The Future is Solar
Posted by Robert Rapier on July 27, 2007 - 10:00am
Topic: Alternative energy
Tags: biodiesel, green diesel, solar efficiency, solar power [list all tags]
Or more precisely, the future should be electric.
I have done a lot of research lately into various alternative diesel technologies as I was working on my renewable diesel chapter. One thing that became very clear to me is that the world will not be able to displace more than a fraction of our petroleum usage with biofuels. I already knew that this was the case with ethanol, but now I think this will be a general limitation for all liquid biofuels. Consider this sneak preview (still in draft form) from the book:
There are approximately 4 billion arable acres in the world. There are many different feed stocks from which to make renewable diesel, but most biodiesel is made from rapeseed oil. Rapeseed is an oilseed crop that is widespread, with relatively high oil production.
Consider how much petroleum could be displaced if all 4 billion acres of arable land were planted in rapeseed, or an energy crop with an oil productivity similar to rapeseed. The average rapeseed oil yield per year is 127 gallons/acre. On 4 billion acres, this works out to be 33 million barrels per day of rapeseed oil. The energy content of rapeseed oil is about 10% less than that of petroleum diesel, so the petroleum equivalent yield from planting all of the world's arable land in one of the more popular biofuel options is just under 30 million barrels per day. This is just over a third of the world's present usage of petroleum, 85 million barrels per day. Yet this is the gross yield. Because it takes energy to grow, harvest, and process biomass into fuel, the net yield will be lower, and in some cases may even be negative (i.e., more energy put into the process than is contained in the final product).
The fundamental problem here is that photosynthesis is not very efficient. Consider the rapeseed oil yield above. Gilgamesh made a table that is basically the solar capture/conversion to oil from various crops. The gist is that only a few hundredths of a percent of the incoming solar energy gets converted into liquid fuels. Of course some did get converted into other biomass, which could be otherwise used for energy, but generally we get a very low capture of the sun's energy for use as liquid fuels. (This exercise can still be proven by assuming the theoretical limit for photosynthesis. One must just make more assumptions and it is not as easy to follow for a general audience).
Consider instead direct solar capture. Let's not even consider the record 40+% efficiency that Spectrolab announced last year. Let's not consider any of the more exotic technologies that are pushing the envelope on direct solar capture efficiency. BP's run of the mill silicon solar cells operate with an efficiency of 15%. That's about 250 times better than the solar to rapeseed oil route. Or, to put it a different way, you can produce the same amount of energy with direct solar capture in a 13 ft. by 13 ft. area that you can by photosynthesis in 1 acre of rapeseed. And odds are that you have a roof with an area that size, which could be used to capture energy without the need to use arable land.
Of course the disadvantages are 1). The costs for solar are still relatively high; 2). We have a liquid fuel infrastructure; 3). Storage is still a problem. But in the long run, I don't see that we have any chance of maintaining that infrastructure. If we are to embark on a Manhattan Project to get off of our petroleum dependence, we should direct our efforts toward an eventual electric transportation infrastructure.
Notes
After posting this essay at my blog, it got linked to from a number of places. Between those links and the original blog entry, some of the comments I read were largely in left field, and many of them didn't come close to representing my actual position or arguments. Maybe that's partially my fault for spending all of 20 minutes writing the post. Which brings up another point: It seems like the less time I spend on a post, the more comments and hits it gets. But I digress.
So, let me clarify a few things.
1. I am not against biofuels. In certain situations, biofuels may be (and probably are) an appropriate solution to the problem. In fact, I continue to work on solutions to biofuel problems, and I wouldn't waste my time doing this if I didn't think there were some applications. My argument is that we won't, as many people believe, displace large amounts of petroleum with biofuels. Presuming we can is presuming that technology that does not currently exist will inevitably be invented.
2. I am not against technology. I love technology - especially biotechnology. But I am well aware of the "technology will save us mentality." Technology doesn't always proceed as you think it should, and it doesn't always respond to monetary incentives. If it did, cancer and AIDS would no longer be with us, and 40 years after the moon landing, a manned Mars expedition wouldn't still be a distant dream.
3. This is not a new revelation for me. I have long believed that our future must be electric for at least 4 reasons. First, is the photosynthetic efficiency that I discussed. Second, internal combustion engines are notoriously inefficient relative to electric motors. Third, we have a lot of rooftops available that will not compete with arable land. And finally, electricity can be produced from a tremendous diversity of sources. Start with biomass, solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, natural gas, coal - all are easily converted into electricity. Contrast that with the uncertainty of a future based on cellulosic ethanol and algal biodiesel.
4. As one person argued, "solar collectors don't self propagate." True, but biofuels don't self-harvest and convert themselves to useful end products. Once the solar panels are in place, they keep giving for a long time.
5. The rapeseed example is merely a thought experiment. Don't spend too much time worrying about all of the implications of planting a majority of our land in rapeseed, or whether instead I should have planted palm oil or corn everywhere. It is just an example to frame the problem. But I do not believe, as some have suggested, that using land that is presently non-arable is going to provide a fraction of the yields you would get from planting all the arable land in rapeseed. So, I think it is a very conservative thought experiment.
6. Several people have suggested that I am just wrong about biofuels; that technological advances will change everything. All I can say is that hope is a wonderful thing. But you better plan for contingencies in case those visions of algal biodiesel fail to materialize.
7. Yes, I know that SI units are better in the context of a scientific paper. And I do use SI units in the chapter. But for most casual readers in the U.S., a yield of gallons per acre is going to be more meaningful than a yield of liters per hectare.
8. I am aware that biomass is stored energy. But you can't harvest all of that stored energy and use it, or you will rapidly deplete the soil. This is why you will never convert anything close to theoretical photosynthetic efficiency into liquid fuels. And theoretical photosynthetic efficiency is still far short of solar cell efficiency.
Bravo, Robert!
In the long run I can see only 4 currently viable energy generation schemes. These are hydro, nuclear, solar, and wind. Hydro is about maxed out for all practical purposes and the remaining expansion of hydro can come nowhere near our collective needs. Nuclear, while the largest in installed base currently, has multiple issues attached that range from successfully managing waste to proliferation of weapons to safe operation of dangerous facilities and others as well.
That leaves solar and wind as the possible safest and most responsible energy gathering solutions we have and solar is, again in my personal opinion, going to be more reliable than wind.
This is it, people. The world goes down the electric road or the world doesn't go at all. Biofuels are either a pipedream or for very limited specific applications only.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
Amen.
I can see biofuels or other synthetic liquids for specialized uses like airplanes/heavy equipment but 90%+ of our transportation/heating/lighting demand can be electric.
People point to our liquid fuels delivery system. that may be difficult to replace in the 3rd world but the 1st world has a electricity grid even more widespread than the gas station network.
It's been said a few times, but to keep it aloft, so to speak.. I have to imagine we'll see a new surge towards Lighter-Than-Air transport. Someone linked a proposal for a sort of hybrid between a Blimp and a Plane. We'll see.
I truly loved the 'Huge Manatee' the other day.. forget compassionate conservatism, I'm advocating 'Absurd Aerial Altruism with Animals' (It's still essentially legal in Maine)
signed by my alterego,
Jetpig
( www.home.earthlink.net/~jetpig )
jokuhl,
alias Jetpig
my favorite flying marine mammals are the dolphins in "A hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy" singing "goodbye, and thank's for all the fish". That's also my favorite apocolypse-some days I'd vote to demolish the earth too!
Marine mammals are protected , though. I wouldn't try to fly any bottlenose dolphins around Galveston.
There was an Army blimp base across West Bay in Hitchcock during WWII, used to scout for submarines attacking the tankers of oil and gasoline going to Europe. My father told me that it was rumored that German U Boat crews would row ashore for leave getting drunk at the houses of prostitution on Post Office Street. The remains of the blimp hangers are still there, six giant concrete supports over a huge concrete slab.
Bob Ebersole
you said: The remains of the blimp hangers are still there, six giant concrete supports over a huge concrete slab.
where exactly is this? I'd like to see it. can you post a map of it or something? I may have seen and never noticed. thanks!
At the intersection of highway 6 and 2004 in hitchcock, head south on 2004. It will be a few miles down on the left.
I found them on google earth. Pretty cool.
I think the most appropriate way for us to decide to demolish the earth is through an overlooked rider on a committee energy bill.. but that's just me. (Or is that how it is already playing out?)
Ok, I'd better go play with my action figures again and regain some control of my universe!
Hey, another poster asked me if I'm going to ASPO-Houston, and while the irony of traveling from Maine is too harsh (Unless I get tix on the Graf Zeppelin Mach Zwei).. are you going to it?
RF
I'll be there, its only 50 miles from my home to the hotel. I've known Jim Baldauf at ASPO for about 35 years, and he has no problem imposing on his friends for grunt work, so I'm sure I'll be helping.
I'm think its going to be a great conference. Awareness has really grown in the media, and they have some great speakers and workshop leaders lined up. I'd love to see peak oil and energy policy become a campaign issue, and there are going to be some big guns there. The Houston Mayor, Bill White is a former secretary of energy and a top fund raiser for the Democrats and is speaking.
Ok guy's, here's the real scoop. Thelma's Bar Be Que has the most awesome brisket sandwitch in the southern U.S.. Her pork ribs are so succulent and beautiful they belong on the wall of the Contemporary Arts Museum. Its that East Texas black-style oak smoked meat, a great homemade sauce-and cheap. $5 or $6 bucks is guaranteed to raise your cholesterol level about 100 points and leave you grinning a greasy smile, and its only about 10 blocks from the hotel.
I'm one of Texas's great experts in cheap ethnic food. I know it sounds a little immodest, but ask my friends. Houston has at least 6 different ways to purchase goat, my infallible indicator of a town's ethnic food potential. Admittedly Chicago has better pizza, New York is the king of hot pastrami and stuffed cabbage rolls-but Houston has at least two all-you-can-eat Indian food places with great goat cury, numerous Mexican food restaurants selling cabrito(roast goat) and birria (steamed baby goat) tacos, guisado(stew) and burritos, and Vietnamese and Thai coconut milk goat curry.
So diet before you come, I'll be happy to guide anyone. Or, if you'd rather, seafood, boudain, and gumbo, soul food, or just steaks.
Bob Ebersole
There's another one at Tillamook, Oregon.
I grew up near Hitchcock and had seen the blimp base columns all my life. In Tillamook, there were the exact same columns, and next to them was another set with the hangar intact - it was cool to get to see what it originally looked like. It's now the Tillamook Air Museum
http://www.tillamookair.com/
This is it, people. The world goes down the electric road or the world doesn't go at all.
I'll take "the world doesn't go at all" for $800, Alex.
It's 2007, where is the solar infrastructure?
Well, theres nuclear and hydro at above 30% of electric infrastructure today. You can get the solar infrastructure up sometime in the next several hundred years...
Solar and other renwables are our only future but only for a very reduced stable population size. Regardless of how much energy we can produce there are is only so much space, water, air and soil. No matter how clever we are in providing for our energy we still have a very bumpy road ahead as we reduce our population levels.
Another thing I wonder about is when do we pass the point with technology that the majority of the population is required just to service the technology for an ever decreasing number of individuals who can afford not to be concerned about it breaking down.
This is just ridiculous - the projected population of 9 odd billion people in 2050 will be perfectly capable of living prosperously once our energy and industrial production systems have been reconfigured.
Solar and wind aren't the only large scale clean energy options - there is a lot of power to be captured from ocean (tidal and wave) and geothermal sources as well.
Big Gav,
Didn't know you were back from hibernation.
Some solidly good new posts on your web site:
http://peakenergy.blogspot.com/
p.s. IMHO, the movie, Children of Men is a religious piece, it was initially released last Christmas
p.p.s. How do you have time for doing all that research and posting?
Big Gav was very kind in the early days of The Oil Drum...hell of a thinker and aggregator that guy.
Thanks guys - glad you still find time to keep track of what I'm up to.
I'm slowly re-emerging from hibernation, though I may take a week or two off this month to write a long post I promised the Alpha Male Chimp Who Can't Drive a long time ago...
As far as time taken to write my stuff goes, I usually find 2 hours a day is sufficient. Basically I don't watch much TV, so that is usually possible most evenings.
I find it takes 2 hours for me just to read through the flame wars in a single TOD post, and then I find myself to be just like other humans and reptiles, merely having wasted another day without preparing for the coming apocalypse. :-)
Well - when I'm posting regularly I rarely have time to read through comments (at TOD or elsewhere) which is why I rarely comment here myself.
I certainly waste more time on the blog than I should - I've got lots of real world things to do as well, although I've decided its best to work towards avoiding the coming collapse of civilisation :-)
I should note some of my larger or more complex posts take a lot longer than 2 hours - something like "The Shockwave Rider" or "Bright Green Buildings and Dark Green Buildings" can take months to slowly assemble. Then some minion of big brother goes and bans it (The Shockwave Rider) anyway without even telling me which bit is annoying...
The idea that Children Of Men is a religious movie is an interesting one - I hadn't noticed it was a Christmas release, but given the prime spot occupied by the baby in the movie that makes a lot of sense...
Well, probably not. I've been putting together the numbers on all the options, and tidal, wave, and geothermal are pretty limited -- see this on tides and geothermal, and the links there to previous summaries of hydro, solar, fission, etc. options.
Basically the only large scale options (more than 10 times present world energy use in total renewable resource - of which we could only ever harness a few percent globally, or hundreds of millions of years worth of non-renewables) are:
* "water" - hydro + if we could somehow capture the latent heat energy associated with water vapor in the atmosphere, total about 3000 times present use
* solar - total about 13,000 times world use, or more if we go off-planet
* fusion - about 150 billion years of present world energy use from D+D fusion
* fission - about 600 million years of present world energy use from U-235.
bah humbug. If we're all going to die, why are you wasting the last few years blogging?
I can buy enough solar panels to make my power bill prettymuch go away for roughly $30K. That's <5% of what we have invested in the house. Obviously that's a net metering system (no batteries) so we do have to solve the storage problem for night/cloudy days, but we'll find a way and it won't take 100 years for it to happen. $100/bbl+ oil will concentrate a lot of minds over the next decade or 2.
Just curious. Are you? Installing panels, that is.
maybe next year. I'd prefer a windmill and want to get a small wind gauge to collect data for a year first.
we pay 30-35 cts/kwhr here.
May I suggest a mix, PV and small wind, if the economics of the two are close. Especially true if you plan to add batteries and develop off-grid capability.
Best Hopes for Renewable Energy,
Alan
30-35 cents a kilowatt hour? Where's that, an oil platform in the north sea? Sun+Windmill have synergy. Most places, it is either sunny and clear, or cloudy and windy.
You can get the solar infrastructure up sometime in the next several hundred years...
And the driving force for Hydro is?
What was the initial energy input for coal and oil?
Well, theres nuclear and hydro at above 30% of electric infrastructure today.
One of them you will not discuss the failure modes of, and the other you love brining up as having a 'costly' failure mode.
