<My Interview About Community OrganizingThe Oil DrumDrumBeat: April 9, 2007>

90 comments on A Letter to My Brother: Peak Oil in Greater Detail

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ThatsItImout on April 9, 2007 - 1:56am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

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

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practical on April 9, 2007 - 4:29am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

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.

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ThatsItImout on April 9, 2007 - 6:26am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

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

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AlanfromBigEasy on April 9, 2007 - 7:03am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

You will note that I wrote:

Biosource butanol is an overlooked alternative that more R&D resources should be applied to but it is decades away from 1 million b/day

Best Hopes for "decade" instead of "decades",

Alan

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Engineer-Poet on April 9, 2007 - 7:45am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

(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:

  • The problem isn't the fuel production, it's the internal combustion engines it feeds.  Neither ethanol nor butanol nor BTL diesel addresses this.
  • One of the oxidation products of butanol is butyric acid (if you thought MTBE smelled bad....)

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.

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AlanfromBigEasy on April 9, 2007 - 9:01am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

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

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AlanfromBigEasy on April 9, 2007 - 8:28am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

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

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