Guest post by Thomas Fuller
I have been broadly correct about two important things in my career as an analyst. (I wasn’t the only one and I wasn’t the first–just far enough ahead of the curve to make a difference.)
The two things were the demographic decline of much of Europe and the rapid adoption of the internet following the release of the world wide web. I was not studying or researching either topic at the time–the two phenomena leapt out of other research I was conducting and were obviously more important than what I was doing at the time, so I dropped what I was doing and started looking at them exclusively.
So now it’s time to try for the trifecta. (No, I really don’t care about that at all–but this is the third Capital Letter Issue that has jumped out at me, so what the hey…)
Inadequate projections of latent demand for energy are leading to poor decisions now and are muddying the debate about both climate change and energy policy for the rest of the century.
The U.S. Department of Energy and the United Nations both project global consumption of energy at 680 and 703 quads respectively by the period 2030-2035 (a ‘quad’ is one quadrillion btus, roughly the energy you could liberate from 36 million tons of coal).
However, consumption trends, if extended, are far higher–they could reach 2,100 quads by 2030, if adequate energy was available consistently and at decent prices. This is because of the confluence of several important demographic trends.
The overall population is rising–it will be about 8.1 billion in 2030, the equivalent of adding another China to the planet. The comparison is fairly apt, as most of these new humans will be born into societies that look like China does now, or like China did 15 or 20 years ago.
These new humans will be stepping onto the energy ladder and consuming vastly higher quantities of energy than did their parents–if it’s available. They will be moving from farms with no electricity into slums with a minimum of electricity–but shortly thereafter, development and globalization will start them on the road to refrigeration, television, washer/dryers, computers, motor scooters, cars, ad infinitum.
These new humans will be joined by yet another virtual China–existing people who benefit from the same processes of development and globalization and jump on the energy ladder with both feet and both hands.
Obviously, many of both type will actually be in China. But even more will be in places like Indonesia, Brazil, the Philippines, large swathes of Africa and the rest of the developing world.
They will want what they perceive as a modern lifestyle–in America that amounts to 327 billion btus per person per year in energy consumption. In Denmark, it’s a much more modest 161 billion btus. But in either case, latent demand for energy will far exceed the 700 quads currently projected by the DOE and the UN.
Assume 7 billion people will be on the energy ladder (changing from wood and animal dung on their way to coal, petroleum, natural gas, nuclear and hopefully arriving some day soon at the promised land of renewable energy). This means there are 1 billion people we have failed. (And I don’t want to ignore them–I just want to present believable numbers for this exercise.)
If those 7 billion consume energy as Americans do it comes to 2,289 quads. (The total will obviously be less, as they won’t all be near the top of the ladder by 2030). If they adopt a Danish model and develop towards that (efficient use of combined heat and power, high taxes on gas, generally high prices for energy, conscious drive to conserve), global energy demand will be 1,127 quads.
Although I would wish that people new to the modern world would automatically choose the far better Danish model, I predict that they will opt for the easier, softer American model and their energy needs will skyrocket.
However, in either case, we will need far more energy than is currently predicted. If they do not get it, they will not fully participate in what the modern world has to offer–education, good healthcare, clean air and water. Nor will they participate in the modern economy, further enriching the rich world with purchases of video games and expensive perfumes. We all will lose, although the losses of the poor will be heartbreaking.
It may well be that the DOE and the UN have correctly identified what governments are willing to build and provide in the way of new energy–but if they are correct, we are condemning billions of people to needlessly live a wretched existence that they would avoid if they could. Because using energy is not just a sign of success at development, or a reward for doing it right or a ‘welcome to the club’–it is often the key mechanism that enables development.
The poor–the two new Chinas–will fight and scheme to get the energy they need. They will burn coal, oil, whatever is available to escape the life sentence of the poor–lives that are nasty, brutish and short.
This conversation is not really about global warming at all. But it is certainly relevant to discussions of our planet’s future climate. China has doubled its energy consumption since 2000. There are two new ‘Chinas’ eager to do exactly the same, mimicking our behaviour of the last two centuries and following the original China’s current example.
The sources and quantities of energy we make available to the world will determine what our planet will look like in the medium term.
There’s no getting around that.
Thomas Fuller http://www.redbubble.com/people/hfuller
A big brain fart hit me when I wrote this:
“Your bogus comparison of USA with Denmark, a country with population 380 million to a country of 5.5 million, as Denmark being more modest than the USA in energy use, is not even close to modest. A country with about 1/69 the population and using about 1/2 the energy is not a modest user.”
Obviously (160 x 10^9) x (5.5 x 10^6) is not half 0f the USA yearly usage.