Hi gr,
Yes, exactly.
"It's 2007, where is the solar infrastructure?"
So, then what do you suggest? Who does what? (Say, for eg., now, us.)
Yeah yeah yeah. I want my MTV too.
May I suggest you (1) look at your state program for solar energy. If you don't have a solar energy program in your state or country, jump to step (4). (2) Do a financial analysis of the payback, ROI, or other metric including incentives and tax credits and deductions. (3) Contact your local solar installer and get a bid, or dial-800-SunEdison (or whoever), and find out what price you would pay per kWh-per term and repeat step (2). (4) Write your State and National representatives requesting a meeting, in which you want to discuss what they are doing to accelerate solar energy use and cost reduction.
If this doesn't work, please let me know. I would be happy to help see that someone gets solar on your property.
It takes a vill...oh forget it.
Hi John,
Thanks, and I'm not good w. sarcasm, so I'm (possibly) missing some of this (anyway, I'm not a TV person, so...?) I was just kind of wondering if he/she had ideas for conversion on a larger scale. Anyway, point well taken, otherwise.
That always seems the last step: write your reps. Why not kiss their asses too? Will it work better or less well?
There are a number of good ideas down thread. Those will go nowhere if we think they must pass the gate of our so-called representatives - because they really represent the likes of Raytheon and General Dynamics.
The system is too ossified. It has to be broken apart to increase reslience and diversity - let 10 thousand flowers bloom because the culling will be terrible. Raytheon and General Dynamics will be of no help. How do we build a photovoltaic factory in Maine with Maine capital and Maine workers that cannot be sold out?
The corruption at the state level - at least here in Maine - is just as bad as at the federal level if not at the same dollar scale. Who gets to privatize the state pier? The Governor's brother or Maine's dear ex-Senator George Mitchell?
Point is, our (mis)reps won't help. If they could, they wouldn't be (mis)reps. It's structural.
Maine's PV program is a tax credit. We end up with rich people getting tax credits for PV systems while everyone else is stuck. It would be a mistake to think that was "broken". No, that is the way the legislature wanted it; it's all about class, who wins and who pays.
cfm in Gray, ME
cfm - Sounds pretty bad up there from what you're saying.
But your rebate up to $7,000 for a 3 kW system is not chump change, and you have a pretty good loan program: $15,000 at an interest rate as low as 1% to homeowners with incomes up to 115 percent of the area median income.
You can't sneeze at the time value of money, and maybe more than the rich people, or at least those earning less than 115% of the area average, can install solar in Maine.
BTW, please feel free to post the letters you've written to your representatives, so we can out them right here for no actions taken. Who knows, maybe they won't get re-elected.
waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting,waiting, waiting, waiting,waiting, waiting, waiting,waiting, waiting, waiting,waiting, waiting, waiting,waiting, waiting, waiting,
Contributors here at TOD have already demonstrated that once a new energy source is practical that it takes about 50 years to get to about 10% of the energy capacity of a society and then another 50 years to get to the 50% mark. We don't have 100 years. This is why we cannot wait for the market to react. This is not business as usual but a serious crisis.
It's also why I mention nuclear. I don't particularly like nuclear because it does have its issues but as Dezakin noted, it has an installed base that can (at least theoretically) also be rapidly expanded. What we need to be doing is expanding the four categories I mentioned before with probably the least emphasis on hydro. Personally, and while it is not what I really want, I end up envisioning a future (if we can even get there) that has a nuclear baseline generating capacity heavily supplemented for peak by solar and wind.
I'm still a doomer because I don't see this occurring at a pace that I think is adequate. In fact it's not really happening at all yet. I hope I am wrong but I don't think I am at least so far. 2007 is already showing declines and most of the peak oil crowd were not counting on real decline to start til after 2010. Is 2007 an aberration? Let's hope so because if it is not and we are on the downslope right now and it is already above 2% decline rate then 10 years out may be true hell if we aren't preparing right this minute.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
The other elephant in the room is that many high grade metallic ores are showing signs of peak.
So even if we're smart enough to take the road electric, eventually society will still have to grapple with the question " what types of devices are worthy of manufacture?".
Somehow HDTVs and IPods don't fit that criteria IMO.
IPods or even better miniture generic computers are an exellent use of resources in utility and hapiness generated per kg raw material or kWh. And the innards can be built to last for decades wich of course only is usefull if the technology plateus or lots of people becomme poor.
Large displays such as HDTV:s are also usefull, especially if they are long lasting.
Voice and data communication is only slightly less important then water, food and shelter since they make all kinds of efforts easier and gives access to culture.
Reading you I could figure out that hey everything is important.
...
GZ - agreed about the crisis (but drop the redundent serious). Can you point me to the contributors or sources at TOD about adoption rates of energy technology? ASAHP if you can.
Dennis Meadows relates energy return to rate of transition here (slide 31).
http://www.aspoitalia.net/images/stories/aspo5presentations/Meadows_ASPO...
He also gives some scope to the current infrastructure size that will need replacement.
It's best to just drink the water.
gTrout - thanks but did you look at the viewgraphs??? Do you know WTF you're talking about?
Consider seriously either a large shot of Russian Vodka. or
plain old peristoika and cheers.
I think some of the animated slides were destroyed in the PDF conversion. But page 31 was clear text.
Here is the basic idea:
Say you have a nuke plant that will provide power for 40 years with an Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROI) of 10. So that means it takes 4 years of nuke output to provide enough energy to build a new nuke.
If you reinvest all energy produced from each nuke, there is exponential growth. But it is limited to 10 new plants from each plant built. If you try to build faster, then society must pay in energy and your nuke plants are a power sink.
This means the exponential growth is strongly limited by EROI.
Just a quick spreadsheet example. If you assume all energy is reinvested, and the nukes are constructed instantly once enough energy surplus is availiable, then you get these results
EROI of 5 gives 11 total nukes in 20 years.
EROI of 10 gives 70 total nukes in 20 years.
EROI of 20 gives 2216 total nukes in 20 years.
Cleaveland gives nukes an EROI of less than 5. Meadows says 10 or less. Odum is 4. Those are the middle of the road answers.
You can see why EROI 100 oil and coal was so wonderful for growth. The last value would end up getting constrained in growth rate by slower building or materials shortages, etc. And these rates are just break even. Society gets no power from this scenario. If you bleed off energy for the rest of us, the growth rate is lowered. And you can get a big jump on growth by taxing other energy sources, hence the nuke buildout in the 60-70's when energy was cheap.
gTrout - my apologizes. The presentation material is excellent and your EROI comments are pretty interesting. Boy was I off the mark.
No problem. The EROI to growth concept needed the example to make any sense. I will polish it up this weekend with a more complete model.
The transition to wood, coal, and oil were all aided by high EROI sources. Those allowed baby sized industries to grow into monsters in just a few years. That energy surplus meant they had tons of energy (money) to reinvest in better ways of doing things.
Nukes, solar, and wind all started with negative EROI values. They had to claw up to the current positive numbers. If you start out negative, it is hard to have profits to reinvest in growth and research.
Now we just need some serious belt tightning to free up investment capital to put into those technologies.
Personally I would like to see a cartel with monopoly power on coal be formed and push the price up. And a windfall profits tax be passed on all fossil fuel profits. Those funds could only be put into renewable energy investments.
Jon Freise
Analyze Not Fantasize -D. Meadows
Meadows can't even do his arithmetic right. 1000 MW/day over 50 years is more than 18 TW, not 10 TW. If he can't even multiply simple numbers correctly, how can his EROI figures be trustworthy? And he doesn't back his assumption of 10:1 EROI with anything.
I've calculated simple EROIs for parts of nuke plants. For instance, the concrete can be "paid off" in mere hours of full-power operation. I'd trust Dezakin; Meadows is just pulling numbers out of his butt.
Per my understanding, much of the concrete in modern nuke plants has to be alumina based, which is much higher energy value than regular concrete.
Alan
Say what?
This just doesnt make much sense... Not all parts of a nuclear power plant are the same. There are parts that require type V cement (low alumina) for sulphate resistance because of cooling water interaction and then there are parts where just structural strength is important, such as the containment dome, which can be any old cement.
I can't imagine embodied energy for the different types of cement is not an order of magnitude different, or close to the energy required for steel manufacture.
His argument may be a little circular, but he does go into this two pages on. You don't get the full rated capacity if you are counting what it takes to build and run the plant. But, with a growth projection, this is already happening in the numbers on which the projection is based so it seems to me that either you reduce the size of the "energy gap" to an effective size or you say what part of the projected growth is servicing energy production.
Another way to look at it is you don't get to keep the ones from the first ten years (40 year lifetime) though you need them to get the later ones, and the ones from the last 13 years don't count because of payback so you've got 50-10-13=28 years clear giving 10 TW effective capacity. To me the last -13 is the problem because you are grubbing in the dirt now for ore and you'll be gubbing then as well, though at that rate of burn, you'll be grubbing for some very low quality ore.
Cheers,
Chris
The whole 13-year figure is based on compounding of very iffy assumptions. If he doesn't have any error bars or sensitivity analysis, I'd say his PDF isn't worth the paper it's printed on.
And none of them are remotely based in reality.
Cite their methods and we'll compare notes... again.
Most of the papers are not on line. To chase back the sources I will need to spend a day or two in the campus stacks and I have not had time.
Till then I find these sources credible. Odum and Cleveland helped define the field. They have more experience at this than almost anyone. And I like the fact they agree in value (of course, they could be siting the same sources).
I have not found a "review" paper (published in a reputable journal) similar to this one on wind EROI. Maybe Nate has seen one. If you spot one, please post it.
http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/10/17/18478/085
Jon Freise
Analyze Not Fantasize -D. Meadows
It sort of demonstrates the unreliability of Cleveland; He just started obsessing about potential subsidies of variable cost (insurance indemnification.) If he wants to play funny numbers with accounting, fine, but then he gets into what might as well be as testable as philosophy.
There isn't any way nuclear power has a lower energy return on wind on the plant alone simply because the construction costs are easily calculable in terms of steel, concrete and the like... roughly five to ten times as much for wind. If Cleveland somehow claims nuclear has an energy return below five, then wind doesnt have any energy return at all if we ignore fuel costs...
Which I suspect where his argument lies. Throw in fuel, and you can either use the Storm Smith approach or the Vattenfall analysis. Guess which one has credibility.
Wind power doesn't require enriched uranium. From the font of all knowledge, the wikipedia:
Modern gaseous diffusion plants typically require 2,400 to 2,500 kilowatt-hours (8,600 to 9,000 megajoules or 9 gigajoules) of electricity per SWU while gas centrifuge plants require just 50 to 60 kilowatt-hours (180 to 220 MJ) of electricity per SWU.
Example:
A large nuclear power station with a net electrical capacity of 1300 MW requires about 25,000 kg of LEU annually with a 235U concentration of 3.75%. This quantity is produced from about 210,000 kg of NU using about 120,000 SWU. An enrichment plant with a capacity of 1000 kSWU/yr is, therefore, able to enrich the uranium needed to fuel about eight large nuclear power stations
Neither the United States nor France actually has any gas centrifugal enrichment so I'll go with the 2,500 kWh per SWU. I think the Iranians cornerred the market on centifuges. 120,000 SWUs is 3*10^8 kWh. There is 8760 hours in the year and I'll assume the nuke is online 90% of the time or 8000 hours. So thats 1.04*10^10 kWhs.
So that limits the EROI to no better than 30 and gas centrifuges are a game changer. I guess I wound up proving nothing, oh well. That's science.
Why? Nearly 60% of the global enrichment is centrifuge, and in the US and France diffusion plants are being replaced by centrifuge enrichment.
http://www.uic.com.au/nip33.htm
Say what? I dont recall them having anywhere near the required infrastructure to compete with Russia in SWU per year.
Sorry, I'm confused. I don't see how it is possible to include fuel costs for wind? Maintenance yes, consumables (hydraulic fluid?) yes, decommissioning yes, but not fuel.
You probably misread the argument; Its just that nuclear power plants require 1/5th to 1/10th the embodied energy of wind turbines while lasting two to three times as long. If one is going to suggest that nuclear has a lower energy return than wind, you have to place your argument in the fuel cycle; Which has been demonstrated many times to be overwhelmingly positive.
How do you figure? The carbon footprint for nuclear is between 30 and 170 g/kWh which does not bode well for a high EROEI. Looks like it would come in around 10 or so. Where is the demonstration, or does 10 sound about right to you?
My own thinking is that once we transmute the daughter elements to stable isotopes, we end up with ERORI much less than one. I think that the question of what to do with the waste has not been adequately addressed.
From the very political link:
Garbage in, garbage out. I thought that was where it was going, and its not like we haven't been here before. The Storm/Smith data has been repeatedly demonstrated to be a nice steaming pile, with the most obvious gamebreaker that they absolutely depend on gasseous diffusion for their numbers, before you start disecting the multitude of less obvious lies relating to plant construction and mining techniques.
Why would we bother? Almost all spent fuel decays to stable isotopes after 300 years anyways, except the transuranics which can be burned as fuel. This doesn't impose extra energy cost.
Is there a solid reference then on ERORI for nuclear power that covers the full life cycle? It seems clear that electricity is not too cheap to meter so there must be some accepted value that accounts at least for the running of the plants. Is this the study you are criticising? I've only just looked at it and I don't see the enrichment method as being the main cost they cite. They seem to find that the system goes below EROEI=1 for low quality ores and the quality of the ore has nothing to do with the method of enrichment. I haven't read it closely yet.
I don't know if you've ever gone hiking. If you have, you might be familiar with the saying "Pack out your trash." With long lived radioisotopes, you've got to do a bit more and retrun them to a stable state. I doubt very much that reprocessing really is going to do much for us given the energy cost of cleaning up the rest of the mess.
Certainly. Its been a topic here before.
http://nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/WebHomeEnergyLifecycleOfNuclear_Power
Its the most glaringly obvious; When you insist on using gasseous diffusion enrichment because its some 50 times more energy intensive per SWU than gas centrifuge techniques, its a major red flag. The University of Melbourne in their assessment of nuclear power lifecycle costs dissected this spread 'study' in more detail if you are curious.
It would be nice if they actually measured the energy costs, as the University of Melbourne study did, rather than operate from theoretical models where they can dictate how they would prefer reality ought to behave.
From the Rossing mine study:
And this is from the lowest grade ore mined today, of 300ppm.
The best argument I've heard was of the acid insolubility of different mineral bodies impeding uranium reclaimation from different ore bodies, but given how widespread uranium is allready, I somewhat doubt this is a problem we'll even bother trying to solve in the next several centuries.
Sorry, there is no energy cost for sealing up spent fuel in concrete, which really is all thats necissary. I'm not sure what other energy costs you're alluding to. Maybe using nitric acid reprocessing plants, but its not like we dont know how to use pyrometalurgical techniques now, or even have to bother doing any reprocessing at all. All the spent fuel generated in history would fill up an average sized parking lot.
