Energy in a Nutshell
By Alice Friedemann
Last revision:
Introduction
Oil is the most convenient
form of energy ever discovered, second only to nuclear fuels in its energy
density. As a liquid, it’s easily
stored, transported, and used. It’s wonderfully
combustible, but with a high enough flashpoint that it doesn’t explode
easily. Its complex hydrocarbon chains
are the basis of the petrochemical industry, which uses oil and natural gas as
a component in over half a million products, and each item is made with fossil
fuel energy.
Basically, if you wanted to
invent an ideal energy source, you’d create oil.
The infrastructure
supporting oil use is huge, and not easily replaced. Trillions of dollars have been spent to build
refineries, oil vessels, drilling rigs, the military air and naval fleets we
use to ensure the oil keeps flowing, and the distribution system (i.e.
pipelines, oil-delivery trucks, gas stations, etc). Not to mention the billions of cars, trucks,
airplanes, and other combustion engine machines that use oil.
The energy to create all these
combustion engine-driven machines -- from the mining of metallic ores to
fabrication -- is monumental in scale as well.
You can’t suddenly build a new fleet of solar, wind, coal, or nuclear
driven tractors, trucks, and cars and billions of batteries, especially at a
time when energy is growing more scarce and expensive.
It took us about 50 years
for the world to switch from wood to coal, and another 50 years to switch from
coal to oil. We have a very, very short
time to try to switch to something else -- less than three decades -- and
whatever we try to switch to won’t be as good as oil or we’d already be using
it.
Since there is such a very
short time left to make a transition, the energy source any
The problems with energy
resources are listed below. While it may
not seem fair that the bright side is left out, that’s all most people ever see
– after all, there’s fame and fortunes to be made from positive press releases,
and negative results aren’t news.
Non-technical
Challenges
There’s been a lot of debate
about the technical hurdles to overcome – is there enough uranium, do biofuels
have a positive net energy, etc., but there’s been very little discussion of
the other hurdles.
Population
Declining energy is only the
tip of the iceberg. Population growth is
at the heart of the converging issues that the Club of Rome models show
bringing ecological collapse between 2020 and 2030. The convergence of global warming, depletion
of fresh water, forests, soils, and fisheries; desertification, loss of
biodiversity, and contamination of our air, water, and soil with toxins will
overwhelm the ability of governments to cope.
There is no energy solution
that can support the world’s current population, let alone a population that’s
increasing.
Energy is the tipping
point. We have already far overshot the
carrying capacity of the planet, but cheap and plentiful energy has allowed us
to work around many of these issues, for example, by pumping large amounts of
clean water from 500 feet.
If it turns out that an alternative
energy resources can exist without any fossil fuel inputs, and has a high
enough energy content to do significant work, then that energy resource could
sustain a certain population, but it will be a much lower number than the
current fossil fuel-based civilization.
Garrett Hardin, in “The
Ostrich Factor”, details how a state-level society could keep its population in
check without the usual war, starvation, and disease. The higher the population of a region when
the “Limits to Growth” are reached, the harder the fall, the more environmental
damage done, and the greater the likelihood that democracy will not survive.
The environmental and
scientific community has been shamefully silent on the issue of
population. It’s way past time to speak
out.
Economic
Even if a crisis strikes and
democracy goes out the window while our government focuses on energy
The people with real money
aren’t going to invest in alternative energy.
They wouldn’t be wealthy if they threw their money away on non-viable
projects. Even if they’ve inherited
their wealth and believe in perpetual motion, they have advisors who keep them
out of trouble. They have viewpoints
similar to Peter Huber’s: “For the next several decades at least, alternative
energy sources aren't serious choices; they are pork barrels, delusions,
demonstration plants and daydreams. (Huber)
Global trade and
just-in-time delivery have too many interdependencies which will be easily interrupted
by wars, oil shocks, hurricanes, and other disruptions to build new power
plants of any kind quickly. Time is
critical. As Hirsch points out, you’d
want to start preparing for Peak Oil at least thirty years ahead of time.
(Huber) Huber, Peter.
Political
Politically, it will be hard
to devote money and energy to new projects when people are freezing and hungry. The existing energy is likely to be diverted
to agriculture and essential services, the way blood flows to your body’s core
if you plunge into icy water.
