Due Diligence: A reader's response to Khosla
Posted by Super G on August 13, 2006 - 11:22am
Please pardon the length and rambling nature of the following, but I lack the time to make it shorter. Disclaimer: I do not stand to benefit financially in any way from any position I'm taking or company I'm citing below.
If you think all rich people are bad or everyone has evil or self-interest as their only goal, stop reading.No, I don't think that. But I know that people don't get rich without going after their self-interest very efficiently, and that might even be an unconscious habit. So, if you:
- are telling people to vote for something which looks to benefit you long before it comes to full fruition, and
- refuse to tell the public just how we can get what you say we will,
I'm from Missouri. Show me.
Finally I believe that the problem of stationary power (electricity) and mobile power (mostly transportation) are different and can be addressed separately.
IMO, that is your biggest mistake. Coupling the transport-energy system to the electric system has huge benefits for both. Even partial fungibility of electricity and motor fuel would remove much of the brittleness from the transport energy system and the grid.
Ethanol has the best TRAJECTORY!
If that's true, I'd like to see the evidence which proves it; it looks more like a fractional arc into a cliff, ala Wile E. Coyote.
Here's my take on it: the USA's highest-yielding crop right now is corn. The average acre of corn can produce about 150 bushels of grain and another 2.5 tons of excess stover; at 2.8 gal/bu of grain and Iogen's 87 gallons/ton of dry plant matter, that acre can make a mere 640 gallons of ethanol. That's a long, long way from the 2000+ gallons even you claim is necessary.
Either you have something to triple the ethanol production over corn, or you don't. If you mean well, you should have no reason not to tell us. Even Miscanthus at 14-odd tons per acre isn't going to break the 2000-gallon mark.
First, what am I invested in? One corn ethanol venture, one corn plus cellulosic ethanol venture, three cellulosic (only) ethanol ventures (all very different approaches), three non-ethanol liquid fuel ventures (next generation fuels to replace ethanol we hope), two gasification ventures (one for coal to natural gas and one for biomass), one solar, one high efficiency lighting (LED - very high risk project), one new high efficiency engine venture, one sugarcane venture, one low impact very low cost housing venture ($5000 homes), a few microfinance institutions and a few others. Battery technologies are among my highest priorities.Then why don't they rate a specific mention in the above? You talk specifics about your ethanol investments, but nothing about batteries.
Are we wrong to infer that there's a whole lot less there than with ethanol?
I would also like to see much broader energy efficiency legislation but I suspect that is harder....Harder still, if the pols can point to a loophole-ridden half-measure and say "We did that already".
The USA has had a bunch of half-measures and abortive efforts toward petroleum independence. CAFE regulations are one of them (they did nothing to discourage ever-more driving). California's ZEV mandate, badly-designed and finally rescinded, is another. Now we're at multiple points of crisis (oil supply AND climate), and we don't have time to mess up again.
These several problems must all be tackled head-on, immediately. Ethanol barely helps either one.
The difference between what is and what can be has to be reached in an evolutionary not a revolutionary fashion.Then why do you propose a major shift of direction in mid-effort? Because that's what you did.
A more likely path is ethanol in today's internal combustion engines, followed by better hybrid technology to make hybrids more broadly acceptable, to increasing the amount of battery storage on cars to make them more "plug-in" capable and over time to reduce the size of the ethanol driven internal combustion engine, thereby reducing the amount of liquid fuel we need for our automobiles.
Okay, let's go over this one point at a time:
- Ethanol in today's engines means going E-10, "gasohol". That takes us up to about 14 billion gallons/year of EtOH, replacing perhaps 10 billion gallons/year of gasoline.
- Then you promote better hybrid technology. This is orthogonal to fuel supply, but even the gas-only HEV's reduce fuel consumption and CO2 emissions far more than current flex-fuel vehicles do (and they start from a lower base).
- Last, you suggest going plug-in as the evolutionary path to pure electric vehicles. This would also obsolete the entire 200-billion-gallon-per-year ethanol infrastructure you talk about, the beginnings of which you happen to be invested in.
Then there's the matter of carbon emissions. There is no practical way to capture carbon from a vehicle, so anything which comes out of a pump is almost certain to wind up in the atmosphere. Hybrids slash carbon emissions by about a third right off the bat, and by far greater amounts if they become plug-ins charged by wind, nuclear or sequestered anything. On top of this, there are some short-term considerations and some long-term considerations:
- The field-to-wheels efficiency of ethanol in FFV's is currently about 7.5%. Biomass-fired stationary plants should be able to get at least 50% field-to-grid, with PHEV field-to-wheels efficiency of at least 30%, perhaps 40%.
- This both stretches biomass several times as far as any ethanol scheme, and it provides biomass backup for the grid.
- A stationary bio-fuel plant could sequester its carbon and become carbon-negative.
And the energy ratio of electricity is far worse than that of corn ethanol.That statement is, to put it bluntly, false. The field-to-wheels energy ratio of cellulosic ethanol is under 10%. Burning biomass in a conventional powerplant at 33%, with a transmission and use efficiency of 60%, yields 20% - at least twice as good. Burn the biomass in a gasifying combined-cycle system at 50% efficiency, and the throughput goes to 30% - more than three times as good as ethanol.
You have access to the best experts on the planet. You also have access to the best spin-meisters. When you say things like the above, guess which ones we think are writing your scripts?
any liquid fuel that has a shot at replacing our gasoline needs has to scale up to 2,000-3,000 gallons per acre.Which not even cellulosic ethanol from Miscanthus can do; 14 tons put through Iogen's process at 87 gallons/ton gives you only 1220 gallons/acre. But that's inside-the-box thinking.
If you re-phrase the demand in vehicle-miles per acre, you are talking 40,000 to 60,000 vehicle-miles/acre/year (assuming 20 miles/gallon of EtOH). Using PHEV's consuming even 300 watt-hours per mile (the Prius+ uses ~250 at the plug) you need 12 to 18 MWH/acre/year. Burning 14 dry tons of Miscanthus at 16 GJ/ton yields 224 GJ of heat, or about 62 MWH; efficiency as low as 20% will get you there, and we can probably get 40%.
On top of that, the plug-in car will run on nuclear or wind and allow the crop to be saved for later, or even sequestered. The flex-fuel vehicle's supply chain is dumping carbon into the atmosphere before anything gets to a pump.
You may really have your heart in the right place, Mr. Khosla... but if that's the case, I believe it's proof that you have not really thought this thing all the way through.
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http://www.epa.gov/mtbe/
Ethanol is being touted as a replacement for metbe. Seems to me that if I was investing in ethanol, I'd be considering the size of the market for mtbe, because I think that is the size of the market for ethanol. I can picture a time when all gas stations in America sell E5 or perhaps E10. But realistically, I see no possibility of every gas station carrying E85 - we don't have the ability to produce that much, and it makes no sense to do so.
That was a very good rejoinder to Mr. Khosla's lengthy ethanol apologia. You hit upon many of the same things that bothered me about his arguments, most of which are very pursuasively put forth but based on some highly dubious premises.
The thing that immediately told me he was on the wrong track was his blatent comment that EROEI is irrelevant. This was shortly followed by two highly erroneous statements about the EROEI of making gasoline in a refinery and the EROEI of electricity. Mr. Khosla appears to be highly technically savvy, so I doubt these statements were made out of ignorance.
He also makes much of the fact that the he is not only invested in ethanol but also in a variety of other good things. Of course we don't know what his investment portfolio actually looks like, so we don't know to what extent ethanol dwarfs these other investments. If one were to go by how hard he's been pushing ethanol, one could probably safely conclude that ethanol is what he is really all about these days.
I was also a bit lost when he started talking about
'trajectories' and ethanol having the best trajectory. Trajectory toward what? I hate buzz words!
Then, like you, I felt that if ethanol is so great, why does he think we'll gradually transition away from it toward some of the alternatives mentioned?
The bottom line is that Mr. Khosla is selling something (i.e., the idea that ethanol is a great thing that will help us solve our energy problem). And like all good salesmen, he is arguing as strenuously and pursuasively as he can that you should buy what he's selling. I for one am not.
I think it's important to note that the level of productivity we have achieved is sutained by a massive use of fossil fuel and ff products for fertilization, pest control and planting/harvesting.
I have seen figures suggesting that this energy input at the front end is tripling the productivity of the modern American acre. If we lose the cheap oil, what is the next best source of fertilizer and how intensively can we farm using it?
If we are trying to replace gasoline, then the corn/biomass production is going to be gas-free or limited.
I am willing to bet that all current production estimates are including all of the productivity advantages that cheap oil has bestowed on us.
The "balance of system" probably wouldn't be doing quite so well, though.
745 watts per hour corresponds to 1 horsepower. I was quite surprised to read that the Prius can move an average mile on 260 watt hours. That's 1/3 of a horsepower at 100% efficiency! Furthermore, you say that that's at the plug, not at the wheels. Surely the charging, motor and drive train losses must be 30% or greater.
What am I missing here? My 1/5 HP box fan motor won't move my car down the road at 50MPH.
Where did you get those numbers?
Watt-hours and watts are not the same thing. Watts are power, watt-hours are energy. You can burn a hundred watt-hours over an hour with a light bulb, or in 60 seconds with a 6 kilowatt heater. 100 W * 1 hr = 6000 W * 1/60 hr = 100 Wh.
What you're missing is that the Prius+ is using that energy in around 2 minutes (at 30 MPH), so the 260 WH would be consumed at a rate of 7800 watts or a bit over 10 HP.CalCars claims 262 WH/mile for the lead-acid conversion and 200 Wh/mile for Li-ion.
Thanks.
I think a lot of people get self-confused when they get into the habit of abbreviating kilowatt-hrs to kilowatts, as in "My electric bill showed only 213 kilowatts last month". From there to kilowatts per hour is a swift slide down the steep slippery slope.
BTW, I have finally got a thin stream of vital fluids flowing again toward completion of my 1kW home power stirling engine and shall give a full report asap. The military industrial vampire had sucked it dry for an entire year (goddamit).
Horsepower
Watts
ENERGY:
Joules
BTU
watt*hours
Power is energy divided by time. Energy is power * time.
If charging a perfectly efficient battery for 10 hours takes 1 watt, then you have 10 watt hours in that battery. That battery can't release all the energy at once after you're finished though, it maxes out at say, 5 watts. So you can power a 5 watt lightbulb for two hours (until the batteries dead) on the amount of energy you charged it with.
Alternately, you could power a 2.5 watt lightbulb for 4 hours, and so on and so forth.
We say that the battery has a capacity of 10 "watt hours," which is a distinct unit.
To make matters worse, I just looked up Joule in Wikipedia, and the entry starts with this misinformation: The joule (symbol: J) is the SI unit of energy, or work ... Gack, energy ≠ work!
Sorry, you should read closer or rehearse your courses from long ago.
The very first lines are absolutely correct :
The joule is a derived unit defined as the work done or energy required to exert a force of one newton for a distance of one metre, so the same quantity may be referred to as a newton metre or newton-metre with the symbol N·m.
But seriously...
Units of Work = joules
Units of Energy = joules
Did I miss something during my Physics degree courses? Care to enlighten us?
The usage on energy is "I use 7 million joules [of energy] a day to heat my home."
The usage on heat is "Theoretically, my car did about 7 million joules of work to get to the top of that mountain, not counting what it blew on heat"
It is undoubtably true that at any moment in time, investment and capital decisions will be based on money: return on capital invested. Why do scientists and engineers have a hangup about energy? Because the economic computations are based on quite volatile and unknowable future prices, radically changing ROI in money, but the energy computations are nearly eternal. The laws of physics and facts about biology and geophysics will be the same 30 years from now. EREOI, quality-adjusted, may not be a guide to profitable investments. It is a good measure however for sniffing out investments likely to be unprofitable.
Dr Kholsa: would you fund a startup which assumed in its business model that the laws of quantum mechanics and hence quantum computation would be different from how we believe it to be now? What about Shannon's theorems? Thought not.
In energy technology there are not orders of magnitude of unexplored physical regimes, unlike the history of semiconductors for 50 years. Those "constant factors", which one may assume can be worked around (and usually are) in the technology you are used to, really matter in energy and fuel engineering. The "wall" is much closer than you think.
I agree 100% with Engineer Poet that plug-in hybrids are far more likely to help with energy deficiency.
In fact, my gut says that ethanol fuel will only be a profitable investment if its ultimate capacity is sufficiently small---as present computations suggest---that it will be insignificant in lowering the price of fuel below the upcoming catastrophic trajectory upwards. In that situation, a farm may be as profitable as the last working oil well in Texas---and yet the economy and people's lives will be disasterously worse than today.
Ethanol production will displace food and biomass to electricity which would otherwise result in better outcomes for people. You mention the strong "path-dependence" and the "trajectory" of ethanol. That really frightens me.
Ethanol may make some people very wealthy---like say a Chinese coal mine with few environmental constraints---but that doesn't mean it's really a good idea.