The author of your article needs a course in thermodynamics. Coal fired power plants “waste” 60% or more of the input energy because of the second law of thermodynamics. The waste heat occurs at about 60 degrees centigrade, and is fine for district heating, but it is not useful for much of anything else. So to the extent that people can send the waste heat to a district that can use it, then that is a great use, and people have known about it for a long time. The original generating station here in Cheyenne, for instance, was a combined thermal/electrical plant. There is a lot of co-gen going on in industry already, but it takes quite a while to replace industrial plants, so this is going to be a gradual process.
When speaking of solar, I take it you are speaking of solar hot water. I thought you were referring to solar photovoltaic. The problem with solar hot water as I see it now is that a person still has to install the gas-fired water heater as well for the times the sun ain’t shinin’. The systems themselves are very expensive. Two dollars per watt is very expensive compared to a natural gas fired heater. If a person were overly concerned about the price of gas going sky-high, then invest in a heat-pump water heater that can simultaneously supply air conditioning in the summer.
I agree with your premise that there is a lot we can do to increase efficiency, in fact industry increased efficiency amazingly after the energy price shocks of the 1970s. However, there are a lot of people who just through numbers out that make no sense or are out of context. The author of the article in your link is one.
Finally, what would be ruinous would be planting the needed area to grains…that is what I was referring to. With regard to switchgrass, 5% of the U.S. is 100,000 square miles. That is the size of Wyoming! I do not know what you mean by 5% of our waste land. Give me a size. I’m going to guess that switchgrass is being over-sold. One does not get the needed biomass on just 5% of waste land, because there isn’t enough water. If you can, please, tell me how effective are these new enzymes for cellulose? My understanding is that at present the fermentation process for cellulose doesn’t work well — I mean, cellulose evolved to be non-fermentable for a reason.
Oh, heck. In the previous post i meant “throw” numbers out, not “through”!
Yes, but if you look at consumption for, say, Finland, you find they do use more electricity per capita than Americans do. So, just because some of these small countries use small amounts of energy, does not mean they are necessarily “efficient”. A good comparison might be energy per unit GDP.
No, Kevin, I was referring to photovoltaics. I just threw the solar hw in there to reference that I have a small amount of experience contracting the installation of panels.
Kevin, I’ve found that these things are easier when I break them down into “bite-sized” pieces. Let’s take my county. It’s about average size, I guess (the average U.S. county is approx 1,100 Sq Mi. IIRC.) We have some pretty fair farmland, and a lot of land in bushes, and weeds. Also, quite a bit in grass on which you’ll see a couple of cows, or a horsie (a little “tax” deal going on there, I believe.) I’d guess we have between 1/3 and 1/2 in rowcrops.
Anyway, we easily have 300 – 400 sq miles in brush, scrub pine, and bushes, and another 200 sq miles in casual grazing. This is probably kind of a typical county in the South. So, would it be a big thing to convert 20% of that marginal-to-unused land to switchgrass, or hybrid poplar, or somesuch? Nah. You’d probably have to be paying attention to even notice.
What you Would notice would be a lot of E85 pumps selling homegrown fuel for $1.75 – $1.85/gal. If you had one of the newer TDI engines such as is coming out in the new Buick Regal, and were getting the same mileage on ethanol, as on gasoline you would notice that you had more money in your pocket at the end of the day. And, there would be more “business” going on in your county because you weren’t sending all that money, and troops, to the Mideast.
Poet, the world’s largest ethanol producer, figures their “Cobs to Ethanol” Plant, Project Liberty, will produce ethanol from cobs for about $2.00 W/O Subsidies. Genera Energy is looking in the same range for their switchgrass facility in Vonore, Tn. Inbicon is already using wheat straw in Denmark for about $2.35/gal.
Switchgrass is for real. It was the breakthrough in “enzymes” that did it. As someone said, earlier, Biotechnology is turning into a monster. What I’m outlining will produce about 20 Million Gallons of ethanol/yr/county. A big coproduct is the approx. 80,000 btus of lignin that you get per gallon of ethanol “After” you’ve powered your process with it.
That’s 9 Trillion, 600 Billion BTUs to be turned into electricity. Per County.
Of course, I haven’t addressed the landfill over in the next county, yet. Fiberight can Produce a whole bunch of ethanol from the paper, etc. that was going into that.
This isn’t any big deal, Kevin. The breakthrough in enzymes took care of that. From here on out it’s just “who wants to do it.”
