Nature’s (Not-Quite) Perfect Battery
by Indur M. Goklany
The major drawback of solar power and other renewables is that they cannot be relied on to deliver energy at their rated capacity for every hour of every day of the full year. Hence, the dollars, effort and human capital devoted to developing more efficient and low cost batteries.
But Nature has already solved this problem for us a very long time ago. It developed a system to capture solar energy and store it underground for future use in gas, liquid or solid form — to be used any time or anywhere we want, in rain or shine or in windy or calm conditions.
We call this energy capture system, “photosynthesis”, and this battery, “fossil fuels”.
Nature would never have thought that elements of humanity would look this gift horse in the mouth. That—even as they use it to turn night into day and make their labor more productive, allowing them to devote much of their waking hours to activities more fulfilling than the constant pursuit of food and sustenance—they would complain about returning the basic building block of its energy store, CO2, back to the atmosphere whence it came, particularly, since this building block sustains much of the living world, including humanity itself.
Some human beings have gone so far as to favor newer storage sources (AKA biomass) over fossil fuels. But biomass itself returns its carbon to the atmosphere. So long as one uses carbon-based combustion, the chances of reducing CO2 emissions are nil, whether one uses new biomass or a fossil fuel. In fact, since newer carbon sources are also associated with higher moisture content in the fuel, burning them would increase CO2 per unit of usable energy.
But Nature’s battery is not perfect, it does release air pollutants. However, CO2 isn’t a pollutant. And the air pollutants that it emits are today cleaned relatively easily without suffering a massive energy or economic penalty.
Should we not celebrate Nature’s (not quite perfect) battery, even though it isn’t perfection itself?
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It’s an interesting idea to term fossil fuels as batteries. However they are a type of battery that once used is disposed of in many billions in the environment with new ones frequently being fitted. By the way, biomass is carbon neutral, fossil fuels add fossil carbon to the environment which would normally be out of the loop. Co2 is also not a pollutant in itself, neither is sewage and excrement which can make for useful fertiliser, but I’m not sure I would like to see increasing amounts disposed of in my environment without being well processed.
I don’t think wood is a newer storage source. I plan on fixing up my fireplace before winter sets in and burning much of the wood that I have collected from my yard over the past few years. I have about a cord of wood just from the branches and dead trees from crowding out.
In B.C., and Canada, we have thousands of forest fires each year on average. I would rather see those trees harvested and use as a fuel source rather than have them go up in smoke In situ.
I would also like to point out that due to human induced increases in CO2 levels, our forests grow back faster than when CO2 levels were lower, and hence we humans own a certain percentage of trees (at least by volume), unless of course Salby is right.
I’ll run out an get the party favors.
It ain’t “Nature”, IT’S BEEN THE ALIENS!!!!
So to have the perfect battery tree, we should genetically engineer them to grow into windmills?
Semantics. Coal and wood are both from rather similar origins. One has been in or on the ground longer than the other. It’s splitting hairs for dogma purposes to label one as sustainable and the other not. Trees are no longer sustainable once their repeated removal has taken required nutrients like P and K from the soil, leaving it barren. Then you have to fertilize. Guess what? A major feedstock for manufacture of nitrogenous fertilizers is natural gas. What goes around comes around.
We call this energy capture system, “photosynthesis”, and this battery, “fossil fuels”.
This may apply to coal etc but oil ain’t no fossil fuel.
Always trapped below impervious rock because it cannot raise to the surface.
The ultimate renewable energy source. Comes from the bottom up
Ungrateful lot those humans.
Interesting thoughts but we do have another battery that we know will run down one day. The sun. May as well enjoy Nature’s batteries while we can eh?
Gareth Phillips says:
September 2, 2011 at 12:18 am
Co2 is also not a pollutant in itself, neither is sewage and excrement which can make for useful fertiliser, but I’m not sure I would like to see increasing amounts disposed of in my environment without being well processed.
You’re comparing CO2 to sewage and excrement?
It is quite funny here in the UK as many people are now using wood burning stoves and the woodland floor is being stripped of wood as the free sources of wood dry up and people have to start paying for it and find it’s not so cheap.
I on the other hand bought a multi fuel burning stove and I buy smokeless coal for just under £500 per ton (cheaper than my father was buying for in the 1980’s) and I don’t use it all, plus it doesn’t rot, in my garden I let Ash trees grow which is a very sustainable source of wood.
I watch my neighbours spending months building up their wood store for the winter (if you work our how much time they spend in terms of money it would work out about £2000 per ton of wood) plus they burn petrol hauling it back to their houses.
Last year I burnt £100 of coal and saved £200 off my gas bill tidy little profit 🙂
Gareth Phillips says:
September 2, 2011 at 12:18 am
Co2 is also not a pollutant in itself, neither is sewage and excrement which can make for useful fertiliser, but I’m not sure I would like to see increasing amounts disposed of in my environment without being well processed.
Anything is a pollutant in the wrong place. For example, in drinking water excrement is a pollutant but in fertilizer it is not. CO2 belongs in the atmosphere. It is plant food, and is not a pollutant there.
And CO2 is processed, every single day. That’s what plants do.
This only makes sense if the amount of new fossil fuels being formed is equal or greater than the amount being used. The CO2 being created may be only having a minor or nil effect on the climate but it is still a finite resource until new technologies come along that are as cost effective. Research into these new technologies is where the renewable subsidies should be being spent not on un economic technologies such as solar and wind power.
