U.S. Air Force Report to Congress Bashes Navy’s Biofuels Program
Posted by Robert Rapier on February 27, 2013 - 1:08pm
The following article by Robert Rapier originally appeared on his R-Squared Energy column at Energy Trends Insider, where he serves as Managing Editor and Director of Analysis.
Sailors assigned to Riverine Group 1 conduct maneuvers aboard Riverine Command Boat (Experimental) (RCB-X) at Naval Station Norfolk. The RCB-X is powered by an alternative fuel blend of 50 percent algae-based and 50 percent NATO F-76 fuels to support the secretary of the Navy’s efforts to reduce total energy consumption on naval ships. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Gregory N. Juday).
In 2010 I conducted an interview with Tom Hicks, who is the Deputy Assistant Secretary to the Navy (Energy). During the interview, Tom described the Navy’s efforts in pushing for widespread availability of biofuels for Naval operations. He stated that sourcing alternative energy is a top priority for the Navy, and would enhance its war-fighting capabilities. He said the Navy sees itself in a leadership role in driving a transition to “homegrown, secure, independent sources of fuel.”
The goal, as described by Tom, is for biofuels to make a major contribution toward the fuel needs of the Navy by 2020. The Navy has embarked upon an initiative called the “Great Green Fleet” in which they would deploy a strike group on all alternative fuels by 2016. By 2020, the goal is for 50% of all of the Navy’s energy consumption to come from alternative sources. In pursuit of this initiative, the Navy is doing research, and testing and certifying all of their engines on renewable fuels.
The Critics
The program has had its critics. A 2011 congressionally-mandated study by the Rand Corporation suggested that renewable isn’t necessarily better for the military. The study concluded “There is no direct benefit to the Department of Defense or the services from using alternative fuels rather than petroleum-derived fuels.” Secretary of the Navy, Ray Mabus, stated that he disagreed “vehemently” with the report. One of the reasons for this conclusion is that the military is near the front of the line if fuel scarcity became a problem, and thus they do not need to push biofuels.
Other critics have suggested that the Navy is wasting taxpayer dollars on a program that should fall under the domain of the Department of Energy. In a July 27, 2012 letter to Secretary Mabus, U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) stated that the navy should stick to building and operating ships. McCain wrote “You are the Secretary of the Navy, not the Secretary of Energy.”
Air Force vs. Navy
On March 1st, 2013, the US Air Force journal — Strategic Studies Quarterly — will publish an article highly critical of the Navy’s efforts. This periodical is sent in hard copy to Congress and top military leaders. The article is entitled Energy Insecurity: The False Promise of Liquid Biofuels and will become available online about 25 Feb at http://www.au.af.mil/au/ssq/.
A longer version of this paper is available at the end of this article.
The article is incredibly in-depth, and raises a number of points that I have not seen raised elsewhere. For instance, one of the selling points that has been used to justify the Navy’s efforts is that if fuel could be produced locally, it would cut down on casualties. In Part 3 of my interview with Tom Hicks, he stated:
And just to give you a sense – and this is based on Army study – but for every 24 fuel convoys that we bring into the theater, we have one casualty. So that’s one soldier, one marine, killed or wounded who is not otherwise fighting the fight or engaged with the local population to build a nation. That’s a big part of what is driving this as well, that there is a human cost to this; a big price to pay and we are very concerned about that.
CAPT T. A. “Ike” Kiefer, who is with Department of Strategy at the USAF Air War College — and is the author of this new report — disputes that. In the report, he notes that in the case of lower-energy density biofuels:
Moving a given quantity of energy around a battlefield as biodiesel instead of petroleum diesel would require 8% more tanker trucks, ethanol or bio-oil 65% more, liquid hydrogen 280% more. Substituting biobutanol, biogas, ammonia, fuel cells, capacitors, or batteries in place of hydrocarbons on the battlefield would require even longer convoys that expose more Soldiers and Marines to enemy attack, not fewer.
Energy Return on Investment
Kiefer argues that certain deficiencies preclude biofuels from replacing petroleum as a national-scale transportation fuel. In his report, biofuels are evaluated with respect to energy return on investment (EROI), energy density, water footprint, food competition, environmental footprint, and lifecycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The author argues that biofuels will harm national and global security more than they will help.
