Fuzzy logic? The Aramco man tries to explain [to Simmons] the science of complex systems and partial information, but Simmons hears only tidings of a bleak future. Obviously, the end of energy as we know it is nigh. Well, blow us down - algorithms in the oil patch! What next? Hydrogen-spewing superbugs? In a word, yes. And that's just the beginning.

Simmons' techno-cluelessness would be funny - calling Jed Clampett with his 12-gauge! - if he weren't the spearhead of a whole hand-wringing school of petro-pessimism. The oil fields are running dry, the gas gauge is on empty, the American way of life is doomed - these ideas bob like plastic shark fins on the storm surge of current oil prices. -part of the Wired article

These mind twist manipulations are pretty effective on Joe SixPack because tucked away in his head are rememberances of "Going to the Moon", the home computer, and the Internet; all indeed great successes of science. What Joe forgets is the slice of foam that knocked the knees out from under the Space Shuttle program.

Call it hubris. Yes we humans are the greatest thing since canned tuna fish. But we don't know why gravity is. We can't make even a single tree (we can cut 'em down & run for sure). And we can't make an efficient solar panel even though we've been trying for years.

Biggest problem might be that the news journalist is a technical illiterate. Gone are the days when the science reporter had to have a degree in science.

http://www.oecd.org/speaker/0,2879,en_21571361_34225293_34671219_1_1_1_1,00.html

http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/02/issue/forwards.asp?p=1

It isn't going to be possible to scale up technologies to current levels of consumption. The doomfreaks (sorry) are pushing a false dilemma: either technology can maintain our current obese habits, or we are screwed.

My view lies in the middle. Technology is perfectly capable of saving us if we meet it halfway. Step 1 of the solution is conservation. Step 2 is technology.

Ever since then I have stupidly stuck to my self-appointed task of working on energy efficient designs, and always, here and overseas, I have been rebuffed by the same old argument "it's not economic when oil is so cheap".  My argument that oil only seems cheap because we can get away with counting only part of its true cost, and that conventional economics is the outgassing of Beelzebub  gets me  nowhere.

I'm not saying that any of my gadgets are all of themselves world savers, but they and lots of other good stuff can be helpful.  Almost everything in a normal american house that uses energy could be made to use a lot less of it if we just applied what we already know.

A couple of simple examples- a fridge that is connected to the frigid outside by a heat pipe so that it doesn't have to run as much in the winter.  Bubblewrap insulation, Wood stoves ( or any heater) with big water thermal stores and built-in stirling generators,   And of course all the car mods we know about, like plugin hybrids, not to mention straw fired power plants for farm equipment.   And of course all the things Amory Lovins has been hawking these many years.

And I betchya a hundred megabucks the above CAN be scaled up and have no serious unkunks

So high oil prices might help some, in my worn out humble opinion.

So lets talk about ethanol:  The US gasoline consumption is 9.5 million barrels / day,  9.5 * 365 * 42 = about 145 billion gallons annually.  The US annual corn crop harvest is 10 billion bushels.  10 * 2.5 = 25 billion gallons of ethanol. Ethanol yield is about 2.5 gallons per bushel.  25 / 145 = about 17% If we used the entire annual corn crop to produce ethanol, the 17% would be used for increased demand before the new ethanol plants came on line.
The NG price by the end of the week may be past $15 after the current cold snap, see what song they are singing by Saturday.

In his yearly birthday speech, the King of Thailand made the following comments ( translation done by artical author)

We have to try to find new kinds of fuels to replace the current ones that could run out in years or decades. If the current sources of fuel run out in 40 years, I will be then 118 years old.

Palm oil seems to be a viable substitute. The prime minister may have seen a Royal car that runs on biodiesel, 100 per cent of which is produced from palm oil. The exhaust smells good and causes no cancer.

I have created such a substitute fuel because I may still have it to use when I am 118. Everybody must think of themselves and they must consequently try to find substitute fuels.

And in another another the following was remarked

His Majesty the King also called on everybody to adopt his Sufficiency Economy theory as a way forward, echoing remarks made by His Majesty in 1996, before Thailand plunged into a full-blown economic crisis the following year.

The principles of the Sufficiency Economy urge Thailand to stand on its own two feet no matter what happens in the outside world. People must thus live within their means and use the country's natural resources wisely.

The thing that chaps my ass (love that term) about the Wired article is that it implies that everything will be taken care of, don't worry your little head about it.  Just sit back and enjoy the techno-toys.  Of course, that's not true; someone has to make the techno-toys, and come up with the new ways to power them.  There's no hint in the article that the author thinks this job is interesting, worthwhile, or even exists in this world.