I find it amusing that the alternative fuel advocates, especially Pelosi who creates a huge personal carbon footprint with demands to be flown around in a wide body government aircraft every weeek, are so threatened by the huge potential of the oil sands that they spout out so much disinformation to discredit the the Canadian oil sands while spreading the risk of peak oil. Here are some facts:
1) “At a world price of US$50 per barrel, the NEB estimated an integrated mining operation would make a rate return of 16 to 23%, while a SAGD operation would return 16 to 27%. ” This might be slightly different today but who cares, if the private investors decide to invest let them do so at the peril of loosing their money. The Alberta Government did subsidize development with research and probably continue to do so, but I am not aware of commercial plant subsidies. These projects have created considerable high paying skilled jobs and prosperity for numerous people. In 1978 the Syncrude project was built while oil was $12/barrel. Not a bad investment at $75/bbl
2) In 2006, the Canadien tar sands are producing 1.126 million bbl/day since this has been a booming community in recent years. This capacity has probably increased since then but I did not find the latest. The fields are believed to contain up to 1.3 trillion Bbl of oil. This is clearly the second largest known oil source just behind Saudi. Think how this impacts the peak oil claims. Oil haters need to shut it down to alarm us about about running out of oil and needing expensive alternative and un reliable sources.
3) The tar sands processing uses about 0.4% of the flow of the Athbasca river. Water use is not an issue as suggested.
4) The Bitumen is a solid in the winter like a hockey puck. So what? Coal is a solid at all ambient temperatures. Today’s technology turns the bitumen into a light clean crude via a thermal process with sulfur removed and hydrogen added to increase the value and facilicitate shipping. Much of the Crude processed today is not the light sweet crude of the past, but with todays’ technology who cares unless you want to scare people. Most refineries have facilities to process heavy crudes.
5) Syncrude is the name of one of the Companies, it is not the name of the product.
6) It is dirty! Yes that is the propanganda from the likes of greenpeace, drink the cool-aid. Visit the site and look around. There are thousands of acres of barren, uninhabited land with mines that represent a fraction of the total land in Northern Alberta that is mined or processed to extract the bitumen. The typical temperature is -30 to -40 C and it is a dry environment with very little snow in the winter while permafrost extends deep below the surfacr. After the oil is extracted, the clean sands are returned to the mine hole and trees replanted. Yes the land is initially cleared just like farmers do to grow crops but it is restored whereas farmland is not. The pictures that green peace show of exhaust from the “smokestacks” is acually water vapor not smoke since the cold air condenses the water vapor. What a hoax. I lived worked on the Syncrude project during the late 70’s startup. I fished the Athabasca river and saw natural gobs of tar on the banks. One could claim that the extraction process cleans up the soil by removing the oil/tar.
7) Yes the tar sands processing does create more CO2 per btu produced, but many of us do not consider CO2 as pollution unless it is the exhaust gas from any of our Senators or members of the House.
Kum,
As far as I know there are no commercially operating plants using enzymes. Correct? If so the claimed economics remain to be demonstrated , and I assume the folks who manufacture the enzyme will determine the market price.
I assume you are aware that so far the cellulosic plants using pyrolysis have been a huge failure and the EPA has had to significantly reduce the required portion of ethanol from cellulosic sources. The one plant I am aware of from the news was the former poster child for cellulosic ethanol and is producing fractional volumes of methanol instead for the forseeable future. Without commercial demonstration the claims are to be questioned. I don’t know the details but the media have reported problems with the Catalyst for ethanol. Do you know the details? How was this missed in the pilot plants?
Mr. Fuller, I have a few exceptions to take with the premises of your post. The picture of the future described in this post is alarming, yet very far from the likely reality. I write on this from time to time on my blogs under the key words Grand Game. see e.g.
http://energyguysmusings.blogspot.com/2009/07/peak-oil-and-unicorns-both-mythical.html
http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/search?q=grand+game
First, we are not running out of oil. The claim that oil production will decline in the next 20 years has been made repeatedly for many decades. Those who make such claims do not properly account for the technology improvements in oil extraction.
Second, natural gas production will continue to increase around the world, again, attributable to improved technology for extraction. Shale gas, coal-bed-methane, in-situ gasification, tight sandstone gas, and methane clathrates all will play large roles.
Third, renewable energy will include electric power from ocean currents, not simply wind, solar, and geothermal. The power available from ocean currents is staggering, and the technology is advancing rapidly.
Finally, the entire future energy picture will be changed fundamentally by the use of hydrogen from artificial photosynthesis, wherein man-made substances similar to plant proteins split water into hydrogen and oxygen, with the hydrogen collected and used as fuel, all at ambient temperatures and pressures using sunlight. Hydrogen storage is a trivial issue.