One of the more interesting arguments in the paper concerns the EROI needed by modern society. The author gives some historical examples from ancient Rome, and then argues that when the EROI of society is below 6/1, “industrial civilization is locked into a death spiral where an ever increasing fraction of its economic output (GDP) is spent on energy at the cost of an eroding standard of living.” When the EROI drops below 3/1, he states that we can either find sources with higher energy returns, or “decay into a pre-industrial civilization with lower energy needs.”
This argument is significant because almost all biofuels are produced at an EROI of less than 3/1. Certainly — as I have noted many times — as the EROI declines, society will have to devote more time, effort, and energy (literally) into producing usable energy for society. The lower the EROI, the greater the input from society in order to produce the same amount of energy.
The Costs
Table 1 of the report will undoubtedly raise some eyebrows:
When it was first announced that the Navy had spent $8.5 million for 20,000 gallons of algae-derived fuel from Solazyme, I reported on this story in U.S. Navy Pays Big Bucks for Biofuels. Following the article, Solazyme CEO Jonathan Wolfson contacted me to clarify that part of that contract was for research and development. Wolfson wrote:
I wanted to clarify that the $8.5 million contract is actually an R&D contract that also includes a fuel delivery. Since that funding is directed to R&D and includes a delivery of fuel, it is inaccurate to divide the contract price by the number of gallons delivered to get to a dollar per gallon figure. We also announced a new contract with DoD and the Navy in September following on the heels of the successful delivery of the 20k gallon contract, which is also an R&D contract and includes a delivery of 150,000 gallons of fuel to the Navy. That contract is valued at a little over $10 million, but like the previous contract is not dividable into a per gallon price because of the R&D focus. Even though these contracts include R&D, you should also assume that the actual fuel production cost (which we do not publish), is currently above commercial costs.
However, as I noted at the time the fact that the Navy is spending millions funding this research is strong evidence that algal fuel can’t yet be produced at a competitive price — contrary to the claims of many hypesters.
Conclusion
The report is definitely worth a read. Even if you disagree with the premise, it is full of interesting historical tidbits. I don’t agree with everything in the article, but the author makes many strong points. In any event, the report will undoubtedly be used as additional ammunition against the Navy’s efforts to create a Great Green Fleet.
You can view the report "21st Century Snake Oil" here.
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You can review the DOD Joint Operating Environment study for 2010. The salient points are the Forward and the energy summary on page 29. Here is the link to the report (PDF): http://www.fas.org/man/eprint/joe2010.pdf It tends to put things in perspective.
We will know when we are past "peak oil" when the Army is seriously considering mules and hay transporters.
Peter
$4,400 a gallon, impressive.
Gosh, Yves, maybe you should go to work for John McCain :-0
Ah yes went to quickly through the article :)
But the thing about bio or agro fuels, is that you can do quite easily "theoretical enveloppes" calculus about what is possible (basically based on the sun energy per square meter available).
David MacKay provides a few figure about this in his "without the hot air" book, and as often with renewable, quite disappointing especially compared with today consumption..
Yes, but Tallow & Algae and Sugar produced at ~$25/gal, and that's only a proof-of-concept limited production run, and includes R&D costs. If it can be scaled up, you would expect economies of scale to bring it down an order of magnitude. If so, we can keep on invading whatever countries our corporate masters don't like indefinitely!
" McCain wrote “You are the Secretary of the Navy, not the Secretary of Energy.”
Let's ignore past colaborations, including the development of nuclear power, and its deployment in submarines and aircraft carriers,, you know, the ones McCain served aboard....and wasn't the military the primary driver for the development of many other long-standing beneficial technologies, including photovoltaics? Any respect I had for the guy was squandered years ago. I also found this paragraph interesting:
One could substitute "the military" for "energy" and possibly reach the same conclusion. Ah, the hubris inherent in imperial thought.
Thanks, Art!
It is sad to say but those biofuels look DOA. It looks like the military should build a big coal-to-liquids plant up in Wyoming to have on standby in order to create liquid fuels. Operate it and sell them into the market but be ready to use it for only military fuel if necessary.
