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Numbers and the State of the Union Energy segment
Posted by Heading Out on February 1, 2006 - 1:09pm
The President's State of the Union message divided his energy initiative into two parts. The first deals with the stability of the supply of energy to the electric grid, and the second dealt with fuels for transportation. Both are fossil fuel dependent, but it is in transportation that the dependance on foreign oil is most critical. Let's unpack them under the fold.
The replacement of oil and gas power sources for electricity will be from an increased investment in "zero-emission coal-fired plants; revolutionary solar and wind technologies; and clean, safe nuclear energy". The funding here does not look for any major breakthroughs. The specific allocations for electric power are:
Coal. $281 million to develop clean coal technologies "to generate electricity while meeting environmental regulations at low cost." And $54 million for a "FutureGen" project with the private sector to seek "an emissions-free coal plant that captures the carbon dioxide it produces and stores it in deep geologic formations."I will probably have more to say about coal this weekend (grin). In terms of automobile fuel, the change in power source is anticipated to come from "better batteries for hybrid and electric cars and in pollution-free cars that run on hydrogen. We will also fund additional research in cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol, not just from corn but from wood chips and stalks or switch grass. Our goal is to make this new kind of ethanol practical and competitive within six years." Specific funding allocations are:
Solar power. $148 million, more than double what was sought in 2006, "to accelerate the development of semiconductor materials that convert sunlight directly to electricity."
Wind power. $44 million for wind energy research -- a $5 million increase over Bush's 2006 request.
Ethanol. $150 million, a $59 million increase over 2006, to find a more efficient way to make ethanol, the gasoline alternative now made primarily from corn in the United States. The focus is to use plant fiber from farms that is currently discarded as waste. "Research scientists say that accelerating research into "cellulosic ethanol" can make it cost-competitive by 2012, offering the potential to displace up to 30 percent of the nation's current fuel use," the White House said.In terms of original fuel source, neither improving battery life, nor building a hydrogen economy really provides an answer to a diminishing fuel supply. In that regard, only the ethanol initiative can be considered a step toward an answer. And in that regard there is already a small red flag waving in Thailand. (thanks to Energy Bulletin). Basically because the rising price of oil was creating problems for the economy, the Thai government had encouraged the use of ethanol as an extender in gas to make gasahol. The Thai use sugar cane, molasses and cassava as the feed stock, and such has been demand, that domestic supplies cannot keep up, and there is competition between the food use and the fuel one. The shortage has led to the closure of 3 ethanol plants and the delay in construction of 18 more. Further the problem is not confined just to the ethanol source.
Plug-in hybrids. $30 million, a $7 million increase over 2006, to develop higher capacity batteries for hybrids as well as "plug-in" hybrids that would allow drivers to charge vehicles and run on electric power only. "These vehicles will enable drivers to meet most of their urban commuting needs with virtually no gasoline use," the White House said.
Hydrogen. $289 million, a $53 million increase over 2006, to develop fuel cell vehicles that run on hydrogen "with no pollution or greenhouse gases." Bush in 2003 launched a $1.2 billion hydrogen initiative and the White House said that "through the president's program, the cost of a hydrogen fuel cell has been cut by more than 50 percent in just four years."
Meanwhile, the outlook for biodiesel, liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) and natural gas for vehicles (NGV) is similar. Chumnong said the problem with LPG was that demand was climbing rapidly due to government subsidies. More and more private vehicles and taxis are switching to this cheaper fuel, which should be used only as cooking gas. "I don't know how long the government can continue subsidising it for motorists. Last year we spent tens of billions of baht subsidising diesel prices," he said.For the United States the primary current source of ethanol is from corn, and, for example in Missouri, a corn-growing state, there is a move to mandate that all gasoline sold in the state should include 10% ethanol. Missouri has 3 plants in production (at about 0.5 million barrels per year each), a fourth in construction and a fifth in planning. (It takes 17 million bushels of corn to give slightly more than 1 million barrels of ethanol, but you can't do an energy balance on that since the process also generates 134,000 tons of distillers grain, which is a high protein animal feed.) Overall the plants will produce around 6 million barrels per year and require just about 25% of the Missouri corn crop to supply that need.
Biodiesel-producers also lack sufficient raw materials, especially palm oil, to keep up with high consumption growth, and the price is also scarcely competitive. NGV is probably the best choice, but the cost of infrastructure and vehicle modification is very high, he said. "A biofuel alternative is a good idea, but it's hard to implement it efficiently. It needs sound planning and political will," he said.
This conflict between food and fuel, already highlighted in Thailand, and present at a low level with the use of corn in corn stoves, could, as the fuel supply changes, have a similar competitive effect in America. Thus, it is important to change the source of fuel from just the corn itself, to being able to also use the rest of the plant. Cellulosic ethanol requires microbes to break down the fibers of the plant, but since the corn has other uses, its cost can be considerably less than the original process. (The Washington Monthly has an article that describes the process.).
Taken all together the goal is to replace 75% of the oil that we get from the Middle East by 2025. The date resonates with the projections of the Hirsch report that it will take 20-years to allow a seamless transition, but that relies on a timely start before the shortfall begins to occur. Given that the US currently gets around 20% of its imports from the Middle East, and it imports 12.1 mbd this equates to a target replacement of 1.8 mbd. When one looks at the anticipated shortfalls between supply and demand that have been projected on these pages, as elsewhere, then this is really not going to help a lot.
It is also perhaps (in the Holmsian tradition) remarkable that he did not mention Natural Gas at all.
“We have only two modes—complacency and panic.”
—James R. Schlesinger, the first energy secretary, in 1977, on the country's approach to energy
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I'm letting my mind cast about for reasons for this ... and not settling yet on one theory or another. I started at one extreme, thinking that conservation was a given at these prices, and drifted all the way to the other extreme, that this "policy" isn't about achieving anything beyond short term consumer confidence.
My mind swings like a boat on anchor ....
:-)
C-Words:
conservation
cardigan
Carter
coal to synfuel (generic)
Canada
Chavez
Start adding!
corn
climate
cooling
collapse
I just want to point something out here -- Heading Out is using TODAY's imports from the Middle East.
According to the current EIA forecast, Persian Gulf oil imports to North America (meaning virtually all goes to the US) will be 5.8 million barrels per day.
75% of that equates to 4.3 million barrels per day...
Revi, over at PeakOil.com, put it this way:
There's an old saying, "The grain is for the farmer and the straw is for the land." You can't take all the production out of a field or forest every year and not expect it to go downhill. I have been seeing huge biomass piles up in the woods lately. You can't biomass everything year after year and expect to grow good trees the next rotation. You can't keep haying a field and not spread manure on it and expect to get a good yield. Sorry. There's no magic fix for this. There is a limiting factor. It's called soil fertility. We can't just withdraw it from the bank. It's like the principal. We can only live off the interest. We can't drive cars on the interest. We may be able to drive a biodiesel tractor, but even that's iffy. A team of oxen might turn out to be the status vehicle of the future.
Right now, we can remove all the production because we replace it with chemical fertilizers. How long will that be economical, though?
As for natural gas...I'm not surprised there was no mention of it. It's pretty clear to anyone who heats their home with natural gas that it's as big a problem as oil.
This view point is absolutely correct IMO. I am a strong believer in biofuels, but not as a total replacement of current petroleum usage. Plant biomass can generate feedstocks for both chemical processes and transportation fuel but there is a limit to sustanable production.
The 1/27/06 issue of Science investigates both the gains to be made in biodigesters and ethanol production. This is behind a paywall but the abstract of the biodiesters article is below for interested parties.
Biomass represents an abundant carbon-neutral renewable resource for the production of bioenergy and biomaterials, and its enhanced use would address several societal needs. Advances in genetics, biotechnology, process chemistry, and engineering are leading to a new manufacturing concept for converting renewable biomass to valuable fuels and products, generally referred to as the biorefinery. The integration of agroenergy crops and biorefinery manufacturing technologies offers the potential for the development of sustainable biopower and biomaterials that will lead to a new manufacturing paradigm.
They make special not that until around 1900 most ingredients for industry came from plants. It wasn't until the mid to late 1900's that production of these components switched to petroleum based.
While I agree with the goals of the article at some point there is only so much energy that can be taken out of the ecosystem each year and have it remain sustainable. That is where we need to focus some research. How do we have sustainable production of plants with a large decrease of fossil fuels? How much of that crop can be dedicated to non food uses? How much energy (electric, liquid fuels, methane, etc.) can be generated from that surplus biomass? We would then have a target to shoot for in conservation of energy and replacement of existing transportation systems.
I think there are opportunities in these directions but they all fall apart if not underpined by conservation. Reduction in current energy usage, especially transportation fuel, has to be the start of the process. Not some after thought, that people are expected to do on their own.
Precisely.
And, I suspect, it's going to take more than conservation. If current trends continue, the U.S. population will be 45% higher by 2050. Peak oil aside, by 2020, the U.S. and Canada, the last remaining major food exporters, will be consuming all the food that they produce. We have some tough choices to make.
Being the biggest exporter does not mean you are the biggest producer. I am trying to do a little research on the largest producers in various foods. I suspect that Russia and China will excel in some areas, even though as in the case of China, their production may not meet their needs in some areas.
Consider the following:
"U.S. processed food imports grew 5.9 percent in 2000 to a record high of $36.8 billion. In the same year, U.S. processed food exports grew 4.0 percent to $30 billion. The $6.8 billion trade deficit in 2000 marked the third consecutive year of progressively larger processed food trade deficits for the United States."
http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/FoodReview/septdec01/
The issue is far more complicated than the above; nonetheless it does reveal that we are not quite in the cat bird's seat.
I agree with Leenan and wouldn't be surprised if the Brazilian cane-sugar program depends on the slash/burn paradigm: you get one or several free-rides before the tilth, health, and nutrition of the soil gives out and the energy return ins subsequent crops decrease below the new and necessary energy input required to grow the crop.
Again, I am sorry to disperse my opinions like this.
peter
I want to say this respectfully but I think you are engaged in non-productive naysaying. It's easy enough to do.
We simply must make a switch to biofuels and/or nuclear power. From what little I've read about Switchgrass it sounds like a wonderful plant for the production of cellulosic ethanol. The carbon and hydrogen extracted from the plant mass leave behind the trace minerals required for keeping the soil viable - they can be recycled. We may well be able to genetically modify Switchgrass to fix nitrogen itself or we can intersperse legumes with the Switchgrass. If not that then something else. It's a tractable problem.
The point here is that we've got a major problem and when a suggestion like Switchgrass comes up I think we can do better than wring our hands and talk about why it JUST CAN'T WORK IN THE LONG RUN. Hell, in the long run we're dead. If we can get something going that gets us through the next twenty years I'll be fine with that.
It will require fertilizer if you harvest it and turn into biofuel. In the wild, it dies and grows back, endlessly recycling nutrients. As most farmers grow it, it's forage - again, recycled.
If we can get something going that gets us through the next twenty years I'll be fine with that.
I won't. I take a longer and broader view. Sure, we could live it up for the rest of my life. Heck, we could probably take food from the mouths of children in Africa and make into fuel for our SUVs. We probably will. But I'm not fine with it. I will never be fine with it.
If you do the numbers on the efficiency of capturing sunlight through switchgrass and ethanol, I think you'll find out that it is way better than photovoltaics, at least in temperate climate. And the beauty of ethanol is you can store it indefinitely and use it for an extraordinary variety of purposes. And when all else fails . . . chug-a-lug.
If you do the numbers on the efficiency of capturing sunlight through switchgrass and ethanol, I think you'll find out that it is way better than photovoltaics, at least in temperate climate.
I don't doubt that. I'm not in favor of photovoltaics, either. At least, not in the long run.
Seriously Don, you should probably try to be at least a little less confrontational. This is a casual blog.
Back when I worked for the USDA, they were experimenting with growing switchgrass and other perennial, warm-season grasses were being tested as an optional forage crop (and for other reasons). I'll see if I can dig up some numbers for you guys to jaw over.