“Yet another alternative is hydrogen from sunshine via enhanced proteins. The British scientists’ breakthrough research in 2004 showed the exact atomic structure of the photosynthesis site in plant proteins where water is broken down by sunshine into oxygen and hydrogen. That hydrogen could and will be used in power plants, probably combined cycle cogeneration because it is the most efficient. The electric power will replace gasoline and coal that can then be used to produce jet fuel or diesel. A major side benefit is that nuclear power plants with their toxic wastes will be shut down forever.” — http://energyguysmusings.blogspot.com/2008/09/peak-oil-not-big-deal.html
There is more than adequate energy supply for increased population on Earth. What is lacking are the political solutions to supply the energy to the impoverished areas.
Don, I don’t know the details. All I know is, “gasification” is looking very iffy. You’re dealing with a Lot of Heat, and, sometimes, processes that deal with a Lot of Heat don’t “scale” they way they’re expected.
Poet, Genera, Fiberight, and Inbicon are all producing “semi” commercial quantities of cellulosic ethanol. Genera said something to the effect that “they” wouldn’t scale all the way up until Jan 1, 2011. Something about the “tax” treatment regarding cellulosic ethanol. Genera is a partnership between the Univ of Tenn, and Dupont-Danisco. They are taking a very deliberate approach to building up the supply chain of feedstock, studying how to store it, and, in general working on the “logistics” of the operation. Poet has been “collecting cobs” for a couple of years, now, and, also, are studying different storage/collection processes. They are, also, waiting, and hoping for a sizable loan guarantee from the government (their “project Liberty” is by far the largest, most ambitious of all the current schemes. Fiberight will be first to market with “true” commercial quantities, probably early in 2011 (although, Inbicon could almost be considered “commercial” now.)
Novozymes, and Dupont-Danisco are, already, committed to enzyme prices that I quoted. This has all caught the “gasification” boys by surprise, and they’re squalling like banshees; but it won’t do’em any good. The race has been run, and the “enzymists” won.
Jim says:
August 13, 2010 at 1:24 am
I suspect there are too many variables to make the ‘the 2nd/3rd world will all be consuming energy at 1st world rates in 25 years time’ statement very accurate at all. Most of all we do not know what technologies lie around the corner – if solar panel prices continue to fall at current rates solar electricity will be competitive with fossil fuels within 10-15 years. If battery technology improves also, it is entirely feasible that by 2035 the entire West could have houses with 75% of their electrical needs supplied by solar means. Equally we don’t know how much nuclear energy will be used in 2035, as it is a political decision, not a purely rational/technology one. Fusion technology may have also come to fruition.
The Victorian Londoners thought that London would soon be 6 feet deep in horse manure, due to the rapid growth in horse usage. Fortunately for them Mr Benz had other ideas. We similarly are using past trends to predict the future. Which is fine, until the trends change.
This was worth repeating. Technology changes are like phase transitions in media, as the behavior of a gas is completely different than the behavior of the solid, as temperatures rise, breakthroughs in technology lead to unpredictable results.
My grandmother, born in 1890, dying in 1984, saw many such drastic transitions. In her lifetime from water carried from the well to a well run electric home, television included. She never believed people landed on the moon, it was too much for her. She said it was a Hollywood production.
I agree that the internet and the web changed the world, as well as satellites and computers. A phase transition.
I agree that the energy problem will be the next phase transition, not in the sense presented in this article, but in the sense that, when energy becomes freely available to all, a new model of how men organize their lives should/will appear. Money will have no meaning and a new value system will have to be devised, probably around work and education in the necessary jobs still needing a human.
Fusion will provide this free energy. How can I be sure? Fusion reactors are to the hydrogen bomb what car engines are to the Molotov bomb. Human resourcefulness and ingenuity will solve the problems eventually .
It may be that more free energy will be available as scientific understanding develops, but at the moment the scenaria are science fiction.
The basic problem facing humanity will be providing a new format for living for all, something like the way the leisure classes lived back in feudal times. We see the beginning of this problem in the number of jobless, created due to mechanization of agriculture and industry. There is a limit to how much value there can be in the service section, which more and more is the only one that can absorb such workers.
Kum Dollison says:
August 13, 2010 at 9:15 pm
“From here on out it’s just “who wants to do it.” ”
Ethanol is not the future – it is too energy intensive. It will have a role and in some places it will remain important for local energy and production, but overall it is likely to be a milestone on the way to better fuels.