All the spent fuel generated in history would fill up an average sized parking lot.
Best Hopes for no earthquake close to this "parking lot"...
Why? Spent fuel casks are big, stable lumps of concrete with low centers of gravity. You could rock them all day without anything happening to them.
I've mostly looked to TOD for expertise on oil so I'm not up on discussions about nuclear power here. Perhaps it is not the best thing to rehash that now. My own sense is that the limit of using nuclear power responsibly implies EROEI less than 1 owing to the need to deal with the waste. There are no accepted solutions to this problem because 1) low energy solutions cannot be engineered for the required timescales and 2) it is not apparent where the energy would come from for high energy solutions that do provide safe disposal. Because the cost curve for solar, in particular, is so favorable, number 2 may be solving itself, and we can think of nuclear power, along with fossil fuel energy, as a stepping stone a technology in the manner discussed by Bucky Fuller.
There is no doubt that allowing waste to cool for several hudred years is going to be a part of the solution. There are some interesting developments in transmutation research in the field of low energy nuclear reactions and in cryrogenically induced shortening of the half-life, but it would be more than premature to estimate the effect of these, if any, on EROEI.
So far as I can tell, the dolar cost of nuclear power is only going up and increasing it's share of the power supply only increases it's per kWh dollar cost. A large increase also has a secondary effect of depleting economically recoverable reserves of uranium prior to the end of the plant lifetimes, ensuring even higher costs. This is just the oposite of how renewable energy behaves. Owing to industrial scale advantages not yet taken, renewables come down in cost as they become a larger fraction of the energy mix. Thus, the points made in the series of rebuttals about the future efficiency of nuclear power may, thankfully, be moot.
I was interested in the proposed solution to the discrepancy in plant construction energy, that highly skilled labor might account for the offset. If so, this suggests that training times would limit deployment of nuclear power on much larger scales in timeframes relevant to peak oil. Don't know if this is actually the reason for the disagreement and the level of ad hominum on both sides in the various rebuttals makes me think that it will be hard for them to come to agreement any time soon. But, who knows? The call for greater transparency seems like common ground, while the nuclear industry seems more and more inclined to cover things up. Perhaps no reliable estimate can be made until that issue is resolved.
I do think that the spent fuel fills cooling ponds rather than parking lots, or at least I hope so. There are heat management and safety issues involved in concentrating the waste too tightly.
You realize that this waste isn't the one ring of Sauron; After several hundred years its much more benign than most mercury compounds, which are toxic forever. We dont have plans for geologic repositories of mercury. This is mostly based on nuclear exceptionalism and ignorance.
While I don't favor 'high energy solutions' to waste management, because there is no urgency to destroy the waste (what happens if we dont destroy it? nothing) as long as you have a neutron surplus in a fast reactor you can destroy long lived radioisotopes and burn transuranic actinides. This has been demonstrated several times before, though not as economically competitive; Its clearly energetically positive however.
Please, why bother? We arent short of space or time. We are only talking about several thousand tons here, not exactly a huge amount.
Nuclear power competiveness is nearly entirely wrapped up in capital costs, construction schedules, and interest rates. Fuel simply isn't an issue over long periods. We've had a spike in fuel costs that not even touched the end price of nuclear power.
Er, on what do you base this?
Sure, it spends several years in a cooling pond, then gets sealed in a storage cask for dry storage depending on location.
Hummm, you may not be aware of the chemical toxicity of some nuclear waste. However, it needs disposal because it is radioactive. This is a characteristic of nuclear waste, not really an exception.
Being economically competitive is a little irrelevent since breeders are not legal in the US.
Your estimate of the waste mass seems a little low but you'll note, I think, that it is somewhat proportional to the power so far produced. Disposal will thus be proportional. If it takes more energy to dispose of properly than has been produced, their will be a question of where the energy comes from.
I would say that we are still exploiting "easy" resources. There is a point, where mining becomes nolonger economically viable. That point is usually estimated to be in about 85 years at the current rate of use. Magic, like seawater, is only that. Even the number 85 years assumes some introduction of breeders if there is any growth in output, and, these are not legal in the US.
Secrecy in the nuclear industry is on the rise in the US. Last year there was a public NRC licensing meeting for a Tennessee processing plant that had to shut down for about 7 months because of a 35 liter spill of highly enriched uranium solution. This nearly caused a criticality incident. The public meeting was not attended because it was kept secret. Many documents needed to assess the safety of reactors are no longer available to the public. As the incident last year suggests, secrecy is being used not for enhanced security but rather to cover up gross incompetence. Going forward, it looks as though neither the nuclear industry, nor the NRC will be reliable sources of information.
It's also a characteristic of bananas, and yet people actually try to increase their intake of dangerously radioactive potassium in bananas.
Mercury componds need disposal also, yet not much fretting in the public mind about mercury compounds despite being much more dangerous to public health. Whats important is the stability of the waste. Gooey gunk that can migrate around the environment is bad; Oxide spent fuel sealed in concrete isn't.
Bullshit makes the flowers grow, one by one, row by row.
Why do you think it takes so much energy to seal spent fuel in concrete and steel dry storage casks?
Try again.
http://nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/UraniuamDistribution
This isn't an indication that secrecy in the nuclear industry is 'on the rise.' Its an anecdote, and one that was reported eventually anyways. A criticality incident didn't occur, and there wasn't any reason to report it. We don't hear about every time a chemical company cleans up a mercury spill in house.
Not sure about that, but blame that on the 'war on terrar' paranoia more than industrial conspiracy theories.
I've looked a little closer at the web site you've been referring to. I find it's treatment of solar power to be deceptive. Why, for example, do they not state the amount of solar power expected in 2040 based on their assumed growth rate? Why do they appear to apply an efficiency twice? If this is an industry related site, it is not too suprising that they may be a bit optimistic for their power source and less glowing about another, yet, for nuclear power, which takes a great deal of planning, what is happening in 2040 is very important since this would be halfway through the lifetime of a plant proposed now.
I think you should take what they say with a grain or two of salt. Overstatement of resources is typical for industry aligned entities. That, after all, is the main issue that TOD addresses.
I'm not so sure that an uncotrolled accumulation point is something that would cause death and destruction in the case of a mercury spill. Your analogy seems a little strained. In any case, the nuclear industry has a pretty poor safety record. What is changing is that we will not be informed of problems and so not be able to react to patterns of incompetence, poor design or deferred maintenance. The NRC has sought to boost confidence in the job they are doing by being candid and forthcoming about problems with the industry. Their new tack can only harm the industry in the long run by promoting a sense of laxity that will lead to fatalities. It won't take much to end the lease on remaining design lifetime that the industry managed to salvage after TMI.
Could you please cite the link and quote, and how thats relevant to nuclear power production? I don't know what you're talking about. If solar power somehow becomes more competitive than nuclear, that's wonderful, but entirely unrelated to observed competitiveness of nuclear power today, or the resource base for the future.
It was done by several at the University of Melbourne, not exactly closely affiliated with the industry as far as I know.
Indeed, which is why their study merited several guest posts here:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2323
Its exactly the same, except mercury doesnt become less toxic over time, and most mercury compounds migrate much more readily than most spent fuel radioisotopes. You can stabilize it as mercury sulfide just as you can stabilize spent fuel fission fragments as glass...
Do you want to try that again?
Injury/death per gigawatt hour maybe?
Consider that dam failures have killed thousands overnight... several times.
Let's take this up again if nuclear power comes up again on TOD. You may want to study how sustained or runaway nuclear reactions work before then though. You're thoughts on the mercury analogy make very little sense.
Here is the link you requested.
The bottom line is that the past quarter century was well and truly squandered. The investments we needed for the future were not made so that the elites could rake in more money to spend on multi-McMansions & other goodies. We're all going to bitterly regret that.
Even such simple things as good insulation for McMansions would have made a substantial difference. But after construction, it is prohibitively expensive to retrofit it in most cases.
Even such simple things as good insulation for McMansions would have made a substantial difference.
And it does not happen because that insulation makes for more expensive up front construction.
But it makes the home owners less sensitive to fuel costs and thus more credit worthy. Thus the banks can lend more money.
Banks in Sweden are usually willing to finance conversions from oil heating or direct resistive electric heating to firewood, pellet or ground/sea source heat pumps. I figured that this makes sense since the saved heating oil or electricity cost enables the home owner to pay the interest and amortize and the house and thus lone security increase in value making it a low risk loan.
Perhaps loans to uprate macmansons makes sense after folding and writing of the building loan?
The substandard insulation (and leaky construction, and windows with summer sun blazing through them without shades, etc.) should have been prohibited outright as non-compliant to building codes.
A building which is almost entirely self-heated in winter, stays cool in summer, and is resistant to most water and weather damage is "future proof". Investments in such buildings are worthwhile. Buildings which can become unusable due to water/weather damage or the expense of keeping them habitable are the civil engineering equivalent of mayflies.
The primary article was Luís de Sousa's Marchetti's Curves but I believe it's also been referenced before. TOD has a lot of material these days.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
Thanks GZ.
Well, I have an idea. That 50 years figure is standard industry making energy available. And it may be quite right. But solar can be different. I'd compare it more with computers. We'll only need the equivalent of Apple Mac ][, Windows 95 or anyother mainstream catchers for normal people to see that the power they can harvest by themselves could be staggering.
The thinking process here would be to leave energy companies on producing solar cells and leave energy deployment and investment to private (normal people) entrepeneurs. Think of the power of wikipedia compared to any other "pedia" made by specialists. That's what I'm talking about. It could seem to be too late now, but remember, wikipedia is 3-4 years old. And its as mainstream as it gets. These things, when well structured, grow incredibly fast.
But as the internet required the government to push it to an incredible system, so will solar and other energy systems need a wide system that will solve the "net-metering" problem annunciated here. There are some private interesting projects on that, but it should be more mainstream.
I like your thoughts LuisDias.
I wish to write an article about the large-scale transformation of the US industrial and manufacturing base in the late '30s through WWII. I already have a bunch of data on production rates of various armaments - planes -tanks - soldier's uniforms...boots.
While not all that comfortable with a comparison to a wartime setting, annual production rates exceeding 1000% of large manufactured goods (ie aircraft) suggests to me the possible.
Now I know many will say that was built out on cheap energy and I agree, but importantly it was built on out on shared sacrifice.
Fire when ready.
I expect geothermal to be a big part of Australia's renewable base load at some point in the future. It is essentially proven technology.
Tidal and wave generation both have enormous untapped potential too. That's one of the best things about renewables, is that there are so many different options, all suitable for various locations. Sure, all of them are more challenging and most likely more expensive than burning fossil fuels, but the end of cheap energy should just mean the end of wasteful energy usage.
wiz, we's love use. Watch (some of us) as we wind up.
Actually there is a fifth: Conservation. Every time we reduce our energy by being able to do the same task with less energy it is the same as building a new power source that lasts the life of the activity.
Stopping nuclear power for not being perfect is like stopping the distribution of emergency food since it contains transfats to stay fresh during distribution.
Or emergency food that contains GMO. That has happenned.
Are you speaking of the GMOed corn in Africa?
Dig deeper - The US makers wanted to send what could have been viable seeds (Thus allowing the US makers to get their patent tributes for the genes). The African nations said they'd take the corn cracked or ground up as flour - the US aid agency refused.
Viable seeds MAY be food. But they are also seeds. And the ability for them to be seeds is why there was an issue.
deleted, see next post
http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/RWB.NSF/db900SID/OCHA-64CGT9?OpenDocument
Referring to Zambia 2003, the government banned the import of all GMO grains. In addition, the people had eaten their seed corn and needed seeds for next year's crop.
http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/hunger/relief/2007/0407slowaid.htm
The corn comes from the World Food Program and the WFP is an agency of the United Nations. They rely entirely on voluntary contributions from governments, corporations, and individuals. The United States provides half of their 2 billion dollar budget.
It is WFP policy not to buy food already in a famine area but rather import additional food. It is US law that the aid money must purchase food in the US and transport it on US flagged ships.
In Zambia, the WFP wanted to change their policy and purchase corn in Luanda where the store houses were somehow full. The Bush administration tried to change the law so they can provide a portion of the aid in cash, but were stymied by the usual agriculture special interest groups. So the whole thing got mired in red tape while children starved.
Some will argue including myself that nuclear isn't simply 'not perfect', it is in fact highly problematic in comparison to the other choices we face. That is the issue!!!
Do we choose a path that creates as many or more problems than it solves or we go with choices that also have their unique problematic issues. To use your food analogy, it is not like there is no other source of emergency food, it is a matter of where we choose to get our emergency food.
I have repeatedly stated that several of the renewables can do anything that is claimed for nuclear with the same level of effort directed.
I might add that in economic analysis of any energy technology that the full cost including externalities be included.
That requires some pretty hard thinking about the unintended consequences of each technolgy, and agreement on how to 'price' what has no market.
It may not even be possible to agree whether the price is positive or negative. On the one hand, Chernobyl made a city uninhabitable; on the other hand, it effectively created a wildlife preserve. Bruce Sterling calls these "Viridian involuntary parks".
Sticking with your example (and not the waste issue or the mining issue), the cost/benefit of ‘one uninhabitable city’ for ‘one wildlife preserve’ fails to account for the loss of human life, current and generational human and wildlife sickness, suffering, and mutations, dispersal of radioactive aerosols across parts of the globe vs _______?
If a logical extension of your example is to argue we know too little to ever fully account for the costs and the benefits of some human activity, I certainly hope you bring up values, not financial but human, in your discussion.
I'm not arguing for that point of view, just noting that there are certain to be people who hold it.
There's one situation where I would agree with it. If an area was currently farmed but would become much drier with climate change, I think it would be better for it to be abandoned to become grassland rather than repeat the Dust Bowl phenomenon of the 1930's. The land would become useless for farming anyway, and the benefit of having the soil held in place by roots rather than blown away is enormous. Radioactives decay much more rapidly than soil forms, and if people were forced off the land soon enough for the grass to take over it would be a boon to humanity in the long run.
I see approximately zero likelihood of this happening, just because of the world's settlement patterns.
Solar energy panels do not use water. You can plant them in a desert. They don't even require soil, so you can plant them in a stone desert. Half the deserts on earth are stone deserts, deserts that don't even have sand that you could irrigate even if you did have water.
This article is great! But it neglect to mention biodiesel from Algea, the most realistic of all biodiesel option. Consider these facts:
1) Algae produce 100 times more oil per acre than traditional food oilseed crops (i.e. corn, soy, etc.).
2) Algae eat CO2, the major Global Warming Gas, and produce oxygen.
3) Algae require only sunshine and non-drinkable (salt or brackish) water.
4) Algae do not compete with food crops for either agricultural land or fresh water.
5) Algae can reproduce themselves and their oil every 6 hours, while it takes Mother Nature millions of years to produce crude oil in the ground.
photovoltaic systems are ready-to-go, off the shelf systems already. Ditto wind turbines = indirect solar. Costs are already coming down to the point where wind is competitive now.