That would be a disaster for the climate but probably a logical way to ensure a liquid fuel supply that will always be available and last long into the future.
The Navy wants to take carbon from sea water then make hydrogen with nuclear power to create jet fuel on aircraft carriers. Call it DOD or DOE or both, it makes sense.
Well if you have excess power from the nukes on board, one can't argue with that as a great way to use the excess power. But for the full military war machine, coal-to-liquid seems to beat biofuels by a long shot.
“There is no direct benefit to the Department of Defense or the services from using alternative fuels rather than petroleum-derived fuels.”
How about indirect, going to war borrowing money from the Chinese then buying oil from the Saudis does not sound like National Security to me. Whether BTL, GTL, CTL or other methods, more independence brings more options and better security.
coal-to-liquid seems to beat biofuels
When did coal and oil stop being from plant sources?
Coal and Oil are just old plants that got processed into 'fuel' without man's effort.
Perhaps the 'cost accounting' of oil/coal is incorrect?
It's the elimination of the (vulnerable) supply lines that would be necessary to re-stock the aviation fuel that makes on-board fuel generation most attractive.
(carbon from the air, hydrogen from seawater, then catalyze into a hydrocarbon fuel)
As my zen friends say: "Survival is not necessary".
Or in this case, highly unlikely.
With the sucess of solar cells, the way forward is synthesis of fuel using the energy from sunlight. It seems they are more efficient than chlorophyll. By using the CO2 from the atmosphere for carbon source, two birds with one stone.
High temperature concentrated solar thermal can split water using iodine and sulfur. Gasify biomass using the O2 and make bio synthetic fuels adding the H2.
Bio aviation fuel both civilian and military got plenty of hype at a small airshow in Australia yesterday
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-02-26/flying-into-green-skies-with-bio-f...
Shame the airlines don't put their money where their mouth is. Note the Qantas CEO holding flasks of blue liquid but it's apparently too expensive for routine use.
I'd put bio jet fuel in the same category of wishful thinking as carbon capture at stationary power plants. It would be great if it was economic but that's highly unlikely. Then what?
I wouldn't put biofuel and carbon capture in the same class. Biofuel, is and always will be a stunt. At least carbon capture doesn't go against physics. Some of the experimental methods might even make capture reasonable. But, then what, disposal at scale (dozens of gigatons per year) would seem to be a serious issue.
Now, maybe the capability to use different grades of fuel in theater could be an advantage -and maybe they just want to disguise their intentions and/or greenwash it. The problem for the military isn't whether fuel is available somewhere in the country, but it is getting fuel to a remote operational military base. Being able to use whatever happens to be available locally, might be an advantage.
Maybe they figure a few bucks spent in greenwashing helps in recruiting and or retention?
My idea for long distance land vehicles (cars, truck, trains, army tanks) is bifuel. Specifically a combination of cheap CNG and expensive liquid fuel. You fill the CNG cyclinder for a few bucks but carry a few litres of high priced liquid. In an emergency you get home on a jerry can of liquid fuel even if it costs $500 a bucket full. That's better than being stranded.
Cars with this capability already exist, for example the CNG/petrol Opel Zafira Tourer. If cellulosic ethanol ever takes off another bifuel possibility is CNG/ethanol which could maybe keep a few cars on the highways 100 years from now.
I tend to agree that the EROEI of biofuels in general is pretty dismal!
However I arrived in Sao Paulo last night and was quite surprised to see signs on all of the airport shuttle buses proclaiming that they were being powered by biodiesel. Even as recently as last year I hadn´t noticed that.
At this point I don´t have any idea how that biofuel is being produced so I can´t as yet comment on its EROEI but I intend to investigate it further and perhaps report on that at a later date.
In any case, stunt or not, all those biodiesel buses sure caught my attention and I got home thanks to one of them... at least for now, it seems, the magicians here in Brazil are still pulling rabbits out of their hats.
Even with all its bioethanol production, Brazil is still a net oil importer. The only reason it has any significant quantities of ethanol is because it cut down half its rainforests. When we run out of fossil fuels with acceptable EROEI's then food production will go down, biomass demand will go up, and there will be no way Brazil's meagre ethanol program could supply even its own internal liquid fuel demand, let alone export any to other countries who weren't blessed with a gazillion acres of productive tropical rainforests to chop down. The numbers simply don't add up. No way, never in a million years.