Hence the desire of people with engineering sense, and without billionaire bankrolls, to convince billionaires to make money with something which is a good idea, and not a bad one.
(my background: I am a theoretical physicist at UCSD, but not directly involved with energy research)
Ooh, ooh, and she's buying a stairway to heaven.
;)
In the short term, the path goes like this: regular vehicles, to hybrid vehicles, to plug-in hybrids with short range, to plug-in hybrids with long range, to all electric vehicles. Every step on that path makes sense, every step is being worked on today. People are clamoring, are begging, for these vehicles. Many major car companies have announced that plug-in hybrids will be an important part of their future strategy. And there are new start-ups every week pushing ideas for all electric cars.
As a long term solution, electricity has far more promise than ethanol. The best thing about electricity is that there are so many different ways to generate it, including renewables. Solar and wind are growing quickly. There was an amazing and little noticed posting here a few weeks ago that showed that official U.S. government projections have wind power producing more added megawatts than any other source in 2007! New solar technologies from Nanosolar and others are revolutionizing that field as well.
In addition, from the Peak Oil perspective, there is also the possibility of coal generated electricity to get us past an oil and natural gas production peak. (BTW, Khosla's ignorance of a possible near-term natural gas production peak is another big mistake in his analysis - he can't ramp up ethanol the way he wants without using coal, because there's not enough NG.) And then of course nuclear is a possibility as well - anti-nuclear policies are a luxury of an energy-rich age where people can easily afford alternatives. Once that changes, nuclear power will suddenly look a lot more attractive.
Another good thing about electricity to power the transportation infrastructure is that most vehicle charging can be at night, when current power lines are underused. It will still be necessary to beef up our transmission and generation capabilities, but not be as much as simple energy equivalence would suggest.
In short, electricity has both a short term path that is attracting investment and consumer interest, and a promising long term story for how an effective and efficient vehicle transportation system can be operated. It has the trajectory that ethanol is lacking. It is where Khosla should be putting his energy and his money.
good post, thanks. You've pointed out the role of electricity in short, medium and long term. But the role of the car is crucial; a lot will depend on future personal transportation.
No.
CRUCIAL is food, CRUCIAL is (warm) shelter
CRUCIAL is fertilizer, chemical feedstock, renewable energy sources...
The role of the car is an irrelevency.
Well.. Ideally, it should be an irrelevancy, but in practise today, we are stuck with it, not only as the equipment we have, but as the 'picture of how to operate' that is in most people's minds. I think the picture can be harder to change than the equipment, really. But we got pictures of 'Laptops' from Star Trek a generation ago, 'TV watches' from Dick Tracy TWO generations ago.. and now they are here. Can the arts be creating visions that will give us some design handles to grab onto? I'd like to think so.
I haven't seen "Who Killed the Electric Car?" yet, since I feel like the whodunit has already been spilled, I'm already a believer, and I'm just weary of the conspiracies, even when I often buy them, in these crazy times. I want to see the Electric Car movie that builds some new constructions, or that puts new ideas, materials, options together. The McDonough book 'From Cradle to Cradle; remaking the way we make things' does this in some really great ways. He isn't anti-business, but is very pro-healthy/business combinations, and has developed some fine examples to show us how..
Of course, the way we're moving now, the next 'big thing' I expect to come down the pipe will probably be the "Orgasmotron".. ach!
When you think about the utter complexity of the petroleum-based energy system we have right now it seems totally ridiculous. That is why I never have bought the arguments about how you "can't run a society on renewable energy sources". With the extreme lengths we go to in order to make our petroleum energy system run, who is to say what the limits of what we can do with other energy sources. If anything a renewable energy system might be significantly less complex.
Could you expound upon this a bit and tell me exactly what
you think would be an alternative?
A workable alternative that is.
What works for a city dweller might not work for someone who lives out west with extremely long driving distances.
One oft-noted trend in the West is moving away from manufacturing and towards service industries. That is, our work today involves bits more than atoms. With improved computer and communications technology it will no longer be necessary for service workers to come together to do their jobs.
Look at the huge traffic jams coming into a major city like New York or Los Angeles. How many of those workers really need to physically be there? Probably only a small fraction. Today, current technology puts remote workers and telecommuters at a disadvantage (I know, for I have telecommuted 300 miles for ten years). We need full telepresence and full scale support of the distributed, virtual office. That means always-on telescreens on each remote worker's desk, so the boss can drop by, so co-workers can have impromptu meetings, etc. All the things that happen in physical offices that keep business running smoothly have to be exported to cyberspace. It can happen but we are some ways from that point yet.
By itself, removing information workers from the commuting equation can greatly reduce our dependence on cars and on oil. And it will happen automatically due to two trends: higher gas prices, and increased terrorism.
Another technology change is farther out, maybe 15-20 years. That is self-driving cars which can serve as an automated, just-in-time taxi service. This can give people much of the convenience of a personal car without the overhead and expense. Most cars today spend probably 99% of their time doing nothing - a terrible waste of this enormous potential resource. Fly across any city and you see vast fields of parked cars. Rather than letting all that capital sit idle, in the future our cars will be workhorses, always busy. There are enormous potential savings by exploiting this vast pool of unused capacity.
DARPA is right now running a new robot car challenge for vehicles that can drive themselves through city streets. The technology is available now in the laboratory; the main hurdles to putting it into widespread use are social and legal rather than technical.
Two caveats: all this will not happen overnight, and it won't eliminate all personal vehicles. The farmer will still need his pick-up truck. But just as 20 years ago nobody would have imagined today's kids who spend all their free time sitting indoors playing video games, IMing and surfing the net, we will likely see a world 20 years from now that is very different from the way people live today. Information technology can go a long way towards changing the way we relate to the physical world - the changes have already begun, and they are likely to only increase as technology improves and as needs become more urgent.
First, teleconferencing vendors are finding that the main barrier to acceptance is image quality. When people have really high quality image and sound, the remote person really feels present, and people love it.
Second, self-driving cars aren't essential to car sharing. Car sharing is expanding rapidly, driven by innovative use of online/telephone based reservations systems. I think car-sharing will be a big deal very soon.
it won't bring home the groceries,
won't take the kids to soccer games,
won't take you to the doctor,
wont' take you on vacation,
won't take you out to eat(a biggie here,,real big),
and won't do dozens of other things that you see
all those in traffic jams doing.......................
I work in networking and its my experience that the networking infrastucture is extremely shaky and therefore needs constant oversight and maintenance.
It just doesn't run own it's own. Very small glitches can have tremendous results. Spam , worms, terror attacks and all the rest can result in many disruptions.
I spend a lot of my time repairing workstations in business and the personal arena also taking care of networks that others have installed and walked away from or went out of business.
If say the cable feed at one of my business accts goes down? They might as well all pack up and go home. Thats how highly complex and dependent it has become.This complexity has a cost. Maintenance. And BTW cable internet is real shaky. At least here in the flyover. This is not buried cable. Any big wind or storm and out it goes.
Its hard to believe how exposed our communications infrasturcture is to terrorist acts of sabotage. Hell it takes many hits on its own anyway. Sometimes I just power off the workstations in my office and go for a long walk and say to hell with it all.
Right now I have to go fix a farmer accountant's PC. The power we get is so dirty that its a constant chore keeping many around here running. Without my own large UPS's I would be dead already. I have 4 workstations to contend with,wireless and security boxes here at the SOHO. Something is always breaking or needing repair. I tell them "Get a UPS". They don't listen.
Just the dust bunnies in a processor HSF can cause outages and no one lives in a dust free enviroment anymore. Did way back in 'raised floor' days but I don't see that anymore. My accts are filthy by nature and they always place the system units right on the floor where all the dust is.
The farmers unit today? Likely a cooked Power Supply.
Had another one the same way just last week.
You can believe what you want to believe. I work in it and I see its faults. I wonder that it functions at all sometimes.
An example: I need to flash a auto dealerships Star Mobile Scan Tool. This is a wireless/Cat5 device that is required for CAN vehicles. So far after 3 days of intensive work it has not been able to function in wireless mode(new box but not that new).
They decided to stop sending updates on CD and now one must D/L them.Well they are so large you need to burn them on a CD.
Besides that I need an SNMP application on my laptop to discover why the wireless network will not function. I need to pull this off my laptop's Recovery & Applications CD but I can read the CD because the DMI is incorrect and the laptop was shipped out with that defect. So I have to burn a D/Led new CD to boot off of just to get the SNMP app,,if its even on there. I need the laptop to debug and resolve the Scan Tool problem.
The saga goes on and on...one problem building upon another. The remote support site is totally clueless. Each time you get them on the phone you get a idiot or they cleverly drop the connection or put you on permament music hold.If you get India,,they have one script "Mrs. XXXXX Please sir, reboot your computer sir'...please sir do not argue with me...yada yada....."
For want of a shoe the horse was lost....yada yada
I am dealing with 6 workstations, an Wireless Access Point, 2 Routers, a cable internet connection, 3 network switches and enough slung together Cat 5 cables to make you puke on the floor not to mention a satellite/server/diu lashup with multiple functions hanging off it that I prefer not to even get into.
This is just a smallish installation.
Work at home? These folks want to just go home and get away from the fendish PCs that seem to run their very lives at work and they battle constantly with.
"Why is that printer not printing? Why is the fax hung? My cursor doesn't work right. Why is this PC so sllllooooowwwwww? Why does Norton keep hounding me about subscriptions? Do I have a virus? Why is this porn showing up on my screen?"..........
I guess my intention was to say that trying to change this picture before the necessity was right on top of us, is proving to be so difficult. Since we have SO much driving built into this lifestyle, will we have the wherewithal to make the transition only after it becomes apparent to 'people' (present company excepted, naturally) that this has to happen.
I do think things CAN change quickly, and here, we do have an abundance of 'stuff' that can be reapplied as tools to MacGuyver our way through.. I mean, simply neighbors getting organized and carpooling for any and everything would stretch our passenger/mpg.. which can be done on a dime, if the Stations were to mostly dry up one month. The neighborhood Email-listserve tools like 'Freecycle' and 'Timedollars' can be the model for organizing broader neigborhoods this way, if the need emerged.
I wonder how much home wireless LAN can be linked so that Neighborhood Networks can happen directly between computers, and not rely on the big 'I'.. Did you know if you have a modem, that you can call any neighbor's computer with a modem, and you don't even have to have an ISP to link up, right? Ahh, the potential is like a balm!
basking in Technotopia!
Bob Fiske
These chariots have been around for at least 3000 years and shows the clear need for some kind of personal transportation with moderate cargo capacity.
Obviously, the chariot can have bike baskets added or a "trailer" for a bigger load. Darn, no more flying down the road at 60mph. Can't have everything!
Don't get me wrong, I don't think cars are going away any time soon. I think they may be around for a while yet to come. But is an electric car a "car" or is it as different as a horse drawn carriage from an ICE car? I guess that depends on how you classify things.
Still, you have to admit there is a significant difference between using cars for all tasks, and using them only for essential tasks and relying on rail or other more efficient methods for everything else.
wouldn't want to be misunderstood: cars are absolutely not crucial to ME (I'm an everyday cyclist), but my perception is that they are most important to the majority around me here in Germany.
I actually think this is another advantage of electric cars in the long run. If everything runs off of the same source (electricity) then everything is interchangable. You can make electricity a lot of ways and you can use it a lot of ways. As long as you can make enough electricity to cover all the usage, you have basically unlimited interchangability. So, that means the least need to change/upgrade infrastructure once we have it all in place.
An idealist, mmm...
The car SHOULD NOT "impacts anything" in theory, but in practice it does impacts everything.
"In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice, there is. "
Enzo Torresi
"The reason that God was able to create the world in seven days is that he didn't have to worry about the installed base."
Anonymous
From http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/quotes.html
Ouch - electricity is the ultimate fungible energy source. Somewhere on this page is my other /rant about fungibility. So we translate everything to electricity and get our cars to run. That puts us over the edge of the slippery slope into the Olduvai gorge that much sooner. What we need is sand in the gears, or as Wendell Berry would put it far more holistically, The Whole Horse. If electricity is all that matters, then what will we do to keep those batteries charged?
cfm in Gray, ME
Very informative. Thank you for your time and effort. I found VK's statement: "energy ratio of electricity is far worse than corn ethanol" suspicious. You addressed that.
I think that electricity offers more options than focusing on liquid fuels to solve the transportation fuel problem. Electricity can be produced in a variety of ways, from nuclear to hydroelectric. The PHEV seems the best way to diversify transportation energy, and it is something we can do right now. Batteries could be swapped out at filling stations for the long trip, etc. etc.. Fueling infrastructure wouldn't need to be changed drastically, and pushing development of the hybrid vehicle would also put greater pressure on battery R&D. One good battery and suddenly the transportation portfolio would be resilient enough to handle fluctuations in liquid fuels, disregarding Malthusian thinking. On the other hand, a monoculture of Ponderosa pine is preceded by quite a diversity of weed and shrub, before eventually returning to a monoculture of pines. Maybe ethanol is weed seed, maybe not.