My dad used to work for the USDA, too. He's got a PhD in plant physiology. I remember him bringing home those blocks of surplus cheese - one of the perks of working for the USDA. :)
FWIW, here's a link I picked up a few days ago:
http://www.agmrc.org/agmrc/commodity/biomass/switchgrass/
It seems to be a good jumping off point ...
Cooperating producers and the project field coordinator oversee more than 4,000 acres of switchgrass, and have learned many ways to improve establishment and management of this crop. In general, the use of frost seeding, relatively high rates of pure live seed per acre, and early season weed control have contributed to improved switchgrass establishment. They also hope to show the benefits of combining the production of a corn crop during the initial year of switchgrass.
The use of fertilizer varies with soil, yield and time of harvest, but has commonly included at least 100 pounds of nitrogen per acre and maintenance rates for phosphorus and potassium. Some work has been done to grow legumes with the switchgrass crop as a source of nitrogen.
Harvest typically begins after the first killing frost in October when the grass moisture content is 15 percent or less. Yields can be 30 percent greater at this time than if harvest is delayed until later in the winter or spring.
And harvesting no doubt takes heavy equipment, too.
1) Switchgrass (Panicum virgatum L.) does not require nitrogen fertilizers. It will grow without it in almost any appropriate soil, even marginal soil.
[My commentary: Note that this is not "anywhere", as some have argued. It is a prairie grass, and will grow where any prairie grass will. Marginal soils are often used for the growing of non-food crops, such as cotton].
2) Switchgrass yields were very dependent on nitrogen fertilizer applications (475lb/acre typical), as well as recommended amounts of phosphorous (30lb/acre typical), potassium (40lb/acre typical), and lime (varied by field pH) and pesticides.
Herbacide (atrazine) was also sometimes used.
Some plots were grown without any of the above.
- Yields from adjoining plots ranged from around 1.5 tons/acre for untreated plots to nearly 6 tons/acre for fully treated plots.
- Initial trials suggest that 79 gallons of ethanol can be produced per dry ton of switchgrass grown.
This info came from:"Cultivar and Fertility Effects on Switchgrass
Biofuel Production in Southern
Iowa. Lemus, R., Iowa State University, Ames. 2000.
"Economic Feasibility of Growing Herbaceous
Biomass Energy Crops in Iowa," Park, Iowa State University, Ames. 1996.
"Management Guide for the Production of Switchgrass for Biomass Fuel in Southern Iowa", Teel, Barnhart and Miller, ISU Extension, PM 1710, Ames, Iowa. 1997.
"The Conservation Reserve Program as a Means to Subsidize Bioenergy Crop Prices." Walsh, Becker, and Graham. 1996.
"Field Scale Evaluation of Switchgrass Grown As A Bioenergy Crop In The Northern Plains.", Vogel, Schmer, Perrin, Moser, and Mitchell, (conducted by the North Dakota State University Central Grasslands Research Extension Center). 2002.
"Building on Biomass", by Larry Reichenberger, 2003. (Article in 'The Furrow', John Deere magazine on ARS biomass energy research at Lincoln, NE).
What are we waiting for?
For example, metropolitan Atlanta claims more than 50 acres A DAY.
"The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that in just the five years between 1992 and 1997 the nation lost 12.8 million acres of agricultural land: cropland (5.3 million acres), pastureland (6.1 million acres), rangeland (1.4 million acres).
Agricultural land also succumbs to forces other than urban development. Arable land is subject to manmade and natural phenomena such as soil erosion, salinization, and waterlogging that can rob its productivity and eventually force its abandonment.
Much of these losses are due to over-exploitation by intensive agricultural practices needed to constantly raise agricultural productivity (yield per acre) in order to provide ever more food for America's and the world's growing populations."
Source:
http://www.numbersusa.com/interests/farmland.html
"Ohio is losing its productive farmland at an astonishing rate. According to the U.S. Census of Agriculture, Ohio had approximately 21 million acres of land in farms in 1950. By 2002, there were 14 million acres of farmland in Ohio." - Ohio Department of Agriculture
"Our food supply is threatened by development. Eighty-six percent of our fruits and vegetables and 63 percent of our dairy products are produced on the edge of urban areas. The United States is losing two acres of farmland every minute, according to the American Farmland Trust. The rate of loss was 51 percent faster in the 90s than in the 80s. Washington State lost nearly 10,000 prime acres a year between 1992 and 1997 at a rate 30 percent faster than during the previous five years. We're losing the most fertile and productive land most quickly." - American Farmland Trust
Oh well.
I just wanted to make it clear for the die-hard Greens who see switchgrass as our salvation when the oil runs out. Biomass will play a role, to be sure, but a fairly small one, primarily on a local level.
I forsee a hell of a lot of coal to liquid facilities being built in the next 10 years. And of course, since they will be cheaper than biofuels (ignoring the environmental costs as we always do), biofuels will only survive because of subsidies.
As for your coal-to-liquid plans, do you think ten years is a reasonable timeframe? How many such plants do we have now? Even if we could build the infrastructure in 10 years (which is doubtful) where would we get the designing engineers, the management, the operations staff, and the experience to put it together?
So tell me, what's not to like here?
That's good, but it's bound to up as we keep harvesting it. That's what happens with any crop.
As ever, scaling-up is the problem.
No. But we will be forced to choose between fuel and food. And I know which I'd choose.
- Corn cobs and stover.
- Switchgrass or Miscanthus Giganticus grown on marginal or erodible land.
- Woody or herbacious material harvested from bioremediation crops (e.g. contaminated with heavy metals).
For that matter, chicken takes 2 pounds of feed per pound of bird to beef's 8; switching to chicken would save 3/4 of the grain input and allow it to be used for other things. You could get twice as much chicken for half as much grain, assuming that you consider chicken to be food. You could convert the excess grain to fuel, or use the freed land to grow biofuels.What I worry about is whether the market, such as it will be, will induce farmers to plant large tracts of potential vehicle fuel at the expense of potential heating fuel or food.
Will Trump refrain from flying his helicopter just so others can have a ration of beans?
We haven't prevented spot famine and deprivation during a half-century of plenty, how can we expect it post-peak?
I'm on record as being opposed to fuel ethanol because of the low conversion efficiency (read the blog). I am in favor of conversion of biomass to charcoal, which is harder to transport but has far more potential as a high-efficiency fuel and as a chemical feedstock.
Nice personal attack.
I am in favor of conversion of biomass to charcoal, which is harder to transport but has far more potential as a high-efficiency fuel and as a chemical feedstock.
That model removes the carbon from the soil, not to mention all the micro and macro nutrients. And because you like combining the carbon with zinc in many of your models, the price of zinc would go WAY up, given worldwide populations and energy demand.
The plan works fine, until you try to scale it. Then, the plan breaks down - hard.
Using perennial biomass crops with large, deep rhizomes and root structures (such as switchgrass or Miscanthus) would increase soil carbon over cropping with annuals.
And this addresses the carbon that leaves the land in the 'make carbon fuel cells/make zinc-carbon batteries' to some processing plant model exactly how?
Because I've seen pointers to your carbon-power plan, but I've NEVER seen you work the numbers for the actual carbon loss from the LAND vs carbon taken from the air.
Using perennial biomass crops with large, deep rhizomes and root structures (such as switchgrass or Miscanthus) would increase soil carbon over cropping with annuals.
The REASON farmers cover crop with ANNUALS is to not have to have farm machernery work as hard as when they want a food crop VS have to try and kill off PERENNIALS when they want to change crops.
You make a broad claim about increasing the soil carbon, but is that due to recycling of the dead grass at the top, or is that Carbon from the air now placed in the roots? Please feel free to addess the actual carbon flow and the effect of removal of carbon to make fuel cells/batteries without ever replacing the carbon back to the land itself.
But - Is there a reason that you have chosen to NOT address the loss of other elements from the land in the 'lets make carbon fuel cells/batteries' model?
All a matter of perceptions and perspectives . . . .
Offering up 'the plan' as 'save us all' IS EXACLTY the issue.
Plans like 'carbonize the plants, there is enough land' or 'make booze for cars' or 'the hydrogen economy' is usually offered up as 'save everyone'.
The diet of cheap oil has made the chief consumer a pig, and have created a set of unsutainable demand profile.
The cheap oil is comming to an end and a fear for how our fellow man will react is why most of us are here.
Thank you writing your "Politics and the English Language Essay." Where are you, now that we need you?
Were I on board the Titanic at dinner in the First Class section with the Captain, and had I noticed the messages he was getting from the radio room in regard to ice bergs, I would have punched him in the nose or stabbed him with a fork or done something else to disable him, because the guy was criminally irresponsible. For one thing he had the engines going flat out, despite pleas from the Chief Engineer to let them be broken in at lower revs. For another, he would have known better (had he been sober) and reduced speed to "Slow ahead" or stopped for the night, had he been in his right mind. He was not.
Once the ice berg sliced open the hull, it would have made sense to man the life boats immediately, even before a call to abandon ship. Note that by the time the berg was sighted, there was NO WAY WHATSOEVER to save everybody on board. Sometimes we must recognize unpleasant facts and deal with them as best we can. Rhetoric does not make reality go away.
Sorry I'm so late with that reference. That report is referenced in the Science article reconsidering whether ethanol is energy positive or negative. I have to say, having read the study and report I'm still quite skeptical. To see why, do a search in the report for "drought". You'll find one hit, "None of the scenarios consider the possibility that technology could overcome yield limitations caused by drought and pests or increase nutrient use efficiency." This sounds to me as though they are completely ignoring the climate change predictions of more drought and heavy precipitation events. But, as usual, technology will solve these drought problems.
I can imagine a day in the future when we have moved a significant percentage of our transportation fuels to biofuels, only to be hit by a multi-year drought that drastically reduces biomass production. We already have farmers giving up irrigation because the high cost of natural gas to fuel their pumps makes it uneconomic.
The 'getting on your nerves' is because he is right, and others have tried to point out to you and all the others 'lets grow grass' or 'lets use tree waste' proposals is:
WHEN DO YOU RETURN THE 'WASTE' TO THE SOIL?
At the point where one can obtain/use one of the grass->liquid fuel processes on 40 acres so that the waste doesn't leave the land AND be able to turn a profit in 5 years, then it is a viable idea.
Otherwise - it is a bad long-term plan.
You feel your nerve being pinched because part of your brain KNOWS it is a bad long term plan.
Please list the following sources of bio-fuel which threaten to leave you without food:
1. Corn cobs and stover.
If the cobs are shipped off to a large processing plant and the 'cob waste' is not returned, after years of doing such you WILL have 'no food'.
2. Switchgrass or Miscanthus Giganticus grown on marginal or erodible land.
What a great plan! Lets base the energy resource on marginal crop yeilds! Marginal land means marginal energy production.
In such an energy proposal, erodable land won't survive the mechnical harvesting of the grasses.
If the energy crop on the land doesn't come in, the taxes on the land are STILL due, and tax demands will result in poor planing over time in many cases.
3. Woody or herbacious material harvested from bioremediation crops (e.g. contaminated with heavy metals).
Now HERE is a workable idea. So long as society decides that the energy needed to seperate contaminates from useful product in the output is worth the energy. Thus far, the track record when there is abundant energy to do such hasn't been so good.
Your three points are nice grass-straw men.
What will end up happening in a grass->liquid fuel model is:
www.maproyalty.com/stanford/6-15-05.html
www.ars.usda.gov/is/AR"archive/feb01/bank0201.pdp
www.nrpb.org/papers/034.pdf
The above sources are all free and reputable and provide links to other respected sources of infomation.
Now, I would like to see some sources that claim to refute the well-documented findings cited above. And if there are none to be found, that will be as interesting as the dog that did not bark in the night.
Two of those links are 404. The one that does work does not lead to a peer-reviewed study, but to a "news abstract" of a report written by politicians, George P. Shultz and R. James Woolsey.