I´m not going to defend ethanol production in Brazil or anywhere else but you obviously know absolutely nothing about ethanol production in Brazil. For starters sugarcane doesn´t grow very well in the rainforests. It needs a much drier climate... The deforestation in the Amazon, which is certainly quite bad, has very little to do with ethanol production.
Actually, Brazil has (err, had) extensive "rain"forests in its southeast, as well as seasonally dry forests and savannah. Pull up Google Earth and you will see that they're pretty much all gone now after the agricultural holocaust, save a few token parks here and there. People seem to think that only drenched, dripping wet rain forests have value, and everything else is ripe for full-on exploitation by humanity. Not so. I've spent time in Colombia and its forests are being ravaged for ethanol production, among other things.
I don´t need to pull up Google Earth, I know the south east of Brazil quite well and am acutely aware of it´s deforestation. While they may be deforesting rainforest in Columbia to produce ethanol, the deforestation of the southern Atlantic coastal rain forest in Brazil occured long before they started producing ethanol in Brazil. Again to be very clear, I´m not defending ethanol production in Brazil.
And trust me, the last thing you need to do is lecture me on the value of the varied ecosystems in South Eastern Brazil. I´m here on the ground in Brazil, I know it quite well, and I´m connected with the Brazilian scientific community, specifically with ecologists who work in this region.
Well, Brazil has a lot of hydroelectricity which helps in processing the ethanol.
Biofuel, is and always will be a stunt.
Not at all.
For the present demands of the billions of humans growing plants to extract oil/sugar and process further does not appear practical.
But with less total demand, why can't biofuel work?
From the Kiefer paper (emphasis added)...
"What is true for corn ethanol is true for all cultivated crop biofuels. Natural gas and crude oil supply the vast majority of the hydrogen and carbon used to make fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, farm machinery fuel, biorefinery process heat, the designer enzymes and bulk organic chemicals needed by some advanced processes, the hydrotreatment hydrogen gas discussed earlier, and a good portion of the electrical energy involved. The parasitic dependence of cultivated crop biofuels upon fossil fuels precludes any chance of them reducing dependence upon foreign oil, assuring domestic supply, or making prices less volatile. Without fossil fuels or a replacement source for massive quantities of hydrogen to make ammonia, all biomass yields—including food—will plummet toward what they were before Haber’s discovery in 1909, with devastating consequences for the world. Accelerating the use of fossil fuels by foolishly and wastefully using them to make much lower EROI biofuels brings any day of future fossil fuel scarcity that much closer and is completely counterproductive to every “clean” and “green” energy goal. Applying ammonia fertilizer to any crop intended for biofuel is an indefensible waste of energy."
http://maxkeiser.com/2013/01/14/greeks-raid-forests-in-search-of-wood-to...
You can also look to the island of Hispañola...the Haiti side primarily heats/cooks with wood while the Dominican side does not. On Google Earth you can literally turn off the overlays and look at the raw image and trace out the border with decent accuracy.
At-scale biofuels are a cruel farce - either stripping the land bare of plant life, strip-mining the soil, or causing large destruction of forests to make way for bio-fuel plantations. The algae thing is interesting as it doesn't necessarily have any land impact, but the logistics involved scream impracticality.
The amount of natural gas used to make fertilizers is large, but not really large compared to total nat gas production. As to your bolded point, that burning the natural gas directly is more energy efficient than using it to make bio-fuels sounds about right to me. However, if the fertilizer was a surplus to begin with, than using it for whatever activity is profitable is what happens.
Go compare the total word ammonia production ( http://www.roperld.com/science/minerals/ammonia.htm ) to world population.
Unless you'd like to let China and India starve, or have the entire amazon cut down to grow soybeans for protein, at least with our current food system, it's much more effective to make ammonia, grow corn, get more energy from ethanol out than you put in in natural gas, AND get a high-protein dried distillers grains.
Burning natural gas might be more 'energy efficient' by some narrow academic perspective, but energy efficiency doesn't make protein.