One other point.
Petroleum, and stationary electrical power (other than wind) doesn't depend on this year's weather.
Suppose a crop failure reduced ethanol output by 50% in one year?
That is not at all unreasonable level of fluctuation for a crop. How well would our economy cope if our vehicles were predominantly powered by ethanol?
We have no ability to store multi-years worth of fuel.
Going to ethanol produced on a yearly basis enormously increases the risk.
The enormous strategic petroleum reserve is only a few months of oil consumption.
For me, something as critical as transportation requires a robust infrastructure backed up by technology which we KNOW works. At the moment, the best outlook appears to be plug-in hybrids powered by nuclear plants for most new capacity.
Palo Verde nuclear plant in the middle of Scorched Earth, Arizona works fine.
cheers
Of course once electric cars are a significant proportion of the automobile fleet I expect the farm lobby to switch from promoting ethanol to promoting biomass to electricity. The only advantage of ethanol is that it is compatible with the cars currently on the road. To misquote Rumsfeld: We will hit peak oil with the cars we have not the cars we wish we had.
Investors, traders, brokers, and venture capitalists make money on volatility. Buy low, sell high. If prices don't fluctuate wildly, there is little opportunity to rake in huge profits.
Fueling the transport sector from a wildly fluctuating agricultural commodities product builds volatility right into the system. Ethanol prices could double from one year to the next, or halve, depending on the vaguarities of the crop.
Lots of investment opportunity there.
See for example the classic, "The Intelligent Investor," by Benjamin Graham in which he makes a clear and useful distinction between investment and speculation.
In a nutshell, investment is based on a conservative interpretation of past performance, while speculation assumes that somehow the future is going to be different (and better in some way) from past performance. There is more to it than this, but that is the essence of the distinction.
Warren Buffett is an investor. Vinod Khosla is a speculator.
Maybe ultra-fast-charge nanotech batteries or capacitors will solve this problem someday. In the meantime, while losing a brand new $59 RV propane bottle in exchange for a nicely painted-over corroded hulk may be sort of OK, I'm not very convinced that I find that sort of thing acceptable for batteries costing $many-thousands.
AFAIK, nobody's looking at swappable battery packs (too difficult to get all mfgr's to standardize, for one thing) but if you did it and used the rental business model, it wouldn't be your concern because it would be the utility's piece of junk and not yours.
If we have batteries which charge in 5 minutes, that whole issue is moot.
I believe that line came from a Saudi oil minister. Some regulars here can probably remember his name.
I'm really tired of reading this old chestnut...
We moved on from stone because we found SOMETHING BETTER (Bronze)... likewise bronze to iron...wood to coal, coal to oil.. etc etc
The Oil Age WILL end because we run out of oil... because there is NOTHING BETTER, save an unlikely last minute miracle such as nuclear fusion...
And, of course it has now become questionable that we even WANT yet another "better solution" given the over-population that the oil era has bequeathed on us and what we now know about the world's "carrying capacity".
I was thinking of "better" in terms of energy density...
But your "better" means smarter or more efficiently... and in this sense you are, of course, correct...
See my comment elsewhere in this Drumbeat re: The Electron Economy
Swap the fuels/engines ("petrol fuel cell"/Stirling Engine??) and you get a very different result..
BTW: I really think you should push your DCFC and Zn solutions a lot more... certainly make TODers more aware of their efficiencies/possibilities? Both certainly put Ethanol in the shade.
Derby County Football Club?
Death Cab for Cutie?
The clue is in these adjacent sentences from E-P's nearby comment ...
In my opinion it's main problems are: very long lead times for new plants; very large project size/cost combined with regulatory/NIMBY uncertainty; supply risk (a major accident has a very small probability, but could easily mean that all plants using that design must be shut down); and last but not least, weapons proliferation. Of course, many are concerned about health risks, both due to accidents and long-term waste storage, though I see those as less important than the health risks of fossil fuels.
Renewables (wind, solar, wave, small hydro, geothermal) have short lead times, ability to be distributed, low supply risk, low health risk, and zero weapons potential. Of course, renewables have problems too, especially intermittency, but as noted in another post, if we can create a system as complex as the oil distribution and refining system, a little additional electrical supply and demand management should be a piece of cake.
The Oil Age WILL end because we run out of oil... because there is NOTHING BETTER, save an unlikely last minute miracle such as nuclear fusion...
I was thinking of "better" in terms of energy density...
It's obviously not true, but people seem to have a blind spot when it comes to Uranium.
I wish I had your confidence that grid/infrastructure expansions would be enough to overcome the intermittency problems of renewables. I think it will take more than a continental super-conducting grid to make renewables alone viable. It will take a breakthrough in electricity storage.
This is the kind of thing: http://news.com.com/Pumping+power+onto+the+grid+from+your+basement/2100-1008_3-6104005.html?tag=nefd .lede
also, the same thing with EV's and PHEV's.
This may not be as wrong as it appears. It's all about how you interpret it, because the oil age may indeed end long before the oil runs out...if we oh, find a way to obliterate each other shortly following peak, or fall into chaos and wind up destroying or losing the ability to maintain the oil infrastructure...
It really only implies, but does not directly state, that the oil age will end because something better will be found.
2006 will be PEAK ETHANOL (hype)
Just like 2005 was PEAK HYDROGEN (hype)...
In a way it is a waste of time and energy, but I suppose that it was inevitable that the public has to examine and reject the easy 'solutions' before it is possible for most people to see what kind of fix we are in.
I think the use of electricity is going to be crucial as well.
A significant "roads to rails" change will provide a big efficiency gain.
Moving toward walk-able and bike-able communities will provide more benefits than any other single change. Human health will improve, neighborhoods will redevelop as social entities, and we will save huge amounts of energy.
Continuously productive urban landscapes will also reduce the need for moving food for so many miles, as will significantly relocalised agriculture.
Finally, relocalisation of much of our manufacturing can provide real benefits in a variety of ways.
This will result in more bioregional solutions with a resulting diversity in human settlement arrangements and infrastructure designs.
I do think that the effort to replace petroleum-based liquid fuels with ethanol is misguided. It may be a helpful partial and temporary solution on a very limited scale, but I sure don't see it paying off in the long run.
Dollars do seem to affect people's vision with regard to what future path is desirable and possible. This intimate connection between profiteering and planning for the future may be a living demonstration of capitalism gone awry.
I've been reading Arthur Clarke's "Hammer of God" and noting that he envisions a planet after capitalism and communism (two very similiar economic arrangements) have both failed.
Interestingly, it is also a place wher people lease very mobile "Fullerhomes" (named after Bucky Fuller, of course) which recycle everything -- including human waste --so as to operate as living machines which make the environment better rather than worse.
At any rate, the visions of science fiction are able to consider the big picture while the visions of most entrepreneurs (of which I am one) are often too tied to money to allow for full analysis of the best paths to follow.
California's Proposition 87
I am still inclined to vote for it, in possibly vain hopes that reason will soon direct funding away from ethanol. For one thing, this bill is the only game in town and does have positive features. I am somewhat reassured that money is to be used according to the following (from the bill itself):
"Based on the standards set forth in Section 26056, the authority may use the funds in the Gasoline and Diesel Use Reduction Account for the following categories of expenditures, based on the relative merit in petroleum reduction of transportation-related applications to the authority for funding from this account:"
Ethanol etc is mentioned but not required to be finded, although I know the lobby will be strong. If, however, the criteria are strictly followed that net petroleum reduction has to be a core decision point, mentioned above and elsewhere, we may be ok.
I am sure many will vote for it for misguided reasons but hope if it passes it can be applied in a productive way.
Dare I say that it will "set the trajectory?"
(Robert, I threw you a link from my blog, hope that helps.)
Hence, I am torn between favoring an initiative that will increase gasoline prices, and opposing one that is being promoted by demagoguery and misinformation. The fact that it directs hatred at my industry doesn't help me form a favorable view, nor the fact that Mr. Khosla can directly benefit from the initiative he is bankrolling.
During the debate, there are times when I wish they would just drill it, get it off the table, and find out it is not the solution so that it can't be held up for political gain and distract people from the real issue.
In this case, perhaps if this proposition passes, it will start to become harder to blame the oil companies for all the problems of the world, and proponents of alternatives will get to start explaining why things are changing, and getting more difficult.
As (in a previous life stage) a former employee of Dow Chemical doing herbicide research (before that an anti-war protester) I relate to your issues of being damned by association by people with a little knowledge.
------------
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2005/8/23/9347/79719
"A plug-in electric hybrid that gets 12,500 MPG and has a range of 20 miles
Posted by biodiversivist at 9:34 AM on 23 Aug 2005
[ print | email | + digg | + del.icio.us | + reddit ]
electric hybrid bike I don't know what this guy's hang-up is with Deuce Bigalow, but high gas prices and the following comment by Odograph [this was a link in the original] on the cost of plug-in electric hybrids got me thinking again. In lieu of paying $3-6K more for a plug-in hybrid electric car:
I especially liked his last idea. I jumped on the net to see what was new for electric bikes and bought a conversion kit from a shop somewhere in California for $300. UPS dropped it off at my house last Monday and I had it on my bike an hour or so later...."
Good site.
Given that Kaleefornya has UC, Stanford, Caltech, LBNL, LNL, and people who know thermodynamics it might be a good idea.
Electricity already has penetration to just about everyplace with a gas pump (they're electric, after all). Electricity is the natural successor to liquid motor fuel because the "pipes" are already installed and paid for. The extra load is no problem if it's handled off-peak. Off-peak electricity is equivalent to gasoline at about 75¢/gallon, or ethanol at 50¢/gallon.
Howzabout you help get the command and regulatory fields levelled, and we let the best technology win?
THE ELECTRON ECONOMY
Consider also that some places (cough, UK) generate a lot of electricity from natural gas.
Also consider that night time electricity is often used in, eg, pumped hydro installations, which doesn't exactly count as "usage" in most statistics because it's being stored for daytime use.
Perhaps, but the average cost would go down and efficiency could go up. Instead of building simple-cycle peaking turbines (35-40% efficient) we could make combined-cycle turbines (55-60% efficient, but they can't power up and down as fast) or nuclear plants and just run them flat out.
PHEV's also don't care so much when they're charged as long as they have enough, in time. This allows the grid to use a lot more solar and wind capacity and deal with short periods of slack or surplus by buffering with batteries.
Excellent reply after a truly excellent rebuttal to Mr. Khosla. I also puzzled for a couple of says on the energy numbers but don't have engineering expertise to pick out the inconsistencies.
As are many TOD posters I am puzzled by Mr. Khosla's motives. Some thoughts from someone living in the middle of bioenergy land (Iowa) on this whole subject.
1) Both ethanol and biodiesel are hot in the heartland. I personally see biodiesel as the better energy capture system from biomass. In any case the people who live here see these plant based liquid fuels as a way to become self sufficient locally.
This is an attempt to at least satify the demand of a great many individuals who live close to these sources. It might be that some farmers hope to be able to feed tractors and combines with biodiesel and personal vehicles with ethanol.
This would keep the farming economy running even with a near collapse of oil. But the infrastucture has to get built now. Liquid fuels are essential for heavy equipment at present. No way to farm without diesel. And the rest of the fleet runs on gas so you need that also.
2) I also agree with you on the use of electricity. Lets get off liquid fuels ASAP. I have owned a Prius since early 2004 and love it. Huge improvement in milage with little loss of function. I have tried to preach, educate, enlighten all my co-workers, neighbors and local policy makers with almost no success. A few of the most educated (and higher income people) have bought hybrids but most are not interested. I think the Prius is a perfect stepping stone from liquid fuels to all electric but most people I talk to don't agree.
Likewise moving the debate to electrified rail and less sprawl have very little traction. Most people can't imagine the consequences of peak oil so won't change behavior, either personally or on behalf of their communities. The Des Moines metro system is even considering rail until 30 years from now. They are only focusing on buses and van pools and of coarse the vans use gas.
So my thought is that maybe Mr. Kohsla has been down this road already and is frustrated with trying to change people proactively. This leaves only investment into incremental projects, ethanol, batteries, etc. I disagree that this not useful. These are bricks and mortar structures that will be functional for decades if needed and maintained. If we have a collapse people won't be able to swap out cars, they will have to use liquid fuels even if it is once a week rather than twice a day.
Maybe this infrastructure will allow us to limp towards that more sustainable system of electricity. And that system will be driven by wind, solar and other. I agree that solar and wind projects should be priority one but the market is still against those approaches today.
So if you had a few million to invest and you really wanted to get a tangeble energy product out after a year or so, what else is there to invest in short term?
One last thing, wind is also big in Iowa but almost all the turbines are put up by existing utilities. Very difficult to be a supplier of electricity if the utilities don't want you competing with them.
