high torque at low speeds, and are thus special cases.
http://www.madhu.com/content/Main/PowerTrains
http://www.autobloggreen.com/2007/08/06/series-hybrid-no-better-than-a-g...
It will be as good or better then a conventional car since they have engines sized for acceleration that runs suboptimally in crusing speed while the hybrid can have have a range extender engine sized for the medium power need and run at an optimal load.
The gain will be smallest for trucks run in even speed on flat roads.
Did any of you see a Prototype Serial Hybrid from Volvo(??) in the early 1990's that used a Turbine on a single shaft with a generator, both optimized for high-speed, and clearly minimal moving parts. I saw a 'car show' brochure and wondered where that concept went to. Too expensive?, was there a technical barrier? (I always wondered if the high revs caused a sound problem or a gyroscopic issue)
Do Diesel Train Locos use Pistons or Turbines?
Bob
Trains use turbodiesels.
I have only read about it. It were an expensive technology demonstrator with a recuperating mini turbine. It were probably to expensive to series produce and I guess that Ford who bought Volvo cars hesitated for a few years before continuing the hybrid work.
Proper engine sizing can save a few percent in efficiency. My issue is with the problems inherent in transmitting engine power to the load. A modern CVT is about 90% efficient, and a manual transmission better than that. It seems likely that a 95% efficient generator with 95% motors are barely going to match this, and are going to be much worse once power conversion from generator to battery, and battery to power stage, + resistive battery losses are added in.
TDIMeister at http://forums.tdiclub.com/showthread.php?t=208125&page=3 (April 6th, 2008, 12:46) seems to be of the same opinion, although his numbers may be a bit biased. He thinks that a 43% efficient diesel might be reduced to 20% by the time it has gone through all of the electronics. BTW, the BSFC chart is quite amazing--it's neat to see how sticking close to 1500rpm minimizes fuel use for a given power requirement. Anyone know where I can find a similar chart for my 2001 Accent 1.5L engine?
Especially after looking at the TDIclub site, I think that a properly tuned, properly sized gas/diesel engine can be inherently more efficient at cruising speeds than a serial hybrid. Which isn't to say that they they are a bad idea for in-town use.
I would definitely agree that an efficient diesel engine is likely to be superior to a serial hybrid at highway speeds.
If someone does most of their driving between cities on open roads then pure diesel is the way to go.
However, a lot of driving is done in cities. It seems to consist mostly of accelerating furiously up to the next red light, alternated with periods of crawling.
Under these conditions a serial hybrid would be competitive.
I am also thinking of the trucks I see moving off from the lights in a cloud of diesel soot as they make deliveries in urban areas. They seem to really struggle to get that initial momentum - electric drive trains would avoid this problem.
So I would advocate long haul trucks and open-highway drivers stick with a pure diesel engine, and serial hybrid trucks, buses and cars be used in cities.
Horses for courses.
The semis might instead be able to use pneumatics. It's common for diesel engines to have a "Jake brake", which releases the compressed air charge near top dead center and dissipates a lot of power (and makes considerable noise). If this air was instead pumped into a storage tank, it could be used for acceleration from a stop (and restarting the engine, so the engine could be shut down instead of idling).
I believe Eaton has tried to develop a system like this. More recent articles show a hybrid electric system (Coke bought some). Anyone have any info on how popular it is?
http://www1.eaton.com/epa/
FYI, AC Propulsion's generator trailer used a 250 cc engine.
Electric drive is not a panacea. Mechanical transmissions are lighter and more efficient at highway speeds; there is a reason that semis can have 21 forward speeds and a torque converter is a rare beast indeed. Electric drive is typically used for applications where massive torque is required at and near stall.
If you want to electrify semi trucks, this goes well with putting them on rails and supplying power via overhead wire. Just leave the diesel off until you need to exit the rail.
But you can still have a manual transmission in a (PH)EV. Use one gear around town, and another on the highway.
No, (PH)EVs are not a panacea, but they're a step in the right direction (ie away from Oil).
There is an emerging field of social science field called community based social marketing which highlights useful techniques to encourage and maintain behavior change such as the one you underwent.
Thanks, when I originally conceived this topic it was this aspect of the post that I thought would bring in most of the discussion - shows how much I know!!
Bryce misses the most important point: Energy independence will be forced upon us by a lack of energy to import.
That's like the elephant in the room.