How far along is algal biofuel?
no one is saying don't work on all possibilities, but you can't hang your hat on a dream (unless you are the Bush idiots crowing about hydrogen as a smokescreen for doing nothing)
I checked with GreenFuel not too long ago. Their AZ pilot algae plant covers 0.3 acre. They are getting 40% CO2 capture. Their yields are 6000 gal/acre biodiesel and 5000 gal/acre ethanol. Remember that their technology requires a concentrated CO2 source like flu gas.
Solar is gearing up with a couple of 500 MW fabrication plants coming online as well as expansions of existing plants nearly everywhere. Silicon supplies are still tight. You can get panels for $3.00/pW retail now (Aten solar) so prices come to about 6.6 cents per kWh if you are willing to use 24V appliances just when the sun shines. I'm also assuming cheapo yard mounts. Inverters for a grid connect and proper roof installation bring the cost higher, but still inline with most utility prices. Here is a first look at the feasability of converting entirely to solar in under twenty years.
In case anyone forgot:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2531
And John Benemann, one of the study authors, commenting on it:
http://i-r-squared.blogspot.com/2007/05/algal-biodiesel-fact-or-fiction....
There is definitely more hype than meat here. Doesn't mean that it will never work, but those 10,000 or 6,000 gallon per acre yields have never been achieved. Maybe some day, but not right now. The line between speculation of what might be achieved (presuming some challenging technical issues are solved) and what has actually been demonstrated, has become horribly blurred.
First off, I agree wholeheartedly with your post. Biofuels will never scale. That said, consider this snippet of algae airline fuel, no less. It was posted on drumbeat a while back. I noted it, but didn't receive any replies.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/4132048a13.html
In my thoughts on algae, I always see 2 major problems, among others. Contamination of desired species, and energetically efficient harvest in open ponds. This group, by working directly in sewage treatment ponds, seems to have circumvented contamination issues, and harvest issues don't seem to bother them.
Any comments or information would be appreciated, especially what alga they are using-even as to whether it is filamentous or unicelluar.
Contamination of desired species,
That was a constant theme in the NREL report. Things that worked well in the lab were quickly outcompeted in the wild. So, the solution to that is closed reactors. But, as others have shown, that is simply not cost effective.
The solution to that is to use wild algae and take whatever they give you. So long as you can make money without getting mostly triglycerides for fuel, it looks reasonable.
But in the end it is more efficient to simply dry and burn the algae in a co-gen electricity power plant. Not that this is a bad thing -- a power plant located with a sewage treatment facility.
you are both wrong.
the correct measure that NREL found to solve the problem was to completely clean out all organisms from the fast running ponds and reseed with the proper amounts of the desired strain.
Thus you constantly reseed the ponds 3-4 times a day with the desired strain, and harvest 3-4 times a day. This prevents wild organisms from gaining a foothold.
NREL, from reading the report was more involved with biology than real engineering. Engineering solves scaleup, but IMHO it cannot solve this problem. Scaleup for bio reactors is a non-trivial problem. Small devations in construction yield substantially better and worse ponds.
Some engineering was looked at, but it was mostly scientists attempting to scale up the lab results with little guidance. There was too much repetition in the experiments for my liking, very little innovation in solving the major hurdles encountered. Some of the experiments were also run poorly, with data not being provided at the conclusion thereof.
Comments on the above.
The group is Aquaflow Bionomic Corp of New Zealand. They have had prior results with a biodiesel blend, and now are going for airline fuel. They have teamed with Boeing and NZ Air to test the fuel, for cold temp and altitude effects. I guess they are going for Richard Branson's prize.
"Boeing's Dave Daggett was reported this year as saying algae ponds totalling 34,000 square kilometres could produce enough fuel to reduce the net CO2 footprint for all of aviation to zero."
http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/secret-kiwi-fuel-ingredient-is-pon...
The group uses sewage treatment ponds and "wild algae", and claim their system would work for diaries and other high nutrient treatment lagoons. They "modify" the ponds, I assume reshape, for growth and harvesting ease.
They have been invited to join a CA tech institute, The Girvan Institute. But no word on their harvesting process. Or if they are seeding the ponds. I guess secrecy is the name of the game with prize pursuit.
True. But algae don't naturally grow in fields of dirt by throwing seeds. You need engineered facilities the whole way through like solar cells. Cost per acre is enormously higher than crops. Possibly bigger that PV or concentrating solar.
You need to pump in enhanced CO2, unlike plants---all plans with realistic success involve with success are next to coal plants and just enhance the useful energy per CO2 emitted
Algae quickly mutate to propagate and survive and be hardy and not produce oil. The problem is that the oil-filled algae are in an unusual metabolic mode---a diversity of wild type organisms in an open system will quickly outcompete the engineered organisms. (Jurassic Park syndrome.) These won't produce oil.
Consider another engineered system where we grow unicellular organisms for their chemical yield: biotech pharmaceuticals. Now, of course the purity requirements are even higher, but you need very expensive bioreactors with continuous maintenance and control of process in order to reliably produce the desired output chemical in quantity and maintain a monoculture of the desired source organism.
I was really hot on algal biofuel until I read some serious investigations.
I now understand to some degree why the DOE program was dropped.
Maybe jatropha will end up working.
mbkennel, sure there are issues with biodiesal, but I think its too early to say whether these problems can be overcome with engineering. One idea of the top of my head would be to truck CO2 algea plants, or maybe even build some kind of pipeline, so they dont' have to be right beside the coal plants.
The whole premise of the OP is that biofuels aren't feasible.
WTF? OP =
1. observation post
2. Roman Catholic Church Order of Preachers (Dominican)
3. out of print
please explain your meaning of OP!
Original Post?
Original Post.
oil production
No, it means original post or original poster, referring to the first post in a thread or the person who made the first post in the thread. OP is common usage throughout the internet on various types of forums.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
Oh Please....
Cute. But that doesn't change the fact that I've seen OP refer to "original post" and "original poster" since before the days when I read Usenet news with Tin 1.0.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
Looks like DOE is funding some promising research to me:
http://www.renewableenergyaccess.com/rea/news/story?id=49412
Looks like DOE is funding some promising research to me:
Errr, didn't you state you have 'facts'? Now you cite 'promising research'?
Which is it? Facts or ideas that may or may not be true?
a) The 100 factor has good theoretical support in a scaling law for all vegatative species. It is not a reason to doubt the NREL data. The specific reproductive rate of a plant varies as the inverse one quarter power of the mass of an individual plant. A rape seed plant is very approx. 1kg. An individual algal plant is approx. 10^-12 kg. The scaling law indicates that algae should be 1000x better than rapeseed. This is reasonable grounds for believing that the NREL algae work can be improved upon. (Niklas & Enquist, Invariant Scaling ... , PNAS v.98 p2922-2927)
b) All biomass/biofuel schemes mitigate CO2 in direct proportion to their production of biomass. Any data that indicates otherwise must be suspect.
c) growth rate from NREL is closer to a day than 6 hrs., and this should be compared to other biofuels, not petroleum. Still its pretty good compared to trees, both at biomass production and CO2 mitigation.
d) There are few economies of scale in algal biomass. (Any conceivable production facility will be vastly larger than an individual plant. The tiniest mechanical device is sufficient to move algae from on process step to the next. All product transfer can be done with piping.) Thus there is no incentive for large corporations to invest in it. But small agricultural operations can, and will experiment and survive.
e) NREL work was always directed towards using flue gas CO2. There is plenty of CO2 in the wild. Algal production can be done almost anywhere below 60degrees absolute latitude. NREL studies of future potential were flawed by strange political constraints on the research. There was a lot of effort wasted on nice ideas that didn't pan out. But a few good data were published.
Biomass, in any species, is not a source of energy. For biomass, the Sun is, of course, the source (think 'solar'). Electricity is also not a source of energy. It is a technique for transporting and transforming energy. For some electricity, the source is biomass, for some fossil fuel or nuclear. Electricity is a great technology, but it is not an answer to the question of source. Photovoltaic panels might be a great source of electricity to run the pumps in an algae pond farm, certainly better than diesel engines running on biodiesel from the algae, and vastly more realistic than electricity from a nuclear plant hundreds of miles distant from the pond.
Of course if what is meant by 'electricity' is just photovoltaic electricity then that should be made clear.
Electricity from coal has no more future than electricity from oil or natural gas (Peak Coal?). I see a strong possibility of civil disorder during the transition to a post petroleum world. Nuclear power and social disorder are a really really bad combination. Talk about things to worry about, what could be better than that! So, in future, electricity is either photovoltaic or from biofuels.
Will algae save the world as we know it? Of course not. But it is rather like heating with wood. It can be used by small groups of humans and will probably be so used whether or not we (peak oilers) approve.
Makes no sense at all to me to tout the CO2 eating characteristics of algae when it is being used to produce biodiesel which will soon be burned releasing the CO2 right back into the atmosphere.
I agree that because it depends on fossil fuel use (though you might try this) there is extra CO2 entering the atmosphere. But, it would anyway. In this case, it is detained for a bit, AND oil that would otherwise be used is not. So, you are not capturing the CO2 from the coal really, but preventing CO2 from the oil entering the atmosphere since the oil remains in the ground.
Now, it does not much matter when the CO2 goes into the atmosphere, so if you are just delaying the oil use, then it is not much of a help. But, if you are doing this as part of an overall program to permanently cut emsissions, with a plan to do something else once the coal plant has to be shut off too, then it can make some sense as a transition technology.
This article is great! But it neglect to mention biodiesel from Algea, the most realistic of all biodiesel option. Consider these facts:
Facts? I see a list that you have posted. I don't see facts of open air, non CO2 concentrated ponds. Nor do I see how the de-watering issue is taken care of.
Please show actual FACTS with URLs ... what you have is a bunch of statements.
Robert, you have grabbed the brass ring once again! :-)
I think that a confluence is building around the solar idea for one simple reason: It is the only large scale source that gets us loose from an endless seasonal "depletion chase".
I have been a fan of the biofuel idea in my youth, but once you see that it involves multiple industries, and conversion after conversion...it becomes what I finally began to see as "death by one thousand conversions"...providing the land, providing the seed, getting the seed in the ground...fertilizer, pest control, energy consumed in harvesting, energy consumed in process and distilling, transport to point of use...it finally begins to look like one of the old Rube Goldberg cartoons, like a steam engine used to power an automatic coffee pouring machine or something!
The path has to be much more direct than that, much fewer steps to usable energy. And it has to be scalable, and production more easily installed at or close to point of use.
Now the debate on what type of solar capture works best for the application....the old silicon chips, the newer generation of CIGS (Copper Indium Gelinium) or a thermal system (concentrating mirror or possibly Frensel Lens of some type)
Things are just now starting to get interesting, as we refine our options down to the ones that have the most bang for the buck! Thanks for your ideas, look forward to your high level of analysis and math applied to the various solar options! :-)
Roger Conner Jr.
Remember, we are only one cubic mile from freedom
Professor Eicke Weber , Linear Fresnel reflectors for concentrated solar thermal cheaper then Parabolic mirrors.
there are comunities where horse drawn transportation exist.
eletrical vehicals would be better. west bengal goverment in india wants to subsidise them.
I agree bio fuels don't go far to replace a cubic mile of oil. I don't see this as a reson not to expand bio fuel production.
is there a way to use biofuel in the refining of heavy crude that would create less polutants in the refining process. like the present controversy in indiana.
perhaps the intention of blending with high cetane biodiesel made using catalytic hydroprocessing.
I don't think I know what I am talking about. maybe we don't use that much diesel
Great work Robert...couldn't agree more.
Came to the same conclusion last year...now working on it.
My company has turned our efforts to Solar and Electric vehicle technologies. The whole last 10 months have been reorganizing the company and prototype development. Should have something to show everyone late fall.
The whole GW thing is helping our situation with certain organizations...most not ready to consider the energy problem.
Here's hoping we can hold it all together long enough to make a difference.
One thing I haven't seen ANY comment about on The Oil Drum is Professor George Olah's book "The Methanol Economy":
http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Oil-Gas-Methanol-Economy/dp/3527312757/ref=...
Here's one of the better reviews of the book (saves me typing, watching spinning beach balls in firefox):
By B. Pankuch (Cranford, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)
Olah (1994 Nobel laureate carbocation chemistry, director of the Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute) and his coauthors do an excellent job going over fossil fuel(coal, natural gas, oil) resources, how close we are to running out of each, the vast number of uses for these resources, and the likelihood of climate change due to their burning. It is assumed that in the future we will have abundant energy available from nuclear and alternative sources. Methanol would then be one of the prime carriers of this energy, and an alternate source for all petrochemicals.
They also cover alternative renewable energy sources, compare using hydrogen versus methanol as a carrier of energy from new renewable energy sources and nuclear energy plants. The authors do a thorough job pointing out the enormous use of hydrocarbons throughout the industrial world for a huge array of products. Not only do we need vast new renewable sources of energy we also need to be able to use this energy to change new carbon sources into useful products. The new source of carbon, methanol from CO2 and H2! Olah, et al shows in great detail how methanol can be changed chemically into the precursors for just about anything and at very high efficiencies. We would use energy from nuclear and new renewable energy sources directly where we can, such as powering our factories and homes' electrical systems. We would use some of this new energy to change CO2 from emissions and hydrogen from electrolysis of water, into methanol to run our cars, trucks, etc., and provide feedstock for all the products now produced from petroleum. Note that methanol formed this way adds no new CO2 since CO2 from the surroundings is used to make it. This is very similar to using ethanol produced from corn or other biomass, except it involves more chemistry.
The new process involves using electrochemical or photochemical reduction of CO2, which forms methanol, formic acid and formaldehyde, CO2 + 2H2 -> CH3OH with additional products which are also changed to CH3OH,
HCHO + HCO2H -> CH3OH + CO2
They don't give a lot of details, because they have a patent pending on the process.
In the interim, while we are developing and building alternative renewable energy sources, we can change coal, natural gas, biomass, etc., into methanol. This is already done to a small degree and existing infrastructure for gas and oil can be used with small adjustments. The authors also compare using hydrogen and methanol, as storage and transport media.
It was a surprise to me that there is more hydrogen in a liter of liquid methanol (98.8 g of hydrogen) than in a liter of liquid hydrogen (70.8 g at -253?C), water for comparison has 111g of hydrogen. Methanol would store and transport much more easily than liquid hydrogen.
The first sources of CO2 would be exhaust gas from utilities and big factories, which generate a lot of CO2, hydrogen would come from water being electrolyzed, CO2 + 3H2 -> CH3OH + H2O. Then as our CO2 capture methods get better it would be captured directly from the air. Anyone in the world would with access to energy, would then have a source for a vast array of chemicals! Note that if CO2 becomes a useful commodity people and nations will compete to pull it out of the atmosphere, and prevent it from being released since it has value. This has much greater appeal than other proposals such as sequestering of the CO2. A lot would depend on how efficient the process is. It would be useful if they would give some information on this, but Olah replied to me that `...we have of course extensive patent coverage filed for and in process. For obvious reasons in our book we could not go into any details.