If we start making ammonia from wind energy, then at some point we'll end up with a surplus and you could use that for retrofitting old combustion turbines for power generation.
EROI (or EROEI) has issues that I have pointed out before:
http://connectrandomdots.blogspot.com/2012/07/test-post.html
And they don't help the author's arguments.
Rgds
WeekendPeak
(and how do I create an embedded link? 'pologies for my HTML ignorance...)
Beat you to it:
http://www.energytrendsinsider.com/2011/10/31/how-not-to-use-eroei/
:)
Creating a link, see: http://www.theoildrum.com/filter/tips. It's the first example. Put your link between the quote marks. Type or paste,, whatever you want your link to look like, where it says The Oil Drum (in the example). For speed, I usually just copy the example at the link above, paste it into my post, and just paste the address I'm linking to over the oil drum's address and paste the title of the article over The Oil Drum. Leave a space after your html code or the link won't work. You can put other html code like bold or blockquote immediately before or after.
This seems to be typically questionable. Some points:
File under 'service sniping' and McCain's interjection as typically uninformed.
Tom Englehardt who runs Tomdispatch.com calculated that it was costing $400 per gallon
for fuels for Afghanistan:
https://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/04/20-1
The Pentagon is the world's largest institutional oil consumer and greenhouse gas emitter.
To me it would be nice to stop these senseless Wars and Taxpayer handouts to the Military Industrial complex in the first place. It is typical that the defense of the per gallon price is that it is "R&D" ie the usual big bucks for cost plus military contracts at taxpayers expense...
I am no expert but alternative fuels has never made any sense to me. How can I create something that has more energy than I started with? I remember when the hype about ethanol hit the "instant solution" rants. Took me 15 minutes with a hand held calculator to know that was a waste. The real issue with all alternatives is adding up ALL the energy inputs, costs, installation expenses, mining expenses, infrastructure costs, etc. And as far as nuclear goes, that has always been a crazy solution. Can't convince me that creating killer waste that can be stored, safely, for thousands of years is anything other than shoving the problem to future generations.
You know doing what any successful business does. I read few comments that appear to be much more than back of an envelope over a cup of coffee calculations.
In my mind, we are in the fantasy stage of problem solving. I've done it many times only to discover there was a whole lot I left out. Wishful thinking is particularly useful when solving something that scares the hell out of me. Unfortunately, wishful thinking wastes valuable time that would be better spent facing reality.
You can't put wheat straw, coal nor crude oil in your gas tank, every conversion has a loss. Turning crude oil into gasoline has a loss. Turning biomass into methanol and gasoline has a loss.
Fossil fuels are already hydrocarbons so the losses are minor. Biomass has those extra pesky oxygen atoms that need to be gotten rid of or rearranged, which imparts significantly higher energy losses.
Either I plant 1% of our pasture land in biofuel crops to replace 10% of the oil used to make gasoline or I continue to import more oil.
While the biofuel crops improve the land and the biochar from the process improves the land, I am fueling the nation with CO2 neutral biofuels rather than giving money to and importing oil from people that would rather see us dead.
Some inefficiency in thermodynamics seems to be a small price to pay for national energy security. Maybe some think we will all scrap our 200 million internal combustion engine cars and drive electric cars in the near future, but I see that as a low probability outcome.
That's a false dichotomy. Why did the U.S have to import so much fossil fuel in the first place ? - and the simple answer is that it uses too much fossil fuel. I realise the same thing applies to Europe to a even greater degree, since Europe has few sources of its own oil.
As to your second point, it's looking very likely. Those ICE cars will stay around without cheap, widely available batteries or another way to transmit electricity directly to numerous electric motors.
When the Model T ford was first built, it was designed to run on both gasoline and high-proof moonshine, which could be picked up on farms acros the country.
The US imports so much fossil fuel because prohibition occurred right about the time cars hit the roads, giving oil companies 10-15 years of time to build gas stations so they would not get clobbered in the market by farmers who could make better fuel cheaper. It wasn't until some farmers got together and funded the first large corn ethanol plants that this started to change.