It's an article on sequestering carbon in agricultural soils. It doesn't say that much about switchgrass, except this paragraph:
It's interesting, but since that estimate is based on R&D in progress, it doesn't amount to more than an educated guess (along the lines of "someday, fusion will solve all of our energy problems.") That is also only one location, so it doesn't really say anything about the overall resource or whether it could be managed sustainably.
Chris
Wind power is pretty good up to supplying about 15% of total power to a grid, after than you run into huge problems from interruptibility.
For your information:
In 2005 wind turbines produced 17% of the electricity consumption in Denmark. On a windy day the turbines would produce maybe 50% of the total power with no problem. Within a few years the wind energy production is expected to increase to 25% with 50% as a longer time goal. The problems from 'interuptibility' are not considered 'huge' but as a technical challenge :-)
Perhaps the model of 'electrical power all the time' is the issue?
Perhaps the level of expectation is unacceptable?
That is a damn shame,
Yup. Damn broken models.
Apparently if we have a less than perfect solution you're not interested in even considering it. You'd better start looking around because that's not the world we live in. Every solution produces new problems - it's in the nature of things. The best we can do is try to come up with practical solutions that create immediate and manageable problems (read Switchgrass) vs: long term and expensive problems (read conventional Nuclear). I'd much rather we move toward biofuels than nuclear energy but I think we'll need both if we wish to make a gradual transition to lower energy utilization.
I assert that we all should heartily endorse and encourage the use of alternative, hardy crops like Switchgrass and Hemp. With Hemp we can solve our natural fiber problem and the Marijuana problem in one stroke. Hemp cross breeds like crazy with Cannabis (Marijuana) and diminishes its potency. Put one field of industrial grade Hemp next to a field of high grade Pot plants and you'll turn them into rope material in two generations. Takes a lot of selective breeding to make good drugs.
It ain't perfect or even a very pretty world but it's what I have to work with and work with I shall. Energy harvest is the name of game where life is concerned. If we want to live in a world of plenty we're going to have to work very hard and keep a good attitude toward the many challenges. Stuart, to my way of thinking, has exactly that kind of approach. Quantitative, analytical, practical and modest.
If we assume nitrogen fixation is handled by legumes or genetic mods and that the trace minerals left behind after distillation or burning are returned to the soil, do you have any further objections? What about that approach is not long term? The only things we are extracting are hydrogen, carbon and oxygen. Those do not come from the soil. The hydrogen comes from water. Carbon, Oxygen and Nitrogen come from the air.
I think growing more biofuel means growing less food. We will not be able to produce enough of both. Unless we import crops from other countries.
You'd better start looking around because that's not the world we live in. Every solution produces new problems - it's in the nature of things.
Exactly. Complexity has an energy cost. In the long run, we are going to have reduce our level of complexity.
FWIW, I'd be more inclined to support nuclear power than biofuels. The numbers are better for nuclear.
Though in the long run, I don't think nuclear is sustainable, either. Mining in general is going to a lot harder without cheap oil, uranium mining included.
The energy cost is barely related to the amount of complexity. Look at computers--the most complex things we've built. They use so little energy that we'll still be able to use them post-peak.
http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2005/12/10/121435/96#8
Chris
IOW, not just the power to run the computer, but the energy it takes to support the societal complexity that allows computers to be made and used. The energy it takes to the mine and refine materials, educate the people to design and manufacture it, all the other industries that have to support it, the coordination between the all the different people working on it, the military that protects the overseas factories, etc.
For most of human history, people more or less produced what they ate. Few people had the luxury of specializing in something other than foraging or farming. A hundred years ago, 97% of Americans were farmers. Now it's the opposite: 3% of Americans are farmers, and they support the rest of us. Oil made that possible.
How fast can you pedal?
Suppose that energy gets ten times as expensive, and drives up the cost of products in proportion (which is pessimistic). Then the price of a cheap computer will go up from $500 to... $5000, which is probably less (in adjusted dollars) than a PC cost when they first came out. And the cost of energy to run that cheap computer will go up from $.02 per hour to $0.20 per hour. And after a few years of $5000 computers, someone would come out with a 500-MHz machine running an efficient operating system that cost a lot less to make because it was built with 1999 requirements and 2009 technology.
Think about how valuable Wikipedia would be in a post-crash scenario. Think about how valuable email will be if the postal service starts charging $3.00 per letter. (Oh, wait, no one sends "snail mail" letters anymore; computers are already saving resources.)
Think about the fact that Intel only sells $10 billion a year of computer chips, compared to a US GDP of $12 trillion. Computer chips are even more super-cheap than $20/barrel oil in terms of the value they can generate. At the same time, if you took 50% of the transistors out of a computer, you'd hardly notice unless you were a hardcore game-player.
Heh, while researching this post, I found this great factoid: "Power dissipation can be reduced as much as 50% simply by designing the chip to operate 10% to 20% slower."
http://www.linleygroup.com/columns/nikkei0104.html
In one of the previous threads where I've discussed this, I pointed out that a single grain of rice could purchase hundreds of transistors. Someone responded that they didn't want to be in a position of choosing between transistors and grains of rice. That's a pointless comment, because it completely misses the point that only a hardcore apocalypticon would predict a future where people can't afford to buy a few million transistors. You don't sound like an apocalypticon. If you don't want me to decide that you're a crypto-apocalypticon, please either quit arguing or argue with numbers. (But first read the previous thread; the numbers are already there, and they agree with me.)
Sorry if I sound pushy. I really want to avoid a long drawn-out discussion that would pit doom-ism against optimism. The alternative is to have a discussion with actual numbers. That's already been done; see my link above. Either confront the numbers, or quit the discussion--or I will.
Chris
Sure, Wikipedia is worth a lot. But as the economy slows and we all become poorer, people will start dropping off the Internet. They can't afford the ISP fees, say, or their computer breaks or is stolen, and they aren't going to pay $5,000 for a new one - not when they're having trouble paying for food and heat. Maybe the power system becomes unreliable, and you're never sure you'll be able to get to a given Web site. People who have been hosting Web sites at their own expense can no longer afford to do so. Companies who were dependent on banner ads go belly-up. Eventually, so many people and Web sites drop off the net that Internet access becomes worth less and less. Wikipedia goes dark. Or is taken over by the government and filled with propaganda. Even the people who can afford Internet access don't bother with it. ISPs start dying. Computers don't sell very well, so companies who make them go out of business. Sure, the knowledge of how to make them remains, at least for a few generations, but computers are considered toys by then.
- Explain how your scenario does not lead to massive dieoff;
- Admit that you're talking a massive dieoff scenario.
While you're asking me to consider the big picture, you consider it too. If we don't have the know-how and technology to make even minimal computers, then we probably can't make and ship fertilizer either. And we probably don't have weather forecasting. Or any of the other things that allow mass agriculture to feed six billion people.I agree that in a massive dieoff scenario, we probably wouldn't have computers or infrastructure. In fact, we'd probably Easter-Island several of our continents on our way down.
Now, what about a muddling-through scenario? Can we agree that if we manage to keep enough technology to avert more than, say, a gigadeath, then we will also have computers--and the computers will be affordable and useful?
Chris
Now, what about a muddling-through scenario? Can we agree that if we manage to keep enough technology to avert more than, say, a gigadeath, then we will also have computers--and the computers will be affordable and useful?
No, I actually believe the opposite. We will be forced to choose between maintaining our population and maintaining our technology. Stanton caused a ruckus, but I think he is essentially right. We can maintain a lot of people in abject poverty, or a few people with a decent standard of living.
In short, I think it's likely we will lose our technology in order to avert a dieoff.
But advanced technology is not the same thing as a high rate of resource consumption. A fraction of todays factories could build repairable gadgets and tools that lasts for generations before recycling. But they will produce much more then that as long as we can afford it. It is mostly up to individual people to buy things that last and can be recyceld.
I understand that. But it's cheap and abundant energy that supports that technology.
My idea of the best-case scenario is that we gradually scale back - population and technology. So there's no dieoff, just a gradual decrease.
I don't see us "abandoning" technology so much as relinquishing it, little by little, as we no longer need it or can no longer afford it.
Cheap and abundant energy supports the massive use of technology for mass manufacturing of goods. We do not have to give up technology if we for instance give up mass manufacturing of SUV:s for distribution trucks and scooters. Or railways and bicycles.
I think they do. Again, I'm not talking about just the energy they consume by existing, but the larger picture.
A hundred years ago, 97% of Americans were farmers. Today, it's reversed: 3% of Americans are farmers, and they feed the rest of us. It's oil that has allowed that. For most of human history, it has been very difficult to support the kind of societal complexity that allows a lot of people to work as specialists who do not directly produce things.
I'm reminded of my old high school, which was in what used to be a very rural area. The old-timers remembered when the school was open through summer, and closed for three months in the fall. The kids were needed to work the farms during harvest, so the school changed the usual vacation time to accommodate the farmer's schedule. Nevertheless, many kids ended up dropping out. They were needed to work the family farm, and a lot of families saw school as a waste of time.
Now, I don't think we're all suddenly going to go back to the land. But we'll be gradually pushed to it, by socioeconomic forces.
Only a small fraction is needed for the farming equipment manufacturers and so on. You probably get more work done if you grow feed for methane fermentation tanks then for horses.
I suspect that at least 3/4 of all people is not needed for anything at all for our technological culture exept keeping each other company and at best producing company and culture for the other 1/4. Having more people also increases the ammount of random bright or genious people but that may not make much of a difference when there is billions of us and we have good communications.
On the other hand, farming by hand could be a great way to keep those 3/4 busy with work and thus increase their quality of life. Perhaps by keeping the weeds out of vegetables? During wintertime people can for instance make hand crafted furniture and other things where precission and identical results is not essential.
I think there's probably an optimal balance, that gets you enough people maintain a certain amount of complexity, but not so many we are facing Malthusian limits. Getting there and staying there is a whole different question, of course.
On the other hand, farming by hand could be a great way to keep those 3/4 busy with work and thus increase their quality of life.
That's it exactly. The economics will change. It will become more reasonable to use manual laborers than to buy farm equipment and fuel for it.
During the Great Depression, the U.S. suffered the most because we were the most industrialized. Many of the people living in the city fled to the country. They went to live with relatives who farmed, because on a farm, you at least had food, and wood for heat. I think we might quickly reach the point where a job on a farm in exchange for food and board seems like a good deal.
I think Tainter is right: we are already facing diminishing returns on technology. That is, we are getting less and less return on our investments in science and technology. This is natural; the lowest fruit is picked first. I'm sure there are still lots of new discoveries to be made, but we will have to work a lot harder for them, and they will give us fewer benefits than previous discoveries have. Over 90% of the scientists who have ever lived on earth are alive now, but we aren't making the kind of technological "progress" we did in the first half of the 20th century. I just don't see how we will be able to continue on this path when the cheap oil is gone.
Now, that doesn't mean we're suddenly be back to the Stone Age. It does mean we will have to make some choices. In fact, I think we already are. The Bush adminstration has slashed funding for scientific research - except for military-related research.
75% work by hand and then we have tractors, internet, electricity, nuclear powerplants, satellite weather forcasts and nerds running supercomputer climate simulations. It might even give healthier lifestyles.
I think most farmers rather have one tractor then 50 people doing the work by hand and methane fermentation equipment powering the tractor is much easier to feed. But getting rid of weeds replaces pesticides that may have bad side effects and you might even put the weeds into the fermentation tank.
Tiny little Sweden will probably choose to build infrastructure, technology demonstrators and do research. A ramp up of weapons research and production and defence force build up will probably not happen untill we get more immediate threaths. This is a little sad from a pure tecnology nerd perspective since Gripen is probably the last Swedish jet fighter. It is very nice to have USA as a friend and if arms is your speciality you better be good at it. We will be happy to sell iron ore, speciality steel (Swedish steel exports were almost unhurt by the US tarrifs since most of the export were extreme high performing steels not manufactured in USA. ), telecommunications equipment and other technical stuff including weapons from the arms manufacturers you own in Sweden. We will probably do our best to not use any oil at all thus leaving more for other countries.