The driving force for the Methanol Economy is new energy from nuclear and alternative renewable energy sources, which we don't have yet, replacing hydrocarbons as fuel. Olah, et al has great confidence that the many problems facing these new energy sources are solvable. The authors are quite negative on the safety of hydrogen, but don't seem to see a major non solvable problem with nuclear. Nuclear as we know certainly has its problems, and most of us are wary of nuclear. Scientific American had an article (December 2005 issue) on the latest nuclear plant design which uses 99% of the fuel rather than 1% in current plants. It would also have proportionally less radioactive waste, with a much shorter halflife. One of the hookers is using two separate liquid Na (at 600?C) loops as a coolant. Not a minor engineering feat. Another recent Scientific American article Sept 2006, instead sings the praises for 3rd generation nukes with improved technology, but with the same problems we currently have.
A fuel cell is being developed which uses methanol directly.
Anode: CH3OH + H2O -> CO2 + 6H+ + 6e-
Cathode: 1.5O2 + 6H+ + 6e- -> 3H2O
Overall: CH3OH + 1.5O2 -> CO2 + 2H2O
It has a theoretical efficiency of 97%, so far 34% has been achieved, while using H2 and O2 in a fuel cell has a theoretical efficiency of 83%. Of course methanol produces CO2 (which would eventually be used as feedstock) as compared to H2 which just produces water, a great advantage.
Anytime we contemplate huge installations for generating energy, whether they are nuclear or renewable we face the problem of transporting the energy to the user. Methanol, since it can use existing infrastructure of pipelines, trucks, gas stations with few changes would appear to be far cheaper than hydrogen. A July 2006 article in Scientific American `A Power Grid for the Hydrogen Economy' pointed out that our nation's electrical grid is experiencing problems and a possible solution would be to create a new national grid which would carry electricity from distant plants-renewable, nuclear, coal fired etc., by a superconductor cooled by liquid hydrogen. You would have the electricity almost resistance free (about 10% is currently lost in transmission) and the hydrogen for chemical uses. The economics of all these proposals is very hazy.
Some further food for thought is a 1998 study that indicates that the unsubsidized price of gasoline was between $6- 15/gal. A number of other studies place it at $3-11. If their methodology is close to correct then the current subsidy is much higher now, and if this subsidy were available to alternative energy sources they would be much more competitive.
Wow, awesome post. Going to have to read up more on methanol.
Conventional transmission losses are about 7% per 100 miles. HVDC (high voltage direct current) losses are about 0.5% per 100 miles. HVDC is probably cheaper than liquid hydrogen cooling :)
American Superconductor by the end of 2007 will be producing 720,000 meters per year of superconducting cable. AMSC says "orders for essentially of of this wire are now in hand". These superconducting grid wires have properties that automatically help in fault mitigation. (disclsure: I own AMSC stock)
The cable will have to be cooled by N2(l). No other way about it. This is the point of failure for HTSC cables, there are no room temperature superconductors yet, and it is unlikely that there will be in the near and mid future.
These wires do not help with fault mitigation, they still fail if the current carried is too great, or if external magnetic fields penetrate. These cables simply reduce electrical losses to zero, but outsource the cost of the losses to the cost of the cooling mechanism. Electricity is conserved, but cooling must be provided at cost. I will also note that the amount of energy saved cannot be greater than or equal to the energy required of cooling, else a perpetual machine of the second kind can be created.
from AMSC:
"Our 344 superconductors are “smart materials” because they are able to switch from a superconducting state with zero resistance to the flow of electricity, to the resistive state when the current passing through the wire exceeds a critical value. Because a high resistance reduces current in an electrical network, the “smart” switching feature of superconductor wire can be used to limit high fault currents that arise because of network short circuits. This is the basis of fault current limiting devices for utility and military applications."
I doubt the ability of the cable to be both HTSC as well as conducting, there are few materials which are both.
most HTCS are ceramics, with negligable conduction at room temp. (well nobium tin is pretty good, but $$$)
other thing, if the HTSC goes beyond the critical boundary, the resistance increase from zero to some number greater than zero causes the wire to throw the generated heat off. THIS IS BAD. When this happens in NMRI machines you have to quench the magnet in liquid helium?/?hydrogen because the heat builds like you would never believe.
the wires will likely vaporize/melt if the coolant is removed from the system. The wires were meant to be maintained at a specific temperature, thus the heat flux being worried about to minimize cost, is that from outside in. However the energy being transmitted through the wire is great, and has the potential to evaporate all the coolant, and from there pretty much instantaneously melt/vaporize the wire.
Ask the company how the excess heat from the switch to regular conducting material will be dealt with in a non-destructive fashion.
G, undergrad engineer
Thousand megawatt thermoelectric plants have high inertia. They do not load follow worth a damn. JET can plug in their megajoule flywheel any time they want. The ISA requires the utilities to have a spinning reserve of 1% of the power on the net. That is expensive. Superconductors are a way of storing huge amounts of power that can be dumped on the grid almost instantaneously. That improves reliability. Superconducting transmission lines are still science fiction.
Wall Street Journal
May 21, Page A2
"Consolidated Edison Inc., provider of electricity to nine million people in New York City and Westchester County, is pursuing a sweeping plan to upgrade its aging electric system, including installation of state-of-the-art superconducting electrical cable in midtown Manhattan."
"The $39.3 million installation, set to be unveiled today, will be largely funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security."
"The Con Edison project will use cable able to deflect power surges that was developed by American Superconductor Corp."
"Jay Cohen, undersecretary of science and technology for Homeland Security, said he believes superconducting cable has the potential to "revolutionize" electricity delivery, making systems better able to bounce back from blows from lightning strikes, equipment failures or hostile acts. Mr. Cohen, who formerly was chief of research for the Navy, said his agency is picking up about $25 million of Con Edison's cost."
Gligamesh,
I disagree: It doesn't have to take any energy at all to keep the SC cables cool, except for the fact that we intend to use them in a 300K environment. Cables in space could be maintained at low temp for free! There's no 2nd Law problem here, just an insulation problem.
And I agree, BTW, that there's no way that all that LN2 cooling could cost less than the 7%/100mi. or whatever of power saved. Thermal gradients are expensive!
I believe something referred to as the 'sealand process' was done as an experiment back in the late 1970's.
Water, electrical power, compressors, heat and catalysts.
Stream47: You've opened a new door here that lots of folks are not yet realizing. The cover of Olah's book screams simple chemistry ie: CO2 greenhouse gas & CH4 methane = CH3OH methanol. Think about this a moment. He's telling the world that CO2 when catalytically combined with methane equals the world's simplest biodegradable fuel alcohol.
The other way that methanol is manufactured around the planet is to combine H2O as steam (H2 & O) with CH4 methane to produce CO H2 H2 H2 snthesis gas and this mixture is then catalyzed with a nickle based catalyst to form CH3OH methanol - the world's simplest and cheapest biodegradable alcohol.
In his book title, Olah is showing us that even more methanol can be synthesized even cheaper using sequestered CO2 as additional carbon feedstock. The magic oxygen atom which converts methane natural gas into methanol liquid alcohol (stable, ambient temp and pressures) can come instead from CO2 instead of from H2O water while producing more synthesis gas intermediates for catalysis. Get it?
The oil industry has purposely kept CH3OH methanol out of the fuel tanks for the past 90 years. Methanol is a bit more corrosive than gasoline when used as a neat fuel as it "oxidizes" so well with one carbon matched to one oxygen in this basic molecule. The four little hydrogens contained within methanol are really just along for the ride as they balance the magnetic valance of this molecule and don't account for 1/4 of the Btu energy oomph of the one carbon atom in this molecule. The oxygen is what converts methane gas into methanol alcohol - and this oxygen is what fans the flames of the carbon atoms in hydrocarbon petroleum-derived fuels getting them ALL to burn up - thus provide more power plus a biodegradable exhaust emission stream at the same time.
Biggest problem with methanol is that it contains 49.9 - let's round this number up to 50,000 Btu's per gallon. Most gasoline contains about 112,000 Btu's per gallon - so like in Indy 500 race cars - to go the same mileage as gasoline - 2.24x the volume of methanol must be combusted to attain the same Btu's of mileage density - but when properly adjusted for air/fuel ratio and waaaayyyyy far advance spark ignition timing - the net result of combusting neat methanol is that the motorist or race car driver has about 35% more power at the accelerator pedal combined with a biodegradable exhaust emissions profile.
Now compare corn ethanol at 75,500 Btu's per gallon. It takes 1.48x the volume of ethanol adjusted for air/fuel ratio to equate to the same Btu strength as found in most gasoline. The ethanol is a two-carbon molecule whereas methanol is a single carbon molecule. Most gasoline is about 5 carbons to 9 carbons but very little of the gasoline is straight chain simple molecules. It contains rather complex hydrocarbon structures that when ignited, provide more Btu's of energy density than does C5 pentane (gasoline's light end) for example. Problem is, about 10% of the complex hydrocarbon components contained in gasoline, diesel or jet fuel don't fully combust when ignited. These unburned hydrocarbons emitted out the tailpipe are what phase separate in the blue sky of water vapor to become an airborne oil spill we see and breathe as smog.
When adding in an oxygenate like methanol or ethanol into gasoline, the amount of dissolved oxygen in these alcohols further increases the oxygen content of the whole fuel mix. The atmospheric combustion air is approximately 20% oxygen - so 50% oxygen content in methanol or 34% oxygen content in ethanol when used in 10% volume blends with gasoline is adding another 5% or 3.4% total oxygen to the air/fuel combustion ratio. Following me? This extra oxygen works to make the 10% unburned gasoline or diesel or kerosene-based jet fuel actually burn up. When this happens, the motorist "feels" extra power at the gas pedal, typically notes serious increases in fuel economy (mileage) and his emissions stream becomes a whole lot cleaner as a net result.
Remember, brown urban smog is just an oil spill in the sky - uncombusted oils that came out of gasoline, diesel exhaust pipes and unburned oils or coal hydrocarbon components emitted from refinery smokestacks, coal-fired power plant smokestacks and especially cement kilns.
What Olah is suggesting is to utilize sequestered sources of polluting CO2 greenhouse gas as "additional" carbonaceous feedstock which is abundantly available and cheap - and therein recycle some of the global warming problem back around as a oxygenated bridging mechanism into petroleum-derived oily float-on-water fuel pool.
What Olah hasn't yet fully realized is the catalytic methodology to build methanol molecules back on top of themselves. Two methanols equal a synthetic ethanol. Three methanols produce a normal propanol. Four of them combined make up a synthetic C4 butanol, etc. And as the carbons in these single chained biodegradable alcohols are increased in length, so is their Btu's of combustion energy density.
Consider a mole of 50,000 Btu methanol molecules becoming 45% stronger Btu by this method of new catalysis. Or the resulting blend of alcohols being 20% stronger Btu when compared to C2 ethanol.
And I'm referring to a blend of synthetic alcohols being formed by catalysis which offer 90,400 Btu's per gallon or a little higher. Use CO2 greenhouse gas for one-half of this new biofuels front-end carbon feedstock and you are onto something here which can go global extra profitably and make the biggest dent in the biofuels industry which corn or sugar cane or rapeseed oil or switchgrass (all harvested ag feedstocks) cannot touch by volume nor through inefficient fermentation depolymerization production costs.
Simply my thoughts. And thanks for the link to Olah's book. I've been aware of it for some time yet decided to purchase a copy today.
Gary Bridge
What you don't realize is that Olah begs the question of how you get the hydrogen to make use of the CO2. When you start digging into that, his entire house of cards falls down. It's the same thing with the H2CAR process, adequately dissected elsewhere.
Engineer-Poet: What you haven't realized here is that the extra hydrogen to make use of the CO2 and reform it as a component of additional CO & H2 syngas volumes comes from boiling H2O water into steam just a little bit ahead in this particular reformation process. Boiling water simply releases both a H2 and a O which are both utilized as gaseous intermediates in synthesizing a CH3OH methanol molecule (utilizing the CO2 as additional carbon-based feedstock) plus a host of other, stronger Btu fuel alcohols.
Don't confuse my thoughts or Olah's with anything to do with isolating H2 for combustion in traditional engines. Some of the answers which people are looking for are right in front of their faces - albeit they just can't see them.
Take a look-see at the cover message of Olah's book once again. He's addressing a rather specific point even though he seems to understand the potential of ambient temperature, ambient pressure, biodegradable methanol even though it contains only 45% or so of the Btu's within a gallon of gasoline. Yet methanol is commercially synthesized using stranded methane reserves at the equator or from coal in South Africa for less than 20¢ a gallon. OK?
Remember too that the first vehicles output from Detroit assembly lines in the 80's carrying FFV chips under their hoods were designed to utilize M-85, not E-85. These M-85 FFV model cars were quietly diminished by political forces. The difference between a synthetic CH3OH methanol and a corn-derived C2H5OH ethanol is ONLY one carbon atom in the base chain of these molecules. But the chemistry sets and the methods and the process economics to isolate these two different lower alcohols is as different as night and day.
Be aware that 5¢ bushel of cattle manure contains more carbon building blocks for biodegradable fuel synthesis than does a $4+ bushel of corn kernels harvested with diesel tractors.
Just my 2¢ worth here. I'm glad that an earlier poster opened up the link to Olah's book and some side issues here in this long discussion thread...
G.B.
Blah! Blah! Blah!
If you knew any chemistry you would know that all those "fuel molecules" can be synthesized from almost anything containing their bare components (C, H, O).
IT'S NOT THE END PRODUCT WHICH MATTERS.
IT'S THE ENERGY BALANCE OF THE PRODUCTION PROCESS.
How many joules are recoverable by burning the fuel with respect to each joule consumed in the production.
Unless the "primary ingredients" (oil, sugar, cellulose) are already energy rich the efficiency (EROEI) is usually below 1, and can be so even when the primary source is energy rich if the production process is inefficient (as for ethanol in some cases).
Or more precisely, all fuel synthesis and refining have EROEI below 1. The point with them is not to gather energy but to turn raw material / energy sources into usefull fuel.
Or more precisely, all fuel synthesis and refining have EROEI below 1.
True, but don't confuse the issue by restricting the energy balance boundaries to strictly the refining process.
It is true that by refining oil into gasoline you get less energy from the refined gasoline than went into the refining process + THE RAW ENERGY FROM OIL (if you had burned directly the oil), but given that the raw energy from oil comes at ONLY the energy cost of prospecting and drilling the whole process, prospecting, drilling, refining is still at EROEI of about 10 to 20 (yet steadily declining).
Given your other posts I would not have expected such a light minded critiscism from you.
You could create methanol for fuel cells by gasifying biomass.