If we would have had a competitive market between on-farm ethanol and gasoline from the beginning, gasoline would likely be 20%-50% higher priced because of the logistics of distribution, and lower economies of scale in refineries, this would have resulted in a more reasonable liquid fuel use.
"How can I create something that has more energy than I started with?"
Simple, plant a seed and wait 150 days and you will get 350-600 times the number you started with, plus the biomass of the plant. It is all driven by electromagnetic radiation (photons) from the sun.
Save 10 seeds and repeat. Save 100 seeds and repeat. Save a 1000 seeds and repeat. etc, etc. People were doing it 10,000 years before there was inorganic fertilizer.
The key is to not 'eat your seed corn' or stated another way do not consume more than is sustainable. We lost that logic by leveraging a few 100,000,000 years of fossil carbon (stored seed) in the last 150 years. Just because we set up an unsustainable consumer model doesn't mean thermodynamically valid energy capture processes don't work. They just don't meet current or desired demand but that model is already proven unsustainable.
So get over it and reduce demand to sustainable real time production level. We have a wasteful liquid carbon fuel problem not an energy problem - don't confuse the two.
Yes. Agriculture can have a positive EROEI but using external energy to increase monetary profit is a slippery slope to the tragedy of the commons.
Scientists managed to find a way to make food out of thin air, great! This agriculture thing means we're free from toil and famine and don't have to collect berries and self-dead hares.. Oh noes, someone also came up with the idea of taking over the Earth, jobs and growth are good, and we'll put in five food in an animal and get one animal food, throw away most of the food in the garbage, and burn up food in these big steel things. Bummer.
That's one problem. There's also a water problem.
Biofuels have got to be the worst energy idea ever brought forth. The whole reason 7 billion people have avoided a Malthusian Collapse due to overtaxing our supporting ecosystems is because we found abundant fossil fuels to burn instead. Now they are proposing to regress about 2 centuries and pursue policies that are guaranteed to result in the deaths of about 6 billion people if taken to fruition?
Even the energy security argument for biofuels (less dependence on Middle East oil) doesn't hold water because of the low EROEI for biofuels which requires some other fossil fuel to power them (at the same time taking away valuable farmland). Presumably, that fossil fuel (coal or NG) would be sourced domestically, to lessen dependence on the Middle East. So then just turn the coal or NG directly into oil, it's a way better return on investment.
And the whole reason the US military exists nowadays is to ensure that the rest of the world continues to use dollars for international transactions, so the US can maintain its ridiculous trade deficit of 13% of global oil production. Ironic that the military wants to do away with that dependence on foreign oil, since that's the main reason for its existence!
They are not totally awful as a general idea. You do get a net zero carbon output (because the plants suck up the CO2 from the atmosphere before you turn them into biofuel and burn them).
But they are extremely expensive thus impractical. I can see them making (expensive) aviation possible in the distant future when the fossil fuels are largely gone.
And ethanol makes a nice environmental friendly fuel additive compared to lead & MTBE.
But for a mainstream liquid fuel right now? . . . Yeah they suck except for maybe ethanol from sugar cane.
But if they need all these fossil fuel inputs as energy subsidies then the carbon gets released from the FF's. Plus they require more farmland which burns up natural ecosystems and releases that carbon sink.
We have 500 million acres of marginal pasture land in the U.S. 1% of that devoted to biofuel crops can replace 10% of the oil used to make gasoline. Biofuel crops like miscanthus improve the soil, so that after 10-15 years the soil has been brought up to food crop quality and you plant more pasture land.
That should be restored with perennial grasses, and large Ungulates to try to get back to a robust ecosystem, rather than the ecocide monocultures of annual grasses provide.
But commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol production is not feasible.
You should tell that to Broin/POET who are about to produce cellulose ethanol in large quantities. You also need to tell that to several other companies that are going to do the same in the next few years.
I don't advocate making cellulose ethanol from biomass crops, you misunderstand. I advocate bio synthetic gasoline, diesel and jet fuel through gasification and synthesis turning biomass into methanol/DME/fuel.
"I advocate bio synthetic gasoline, diesel and jet fuel through gasification and synthesis turning biomass into methanol/DME/fuel."
Not a chemist, but this process sounds energy intensive; any thoughts on its EROEI?
