90 comments on A Letter to My Brother: Peak Oil in Greater Detail
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Alan,
Yes, we are making use of corn ethanol today and it:
All for a fraction of the cost of the subsidies that the oil industry gets. I don't see how this is a waste of money.
Nobody, me and all engineers included, can foresee what breakthroughs might come from trying cellulose ethanol or hydrogen. Considering that the oil industry has had over a 150 years to get to where it is, we should spend at least another few decades supporting ethanol and hydrogen, especially considering the successes we have already achieved.
Would your business be viable without subsidies? With an energy ratio of 1.1 (1.3 if you include an animal feed by-product) it provides virtually no net additional energy. All of the other benefits are simply "make work".
Would the petroleum industry be viable without subsidies? There are a bunch of large, well-armed subsidies escorting oil tankers in the Persian Gulf every day. At least farmers don't need to be guarded.
At least farmers don't need to be guarded.
Yet.
| The problem will solve itself.
| But not in a nice way.
you're bad.
By all means, let us either end the subsidies for the oil industry or have these subsidies reflected in the cost of oil products. Beware, however, much of these costs would be passed on to the costs of ethanol. The petroleum industry would be viable; it is just that the quantity consumed would be reduced, probably far more than the barrels of fuel being added by the entire ethanol industry.
So, really, all you have done is just identify yet another subsidy for the ethanol industry. And, by the way, the net reduction in our oil imports from ethanol is the relevant figure. Can you tell us the actual net reduction in imports that has occured from the ethanol production that occurred last year?
If you fix the USDA's funky accounting, it's actually providing about a 9% increase over energy input (and maybe not even that, for highly-irrigated Nebraska corn).
9% of 5 billion gallons/year gross is about 450 million gallons/year net. The 51¢/gallon subsidy applies to all of it, so the subsidy for each net gallon of ethanol is about $5.67. Since ethanol has roughly 2/3 the energy of gasoline, the subsidy comes to about $8.50/gallon equivalent.
And starves millions in the third world, as US corn prices have doubled. Soybeans are disappearing too, as acreage gets switched to corn which will disappear into stills. And fertilizer demand increases (because corn does not fix nitrogen), driving up costs for third-world farmers too.
Mostly on vehicles too old to have modern pollution controls, which are rapidly disappearing from the roads.
450 million out of 140 billion gallons is less than one half ounce per gallon. Inflating tires would save more than that. Not speeding would save at least as much.
Yes, starving people have little threat of obesity and Type II diabetes.
'bout the best way to make ethanol, in my mind.... is with small scale production, at the individual farm level, production to be used by the farmer.
I see no long term, large scale viability.
Alright, one more time....
If you fix the USDA's funky accounting, it's actually providing about a 9% increase over energy input (and maybe not even that, for highly-irrigated Nebraska corn).
Nope, I am not conceding this point. Robert is very talented but he is wrong on this one. It isn't his fault, everyone doing these studies is using old data. My whole point about supporting ethanol is that it is good now, and has the potential to be a great energy source as technology develops. It makes no sense to argue against this point by quoting me data on the current average industry statistics. For instance, this corn ethanol plant added simple, existing technology such as a fluidized bed biomass incinerator and windmills to obtain an energy balance of 6 energy units per input. There is also this slightly more advanced corn ethanol plant that thinks it can get 46.67 BTUs per BTU input. He wants to build 15 more of them too. There are now over 114 ethanol plants in the US and a couple of hundred in Brazil and each new one is more efficient than the one before. Meanwhile, each oil well drilled is less efficient than the one before because the easy oil is gone. Just to finish this point, I don't like the subsidies and tariffs, it is just necessary because oil is subsidized.
And starves millions in the third world, as US corn prices have doubled.
Jeeze, the world has changed! Starvation has been replaced by obesity and diabetes. Just google global obesity and you get things like this:
More than two-thirds of the world's estimated 246 million diabetics come from less-affluent developing nations, and more must be done to curb a disease that now rivals HIV/AIDS in terms of suffering and death around the globe. This isn't Live Aid time anymore.
Mostly on vehicles too old to have modern pollution controls, which are rapidly disappearing from the roads.
Ethanol is also carbon neutral.
450 million out of 140 billion gallons is less than one half ounce per gallon. Inflating tires would save more than that. Not speeding would save at least as much.