All of these projects must
be done in a time of increasing hardship, which means increasing crime, and the
risk that key engineers will be hijacked or kidnapped, requiring local
governments to divert increasing amounts of energy to maintaining order.
If wars are being fought
over the remaining oil fields, and large naval fleets patrol the seas to
prevent piracy and the continued flow of oil, the military will use an increasingly
large percentage of the available oil. (Bucknell)
Social
There’s a great deal of
local opposition to building the following types of power facilities: LNG (Liquid
Natural Gas), windmills, dams (hydropower), coal, and nuclear power.
If a
Psychological
Back in 1981, Commander
Howard Bucknell III wrote that the public’s understanding of the energy
situation was far removed from reality, because when given uncertain and
contradictory information, the public believes what they want to believe.
Howard Bucknell III. 1981. Energy and the National Defense.
http://www.energyskeptic.com/EnergyNationalDefense_Bucknell.htm
The public and politicians
have always blamed energy shortages on oil company conspiracies or outside
enemies, which lessens the urgency to adapt.
Ninety percent of the public
is scientifically illiterate, and when you combine that with the psychobabble
of the Self-Help and Positive Thinking movements, the public is more likely to
think of Peak Oil proponents as pessimists.
Scientists and engineers are
paid to solve problems, so they tend to see energy problems as challenges that
can be solved.
Finally, the worst-case
implications are so depressing that very few people are willing to contemplate
them.
EROEI – Energy Returned on Energy Invested
Before we throw what
remaining resources we have at “solutions”, it would really be a good idea to
spend the energy on something that might work.
For decades scientists have longed to study EROEI, but haven’t been
unable to obtain funding, the EROEI of various energy sources.
Ultimately, all that matters
is energy. When it comes to evaluating
alternative energy sources such as ethanol, if it takes more fossil fuel energy
to create ethanol than the energy contained in the ethanol, then ethanol is an
energy sink, and it’s not worth pursuing.
Tad Patzek at LBNL and
U.C.Berkeley, has not been able to get funding for a project which would
determine a consistent thermodynamic description of all major energy capture
schemes, both biological and fossil, so that we could compare apples to
apples. This would be a simpler way than
EROEI to see what energy sources might replace fossil fuels, because EROEI gets
endlessly bogged down in which inputs of energy to include or exclude –
boundary issues.
Patzek wrote me that one of
the reasons he suspects he can’t get funding for this is that “no one wants to
know that they may be working on a senseless project, such as industrial
hydrogen from algae.”
Charles Hall, at SUNY, who’s
written some of the most important papers on EROI for decades now, has gotten a
total of $800 in grant money to study EROI.
He believes it’s too political an issue.
Hall guesses you’d need an
EROEI of at least 5 to continue western civilization.
Keep this number in mind
when EROEI figures are mentioned below. Most
of our infrastructure was built when oil had an EROEI of 40 to 100 (i.e. one
barrels’ worth of energy netted you 40 to 100 more barrels of oil).
The issues and problems of energy “Solutions”
I’ve pulled the issues with
energy alternatives from books, scientific journals, and internet discussion
forums such as energyresources and the oildrum. I find people are bored silly by anything with
a lot of numbers and equations, so this is a very easy to understand and
non-technical discussion of the issues.
In fact, it’s too simple – discussion of complex energy issues does not
lend itself well to the
sound-bites, so you’ll need
to follow up with your own research by reading the references to get the full
picture.
Non-Renewable Energy Sources
Oil
Since oil is so fabulous,
why not just drill for more? Economists
don’t believe that there is a finite amount of anything, all you have to do is
drill a hole, pour money intp it, and Voila! – black crude flows out. When a resource is scarce, the Market goes
out and finds more. And people thought
Cargo Cults were crazy…
Even if the oil industry had
five hundred quadrillion dollars, there simply aren’t enough knowledgeable
people to hire – they were all fired during the oil bust of the eighties, and
now over half the current engineers and drilling rig employees are nearing
retirement. And there aren’t enough
drilling rigs. The average age of the
existing rigs is older than when they’d usually be retired – they’re rusting
and need to be replaced. And the overall
infrastructure may be in bad shape, as the recent news of BP having to shut
down its
Coal
1) Coal doesn’t contain as much energy as oil. It’s fifty to two hundred percent heavier
than oil per unit of energy generated, which makes it far more energy-intensive
to transport.