I would, too. But I greatly fear a dieoff in countries like India as oil gets scarcer. I don't think they will be high-tech for very long.
I think most farmers rather have one tractor then 50 people doing the work by hand and methane fermentation equipment powering the tractor is much easier to feed.
Probably, but eventually the day will come when there are no tractors available.
I could also see the government confiscating farmland, and putting the poor to work on it. As a replacement for welfare and food stamps.
Some countries will definitely do better than others. European countries might do fairly well. A lot of their infrastructure was build before oil, and they could go back with relatively little pain (compared to the U.S.). Many European countries have very low birthrates, even shrinking populations, which will probably help, too (unless there's a war). And there's the more socialist outlook in general.
I think Japan may do well, too. They are very aware of environmental issues. Though the population is much higher than it was in the pre-industrial days, they have a low and falling birthrate. Being an island will probably help. (I have a feeling immigration is going to be a huge issue in the early part of the post-carbon age.)
But why? The farmer can produce more with it and can thus pays for it and its spare parts. Having a tractor on the farm makes more resources available and that supports the tractor manufacturer. Why should all the tractor industries, nuclear powerplants, etc curl up and die when they make stuff usefull? These machines can not be replaced with bare hands. (Well of course, the tractor can be replaced with bare hands if there is a lot less people to feed. )
If our technological economy contracts with an outragous 90% I assume that the remaining 10% will be extraordinary valuble and anything will be done to keep it going. About 10% would not be that hard to run on hydro power, nuclear power, biomass, etc.
The engine takes in any kind of plants, and puts out electricity, heat, ashes, water and carbon dioxide. The ashes go on the ground which is grateful to get them back, and the rest goes into the atmosphere from whence it came.
We will guarantee this hermetically sealed engine to last your lifetime with NO MANTENANCE and not terminate either itself or you prematurely. Note the nice forest green color. Very symbolic if you get my meaning. What am I bid?
There's an interesting un-referenced claim over at Wikipedia right now: "Although there were complaints of a "smell" coming from the plant, complaints were still being placed even when the plant wasn't operating. The complaints stopped when the complainers were identified. Investigators are looking into the case believing that the tipsters were biofuel competitors to the TCP plant."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization
Chris
In any case, I think the inefficiency is more of a problem than the smell. They could always put the plant out in the middle of nowhere. If it could really produce $15 a barrel oil, it would be worth it. But for $80/barrel oil - probably not. At least, not yet.
Did you know that one of the causes of failure of tractors is over-maintenance?
No sale anyhow? Curses, foiled again. Maybe should learn Mandarin
If I had money and I could see your engine work, test it and read thru your documentation I would buy a distribution licence and a couple for resale. I would probably rebuild it for wood pellet fiering as a miniture stationary combined heat and power engine.
No, I have never heard about over-maintainance of tractors. But I know that sloppy work letting dirt get inside hydraulic systems is a problem.
I would recommend you to scrap your fridge and buy a new one that uses far less electricity.
You can use any working gas, but hydrogen 'raises' the engine efficency is all.
One 'plan' had a 1hp engine, made from pressed metal and using Nitrogen and costing $89 in container load quanities existed.
http://www.omachron.com/ was the designer but blames events of 2001-09-11 on why the engine didn't happen.
Now, would you prefer racing stripes, or no?
Sounds wonderful, but I can't afford it. Also, aside from my old New Idea manure spreader and a grain auger, there is no equipment on my farm that this tractor can handle. So, how much bigger would one that can produce 110kW have to be and what would it cost?
And it is quite true that hydrogen works well. Indeed, best. However it tends to wander thru the hot metal, one proton being much like another. On the other hand, this process is slow,and a little juice diverted to pulling water apart will more than make up for the leak.
As for cost, one piece of iron is also much like another one, except that these things need some high temp metal, but not much of it, so multiply your diesel cost by maybe 1.3 and you have a generous estimate. (mass production, of course). then you factor in the fuel, global warming, government actions on fossil fuels and so on as we all know so well, and you are way ahead.
And just for you, kind customer, the racing stripes are free!
Thanks anyway and good luck.
For the information of those who have not had Botany 1 or the equivalent in college, lots of plants do not require any nitrogen fertilizer at all, e.g. legumes. Others will yield more if you add more nitrogen (like switch grass), but they do not really need it. Corn and some other plants that produce a lot of protein (which is nitrogen rich) do require a heckuva lot of nitrogen. But holy smokes, we are drowning in manure in many rural areas. Also a historical note: Soils fertilized with natural manures have retained their fertility for up to 5,000 years of intensive cultivation in some cases. The trick is not to ruin your topsoil with salinization from improper irrigation or use inappropriate soils for plow agriculture, as was done before the Dust Bowl era.
Sustainable agriculture is something that many human cultures have figured out how to do.
Drying uses copious quantities of natural gas.
"While peanuts require less nitrogen fertilizer in the field, the harvested crop does require the use of natural gas in the drying process. Boyd said the cost of drying peanuts has increased nearly $4 per ton costing their operation an additional $4,000 in drying costs last year."
I used to work for USDA/APHIS (Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service), and guess what we did there?
http://www.gfb.org/gfbnews/april_05/april3.htm
In this case the key is the resource required - the land. Currently it may seem a good idea to devote some land to ethanol and biofuels. Ok, I'm for that, the economics looks OK, even the EROEI should be higher than 1.34 IMO (more like 3-4). But you can not envision what type of problems this could lead to, in a post peak society if things start getting desparate... Can you guarantee for example that we will not cut down our forests to grow switchgrass? I can not... That's why I'd rather encourage us emphasizing on the other alternatives while we still have the resources to do it, instead of betting huge amount of them on a potential timebomb. If we are going to make biofuels and ethanol they must be a part of the solution, and we must make sure that they remain only a part of it, and also a controllable part.
P.S. Disclaimer: as a person that grew in a village I am brought up with... you may call close to a religious attitude towards land; using it to grow fuel instead of feeding people feels to me as a sin. Hope I'm wrong about that.
I'm all for transition strategies, but ultimately the only solution is a massive reduction of our consumption to a sustainable level.
Isn't that the type of thinking that got us into this mess in the first place?
[quote]
There is a limiting factor. It's called soil fertility. We can't just withdraw it from the bank.
[/quote]
I thought one could just put the leftovers back on the field. Or with corn, feed it to animals and then put the manure on the fields. Basically you are fermenting sugars/starches and the rest is cellulose/trace minerals. Ethanol is hydrogen carbon and oxygen. Nitrogen can come from clovers/legume rotations. But on a large scale it would require a huge amount of land at current demand. Only if we get the demand down a lot would it work longer term.
There won't be much in the way of leftovers if we're turning stalks and grass into fuel.
Though certainly, recycling can help. In the old days, manure was a valuable commodity. They didn't just throw it away like they do now. We can definitely improve there.
True. There should be at least minerals let over since EtOH is C H and O.
Look at the Amish. They rather buy hay from off the farm than grain since hay adds so much bulk to the fields than grain. If they have to choose, grow the grain and buy hay to feed horses.
I remember reading about England having to buy hay from else where to feed their horses, this was around 1900 before oil/cars took over. They could not grow enough for themselves (transportation & food). (peak hay? :) )
No-till corn farmers already have to remove much of the stover from the field because it interferes with warming the soil in spring (reference: Corn Stover Collection Project). The potash and potassium removed will wind up in the non-fuel products and can be returned; nitrogen will be removed in the grain as well as the stover and has to be made up some other way. Fortunately there is enough biomass in stover that only a fraction is enough to make fertilizer to replace the nitrogen (gasify biomass, steam-reform to hydrogen, use hydrogen in Haber process to make ammonia).
I won't post this for the third time, unless Heading Out wants to. The post is down the way(SOTU Open Thread 3).
this forum still do not get it and
maintain the view that ethanol and
biodiesel are feasible for mass
transport, so I will repeat. The
energy return on energy invested
is pathetic and can easily fall into
negative territory. There is not
enough land on the planet to provide
more that a pittance of fuel. Without
fertiliser inputs (which are based
on cheap oil and gas) the entire
system must inevitably fall over.
Hydrogen is incredibly difficult to
make and to store. It usually has
an energy return of about 0.7.
Clean burning coal is an oxymoron.
There is nothing in the Bush 'plan'
that is even worth discussing,
except from the aspect of how to milk
the system and make some short term
cash from government subsidies.
The whole speach was as much a
fabrication and fantasy as the
speaches about Iraqis attacking the
US on 9/11, the fabrications about
Weapons Of Mass Destruction, the
speach about nobody being able to
foresee the failure of levees....
It was all designed to keep the
American public misinformed about
reality and the future, so business
confidence will be maintianed and
consumers will keep spening money
they don't have. And to provide a
system to siphon more public money
into the coffers of already wealthy
energy companies.
Some regions and countries can replace most of their fossil fuel use with biomass. That leaves a little more for the rest of the world. That is the least the regions that got the resources can do.
What surprises me is that the sums were so small. USA is a huge and rich country, why dont you do much more?
Because our government really doesn't mean it. This was all just lip service. In the end it is big business that runs the US and there is still lots of money to be made in hydrocarbons. Is that shortsighted? Of course, but business rarely looks ahead more than two quarters nor behind by more than same quarter last year.
This is a very common myth that does not withstand even basic strutiny. Most significant capital expenditures cost money over the short-term and produce value over the long-term. Companies still make these investments and the market rewards them for those that it deems wise (ie. will earn returns above their cost of capital).
Or look at Google. What percentage of the value of that firm can be attributed to the next two quarter or even two years? And what percent can be attributed to long-term? The answer is that the company and market are looking almost exclusively long-term.
As for Google, I think you have been mislead, the folks buying that (non-dividend) stock are playing a lottery and hoping for immediate payoffs. That's why when they announced the other day that they had made record profits, "investors" started dumping the stock. Why? because while they made much more than ever before they did not make as much as the analysts had predicted.
And it goes on from there...one of the longer format Editorial pages in recent memory.
Of course, this gets back to the supply problem and the question about conservation: it's not going to be enough to switch to another fuel source, since it does not seem that there's anything out there that compares to oil for EROEI. And so we return to hoping that most important interpretation of the "we're addicted to oil" message is the one that gets through.
Interesting...
http://energy.cr.usgs.gov/other/npra/
And I argree completely with the comments about the curious lack of discussion about conservation. Honestly, would Bush's tongue have snapped off and fallen out of his mouth if he'd said the word??? I think conservation is the perfect first step, and it's why when I re-designed my web site recently that I added sections on private activism (conservation) and public activism (political engagement). Even if we appeal to consumers with nothing loftier than, "Do these things and YOU*'LL SAVE MONEY," we should be able to kick-start a new interest in conservation. (I came up with the private activism name to avoid "conservation", since it has a passive, almost defeatist, implication for many people.)
I see biofuels as a critical mid-term bridge as we move mainstream transportation to electricity generated by renewables and nuclear power. What's mid-term? Probably from now (or very soon) until we have the electricity infrastructure and transportation technology needed to move a majority of non-commercial transportation off liquid fuels completely. Biofuels (especially cellulosic ethanol) will be very useful in minimizing the economic impact of peak oil, as well as keeping the vehicles rolling once the post-peak production declines kick in.
Lou,
That is my point exactly. We need a plan now to reduce consumption. We aren't going to just eliminate all the rolling stock from the highways 2 years after peak oil. Transition is all!
I'm all for a smooth transition. The question is, transition to what?
Your insistence that the personal car has to go suggests a socio-political agenda rather than a projection of energy trends. For that matter, so do your hysterics.
But I have a feeling I will be facing a career switch before I retire.
If DCFC's don't work then there's an alternative using zinc-air fuel cells.
Sharpen your pencil. I'll wait.
Zinc-air fuel cells have already powered a municipal bus in tests (see Electric Fuel's vehicle page), not sure about the electrode composition.
If you can't think of anything except hydrogen when someone mentions "fuel cell", you need to learn more. A LOT more.