Corn stalks, wheat and rice straw, switch grass and lots of different feed stocks from forest and agriculture can be gasified to producer gas, then processed to synthesis gas and then methane and then methanol.
There are an estimated 1 billion tons of usable biomass in the U.S. indicated in a Department of Energy study. With 100 gallons of methanol per ton that would make 100 of the 140 billion gallons of liquid fuel that we use for transportation. Combine that with fuel cell efficiency and you have a CO2 neutral form of transportation.
CalGuy,
Are you sure you're not talking about destructive distillation? Nothing but heat and a closed container are required to make methanol from biomass - hence the name, "wood alcohol." Sounds like a natural app for a solar concentrator. It's not particularly efficient, but we have to return most of the carbon to the soil anyway, if sustainability is a priority.
Methanol is only one of many products of destructive distillation. Gasification can produce syngas (CO+H2) which can make desired products by catalytic synthesis. There are off-the-shelf reactors for making methanol from syngas, and the yield of the desired product will be much greater.
Solar + Wind + Tidal + EVs + PLHVs = the answer.
Intermittent renewable energy stored across the land in vehicle batteries vis a vis V2G technology. (Oh oh - I said that word).
At scale, forget biofuels.
Oh -the rigs no longer looking for oil can mine lithium from the ocean. Once out, it, like all other non-radioactive elements, is recyclable.
Great work, Robert, and to Euan's article also.
Solar + Wind + Tidal + EVs + PLHVs = the answer.
Intermittent renewable energy stored across the land in vehicle batteries vis a vis V2G technology. (Oh oh - I said that word).
There is probably no way we'll run a global economy AWKI (as we know it) on that kind of setup.
Not saying we need to, but thems the breaks.
Agreed. Welcome to a new world. Heck even the Amish are embracing solar, maybe electric buggies will be next.
"There is probably no way we'll run a global economy AWKI (as we know it) on that kind of setup."
It looks to me like we can. Would you like to elaborate with numbers?
See recent reports by ACORE summerized here and EPRI here. Will post some graphics.
click to enlarge
Try this and this for above graphics.
John, were you agreeing with me, or disagreeing?
I don't see anything here that limits wind or solar. The ACORE report simply projects the amount that could be developed by 2025 based on current growth rates: there's no indications of limits to market penetration.
The EPRI report is intended to analyze the effects of various amounts of PHEV's. They simply assume certain market penetrations, and don't present any limits.
I think the authors of both of these are very optimistic about the long term usefulness of wind, solar or PHEV's.
Nick, the ACORE report states the potential for renewables by 2025, based on input from a number of credible stakeholders. I don't think this meant as a limit.
The EPRI report does look at high and low cases of EV market penetration (an assumption on their part) to assess CO2 and GHG reduction.
Combined, and mindful of GW and peak oil (of which by my watch we're 20 months past), these provide a one-two punch that may light a fire under Congress to agree on an energy package with guts. It is certainly being incorporated into thinking and plans at the State level.
It will be a new world, and probably not one where people are at each other's throats.
In a scientific taxonomy of energy sources, wind IS solar, but with a twist: global warming WILL change weather patterns and therefore wind patterns. The siting of wind farms based on historic weather data may turn out to be sub-optimal for the future.
equal to solar...
constructed turbines can be moved, they do not become magically useless and broken if the wind stops.
now how far they can economically be moved is another story.
Why isn't the developing world (Africa) powering up this way, then? Why is Iran investing in nuclear and not solar?
If it's feasible to run a world-class economy on solar/tidal/wind, then why aren't China and India building solar/tidal/wind over coal/NG?
gr1nn3r
Africa:
When most of the peeople are deperately poor, under $5.00 a day, how can they invest in anything.Bob Ebersole
Iran:
they may be investing in solar and wind as well as nuclear, but who can tell? Do you remember all the WMD that were never found in Iraq, or the yellow cake uranium supposedly bought from Niger?
Excellent! This is exactly my point. If solar is ready in the here and now, then why can't countries/villages/regions in Africa build some energy wealth by deploying solar energy?
Do they need outside assistance? Some sort of bootstrapping? Will we need a similar kind of bootstrapping?
To anticipate a response, is social cohesion and corruption the problem? Will we be able to maintain our level of civility on the downward slope of the oil curve. Is our sophistication due to our energy wealth?
I don't really expect answers, but it's food for thought.
Thought experiment: How about plopping down a solar panel factory somewhere in Africa. It'll be a hot item in the coming years, and I'm sure land and labor are available at great prices.
Solar cell fabrication plants are a little bit energy hungry. Normally cells take a little under 2 years to pay back what was used to make them. So, you need a source of cheap power to build a plant. You also need a source of solar grade silicon. Making this is getting easier, but it is also a pretty demanding industrial effort. The costs in are still material and energy more than labor so you don't always gain by going offshore.
From the little I've read about analyzing the payback time for solar it sounds like substantial energy is also tied up in the aluminum support structures and other parts of the system in addition to the silicon.
However, I do agree that this should be a real positive for equatorial countries. From a simple resource standpoint they have enormous amounts of solar energy landing within their borders but it is difficult to use. It's like saying they have proven oil reserves which are miles deep under miles of ocean. Lots of energy but not easy to get to.
aluminum is recyclable however, and smelting new from old is much less costly than mining new stuff.
the only good thing i could think of.
If solar is ready in the here and now, then why can't countries/villages/regions in Africa build some energy wealth by deploying solar energy?
Individual villages have. Lights at night, 10 foot parabolic reflectors to cook with, running water pumps for crops.
http://journeytoforever.org/sc_link.html
http://www.princeindia.org/Balcony%20cooker%20article.pdf
http://www.princeindia.org/newproducts.htm
(Adding links to the Scheffler Community cooking system because I spent too damn long looking it up this time)
Thought experiment: How about plopping down a solar panel factory somewhere in Africa.
Companies won't do it because of the history of a lack of stable governments and taxation structures. Not to mention a relative lack of human capitol in the form of trained (or trainable) workers. Much of Africa lacks 2-3 generations of families being well fed and educated.
Hi gr,
Thanks and is this a rhetorical question?
There could be a lot of reasons - the same factors that keep us on this oil-gobbling path. Also, could be that in the short term the FF are more net energy return, but this won't last long. It could be "they" don't see that what FF there are should be used to put in place the only infrastructure(s) that can conceivably work on any scale, namely (at least for purposes of this discussion), solar/(possibly wind)-related ones.
Also, the aspects of design and (let me just say it) the social/cultural/legal aspects, such as legal rights of women - (as I tie that directly to population, quality of life and savings of all sorts) - enter into any discussion of what has to happen to maintain "world-class" economy. Or, "world-class" civilization, perhaps.
What does "world-class" economy mean?
Does it mean strictly local food production, less manufacturing in total? Does it mean incorporating composting into sewage treatment? Does it mean providing
food, clothing shelter and then the icing is scientific research? Or does it mean...?
Hi again gr,
I basically like your questions, it's just that I'd encourage you to keep at it.
re: "Why isn't the developing world (Africa) powering up this way, then?"
Well, look. Who in Africa sells Africa's oil to whom? And why?
Then, perhaps we could answer this.
Who is in a position (in the real world) to make the changes that might bode better (if not well) for humanity?
In theory, everyone. In practicality, some are better placed than others.
Well why aren't we deploying solar technology in our homes and offices if it is ready in the here and now?
Everyone hates being dependent on "foreign-oil" and contributing to global warming.
Why are we and China investing money in new coal power plants rather that solar/tidal plants?
I think there are plenty of people hawking solar technology. People aren't buying because it isn't good enough yet to replace the status-quo (fossil fuel power). That's my point.
Finally, I would consider a world-class economy to be a high-technology economy. For example, Google plopping a server farm somewhere in Niger would be a good start.
India is pursuing a world-class economy and is having (fossil fuel) power problems... why not turn to solar power if it is ready?
I'd guess it isn't "ready" in the sense that there's enough manufacturing capability and expertise for the possibility of building solar farms of sufficient size to provide the equivalent power that can be gained from nuclear (the path India is persuing).
But also there's a risk factor: we know we can build a 1000MW nuclear power plant, and be sure it will generate the expected base-load electricity. No-one's proven that we can build a 1000MW solar farm that can generate base-load electricity, and nobody wants to risk trying as long as their are surer options that don't cost significantly more.
Note that China is already looking at building the world's first 1000MW solar power plant (using solar thermal), at a cost of ~2 billion USD, roughly the same as an equivalent nuclear plant. Presumably the running costs are somewhat lower (although they present far more unknowns).
But Wiz, Joe Sixpack is so forward thinking and rational he's demanding these investments in renewable power. Right?
Not sure what point you're making. Joe Sixpack is presumably less likely to want a nuclear reactor than a solar power plant in his back yard...even if he was threatened with the possibility of higher electricity bills, so I'm not sure how his opinion is going to matter much.
You stressed that the average consumer is forward thinking enough to demand rational energy policies in another thread.
And yet he's calling for neither.
Because he votes for the politician who makes energy policy.
I'm sorry, when did I ever assert that the "average consumer is forward thinking enough to demand rational energy policies"? At most I asserted that the average government is going to do their damnedest to ensure energy is sufficiently available and directed to provide essential services.
Joe Sixpack will vote for the politician that is making the promises that appeal to him the most (well, actually, more likely he'll keep voting for the same guys he always has). If one political party comes to the conclusion that the best way to make up for dwindling energy supplies is to build a nuclear reactor, and the other comes to the conclusion that the best way is to build solar power plants, Joe Sixpack's opinion will make little difference either way.
I thought in a democracy the government does what the people will. Thus a government is only as forward thinking as its voters (ie Carter/Reagan).
You have a funny notion of how politics work. Joe Sixpack never votes for someone that promises him less when there is always someone promising him more. Even if the guy promising him less is right.
Much more likely the choice will be between one party calling for suing OPEC and another party calling for more drilling. Some minor candidate will call for nukes,solar and conservation but he/she won't have a chance.
The average politician will do his/her damnedest to make sure he/she is re-elected. If they put the welfare of their people ahead of the election they tend to have very short careers and are often replaced with politicians that have the opposite priority.
I never suggested that any politician would promise less.
How long do you think the charade of calling for suing OPEC and more drilling is going to last as oil supplies keep falling and falling election after election?
Politicians may do their damnedest to make sure they re-elected in the lead up to election day, but once they're in office, their vested interest is in making sure that Joe Sixpack can at least be fed and keep warm. And any half-competent government will be aware of what's required to achieve that.
Furthermore, after 5 or 10 years of continuous economic turmoil and downturn, the average voter's interests will significantly different to what they are now.
You don't think we'll need conservation of some sort?
Right up to the point where governments collapse. Hell, its obvious now what needs to be done and no one is doing a damned thing. Carter tried to end the charade and look what he got.
Sure they do. Politicians never vote against the interest of the people they represent.
It was the energy policies we set 30 years ago that we are living with today. Politicians look 2 or 4 years into the future, not 30.
Yet they'll be just as stupid, shortsighted, and selfish as they are today.
Besides, mitigation needed to start 30 years ago not 10 years in the future.
That we'll need conservation is well-accepted, and promoted (not heavily, of course) by both political parties here. I can't speak for the U.S. But how is that a 'promise' of anything?
And you say it's obvious what needs to be done now - but it obviously isn't, at least to those that matter. The fact of the matter is that right now we do have enough energy to sustain the way we use it.
Yes, if we'd started 20, 30 years ago at converting our energy sources to nuclear/renewables and our cars to electric, then there would be no real problem to address.
If we embarked on a crash program today, we could probably (at a stretch) avoid any really serious consequences of a major energy supply drop. Well, we haven't, and, you're right, we probably won't for another 5 years at least. So yes, we've almost certainly committed ourselves to a very bumpy future by leaving it too late. But you (and others) appear to believe that there's nothing at all we could ever possibly do that will even save some respectable sort of remnant of a technological civilisation.
No, we fear the most we can do is just "save some respectable sort of remnant of a technological civilization."
But you think at some magical point in the future humanity will pull its head out of its butt and work together to solve the problem. Because, after all, once the economy collapses we'll be able to accomplish everything we couldn't seem to do during the heights of industrial civilization.
Lots of we's there. Who are 'we'? (Sound's like the Who's who are you... if you (...)catch my drift)
There will be no "magical point in the future". Most likely there will be a gradual eroding of vested interests and inertia against doing what we know needs to be done now. And nor is there just "one problem" that all 7 or 8 billion of us will suddenly decide to work together on. Most of us will contribute to solving the problems by being forced to change our ways due to lack of cheap energy, lack of cheap food, lack of easy transport, lack of easy jobs etc. etc.
Sure, there will always be a proportion of the population that will throw their hands up and say its all too hard, or resort to rioting and looting out of desperation. But once sufficient numbers of us no choice but to change our attitudes and behaviours just in order to be sure where our next meal is coming from, your Joe-Sixpack stereotype of today isn't going to last long.
Most likely there will be a gradual eroding of vested interests
No, there will be a HUGE increase of vested interests, just of different kind.
your Joe-Sixpack stereotype of today isn't going to last long.
Right, Joe-Sixpack will turn to Neanderthal or at best Bagaudae.
Yes, I should have said existing vested interests, or "vested interests in the status quo". Once the status quo doesn't look so good any more, or becomes clearly impossible to maintain, there won't be much reason to want to hang on to it.
Let's just hope that Joe Six-Pack doesn't become Joe Six-Scull!
To quote the great H. L. Mencken: "As democracy is perfected, the presidency represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."
The time is now, folks :-)
IMO Thompson is a shoe in. It has been set up for him to win by the PTB.
I live in Northern California. Our utility company, PG&E, charges (as I recollect) $14.95 per month to grid-tie a home solar system.
There's two of us in out household and we use from between $14 and $29 per month of electricity at about $0.11 per kwh. We would have to generate almost 136 kwh or solar per month just to pay for the grid tie.
Over a five-year period (life expectancy of a battery system), the grid-tie would add up to $897 -- perhaps more than enough battery capacity for our demand.
There's just me and my wife living in our small house and we both work at home. We don't have any radical energy-saving appliances, but they are fairly new. And we use propane for our heat and hot water.
Conservation is the cheapest form of energy!
To most it's fairly self-evident.
You missed class that day didn't you.
Check, please.
gr1nn3r:
Great point. I think the reason is reliability. Solar power, as you can buy it off the shelf today, is not suitable for providing base load power. Yes, we have a lot of ideas such as pumping water up hill in the daytime and letting it flow down at night, or heating up ponds of molten salt to store heat with which to make electricity at night or on cloudy days.
Those ideas need to be proven out with many installations. Just as GE can come in and offer to build a nuclear plant we need large companies with good track records who can offer to come in and install a 500MW solar plant with guarantees of reliability and uptime. Then bureaucrats can make decisions based simply on cost or the desire to use solar. Currently the choice is a well proven coal or nuclear plant versus a science experiment in solar.