2) According to David Goodstein, professor of Physics at
Caltech and author of Out of Gas: the End of the Age of Oil: “We use
about twice as much energy from oil as we do from coal, so if you wanted to
mine enough coal to replace the missing oil, you’d have to mine it at a much
higher rate, not only to replace the oil, but also because the conversion
process to oil is extremely inefficient. You’d have to mine it at levels at
least five times beyond those we mine now—a coal-mining industry on an
absolutely unimaginable scale.”
3) Turning even more heavily to coal will accelerate
global warming and sudden climate change.
4) Coal is lumpy -- you can’t pour it into your gas
tank.
5) Liquefying coal takes half the energy contained in
the coal.
6) Coal liquefaction requires huge plants that are as
expensive to build as oil refineries (no new refineries have been built in the
7) We barely have the rail infrastructure to get coal to
electrical generation plants. Currently
40% of train cars carry coal. Even if
the train network were increased, there is a limit to how many trains can
physically be brought to a coal mine.
8) When coal is burned in coal-fired power plants, coal
emits more radiation than nuclear power plants.
The acids released are ruining farmland and forests. Coal also emits arsenic, sulfur, and mercury,
which is why you can only eat fish a few days a month across the lower 48
states.
9) There is a notion that we have hundreds of years of
coal to burn, but if we turn mainly to coal provide liquid fuel (it already
accounts for half of our electricity generation), then we have about fifty
years of coal left, and even less than that if our use of it and our population
continues to grow exponentially.
10) We’ve already
mined the best and most accessible coal.
The deeper we dig, the greater the minimum energy requirements. Since
the best quality and most accessible coal were mined first, more and more
energy is required to mine and refine increasingly poor quality resources.
11) Mining coal is
tremendously destructive to the environment.
12) Liquefied coal
(CTL) is a water guzzler, requiring 3 barrels of water for every barrel of
coal.
13) We don’t know
how to sequester carbon dioxide with the certainty that it won’t escape back
into the environment. The space to
sequester carbon dioxide is limited, and if the plan is to inject it into
geologically stable oil wells, the cost of running pipelines from the power
plant might be prohibitively expensive both energy and dollar-wise.
14) CTL might make
people foolish enough to think we can continue on the way we have been, and not
make changes in our lives.
Tar and Oil Sands
1) Tar/oil sands are truly problematic. The process of conversion uses a great deal
of natural gas to infuse the tar/oil sands with hydrogen, and we’re running out
of natural gas at an even faster rate than oil.
Production of oil from tar sands requires between 400 and 1,000 cubic
feet of natural gas per barrel of oil produced, which releases five times as
much carbon dioxide as conventional oil production.
2) These sands also take a tremendous amount of energy
to process, requiring expensive mining, crushing, high temperatures,
centrifuging, and a lot of water to strip the oil from the tar sands to which
the oil is clinging. Consider this
description of Brendan Koerner’s about how oil sands are mined:
“
3) In
4) No matter how the extraction is done, the process is
slow, and will never replace the amount of oil we’re presently using.
5) It’s not clear whether the EROEI will continue to be
positive as the mining pit gets deeper.
It takes more energy for a 400 ton truck to get back to the factory from
300 feet down than when it’s initially scraping the surface.
6) Using nuclear power to refine tar sands won’t work,
because it wouldn’t be long before the oil sands being mined were too far from
the nuclear power plant to transport it there economically.
Shale
Oil
shale is any sedimentary rock that contains solid bituminous materials that are
released as petroleum-like liquids when the rock is heated.
1)
Restoring the land after mining the shale will be very energy
expensive. When oil shale is retorted,
the inorganic portion of the shale expands considerably. The spent shale
remaining after retorting has no commercial value, but it must be disposed of
in an environmentally acceptable manner. Ideally, the spent shale is placed
back in the mine, refilling the mined-out cavity and helping to prepare the
area for land reclamation. Because of the popcorn effect, the volume of spent
shale is greater than the volume of the mine from which it was taken. Thus even
if the mine were completely refilled, there would still exist some amount of
spent shale for which alternative disposal methods must be sought
2)
Shale oil needs to be mined, pulverized, and heated to get the oil
out. It's done with machines that burn
oil to dig, drill, blast, crush, load, haul, dump, heat, hydrogenate, refine,
and transport the ore and final product.