Road use taxes is based on fuel useage.
If there was an electric option, how would that effect road taxes is the more important question.
Their electric bill from charging in peak hours will convince people rather quickly to set the charger to start at a late hour.
I presume that the vehicles themselves would automatically be set to charge at night by default and you would have to manually change something to charge immediately.
I don't expect electrical generation to be "free" for PHEV charging, but only that the incremental cost will be less than trying to buy the next barrel of oil from people who want to kill us.
I never claimed that the charging would be free; the cost of fuel, O&M, and other expenses see to that. But a good architecture could slash expenses; if the grid operator knows by 8 PM that they have to supply X number of gigawatt-hours between now and 7 the next morning, with almost no restriction on exactly when they do it - plus they can fall a bit short without anyone even noticing - they can do it with the cheapest possible combination of generators. It's only when demand heads up towards the peak that it would get expensive, and people would change their behavior if they had to pay the price.
No offense, but our engineers had a similar misunderstanding of human behavior. Further, our network plant at peak was running close to capacity and it only took a relatively small number of additional peak users to overload and seriously degrade access at prime sites.
If you can use PHEV's to level the demand curve, you can run the coal-fired plants flat out and convert some simple-cycle turbines to combined-cycle plants. This raises their efficiency from 35-40% up to 55-60%, squeezing a lot more energy out of the same amount of fuel and cutting the cost per kWh.
And then of course there's the ability to make demand follow supply if you install a bunch of wind farms....
What is so 'great' about Mr. Khosla's insight? That ethanol has the backing of politicians and big agri-business and can therefore be made into a profitable business relatively easy?
Maybe that's great if Mr. Khosla makes a tidy profit on his investment, but it does little if anything to alleviate our energy problem. Sure, ethanol may be more 'evolutionary' that other alternatives, but is it evolving our energy situtation forward or backward?
No matter how brilliant its backer is and no matter how much money can be made from it, a bad idea is still a bad idea. And there is widespread consensus among many highly knowledgable and PRACTICAL people that ethanol is a bad idea.
No there isn't. There isn't much consensus on anything right now. Look at investment in ethanol vs electric vehicles and tell me all those scientists are spending their days on a technology they know can't work. Hmm.
I should point out to you that scientists 'spend their days on a technology' that somebody else PAYS them to spend their days on.
An ethanol company will put an ad in the paper for engineers and scientists, and a certain number of people will fill those positions. So what? Whether it works or not is immaterial: they are merely doing their job to earn their salary.
You seem to forget that scientists and engineers seldom decide the outcome of anything. The people that do are the ones who control resources, i.e., MONEY.
So that is my response to your, 'Hmm.'
So "scientists working on X" doesn't mean X is worth spit. Multiple independent scientists reporting similar results with Process X in peer-reviewed journals means something. Not everything, but something.
More importantly, ethanol has the backing of a diverse grouping of socio-political-enviro interests, governments and NGOs, rural communities, research ventures; members of the corporate community included.
I assure you that the list of knowledgeable and practical people who support ethanol and think it is a good idea (for a host of reasons) is far, far longer than the list bearing the names of those who don't.
I can also assure you that the list of knowledgeable people is much shorter than the list of people who don't know much at all about ethanol, yet still think it is a great idea.
Besides that, what do you mean by "it is a good idea"? I think we should be funding a lot of research into cellulosic ethanol. Therefore, I think it is a good idea. I don't think ethanol as we make it today is a good idea.
Corn-ethanol has limitations, however, we can't make the jump to cellulosic until the public fully understands and becomes engaged in what and how ethanol can be produced.
The trajectory Vinod outlines is corn->sugar->enzymatic->gasification->DECs->algae.
As a whole, North Americans:
- are stuck at corn (let alone wheat as Canadian farmers can attest)
- understand sugarcane but consider it foreign
- are 'peeking' at enzymatic
I call it an ethanol learning curve -albeit steep insofar as Peak Oil is considered- it is not insurmountable.Interesting comment. Personally, I read Khosla's essay and came to the exact opposite conclusion!
Khosla's pushing ethanol, which quite clearly seems infeasible in the market as replacement transportation fuel on any kind of large scale, at the moment. But he nonetheless pushes it as "the answer" in the hopes that further technological developments will spur different and better ways to make ethanol (i.e., move away from corn to something much better)
You can't get much more "command and control" than that!!
Here is one person assuming that his envisioned "trajectory" is "THE" path, while discounting the advances that might be made by others pursuing very different paths (i.e., those envisioning electric cars, electric rail, or some combination of that. . . ).
Further, I think Khosla discounts the ways in which humans might evolve into more preferred methods of transit than the personal automobile (for reasons even beyond energy, which is to me the most obvious, but not the only, inefficiency with a car culture), at least for transit in certain situations.
Why not, instead of pursuing the ideology of one person, put all types of alternative technologies on equal footing, so that, in the laboratory of human ideas, we see which one emerges as the strongest?
I'm not trying to get into some sort of "markets solve all" analysis here. All that I'm saying is that at this point we really need some strong technology, or combination of technologies, to emerge that will help bail us out of our energy situation.
Given that huge need, why don't we let the horses run the race before declaring the victor(s)? It is exactly this insight that Khosla appears lacking.
It seems to me that the TOD'ers -- Engineer Poet clearly included in this -- are much more creative and flexible in both their vision of the future and of technological progress than perhaps you are giving credit for.
If our market system does not evolve -- and rather quickly -- beyond what it is today, it will become extinct.
"Socialism [communism] collapsed because it did not allow the market to tell the economic truth. Capitalism may collapse because it does not allow the market to tell the ecological truth."
Oystein Dahle -- Sr. VP Exxon for Norway and North Sea
excellent analysis.
One thing that would really move electric powered vehicles over alternatives is a grid connection along the major routes, highways and main roads replenishing the on board batteries and saving them for the secondary roads.
This article discusses exactly this type of solution.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m3165/is_n5_v26/ai_9022131
We have talked about the need for peak storage using
the batteries in the cars is a cool approach I did not think
of.
http://www.renewableenergyaccess.com/rea/news/story?id=45369
Finally in cases where you need a longer range I don't see
why additional battery capacity in the form of a towable trailer could not be used to boost range out to say 100km.
A trailer approach would make it easy to have and exchange
process. It would not have to be a traditional trailer but could work via a integrated frame connection. Extra storage
could be avialable above the batter pack. For things like vans this could be a extra pack placed on the roof and in addtional wells under the floor.
And last but not least with a major push rapid charge batteries look like there not only reasonable but possible
in the near term.
Toshiba already has one close to being marketed
http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2005/03/super_charge_ba.html
I see that good electric car solutions are available
now and also there are near term solutions that solve remaining issues for electric cars. And finally as in any industry as the amount of engineering expertise builds there is no reason we cannot expect significant advances in electric car technology that further refine and improve any shortcomings.
Finally even with all this whats missing ?
We cannot easily support the massive sprawl of our current
extreme exsurbia lifestyle. I suspect that why people shy away from electric cars since the less the sprawl the better they work.
If you had a eletric car you would want to make it too you work place and back on less then 50% of the charge to allow reserves for side trips. Assuming a minimum range of say 100 miles you would want to use half that for normal driving.
Say 50 miles roud trip. Which puts you at about 25 miles as a comfortable radius. Even better would be half that so about 10 miles from you employeer.
Now life get very intresting when you talk about a dual income family these calculations can blow up.
My point is even with electric cars you still need a strong mass transit system and centralizaton they don't
solve the exurbia problem because no matter how you slice it exurbia is simply not a good design for a efficient society.
I do believe we can afford private electric transportation
and that its doable but I don't see it solving the overall need to retract and centralize our cities. We are still faced with a major upheaval in how we live and work.
If you assume the ten mile limit then its obvious that your electric car would spend a lot of time locked in traffic
making public transportation a real solution. This preassure
to reduce the radius from the city center results in private
transport becoming unviable simply because of density problems. So your back to electric cars being useful only to move people to central mass transit.
Under that constraint you don't wan't to spend 30 min driving to the central terminal and then wait for a train.
You looking at a 5-10 minute commute to rail.
So you can still have some sprawl but it would agian move back to a more traditional small town centered on the local rail connection. And even then you probably don't wan't more then a 30 min rail ride to the city center. For the rail lines there are hard limits on the number of stops for best service you would want express trains that don't stop at all
from the outlying town to the city center.
My point is you don't have to have everyone packed into a single city but on the same hand there is still strong pressure to aggregate in villages.
I think this is the underlying reason that electric solutions are being rejected and ethanol or liquid fuel
transportation is being pushed. Under the covers its the approach that allows us to keep our sprawl dammed the cost.
You can electrify roadways add charging stations at parking places etc etc but once you consider the cost of maintaining
our sprawl and converting to private electric cars it simply does not make sense vs the village/city mass transit model.
With electric cars relegated to being used for the unique parts of a journey.
Khosla is not saying this but once you do the analysis it the only real benefit of keeping liquid fueled cars.
The american love affiar with the car is tied tightly to the Mcmansion lifestyle.
To reply to my own post. I'm pretty convinced that trying to electrify our current sprawl does not make sense vs mas transit. I don't think that's a surprise to anyone. But if you assume the presence of a good electric rail system is there still a need for electric vehicles ?
I think so and there are two use cases the taxi and the delivery vehicle. Even with good mass transit there are plenty of cases where it makes sense to rent a taxi for transport between two destinations. And we still have to distribute goods between points. Thus it looks like the best electric vehicle would be a combined taxi/truck that can with say folding down the seats hauls goods or convert to a people hauler during rush hour.
Already been mentioned on TOD.
http://www.ruf.dk
You should take a look at AC Propulsion's website (http://www.acpropulsion.com/)...they've got some interesting things on grid-tied EV's and even have a range extending trailer (http://www.acpropulsion.com/Products/Range_extending_trailers.htm) The Tzero with LiIon batteries has a 300 mile range, 0-60 mph in 3.6 seconds and covers the quarter mile in 12.2 seconds. Top speed is 102 mph (rpm limited). Estimated top speed with appropriate gearing is 140 mph.
http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel_library/ethanol_motherearth/meCh3.html
Jerusalem artichokes come in at 1200 gallons per acre.
They're a member of the sunflower family and do grow tall - the tallest of 20 plants in my garden last year (southern UK) was 3m (10'). Some varieties usually flower, some usually don't, mine mostly did last year. Propagation is from tuber (like potatoes). I grow mine at closer spacings than usually recommended, I use about 30cm (12") between plants between and within rows, and get a yield of about 1kg or more per plant. At these spacings weeds have no chance, lol, they form an impenetrable forest. Mechanical harvesting would probably dictate between row spacings of about 75cm and within row of 20cm to 30cm. No fertilisers needed but apparently a bit of nitrogen and potassium can increase yields by up to 30%. Biggest cultivation problem is tubers left in ground which will grow in subsequent season.
They make an excellent soup, are a great addition to stews, can be sliced and deep fried as chips or crisps, boiled, steamed, roast - almost as versatile as potatoes. Their one problem is inulin (see links below) which causes 'wind' in most human digestive systems unused to it. This effect reduces considerably if you eat them fairly regularly, though the first few meals of the season usually cause some amusement.
Here are a few links about them:
http://www.gardenzone.info/crops/jerusalem-artichoke.html
http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/afcm/jerusart.html
http://www.innvista.com/health/foods/vegetables/artjeru.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem_artichoke
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inulin
Now, to my point: has anyone here experimented with processing jerusalem artichokes for sugars, flour, alcohols? Or grown or processed them commercially? Or know someone who has or has researched these topics in any detail?
My hunch is that jerusalem artichokes could be a useful crop for such processing and their only significant disadvantage is the persistence of unharvested tubers as a subsequent weed - which could be solved by a herd of foraging pigs ;)
http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel_library/ethanol_motherearth/meCh3.html
The Jeruselum artichoke page is http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/duke_energy/Helianthus_tuberosus.html
I do love it when calculations back up instinct, for example the field to wheels efficiency of biomass vs. ethanol.
I am convinced corn to ethanol is a bad investment for a number of reasons.
I have a question about hybrid cars, one which has nagged at me for some time. Have you calculated the energy embedded in producing the batteries and amortized this energy over the life of the batteries in calculating your EROEI returns? I always suspected the energy input of producing the batteries made the EROEI return less than that of a similar gas only car. I based this solely on the added cost of buying a hybrid which of course includes other costs over energy input. I also understand the Prius may even be sold at a loss to Toyota furthering my suspicion.
Embedded energy has to be included in the producer's price (which is often a fraction of retail), so let's call it $100/kWh for the NiMH and $200/kWh for the Li-ion. (I suspect that energy is actually a much smaller part of the price.) That's the price of about 1.3 and 2.6 barrels of oil, respectively. If you need 2 kWh of storage for a hybrid car, that's 5.6 bbl (235 gallons) max. If you figure a Prius gets 46 MPG compared to a conventional car at 30 MPG, the energy difference would get paid back in about 20,000 miles.