There are another 90 corn ethanol plants and 6 cellulose ethanol plants being built in the US. When you argue that this isn't much compared to gasoline, you are actually supporting my position. I think ethanol needs more R&D support relative to petroleum because as oil production declines, we will have a lot to make up.
Yes, starving people have little threat of obesity and Type II diabetes.
Again, you are still thinking ethiopia in the '80s. People around the world have McDonalds, Walmarts, KFC, Coca-cola. These aren't the healthiest things to have, but it beats starving. Except in a few, isolated places starvation is not an issue, and in those places where it is, it is warfare or some other acute, artificial cause, not ethanol production.
Ethanol is also carbon neutral
I resent a bit your trolling hijacking of this thread, but this much is just TOO much to let pass,
Corn Ethanol produces LARGE amounts of GHG.
Natural Gas for nitrogen fertilizer (corn is a HOG)
Diesel for planting, spraying, harvesting and hauling
Sometimes, natural gas or propane for drying
Petrochemicals for insects, herbicides
Natural Gas or coal for distillation
AND
Methane releases from feedlots where the last ~20% of the energy recovery comes from !
About a wash with just burning oil and compressed natural gas directly in vehicles.
Remove ALL ethanol subsidies, require some oxygenated additives (ethanol, butanol, whatever) in fuels in polluted urban areas and lets invest in REAL solutions elsewhere.
Best Hopes,
Alan
I cannot let your lies go unrebutted before the staff removes your account.
Ethanol stinks now. Even the best cellulosic ethanol schemes stink. IOgen claims what, 77 gallons/ton possible? Syntek was talking 100 gallons/ton. If you can achieve 100 gallons/ton and you can find the 1.3 billion tons of biomass claimed in the "Billion-Ton Vision" (which will only come about with substantially different crops), you're still only talking 130 billion gallons of ethanol, packing the energy of only ~87 billion gallons of gasoline. That's barely more than half our gasoline consumption, with NOTHING left over for:
We need much better, which means we cannot spend time on half-measures like ethanol for a business-as-usual vehicle fleet.
Engineer-Poet says,
"I cannot let your lies go unrebutted before the staff removes your account."
Why should the staff remove his account?
I think corn ethanol is a boondoggle, and of all the bio-fuels alternatives, the weakest and worst one to throw our efforts behind. However, the poster in question, Keithster100 , has said nothing personally insulting, not engaged in cursing or profanity, engaged in no personal attacks, nor insulted anyone at the point of your implied threat. He/she simply posted viewpoints that do not conform to the accepted orthodoxy here. This is not grounds for removal, and would be an exercise in censorship not in keeping with the open forum and free exchange of views that we have come to expect here.
At some point, perhaps some one at “the staff” needs to re-confirm that the “open forum” is still open, and explain that posters should not be threatened with removal simply because they hold differing viewpoints.
Oh, one more time, everybody, check our bio-butanol, the great 4 carbon alcohol that holds sooooo much more promise than ethanol. :-)
Roger Conner Jr.
Remember, we are only one cubic mile from freedom
Well said. Keithster100 and I are about the only ones here that take on the conventional wisdom of TOD with regard to ethanol. I admire his (her) persistence. It's not easy to be in the minority and have have your ideas trashed all the time. Why don't I just leave? Because TOD is an excellent site that addresses what I think is the main problem of the 21st century. Besides, it is easy and fun to poke holes in the flawed conventional wisdom so often expressed here. Alan's post is no exception. Notice that the EROEI for electricity production was not mentioned. If I recall it is something like .3. Was it omitted because it would make ethanol look like a bonanza? Ethanol's EROEI of 1.3 would be considered a bonanza if it were MROMI (money return on money invested). Wall Street would have a field day and indeed it has.
The high EROEI on oil compared to alternatives is a deeply flawed argument. Stealing from the earths oil bank is of course more profitable that going out and working for energy. But stealing's days are numbered. As ethanol opponents love to talk about flaws and unsustainability, I think it is safe to say that the whole point of Peak Oil is that oil production is deeply flawed and unsustainable. This should not come as a surprise as IMO most things in this world are deeply flawed and unsustainable including each of our lives. But the world goes on anyway. The dinosaurs were deeply flawed and unsustainable but here we are. So what if ethanol is deeply flawed and unsustainable? You have to work with what you got or give up. The conventional wisdom at the oil drum is despair because there are no perfect solutions. So it has always been and so it will always be, at least on this earth.
practical,
As I said in the opening line of my post in defense of Keithster100's right to speak his position, and make even more clear on down in a later post, I am afraid I cannot share your enthusiasm for ethanol, in particular ethanol from corn. However I do think that there are people who have come to various conclusions on this, and they have committed no offense to TOD by simply voicing their viewpoints. I suffer likewise by being a supporter of solar and wind to hydrogen, which I think is, at the end of the day, the one truly sustainable fuel we will be able to come up with, and is carbon clean.