3)
The hydrogenation step requires a tremendous amount of water to provide
hydrogen to refine the shale. Separating the hydrogen from the water uses a
large amount of energy. An estimated one
to four barrels of water are required for each barrel of oil. Where this water
would come from is a mystery, the
4) Randy Udall and Steve
Andrews: "Compared to the coal that launched the Industrial Revolution or
the oil that sustains Western Civilization, oil shale is a pathetic
pretender…When it comes to energy, quality is everything. Quality can be
measured in various ways—cost, convenience, and cleanliness all matter-—but
energy density trumps them all…Pound for pound, oil shale contains one-tenth
the energy of crude oil, one-sixth that of coal, and one-fourth that of
recycled phone books...Dung cakes have four times more energy than oil
shale…Searching for appropriate low-calorie analogies, we turn to food...Oil
shale is said to be “rich” when it contains 30 gallons of petroleum per ton. An
equal weight of granola contains three times more energy. The “vast,”
“immense,” and “unrivaled” deposits of shale buried in
5) Steve Mut, CEO of Shell's Unconventional Resources
unit, spoke at the Denver ASPO 2005 conference about Shell’s project to use
shale oil. He pointed out that people
have been trying to do this for over 100 years, so there was no guarantee
they'd succeed. Shell has been working
on a small-scale project for over two decades.
If they decide to scale it up to a level of producing significant
amounts of shale oil, it would require eight to ten gigawatts of power a day,
as much as a large city uses.
Natural Gas
1) Currently it’s used for about 25% of our energy,
mainly for electricity, heating, and cooking.
2) But we don’t have enough natural gas left to
substitute for oil – natural gas production peaked about 1970 and has a much
steeper depletion rate than oil.
3) We could import natural gas in liquefied form (LNG),
but that requires billions of dollars of large processing plants and special
ocean-going tankers. All of the
proposed new LNG facilities have been prevented by communities worried about
the explosive potential of the LNG facilities and ships.
4) Natural gas can’t be used by most vehicles, though
there are Fed Ex and other vehicle fleets running on natural gas
currently. It can take up to 8 hours to
fill a tank up with gas – it needs to be forced in and pressurized to be dense
enough to power a vehicle.
Methane Hydrates
These are a crystalline form
of methane gas and pure water that exists where pressures are sufficiently
high, or temperatures sufficiently low.
1) They’re at depth in oceans, so they’re hard to get
to. If you get them and bring them to
the surface, they expand 164 times, which makes it hard to store and transport
them. You’ll need to use energy to
compress them into a high enough density to do work
2) Bringing them to the surface will release carbon
dioxide, increasing global warming.
3) Drilling in the geologically unstable areas where
methane hydrates are found could trigger landslides, which could damage
underwater pipelines and cables.
4) We don’t know how to get them in significant quantities
yet, and the problems of doing so may be insurmountable
5) They are not concentrated in reservoirs like
oil. They’re dispersed in thick layers
at considerable depths. That would make
them very ecologically destructive to mine, since you’d have to cover such a
large area of the ocean floor to get them, sifting through millions of cubic
yards of silt to get a few chunks of hydrate.
6) One of the hypotheses for extinctions in the past,
such as the Permian, which killed 95% of life on the planet, is that a massive
release of methane hydrates occurred.
Even if we don’t mine them for energy, it’s possible that global warming
will release them again as the permafrost melts in polar regions.
7) Since methane hydrates form at low temperatures, you
could try to mine them by raising the temperature. You don’t need to raise the temperature much,
and it’s easy enough to do this by drilling for geothermal heat. The problem is, it’s very hard to distribute
the heat into the gas hydrate layer.
You could also play with pressure and antifreeze to mine hydrates, but
there are problems with these methods as well (Deffeyes. 2005. Beyond Oil, pp
74-76).
Nuclear Power
“To produce enough nuclear power to equal the
power we currently get from fossil fuels, you would have to build 10,000 of the
largest possible nuclear power plants. That’s a huge, probably nonviable
initiative, and at that burn rate, our known reserves of uranium would last
only for 10 or 20 years.” (Goodstein).
