The Oil Drum

Introduction

I had to dig way back in my Gmail archives to figure out how it was that I first interacted with Choren. I had written several articles on biomass gasification in 2006, and when I announced that I would be moving to Scotland in early 2007, I received an e-mail from Dr. David Henson at Choren. David, at that time in Business Development at Choren and now the President of Choren USA, said he had been reading some of my essays, and he extended an invitation to visit the biomass-to-liquids (BTL) plant that Choren was building in Freiberg, Germany.

Figure 1. Choren BTL Production Process. (Source: Choren)

As the longest day of the year is just past, we begin the inexorable annual trajectory towards winter. A short fifty years ago, people heated their homes in winter with coal. A hundred years ago and before, people living in cold climates largely stayed warm in winter with firewood. Today, in a country (and planet) with vastly more people, we heat homes in northern climates largely with high quality fossil fuels, specifically natural gas, heating oil, and propane. Trees, a less energy-dense form of stored sunlight than oil and gas, have recovered a good part of their former % of landcover in the US, despite being still used for paper, wood, furniture, pulp and some heat. Below is an analysis of how the US residential sector heats its homes, how large are our forests and how much they grow and how much wood we could use for heat, after fossil fuels decline.

Vermont - Circa 1860 Where are the Trees?

Request for Info on Ethanol Incentives and Biomass Sources

I need some help gathering information. I know that some of you will be quite knowledgeable about certain aspects of what I am looking for. I was in London this weekend (found myself standing next to Jesse Jackson at one point) having a look at a promising cellulosic ethanol technology. I will not go into details, because they don’t want to release details yet, but they have asked for my assistance in developing a business plan and helping work through technical hurdles.

This is not the first time I have been asked to do something like this. It probably isn’t even the 100th. But there have only ever been 2 or 3 that I saw and thought “This could be something.” And this could in fact be something. It is a unique approach to the cellulosic ethanol problem – and I have no doubt that this technology will handily beat the economics and energy returns of the current cellulosic plants being built. And this isn't just a sketch on paper. They are deep into R&D on this thing.

In 2006 the government of the Netherlands instituted a commission to study how a market for sustainable bio-energy can be created. On 26 April 2007 the commission handed over their final report (downloadable pdf version written in Dutch) to the Dutch Minister of Housing, Spatial Planning and environment. The general concept of the advice is to institute a trading scheme for sustainable bio-energy, in the form of certification with stringent sustainability criteria. Looking at what is happening now, it seems very likely that the Dutch Government will incorporate the criteria in this advice into the new subsidy scheme for sustainable energy. Especially since the woman that chaired the commission on criteria for sustainable bio-energy, Prof. Dr. Jacqueline Kramer, recently became the Dutch Minister of Housing, Spatial Planning and environment, and therefore handed her own report over to herself on 26 April.

One of my repeated criticisms of the current US administration¹ is that it is dishonestly opposed to real alternatives to petroleum (and fossil fuels in general), and acts to obstruct those alternatives outside the public eye rather than having a fair and public appraisal.  Some of this obstruction is more or less direct (cancelling a domestic hybrid-car program set to deliver product in the 2007 timeframe and also suitable for PHEV modification, and replacing it with a program of dubious feasibility and a very long time horizon), but some of it is more subtle, taking the form of misdirection.

This misdirection is evident in the shameless promotion of unready and perhaps impossible fixes, such as:

• Cellulosic ethanol.
• Oil from ANWR (at best, a fraction of what we could save with better CAFE or just plain price-driven demand destruction), and last but not least,
• Hy(pe)drogen.

This was the first day of the "Advancing Renewable Energy - An American Rural Renaissance" Conference in St Louis. At least that was the title at the top of the page, but over the course of the day it became hard to believe that it was not the National Ethanol Show. As one of the speakers (Robert Engel, President of CoBank) said this afternoon, "now is the perfect weather for Ethanol," by which he meant that the oil price was up, the MTBE issue required a substitute, there are record corn crops , the regulations have become favorable, and the world is in a period of economic growth). And when Vinod Khosla got up to speak this morning, he followed a relatively gentle presentation by the President (Red Caveney) of the American Petroleum Institute. Not that those relatively benign comments stopped Vinod from piling on, as he gave his relatively passionate speech, but more of that later.

So, how is it going? Well the best set of talks, in my view, was the last panel discussion of the afternoon on liquid fuels and bio-products. The presentations were very informative and the discussion lively and interactive, and the panelists were very realistic. But to begin let me start with where I walked in, just after the meeting started. And I immediately found that I could not find a seat in a room seating over 800. (There is talk that counting everyone there will be around 1500 folk here).

[editor's note, by Prof. Goose] Forget not the reddit and digg buttons!

The time has come to put the ongoing biomass debate in a larger context. My thanks to many TOD participants for their informative comments. I usually work the "problem" side of climate change, peak oil and natural gas supply in North America. Here I intend to address the "solutions" side of the debate. It is important to remember that no solution is without its attendant problems.

This post is lengthy and complex because the larger picture requires that I talk about a number of different subjects: electricity generation and usage trends, the weather & climate, coal trends, natural gas trends, CO2 emissions as they relate to electricity demand and biomass for power generation. However, if you'll bear with me, a coherent picture emerges at the end. I will confine myself to the United States and not talk too much about oil.

The NY Times is really starting to get the complexities of examining potential alternative energy projects. Despite the obvious toilet humor potential of the subject, they had a serious editorial today about converting manure to power:

As a livestock farmer and environmental lawyer, I've paid particular attention to discussion about using manure as "green power." The idea sounds appealing, but power from manure turns out to be a poor source of energy. Unlike solar or wind, it can create more environmental problems than it solves. And it ends up subsidizing large agribusiness. That's why energy from manure should really be considered a form of "brown power."