The average car covers that in about a year and a half; the average taxi, in a few months. That's a pretty darn good payback if you ask me.
I think it's more practical to migrate through more efficient gasoline cars, than to (as many in the mainstream seem ready to do) sit pat with the SUV and wait for "the replacement."
The problem we face is that not long from now, energy availability will go on a slow but maddening decline. Estimates vary, but it could be a seemingly "benign" 3 percent a year. But each year after the peak, there will be 3 percent fewer barrels of oil to make gasoline with. And the next year, 3 percent less. The low hanging fruit will be picked first in terms of conservation - but the "energy diet" will relentlessly worsen by the 3 percent a year.
If you live close enough to work (and you're a daredevil) you could commute on a bicycle and laugh at the gas prices - until the economy goes bad and you are laid off that is. Or, rolling blackouts can make your workplace no longer function. Nobody knows what the future holds, but cars will likely go extinct.
Well, oil will decline, but not electricity. And, we are "getting hot" on renewables: wind is 30% of new generation in 2006, and almost 50% in 2007.
Wind and solar combined make up less than 0.01% of US power generation presently.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/neic/brochure/renew05/renewable.html
That's not much, but if we can double it every 2 years for a while it will quickly become significant, and then major.
Of that, 11 GW is wind. Adjusting for capacity factors http://www.nei.org/documents/U.S._Capacity_Factors_by_Fuel_Type.pdf
we get 3.6 GW of average production, or about .75% of total US electrical production that will be added in 2007 alone.
That's almost half of all new generation planned in 2007. That's a big deal: wind has arrived as a major component of electricity generation.
Actually, that figure looks low. By the end of 2006 wind should be generating at least double that.
Naturally, I referred to the top chart (consumption) for my claim, 3.3% (1% solar + 2.3% wind) of 6% (renewables) is 0.00198, or 0.198%.
That's more than I originally suggested (I forgot about moving the decimal), but less than E-P found, or the lower chart suggests, and still a pittance (and a shame).
The top chart is very misleading. First, the data is old (2004 is old, in the fast moving world of renewables), and second it compares thermal inputs to heat engine electrical generation sources(coal/nuclear) to electrical output (converted to btu's) from renewable sources, which is very misleading.
It's most useful to just look at electrical generation, to get an idea of where things are and where they're going.
Finally, I agree with you that it's too low. Fortunately both wind and solar are doubling about every 2 years in the US.
But.
When did electric vehicles suddenly become viable?
Right now the "cutting edge" of PHEV design seems to be to use LiIon batteries and piggyback off the laptop industry. Great idea except:
- They wear out
- They are very expensive
- The materials they are made of are not exactly abundant
Not to mention the basic issues with implementing a widespread PHEV rollout today even if the battery technology was solved:- Quite a few countries don't have enough native electricity generation capacity to go around. India loses a lot of what it generates through power theft, Sweden is in the process of trying to close down its reactors, UK is facing energy shortfalls as gas dries up unless a very unpopular expansion in nukes is used, China is building power plants at a huge rate just to try and keep up with domestic demand ... even where there's tons of spare generating capacity, that doesn't mean the grid itself can take it!
- Nobody is actually making mass producing them and there isn't a clear migration path for existing vehicles (whereas ethanol can be blended with gasoline)
- It's hard to store - that means if generation or the grid is interrupted it's not just the lights that go out. Food stops arriving at the supermarkets as well.
- Although EPRIs numbers w.r.t spare grid capacity at night are interesting and convincing, they seem to have extrapolated from the average domenstic car driver and not factored in road haulage .... also it's only one agencies figure, and they have an inherant bias towards things that use electricity, so I'd really like to see further study of whether a large PHEV fleet could really be recharged overnight just using spare capacity.
Basically, I simultaneously agree both with Engineer Poet and Vinod Khosla - PHEVs are great and the way to go long term but right now the technology is not there, unlike with cellulosic ethanol where it has been demonstrated in convincing prototype plants and the only remaining challenge is to scale it up to industrial quantities. Migrating to ethanol and then to PHEVs (and eventually all electric) once the technical challanges have been solved would be great.(which is in fact what Khosla was saying all along, if you read the original post again)
Situation today:
Pluggable hybrids require a breakthrough in battery longevity under heavy use. The energy density of Lithium ion is already good enough, though better is always better.
Ethanol economy requires a breakthrough in cellulosic processing.
The difference?
Solving the problem with Ethanol, even assuming great cellulosic processing, runs into fundamental physical limits of capacity and crop yield which will not change, because they are a result of fundamental thermodynamics and facts about the solar insolation of the Earth.
There is nothing in the laws of physics which preclude high-longevity batteries.
The future "trajectory" of ethanol hits a huge wall even assuming a few technological miracles. That's the difference, and it's a result of fundamental physics.
Then you have problem of mass environmental degradation and competition between fuel and food mixed up with water: that may---ok, is certain to---induce enormously bitter social problems.
If you don't have that competition, then you can compute quite confidently that ethanol will be nearly irrelevant for helping against oil depletion.
Coming back to pluggable hybrids: we just REALLY need the batteries, and we already know how to build large-scale nukes.
In the mean time, we could build cars to be "battery agnostic" and put sealed lead-acid cells in them (the first Prius+ was built with batteries sold for electric bicycles). People could upgrade their cars whenever it made sense, and we'd begin enjoying the benefits immediately.
They are manufactured by A123 Systems, which claims the following advantages (pardon the advertising): Twice the energy density of other Li-Ion batteries, 5-minute recharge, long calendar life, withstands extreme shocks and vibration, performs over a wide temperature range, no danger of explosions, constructed of environmentally safe materials.
The cells are included in the DeWalt 36v line of battery powered tools. Here's a story about an electric motorcycle racer who broke the speed record with those batteries mounted on a motocycle that goes 0-60 in 1.9 seconds. Here's some evaluation and background by an engineer who used the cells to build an electric bicycle.
These are impressive...they're spec'd out to 100% Depth of Discharge!
I agree electric vehicles should have "drop-in" battery packs, but I'm not sure I'd buy a very expensive vehicle where much of the cost was on batteries, then junk them a few years later (assuming they last as long as that)
Meanwhile, battery technology has been stagnant for a long time. The links posted further down are interesting and I'll read them now, but people have been claiming big breakthroughs for a long time and when it comes down to practical questions they fail (eg do they rely on extremely exotic materials, are they safe, do they have weird side-effects like memories).
So, if battery tech that is good enough for real PHEVs is just around the corner, I guess I must eat my words and admit you are right (because I agree about the long term trajectory of ethanol). If improved energy storage is still quite some way out - as Khosla seems to believe - then ethanol makes sense, especially if you believe peak oil is imminent (in which case being patient is perhaps not really an option).
Only time will tell.
Oh final thing. We know how to build large nukes. However poltical will is often lacking to build them ..... it's a very unpopular generation option, especially with all the horror stories around lately of reactors cracking open and such. So I'm not really convinced our ability to scale up generation is there. At least, not in England. If anything I foresee big electricity shortfalls in the next 10 years.
Which reactor has actually cracked open? Steven King had a horror story about a haunted car who killed people too.
This is so bizzare. A heat wave killed 35,000 people a couple of years ago. That's about how many would be murdered by a terrorist fissile nuclear weapon in most Western cities, and terrorists don't even remotely have that capability now. Even if global warming were 1/10th responsible for that heat wave---it still killed more people than Chernobyl.
So I'm not really convinced our ability to scale up generation is there. At least, not in England. If anything I foresee big electricity shortfalls in the next 10 years.
OK---now try the equivalent scale up with ethanol. People might actually starve rather than just be scared by something that didn't and likely won't happen.
here's a gratuitious insult, and I hope I won't get banned...
When did the English turn into such precious nitwit pansies?
- How many points for initially issuing an insult, derogatory comment, etc...
- How many points for backing the original offense?
Could the PC crowd enlighten us?
Look, the concerns people have about nuclear power are complex and not simply "zomg we're scared!!!":
- The nuclear industry has a history of failure and incompetence. It needs subsidies. It tends to cover up problems/mistakes (the cracked reactors being only one). It has a huge lead-in time before new reactors can come online.
- Decommisioning is turning out to be more complicated and expensive than was thought. Now the nuclear companies are bleating that they can't afford to do it safely and need the govt to bail them out
- No convincing arguments for what to do with the waste, still. It gets moved around, it gets stuck in cooling vats and stirred a bit, but it never seems to get dealt with. A lot of people aren't at all happy at the idea of storing it for millions of years either - we don't seem able to do it properly.
These are the issues that concern people about nuclear power, not risk of something suddenly going boom (which I agree is unlikely to happen).That's why you use ethanol in places with an obesity problem. Put the high fructose corn syrup to good use as a fuel additive instead of putting tanks of biodiesel around peoples' waistlines. Either that, or let oil companies harvest the fat by giving free liposuction to get the fat to make biodiesel with.
On a more serious note, we can afford to divert all that sugar from the food which only runs up healthcare costs anyways. Except for fresh veggies, sugar is added to nearly everything. I bought some low-calorie salad dressing, and out of curiosity, read the label. What did I find? Sugar! In a diet product! I wouldn't be surprised if companies inject sugar into the fruits to try to make it more addicting.
By getting the added sugar out of the food, people would be healthier, and eating fewer calories, require less A/C in the summer when they get skinny. Add clothing to stay warm in winter. Healthier people need less energy input for summer comfort, and the grid strains already.
Compare this with ethanol, where we can make and are making overnight changes, but on a path that ultimately doesn't take us where we need to go. Ethanol cannot substantially replace gasoline, not with technology that is plausible in the next 10-20 years. Plus, there is no ethanol pipeline infrastructure. It has to all be shipped in tanks, which is inefficient. With electricity, the distribution infrastructure is in place and just needs to be beefed up. Or perhaps local generation will become practical via cheap rooftop solar plastic.
So we can either be patient and wait a couple of years until plug-in hybrids start to become practical, getting onto a path which is a true long-term solution; or we can run around like Chicken Little and invest in an ethanol path which cannot solve our problems in the long run. Patience is never an attractive solution but that's the situation right now. Impatient consumers can at least buy regular hybrids today and perhaps hope for increasingly cheap aftermarket plug-in conversion kits as battery prices come down.
Not true. Syntec scientists work with low theoretical yields of roughly 100 gallons of ethanol, methanol and higher order alcohols per dry ton of gasified biomass - the best candidate being a DEC (Dedicated Energy Crop) such as switchgrass that produces 10 tons of biomass per acre (modest) or 1000 gallons per.
It is this 2nd generation ethanol production path (thermo-chemical conversion) that Vinod Khosla specifically outlines and invests in re: ethanol trajectory.
Why?
Do the following calculation: 10,000,000 acres planted with DECs that produce on average 10 tons of biomass per acre equates to 1000 gallons per acre X 10,000,000 = 10,000,000,000 gallons.
10,000,000,000 gallons ethanol/year / 42 gallons/barrel * 0.62 gallons of gasoline equivalent / gallon ethanol = X barrels-equivalent of ethanol per day.
X barrels-equivalent/day / 9.125 million barrels gasoline per day = Y% of US motor fuel consumption.
Solve for X and Y.
Extra credit: At 6.1 GJ/barrel and ~19.1 million barrels per day, what fraction of US oil consumption can be directly substituted by your hypothetical production of biofuels?
This does not include the millions of tons of agricultural residue (corn stover, rice straw etc.) produced each year, nor have I touched upon the millions of tons of renewable wood waste being produced annually by our forests.
Then there's the host of untapped or inefficently tapped landfill, MSW and biogas feedstock sources in North America and last but not least, substantial stranded natural gas deposits in the WCSB.
All of the above can be turned into ethanol but not without prioritization, funding and legislation which brings me again to the Oreo cookie example.
At $10 Billion per Oreo, DOD recieves 44 cookies worth of funding excluding operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Energy Independence on the other hand, gets less than one half of one Oreo.
"...well, it's his money, let him spend it on what he wants"
Another way of looking at it is:
Money=Energy
Or, perhaps, that money controls the flow of energy. What we are faced with (optimistically) is marshalling existing resources to change the equation for the future. Anything ultimately unproductive (such as building infrastructure for the ethanol economy or the hydrogen economy) which compromises the ability to do so should be fought. With private monies, this might not be possible. Any government assistance with this, though, should be cut off at the knees.
On the other hand, at least he not completely in orbit-- unlike a few local boys (in Seattle) who are trying to be--namely: Paul Allen and Jeff Bezos (Amazon).
"In November, White House officials invited another venture
capitalist,Vinod Khosla, to make presentations. Mr. Khosla, a wealthy co-founder of Sun Microsystems Inc., has become a leading investor in new techniques for producing ethanol. "Alternative energy is not a niche. It's a mainstream option," he says. Mr. Khosla says he urged the White House Council of Economic Advisers to consider government mandates that would force car companies and gasoline stations to advance ethanol use. The advisers were "not jumping up and down" about the idea, he says. "The questions were along the lines of, 'Do the economics make sense?'" says Mr. Khosla. "They were focused on economics, not environment.""