Just now someone is building a 1GW solar plant in California. When there are ten of these and they have a good track record it will be easier to build the next ten.
All you have to do with solar and wind is integrate them with electric vehicles and ice-storage air conditioning systems. This gives you the demand-scheduling flexibility to deal with the variations in supply; the remaining fossil plants can be scheduled with a lead time of hours rather than responding to fluctuations lasting minutes.
E-P, Well put, and I like the ice storage. Could you just keep repeating your message 'til you're blue in the face (from the ice storage, of course)? RR is tuned in, and the silent majority is listening.
Mind doing me a favor, John?
This might be too hard or take too much time. If so, that's ok but if you'd like to take a crack at it, can you describe how society might look if we reorganized around all these other options (other than fossil fuels)? I don't know about you but in my mind, suburbia goes away. Profligate consumption goes away too because our EROEI, while positive, is somewhat lower than fossil fuels. This all implies pretty serious social reorganization, or at least it seems so to me. You may agree or feel otherwise but I'd appreciate your thoughts on the matter.
This is just my personal opinion but a society built on renewables and having a goal (one of many goals actually) of being a sustainable society could very well be "high tech" but it certainly seems that it would be structured radically differently than what we see today.
Anyway, if you'd like to take a shot at what you think such a society might look like, I'd love to hear it, here or anywhere else.
Thanks in advance regardless of whether you take on that burden or not.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
Will get back to you tomorrow but honestly while I share most of your opinions/visions of what the future may hold, there are many here and elsewhere that have and continue to address this, some quite well. Thanks for asking, though.
Why is Iran investing in nuclear and not solar?
Duh. Same reason you have people pushing fission here.
A big old fission reactor means that everyone around it is dependent on that one reactor. If everyone has solar + a bit of excess capacity and 'shares' the excess on the grid, the government looses control, the power company looses control, et la.
A fission reactor also means money to be spent "keeping it safe from evil_doers" - another way for one group to have control over another.
The shackles of debt, fear, and an 'easy life' (of cheap calories, abundant power, excessive consumer goods et la) helps to keep the rabble in check. A distributed power grid makes for a harder time to control via regulation of one key resource in one location.
Where it all might not end well is when the bread and circuses comes to an end.
Is the plural of circus circi?
I disagree, Iran is pushing nuke so they can get in the nuke club and be feared/respected as they feel they should. If they did not behave like a rogue state there would be no international misgivings about them acquiring the tech.
matt
The simplest answer is that, in fact, they ARE investing heavily in wind/solar, but those industries aren't large enough yet to supply their massive energy needs.
Wind & solar are doubling every 2 years, and soon they will get there, but they're not there yet.
Oh -the rigs no longer looking for oil can mine lithium from the ocean.
I have seen suggestions to put wind turbines on them, but I don't know how practical it will be to produce electricity that far from shore. Plus, capital costs for building on the platforms is much higher than for building on shore.
Off-shore wind has much higher public acceptance than coastal. Hmmm - hadn't thought of using wind (and solar?) on rig to run the mining. Now that's probably got one heck of an EROEI.
The environment offshore is extremely expensive to maintain. You have to constantly clean paint and repair things. These workers need food and housing and AC. My vessel burns 20000 gallons a day in diesel at anchor just to run our equipment. This is not even counting what you are wanting to do extracting lithium.
Take an island that is geologically stable set up an electric economy an put in all the wind solar tidal you can with a nuke plant to back it up. Then use the excess electricity produced to extract from seawater. The economic value of this type of mining is probable years out though. The fresh water made would be worth more.
matt
Also,American environmental laws prevent oil companies from just abandoning platforms. The cost of cleaning the rigs up would no doubt be more than building a concrete base like the Europeans do on their offshore turbines.
Also, laws are such that anyone who has ever owned a piece of an environmental hazard like a decommissioned rig is liable for the clean-up. And, its a good law, it protects us all. It keeps operators from just dumping an old platform and calling it an artificial reef, or selling it to an operator that has no intention of cleaning the rig up when production ceases.
So it would require amendments to the environmental laws to make this legally possible. And I, personally, would not support that plan. The risk is too great.
Bob Ebersole
How are off-shore drilling rigs decommissioned and scrapped? In a post-PO world, I would have guessed that much manufactured material must be worth recycling and the cost to clean it up. Would someone really just dump it in the ocean?
On a semi or jack up they take them into a dry dock and salvage or dispose of everything
Platforms on stilts have every module removed then the top section is cutoff. This is also taken ashore and recycled or otherwise disposed of. The stilt part is cut off on the floor of the ocean and toppled over to make a reef. This saves the company money and theoretically is ggod for the ecosystem. The seafloor is mostly mud near the mississippi so this structure allows things to take hold and provides shelter for smaller fish from larger predators.
It is much cheaper to sink scrap metal than it is to transport it ashore, sort it clean it melt it down and reform it. Right now iron ore smelting is way cheaper than that process.
matt
Thanks for the information, matt. Will store and use somehow someday.
Hello JM
Some wind generator info.
EROEI offshore and onshore are almost identical!
A recent Life cycle assessment comparison of an onshore- and offshore 3 MW wind generator gave an energy payback time of 6.8 months for offshore- and 6.6 for onshore.
See details here:
http://www.vestas.com/NR/rdonlyres/CB1E6A32-EB4E-4845-9451-4B5255BBB111/...
With a lifetime of 25+ years the EROEI- is >35-40 times for both. It seems that the higher energy production offshore is offset by the higher energy cost for infrastructure, foundation and maintenance offshore.
But both onshore and offshore are indispensible in the future- and we must build both.
When that is said, I also believe that we have to use all the possible energy sources with EROEI > 2-3 , together with a massive reduction (better energy efficiency and conservation) of societal energy consumption. The more we reduce the easier it is to make solar, wind , biomass heat etc work.
I would put the lifetime at 35-45 years depending on how the maintenance costs scale (Using some kind of accounting anlysis I can't remember the name of right now; you would only choose to replace turbines with new ones when all costs for the alternative are lower than the future costs for the current[which at the EOL is typically maintenance.])
on the flip side, maintenance reduces eroei.
Wow... just started looking at this report. Thanks And1 - will pass on to non-readers of TOD.
V2G is one way of doing it and could provide part of the solution, but pumped hydro is 75% efficient and could provide
MUCH more power to communities. All your wind and solar sources are used to pump water back up to elevation and at night let out to create electricity for the cities. No problem with using renewable energy for everything, including cars.
"V2G is one way of doing it and could provide part of the solution, but pumped hydro is 75% efficient and could provide"
Yes, but a few quibbles: V2G won't be needed for a long time. Just the buffering provided by dynamic charging will help renewables enormously.
Pumped hydro can be 80-81% efficient.
Don't forget power-factor correction. Lines and transformers are rated in volt-amperes, not watts. If you can adjust the power factor on a line from 0.8 to 1.0, it can carry 25% MORE power with no increase in capital costs or losses. The reductive charging system created by AC Propulsion is ideal for this, and V2G is a built-in capability. There is no point in putting the capability off when we can have it today.
Sure. I just don't want people to be distracted by V2G, which will take some planning & investment.
People tend to see the amount of work needed by V2G, and assume that EV/PHEV's won't be able to help deal with renewable intermittency. In fact, just the charging will make an enormous difference, and that can start with a simple timer to move charging to the middle of the night.
Robert,
I agree with you conclusion, solar is the way to go. I would stand up though for photsynthesis. It is not that inefficient. It does about as well as current PV which is why algae can be turned into fuel with about the same energy harvest. (You still lose because the fuel then goes into a heat engine.) But, plants are evolved to be eaten not burned. The rotting of forest mulch, the grazing of cattle, and the predations of insects all provide CO2 for further plant growth. From an ecological point of view, photosynthesis is just a means to fill out a niche, not the be all and end all of existance. It is useful for making structures that bring leaves into sunlight or nectars to tempt fertilizers of fruit to help spread seeds. It is pretty efficient, but it is not the only thing plants do. We can pick crops, like algae, which do little more than photosythesis, and this gets us close to our current liquid fuels consumption, but it seems to me that it makes much more sense to sprout our own silicon leaves, keep the efficiencies involved with this specialization and make liquid fuel use a relatively rare practice. It makes sense in some places, but not here where we can jump past most of that.
It does about as well as current PV which is why algae can be turned into fuel with about the same energy harvest.
But nobody ever got those 10,000 gallon per acre yields that are often cited for algae. Those were speculations based on solving "many R&D hurdles before it can be practicable." That's a direct quote from the close-out report where that huge yield number was taken from. It is based on massively scaling up a lab result, and solving a bunch of technical problems. And I know at least one co-author of that study who says even that was more optimistic that was warranted by lab results.
Nobody every was able to make an economic case for algae that would compete with $30 oil, so nobody's research proposal was ever funded. The world will be different in future, and maybe somebody will try. If they succeed, they will probably not have a salable product. They will be overrun and ignored just like the original discoverers of gold in California.
And then again maybe it just doesn't work.
Hi Robert,
In an earlier reply, you cited theory but I was citing production numbers. GreenFuel has a pilot plant in Arizona. The area is 0.3 acres. I was interested in them because the coal plant down the Potomac from me has to put in scrubbers. A friend at church was concerned that her well would run dry because they planned to draw a huge amount of potable water from the aquifer to run the scrubbers. What GreenFuel is doing has 90% water recycling because they control evaporation and they can substitute for a scrubber since the flu gas goes through the water. So, I called them up. Here is what they are getting in sunny AZ: 6000 gal/acre biodiesel and 5000 gal/acre ethanol. This is what they are producing now. This is not as high as 10000 gal/acre biodiesel but it is much higher than for rooted plants.
As it turns out, Maryland is forcing the coal plant to use grey water and because of the way the land is parceled up near the coal plant, I doubt Greenfuel would be interested in the site. They need 5 acres per MW of plant output for gas fired plants and 8--10 acres per MW for coal fired plants and the land has to be adjacent to the plants. So, they'll do best where land is cheap and it is sunny. This is what Arizona is like. Now, for a 1 GW plant, they'll produce about 30 million gal of biodiesel per year plus ethanol. That is some liquid fuels, but it likely can't replace what we use. It does make fairly efficient use of solar energy if what you are after is liquid fuels. I'm pretty sure they would give you a tour of the plant if you asked, especially since you are writing on the subject.
Call Gary Leung at 857 253 0111.
My feeling is that we should be thinking of liquid fuels as a specialty product. Something you might use if you need to take a trip longer than 40 miles where the shorter trips are electric powered. They should be used where nothing else would do the job, but when something else can do the job, it is usually going to be cheaper.
I'd love to see it go, so I started googling Greenfuel, and got suspicious with this endorsement:
"We got put on the shelf in 1996 when Clinton was balancing the budget and cut way back on renewable energy because diesel was so cheap then," Sheehan said. "The desert Southwest is prime land for this kind of technology and just a fraction of the Sonoran Desert could produce enough algae to take care of nearly all of the nation's diesel needs."
and:
"Sheehan said that the country could produce only 4 percent to 5 percent of its total diesel needs in soybean oil.
"Algae is a tremendously large resource base compared to that and other vegetable oils because you don't have to worry about a growing season," Sheehan said. "And getting a major utility like APS to invest in this is impressive because it means this technology is now in the spotlight."
Nearly all of the nations diesel?
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/business/articles/1014biz-algae...
Well, apparently they are having some troubles, as of July 1 of this year.
"Unanticipated setbacks with GreenFuel Technologies’ unique bioreactor system led to the layoff of half the company’s 50-person staff and Bob Metcalfe’s appointment as interim CEO, Xconomy has learned, adding detail to what we reported yesterday. Cambridge-based GreenFuel seeks to use algae to convert carbon dioxide emissions into biofuel. However, in the last few weeks, the company was forced to shut down its third-generation algae greenhouse in Arizona, which produced too much algae to handle properly. That was coupled to another blow, in which GreenFuel learned that its algae-harvesting system would cost twice as much as anticipated."
http://www.xconomy.com/2007/07/01/metcalfe-takes-reins-at-greenfuel-afte...
Once again harvest problems, and problems of maintaining log phase growth. I gleaned from other articles on Greenfuel Technology, though perhaps incorrectly, that contamination issues are met with maintaining log growth, which in turn feeds on their light and harvest problems.
I wish them the best going forward, perhaps with carbon credits and more time they can get it to work.
In an earlier reply, you cited theory but I was citing production numbers.
You think you were citing real numbers. But the analysis that I linked to, the Fireangel/Dimitrov analysis, point very strongly at Greenfuel's numbers being overstated. The ethanol number alone is a tip-off. I guarantee you they aren't getting those kinds of ethanol yields. They are projecting that the cellulose in the algae is worth that much ethanol. That's it.
Um, single-celled algae don't make cellulose, do they?
Cellulose is the major structural component of plant cells, found in the cell wall. Algae are plants. Plenty of articles regarding algae and cellulose on the net, too.
Now that I search, I see you're right. But not all of them (some don't use cellulose at all) and the size of the structures to be broken down will be much smaller than for higher plants.
Hi Robert,
You could well be right. The xconomy article doug fir posted suggests that they are not yet handling the full production. On the other hand, projecting ethanol based on an assay of the operational broth is likely to be fairly close. Sounds also like they are getting higher growth rates now too (summer time?). So far as I understand it, they are only planning to ferment the carbohydrates. The used (dried) mash will be burned mixed with coal. Myself, I'd consider leaving it wet to grow mushrooms for a further fermentation round along with protein production.
Myself, I'd consider leaving it wet to grow mushrooms for a further fermentation round
So you have the conversion of cellulose to fungi (Oyster mushrooms on straw with the growth medium then fed to pigs/cows - research on this is documented) but what 'fermentation' process are you proposing?
Biogas? Some form of alcohol?
Just regular yeast. Make a mash of the mushrooms and ferment the carbs. There is some research on mushrooms that self-ferment yielding beer-like alcohol concentrations, but is probably better to use a mash and go higher. The main point here is that people can get this going on their own without waiting for Iogen or Range Fuels to locate in their area.
I'll have to try 'fungus wart' Thanks for the 'pointer'. (And if I ever get a butyl reactor process working I can try for that)
I seem to recall an effort based on growing wild-type algae in open ponds, getting enough biomass for ~5000 gallons/ac/yr of ethanol. Ah, here it is (I can't locate anything recent on Aquaflow, unfortunately).
The biomass product may be biased towards carbs and protein rather than lipids, but IIUC there are ways to turn all of it into fuel. There may be secondary (brewer's yeast) and tertiary products as well.
The article didn't mention ethanol that I could see.
Absolutely, the only way to go with algae is wild algae. But, I wonder what the oil yields are that they are getting, as well as the energy inputs to harvest and extract the oil. My suspicion is that this isn't a pretty picture. The NREL close-out project reported very low yields when they scaled up to the open ponds.
i believe the max seen for any given harvesting period was 50 g/m^2*day. Probably during the longest days of the year in the hawaii or california test sites.