There are basically two kinds of energy available to us: solar and nuclear. Solar is very diffuse, whether we gather it via solar panels or switchgrass or wind turbines. Oil is also solar energy, of course, but we don't have to do the gathering. Nature did that, over millions of years.
What that means is that we'll be working a lot harder for our food, clothing, heat, power, and other material goods. That means our standard of living must drop. More energy expended in gathering energy means less we can use to support our lifestyles.
Pierre Chomat, in his book Oil Addiction: The World In Peril uses the concept of "energy slaves." One gram of oil contains the amount of energy a manual laborer can produce in a day. Our standard of living is supported by these "energy slaves." We are barely conscious of how much energy we are using - the equivalent of having a hundred or more human slaves each. A plane load of tourists flying from California to see the Great Pyramid of Egypt consume as much energy as was used building it. Running a washing machine uses as much energy as it would take a crane to lift the entire house 20 feet into the air.
Yes, we can certainly get energy from sources other than petroleum. But it's going to be work, whatever method we choose.
Of those things I named, at least two of them cannot use ethanol in any way, shape or form (save perhaps as antifreeze). Ethanol won't get to the active zone of a direct-carbon fuel cell, and it doesn't react with zinc.
Congratulations, you just dismissed things that you did not even understand. You just know we're doomed, don't you?
Sez who? A hundred years ago we had to work a great deal harder for a much lower standard of living. The difference between then and now isn't what we've got, it's what we've learned. It's know-how, literally techno-logy.We can make buildings which need next to no energy for heating and lighting, today. We can engineer our crops to make their own nitrogen, today (I hear Monsanto has already done this with maize). Wind power is now cheaper than gas-fired. The same technology which converts whole plants to hydrocarbon fuel can turn them into chemical feedstocks.
If we can boost our efficiency to 80% using DCFC's, we can get more end-use energy out of bio-charcoal than we currently get from petroleum (elaboration and calculations). I notice that you didn't bother to read that before dismissing it either.
Does it now?My CRC lists #2 diesel at 19,110 BTU/lbm, which comes to about 44.4 kJ/gram. I've climbed a hill on my bicycle at a rate which I calculated as doing 148 watts of work against gravity; that's 44.4 kJ in 300 seconds. This laborer must be mighty lazy if it takes him all day to do what I can do in 5 minutes.
You have accepted nonsense as gospel, and repeated it uncritically. You should be ashamed.
Use your superior thermodynamic knowledge to tell us all how much availability is going to waste from the solar energy at its 5700 K spectrum falling on the average roof and being dissipated at ~350 K. Compare that to how much energy the household under that roof actually uses, after conversion losses.You might learn something.
I was speaking in general terms - about all alternatives, not the just the ones you named.
You just know we're doomed, don't you?
No, but as PaulS said near the end of this thread, I think there's either a lot of nuclear power or a lot of abject poverty in our future. Possibly both.
A hundred years ago we had to work a great deal harder for a much lower standard of living. The difference between then and now isn't what we've got, it's what we've learned. It's know-how, literally techno-logy.
I disagree. It's fossil fuels. We can do anything - as long as we have cheap and abundant energy.
My CRC lists #2 diesel at 19,110 BTU/lbm, which comes to about 44.4 kJ/gram. I've climbed a hill on my bicycle at a rate which I calculated as doing 148 watts of work against gravity; that's 44.4 kJ in 300 seconds. This laborer must be mighty lazy if it takes him all day to do what I can do in 5 minutes.
While is certainly is work in the physics sense to bike to the top of a hill, it's not work as far as a putative slave master would measure it (unless you are carrying something for him).
IIRC, Chomat's work was based on Buckminster Fuller's. (Fuller actually measured the amount of work that could be done by a human laborer, using army conscripts.) Chomat used digging for his standard. A human working all day to do what a bulldozer can do with one swipe.
Human legs are more efficient than human arms, so that may skew the results a bit. However, it was typical manual labor for much of U.S. history. ("Digging ditches" is still the derogatory term for manual labor, probably because the labor that can be done by human legs, even a hundred years ago, was better done by a horse or a team of oxen.)
Anyway, the energy slave calculations look something like this:
http://www.manicore.com/anglais/documentation_a/slaves.html
Use your superior thermodynamic knowledge to tell us all how much availability is going to waste from the solar energy at its 5700 K spectrum falling on the average roof and being dissipated at ~350 K. Compare that to how much energy the household under that roof actually uses, after conversion losses.
I don't have to. David Goodstein has already run the numbers. There are detailed thermodynamic analyses in his book, Out of Gas: the End of the Age of Oil.
And with that, I will stop responding to your posts. I have been perfectly civil to you, and don't quite understand why you're so upset. But people are clearly starting to become uncomfortable with the exchanges in this thread. For the good of the site, I think it best I simply no longer reply to you.
Now you're undergeneralizing, implying that if it's cheap and abundant, it must be fossil. That's false.
Take wind power. Of the top 20 states, the top 5 alone could produce 5520 billion kWh/year (630 GW average); the top 10, 9068 billion kWh/year (1035 GW average). Total US electric consumption for 2004 was a mere 3954.4 billion kWh (450 GW average).
It's strange, but I cannot recall you providing a single calculation or hyperlink other than the one above. You've certainly never done calculations when challenged to support an assertion.Since you won't, I will. The Carnot efficiency of an engine operating with T(source) at 5700 K and T(sink) at 350 K is (5700-350)/5700 or 0.9386. If you receive 1550 kWh/m^2/yr of sunlight on 100 m^2 of roof, the total available energy is about 145 megawatt-hours/year or 16.6 kW continuous. Compare this to:
- Average US electric consumption of 450 GW, or ~1.5 kW/capita.
- Total power use of US vehicles at the wheels, less than 200 GW average.
This is not pure pie in the sky. Recent developments with quantum dots have shown the possibility of PV conversion efficiencies of 60% to 65%. We may see 30+% at reasonable prices in the next few years. Few things are cheaper and more abundant than sunlight.Because you've been much less than honest and forthright, and I despise liars. Dishonesty and evasion are anything but civil. If you have facts to support your assertions, bring them to the table; if you have no facts, you have no business making noise.
There is nothing, nothing whatsoever that can penetrate the bullet-proof armor of invincible ignorance.
The ancient Greeks said it best:
"Against the stupidity of men, the gods themselves strive in vain."
Let us now ignore the invincibly ignorant.
Far better to refute it. And the armor that facts bounce off of is often pierced by sarcasm.
http://odograph.com/?p=335
(My calculation, like that made by some other net-folks, relies on the near equivalence in chemical energy of fossil fuel oils and food oils - that's what makes biodiesel cars get the same mpg as 'regular' diesels)
And though it seems otherwise to those trying to drop holiday pounds, living organisms are actually very inefficient. Much of the energy in the food we eat is wasted. It's thrown off as heat, it's used for basic maintenance (cell repair, digestion, circulation, etc.), it passes through undigested. It's not useful work (at least to a theoretical slave master).
Organisms and machines both do productive work, both throw off waste heat, and both generate exhausts of various sorts.
You may start with the assumption that a 100 year automobile evolution has produced a more efficient beast than an umpty-ump million year evolution of mammals ... but test it with a little math.
Compare as I did the efficiency of a man on a bike with a man in a biodiesel VW:
http://odograph.com/?p=334
?????
I am not making that assumption at all.
If you didn't mean in comparison to machines, how else could it have any meaning, particularly with regard to "ergamines"
I'm not sure if you got it, but in one of those linked pages I gave you I noted that food calories for humans are actually measured in a calorbomb-calorimeter and the similarity to explosion in an internal combustion engine is really quite remarkable.
Also, if you don't like my math on Chomat's Ergamine - go ahead and parse out this alternate calcuation:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bgoodsel/post911/2005/08/correction.htm
I meant in comparison to a perfect conversion - a universe in which the second law of thermodynamics does not exist. Where energy in does equal work out.
I was looking as both perform in the real world.
(a device that measures food calories by explosion/burning without "[violating] the second law of thermodynamics.")
You will need it to go back over your calculations.
Because the calcs on the Egosphere ignore the the carbon in the soil so the flora and fauna can grow.
"Depositing Carbon in the Bank: The Soil Bank, That Is"
The zinc alternative? Come back with a model that accounts for increased zinc demand and the effect of that demand.
As you are so deeply into engineering in this matter, fixing up your calcs should be trivial. I'll wait for your changes. Unless you run outta a sharp pencil.
Consider, the amount of energy stored in a capacitor follows this form: E = V^2 * c/2
E is energy in Joules, V is voltage, C is capacitance in farads.
One recieves a much greater boost by upping the voltage in such a system. Additionally, the largest capacity capacitors I have seen are 3 farads, and run at 12 volts for car stereo purposes. This is not enough energy. If one could store energy at, say 10 million volts, a half farad capacitor would easily suffice. However, such would require two things; a VERY big transformer, and a dielectric that does not break down at 10 million volts over a short enough distance to build a .5 farad capacitor and fit it into a vehicle. I would be very interested on any information / thoughts on this subject.
For equivalent construction methods & materials, energy stored is proportional to volume (and thus weight). Operating voltage is usually chosen for the convenience of the system.
A capacitor with twice the voltage rating needs dielectric twice as thick, which means that only half as much dielectric surface area is avialable for the same volume. Halving the area and doubling the dielectric thickness reduces the capacitance to 1/4 the original value. E = 0.5*(C/4)*(2*V)^2 = 0.5*C*V^2, unchanged.
(Of course, the "methods & materials" could probably be improved, but that's a different issue.)
I still wonder if they aren't manipulating market prices this way, because it has led on several recent occasions to commercial stock builds significantly exceeding market expectations (if the oil had instead gone into the SPR).
When will they start refilling, if not now?
Oil is up near $69 again, supposedly on worries about Iran.
Off topic, with the Nov EIA figures out today, I hope Stuart will update his production graph.
Fists fly during energy crisis debate
Furthermore it is ludicrous to think that such "waste" from a highly entropic, petroleum-based, industrial agriculture system would power that system, much less leak energy to drive mom and the kids to soccer.
It "requires 45% more fossil energy to produce 1 l of ethanol using 2.5 kg switchgrass than the energy in a liter of ethanol," pg.7, "Ethanol Production Using Corn, Switchgrass, and Wood; Biodiesel Production Using Soybean and Sunflower," David Pimentel and Tad W. Patzek Natural Resources Research, Vol. 14, No. 1, March 2005
This article was published 1 year ago in a peer-reviewed journal and has yet to be challenged in a meaningful way. Natural Resources Research sponsored by the International Association for Mathematical Geology (IAMG) and is co-sponsored by the Energy Mineral Division of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG/EMD).
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/01/060126194250.htm
EROEI- properly designed energy systems require no input of fossil fuel products in the manufacture of ethanol. India and Brazil are doing it now.
Here's a recent piece of interest in of all places the AEI magazine
http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleID.18976/article_detail.asp
Alcohol fuel can be a total solution, if we design the system correctly. It includes harvesting marine algae and cattails. Cellulose will be very important and NREL feels it can meet twice US energy needs. Not including the marine algae and cattails I spoke of. It's clean burning, the ddgs build soil fertility, there are many good feedstocks.
Any analysis that reaches this ridiculous conclusion needs to be dismissed out of hand. The fact is, one year later, not one reasonable critique of Pimentel's methodology or his results has surfaced anywhere. Period.
Whenever Pimentel and his work are mentioned ad hominem attacks also seem to follow. Yes, Pimentel has been trashed but his work stands. Do you know anything about agriculture? Or industrial fermentation? They are both highly energy-intensive operations and plants capture a fraction of the energy stored in fossil fuels. Do your self a favor and read Pimentel instead of cavilierly dismissing him.
There have been countless studies dismissing Pimentel's work out of hand. Countless. Do the homework yourself. David Morris, Shapouri, etc, etc.
Industrial agriculture is energy intensive. Organic farming is not. Pimentel himself says so. Then why not make alcohol from organic crops only? Why apply alcohol fuel to a system that is a failure? I repeat, redesign the energy system. Feedstock variation, crop rotation, heal the soil.