On ethanol, I would have nothing against it whatsoever if I were not worried about the consumption of valued resources in it's production (topsoil, water, and most importantly, natural gas), and troubled by the "food vs. fuel" issue. Some of these issues can be mitigated to some extent (the growing of the imput crop in areas that do not have to be irrigated but will produce by natural rainfall, careful contour and conservation farming, and alternative cropping and strip cropping between hedges, in other words, something akin to "permaculture" farming to preserve topsoil)
The issue of natural gas consumption to me makes ethanol extremely problematical. Even the corn growers themselves confess their absolute relience on inexpensive natural gas, having gone to Washington to testify to this. If some of the crop can cleanly be used to replace nat gas consumption in the distilling process, or in the production of fertilizer, this would go a long way to making the option more acceptable. The use of coal to complete the distilling, as is actually being discussed in some cases, is to be a horrendous backtracking on the so called "clean fuel" that ethanol promises to be, and would to my mind be the nail in the coffin that would end it.
I have another problem: I have become more and more convinced that bio-butanol shows much more promise than ethanol. If you are not familiar with it, do a google, but here are some links to get you started:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Butanol
http://www2.dupont.com/Biofuels/en_US/index.html
http://www.greencarcongress.com/biobutanol/index.html
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2007/02/biofuels_entrep.html
http://www.butanol.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clostridium_acetobutylicum
Bio butanol is an alcohol, but of 4 carbon structure. Thus, it has a heat content comparable to gasoline, and is far less corrosive, requiring no change in infrastructure to distribute. It has in testing been run in autos with absolutely no modification, as a one to one replacement to gasoline. It will mix with gasoline, or with ethanol. As a finished product, it is a magnificant fuel. It can be produced from any plant that will produce ethanol, including corn, but sugar beets are the chosen imput crop, yielding higher return than corn for the cost of production.
Dupont Corp., in a partnership with British Petroleum, is building a facility to produce bio butanol in the U.K market. If this project goes well, I would not be surprised to see many of the proposed ethanol production plants in the U.S become butanol plants.
I have long wanted to do a post depicting a bio butanl study here on TOD, but in honesty, I don't think it would be well recieved here. I think that sugar beets could be grown and barged on the Mississippi/Ohio/Missouri River system basin, and then the butanol liquid fuel hauled by barges out to various distribution points on the river and intracoastal water way, creating a "homeland security" civil defense fuel, and a fuel for market that could be widely distributed as a "backbone" liquid fuel in America. The buzz now is with bio butanol, and the limits are: (a) how much fertilizer per ton of liquid fuel and (b) what would the yield of liquid fuel be per dollar and ton of imput crop. These would decide the issue. If the fertilzer consumption is too high, then we are back to the same problem we have with ethanol, albeit with a much better finished product, that being natural gas consumption for fertilier. The yield will determine everything, and we are awaiting Dupont/BP's results with eagerness.
Roger Conner Jr.
Remember, we are only one cubic mile from freedom
You will note that I wrote:
Best Hopes for "decade" instead of "decades",
Alan
(Rassafracker... I had a big response written and then lost it by closing the wrong tab.)
Butanol appears to yield roughly the same product volume as ethanol, but has superior energy yield (93,000 BTU/gallon compared to about 78,000, if memory serves). But it's nowhere near a solution for the same reason as ethanol:
There's no security in a system which is guaranteed not to work. In contrast, the PHEV is guaranteed TO work, and for a fairly small price. The electric path for the PHEV bypasses all of the issues with liquid-fuel conversion efficiency and engine losses. A PHEV can run most of its mileage on wind or even solar power at a price many individuals can afford. In a world of silver BB's, the PHEV is a silver buckshot pellet.
I have often called limited access highways and very busy streets "auto sewers" because of the way that they repel people. With the lingering aroma of butyric acid .... :-)
This increases my support of butanol. What better way to get people out of their cars than with a stink bomb !
And if someone truly MUST drive to live, minor nasal surgery may be all that is required.
Best Hopes for Butanol !