Open ponds were getting consistent ~15-20 g/m^2*day.
(i'm also not sure if it was days or hours for the timescale)
EP,
Aquaflow is the same company I referenced upthread on airline fuel. Although this article does state the product is 5% biodiesel, no word on harvest or dominant specie or species type harvested. No word either on ethanol-only diesel. Please post if should find more information.
"the petroleum equivalent yield from planting all of the world's arable land in one of the more popular biofuel options is just under 30 million barrels per day."
Robert, your analysis of biofuels is wrong because you are considering the world as one unit and that's not the way it works. Present and potentially arable land as well as liquid biofuels usage intensity are NOT evenly distributed around the world. The countries with more biofuels production potential (e.g. Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay) have much lower liquid fuel (and energy in general) usage per capita than OECD countries. Therefore if they maximize the allocation of their agricultural potential into biodiesel production (plus sugar cane to ethanol), they will be able to run their current infrastructures FOR EVER, and it is just not reasonable to expect they will forego that possibility. So the people in countries that today depend on agricultural exports from these countries will have a problem.
Please bear my repeating the conclusions from a previous post:
- Once significant biodiesel production capacity has been built, land arbitraging based on farmers' profits per acre will drive the allocation of land to biodiesel crops (soybean, sunflower and rapeseed, SSR for short) or to grain crops.
- From that moment onward, fuel arbitraging will make the price of diesel fuel (however high it goes) set the floor for the price of SSR oils. Land arbitraging in turn will set the floor for the price of wheat and corn.
- There is a food Export Land Model, where food exports will be falling not because rising internal consumption, but because of ever increasing feedstock and land diversion into biofuels production.
- Poor food importing countries, and poor people in general, will be priced out of food.
- The world is NOW at peak food.
- Demographic scenarios of 9 billion people don't stand a chance.
- To minimize future (next decade?) starvation, people should be encouraged to:
Stop building, particularly suburban houses that imply a loss of farmland.
Stop procreating at higher than the replacement rate.
This triggers a thought: There are many inputs to a functioning economy. Some years ago, a new idea burst on the scene, called 'linear programming'. Vast computer programs were written to optimize economic activity. Where is this stuff now? I see no inkling of that work in peak oil discussions.
'linear programming' is part of a much larger set of approaches, sometimes called Operations Analysis. It's very widely used. For example, airline operations are heavily influenced by it.
Hi geek and Nick,
I'd also wondered about this. In a way, it's what Alan does when he talks about freight rail to move agricultural "products" from the CA Central Valley to the coast (LA). But who else is thinking about it as a helpful tool? (Other than the military.)
My guess is, under the current legal arrangements of corporations and states, there's something countering efficiency - if we assume efficiency to be the goal of OA - in the sense that the corporate entities determine their parameters in a different way than we might see as wise, given our understanding of what's ahead. (A corporation "believes" it wants efficiency, but for whom? In other words.)
You could also make the argument that the parameters are everything and that suburbia itself is a result of "successful" OA - only "they" ignored some factors. Like cost of fuel, and also simply having no priority for things we might consider fundamental to, say, local food production, distributed energy, etc.
---edit: In other words, geek, I'd encourage you to look into this. Pick some factors, and write them up for us, maybe?
"Operations Analysis" is also known as "Operations Research" to some actuaries.
NPR had a food expert on a few weeks ago. He said that the US food industry produces twice the required calories per day that we need -- and that the food industry's main focus is spending billions of dollars convincing us to consume it.
Robert,
Thanks for your hard work and scientific honesty, plus your bull dog Aggie tenaciousness. The efficiencies seem to win the debate-the fellows with the methanol or alge suggestions still have to contend with the efficiencies of solar vs. photosynthesis.
Another thing, solar, and its cousins, wind,hydro,and tidal are non-polluting. There is no disposal of waste problem. The only hang-up is the storage, which can be handled with pumped water storage and batteries. Any internal combustion engine produces waste in the atmosphere, particulates and CO2.
There will always be a market for liquid fuel for aviation and possibly for some long distance transportation, and bidiesel and alcohol might be suitable there. But its clear that if we want personal transportation, electric is the way to go. Its nuts to use hydrocarbons any longer-we need them for petrochemical products.
OilManBob, You said it all and you said it well.
Robert,
Thanks for your report.
Woudn't it be better if we take into account only the barrels requiered for transportation? I mean, from those 85 millions only a part is used for that purpose and biodiesel won't be used to generate electricity, obviously.
Fernando
I don't know about the rest of the world, but in the U.S. only 3% of our electricity is produced from oil:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/fuelelectric.html
But I reiterate - don't get too hung up on that thought experiment. That goes for Beach Boy as well. We could run endless permutations of that experiment. For instance, I can counter your 85 million barrel argument by pointing out that the net is going to be far less than 30 million barrels will actually be available for displacement because of EROEI issues. We could go round and round forever on that. It is merely to put some sort of scale on the problem.
Yes, of course and I totally agree with you. Actually, I was trying to strengthen your argument for presenting it to non U.S audiences.
As far as I know U.S. consumes a lot of those 85 millions but not all of them, nor all the arable land belongs to U.S. I thought that the first objection to your reasoning would be like the one I presented.
Fernando
Fernando,
The US uses about 21 million BOPD, about 1/4th of the world total. approximately 70% goes for transportation (gas, diesel, jet fuel) and most of the rest is used for petrochemicals. If we would stop using oil for most transportation, we would save about 1/2, 10 mbopd, and have enough demand to set up markets that could supply the world with renewable energy.
This is doable, and would ease global warming very substantially. Use Alan Drakes electrification of rail plan, and convert to electric cars for individuals.
Bob Ebersole
Robert,
Are you putting a chapter in your book on PRT? The cost of implementation is about 3x cheaper than replacing the fleet with electric cars. It could be built in 10 years compared with the 15-20 years it will take the auto and battery industry to crank out 200m new cars. Do we even have a battery yet?
I hear that PRT has a faster average speed than airplanes between SF and LA. Local commutes in electric cars will only get slower as the population grows.
The other advantage is that it requires 3x fewer solar panels to run it.
The third advantage is that it frees up parking lots and side streets for dense housing which encourages walking and bikiing.
http://www.solarevolution.com/PRT/
"Do we even have a battery yet?"
Yes, we do. Check out http://www.a123systems.com/ and
http://www.gm-volt.com/ .
There are a number of others: http://www.fireflyenergy.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2...
and
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/rtrs/20070722/tbs-lgchem-volt-7318940.html
ZAP Claims 100 miles on Lithium Batteries from China
http://tinyurl.com/39gncr
the new plug in hybrid
http://toyota.pod.tv/jp/tech/environment/phv/conference/driving_300.wmv
Let My People Convert! - The A123 Challenge
http://www.plugsandcars.blogspot.com/
I've seen those reports. Show me how electric cars are better than PRT. The numbers don't support investing in PHEV or electric cars (even if you can produce a battery) for the reasons listed above. Why throw good money after bad?
PRT may be better than PHEV/EV's, but PRT is a large, slow investment, requiring a great deal of planning and a critical mass. At this point there are no real installations.
While PRT is getting started, PHEV/EV's will be growing very fast. PRT may win in the end, but they will coexist for a very long time, and PHEV/EV's will be much bigger for a long time.
PRT requires computers. In the 1970s the computers were too slow to control cars. How can EVs grow fast without a battery? PRT will rear its head before long. Which today's computer power, PRT will remove the automobile from cities and relegate it to rural areas. Who wants to drive at an average speed of 15 mph? Only an idiot with no sense.
"How can EVs grow fast without a battery?"
The batteries are here. See A123systems, Firefly, GM-volt.com, and my other posts here.
You might also want to check out these guys:
http://www.altairnano.com/
Tech looks promising and they've been able to demonstrate viable real-life applications. What's truly remarkable about this battery are the short charge times - a little longer than it takes to fill your gas tank. This, along with decent range even in a heavy, full-size vehicle might just be the thing that will win Mr Average Consumer over to EVs.
Combined with a serial hybrid approach like the GM Volt (small ICE that only kicks in to drive a generator that charges the battery, which has the added advantage that the ICE can run at its "sweet spot") this solution can give you a vehicle with practically unlimited range.
There are also interesting developments in the pipeline as far as electric motors for vehicle use are concerned:
http://www.worldcarfans.com/2050824.001/1.html
Does it work in minus 20 winter weather? 120 deg in the heat? What about high vibration? you are looking at 3-5 years before they can start mass production. Recycling is another big issue. PRT, with simple technology, can rapidly take the place of commuting before BEV or PHEV get out of the starting blocks. Read those press releases carefully. I think the term is vaporware.
I don't know about AltairNano, but IIRC A123Systems has a low temperature limit of -30°C (and could probably self-heat from lower temperatures, if full-power operation is required) and the Killacycle heats them up to +70°C (+158° F) before runs because that's where they reach optimum performance. AFAIK, there are no places on earth which reach such high temperatures aside from fires, volcanoes, etc.
That sounds pretty good. But how long is the warranty on the A123Systems battery? That is the acid test of how much they believe in the technology. No pun intended.
"Does it work in..."
Altairnano: "Extremely wide operating temperature range from -50°C/-60°F to +75°C/165°F"
"mass production"
Several hundred vehicles this year, 6000 to 8000 next year.
"Recycling"
Altairnano: "no environmental hazards"
"vaporware"
AES (one of the world's largest power companies) has invested in Altairnano and an executive VP of AES is on the Altairnano board of directors.
Interesting, but I don't consider 8,000 per year mass production. How about vibration? Will they last for years? I still think we are 3-5 years from mass production and another 20 years to replace the fleet. At a cost of $8T, I'm not convinced that EVs are the best transportation system that engineers can design or the cheapest investment.
According to one article that I read, Phoenix can get to 100,000 units per year by 2010 (the truck base is made by South Korean company Ssangyong). I haven't heard any problems about vibration, and the batteries are estimated to last for 500,000 miles.
Basically your 3-5 year timeframe started a couple of years ago -- by a LOT of companies. For instance, Enova Systems makes a bus and truck hybrid retro-fit that is being demonstrated in a number of states to raise the fuel mileage by 70% to 100%. Their partner, IC Corporation, makes 60% of all school buses. Enova could, in theory, retro-fit the majority of the existing 800,000 buses, and perhaps a good chunk of existing medium duty trucks (they have signed a deal with an Asian truck OEM just recently to integrate and/or retro-fit medium duty trucks). Verizon (the second largest fleet operator in the US) has already started testing Enova retro-fit converted service vans.
I've read about many companies that are several years into their plans for hybridizing or electrifying big rigs, heavy and medium duty trucks, city buses, school buses, service vans, etc. And anything with a long drive shaft is subject to hybrid retro-fit. The bang for the buck is there -- 2-axle 6-or-more tire trucks use approximately 3.5 times the gallons per year of cars, big rig trucks use approximately 21 times the gallons. Fleet operators aren't stupid, they've been looking into this since Toyota blazed the trail years ago.
"Do we even have a battery yet?"
Not really ... we can power a few mobile phones ... the batteries are hugely expensive and don't last very many recharge cycles. The cost of an electric car with a useful range will be much higher than now, that's partly why there aren't very many of them.
Currently, there are 600 million cars in the world with a population of >6000 million ... therefore only 10% of us have enough money to even buy an internal combustion powered car ... so IMO forget cars when there is no oil (or gas or coal). This will be just a few more years after peak.
If you currently are lucky enough to have a car, make the most of it 'cos you're going to have to learn to live like the other 90%. Your children and grand-children will have to learn to live without fossil fuels, so you might as well start to convert now so you can teach them how to do it ... and maybe leave just a little for them (for things like fertilizer so they can grow enough food!)
Also, solar panels are only say 16% efficient when at the correct angle to the sun ... so sticking them on your roof is very, very inefficient ... nothing like 16%. This is why commercial solar power stations always track the sun ... then you get the (relatively) high efficiencies.
Xeroid.
"the batteries are hugely expensive and don't last very many recharge cycles. The cost of an electric car with a useful range will be much higher than now, that's partly why there aren't very many of them."
Not true.
I believe A123systems is getting around 5,000 cycles before the battery loses 20% of capacity (that's a fairly standard definition of cycle life). They promise 2,000 cycles for power tools, a very harsh application. Tesla says that they are paying $400/KWH for good quality conventional Li-ion. I've seen no reason why A123systems can't get close to that price in the next few years, which would get you $.08 per per kwh-discharge, and about 2 cents per mile in a mid-size sedan (plus electricity costs of 1-4 cents/miles).
Please note that lead-acid is available for $65/KWH, and 400 cycle life, which gives $.16 per kwh-discharge, and about 4 cents per mile in a mid-size sedan. So, we could do a PHEV with lead-acid right now that would be cost-competitive with an ICE vehicle, it would just require battery replacement every year or two, which would be slightly inconvenient.
Firefly says that their lead-acid will cost $100-150 per KWH. Their main selling point is extended life (in addition to much lower weight, and higher power). I haven't seen a cycle life yet, but I would hope for 2,000 cycles. That would get you $.075 per per kwh-discharge, and about 2 cents per mile in a mid-size sedan.
Electric transport is here. Heck, it's been here for 100 years, just not competitively convenient. Now, it's all over but the engineering to accomodate the specific characteristics of the newest batteries to be used.
" forget cars when there is no oil (or gas or coal). This will be just a few more years after peak. "
The most pessimistic projections show 50% of oil production still remaining after 20 years.
"sticking them on your roof is very, very inefficient"
Not really. Just set them at the right angle for noon-time sun, and you'll get peak efficiency at that point. Before and after that efficiency falls due to the angle, but so do light levels. Most of the time it's a worthwhile tradeoff to do away with the complexity and cost of tracking systems.
There are small tracking systems such as energyinnovations.com, but that hasn't been sold commercially yet. Simplicity is often a good thing...
PV panels are available that make use of the sun when on an angle, also the Pv's that score with direct sun, here in New Jersey, we get 130% of electrcity used per annum. so 30% is sold back to the grid. ANd these are the panels that dont turn on untill hit with near direct sun.
Nick,
Altairnano's battery is 20,000 cycles to 80% capacity (good for about 500,000 miles in a small vehicle). Even at the current $65,000 low volume production price, it would only take 400,000 miles to break even (versus 20mpg, $3.25 per gallon) -- and that's not including the other lower cost of ownership for electric vehicles. (disclosure: I own ALTI stock).
On the one hand, IIRC the $65K/battery pack price is overstated: that includes a lot of onetime engineering.
OTOH, 20,000 cycles is more than is needed, so using the full cycle life for cost/KWH calculations understates the cost.
Most importantly, I'm still not quite convinced that Altairnano is for real. They seem to have orders, and be shipping things, but the company looks so flakey!
A123systems and Firefly look a lot more credible. It will take some vehicles on the road for a few years to convince me with Altairnano, or an outside expert with really great credibility.