India and Brazil. No fossil fuel inputs in fermentation. Large scale. Powered by methane. Check it out.
Pimentel is a shill for big oil and the peak oil movement has pardoned him for too long. Barry Commoner proved him wrong years ago in work at the CNBS. You think he's reasonable because it fits in with your paradigm, one of hopelessness. It's a peak oiler disease. Don't waste time with insults please.
Furthermore, commercial large-scale organic agriculture is just as energy intensive as conventional. It requires the same heavy equipment. What it doesn't use is natural-gas fertilizers it must replaces with nitrogen from manure, compost, and green crops. Each of these fertility systems uses as much or more net energy.
As I mentioned in an above post, I would be surprised if Brazil were using slash/burn methods to produce their much vaunted sugar-ethanol fuels. That is, they get one or two shots of high production from a piece of rainforest or savanna and then abandon the land when the nutrients deplete.
Once again, your personal attacks on Pimentel are uncalled for and your anger trumps your ideas. You might want to "heal" (to paraphrase you) your thinking and attitude.
The other technologies - particularly cellulosic - were not the subject of Pimentel's paper, so it's hard to "trash" it on those grounds. They're also not commercial yet.
Pimentel looked at cellulose. From the same paper: "About 57% more energy is required to produce a liter of ethanol using wood than the energy harvested as ethanol."
Alcohol's heating value is lower than gasoline's--about 77,000 Btu per gallon compared to 118,000 Btu per gallon for gasoline .
However, heating value has very little to do with a material's value as fuel--it's simply the amount of energy theoretically given off if a material is burned with an optimum amount of oxygen. Very little of a fuel's energy becomes work (miles per gallon) in an internal combustion engine. Theoretically, 10% of fuel's energy goes into friction, 15-20% becomes work, and the remaining energy is waste heat and exhaust. In reality, many cars on the road only get 15% or less gasoline energy converted into work. Alcohol, on the other hand, has achieved 48% work efficiency in the lab, and 43+% efficiency on the road.
"The feed needs to be dispersed from the farm to the animals and once again, that requires fuel."
Right. Use ethanol. Duh.
Let me anticipate your response:
<crickets chirping>
I think that cellulosic ethanol is a dead end because the end-use efficiency is so low, but I'm not about to claim that it's energy-negative. The proponents claim to turn the cellulose into fermentable sugars and distill the product with heat from combustion of the lignin. Since the proponents include publicly-traded companies whose officers could go to jail if they were lying, I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt over someone who comes here with tons of bombast, not a single on-point citation and outdated (and long-debunked) references for his other major claims.
Again, Pimentel's numbers are way out of line compared to both other researchers (IIRC he assumes things like reconstruction of farm and fermentation equipment every year!) and statements by reps of publicly-traded corporations. Others have claimed above that Pimentel receives his financing from the oil industry, which puts his credibility on par with global-warming denialists. Unless you can show that the paper's refutations are wrong, you've got no case.
You are asking me to what? disprove a null? His paper was published in a peer-reviewed journal one year ago, the methodology is there to examine, and it has not yet been challenged. Until that happens I take it as the standard on this subject. The personal attacks do not help your argument
Contrary to your assertions, that study has been found to be loaded with errors. The authors of the meta-study back up their claims by freely distributing both their paper and their model (unlike Pimentel and Patzek, whose paper is behind a pay-wall) . Here's what they had to say about P&P (without naming them):
I'm beginning to see some stylistic similarities between you and creationists; you pretend that data which point away from your desired conclusion simply don't exist. This is dishonest, and until you admit that you live in the same universe with the same facts as the rest of us, productive discussion with you is impossible.I expect you will be snarked and jeered at instead.
The same can be said of your models that ignore returning carbon and post-process organic material to the land, or your zinc cell proposals that ignore the increase in zinc demand and therefore price.
I expect you will be snarked and jeered at instead.
Once people understand the soil food web the overly optimistic proposals at the egosphere will be subjected to snarking and jeering.
A carbon process wouldn't have much in the way of organic byproducts. Using some of the charcoal as a soil amendment might be worthwhile; I've read that charcoal does a good job of trapping nutrient ions and preventing them from washing away. The slag product of zinc reduction could be returned to the soil as well (perhaps after processing to remove remaining zinc), but I don't pretend to be either an ag scientist or a metallurgist so I can't even speculate what's going to be in it.
I don't address it because that depends on factors outside the scope of the analysis. I'm not a mining engineer or commodities trader either.For 200 million vehicles and 60 kWh of metal each, I calculated an inventory of about 1 year's world zinc production; amassing that over 10 years would require about 10% of what's currently mined. What that does to prices depends on the elasticity of other demand and the ease of increasing supply.
Even a very shallow cover crop, like clover, with a root structure only an inch or two deep, makes a HUGE difference in erosional control and overall soil tilth.
Simply leaving a satisfactory quantity of crop residue, or applying a surface layer of organic mulch, like wood/bark chips or straw, has a sizeable effect.
Deeply rooted or buried crop residue (4"+), on the other hand, has very little value at all.
There is also the issue of returning nutrients from the
to the field, absolutely essential for sustainability of the land and long-term viability of any crop. This has been the problem in subsaharan Africa (and increasingly, Haiti), where systemic famine now exists.
Historically, this is done by tilling the remaining plant material back into the soil.
However, USDA (and other) studies have shown that this is hard on the land, and as a result efforts have been made to encourage environmentally friendly approaches such as no-till cultivation, mulching to control weeds rather than spraying herbacides, using natural predators and genetically engineered crops instead of pesticides, and programs such as the Conservation Reserve Program.
Some sources:
http://www.agr.gc.ca/pfra/land/residue_e.htm
http://www.ipm.iastate.edu/ipm/icm/2000/8-7-2000/tillage2001.html
http://www.nal.usda.gov/afsic/AFSIC_pubs/srb9902.htm
http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:rD_6kFc6PvUJ:whyfiles.org/199_soil/3.html+leaving+field+nutrient s&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=6
"Agriculture does not improve soils," says Ward Chesworth of the University of Guelph in Ontario. "For more than 10,000 years we have conducted a long agricultural experiment with the biosphere by using modified annual grasses to mine the soil for plant nutrients.
"Like all mining operations, this one will eventually fail unless we can find a way of conserving the fertility of soil that does not depend on the diminishing natural resources that we currently use for that purpose."
By necessity, crops use up nutrients from the soil. Historically, these nutrients have been returned by plowing harvested crop residue back into the ground and with fertilizers. But intensive plowing causes erosion, and some nutrients -- nitrogen, most notably -- are difficult to replenish.
Erosion and losses in soil fertility are inevitable products of conventional agriculture, together constituting the "problem of agriculture," says Wes Jackson, director of The Land Institute in Salinia, Kan.
Annual grasses like wheat, rice, corn, rye, and barley account for 70 percent of the human diet, Jackson says. Historically, these annuals have been planted in monocultures -- one crop per field. It's a bad model, Jackson says, if preserving the land is an ultimate goal. Monocultures leach more nutrients, are invaded by more weeds, and attract more disease and pests more than fields planted with more than one crop."
Switchgrass, as proposed as an energy substitute, is not a silver bullet. Monocrop grasses, regularly harvested and consumed (in this case by machines rather than people or animals) is just the same old problem we already face in agriculture, only multiplied.
The major nutrients we need to worry about are potassium, phosphorus and nitrogen. If we can keep the materials loop closed we can keep the K and P in place (ideally we'd promote or create fish like salmon to bring nutrients up from the ocean in their migrations every year). Nitrogen can be made by legumes (if we can make nitrogen-fixing corn, we can probably make nitrogen-fixing fuel grasses) and it does not take much of a grass crop to make enough nitrogen via the Haber process. Last, perennials lock the soil in place with their roots and make it much more resistant to erosion. We should be shifting away from annual fuel crops as fast as we can.
And yet I can show land and soil worked over time for crops HAVE improved.
Rock dust, green cover cropping, manure are all ways to improve the land. All parts of an Agriculture plan.
but anything that burned in nature is probably safe to cut and use as fuel if we put the ash back.
The 'carbon from plants plan' is moving forward now - you have went from not even acknologing the need to return 'ash' (your analysis of using tree waste) to the use of might/could to describe putting the ash back, to 'put the ash back and its a workable plan - because I'm assuming the carbon is all atmospheric'.
Now you just need to show all the carbon IS from the air, not from the land.
(see, you CAN be taught!)
Next step in your plan - how to you make your carbon-zinc economy work without needing to ship the material 100's of miles. Because the farther the 'waste ash' is away from its source, the less likely it is to be returned from its source.
Nitrogen can be made by legumes
As far as nitrogen fixing in the soil goes, that is a feature of bacteria that works WITH the legume.
So to say:
if we can make nitrogen-fixing corn, we can probably make nitrogen-fixing fuel grasses
is either sloppyness with the language or a lack of understanding of the process.
we should be shifting away from annual fuel crops as fast as we can.
Almost all food crops are annuals. And trying to kill a perannual to make way for a food crop as part of a rotation plan will only result in less food crop.
The whole idea of the cover crop is how eaisly it dies when once is growing food in crop rotation. Because eventually you want to rotate something else in.
"You have went"?
When people have been applying wood ash to their gardens to promote growth for centuries, it hardly seems necessary to mention such trivia in a modern context. Yes, I admit that chemical nutrient cycling is still important! (I never knew that failing to mention something was considered a denial. Must be some newfangled social rule.) Are you happy now? Would you like a cookie?
"how to you make"?There are several material flows in this scheme, of which the plant nutrients are only one. Carbon as charcoal is storable and non-toxic, and is likely to be shipped and stored much as coal is. Of course, vehicles have to return for new cargoes; if it's desirable to send ash back, it doesn't seem to matter much how far it has to go as long as the (char)coal train is making the trip anyway.
Work to make nitrogen-fixing microbes to inoculate both wheat and maize is on-going. If it is desirable to do this for fuel grasses, I'm sure the work could be broadened.Lots of fruit crops, some of the better forage crops and the best fuel crops are not. What was your point?
One of the selling points for Miscanthus Giganticus is that it can be killed off with the same Roundup used to clear weeds.
"how to you make"?
If that is the best you have got, you are not worth talking to.
FWIW, your objections are addressed in Developing Switchgrass as a Bioenergy Crop.
There is quite a disconnect between the people who have land and crops they manage and the people who make statements like 'just grow grass everywhere'.
Even a very shallow cover crop, like clover, with a root structure only an inch or two deep, makes a HUGE difference in erosional control and overall soil tilth.
And soil erotion will be important as one can't just dump on more Nitrogen and more land goes into production to 'grow' power.
Simply leaving a satisfactory quantity of crop residue, or applying a surface layer of organic mulch, like wood/bark chips or straw, has a sizeable effect.
The anecic earthworms don't use the residue as food, but the bacteria and fungus that use the residue as food. Aneric worms increase the ability for the land to absorb water, so runoff erosion is less of an issue.
Deeply rooted or buried crop residue (4"+), on the other hand, has very little value at all.
Ways it does have value however:
- It can bring up elements from the subsoil and deposit them on the surface as dead plant material.
- It can break up plow hardpan and can provide paths for other roots to grow in the new voids.
- The dead roots provide food for the worms
There is also the issue of returning nutrients from theto the field, absolutely essential for sustainability of the land and long-term viability of any crop.
This is the key right here. Anyone who is proposing crop baised fuel should have an answer to this issue. If they do not have it as part of thier plan, they either don't like the answer and are ignoring it, or they have not thought the idea through to its conclusion.
Then the plan, as a plan to follow, is rather useless without such analysis.
Carbon for fuel cells/batteries will want to be rather pure. Processing left over corn bits or grass is not a very pure carbon. Where is the energy budget for this purification?
but I don't pretend to be either an ag scientist or a metallurgist so I can't even speculate what's going to be in it.
But you DO keep pretending that you have this well thought out plan. And others, like at grassbioenergy.org don't speculate - they have done analysis.