The range of estimated
uranium reserves left ranges widely, varying from 30 to 500 years. But as the concentration of uranium in ore
declines (since the best ore is used first), while at the same time the energy
to mine, transport, and concentrate the ore is declining, the higher estimates
appear to be unlikely.
Nuclear power has been
unpopular for such a long time, that there aren’t enough nuclear engineers,
plant operators and designers, or manufacturing companies to scale up quickly
(Torres 2006).
Nuclear plants require huge
grid systems, since they’re far from energy consumers. The Financial Times estimates that ten
thousand billion needs to be invested world-wide in electric power over the
next 30 years. “More than half of the investment needed in the utility sector
will have to be used to build and improve transmission networks”. (Hoyos 2003).
Nuclear plants must be built
near water for cooling. Scientists
believe one of the likely outcomes of global warming is a rising sea level. About half of existing power plants are
vulnerable to this and will need to be decommissioned ($$$ to do: find exact
number). If we wait too long, floods
damaging the electric grid could lead to a catastrophe by swamping both the
electric grid and nuclear power plant backup systems, and eventually flood the
nuclear power plant itself.
Are there enough sites to
build 10,000 new nuclear plants? If sea levels are rising, does that lessen the
possible building sites even more?
One of the most critical
needs for power is a way to store it.
Large storage batteries of any kind – for storage or for transportation
-- have not been invented despite decades of research.
A great deal of the electric
power generated would need to be used to replace the billions of combustion
engine machines and vehicles rather than providing heat, cooling, cooking power
and light to homes and offices. It takes
decades to move from one source of power to another. It’s hard to see how this could be
accomplished without great hardship and social chaos, which would slow the
conversion process down. Desperation is
likely to lead to stealing of key components of the new infrastructure to sell
for scrap metal, as is already happening in
Breeder reactors
- We’ve known since 1969 that we needed to build
breeder reactors to stretch the lifetime of radioactive material to tens
of thousands of years, and to reduce the radioactive wastes generated, but
we still don’t know how to do this.
(NAS)
- If we ever do succeed, these reactors are much
closer to being bombs than conventional reactors – the effects of an
accident would be catastrophic economically and in the number of lives
lost if it failed near a city (Wolfson).
- The by-product of the breeder reaction is
plutonium. Plutonium 239 has a half-life of 24,000 years. How can we
guarantee that no terrorist or dictator will ever use this material to
build a nuclear or dirty bomb during this time period?
Greenpeace has a critique of
nuclear power called Nuclear
Reactor Hazards (2005) which makes the following points:
1) As nuclear power plants age, components become embrittled,
corroded, and eroded. This can happen at
a microscopic level which is only detected when a pipe bursts. As a plant ages, the odds of severe incidents
increase. Although some components can
be replaced, failures in the reactor pressure vessel would lead to a
catastrophic release of radioactive material.
The risk of a nuclear accident grows significantly each year after 20
years. The average age of power plants
now, world-wide, is 21 years.
2) In a power blackout, if the emergency backup
generators don’t kick in, there is the risk of a meltdown. This happened recently in
3) 3rd generation nuclear plants are pigs
wearing lipstick – they’re just gussied up 2nd generation -- no
safer than existing plants.
4) Many failures are due to human error, and that will
always be the case, no matter how well future plants are designed.
5) Nuclear power plants are attractive targets for
terrorists now and future resource wars.
There are dozens of ways to attack nuclear and reprocessing plants. They are targets not only for the huge number
of deaths they would cause, but as a source of plutonium to make nuclear
bombs. It only takes a few kilograms to
make a weapon, and just a few micrograms to cause cancer.
If Greenpeace is right about
risks increasing after 20 years, then there’s bound to be a meltdown incident within
ten years, which would make it almost impossible to raise capital.
It’s already hard to raise
capital, because the owners want to be completely exempt from the costs of
nuclear meltdowns and other accidents.
That’s why no new plants have been built in the
The Energy Returned on
Energy Invested may be too low for investors as well. When you consider the energy required to
build a nuclear power plant, which needs tremendous amount of cement, steel
pipes, and other infrastructure, it could take a long time for the returned
energy to pay back the energy invested. The construction of 1970’s U.S. nuclear
power plants required 40 metric tons of steel and 190 cubic meters of concrete
per average megawatt of electricity generating capacity (Peterson 2003).