You can go from methane to synthetic gasoline at about 60% efficiency. If I use waste heat from a power plant, I can get biomass to gasoline at about 70%. Crude oil to gasoline is about 80%.
So for a small penalty in thermodynamic efficiency I get cleaner, renewable, sustainable and CO2 neutral fuels to run 200 million cars, or I continue to pay money to and buy oil from people that hate us.
Where does ``CO2 neutral`` come fromÉ You have all the external energy inputs needed to produce, transport and process the biomass. These always seem to be conveniently ignored by biofuels proponents. Are those energy needs going to be provided by the produced synthetic fuel from biomassÉ What is the EROEI of the whole process thenÉ If it`s anywhere close to 5:1 or below it isn`t going to work.
Do you have references for this 70% conversion efficiency from biomass to gasoline in flues of power plantsÉ That flue gas sure ain`t carbon neutral. There is nothing `renewable and sustainable` about it.
200 million cars on 1% of marginal pasture land?
10% of the gasoline for the the cars and CO2 neutral because the plant absorbs CO2. You guys can just go on buying oil from the Saudis.
Have you any evidence that large scale biomass is possible and more important, if you think as alternative about power to gas and gas to liquid, what would be the difference costs and yield per squaremetre using PV/wind as energy sources. Nuclear power would also be possible.
"You should tell that to Broin/POET who are about to produce cellulose ethanol in large quantities. You also need to tell that to several other companies that are going to do the same in the next few years."
There have been a dozen producers that have promised to do that "in the next few years." Range Fuels was supposed to do that. My prediction is that anyone who starts making cellulosic ethanol in quantity will bleed cash, and the more they make the faster they will bleed.
We have 500 million acres of marginal pasture land in the U.S. 1% of that devoted to biofuel crops can replace 10% of the oil used to make gasoline. Biofuel crops like miscanthus improve the soil, so that after 10-15 years the soil has been brought up to food crop quality and you plant more pasture land.
Please provide valid references to yield trials on typical US "marginal pasture land" demonstrating longer term (greater than 5-10 years) Miscanthus production. I'm not interested in vested-interest promotional material --- real references please. Also note the required irrigation and fertilizer demands to stimulate this yield, and how it compares with non-irrigated / non-fertilized land.
The lower 48 states is 8 million square kilometers and your "500 million acres of marginal pasture land" is 2.5 million square kilometers, so that's 27% of the total area of the lower 48 as "marginally productive pasture". Please show us exactly where all this marginal land is because when I pull up Google Earth I see the majority of the farm belt in production with intensive agriculture already, not much room there for an additional 27%. Is this "marginally productive pasture" in drier areas like Texas and other places in the West? Then how does its productivity there compare with say an Iowa corn field?
I'll respond, all the trials for muiscanthus are from Europe :
https://bioenergy.ornl.gov/reports/miscanthus/test_locations.html
You can find trials for other bio-fuel crops from the same website.
ORNL is the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, United States
Perfect, thanks.
Not sure how well miscanthus grows in dry land, e.g, see
https://bioenergy.ornl.gov/reports/miscanthus/test_locations.html
Not if the battery is charged with a PV panel or wind turbine replacing a generator running from diesel and powering a base or ship in the war zone. If biofuels are processed into liquid fuel in the war zone, then the supply chain would be reduced. The U.S. Navy wants to produce jet fuel from an aircraft carrier's nuclear reactor and sea water eliminating the need to resupply it by transporting it around the world. The navy might want to use biofuels at their domestic bases reducing the demand for fossil fuels which can be transported to the battlefield.
Maybe Kiefer's attitude is due to his perspective in the air force which flies logistical supplies into bases that have been secured. I think tanker trucks are more vulnerable to attack from an inferior opponent than C-130's.
Military Microgrids
Stationary Base, Forward Operating Base, and Mobile Smart Grid Networks for Renewables Integration, Demand Response, and Mission-Critical Security
http://www.pikeresearch.com/research/military-microgrids
Just for clarification, the author, CAPT Kiefer, is a US Naval officer assigned to the US Air Force War College.
Cheers,
Aldo
How about not funding the other side in the war on terror?