Silica, 'alkali metals' (potassium/sodium/other bits), chlorine and sulfur are listed, but even they don't list manganese, magnesium, boron, copper, molybdenum, zinc or iron - all of these in shortage or excess can cause certain plant problems depending on the plant. And I found this data in less time than it has taken me to type up the reply.
What that does to prices depends on the elasticity of other demand and the ease of increasing supply.
Increasing supply WHILE the world enters a time of DECREASING cheap energy. Cheap energy that is used to cheaply increase the supply.
Or did I miss the whole point of PeakOil and WHY we all come to the message boards and engage in our attempts to convince others that one plan or another will fail or succeed?
Most of us are convinced 'Plan Burn Cheap Oil' is doomed in the near future, if not already doomed. But your 'grow grass and make carbon' plan has glossed over quite a number of rather big issues. So if you wish to convice others of how right-thinking your plan is, you are going to have to show that you have addressed the zinc avaibility issue and the effect of the removal of the elements from the land used to grow the material. To date, you have not shown enough 'sharp pencil work' to back up the idea.
( Come to think of it, I don't remember seeing the e values of the zinc transitions, then back again for zinc to be re-reacted. But the basic idea of there is only loss when one starts at one chemical state, reacts, then returns to that chemical state would mean any carbon-zinc battery process will need power from somewhere else to push the electrons back to having potentional energy. So a carbon-zinc cycle is no more a oil substutite than the 'hydrogen economy' model is an oil substutite.)
I call it a concept, a possibility, something for further development; you're the one who insists that it's a plan.
Why not? We're making wind cheaper over time. Since much of the energy used to refine zinc goes into electrolysis, wind seems very appropriate for the purpose.
I don't go where I can't get the data to go. I don't have a grant to do this, or privileges at a research library; maybe I'll interest someone who does, and then I'll write about their results.
YES! YES! YOU GET IT NOW!
Zinc is a convenient medium for storing non-petroleum energy and getting it aboard vehicles. Zinc can be regenerated from oxide by electrolysis or carbon reduction, and one of the more interesting variants of carbon reduction uses heat (from e.g. solar concentrators) to boost the total energy product. It's just a way of getting energy from wind, solar and biomass into a common, clean and compact form, and it appears to be more feasible than hydrogen in the short and medium term.
If it didn't do that, I would be talking up something else.
Now, if corn oil is usable as is as a fuel, then it should certainly be included. But it's not clear to me why "dried distillers grains with solubles, [or] corn gluten feed" should be counted towards the energy payback from ethanol manufacture. What happens at the large scale when those coproducts greatly exceed demand - are they not simply additional waste in the process?
Now the argument that some of P&P's "input data [...] are old and unrepresentative of current processes, or so poorly documented that their quality cannot be evaluated" is more disturbing - on the other hand why was this a secondary criticism rather than the primary one, if it makes that much difference to the numbers?
The bottom line is that the EROEI numbers do not disagree by that much when all is properly accounted for; some people find it provides a barely positive return, P&P find it negative. If P&P are right it's doing no good at all, but even if they're wrong, it's not really doing that much good. If bio-fuels are part of the answer, let's find ones that are much more clearly making a difference.
And on your direct-carbon fuel cells - well, when we see cars running on coal then perhaps we'll know they've arrived. But that is surely not an argument for ethanol - as you note elsewhere, biomass converted to charcoal would do much better.
If we assume the following annual productions:
- 42.45 billion pounds of chickens @ 2 lb feed/lb,
- 42.37 billion pounds of cattle and calves @ 8 lb feed/lb, and,
- 25.94 billion pounds of hogs and pigs @ 2 lb feed/lb
we'd use ~475 billion pounds of animal feed. If half of this can be spent grains, that's about 238 billion pounds of product which can be usefully used as feed. If it is displacing its weight in shelled corn (it has more protein, so it may displace more) it would serve in lieu of ~4.2 billion bushels of corn, about 36% of the 2004 crop.It doesn't seem likely that we'd have to dispose of any spent grains other than as animal feed. What we need to do is integrate the distilleries with other farming operations to eliminate the energy-hogging drying step and allow fermented manure to fire the distilleries. Ideally we'd substitute switchgrass or other forage crop for the corn to get greater productivity (grass can be used as forage for ruminants and IIRC can be just as productive while requiring less cultivation; from memory, could be wrong).
Say it again, brother! Do I hear a "halleluiah"?The root of the problem is that people believe that the stuff that makes the car go has to come from a pump. If we could switch to plug-in hybrids, most of our mileage could be run on electricity instead. We have a lot more options for making electricity than liquid fuels, but we've got failures of imagination at the grassroots and obstruction at the top.
Furthermore, the study refers to slightly low corn production values of several percent in the Pimentel study. As the energy cost to grow the corn is only one of many inputs (and a rather inconsequential one at that) it is not a valid criticism. Pimentel's number hold even with slightly more productivity on the corn input line.
Once again your personal attacks detract from you already faulty reasoning. Painting Pimentel and me as Creationists because we do not support government boondoggle, agriculture giveaways, ecologic tragedy, and bad science is a distraction from you own suspect motives -to sell stock.
Chris
If it will burn, it can be used to make steam (and cogenerate electricity before being used for process heat), fire a gas turbine (and spin a generator before the exhaust gases make steam), etc. Enzymes from wood mushrooms may turn lignin into monosaccharides for fermentation.
Unfortunately there are only about 170 million tons of black liquor solids produced each year, so it's not going to be a very big contributor.
Modern pulp plants also get all their electricity from raising the temperature and running the steam thru a turbine before using it as a heat sourc in the processes.
If they add gasification they can either add gas turbines and sell electricity or add synthesis stages and sell motor fuel. But selling motor fuel makes so much energy leave the plant as fuel that the calculations snow that they have to add additional biomass to burn to get process heat. This is anyway a win since biomas unsuited for gasification can be used for this support heat. Unfortunately this technology is still under development but it seems to be promising.
Myself I find FT-diesel attractive since it is almost as efficient and require no new distribution or wehicle investments. Methanol might be intresting if the fuel cell technology is developed further.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1102AP_Mexico_Cuba_Oil_Summit.html
Guess who is interested.
Total biomass primary energy capture worldwide is 4000 quads (quadrillion btus) per year. Humans currently use over 400 quads, and you've seen Stuart's growth curves for the next century or so. So current world energy needs could possibly, barely, fit within what the biosphere can provide - but it leaves essentially no room for growth, and no margin for error or significant losses in processing.
In particular, it's far more efficient to convert biomass directly to electricity (by burning it close to where it's grown, to boil water for steam turbines) than to convert it to ethanol.
Just as Stuart Saniford addressed the carbon cycle in his recent series of excellent posts, so we need to address the nitrogen cycle (and to a lesser extent, the phosphorus cycle and other plant nutrient cycles).
At the risk of belaboring the fundamentals, let us remember that all plants contain not only carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, but also nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and other nutrients. There is no exception to this basic fact.
Let us just consider nitrogen for now, as it is by far the largest component of the various plant nutrients. In a natural pre-agricultural environment, the nitrogen just keeps cycling around in a big circle: from soil to plant, and back to soil as the plant decays. This cycle has been running smoothly for millions of years in a more or less stable equilibrium.
But along comes man and develops agriculture. The whole purpose of agriculture is to remove a useful portion of the plant mass from this closed system and use it for food and fiber. If the use is close to the source, then most of the nitrogen in the food and fiber eventually gets recycled back to the soil via the disposition of human and livestock waste and the decay of fiberous materials.
However, as civilization developed the sources of plant matter and the final disposition of same became more and more dislocated. This dislocation has gotten more extreme as civilization advanced, to the point where nitrogen sources and sinks can be at opposite ends of the earth (e.g., the nitrogen in a shrimp grown in a Southeast Asian fish farm gets eaten by a person in St. Louis and eventually becomes sewage that eventually flows down the Mississippi River and out to the Gulf of Mexico).
In the US especially, as we have moved toward high-intensity factory farming, the flows of nitrogen into and out of particular regions has gotten more and more extreme. Huge quantities of grain move from one area to feedlots in another area where huge amounts of animal waste are generated, than the product (meat on the hoof) is moved to yet another part of the country.
While a traditional Chinese peasant subsistance farmer may be in harmony with his environment, US agribusiness certainly is not.
So back to nitrogen re biomass to ethanol. There is a very good reason why ammonia-based synthetic fertilizers have become almost universally used: they are far more cost-effective than trying to collect, transport, and apply animal manure. Ammonia is about 85% nitrogen, while wet animal waste from a large feedlot might only be about a 1% by wet weight. That is why manure from animal production finds economical use within only a rather small radius of its point of generation.
Then there is the problem stemming from the fact that fertilizers are typically applied only once or twice a year, whereas animal wastes are generated around the clock all year round. So storage and handling becomes a major drag on the ability to use such wastes on a national basis.
Again, it is all a matter of serious dislocation between nitrogen sources and sinks. As an example, tiny Delaware has a very large poultry industry in the southern part of the state. Some of the poultry feed is grown locally and some is imported from out of state. The net result is that there is far too much nitrogen coming into Delaware and not enough going out (as chicken meat). The poultry operations give away the manure to local farmers but there is just too much of it. Steps have been taken to process this manure into a more transportable fertilizer, but it has its drawbacks, and the problem still persists.
Maybe some of you ag majors out there can correct me if I'm wrong, but I will go out on a limb and make a blanket assertion: no intensive harvesting of any crop for use away from its point of generation can continue indefinitely without the external injection of nitrogen and other nutrients. So, we cannot magically grow huge crops of switch grass or whatever without massive amounts of fertilizer input. This is going to be a persistent problem with any biomass-to-fuel scheme. And the dislocations between nitrogen sources and sinks will only get worse.
That is why I don't think modern agriculture is capable of using animal manure as its main source of fertilizer. The inputs and outputs are all out of whack.
Do you agree that nitrogen is the only fly in the ointment here? The trace elements will remain in the ash or byproducts of conversion and can be returned to the soil locally. It would be nice to think that small local breweries could churn out ethanol economically. If so the trace returns need only travel a few miles. But even if not, the volumes of ash or residual don't seem excessive even if they must travel several hundred miles.
I find the idea of biomass very appealing. It encourages us to live within our solar budget and I have hope that the process might work locally - unlike nuclear, oil or coal. I'm finding my hackles being raised by all the naysayers. It's obviously not THE answer but if we can put some otherwise unarable land to use raising weeds for our furnaces and our stills then what's the harm?
Now if you are getting your hackles up, I suggest a dose of education. It is a great sedative and relieves one of ignorance.
This could be a great discussion that could help a lot of us understand these issues much better. I don't have the technical background that I need to figure this out on my own. It is possible that Pstarr is right and could convince me and others. But I have never met him/her and can not be expected to take his/her word at face face value. If the facts support you provide them. EP certainly does here and on his own website.
If I learn I'm wrong (or make an error), I admit to it and even correct myself. I'm not always my own harshest critic, but I try.
Perhaps you have educated yourself to the extent that the sedative quality of said education has put your numerate mind to sleep. I'll stick with my hackles, thanks.
I may be wrong but I was under the impression that humans managed to raise crops prior to oil and coal. They fed approximately 1/3 to their draft animals, fed themselves, and had enough left to support the townspeople. I describe a situation where there was sufficient energy to cultivate and ferment the crop using nothing but the proceeds thereof. Presumably all this from the energy stored in the plants.
Lots. How helpful.
"What it can't do
"We're clearly not going to fuel the nation from crop wastes. 87 million gallons per plant times 36 plants is only 3.1 billion gallons per year, a minuscule fraction of our 139 billion gallon/year gasoline appetite. Even if yields were sextupled through e.g. the growth of switchgrass or Miscanthus at 15 tons/acre we would only get to about 30% of distillate fuel consumption or 9.3% of total motor fuel consumption. The outlook for electricity would be rosier, but it would still not come close to replacing coal.
"But that's not so bad; it would lay the groundwork for more efficient systems to follow, and by itself it would be a very promising start."