Alan
it would make ethanol look like a bonanza ?
Trading 20 BTUs of diesel or gasoline for 1 BTU of electricity is a REAL bonanza ! Even if a good % of the electricity comes from natural gas with a conversion efficiency of 0.6 and coal with a conversion % of 0.35, the #s still look like a bonanza to me !
And when New York City can start on just 22% of one of the two most important Urban Rail projects in the nation, and it is limited to building 22% because federal matching is only 1/3rd (with 80% federal matching it could build ~90% with the same local monies); then ethanol subsidies look like obscene waste.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/09/nyregion/09subway.html?_r=1&oref=slogi...
Bit of background; The 4 track Lexington subway is operating over capacity at 600,000 pax/day. (in context, these few miles of subway carry about as pax miles as Amtrak). Lack of capacity and over crowding discourages ridership. 2nd Avenue parallels Lexington, mainly to the east. It would attract many current Lexington riders and new riders as well since it would be closer to them. A less crowded Lexington subway would attract more riders from the west.
The 2nd Avenue subway will be built with 2 tracks as an economy measure, which will limit it's capacity and express service for centuries (that's what tracks 3 & 4 are used for).
Best Hopes,
Alan
Dear Engineer-Poet,
I have a lot of respect for your work here on the Oil Drum.
And for you opinions on the Peak-oil matters.
But surely we now know that there is no silver bullit in solving our energy problems. I think that the debate now states that we are going to need every option:
-Coal to liquids
-Fission/Fusion
-Solar
-Wind
-GeoThermal
-Tidal
-Biomass in every way. So that includes Wood/Cane/Corn/Algea Ethanol, biodiesels etc.
I think that for the open discussion it would be better to say that Ethanol is merely a limited option instead of stating that it is nothing. If it was nothing, it couldn't be done like it is done in Brasil.
Roger From the Netherlands
In a mild decline post-Peak Oil, a strong effort on the following "would be enough" for the US.
Build nothing but small diesel cars (perhaps with some very small gasoline cars) Push compressed natural gas for speciality transportation.
Maximum effort (take traffic lanes from cars, special green lights for bikes first, required free bicycle parking EVERYWHERE, taking from car parking) to push transportation bicycling.
Tax car parking and gasoline/diesel to EU levels. Raise airline taxes.
Electrify our freight railroads and toll all interstate highways at high levels.
Build as much Urban Rail as possible as fast as feasible.
Require solar water heating in new construction and push retrofits. Require much higher levels of insulation in new construction and push retrofits. Also push solar space heating.
Keep wind on it's current growth curve.
A different (and I would argue better) set of options.
Best Hopes,
Alan
Alan,
I like you're idea of the electified lightweight railsystem.
I think that electification of our transport system is the way to go. Because that allows us to deversify in the energy sources used to transport (more ways to produce electric power than oil and nat.gas alone).
Besides the conservation as you propose, are you aware of the following alternative for personilized transport?:
http://theaircar.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmqpGZv0YT4
Very nice option for urban transport!!
Oh, and I don't think that compressed natural gas is any good for transport. This resource will deplete very rapidly any time now and we are going to need it for heating homes and fertilizer and oil-sands..
Roger From the Netherlands
I have a jaundiced view of new technologies that "will save the day". I have seen new technologies stumble and fail in the real world.
Example: Westinghouse built elevated, light weight electric mini-buses in downtown Miami. In theory, great almost revolutionary idea ! In practice, very high costs and quite limited passenger appeal. Truly a white elephant.
The time scale to develop, scale up, build and operate prototypes is so high that we will be deep into post-Peak Oil before they can make even a marginal difference.
I am NOT against further R&D, but we need to be realistic with our plans. Take what we know works today and can be conservatively estimated for tomorrow (wind turbines will be xx% more cost effective in 2015 than today; if XX < 25%) and plan from there. If a solar PV breakthrough appears, modify plans accordingly BUT DO NOT COUNT ON A BREAKTHROUGH !!
Insulation works. Solar hot water heating works. Electric railroads work. Urban Rail works. Wind Turbines work. Pumped storage works. HV DC transmission works. Small diesel cars work IF pollution and/or safety standards are loosened. Transit Orientated Development works.
Best Hopes for Reality Based Planning,
Alan
Brazil's climate is uniquely suitable for sugar cane; the USA cannot duplicate its accomplishment any more than the Netherlands can. However, this may be a good thing. Brazil is busy converting rainforest into cane plantations and soybean fields. The deforestation and climate change are altering rainfall patterns in the Amazon basin. When it's too dry for cane, not even Brazil will be a "Brazil" any longer.