The military has clearly identified dependence on foreign oil as a threat to national security. I would suggest that national security falls under the purview of the armed forces.
The point is to make the fuel closer to the end use, if not actually in theater. No need to truck fuel through dangerous areas and therefore no losses due to casualties. Also, I am not an expert like these guys but to my understanding the Navy doesn’t truck much fuel through hostile territory.
Concerning EROI, biofuels have a low EROI because it is cheaper to make them with petroleum inputs. Businesses are successful or not successful based on being able turn a profit not EROI. If fossil fuels were priced to reflect externalities, biofuels would consume a lot less. For instance, a primary fossil fuel input for biodiesel is for methanol, which is primarily made from natural gas. However, methanol, or ‘wood alcohol’ can easily be made from . . . er . . . wood. The largest fossil fuel input for ethanol is the natural gas to distill the ethanol out of the water (~50%). This is just heat which could be provided from waste heat from power plants or from concentrating solar. Second largest is the energy input of the nitrogen fertilizer produced by natural gas (~30%). 200 years ago corn whiskey was made from corn fields plowed by horse, fertilized by manure, and distilled with wood. Estimate EROI? Easily > 6.5+. Of course, I am not suggesting that we go back 200 years in technology. But using CSP to distill and better farming practices would improve the EROI a heck of a lot. It is just more expensive. The people who keep pointing to EROI as a reason against biofuels apparently want biofuel producers to fall on their swords financially for the point of EROI. Like E3 Biofuels.
Concerning the costs – according to the Defense Logistics Agency:
Source: http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/archive/2010/April/Pages/HowMuchf...
Given these prices, producing fuel in theater at the prices listed here looks very reasonable. Considering that these costs include some R&D, they are downright attractive.
When I was in the Persian Gulf, we had to pull into less-than-secure ports to refuel and replenish; basically sitting ducks during refueling. The alternative was to un-rep (underway replenishment), also risky in certain ways, and requiring replenishment ships to be in the area; vulnerable, expensive, and unarmed. When two ships are linked up, they have to hold a steady course and speed, unable to maneuver, also increasing vulnerability. We held "emergency breakaway" drills for that reason.
I doubt that smaller ships ( destroyers, frigates, etc) will ever have the capacity to make their own fuel, but nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Carriers already make alot of stuff; makeup water for the steam plants and reactors, O2 for aircraft and other uses, fresh (distilled) water etc. One of my jobs on subs was making O2 and disposing of the hydrogen. I also ran the CO and CO2 scrubbers, etc. The electrolysis part of the process is already very mature technology, the reactors have plenty of spare capacity, and millions of gallons of seawater are already being processed and utilized every day.
I'm just pointing out that there's a need, and at least part of the process is off-the-shelf. Not saying it's viable or cost effective. I don't see the US empire being able to keep this stuff up much longer anyway, at least not at the scale we've come to take for granted. Greer makes a good case that the carrier battle group concept is already obsolete. While I don't consider him an expert, there's likely to be some merit to that.
I don't know about using CSP for large scale distillation (actually it sounds like a good idea), but CSP overall is a less technically demanding way to capture sun power and even with a higher efficiency than most solar panels. I'm surprised it isn't used more.
The obvious solution is to bring back the steam powered vehicle and burn the biomaterial (wood, algae, corn...) directly.
Robert (or any one else), do you have an estimate of the cost per gallon of kerosene or gasoline produced from in-situ processing of kerogen ?
If I recall correctly, Shell have done some limited trials of this. I am just interested for my own curiosity (not advocating its use) of where it might fit in (ballpark figure $/gal) compared to CTL/GTL and the biofuels.
I would say that the fact that Shell decided not to continue with that implies that they didn't feel the economics were attracted enough to warrant a protracted fight over it. The fact that they were suggesting nuclear reactors to provide the heat tells me that doing it with other sources of electricity wasn't remotely an option. If I had to guess how much it cost, it would of course depend on their source of heat, but I would guess that it was at least $2-$5/gallon more than CTL or GTL approaches (which generally aren't economic either).
Thanks Robert :)
This review of Capt. Kiefer's study has been posted:
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-03-04/i-twenty-first-century-snak...