The parasitic energy requirement for ethanol production is high – ~60% IIRC (yes this can be provided from the lignin byproduct). Add in the energy requirement in farming the biomass and transporting it and the net energy production is limited compared to other processes (gasification, biogas). There are effiencies to be gained and improvements in technology but even if we get to ambient temperature fermentation or enzymatic conversion, the big energy requirement is always going to be the phase separation of ethanol and water. In addition, there is still a lot of waste from the process to be dealt with – lignin. Burn or gasify it? yes, although you need heat to dry it first or waste energy burning water. Turn it into biogas? Not in its native state – it needs preprocessing of which I believe the research is still in its infancy.
The bottom line is that ethanol does not have the energy density of oil so the per bbl net energy yield on the process is not in the same league.
Gasification is interesting because it is efficient at a useable scale. In fact for biomass scale is everything as you need an increasingly large effective transport radius as you scale up and small scale is better; if it is economic and the technology is efficient at small scale – that is the way to go. Ethanol is not there.
And there is no reason for those folks to have any lower life style than the rest of us. There is no shortage of stuff nor of energy. The real China is busy building coal facilities like crazy too. I expect the coal and natural gas curves in that graph are wrong. (We’ve just recently developed ways to get giga-tons more of it from ‘tight gas deposits’ so we’re swimming in the stuff….)
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/08/08/everything-from-mud/
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/05/29/ulum-ultra-large-uranium-miner-ship/
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/there-is-no-shortage-of-stuff/
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/there-is-no-energy-shortage/
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/07/20/china-makes-western-co2-control-pointless/
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/02/25/china-where-coal-turns-to-money/
It’s still growing exponentially. A good benchmark to watch is the cost of human genome sequencing. In 2000 it was $100 million. Today it’s a little over $10,000. The Archon X Prize is $10,000,000 to the first company that can do it for $1000.
Another good metric to watch is the growth rate of genomic databases such as Ensembl.
http://uswest.ensembl.org/index.html
Of particular note is the Venter Institute’s progress with artificial genomes. They’ve assembled a complete function minimal genome (about 120 thousand base pairs IIRC) and transplanted it into an evacuated bacterial shell which then came to life and grew out into a colony. They did it with mail-order DNA snippets.
The time and cost of doing things like this is plummeting. As the cost drops the rate of progress accelerates commensurately.
Venter’s first big practical goal is an artifical organism which can convert ligineous biomass (read agricultural waste) directly into biofuel. The current process is not economically feasible and so only high value feedstocks such as corn or beets are utilized and even then it’s still not economically viable without subsidies.
I can’t imagine Venter is more than 20 years away from that goal. There’s really very little invention required. All the functionality needed exists in nature right now. It’s just a matter of cutting and pasting the right genes into an artificial genome. The trick is to get the cost of creating and testing artificial genomes low enough and fast enough that the tried and true method of trial & error can be employed in the quest for specific functionality.
I very much would like to see bio-engineered organisms that eat CO2 and provide energy in return on a large scale, and nano-coatings that reduce friction for roads, tires, train-tracks and wheels, aircraft fuselages, ad infinitum.
But spending ever more money on ever more expensive offshore wind farms in my mind is a vanity purchase and is not advancing the cause.
anna v says:
August 14, 2010 at 12:15 am
[…]
“I agree that the energy problem will be the next phase transition, not in the sense presented in this article, but in the sense that, when energy becomes freely available to all, a new model of how men organize their lives should/will appear. Money will have no meaning and a new value system will have to be devised, probably around work and education in the necessary jobs still needing a human.”
(Emphasis mine) That’s a gem of a paragraph anna v. The “One World Government” discussed welcomingly or in fear by many here is really just a bigger version of the same old governments we’ve always had. I don’t know how humanity will reorganize itself, but socialist-capitalist-imperialist models will probably be put aside for something no onehas conceived of yet. Fun to tink about; what could the new way be? (Don’t forget that there always will be individuals that will want to control the whole shebang.)
[…]
The basic problem facing humanity will be providing a new format for living for all, something like the way the leisure classes lived back in feudal times. We see the beginning of this problem in the number of jobless, created due to mechanization of agriculture and industry. There is a limit to how much value there can be in the service section, which more and more is the only one that can absorb such workers.”
Good example. We will have billions of people and the means to support them and they all have nothing specific to do. So what will they do? Mischief? Great things? Individuals will have to change their mindset or there’s a good chance we’ll descend into unstructured chaos.
Excellent post, anna v.
My emphasis above.
Yeah, that’s the rub. When the cost and tools required to create an artificial organism drop to the point where individuals can whip one out in a spare bedroom things are going to get real interesting to say the least.