The real world is different.  Someone's going to have to do the engineering to make the energy systems.  Someone is going to have to gene-splice the bugs that turn the trapped oil in spent fields into methane, munch cellulose and turn out ethanol, use sunlight to crack water into hydrogen and oxygen.  If you don't have the people capable of doing the job, it doesn't get done; if you have the people but don't pay them to do the job, they do something else and the job doesn't get done either.

Or it gets done by somebody else, who gets a patent on it and you're stuck buying your necessities from them.

We've got a lot to do, and while I see hints that things are happening there is no movement big enough to address these problems as fast as they're going to hit us.

The author Mr. Reiss' tone is too breezy. The whole piece is glitteringly general. Yet, he hints of inside knowledge "Smarter money is betting that using plant waste will prove more economical." Or "...Shell has found a better way to extract oil from shale, reviving a long-abandoned resource", except that he is incorrect, ramping up to market quantities of shale oil is still a long way off. I just wish Reiss had spent that second day studying his subject. Maybe he has a concussion.

That doesn't mean $5/gallon gas would necessarily be bad, but the article just didn't touch on the real issues at all.

I am a biochemical and chemical engineer with grad degree (MIT) who has worked in renewable energy for 35 years.  My own experience included (a) working as a renewable biofuels engineer at Exxon (yes, they really had such a program--over 25 years ago.  It went extinct in company with much else, a solar group and Paraho oilshale in Rifle, CO.  Bob Hirsch was there at the time) (b) Biofuels-fueled electricity generation at the Electric Power Research Institute, Palo Alto CA. (c) 35 years of working on a "silver bb" which is landfill gas.  I credit Steve Andrews for the "silver bb" term (d) much experience with renewables in other organizations as well.  

I will offer comments and am willing to back them up with analysis to the extent anyone wants. My view is that no amount of rising price will pull off some of the most widely touted biofuels alternatives, most prominent of which is ethanol from cellulose.  I with others recently analyzed municipal solid waste to ethanol processes in all main variants for a large company managing waste and found prospectively (a) a fuel yield of 5-15% of the input waste heating value as ethanol product (b) that the conversion EROEI for ethanol from solid waste was about 0.1-0.2, ie godawful.  I think barring a miracle the situation with lignocellulose is equally miserable and unlikely  (we are more likely to see a 200 MPG petroleum product fueled  car than ethanol from solid waste or wood or cellulose, for reasons I would find a way to discuss for anyone interested)  

Ethanol from corn and mixed tank solid waste digesters are at best so-so or marginal with EROEI of about 2/1 to 3/1 The best of them have parasitic energy consumption of about 35-50% of  gross product energy they produce.  One can show (I have done so) that the cost of methane from the mixed tank digesters equates to over $30/mmbtu or about $200/bbl oil.  And that's with embedded European subsidies that may not be fully counted.  The corn ethanol cost is well over $100 boe without the subsidies and corn ethanol is likely marginal as a fuel solution, at best. It's as much for farmers as anything else.  Mixed tank digesters for animal manures are a mixed bag, but the best of them can make fuel (mixed methane/CO2) at well under the current oil or natural gas energy price.  But that's without cleanup which is a "whole nother issue".

Landfill gas "works" with a total potential for optimized landfills (my field for over 30 years) of about 200 billion +/- CFY of methane for the US.  This would be about a 4-fold increase from current gas energy from waste landfills.  Electric power is the easiest use.  Cost today varies widely, but is generally quite economical for mixed impure gas, range 2-6/mmbtu.  But contaminants can get in the way.  And about 1% of current US natural gas supply is the upper limit for this resource. There's not enough waste -- in this case a reversal of usual complaints.

Combustion works--but we knew that.  And wood stoves are out of favor and do not address  many peoples' need for an easily delivered fuel for home heat.  Having been in New England for 25 years I think that wood stoves will come back.  Their emission controls will be less than perfect but such stoves could make up for a lot of shortfall.  Re wood, I  have had long discussions long ago with large forest products company people who do well at running their plants on as much heat from wood combustion as they can get.

Algae do not work.  Period.  I can turn you over to the realists, the Deffeyes and Colin Campbells of algae, but having worked on algae myself it's worse than that with algae.  They are unlikely to start.