A governmment protected market is where you want to be.
From what I've been reading on TOD lately, it appears that Mr. Khosla is trying most strenuously to 'prime' the American political landscape to be very friendly toward ethanol, his current 'play'. And that is exactly what it is: merely an stock market 'play'.... something which, if played correctly, could make even more millions for Mr. Khosla, up to the point at which he unloads it and goes on to the next 'great thing'. Oh, I know the type so well!
We should not even be having a dialog with this person. For he has many conflicts of interest and ulterior motives, and is using this forum merely as a sales tool.
Furthermore, I would advise our esteemed Robert Rapier not to be seduced by Mr. Khosla's charm (and probably veiled hints at lucrative job opportunities). A
deal with the devil is just that: a deal with the devil.
I think stationary biomass-to-electricity has the same kind of limits that doomed ancient civilisations; you can't overharvest the surrounding biozone. Therefore IMO it has to be nukes or smaller populations. It would be great though if PHEVs could double as a storage medium for renewable energy. We need a demonstration project somewhere.
Discussion on EROI
This is very on-topic for this thread, so I have brought my latest response over here:
You say that we don't consume the oil, but it's gone, isn't it? We started with 1 BTU of oil and at the end we have 0 BTUs of oil, and 0.8 BTUs of gasoline. If the oil is gone, it seems to me merely a matter of semantics whether we say it is "consumed", "processed", or whatever.
No. That's your misunderstanding here. The oil isn't "gone". Oil is made up of all of those various cuts: gasoline, diesel, etc. The processing involves, for example, distilling off the gasoline in a distillation column. This is where energy is actually consumed. You can put in 1 BTU of oil, and out comes 1 BTU of gasoline, diesel, fuel oil, etc. However, you have input 0.2 BTUs of fuel gas, to produce the steam to distill off the fractions. Your energy "invested" is only the 0.2 BTUs that were consumed. The oil is not "invested" because it still exists as fuel to power your vehicle.
The situation with ethanol is quite different. You actually have to burn 1 BTUs to produce 1.2 BTUs. Those BTUs are gone - no longer available as vehicle fuel, just as was the case of the 0.2 BTUs of fuel gas when you processed the oil.
We don't count the BTUs of the corn as input, because they (mostly) come from sunlight, which is our energy source.
That's not correct. Photosynthetic efficiency is very low. The corn BTUs come mostly from the natural gas that went into making the fertilizer. If you want to do the calculations for ethanol just like you did for gasoline, then you can either factor in the contained BTUs of corn (1 BTU of corn may net 0.2 BTUs of ethanol) or factor in the contained BTUs in a barrel of crude ethanol, and then the net after processing.
It's true that in the ethanol case, the fossil fuels were burned, while in the gasoline case, they were chemically transformed. But I don't see why that is important.
What are we after at the end of the day? We want a liquid fuel. In the case of ethanol, since the fossil fuels were burned, they are only available as liquid fuel after the ethanol is produced. In the case of oil, the oil is the liquid fuel, it's just mixed up with other things.
In the case of ethanol, we put in 1 BTU of fossil fuel and some hardened sunlight in the form of corn, and get out 1.2 BTUs of ethanol. In the case of gasoline, we put in 1 BTU of fossil fuel and get 0.8 BTUs of gasoline. That seems to be a fair, apples to apples comparison.
It's not apples to apples. Here is the easiest way to get past your confusion. I guarantee you that if you work this problem out, you will no longer be confused. Let's say I have 1 BTU of energy that I am willing to invest in order to produce a liquid fuel. This BTU is energy that will be consumed in the process of producing the fuel. Typically this will involve some combination of electricity and natural gas. How much will I end up with if I invest in ethanol, versus investing in gasoline?
I am totally lost here. Rather than my trying to guess, please just tell me exactly what "processing" means here? And when you speak of "the EROI of oil" are you referring to the process of getting oil out of the ground, which is indeed often quoted as having an EROEI of about 5 to 1?
The 5/1 is from oil in the ground to gasoline in your tank. I assume oil extraction of 10/1 (the world average is actually 17/1) and the refining step is also 10/1. Then the entire process is 5/1 (or 8.5/1 if we use the world average oil production value). By processing, I mean the same kind of steps you use to make ethanol from crude ethanol. The first processing step is distillation. In the case of ethanol, it removes the water from the ethanol. In the case of oil, the various fractions (gasoline, diesel, etc.) are removed.
Note that there is considerable value left in the corn (e.g., corn oil, corn stover) even after the extraction of ethanol. Should you not count these items in making an ethanol vs. gasoline from crude comparison?
That's part of the BTU analysis. Those byproducts are valued as BTUs. They are a part of the 1.2 EROI. There is also material left over from processing oil (coke, asphalt) but they are all treated as BTUs.
As usual, Robert, your breakdown explains exactly the problematical nature of the "ethanol solution".
Your explanation however, is so good as to give the possible path forward if someone still wants to attempt the "ethanol solution".
If the energy imput side can be brought down, by way of using renewable for the distilling (solar) it changes the balance a good deal. Also, use of agricultural byproduct as fertilizer to bring down the natural gas imput of fertilizer and extreme careful metering of the fertilizer imput for most effect per volume is a possible development.
This would probably best be done by small batch production, however, and a far more decentralized industry than Vinod is invisioning, one that can be timed to maximum sunlight for production and more relience on stored ethanol. In this way, the idea of the "farm co-op" to provide fuel for a local area in limited amount would be concievable.
The one thing that keeps me studying ethanol and bio-Diesel at all is just that:
With a few developments and introduction of renewables into the loop, the production of biofuel and ethanol can come upward in the EROEI equation.
Fossil fuels, on the other hand, are only going to come down in the energy returned. In this way, time is against fossil fuel. We accept that at least some volume of portable compact liquid fuel will always be needed in the world.
Except for bio fuel (including your fascinating bio-butanol, I am still studying that!), what other options are there?
Roger Conner known to you as ThatsItImout
I am fully on board with electrifying as much of our transport as is practical. I think this is a no-brainer, since we can produce electricity from so many different sources, and you could in theory sequester CO2 at the source. Instead of pumping all of this money into ethanol, we should be pumping money into energy storage systems. And conservation, conservation, conservation!
I agree with your assessment.
But--
Have you tried to influence anybody directly to consume less? It is difficult to near impossible. No one wants to consume less (have a lower lifestyle) if others are allowed to consume as usual. And everything other than liquid fuels is considered loss of the American lifestyle at present.
If you can't convince large numbers of individuals with your arguments how in the world do you get politicians to follow your advice? Where is the base of support?
What we need is either legislation, or just scarcity to drive prices higher. That is the only thing that will ultimately work. I think in time the politicians will see that higher gas taxes are a good thing. I think it can be sold to the public, provided income tax rates are reduced to offset the higher tax burden.
The first trick to get people to consume less is good engineering....
Let me give you an example I have used in other posts....I have a friend who throughout this summer enjoyed good air conditioning in his home, didn't really think about it. I heard others whine about the electric bill, which for some people exceeded $300 a month.
My friend however, never paid over $40 bucks a month for electricity. In the late 1990's when he built his home, he opted for the geo-thermal heat pump based on the sales pitch of the utility and an incentive from the utility. He is now very happy with the decision, but of course for the money saving reason, and the enjoyment of a comfy home. He doesn't even realize that he is assisting in reduction of coal and natural gas consumption, and also reducing total greenhouse gas emissions (frankly, I know him well and he wouldn't give a shiit about those issues, he considers them "liberal" causes anyway!)
His heat pump knows no politics however, and sits there operating in a 56 degree medium, barely working at all, as if it's eternal mild spring!
It's fun to trick people into accidently doing the right thing! :-)
The technical opportunities for this sort of thing are endless, but you need something: Talented technicians and designers.
Roger Conner known to you as ThatsItImout
C'mon, now. Got the Cease-Fire. What's there not to be happy about?
Electricity is still ridiculously too cheap. No one here can disagree with this. I can leave 3 computers on all day and it won't make any difference. I don't. Without going into details, my footprint is probably the lowest of anyone commenting here. For a very simple reason. I pay attention.
You can too. If you care.
Here's how. In several simple steps. *
* oh, wait, Matt Savinar is advising me that I should charge for this advice. OK, we have to discuss this. I'll be back after a short break. During this break, Matt thinks you should go to Amazon.com and buy any book you can find by Richard Heinberg or Michael Ruppert. Any news is good news.
Your a bit more interested in the political/sciological side than I am....
I used to be, a real activist type, but in my older age I came to be more interested in the technology...
If I could heat and air condition my home on a tenth of the kilowatts, it didn't matter whether I was conservative or liberal, it still meant good things....
Albert Schwietzer once said that as a doctor in Africa, when a tribesman came to him with a strangulated hernia, he did not care if the doctor was white, black, Christian, Jew or Muslim, he just needed relief from pain....at that moment, that was the only measuring stick...so it is becoming with energy...ideas will no longer be seen as "liberal" or "conservative" but judged by whether they work to allow people to live their lives on fewer kilowatts.
"Electricity is still ridiculously too cheap." Coal fired electricity surely is, if you think that global warming is an Earth threatening occurance (many folks do), and here in the south (and my e-mail is correct if that is the one your referring to), it is givaway.....of course, unless you are poor and elderly and must have air conditioning, and live in an old outdated frame house.....this describes many...oh, the guy drives an Explorer by the way....Caddy's are so passe' even to the average schmoe....in a few years, he will be tricked again, when the hydraulic hybrid drive comes to the Explorer, and the poor guy is accidently getting 35 miles a gallon driving a boxcar that used to get 16, and doesn't even notice how much fuel he is saving....just knows he has more money in his pocket....he won't mind, given there will be no noticable sacrifice....in this way, we can make peak 2010 become peak 2040, and by then the poor guy will be free from the mortal coil and our kids will be using technology we only dream of.....that is, if we train our kids to be technicians and artistic designers, and not to stare a mule in the back of the azz.....:-)
Roger Conner known to you as ThatsItImout
But sure, you can teach conservation if it adds up to a better situation. I spent the last week in Palo Alto, in a motel with my clan. They ran their AC, and I just opened two windows in the cool nights and shut them during the day, and had nice cool room and no noise, more pleasant than theirs by a long shot. They left their AC on only because they didn't think of that alternative.
That's part of my WitsforWatts initiative. I will report on the well water recirculation home cooling system when I get some data. All of 80 watts input.
And don't tell me how much I fell from grace by that ride to Cal in that late, small, noisy MD80. I know. But my son only gets married once in a while.
Alas, it will never work, I agree with NC on this.
If any solution is to be found it will be thru some indirect route or some exogenous (WRT psychologic/economic incentives) compelling reason.
Regulation is not the way to go either because it can be thwarted and breeds resentment.
Maybe this will make things a little more clear. In the case of the efficiency of gasoline (0.8) you are using 1 BTU of unprocessed fossil fuel (crude oil) from the ground to produce 0.8 BTU of gasoline. For the EROEI of ethanol (1.2) you are using 1 BTU of processed fossil fuels (gasoline, diesel, and natural gas) to produce 1.2 BTU of ethanol.
To determine the efficiency of ethanol so you can compare the fossil fuels destroyed after you have burned both the gasoline and the ethanol in your car you need to include the efficincy of producing the inputs for ethanol. If the inputs were all gasoline you would divide the 1 BTU by 0.8 to get a total of 1.25 BTU of crude oil. The resulting efficiency is 0.96 which you can compare to the 0.8 of gasoline.
This doesn't make ethanol a better energy source than gasoline, it just means its getting slighlty more energy out of the fossil fuels allowing them to last a little longer or reducing the CO2 produced per mile driven.
Actually I think this makes things less clear. In the case of gasoline efficiency, you "use" 1 BTU. In the case of ethanol EROI, you "consume" 1 BTU. In the former case, you still have 0.8 BTUs of liquid fuel available, and you only consumed 0.2 BTUs to get it. In the case of ethanol, the 1 BTU that you used is gone.
To determine the efficiency of ethanol so you can compare the fossil fuels destroyed after you have burned both the gasoline and the ethanol in your car you need to include the efficincy of producing the inputs for ethanol. If the inputs were all gasoline you would divide the 1 BTU by 0.8 to get a total of 1.25 BTU of crude oil. The resulting efficiency is 0.96 which you can compare to the 0.8 of gasoline.
In the case of gasoline, when you burn 1 BTU in your car, then you have actually burned a total of 1.25 BTUs of crude oil. Yes, I agree with that. When you burn 1 BTU of ethanol in your car, you burned 0.83 BTUs (1/1.2) of fossil fuels in the production of the ethanol, and then you burned the 1 BTU of ethanol in your car. The total BTUs then burned if you are using ethanol is 1.83, versus 1.25 if you are using gasoline.