I presume you’ve read “Engines of Creation” by K. Eric Drexler (1986). I read it in 1987 and my thoughts on the progression of technology have never been the same. At that point in time I was working with Intel and AutoDesk developing high performance CAD/CAM graphics hardware for IBM-compatible desktops. AutoDesk was the focus point for Project Xanadu at the time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu#History
anna v
“Fusion will provide this free energy. How can I be sure? Fusion reactors are to the hydrogen bomb what car engines are to the Molotov bomb. Human resourcefulness and ingenuity will solve the problems eventually .”
Won’t happen. The engineering obstacles are insurmountable. There are simply no materials that can withstand the fusion energy long enough to be economically viable even if a way to exceed breakeven for some short period of time is developed.
The only fusion reactor we need has been up and running for billions of years and it will keep running without maintenance for billions more. All we have to do is find better ways of collecting the heat from it.
Another technology I’ve been watching closely is called a space elevator. We need about one more order of magnitude improvement in carbon nano-tube technology to make it practical to run a cable from the ground to orbit. An order of magnitude may sound like a lot but it really isn’t as improvements of that order have come rapidly in recent years. If a space elevator becomes a reality (which is one heck of a lot safer bet than practical fusion reactors) the cost of lifting mass to orbit drops by a factor of 100 or more. It then becomes practical to build vast solar energy collectors in orbit where the sun shines 24 hours a day at much higher intensity than ground level and there’s no weather to deal with – the collectors can be paper thin and never get dirty or damaged. The energy can then be transmitted to virtually anywhere on the earth’s surface via focused microwaves to small footprint rectenna farms on the surface which solves one of the biggest hurdles in alternative energy – how to distribute the energy from point of production to point of use.
At this point I think it’s a horse race between orbital solar energy using established technologies (the cost of lifting mass to orbit is the only real impediment) and ground based collection through genetically modified organisms. I believe the latter will win the race handily mostly because it is purely and engineering problem and the infrastructure for liquid fuel distribution is already in place. Most recently manufactured vehicles have motors that automatically adjust themselves to 85% alcohol fuels and the diesel fleet can run on vegetable oil as easily as diesel oil. Practical electric vehicles and means of charging them rapidly when needed are huge obstacles. Battery technology is not improving at an encouraging rate and the exotic, costly, toxic materials involved are obstacles in and of themselves. The copper alone needed for billions of electric wheel-motors will drain so much of the world’s copper supply that it becomes infeasible. Electricity has its place but that place just isn’t transportation fuel. Non-mobile applications where the point of production isn’t too distant from point of use is electricity’s forte. Elsewhere liquid fuels are going to continue ruling the day.
Dave,
Maybe you can explain to me how it makes sense to bypass the filtering system our atmosphere provides against too much solar heat getting to our planet allowing it to maintain a relatively constant temperature. All energy ends up as heat. All extra energy you bring in heats the planet up. Of course a portion is re-radiated to space but not all. Could this would be worse than the impact CO2 apparently has in reducing the amount of IR the earth gives off to outer space.
BTW the solar panels on earth do the same thing, they reduce the amout of IR that would otherwise sent off to space.
Dave,
BTW, I agree with your comment on electric cars. Industry has been working on a “magic” battery for over 60 years. If it was easy, it would have been done. People bragg about getting 50 to 100 miles out of a charge. How many miles do you get driving home from workat night in a winter snowstorm with the heater on, the wipers running, and with the lights on in heavy traffic for hours? Besides the media ignores the fact that over 50% of our electricity is generated from “dirty” coal and the cost to replace the current infrastructure liquid fueling system is enormous.
The electric car is a niche vehicle and I commend those who use it.
Verity Jones says:
August 14, 2010 at 4:33 am
Ethanol is not the future – it is too energy intensive. It will have a role and in some places it will remain important for local energy and production, but overall it is likely to be a milestone on the way to better fuels.
The rub here is the transportation fleet is ready for it with so many E85 capable motors already on the road.
The parasitic energy requirement for ethanol production is high – ~60% IIRC (yes this can be provided from the lignin byproduct). Add in the energy requirement in farming the biomass and transporting it and the net energy production is limited compared to other processes (gasification, biogas). There are effiencies to be gained and improvements in technology but even if we get to ambient temperature fermentation or enzymatic conversion, the big energy requirement is always going to be the phase separation of ethanol and water. In addition, there is still a lot of waste from the process to be dealt with – lignin. Burn or gasify it? yes, although you need heat to dry it first or waste energy burning water. Turn it into biogas? Not in its native state – it needs preprocessing of which I believe the research is still in its infancy.