Never underestimate
NIMBYism, which is already preventing nuclear power plants from being built. The
political opposition to building thousands of nuclear plants will be impossible
to overcome.
The costs of treating
nuclear waste have skyrocketed. An
immensely expensive treatment plant to cleanup the
References
Dininny,
Gately, G.
Goodstein, D.
(Greenpeace)
H. Hirsch, et al. 2005. Nuclear Reactor Hazards: Ongoing Dangers of Operating
Nuclear Technology in the 21st Century http://www.greenpeace.org/raw/content/international/press/reports/nuclearreactorhazards.pdf
Hoyos, C.
(NAS) “It is clear, therefore, that by the
transition to a complete breeder-reactor program before the initial supply of
uranium 235 is exhausted, very much larger supplies of energy can be made
available than now exist. Failure to make
this transition would constitute one of the major disasters in human
history."
Peterson, P. 2003. Will the
Torres, M. “Uranium Depletion and Nuclear Power: Are We
at Peak Uranium?” http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2379#more
Wolfson,
R. 1993. Nuclear Choices: A Citizen's
Guide to Nuclear Technology. MIT Press
Hydropower from Dams
1)
Ultimately dams silt up, usually within 25 to 200 years, so hydropower is
not a renewable source of power.
2)
We’ve already dammed up the best rivers. There are now more than 45,000
dams around the world, affecting more than half -- 172 out of 292 -- of the
globe's large river systems.
3)
Damming prevents salmon and other fish migration.
4)
We've built dams in more than half of the large river systems and have
decreased the amount of sediment flowing to the world's coasts by nearly 20
percent. This is causing long-term harm
to the world's river ecosystems and raising risks that many coastal areas --
sometimes hundreds of miles from the dams -- will be flooded soon because they
are deprived of sediments that help offset soil erosion. The harmful effects of
ebbing soil deposits will be accelerated by the rising sea levels caused by
global warming, say the researchers.
More than 37% of the world's population, or over 2.1 billion people,
live within 93 miles of a coast.
5)
Dams are reducing biodiversity
Renewable Energy
Sources
The most important reason
renewable energy sources will never be able to replace fossil fuels: the energy
to build windmills, solar panels, and so on, takes more energy than what is
delivered.
Take windmills for
instance. When all of the oil is gone,
windmills must make more windmills solely on windmill power. Windmill power must be stored to concentrate
the power enough to do useful work. So
right off the bat, windmills must not only be able to generate enough power to
build mining equipment and factories to mine iron ore to make more windmills
out of steel with, the windmill is also making batteries from start to
finish. Plus all of the components of
the electrical grid to deliver the windmill power to customers. All of the components need to be delivered,
the people who make the components need to use windmill energy to get to work,
and the windmills have of course, made all of the tractors, trains, trucks, and
other components of agriculture so the windmill workers don’t go hungry. Now finally, if there’s any extra energy
after all this energy expended to make more windmills, finally other people
outside of the windmill industry can have some power.
Whatever problems fossil
fuels might have, they contain orders of magnitude more energy than renewable
sources such as wind, solar, hydrogen, and biomass. Replacing them with renewable energy sources
has several major challenges:
1) The main problem facing us is the need for a liquid
transportation fuel that can be used in existing vehicles. Solar, nuclear,
wind, geothermal, wave, and tidal power don’t address this need.
2) Natural gas based nitrogen fertilizers have allowed up
to five times as much food to be grown as could grown otherwise, and that plus
mechanization from planting to harvesting, and oil-based distribution and
processing has allowed an extra four to six billion people to exist on the
planet than could otherwise be supported.
There are no renewable energy sources that can fertilize plants, except
for guano, and there are very finite amounts of that. Bat guano used to be so important to farmers
that the U.S. Congress passed the Guano Islands Act in 1856. This allowed
3) Most renewable energy (except oils from plants) can’t
replace the half million products made from the complex hydro-carbon chains
contained in fossil fuels, such as plastic, medicine, paint, pesticide, etc.
4) Renewables such as wind and solar are very diffuse
and need large collection areas to capture their energy in real time.