Brazil's accomplishment is only impressive in relative terms. It only produces 0.85 barrels/capita/year, which is a large fraction of a very small gasoline consumption. Even if the entire OECD did just as well, it wouldn't get us very far; our problem is downstream.
Ethanol (and bio-alcohols in general) is not a limited option so much as a limiting option. Turning a ton of biomass into 100 gallons of ethanol yields 7.8 million BTU of fuel, and perhaps 2 million BTU of useful work. Do that, and the biomass is gone; invest in the infrastructure to do that, and you have trouble taking better paths. But if you carbonize the biomass (8 million BTU/ton of charcoal) and run it through direct-carbon fuel cells, you can get 6.4 million BTU of electricity out (plus heat and chemical energy from the carbonization process). Storing charcoal is also cheaper and easier than any sort of alcohol.
The choice between ethanol and butanol is like a heart patient choosing between steak and barbecue. What we need is to hit the salad bar instead!
E-P,
Just as I said before: there is no silver bullit. And Ethanol is not going to save the American Way of Life (or the Dutch way for that matter). So we need every option that is available. And Ethanol is one of them. Maybe you're right about the US being not suitable for Corn/Cane Ethanol. But then again, as I stated before, we should not look at any option as being the only one.
You're right about the salad bar; we need to downscale our energy comsumption fast. And to deversify our ways of producing energy. And again, Ethanol is just one of them. It will never "save" us, but you cannot deny it's (limiting/limited) use in some areas in the world.
Other places will use Geothermal (Iceland), wood to liquids (Scandinavia/Canada) Coal to liquids (US and China). Others will just try to please Putin for a while (Europe).
We in the Netherlands are trying to secure our future by ever increasing our trading in depleting energy stocks.
Roger From the Netherlands
Ethanol is already driving up all corn related prices and it can only get worse. For those who eat corn related foods, this represents an additional expense; for those on the margin this may push them ove the edge. Our corn based industrialized agricultural economy is already an obscene way to furnish our food supply. Ethanol just feeds the problem. This way we continue to have a corn based industrialized food supply, but we get to pay more. So no, I don't think we should be exercising this particular option.
There are two ways to make progress on the liquid fuel supply problem. We are only looking at the supply side. But we are not looking at the way we grow our crops and provide our food in the first place. We should look at moving away from massive reliance on corn for whatever purpose and focus more on those crops and methods which require lower levels of fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, thus reducing fossil fuel use. Ethanol is just another way of perpetuating an a system that is already deeply flawed.
If we were just cutting into the corn supply to provide ethanol, maybe I wouldn't be so concerned. But this has and will result in less of other things like soy beans and vegetables. Why would any sane farmer out there grow vegetables with all the subsidies for the other crops like corn?
I kind of disagree with you.
"and windmills to obtain an energy balance of 6 energy units per input"
- so because renewable energy is used the EROEI goes up? Well, what if you sold that electricity on the open market? We yould use that electricity for other things than to run a ethanol plant, right?
"this slightly more advanced corn ethanol plant that thinks it can get 46.67 BTUs per BTU input. He wants to build 15 more of them too."
- but it only starts production of its "closed loop" this february. I am really interested to see if that closed loop holds 10 years or so... moreover, they use the bio-gas from the manure to do the distilling process. I find that is a bit the same problem as above. How about selling that gas at the open market? I also notice the word "want". We will see what happens in reality...
It looks as if the PROCESS of ethanol is the same, with an EROEI of 1.5-2.5, and that you can increase this by adding renewable energy on site.
But people would probably like to use that clean renewable energy directly for other things...
Keithster100,
I've been waiting for you to post something with a little substance now for a while. This post definitely qualifies and is more than just your standard "ethanol is great" type post. In fact, I think it fair to say this is your best post yet.
The links on the two ethanol plants are good industry pieces. Typically, they are long on cheerleading and short on some of the specifics (but they are informative nonetheless). Are you aware of or have you read more technical information on those particular plants or their processes? Linking to the scientific details would be of great value here in pushing the debate (read: your agenda) forward. Given the corn plant biology, it seems difficult to accept a conclusion that corn can best sugar cane as an ethanol source without a more rigorous analysis.
Have you thought about the available land/food or fuel issue?