I built an experimental setup for producing fuel grade ethanol. With cane sugar as the only feedstock and a strain of yeast that can turn water/sugar into clear 24% ethanol mix in five days and an insulated electrically heated boiler I can turn out fuel grade ethanol for about $4/liter. The greatest cost is in the feedstock as I used cane sugar from the grocers at $0.35/lb. If I were to use molasses purchased in 55 gallon drums, which is a great feedstock, I can get that down to $4 per gallon including the delivered cost of electricity to drive the distillation.
But that’s not the most cost efficient method of distillation I found. Last fall I built a room-temperature distillation apparatus that uses a vacuum chamber in an ice bath. I didn’t calculate the energy efficiency but it was minimal even without insulation. Basically only the latent heat of ethanol vaporization needed to be added to the boiler to maintain a temperature of 25C. The vacuum only has to be established at the beginning so no vacuum pump needs to be kept running. Ideally the whole setup could function virtually cost-free by running it in the winter somewhere where it’s cold outside. A low temperature solar concentrator on a clear winter day is adequate to heat the boiler and the condenser can simply be a length of pipe exposed to the cold air.
That said, I’m not at all sure that a GM yeast can’t be fashioned that can survive considerably more than 24% alcohol concentration. The strain I used was just a result of normal breeding techiniques. Other fungi carry suites of enzymes (mushroom mycelia in particular) that can break down lignin and cellulose into carbohydrates albeit rather slowly and with some substantial effort needed to maintain the environment. Again I don’t see why GM mycelia can’t be fashioned to break down ligineous biomass without much hassle.
That said it’s vegetable oil that has more intrigued. I happen to have some Chinese Tallow tress growing on my property. They are a prodigious water-loving invasive species here that grow like giant weeds near the lake shore. I recently discovered these are the third-most productive plant for producing biodiesel after algae and oil palm. Through genetic engineering it seems quite feasible to construct a green plant that fills coconut-like pods with pure vegetable oil ready to pour into the fuel tank of any diesel engine. These could simply grow as a vast mat close to the ground like watermelons. In fact once biotechnology really gets wound up you can simply grow your pipes and tanks and eliminate just about all the labor and manufacturing.
“The bottom line is that ethanol does not have the energy density of oil so the per bbl net energy yield on the process is not in the same league.”
Likewise, gasoline contains 20% fewer BTUs per gallon than vegetable oil. Not sure what the point is. The differences don’t put alcohol, gasoline, and diesel into different leagues. They all play in the same ballpark and the distribution infrastructure is the same and extant.
“Gasification is interesting because it is efficient at a useable scale. In fact for biomass scale is everything as you need an increasingly large effective transport radius as you scale up and small scale is better; if it is economic and the technology is efficient at small scale – that is the way to go. Ethanol is not there.”
Actually I came very close last year to building a gassifier last year. On two acres of mostly wooded land I figure I collect and burn about 10 tons a year of deadwood. Currently I get off my butt about 3 times a year and spend a couple of days collecting a few tons into a big pile and setting a torch to it on high ground. The ashes are so minimal I usually just let normal rainfall wash it downslope where it fertilizes the very trees from whence it came. Once I did a huge amount of burning on the lakeshore and left the ash pile there. Then a small flood came along which put the ash pile under a foot or two of water. The algae bloom over that ashpile was a sight to behold.
Anyhow, I hate wasting perfectly good wood but there’s only so much I can burn in my fireplace and what’s generated from landscape maintenance is mostly smaller branches and mostly still green. A good intense fire burns the green stuff (oak leaves and juniper needles) just fine but it’s unsuitable for a fireplace. Anything combustable (cardboard and paper) from manufactured products goes into my fireplace as well. A gasifier looked like it might be productive although I’m not about to foul and eventually ruing any of my gasoline engines with it. What I considered was tanking it in propane bottles and using it in place of propane which appears to be feasible without modifying any of my propane-burning appliances of which I have half a dozen including a mosquito-magnet which burns propane to produce CO2 which in turn attacts mosquitos into the suction trap. I might still look further into that at some point in time. I could probably produce way more than I need and sell the excess into the market for propane BBQ grills and get a premium for it because it’s carbon-neutral.
Friends:
There is only one certainty concerning future energy technologies, and it is that we do not know what they will be. Therefore, it is pointless to postulate about them.
We can assess present research and hope it leads to advances. These would be materials science developments that provide abilities to construct cheap ‘room temperature’ superconductors, Carson Towers, fusion reactors or space elevators.
But it is more likely that (excepting ‘room temperature’ superconductors) if these technologies became available then they would not be used because some now unforeseeable technology will be adopted.
Few predicted the rapid adoptions of the internal combusion engine before Diesel, or viable powered heavier-than-air-aircraft before the Wright brothers, or home computers before the Apple II, or etc..