For all of the biomass things that ":work" in substituting for oil and gas, I think we are looking at less, possibly much less, than 5% of the potential shortfall expressed as the heating value of oil and gas imports today. But 5% of our shortfall would still be 1 mmboe/day, more or less, and is not to be dismissed.  

So my view is that rising fuel costs, and probably more importantly shortfalls, will cause alternative biofuels energy resources' uses to rise.  But Wired magazine greatly overestimates the added renewable fuel of one sort or another coming from the "moguls", that could fill the gap. The biomass field offers other significant hope. I haven't mentioned everything, particularly some other options for vehicle fuel (running cars on wood and the like--you can do it) that have been surprisingly widespread in times like WWII.

My name is Don and if you want to email me I am at nietsnegua@aol.com.  Send me your phone number and we can talk--it's easiest.  

It would be good to have a thread to discuss the economics of various biofuels, estimate maximum production and costs. This might give us a better idea of what lays ahead. It would also counter the technogeek cornucopians argument. There certainly is enough skill lurking around the Oil Drum to get an estimate of the different alternative transport fuels, including biofuels.

Hydrogen, corn to ethanol, canola based biodiesel all seemed doomed to fail to me. But why do you suspect cellulosic ethanol fails muster too?

Here I will stick to why I think ethanol from lignocellulose is not likely to happen. That alone gets us into a great deal of complexity.  My history includes telling my former thesis adviser, who was founding Biogen 25+ years ago, that ethanol from lignocellulose was unlikely.  That was unwelcome but has proved true to date. There is no detailed reasoning or process evidence that shows me the contrary.   (Iogen Canada and even partner Shell is not necessarily onto any solution for reasons I can discuss)  The reasons remain the same now as they were then. 

Start with evolution of plants.  Digestibility, alpha-(C6) cellulose purity and small particle size are needed to facilitate the hydrolytic process.  But plant composition is the result of a 100 million or so year evolutionary process, (biowarfare in a way, another area of mine by accident and experience following military draft), between bacterial and other biota that want to eat the plant, and the plant.  The upshot is that the bulk of just about any plant biomass (lignocellulosics more or less) is hard to hydrolyze.  The edible or easily bioconvertible fraction, (carrots, cane juice, cotton, corn etc etc that are there for the plant's or sometimes humans' purposes) always turns out a lesser fraction of total plant organics than we engineers of biofuels processes would like. 

So we seem compelled to consider lignocellulose, ie basically wood, as feedstock.  Its problems include

(a) Pretreatment and small particle size are needed,  But the pretreatment is closely akin to pulping for paper manufacture which has been developing and improving for well over a century.  Whatever the process, it seems hard to believe that costs will fall below $ 100/US ton of convertible feedstock product.

(b) Generalizing, the lignocelllose has a lot of "other" stuff, lignin of course but also polypentose hemicellulose.  Even though fermentable in principle, (and patent of Lonnie Ingram notwithstanding), the pentose sugar cannot give enough energy for bacterial growth and a self-sustaining ethanol fermentation.

(c) The hydrolytic process, whether acid or ezyme mediated, is outside-in and involves trades of various sorts.  (I have a lot of experience with the hydrolytic decomposition of high-alpha cellulose fractions of solid waste and even that can take many months--more on request).  And enzymes have been evolving for ca. 100 milion years with the same purpose as humans' and the whole world as a reactor .  Further improvements would seem likely to come slowly and incrementally (although I will acknowledge the possibile improvements in high temperature stability which has been under less developmental pressure from an evolutionary standpoint)

(d) Acid hydrolyses give at best 50%of stoichiometric glucose yield on alpha-cellulose.  By my calculations the heat energy required for acid hydrolysis can be a 2x or more mltiple of any potential lignocellulose-derived ethanol energy out

(e) When starting with lignocellulose, acid hydrolyses break down over half of C6 cellulose and almost all C5 hemicelulose to wastewater.  In sum, over 50% the C6 and C5 celluloses' reducing (potential fuel) value ends up as wastewater.  It would seem to take about 5000-10,000 btu/lb BOD of prmary energy to treat the wastewater.

(f)  Organics residues both from lignocellulose preprocessing and also associated enzymatic treatments and fermentation residues are a problem

(g)  Nobody has satisfactorily explained to me how the necessarily long-term enzymatic hydrolysis avoids contamination with acidogens and methanogens that can hijack the sugar products. 

(h)  Parasitics relating to distillation of necessarily dilute ethanol add stll more energy use to an already dismal EROEI balance sheet.

