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- Do not perform the lossy conversion of biomass to liquid fuels.
- Use the most efficient converters we have to turn the chemical energy into work.
If "The Billion-Ton Vision" is correct, we have more than enough biomass available to supply the actual energy we derive from petroleum motor fuels (after refining and engine losses); we just can't take the same lossy route to get there.Or, golly Gee, convert the photons directly into electrical power and by-pass all the photons to bio-mass to 'work' conversions.
If you have resolved the issues of storage and capital cost, by all means.
Production:
http://www.us.schott.com/photovoltaic/english/index.html
http://ovonic.com/me_images_solar_11.cfm
http://www.windside.com/
... Evergreen Solar ...
Storage:
http://www.ngk.co.jp/english/products/power/nas/index.html
... etc ...
Disclaimer:
I have no financial connection with any of these companies, though I did have some Ovonic stock in my IRA or 401K for a while. Or maybe I still do, I'd have to look. Being a shameful trader, I have advanced / retreated based on fad and fashion in my investments. My connection with these companies is largely sentimental, having searched for them after visiting The Oil Drum. (or simply followed links posted by others including E-P, thanks)
As for capital cost, that's another matter. With TPTB in the process of actively wrecking the economy it will be more difficult. If we had a "war on energy" maybe ... :)
I've talked up Evergreen Solar myself, but sodium-sulfur batteries are a solution for storage on the time scale of hours or days, not months. The major benefit of biomass is that it is fixed in chemical form and is relatively stable for some time; simple and inexpensive processing can increase that period of stability to more than the lifespan of the typical human civilization.
If you have a heap of PV and wind generation and some DCFC powerplants with silos of charcoal for the times when the first two are slack, it addresses most of the objections to an RE-based economy. I don't think sodium-sulfur can fill the same niche.
Sodium-sulfur batteries are essentially stable when cooled to ambient temperatures, and could last for eons. Of course it takes a few days with the resistive heaters to get them back online. But, yeah, they are essentially designed for peak leveling.
But most of the PV storage requirement is in the 18 hours or so when the array isn't producing an excess, isn't it? I'd think the hours/days time scale of NaS goes pretty well with PV. For cloudy / calm days, of course you need some additional storage...
If we could build something like a sodium-sulfur flow battery, seasonal storage of electricity might be practical. Size would be an asset; the larger it was, the less it would be affected by heat loss. But I've not heard of anything like that, so it may be a bit beyond today's state of the art.
There's the diurnal cycle, but there's also the annual waxing and waning of the availability of sunlight in much of the world (especially those parts which get cold in winter).
This is where technologies which store energy outside the converter win out; they can be made larger at much smaller expense than making bigger batteries. Flow batteries have tanks, fuel-cell powerplants have stores of fuel. If you harvest a supply of energy once a year, you have inherent storage of energy on a scale of months at no additional expense. This meshes well with intermittent sources like wind and solar.
I've resolved the issues the same way you've resolved all of your proposal issues.
On the capital side - how can *I* hope to change the tax laws?
Your point A was concern over the lossy nature - I just pointed out how loss can be adjusted.
Tax policy doesn't create capital, it just shifts it around. No amount of tax fiddling is going to make it worthwhile to charge batteries through the summer and heat with electricity in the winter.
I think you were rather badly off-target.
The loss in conversion of biomass to conventional liquid fuels is in the region of 50%, and the drivetrains which use those fuels range in efficiency from the 40's (medium-speed diesels) to 15% (typical gasoline-powered light vehicle); end-to-end efficiency is somewhere between 7 and 20-odd percent. If we pyrolized the biomass directly to gas and charcoal for use in high-temperature fuel cells, we could get something closer to 70%. Total useful output would be multiplied by a factor between 3 and 10. This is the difference between partial displacement of petroleum motor fuel, and near-total replacement of petroleum, natural gas and coal.