That seems to say that we won't be living within our "solar budget" for a very very long time, if ever.
Lets ignore, for the sake of my point I wish to make, the potentional danger of a genetic modification.
To say 'comparable weed' ignores HOW legumes fix nitrogen. The fixing comes from the soil food web - it happens via the Rhizobium-family bacteria.
That is correct, or at least it is the collective opinion of those I worked with for several years at USDA/APHIS. Intensive is the key phrase there. Sustainable agriculture, by definition, is neither intensive nor dependend on large artificial inputs.
How many acres of land would it take (corn, switchgrass?) to replace 1/2 the current US gasoline usage with ethanol if the land were dedicated for that purpose? Let's just assume the EROEI is positive for sake of discussion.
So, what would we have to do? Convert an area the size of X to make that much ethanol? How big is X?
- Switchgrass may be more efficient than corn to convert to ethanol
- Switchgrass could be grown on less fertile land which may not include the land currently being used to grow corn
- The current vehicle fleet is incredibly fuel-inefficient
- Most of the corn grown is fed (very inefficiently) to animals so that we can eat them
etc.(I seem to remember that these corn-for-ethanol numbers came out of Exxon - say no more!)
This is a much more complex system than can be detailed by a few statitics extrapolated from a laboratory bench experiment, posted in blog comment.
I think we would be hard-pressed to find any research that has taken all of this into consideration.
However, I'm sure Stuart will have nothing to do when he's finished his Carbon Cycle posts! ;-)
- once assuming diesel tractors and natural gas processing
- once assuming ethanol tractors and ethanol processing
Those will be your two extremes, the best and wrost case. I'd guess that the first number is scary and the second is impossible ...E85 mpg depends on the engine you run it in; Saab seems to be getting equivalent milage using their fancy engine management system which alters the ignition timing (and injector sequencing?) on their flex-fuel system.
550m3 = 145294 gallons
1km2 = 247 acres
145,294/247 = 588 gal/acre
140,000,000,000/588 = 238,095,238 acres
the acreage of the entire US is 2,379,975,218 acres.
Exactly how much tropical farmland do we have that can grow sugarcane?
Total US farmland is about 930 mln.acres.
The you should divide it back by 1.7 again for vehicles with engine management systems like Saab's which get equivalent mpg for E85 as gasoline (due to increased efficiency when optimized for E85).
I agree with garytencents that acreage required would be 238M acres. But Dave asked for 50% replacement hence 119M acres or 12.8% of LevinK's number for US farmland.
As an aside, the US has approx 3 acres farmland per capita; here in the UK it's more like 0.5.
Just in case any one is still reading this thread :)
from Hudson Institute
Washington State bioscientists say it takes about 2.4 acres of land growing corn to support a car driving for a year on E85--gasoline with 15 percent ethanol mixed in. If we ran even 10 percent of our cars on the ethanol mix, that would take about 48 million more acres of good cropland away from Nature--or 100 million acres of poor cropland. U.S. national forests total only 191 million acres.
Some of the Green die-hards say we could make ethanol at less cost from the cornstalks and sell the corn. They don't realize that the cornstalks are left on the field to maintain soil nutrients level--and to minimize soil erosion. Taking the stalks for ethanol plants would be an environmental sin--and we'd have to burn up still more liquid fuel to gather huge tonnages of them into an ethanol facility.
Might as well make a virtue of necessity.
Given that we do just plain burn valuable resources like oil and natural gas for heat ... the switch seems incredibly obvious. It boggles my mind really, that we would we would waste so much energy (here and in the real world) on converting biomass.
... is this the "bounded rationality" of the human species in action? Our reach (for a future-proof future-fuel) exceeds not just our grasp, but the obvious next steps.
Fuel for cars is definitely going to be the biggest problem.
But yeah, it makes a lot more sense to just burn the stuff. This article is about an island in Denmark that is trying to go oil-free:
On a tiny island off the Danish coast, life after oil is working out just fine
It's old, but interesting nonetheless.
(When I ride a bike to get groceries or lunch, people call me "buddy" ... what's with that? I suspect that they suspect I am down and out ... no car, you see.)
- Using intense inputs, we in the USA currently produce around 150-200 watts per person of net food energy, some of which is still exported. We consume around 12000 watts per person total, of which around 2500 watts is from crude oil and natural gas liquids. (Wattages average 24/7/365.) To free ourselves from the oil and liquids, we'd need to expand net agricultural energy output by a factor of 12 or 15. To free ourselves from net CO2 emissions we'd need a factor approaching 100. Is either even conceivable in any timeframe that matters? Maybe we would get a factor of two by shutting down the beef and pork industries and moving down the food chain, but wouldn't that guarantee protein starvation in the event of a bad soybean blight?
- Parts of the Midwest look like polders because the fields have sunk up to six feet below the grade level of the roads. And that's been with us removing only part of the plant material for 100 years. Do we really get to remove most or all of it and still leave soil suited to growing more crops? Seriously? Are you kidding? What's left when all the carbonaceous material is gone? Hardpan? Concrete? Isn't that sort of thing the problem with cropping tropical-rainforest soils?
- Ethanol looks set to occupy a perfectly fine niche and make a minuscule dent in overall fossil fuel consumption. It also looks to be a wonderful excuse for NIMBYs like Ted Kennedy to continue to support renewable energy in theory, while resisting any practical application. Since the silver BBs are all small, won't we need all of them, as louGrinzo suggests?
- The speech takes aboard the totally bizarre notion that we can become independent of the Middle East by reducing consumption by the imputed amount we import from there. Weird. When did oil stop being fungible? When and as Middle East supplies dwindle or are embargoed, won't those directly using them look elsewhere? If not, what magic will stop them? How can we possibly be independent without withdrawing from the international market altogether?
- Heading Out's Thailand note seems to have escaped notice here. There are still food surpluses, but they don't seem enormous. Do they exceed 15 watts per person? Can we really afford to burn food on a large enough scale to make a difference? Can we afford to do it directly by converting corn or wheat seeds, or even indirectly by converting food fields to switchgrass or whatever? How much non-agricultural land can we really convert to switchgrass before the NIMBYs whip up a storm?
- Does anybody here who airily thinks Brazil is a shining example have the slightest idea of how thoroughly awful life is in a sugar-cane field? Oh, I know, there's a certain amount of throwback tourism to the Cuban fields by church and "community" groups. But unlike the hapless Cubans, they get to leave, they get to pontificate without having to live it. What sort of horror do we want to bequeath to future generations?
- Where, oh, where does the hydrogen come from? Oh, I know, it's the most abundant element in the universe. But did someone invent a star scoop and fail to tell the rest of us?
I'm starting to think, for some reason, that there's a lot of nuclear power in our midterm future. Or else a lot of awful abject poverty.And I agree with your conclusion.
More people should read that.
Whoa, that's interesting. If only 1/5 of our [U.S.] energy comes from liquids, then a 5% per year drop in oil energy is only a 1% drop per year in total energy. I hadn't looked at it that way before.
I know another significant percentage comes from natural gas, but that seems to be peaking already in North America. If the gas and oil peaks are separated by a few years, we'll have more time to adjust. (The gas peak might shift more energy to oil, reducing my optimism. How recent and how precise are the above-quoted figures?)
Chris
A crisis wherein we will be forced to navigate through some sort of decline whether it be 3%, 5%, 8% or what have you.
Therefore I submit... that if 400,000 of us within a 10 year period (basically starting at ZERO) can work collectively to put a man on the moon -REPEATEDLY- using slide-rules no less, than I assure you that we as a society can overcome this crisis with leadership, timely mitigation, conservation and the mass cultivation of HEMP for BioFuels.
Hemp IS our silver bullet. Henry Ford knew this.
In fact, Henry Ford knew this 80 years ago but was actively discouraged from building and powering his cars with hemp - the greatest net biomass producer of all time!
You want to talk about EROEI?
Screw corn and sugar cane. Lets do the math on a plant that produces 9 tonnes of biomass per acre in 90 days, three times a year, without pesticides or herbicides.
A plant that will grow practically anywhere and is a preferred fallow crop that uses minimal fertilizer inputs - of which roughly 50% go back into the ground.
A plant that doesn't compete with food crop acreage but COMPLEMENTS it.
A plant that would do legions of good for the environment through CO2 absorption, while stemming the tide against both soil erosion and depletion.
And I'm not even getting into the myriad of other uses that would effectively reduce our petrochemical addiction.
Can someone do the math on the amount of oil we would save if the cotton industry (the heavyweight crop re: chemical and fossil fuel inputs) were to be replaced with hemp?
How about in other industries like paints or plastics?
There's absolutely no need for Team Defcon.
WE CAN DO IT!
Isn't it ironic that the ethanol producers are importing the raw materials because the sugar producers get more money for their sugar by exporting it!
Of course, one of the reasons that the price of sugar is so high is because Brazil is using more of it to produce ethanol!
Once the price of petroleum goes much higher, then the ethanol producers will be able to pay more for their raw materials, so there will be even less sugar for food (not such a bad thing, mind you).
Sugar is a highly regulated market full of distortions and subsidies. That is certainly the case here where the price has been capped by the government. I am not sure that the Thai example means much.
Sugar has virtually no nutrient value and is a cause of many health problems. I find it odd that people would think that sugar is such an important product for mankind that considering it for energy is wasteful. If the option is the dark ages like so many presume, couldn't you just go without Coca-cola?
However, the western diet (and in particular the US diet) is riddled with sugar. I remember stopping off in San Franscisco one time and ordering french toast for breakfast. It came covered in icing sugar, with a jug of syrup on the side! Yuck!
Unfortuately, this will just be another inflationary influence on foodstuffs (along with increased energy costs).
If thai prices of sugar are capped, then I can understand the sugar producers exporting it instead. They would obviously get much more money for it than selling it on the local market.
I should have said that in general a lot of agricultural practices seem as or more wasteful than energy production. Some of this could be displaced without to much pain. It sounds like you agree.
I read a lot of the 149 comments, and was informed about: biomass, switchgrass, "clean" coal, windpower, ethanol, alcohol, and a slew of other energy substitutes. But I did not read one word about the radical changes in lifestyle that surely will come at the end of the current era of cheap oil.
Since World War II, America has changed dramatically, mostly due to the automobile and the low value put on oil. Suburbia is a place where you have to get into your car and drive to buy a gallon of milk, and to commute, maybe 100 miles or more, to work and back. Some of the dumbest sights I have ever seen are the travel reports on morning TV, featuring thousands of cars, mostly occupied by a single person, inching slowly along the nation's freeways.
The country has done itself a huge disservice: by allowing the rail systems to disintegrate, by spreading the tentacles of suburbia out onto prime farmland, by ignoring public transportation, and producing inefficient vehicles.
The entire American way of life is supported by cheap oil, and we are addicted to it. Alternate energy will be costly and a mere band-aid to try to cover up the hemorrhaging.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060202/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush_interview;_ylt=An5.z2krGGBMl3u2TMuaLWOs0NUE; _ylu=X3oDMTA3b2NibDltBHNlYwM3MTY-
Bush dismissed the idea of increasing fuel efficiency standards for cars, trucks and SUVs as a way of curbing foreign oil dependence. "My plan is to diversify away from oil. ... You're asking questions about how you deal with cars running on gasoline made from oil, I'm telling you let's get some cars running on fuel other than oil."
In the US we consume 105 EJ of commercial energy every year.
In the US, the total amount of energy captured by all plant matter (including roots) is about 95 EJ (and some estimates as low as 80 EJ)
It doesn't compute.
Second, how do you maintain business as usual in the shift from the use of an enormous STOCK of stored solar energy to the annual income from the FLOW of solar energy?
That doesn't compute.
EROEI matters enormously. If all we had was an energy supply of 1.2 EROEI fuel (ethanol), then 83% of our activity would be the production of the fuel, and 17% would be the net energy available to run the rest of the economy.
That doesn't compute.
Powerdown first, then figure out what sustainable remainder there is for everything else.