(i)  The truly available bulk pure cellulose substrates like waste paper have higher value on the recycle market than they can possibly have as feedstock for fuel.  And their recycling spares fuel so recycling rather than ethanol seems at first look, an energy win anyhow.

And there's more in the way of what I call "where forgotten bodies lie buried".  And I was with experts at MIT and my guesses (we are all guessing to extents) have proven among the accurate so far.  But email your phone numbers to me at nietsnegua@aol.com. And we can talk over the likelihood of overcoming what I consider multiple barriers. 

Don aka Pomona96

As of right now there are many simple things that people can do to make their lives much more efficient and cheaper, without having to be a scientist or engineer.  If every new home was built to the highest practical efficiency standards, how much energy coupld be saved annually?  If every new car was super efficient how much oil would be saved versus the gas guzzling SUV's that are so prevalant now?  How much could be saved if the Federal Government mandated that all fleet vehicles purchased for general usage, mail trucks, that sort of thing, were powered by hybrid engines?  What buying all of those vehicles every year do to the cost of hybrid engines?  I'm sure that would help the cost decrease dramatically, especially if our contract was a stable one for a few companies for an extended period of time.  If we said to Auto company X, "We are going to purchase 10,000 hybrid cars a year every year from you."  They would be able to pen in 10,000 hybrid sales and not have such a great risk for investing so much money in a new plant line.  Also, if the government tried to purchase a conversion kit for cars to convert them into hybrids.  If this could eventually be done for half the cost of a new car, it could provide the impetus for people to take their gas guzzlers off the road before the usual ten year cycle for a new car.