Hydrogen
The energy-literate scoff at perpetual motion, free energy, and cold fusion, but what about the hydrogen economy? Before we invest trillions of dollars, let’s take a hydrogen car out for a spin. You will discover that hydrogen is the least likely of all the alternative energies to solve our transportation problems. Hydrogen uses more energy than you get out of it. The only winners in the hydrogen scam are large auto companies receiving billions of dollars via the FreedomCAR Initiative to build hydrogen vehicles. And most importantly, the real problem that needs to be solved is how to build hydrogen trucks, so we can plant, harvest, and deliver food and other goods.
Making it
Hydrogen isn’t an energy source – it’s an energy carrier, like a battery. You have to make it and put energy into it, both of which take energy. Hydrogen has been used commercially for decades, so at least we don't have to figure out how to do this, or what the cheapest, most efficient method is.
Ninety-six percent of hydrogen is made from fossil fuels,
mainly to refine oil and hydrogenate vegetable oil--the kind that gives you
heart attacks (1). In the
Only four percent of hydrogen is made from water. This is done with electricity, in a process called electrolysis. Hydrogen is only made from water when the hydrogen must be extremely pure. Most electricity is generated from fossil fuel driven plants that are, on average, 30% efficient. Where does the other seventy percent of the energy go? Most is lost as heat, and some as it travels through the power grid.
Electrolysis is 70% efficient. To calculate the overall efficiency of making hydrogen from water, the standard equation is to multiply the efficiency of each step. In this case you would multiply the 30% efficient power plant times the 70% efficient electrolysis to get an overall efficiency of 20%. This means you have used four units of energy to create one unit of hydrogen energy (3).
Obtaining hydrogen from fossil fuels as a feedstock or an energy source is a bit perverse, since the whole point is to avoid using fossil fuels. The goal is to use renewable energy to make hydrogen from water via electrolysis.
Current wind turbines can generate electricity at 30-40% efficiency, producing hydrogen at an overall 25% efficiency (.35 wind electricity * .70 electrolysis of water), or 3 units of wind energy to get 1 unit of hydrogen energy. When the wind is blowing, that is.
The best solar cells available on a large scale have an efficiency of ten percent when the sun is shining, or nine units of energy to get 1 hydrogen unit of energy (.10 * .70). But that’s not bad compared to biological hydrogen. If you use algae that make hydrogen as a byproduct, the efficiency is about .1%, or more than 99 units of energy to get one hydrogen unit of energy (4).
No matter how you look at it, producing hydrogen from water is an energy sink. If you don't understand this concept, please mail me ten dollars and I'll send you back a dollar.
Hydrogen can be made from biomass, but then these problems arise (5):
- Biomass is very seasonal
- Contains a lot of moisture, requiring energy to store and then dry it before gasification
- There are limited supplies
- The quantities are not large or consistent enough for large-scale hydrogen production.
- A huge amount of land would be required, since even cultivated biomass in good soil has a low yield -- 10 tons of biomass per 2.4 acres
- The soil will be degraded from erosion and loss of fertility if stripped of biomass
- Any energy put into the land to grow the biomass, such as fertilizers, planting, and harvesting will add to the energy costs
- Energy and costs to deliver biomass to the central power plant
- It’s not suitable for pure hydrogen production
One of the main reasons for switching to hydrogen is to prevent the global warming caused by fossil fuels. When hydrogen is made from natural gas, nitrogen oxides are released, which are 58 times more effective in trapping heat than carbon dioxide (6). Coal releases large amounts of CO2 and mercury. Oil is too powerful and useful to waste on hydrogen–it’s concentrated sunshine brewed over hundreds of millions of years. A gallon of gas represents about 196,000 pounds of fossil plants, the amount in 40 acres of wheat (7).
Natural gas is too valuable to make hydrogen with. One use of natural gas is to create fertilizer (as both feedstock and energy source). This has led to a many-fold increase in crop production, allowing an additional 4 billion people to exist that otherwise wouldn’t be here (8, 9).
We also don’t have enough natural gas left to make a
hydrogen economy happen. Extraction of natural gas is declining in
Putting energy into hydrogen
No matter how it’s been made, hydrogen has no energy in it. Hydrogen is the lowest energy dense fuel on earth (5). At room temperature and pressure, hydrogen takes up three thousand more times space than gasoline containing an equivalent amount of energy (3). To put energy into hydrogen, it must be compressed or liquefied. To compress hydrogen to 10,000 psi is a multi-stage process that will lose an additional 15% of the energy contained in the hydrogen.