I think it makes far more sense, and is less confusing, by considering EROEI in terms of how many BTUs were actually consumed in making the liquid fuel. For crude oil, you consume about 1 BTU to get 10 BTUs out of the ground. Then, for the refining step you consume about 1 more BTU to refine 10 BTUs into usable products. The BTUs consumed in making 10 BTUs of liquid fuel was 2 BTUs, for an EROEI of 5. In the case of ethanol, to produce 10 BTUs, you would consume (10/1.2) = 8.33 BTUs. The net in the case of ethanol is 1.67 BTUs when producing 10 BTUs. The net in the case of gasoline was 8 BTUs when producing 10 BTUs. That's what people like Khosla don't seem to understand, and that is why ethanol can't compete with gasoline unless 1). Subsidies and mandates continue, therefore masking the inefficiency; or 2). The EROEI for ethanol substantially improves.
If all the inputs were from natural gas, in effect making it a round-about way of doing Gas to Liquids you would end up with ~15% more energy in the liquid fuel than was in the natural gas. Do you know of another way to do Gas to Liquids which produces a liquid fuel with more energy in the liquid than was in the natural gas.
If biomass was burned to produce the energy for the distillation that would cut the fossil fuel use nearly in half. Then the ethanol would have twice the energy as fossil fuels used. You could get twice as much energy from the limited supply of natural gas as you would otherwise. Of course as always your answer is going to be: produce more natural gas or oil instead. Its as if whenever someone mentions ethanol you suddenly become one of Jerome Corsi's followers, that abiotic oil must exist somewhere.
I have addressed this argument before. What we need to do is use our BTUs efficiently. So, what is a more efficient use of our BTUs? We can take 1 BTU and turn it into 5 BTUs of gasoline, or 1.2 BTUs of ethanol. The gasoline route results in far less BTU waste, as long as fossil fuels are available.
Here is, I believe, a variation of your argument: Take 1 BTU, turn it into 5 BTUs of fossil fuel, and then extend that even further by turning those 5 BTUs into (5*1.2) = 6 BTUs of ethanol. In the process we gained 1 BTU, but we burned 5 BTUs to make 6. However, as long as fossil fuels are available, it is far more efficient for me to take the 5 BTUs and turn it into 25 BTUs of gasoline, instead of 6 BTUs of ethanol. That's why ethanol always loses this particular argument.
Of course as always your answer is going to be: produce more natural gas or oil instead. Its as if whenever someone mentions ethanol you suddenly become one of Jerome Corsi's followers, that abiotic oil must exist somewhere.
Of course that is just what I did. However, you don't seem to understand that we can't smoothly transition from 5/1 to 1.2 to 1 without tremendous impacts to society. See Nate's sasquatch essay. EROI is very important. I don't think abiotic oil exists anywhere. I think we are depleting reserves. But as long as they are there to be depleted, that's just what we will continue to do, because it is far more efficient to make gasoline than ethanol. Society as it exists today could not run on an EROI of 1.2.
Bottom line: Ethanol is far less efficient to produce than gasoline. My point here is to rebut Khosla's claim that ethanol is more efficient to produce than gasoline. Your arguments are veering off into other areas that don't impinge upon the point I am making. Case in point, your comment about abiotic oil.
We have a limited supply of fossil fuels, I say we need to use them efficiently. I believe we should do what we can to leverage them to produce as much energy as possible from this limited supply.
However, as long as fossil fuels are available, it is far more efficient for me to take the 5 BTUs and turn it into 25 BTUs of gasoline
Why the rush to squander our inheritence? How about leaving some of it for the next generation. Think about the children .
See Nate's sasquatch essay. EROI is very important... Society as it exists today could not run on an EROI of 1.2.
I agree thet EROI is important, for something you intend to run society on. Unlike Khosla I'm not claiming we can run society on ethanol. I don't expect corn ethanol's share of liquid fuels to get beyond twice what is produced now.
For something this small I don't see the EROI as the most important consideration. I see portability and compatibility with with our legacy auto fleet as more important. We don't obsess over the EROI of alkaline batteries, we use them because they fit in their niche.
I don't expect corn ethanol to be used as a long term solution. It was done before in the early 80's and was abondoned when oil prices dropped. It will either be replaced by something more efficient or, once there are a significant number of electric cars on the road, by biomass to electricity to replace coal or to gap fill when the sun/wind don't cooperate.
I only see it as a bridge away from petroleum alone as transport fuels and as away to stretch the life of fossil fuels.
Your arguments are veering off into other areas that don't impinge upon the point I am making. Case in point, your comment about abiotic oil.
Okay, I got a bit snarky there because I felt you were just repeating your talking points instead of addressing my arguements. I appologize.
I think we are talking past each other here. I am not advocating squandering our inheritance. I would like nothing more than a massive reduction in our gasoline consumption. My argument is an attempt to show that Khosla and others who argue that the efficiency of producing ethanol is higher than for producing gasoline are flat out wrong. It seems that you agree with me on this, but suggest ethanol as a way of extending our fossil fuel endowment. Different argument. However, if you do the math, you will see that this is only possible on a large scale if we can massively power down, since far more BTUs will now be consumed in producing the energy that we need.
As noted in the other thread, I don't really view it as "consming" the energy, it is transforming it in an energy-gaining way, with the gain coming from (literally) harvesting some solar energy. Whereas the gain from drilling oil and turning it into gasoline comes from depleting a finite resource, and with concomittent increases in net CO2 in the atmosphere. That is my reading of Alan's comments, which echo mine from the other thread.
I'm somewhat dismissive of the cost argument since one could view the extra cost as the price paid to avoid those negative effects, just as one might take a similar view of the extra cost of a renewable electricity source versus coal. Obviously it will not be the path taken absent government action to correct for the externalities, but it should still be judged on technical and environmental merits, then the cost comparison made versus other alternatives that achieve the same ends.
And that is the real problem, as you pointed out in the other thread. The complex accounting for inputs and outputs casts a lot of doubt on a very marginal gain of 1.2 for 1. Not to mention the other environmental side effects. Costs nonwithstanding, my view of the process might change if the gain was 2x or 3x. At that point I suggest that the better comparison would be versus other ways of harnessing solar power from the same amount of acreage, and/or versus other means of producing whatever liquid fuels we need.
It seems pretty clear that if solar power is the source, then for a given amount of land, solar thermal to electricity to PHEV makes better sense because in addition to the efficiency issues, we can devote otherwise-useless land to the process. Even better if a more cost-effective renewable such as wind is used. That still leaves some demand for liquid fuels not only for PHEVs but for aircraft, heavy equipment, freight, etc. That's where I think biofuels will find their place.
Why not do this with other materials. Natural gas, coal and diesel cannot be used in most of american cars. Why not combine a step with a large gain, such as producing natural gas or coal, with a group of steps with a small gain to produce something which can be used in cars. A large gain combined with a small gain is obviously better than a large gain combined with a loss (15 * 1.2 > 15 * 0.8)
Let's look at this more closely. In your example, we have 15 BTUs of energy. If we burn the 15 BTUs in making ethanol, we end up with (15*1.2) = 18 BTUs. The efficiency of this process is only 20% (versus 80% for gasoline).
We have 2 other choices for our BTUs. We can burn them in our car. In that case, ethanol was the better choice (see caveat below). That is your argument. But the other thing we can do is plow those BTUs back into producing more oil. Or, a combination of running a vehicle and producing more oil. In this case, we end up with far more BTUs than we do in the case of ethanol. That is the efficiency/EROI argument, and I reiterate my point that ethanol handily loses this argument. Whatever reasons you can come up with for using ethanol, efficiency of production is not one of them.
However, here is the major caveat that we haven't discussed. When considering that the EROI is 1.2, we are treating byproducts like animal feed as BTUs. You don't burn animal feed in a vehicle, so 1.2 is a bit of an exaggeration for ethanol as a gasoline replacement. If you look at the USDA reports, you will see that ethanol BTUs out are about equal to fossil fuel BTUs in. Not counted are the energy that went into building the ethanol plant, nor things like topsoil mining and pesticide pollution. The additional 0.2 BTUs come from the animal feed byproduct. If you factor this in, I think it should be clear why I don't consider turning 1 BTU of fossil fuel into 1 BTU of ethanol and 0.2 BTUs of animal feed, while mining topsoil and failing to account for secondary inputs, a good idea.
No one seem to be concerned that 1 BTU of crude oil at the refinery produces less that 1 BTU of processed fuels. Obviously this is because they are coupling a process which loses some of the energy but results in a product campatible with cars with a high EROI process which produces a product which is not compatible with cars.
I see ethanol as a similar process. It couples a high EROI production of natural gas with a slower process converting this plus some other fuels to a liquid which is available to cars.
One last thing, we have a limited supply of fossil fuels, it best to get the most use out of them as possible. On the other hand over 100 quadrillion BTUs fell from the sky today.
It is an addendum to this
We have a limited supply of fossil fuels, it best to get the most use out of them as possible. On the other hand over 100 quadrillion BTUs fell from the sky today.You've been counting how many BTU's can be produced, I've been counting how much fossil fuels are going up in smoke. It's been interesting talking past you.
Sorry if this question was somehow already covered, but...
With the 5:1 oil or 1.2:1 ethanol out:in ratios is there a way in either one to substitute meaningful amounts of electricity on the input side? -- with the obvious implication that the electrical energy could come from wind, CSP, etc.
But, from an energy efficiency point of view, yes you could improve the situation dramatically if solar power could be integrated into the process.
Hmm, lets follow that logic a bit farther, lets say we could invest the energy in batteries and electric motors for a hybrid vehicle or invest in producing more gasoline. Now if we produce batteries the energy return is ZERO. If we produced gasoline we would have five times as much energy. So if you want to determine how long the 20% improvement in mileage of a hybrid takes to pay back the energy invested in the batteries motors and controls we need to multiply the energy spent on the battery etc by five to account for the opportunity cost of not using that energy to produce gasoline.
When someone wants to buy a new car, should she buy a new hybrid or a new conventional car?
No, it isn't. You have potential energy in the battery. Calculating an EROEI for a battery would be difficult in comparison to combustion fuels, but I think it could be done. You would have to look at the inputs and outputs over the life-cycle of the battery. If the electricity is being produced from fossil fuels, the overall EROEI is probably less than 1. It could be greater than 1, depending on how good the EROEI for the coal extraction step is. But if you combined the battery with a renewable source, you could probably push the EROEI of the life cycle well above 1.
Fungibility, that wonderful neoliberal concept that equates snake oil with gasoline at the right price, is responsible for the multiple points of crises all at once. No tuna? Use tilapia. No tilapia? Use penguin. No penguin? Eat your camels/horses/seed corn/children. They are all fungible. But the pot is not empty until it really is EMPTY. And then, you know what? There really is NOTHING LEFT. Microsoft's "one degree of separation" just means your business is going to get rolled up if you use their standard software which you don't own and don't control - because YOU are fungible.
Energy, growth, economy, environment - this clusterfuck as Kunstler so aptly puts it - they are all tied together intimately because they are at root the same. Oikonos is the old greek word. None of them can be tackled without the others. But people talk about solving our energy problems merely by adding more growth, more $$$ and more trees from the already chipped out forests.
We can't discuss energy and replacing energy sources without addressing diminishing returns, scale and environmental costs - no more externalities.
If, however, one is rich, one can dump trash into a poor neighborhood. One can take corn from a poor community to feed an SUV. One can chip whatever is left of their forest. Krugman pointed out recently how with 2004 numbers, only the top one-half of one percent are doing better lately, I'd rather argue that most of us have been doing worse since maybe the early 70s. Peak Apollo. :-)
cfm in Gray, ME
nomination for Maine governor on NPR. Good direction but way too much for the average Mainer to understand.
Let's go. If ethanol is so important, than I can't imagine Mr. Khosla had anything better to do in the last two days than read Robert's and Poet's threads and form responses to our comments.
I'll be expecting responses to my comments first, since I posted first, and received great agreement with and virtually no dissent to my views. I represent the hoi polloi. You can respond to Engineer Poet second.
We're waiting. Please hurry. Mother Earth awaits.
I would feel better about Mr. Khosla's intentions if he was having a more honest public discussion about the potential and challenges of ethanol as an alternative fuel. Public statements similar to the one made on this blog would be a good start:
There are limits to using electricity to filful a transportation fuel gap.
The Grid is already understress just to meet existing demand. As supplies of oil and gas decline, demand for electricity will soar as consumers and business become more dependant on electricity for heating, cooking, and other demands that traditionally used oil and gas. This leaves no room for plug hybrids or any significant personal transportation.