I have read similar reasoning in a Russian paper years ago, even though that reasoning was more like a joke. Then again, in every joke there’s a part of a joke…
It was like this:
1. All ecosystems are always evolving to form a locked cycle of resources, minimizing the wasted energy and matter.
2. However there was and is a considerable energy leak from ecosystems, as the energy stored in fossil fuels is removed from biological cycle and thus lost to the Earth ecosystem.
3. This is why the Nature created humans. Their biological role is to burn all fossil fuels, thus returning the stored energy and resources into the biological cycle of Earth, thus enriching it. 🙂
Sooner or later we have to take this “newer” coal into use since we are emptying our fossil deposits at a terrible pace where demand has outgrown supply already in the 2030s. According to IEA we would need 3-4 Saudi Arabias to meet the demand by that time.
Ill ask once again What the hell has happened to the Berkeley Earth project Temp data. Its now 4 months overdue!!!! Its highly suspicious …lets take a punt: Temperatures have been found to be completely flat since 1880 when ALL data was included. CANNOT be published. Stop project in its tracks. Will not hear from this group again what a farce. They are a disgrace to Science.
@Indur
> “Nature’s (Not-Quite) Perfect Battery”
Of course, nothing in Nature is quite perfect. There are no perfectly round circles or perfectly straight lines. There is always some perturbation (macro or micro) which detracts from perfection. So it is with “natural batteries”.
A brilliant essay, Indur, intended for the AGW/CAGW audience, who will be conflicted to discover that their worst enemy is also their best friend. (In the same sense that Mr. Obama might admire his own worst enemy (the Tea Party) as a very effective bunch of grass-roots Community Organizers)
😐
Anthony,
We do have other areas still NOT been looked into that has vast amounts of energy.
This planets own motion and the forward momentum of the solar system.
Science has been looking at perpetual motion machines and yet they forget this.
Magnetics in a sense would be considered in that category. Where do they get the energy to keep the field running continuously?
Maybe one could mention that in this (hydro?)carbon battery, the CO2 is eventually recycled (via photosynthesis) in order to make new carbon batteries (wood) or in the latests algae developments, oil…..
Odd also how little we hear of the toxic metals used in solar panels, batteries in UPS systems based on solar and wind, energy saving lightbulbs, batteries in hybrids etc…
Clean energy’s dirty little secrets seem to get buried underground.
Sorry, the EE in me knows a battery is what powered various things as a kid. It’s a black box that provides a near constant DC voltage up to some inherent current limit for some amount of time. It wasn’t until physics class or maybe even college that I realized an ideal battery would maintain that voltage at any current for any amount of time.
(Note this is very different from capacitors which hold a charge much like a tank of air does – the more electricity stored in a capacitor, the higher its voltage (air pressure) is. Just because “SuperCaps” can maintain computer memories for weeks of computers or weather sensors overnight doesn’t make them batteries.)
Except for the recent discovery that trees can be used as weak batteries, plants, especially in the form of peat or coal, are merely solar energy storage systems best used to provide heat energy which can then be transformed into other forms.
See http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/09/oh-the-tree-huggers-wont-like-this-exploiting-trees-for-electricity/
for the only other WUWT post on using trees as batteries.
Good point there. I agree!
The energy from photosynthesis was created in the Sun. It took a million years to reach the surface of the Sun, 8-1/2 minutes to get here, a growing cycle to store, millions of years more to concentrate into a high-yield energy source, and a hop, skip and a jump to extract, refine & use.
Coal is obviously from photosynthesis. Oil is in somewhat of a controversy. But all that energy came from the Sun.
Wind is from differential heating of the Planet, so it too comes from the Sun.
Geothermal is stored heat from the condensaton of the Solar System nebula and tidal friction, so it’s energy was imparted from the Galaxy originally, but is now Gravitational.
Nuclear (fission) is from recycled stars, particularly SuperNovae, as the heavy elements beyond Iron are not normal products of fusion.
We currently can’t do a thing with fusion.
Solar is a high investment and high maintenance/low yield affair requiring advantages siting.
Wind is likewise an iffy venture. Geothermal is site limited and scant. Biomass is a locale/species dependent young field. The plant life that stored the fossil fuels is mostly extinct Biomass also competes with agriculture, and that is it’s biggest downfall.
Fission is messy and deadly.
Fusion is an elusive butterfly not yet captured, save the known source 93 million miles distant.
That puts fossil fuels at the top of the energy use chain, for the present and possibly near long-term.
Compared to the energy source nail-biting thriller, CO2 is an Elmer Fudd problem.
The viewers might consider the life of mold on the skin of an orange. From small beginnings, the mold prospers at a rapid rate until if totally covers the skin of the orange. Then as the orange is consumed the mold dies leaving behind mold spores seeking another orange. Earth is the human orange. A new orange is not in the near term future. Paleo types say there have been a few “bottlenecks” over the millenia when the human population drastically shrunk. The most recent bottleneck was the plague of the Dark Ages of Europe and parts of Asia. The question is are enough humans intelligent enough to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past and continue to prosper?
@gareth
>>>By the way, biomass is carbon neutral, fossil fuels add fossil carbon to the environment which would normally be out of the loop.
I am not so sure about that. There are alternative uses of some biomass fuels, like making food, that would not result in CO2 being released to the atmosphere, so I guess that they are not, in a true sense, carbon neutral.
That is just the kind of green arithmetic that results in, for example, talking about “green jobs” that, in fact, are really a destruction of wealth, and jobs.