I think the catch is that everyone has their eyes on the same biomass:
Homeowners see wood as a fuel for heating and cooking. If other sources are scarce, they will cut down anything they can find.
Electrical utilities see wood as a renewable biofuel for their facilities. All they need to do is burn it or gasify it.
Wood is also an alternative for making furniture, benches and a lot of other things, if we don't have enough plastics and steel, because of energy shortages.
Somehow, the folks making liquid fuel for automobiles think that they will get the entire amount of excess biomass themselves. If they are going to grow their own, they will need to start very soon.
Oh yeah, you have to watch out for the fuzzy math. You can not use the biomass for everything. You might replace 30% of the oil used for gasoline OR you might replace 30% of the natural gas we use, but not both.
The forest products waste is after the lumber is sawed and the paper is made. It is another revenue stream for the forest products companies. The same with farm crop straw. The farmers can get some money from all that they can spare. Biomass can help, but it can not bring us the energy independence that people talk about.
Yes and no. Homeowners aren't looking to heat with corn stover or rice straw, to give one example.
But you put your finger on something that worries me: Suppliers lock into relationships and Congress likes mandates, so we probably have only one chance to get this right. We need to make sure that new biomass-based energy initiatives address as much of our combined energy, pollution and climate problem as they can.
Considering they burn cow dung in certain places of the world. I think it's safe to assume corn stover and rice straw will be candidates should no higher energy sources be left to burn.
All the better reason to use the straw in something which doesn't produce fly ash.
Edit: This comment was supposed to be a reply to the next comment, not this one. Sorry for the confusion.
An off topic comment about rice straw: It has very high silica content. When burnt, very fine silica particles are put into the atmosphere. It is an air quality nightmare. Think silicosis.
Really? Silicosis? I could swear that all the rice farmers burn their fields after the harvest. I'd see it every fall when I lived in Japan. Is it really that bad for you?
One of the more interesting recent discoveries regarding silicosis is that freshly-spalled silicate particles are at least an order of magnitude more dangerous than old weathered particles. Think broken chemical bonds, free radicals. Think of the difference between water and hydrogen peroxide.
So the dust from a quarry can be extremely hazardous, while environmental dust, though still somewhat unhealthy, is much less so. The phytoliths released from burning rice straw would fall in the second category in my estimation.
From an article by David Pimentel:
And yet here we have someone claiming that biomass could easily power all of our cars and trucks, with a few tweaks.
Fossil Fuels - Coal, Nat Gas, Oil, Propane, Wood, etc.
Nope, we Won't replace All of Those; but, we can make a pretty good dent in our gasoline/diesel usage.
A Billion Tons of Usable biomass could equal 100 Billion Gallons of Ethanol. Add in a 50% increase in energy efficiency (the new engines coming online are there now) and, goodbye gasoline.
Next.
Okay...
a barrel of oil is refined into 44 gallons of gasoline. We use 20m barrels of oil a day, or 880m gallons. In a year, that's about 320b gallons. Ethanol has about 60% the energy of gasoline, so 100b gallons (assuming yearly production) is equal to about 60b gallons of gasoline, or 19% of annual production. I think that half our oil goes to transport, so 100b gallons of ethanol could be 38% of our fuel. Not a trivial amount, but not a replacement either. It would go a long way however, assuming 1b tons of waste cellulose is available and has no competing uses.
That would probably be me.
What you fail to take into account is the gross inefficiency of the internal combustion engine. The actual work which gets to the wheels of vehicles in the USA amounts to perhaps 5-6 quads/year; biofuels are sufficient to supply this if efficiency can be improved far enough.
I would not characterize my proposal as "a few tweaks". It would require the wholesale replacement of the vehicle fleet, with most energy being supplied as electricity. Doing this completely would take around 20 years, and involve infrastructure upgrades as well. However, it would almost certainly be cheaper than the $20 trillion estimated for the cost of doing it with oil over the next 25 years, and cleaner too.