History shows that predicting major technological changes is probably not possible. If it were possible then major corporations would all be working to win the race for them. But the race is usually won by people whom most others think are cranks until they win.
Richard
Energy can not be created or destroyed. Any amount of heat we siphon off from from surface insolation, unless it is stored forever in chemical bond energy (we produce fuel but don’t use it), ends up being radiated out to space. We simply collect it at high density, use the temperature gradient to extract mechanical energy, which then becomes mechanical waste heat and resumes its march back out into space in a more diffused form. Insolation collected in orbit is a different story. The collectors don’t shadow the earth so whatever we collect and send downward is additional to what the earth normally receives. The saving grace is that humanity’s energy consumption now and into the foreseeable future are insignificant compared to the total amount of insolation on the surface.
I was one of those few who predicted home computers before the Apple II. The year was 1977. I was taking Entreprenuership 101 in an off-campus offering by Pepperdine Business School at MCAS El Toro while I still in the Marine Corps. The term project was to develop a business plan. Mine essentially was the business plan later employed by a number of franchises like Computer Land, Comp USA, and others.
Too bad I didn’t use it myself but I’m an engineer not a business man so I was much more interested in design and invention of the hardware and left the selling of it to others.
I’m here to tell you that biotechnology has far more potential today than personal computers did in 1977 and I have a perfect record in technological predictions so far but with a sample size of just one prediction there’s not exactly a lot of history in the record. If I were a young techological genius full of piss and vinegar again I’d be getting started in a bioengineering career today and, just like the home computer revolution that began 30 some years ago I’d expect the biotech revolution would be just as robust and fulfilling over the next 30 years.
Not all infant technologies are so recognizable but computers were back then and biotech is now.
Richard S Courtney says:
August 14, 2010 at 9:18 am
“[…] History shows that predicting major technological changes is probably not possible. If it were possible then major corporations would all be working to win the race for them. But the race is usually won by people whom most others think are cranks until they win. ”
You’re talking about disruptive technologies. There’s actually pretty good experience about such disruptions. The web was one, for instance. Usually you see a clean exponential growth curve in the number of installations until market saturation makes it level off. Ray Kurzweil analyzed a lot of those.
Hardly. It’s a huge issue. It has to stored and distributed either under great pressure or in cryogenic conditions. The infrastructure exists for neither. Either way it isn’t suitable for transportation fuel. While there is some progress being made in storing it with chemical absorbants the progress is glacial and holds no promise of becoming practical. Hydrogen as fuel would be moer aptly called hypedrogen because that’s pretty much all it is – hype.
I agree that people won’t notice the change, probably, but I’m not talking about what people notice when I say environmental trouble. 20% of 600 s. miles, is 120 sq miles, in a monoculture of switchgrass or hybrid trees–it doesn’t matter. Monoculture leads to environmental trouble. Once you begin using it as a “crop” you will find yourself in the business of pesticide, fertilizer, and other inputs. People have been talking about switchgrass out west here for years, but they are speaking of planting it in a combination of other plants, and harvesting so minimally that no inputs are needed. That runs the needed acreage way up.
With regard to many of the cogen, biofuels schemes, I am being serious when I say that people need some background in thermodynamics so they can appreciate the real limits on these ideas. Some one above, Verity Jones I see, mentioned energy to separate phases. The second law of thermodynamics places limits on heat engines, heat pumps, the separation of mixtures, efficiency of combustion, and so forth.
Yes, we can do better than we are at present with regard to renewable, but the political class have no end to their exuberance, and throw wads on money at every project that runs from the brush. No matter how well-intentioned we, as tax payers, should not let them pursue some, perhaps most, of them.
Anyway, it’s been an interesting discussion, but we’ll have to agree to disagree for now.
Dave Springer says:
August 14, 2010 at 8:12 am
anna v
“Fusion will provide this free energy. How can I be sure? Fusion reactors are to the hydrogen bomb what car engines are to the Molotov bomb. Human resourcefulness and ingenuity will solve the problems eventually .”
Won’t happen. The engineering obstacles are insurmountable. There are simply no materials that can withstand the fusion energy long enough to be economically viable even if a way to exceed breakeven for some short period of time is developed.
Well, ITER, the international collaboration for building a megawatt tokamak is on the way and will answer the question of the viability of the tokamak solution.
You are also underestimating human ingenuity, new technologies and breakthroughs.
We shall see who is right in a few decades 🙂
Wasn’t A.C.Clark who wrote about the space elevator? It would be good if humans could make one for many reasons other than solar energy for power. It would be excellent to have when the next ice age starts, the only true climate prophecy, to reflect extra energy on the earth and avoid the catastrophe.