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Butanol, and n- alcohols up to about n-heptanol, are potential ICE fuels, and will no doubt one day be items in the "fuel boutique" for those times when nothing but an ICE will do (you just have to fire up that old Duesenberg, or need portable energy for your trek up K2). They are nearly drop-in replacements for gasoline and perhaps diesel fuel. Bacteria that make butanol have been known for nearly a century.
However, along with ethanol, they are destined to occupy a small niche in the overall energy budget. The first thing everyone is going to do (dragged kicking and screaming and shooting their neighbors) is conserve. It will become rare for solitary individuals to cruise around in two-ton steel vehicles just for idle amusement. Eventually, even in USistan, transportation will be electrified. There just isn't any other way, really.
The reason is this: there aren't enough atoms of fixed carbon in the biosphere to replace fossil fixed carbon at the rate we are currently burning them. By a factor of several hundred, near as I can gather from articles occasionally linked from TOD.
| The problem will solve itself.
| But not in a nice way.
They work just fine in a fuel cell too. I don't disagree that they will be used only where needed but they are a lot better fuels for a host of reasons than ethanol. Unless/until we get batteries with a energy density similar to gasoline organic fuels coupled with a fuel cell will have uses. And they won't be cheap probably 8-10 a gallon and probably with a nice tax on top. And the supply will probably be limited.
Their is nothing wrong with organic fuels used as needed.
"The reason is this: there aren't enough atoms of fixed carbon in the biosphere to replace fossil fixed carbon at the rate we are currently burning them. By a factor of several hundred, near as I can gather from articles occasionally linked from TOD."
I would really like to see this calculation. It would be an interesting exercise to see what kind of turnover is nessisary in biomass growth to sustain current consumption.
So would I - that's the about as baseline as it gets. We'll find out real fast whether we have a physics problem or an engineering problem.
I was thinking of a remark posted some time in the last six or eight months stating that we are blowing through 400 years' worth of fossil hydrocarbon every year. Perhaps that source was talking about the natural sequestration rate in peat bogs and such.
I may have overstated the ratio, as the Wikipedia says the biosphere has "about 1900 gigatonnes of carbon". So if we throw every last polar bear, housecat, and blade of grass into the TDP retort, we may juuust be able to make our 85mbpd of artificial fuel for awhile... :)
| The problem will solve itself.
| But not in a nice way.
Fixing carbon from CO2 in the atmosphere is certainly possible using solar energy. The problem is not carbon, the problem is converting sunlight to energy in an efficient manner. No one doubts that there is enough energy hitting the earth.
I doubt that the economy can survive waiting until 2030 or 2040 for a new fleet of electric cars, so we need to solve the biofuel problem somehow to power our soon-to-be-downsized-increasingly-vanpooled fleet.
The problem is not carbon, the problem is converting sunlight to energy in an efficient manner.
No, the problem is doing it (conversion to useful energy) in a cost effective manner. Efficiency per se would only otherwise be important if sunlight (and land to collect it on) were scarce. As it stands, efficiency is important only to the extent it affects the capital cost of the system per unit of capacity.
Maybe, but it doesn't answer the right question.
We don't inherently need to replace fossel fixed carbon at the rate we are consuming now. We just need enough energy to provide the humans on this planet with a viable lifestyle and economic system.
It seems that from a theoretical perspective we do have enough. Engineer Poet posted a piece a while ago showing how biomass could provide much of our energy needs. Solar could supplement it (http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/11/27/0432/3533). Finally, there is no real need for humans to use as much energy as we do. We are only so wasteful because energy is cheap. Once it is no longer cheap, we will use less to produce the same results.
I'm not saying it is easy or that it will happen, but it doesn't seem like there is any theoretical barrier to adjustment to declining fossil fuel supply.
True.
I just sort of latched onto this subject, because for me it's like the ethanol hype only more so. There seems to be a 'techno-fix' mentality about these proposals with an implicit assumption that they will scale up to tens of millions of barrels / day.
In the end, I think recycling and reuse will prevail. It's a lot cheaper to simply separate the glass, plastic, steel, dog poop, carrion, spent batteries, etc (or to keep them separate) than to somehow try to cook them down into primordial soup and re-refine them. It's a symptom of our open-cycle culture, I think, to just throw everything together like that...
Well I suppose, until the number of carbon atoms in the form of humans equals 1900 gigatonnes or so :^)
Unfortunately as explained by Matt Savinar, Jay Hanson, and others: it isn't anything like human nature to even try to conserve. I think the re-education process is going to be extremely painful at best.
And then you have the likelihood of catabolic collapse: the good news is, almost everybody survives; the bad news is the same thing, as we now have six billion mouths to feed on a dwindling resource base. Last time humans lived in comfortable harmony with nature, there were not nearly this many of us.
| The problem will solve itself.
| But not in a nice way.