A vast investment will be required for the grid just to cope with oil and gas depletions. For instances there are a large number of gas fired power plants than will need to be replaced with coal, nuclear and wind. All of these replacements require much larger footprint and use much more water (Nuclear & coal need lots of water, n-gas does not). Wind has a techinical issue since the wind doesn't always blow or blow full speed. To utilitize wind for baseload generation it will need to be backed up using a storage system (either hydro, or compressed air), which raises costs and its footprint considerably. In the case of a compress air storage, a large underground cavity must be available, which limits where this system can be used. Geography and Land availbility also puts constraints on Hydro based storage systems. While other systems such as chemical batteries and fuel-cells offer a smaller footprint they have limited lifespans and aren't as reliable as hydro and compressed air storage systems.
Using Biomass to generate electricity is not without issues.
- It completes with food. Without fossil fuel fertializer inputs, crop yields will decline. This will require more land to meet food production demands.
- Transporting biomass to power plants. Its going to take a lot of biomass to keep the plant fired. This means lots of energy to harvest and transport it to the plant. It takes about 26,000 tons of biomass per day to fuel a 700 megawatt power plant. If we assue a harvest yield of 26 tons (dry) per acre we would need 1,000 acres per day or 365,000 acres per year of land to fuel just one 700 megawatt plant.
- Water usage. Planting all that biomass for fuel is likely going to require massive amounts of water for irrigation. We are already rapidly depleting aquifers in the bread belt.
The bottom line is that the deeper you dig into finding alternatives for oil and gas, the more you will discover that there are no technological solutions. Time also running short. The probably of a production collapse of oil and gas in the next five years is extremely high. This is do the fact that nearly half of global production of oil comes from the dozen largest oil fields, all of which have past peak production decades ago and are nearing depletion. When they go, we will enter a phase of rapid production declines. There is no time to left to start building a replacement infrastructure on a national (US) or global level.We also must consider the geo-political events associated with PO. Namely states that have remaing oil and gas reserves will cut back or end exports for their own domestic consumption. It is highly unprobably that exporters will continue business as usual, once PO is global recognized. As we debate, countries like Norway, Canada, and Austrialia are discussing export cuts behind closed doors as a means to stretch remaining reserves in response to PO.
Most of the energy going into coal and gas fired powerplants goes out the chimney and cooling towers. Very little of this heat is put to good use. The tradegy of most ethanol plants is that they don't use that energy we throw away.
That stress is limited to peak demand periods. Vehicle-to-grid could actually help reduce that stress.
This makes it all the more important to stop burning oil in cars at 15% efficiency and, if we have to, burn it in combined-cycle gas turbine generators at 60% efficiency. Quadrupling efficiency cuts requirements by 75% (somewhat less after losses); being able to use wind and solar power to substitute for even that remaining fraction of oil consumption would further improve matters.
Biofuel grasses which are suitable for fodder compete only marginally (they reduce beef supply, but beef is bad for you anyway). Corn stover, wheat and rice straw, forestry waste and municipal biomass waste do not compete with food at all.
So don't. Carbonize the biomass on-site (burn the off-gas in a microturbine to harvest the energy in the gas). Only transport the charcoal, which has about half the energy in 30% of the mass and is far more dense.
If you're already growing the stuff, there's no additional water required.
Funny, when I dug into it I found exactly the opposite.
My original statement included "As supplies of oil and gas decline, demand for electricity will soar as consumers and business become more dependant on electricity for heating, cooking, and other demands that traditionally used oil and gas." which you seemed dropped and you did not explain how "Vehicle-to-grid" would reduce electrical demand? How does increasing switching from gasoline and diesel to electricity reduce grid load?
>>This makes it all the more important to stop burning oil in cars at 15% efficiency and, if we have to, burn it in combined-cycle gas turbine generators at 60% efficiency
Wheel efficiency using hybrids is lower than conventional vehicles. The reason why hybrid are more fuel efficient is simply because they have smaller engines. If conventional vehicles were equiped with the same size engines and included auto start/stop to disable idling, they would get better milage because they would be lighter (no batteries) and would not have the mech. to elect. to mech. conversion losses. Comparing Internal-Combusion vs CCGT engines does not address the large number of issues that accompany it. Your glossing over the technical challenges and overall system efficiencies.
>Biofuel grasses which are suitable for fodder compete only marginally (they reduce beef supply, but beef is bad for you anyway). Corn stover, wheat and rice straw, forestry waste and municipal biomass waste do not compete with food at all.
There is not sufficient waste products to displace current ngas/coal/oil consumption for power generation. It takes about 1,000 acres of biomass to feed one 700 Megawatt plant for one hour. Plus, we are not including the energy required to transport and preprocess waste product to the power plant. Your idea of using waste materials + crop remainates + ending beef consumption still leaves you a gap of at least 1000 fold in the amount of land required. Much of the waste created today is the result of processes fueled by fossil fuels. For instance it takes lots of energy to produce paper, plywood, etc. When oil and gas go into decline there will be less demand for goods and costs rise, and businesses will also use waste products to power the machinary. Therefore a large amount of waste produced today will not be available for power generation in the future.
>>Transporting biomass to power plants.
>So don't. Carbonize the biomass on-site (burn the off-gas in a microturbine to harvest the energy in the gas). Only transport the charcoal, which has about half the energy in 30% of the mass and is far more dense.
You can't burn solids effectively to power turbines. The best practical method would be gasification (syngas), however this is not significately more efficient, since significant infrastructure is required to produce syngas and transport it (pipes). By Carbonizing the biomass on site you lose efficient as some of the biomass must be consumed in the process wasting heat energy. Using "microturbines" is impractical from a maintanance and equipment costs and they are inefficient compared to large turbines. First you would need hundreds of them to match the output of just a few large supercritical steam turbines. In addition it would be extremely expensive to utilitize secondary heat recovery to maximize efficiency of modern coal fired power plants. Then add in the cost for NOx and particulate scrubbers, transformers, and other necessary equipement. The reason why power generation is centralized is the "economy of scale" effect, which has much lower operational and maintance costs and better efficiency than decentralized power generation systems.
>If you're already growing the stuff, there's no additional water required.
You will be farming this land. Under natural conditions it make take several years before wildgrasses or other suitable plants to fully develop to the point where its economical to harvest. If you do not use irrigation than you will probably need three to four times the land area and what happens during a drought? I also previous didn't bring up the issue of soil nutrient deplention. With out artificial inputs to replace losses the land will quickly become depleted and useless for harvesting biomass. Natural soil enrichment requires decades to hundreds of years.
>Funny, when I dug into it I found exactly the opposite.
I don't want to come across as abrasive, but I believe you haven't dug nearly deep enough. Every one of your responses is either a one or two liner cornocopian answer that gravely misses the fundamental challenges. And to top it off, you used a blog as your final answer. I have done my best to summarize some of the challeges, but a full response would require many pages which I don't have the time to properly respond in full. As much as you feel Khosla has missed the issues, I feel the same about your ideas. You have simply glossed over agraculture and energy production without doing a proper analysis. For instance from the blog answer, 1.3 Billion tons of waste materal is a drop in the bucket. 1.3 Billion tons will fuel less than five 1 Gigawatt power plants for a year. The state of New York alone averages more than 20 Megawatts in electricity alone.
Besides just looking at the technical side of issues, you also need to examine the economical and environmental issues, which have been not discussed at all.
The focus then, should be on changing said biomass into LTFs such as ethanol and bio-methanol via syngas derived from biomass gasification.
Is it economically viable to collect all this biomass? Proabably not. Therefore any encompassing energy strategy must coordinate the strengths and weaknesses of cogen facilites, DEC and biofuel production in relation to location and availabilty of feedstock sources.
There are a lot of potential synergies with gasification, power/heat production and traditional ethanol fermentation that have yet to be capitalized.
One element that Engineer Poet brings up (quickly dismissed unfortunately by TG) is the by-product of gasification - char.
Char as it turns out... just might be the absolute best way to condition soil that man has ever devised.
see: Terra Preta http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v442/n7103/full/442624a.html
And it just so happens that char is a by-product of the Syntec process.
You can read it. If you are right, you will find errors. If you are right, I will acknowledge them and update those pages, and my claims.
What are you waiting for?
But you're off to a really bad start:
1.3 billion dry tons @ 16 GJ/ton is 20.8 exajoules or about 20 quads. Converted to electricity in conventional powerplants at the average heat rate of 10,200 BTU/kWH, it would make 1,934 billion kWh. That's more than what the USA obtained from coal in 2002.You'll have to do better than that, or reconsider your nick.
To which I reply proof provided: www.syntecbiofuel.com
Your previous question has been responded to. Just for your edification, I'll give the answer key here:
X = 404,000 bbl-equivalent per day
Y = 4.4%
Extra credit: roughly 1.9%.
North American AG can support far greater acreage devoted to DEC production - try 100,000,000 acres.
100,000,000 acres x 10 tons acre x 100 gallons per ton.
This is a substantial amount of renewable fuels.
And if supported by a federal DEC->ethanol strategy, we would conserve massive amounts petro-chemical inputs while simultaneously improving the envrionment, the farmer's livelihood and the rurual economy upon which they based.
Ethanol is a great fuel for internal combustion engines, but ICE's are inefficient. The most efficient converters are fuel cells, and the best of the best appears to be the direct-carbon fuel cell. If you can convert biomass energy to half charcoal and half off-gas, converting the off-gas to electricity at even 35% efficiency and the charcoal to electricity at 80% efficiency, your total throughput is 57.5%. Using your figure of 100 gallons of ethanol (8.86 GJ/ton @ 84,000 BTU/gallon HHV), a ton of biomass at ~16 GJ barely yields fuel at 55%; after putting it through improved vehicles which achieve 20% instead of today's 14.9% efficiency, the net output would be a mere 11%. With today's vehicles we'd get about 8%!
You want us to throw away 81% of the energy we could get out of biomass just so we can use the liquid you know how to make (and profits you). That's no way to make a future.
A Federal biomass strategy based on electricity and charcoal would yield far more useful energy per dollar of investment. Further, excess charcoal could be plowed into the earth to serve as a carbon sink and a medium to capture nutrients to prevent them from washing away and polluting rivers, lakes and oceans. We could have an anti-global warming "plow it in" payment system.That is, if we DON'T go your way.
However, it is important to realize that both your solution and the ethanol path are both biomass solutions, so that steps to increasing biomass yield and maintaining sustainability are common to both approaches.
Now, is there any problem with putting resources into both pathways to see which actually works out the best? I agree that bioethanol is not going to be enough to maintain the status quo. But even if it can supply 30% of what we currently use, coupled with conservation efforts, that is surely a substantial contribution.
And if I am wrong about this, and you maintain that we must concentrate on biomass-to-electricity, how exactly should we go about it? Does it depend on effective political action, or what?
I also have a concern that if we suddenly went the way of a plug-in vehicle, the immediate effect would be the construction of more coal-fired plants to supply the increased demand, which is of course the last thing we need right now.
I personally favor plug-ins, but if that results in new coal plants, instead of wind and nuclear, I'll take the ethanol I guess.
Unless that is really just a very expensive coal-plus-topsoil-plus-depleting-ancient-aquifer to liquids process.
I think I want both: some ethanol, and get the bulk of the substitution via plug-ins powered by uranium & wind.
As far as biofuels, why not Diesel, as the thermodynamic efficiency of Diesel engines are intrinsically superior to spark-ignition?
Yup we're a CAN/US outfit and probably the most visible group in the industry persuing gasification.
As far as we're concerned, Peak Oil is a liquid fuels crisis that can be managed in large part by biofuel production primarily through ethanol but also through bio-methanol, bio-butanol and bio-diesel as well as FT products.
Conservation is strongly advocated (at least by me) along with PHEVs, electric rail and so on, as biofuels are not a silver bullet.
Diesel works for Europe, Japan and China but not for North America insofar as passenger transport is concerned.
What progress I've seen being done in diesel though (NA market) revolves around engineering engines to be more efficient or turning them into hybrids - Mac, GE, Westport.
Ultimately, I envision a number of bio-hyrbids on the road in the coming years as both GM and FORD view flexfuel vehicles as a segement that will resonate with consumers as an 'American' product albeit coupled with proven Japanese hybrid ingenuity.
IMHO, North American transportation can be profitably scaled down while biofuel and renewable energy production is scaled up. Timing is key -as evidenced in the Hirsch Report- but so is policy.
This is where Bill Clinton's admonition rings true.
The immediate effect would be increased demand for wind power, which is a perfect match for charging the storage in plug-ins. In fact, the storage in plug-in's provides needed storage for more wind than what is needed for the car, so the more plug-in's you have, the less coal you can use.
The problem is that it doesn't reduce the need for coal and gas, and the greenhouse contributions from those two will wind up slashing (through drought and heat stress) the productivity of all ethanol feedstocks, from sugar cane to switchgrass to poplar trees.
We could use oil-fired combined-cycle gas turbines instead (50+% efficient compared to vehicles at 15%), and build wind out to cut down what we need from them. If you've cut requirements by 2/3 right off the bat and then start eating into the remaining third, you've gone a lot farther than a program based on ethanol would let you.