Environmentalists have been worrying about global warming for years. There is growing evidence that the process and consequences are accelerating.  In addition to other events, such as encroaching deserts, there is concern that Greenland and Antarctica ice might melt over the next 100 years or so - if it all went, sea levels would rise nearly 200-ft. The really bad actor is coal, which puts more CO2 into the atmosphere per unit energy than any other hydrocarbon.  Meanwhile, peak oil could be here fairly soon, so the challenge is to stop burning coal while finding an alternative for at least part of our oil usage. Conservatiom is already happening as oil price rises, and renewable sources such as windmills will help at the margin, but we will have to move in a new direction if we want to maintain any semblance of our current lifestyles.
The seventies saw the widespread introduction of commercial nuclear power into the US, ending with just over 100 electrical generating stations. Perhaps 1 unit/month was installed during the heyday. Since then, and in response to three-mile island/Chernobyl, the US reverted to 100% hydrocarbons for new capacity, mostly coal but recently substantial ng. We are now concerned with both global warming and peak oil, resulting in some reconsideration, not least in GB but including some US environmental groups such as the Sierra Club, of the nuclear option. Many countries are in the process of expanding nuclear power, both in Asia and in Europe, but hydrocarbon rich US remains hesitant.
Many remain concerned about nuclear waste, probably because a major waste constituent, the actinides, remains quite hot for hundreds of thousands of years. To counter this, some are now proposing plant types that attempt to address the waste issue. One of these, developed at Argonne National Lab, and designated the advanced liquid metal reactor (ALMR), is described in the Scientific American December issue.
Commercial reactor nuclear fuel starts with around 4%U235 and 96%U238. The U235 fissions (divides, creating daughter products plus heat), some of the U238 transmutes to PU239 and some of this also fissions.  Some Uranium transmutes to other actinides (a group of mostly man-made heavy metals, such as plutonium, that also includes naturally occurring thorium and uranium).  Some of the actinides do not fission because commercial reactors moderate (slow) the neutrons to a speed that does not promote fissions among actinides. After a period, daughter products from the fissioning elements accumulate, and some of these are neutron absorbers, which eventually reduces the available neutrons for further fissions, at which point the fuel must be removed and replaced with fresh fuel. Removed fuel is called spent fuel, even though around 95% of the potential fission energy remain unused.  When it first comes from the reactor it is extremely radioactive, so is stored in pools for at least ten years.  At this point it can be transported to a repository, but remains hot enough to require special transport casks.
At one time it was thought that spent fuel would be reprocessed, recovering the uranium and plutonium for reuse in new fuel rods. However, President Carter thought this process could lead to proliferation of material that could then used for bombs, particularly the plutonium, and by executive order stopped US reprocessing of spent fuel from commercial reactors on the grounds that our forgoing reprocessing would encourage others to do the same. (Rather inconsistently, special reactors on US military reservations continued to transmute and harvest plutonium from U238 to increase our arsenal.)  Sadly, this action did not dissuade the Chinese, North Koreans, Indians, Pakistanis and Israelis from going forward - indeed, only Israeli unilateral action prevented Saddam from having his own bomb.
The new reactor solves essentially all the objections to varying degrees. First, spent fuel from commercial reactors is chopped, and the metals from these fragments are plated out at high temperatures, meaning the non-metallics are left behind. Then, cadmium, a neutron absorbing metal, is melted and removed, and the remaining metallic mass of uranium, plutonium, and other actinides are cast into new metallic actinide fuel (AF).  This fuel is proliferation-resistant because the material is very radioactive, and just as difficult for potential thieves or terrorists to handle as current spent fuel. AF is then fed directly into an ALMR. The ALMR is liquid-sodium cooled, and because liquid sodium does not slow neutrons, the fast neutrons are able to eventually fission all the actinides.
The non-metallic elements, constituting around 1% of the original spent fuel, are placed in a long-term repository.  The non-metallic wastes will decay to near background in less than 500 years, providing confidence that the storage methods will be able to protect the future environment.  
Spent fuel is starter fuel for ALMR reactors, but once started, the reactor can be fed a variety of actinides, including the common (and depleted of its U235, so useless for bombs) U238, of which we have hundreds of thousands of tons left over from bomb and commercial reactor programs. Accordingly, the world's energy-intensive enrichment plants, which can be used for creating bomb material as well as enriched fuel for reactors, could be shut down.  In addition, thorium is fairly common, and this material could presumable be added to the stream, along with plutonium, if we decide we do not need all of the material we now have for bombs. My guess is, the fissioning potential from already mined and depleted uranium is sufficient to replace the world's coal-fired plants for a millennium, and there are readily available ores for far longer.
It is well known that nuclear fuel is cheap (although anti-nukes complain that the energy-intensive enrichment process is government subsidized) while plant construction and maintenance costs are expensive. Spent fuel is less than free - it is worth money (storage costs) to the government and utilities to get rid of the unwanted spent fuel. Processing the spent fuel into AF is not energy intensive but hardly free (everything must be done remotely), but with credit for reduced storage costs the net is probably not much.  And, the political value of reducing the time required for repository waste to decay to background, thus allowing the nuclear solution to proceed with reduced resistance, is incalculable.
A concern for liquid-sodium cooled reactors is that the metal burns in contact with water. The US, France and Russia have gained substantial experience with handling liquid sodium over the last thirty years as they experimented with various fast reactors, and over this period there have been sodium/water fires. In spite of the lessons learned, there will probably be more accidents in the future. Of course, water is not allowed anywhere near a sodium-cooled reactor or its containment building; reactor coolant is piped to an intermediate heat exchanger, and liquid metal from this component, not necessarily sodium, is then piped to a boiler to generate the steam that eventually generates electricity.  Accidents with sodium have never affected a reactor or caused any serious problem within the reactor containment building.
The US hydrocarbon price increases are not yet alarming here.  GB, on the other hand, is under considerable stress from insufficient ng right now, which explains their move towards nuclear; unfortunately, new plants will probably not come on line for at least a decade. The US is probably about five years behind GB in severe ng shortages, this winter notwithstanding. The production of NA ng may "fall off a cliff" by 2010 whether oil peaks or not. As has often been mentioned, the sooner we embark on alternatives, the better.
The world is in the process of learning hydrocarbons are "worth" far more than the extraction cost, and meanwhile we cannot afford the long term cost of burning them all. Coal and ng can be turned to liquid fuels and plastics while otherwise useless actinides can be used for electricity generation (and, therefore, home heating.)  As fossil prices continue to rise renewables will get their chance, but indications so far are they will not generate anything like what we have become accustomed to. As an aside, the world does not have large tracts of arable land to turn to bio-fuels. The Brazilian success story comes along with denuding the Amazon.  Forests "attract" rain.  When the trees are gone temperatures rise, causing highs that repel clouds; desert encroaches. It is far from clear that the Brazilian miracle is any more renewable than an oil field.
If we could install 1 nuke/month in the seventies we could install at least 2/month today, with the first plants coming on line by 2015.  At this rate we could replace all existing coal and ng electric generating plants, plus all of our existing aging nukes, by 2035.  Coal and ng could then be reserved for transport (coal gasification to liquid fuels, said to be feasible at $40/barrel oil) and plastics. Perhaps somebody could be persuaded to calculate the reduction in CO2 emissions if such a plan were implemented.