If you liquefy hydrogen, you will be able to get more hydrogen energy into a smaller container, but you will lose 30-40% of the energy in the process. Handling hydrogen requires extreme precautions because hydrogen is so cold – minus 423 F. Fueling is typically done mechanically with a robot arm (3).
Storage
The more you compress hydrogen, the smaller the tank can be. But as you increase the pressure, you also have to increase the thickness of the steel wall, and hence the weight of the tank. Cost increases with pressure. At 2000 psi, it’s $400 per kg. At 8000 psi, it’s $2100 per kg (5). And the tank will be huge -- at 5000 psi, the tank could take up ten times the volume of a gasoline tank containing the same energy content.
That’s why it would be nice to use liquid hydrogen, which allows you to have a much smaller container. But these storage tanks get cold enough to cause plugged valves and other problems. If you add insulation to prevent this, you will increase the weight of an already very heavy storage tank. There are additional components to control the liquid hydrogen which add extra costs and weight (11).
Here’s how a hydrogen tank stacks up against a gas tank in a Honda Accord.
Tank
Amount Weight Driving Tank
Of fuel With fuel Range Cost
Hydrogen 3 kg @3000 psi 400 kg 55 miles (5) $2000 (5)
Gasoline 17 gallons 73 kg 493 miles $ 100
According to the National Highway Safety Traffic Administration (NHTSA), "Vehicle weight reduction is probably the most powerful technique for improving fuel economy. Each 10 percent reduction in weight improves the fuel economy of a new vehicle design by approximately eight percent”.
Fuel cells are also heavy: "A metal hydride storage system that can hold 5 kg of hydrogen, including the alloy, container, and heat exchangers, would weigh
approximately 300 kg (661 lbs), which would lower the fuel
efficiency of the vehicle," according to Rosa Young, a physicist and vice
president of advanced materials development at Energy Conversion Devices in
Fuel cells are expensive. In 2003, they cost $1 million or more. At this stage, they have low reliability, need a much less expensive catalyst than platinum, can clog and lose power if there are impurities in the hydrogen, don’t last more than 1000 hours, have yet to achieve a driving range of more than 100 miles, and can’t compete with electric hybrids like the Toyota Prius, which is already more energy efficient and lower in CO2 generation than projected fuel cells. (3)
Hydrogen is the Houdini of elements. As soon as you’ve gotten it into a container, it wants to get out, and since it’s the lightest of all gases, it takes a lot of effort to keep it from escaping. Storage devices need a complex set of seals, gaskets, and valves. Liquid hydrogen tanks for vehicles boil off at 3-4% per day (3, 13).
Hydrogen also tends to make metal brittle (14). Embrittled metal can create leaks. In a pipeline, it can cause cracking or fissuring, which can result in potentially catastrophic failure (3). Making metal strong enough to withstand hydrogen adds weight and cost.
Leaks also become more likely as the pressure grows higher. It can leak from un-welded connections, fuel lines, and non-metal seals such as gaskets, O-rings, pipe thread compounds, and packings. A heavy-duty fuel cell engine may have thousands of seals (15). Hydrogen has the lowest ignition point of any fuel, 20 times less than gasoline. So if there’s a leak, it can be ignited by a cell phone, a storm miles away (16), or the static from sliding on a car seat.
Leaks and the fires that might result are invisible, and because of they high hydrogen pressure, the fire is like a cutting torch with an invisible flame. Unless you walk into a hydrogen flame, sometimes the only way to know there’s a leak is poor performance.
In 2002, given the same volume of fuel, a diesel fuel vehicle could go 90 miles, and a hydrogen vehicle at 3600 psi could go 5 miles. But that’s nothing compared to the challenges trucks face. I know we’re just supposed to only driving a hydrogen car, but it’s really hydrogen trucks that are most critical. If we don’t figure out how to make them, we won’t have a way to distribute food and other goods across the country.
A truck can go a thousand miles with two 84 gallon tanks placed under the cab, which takes up 23 cubic feet. But the equivalent amount of hydrogen at 3600 psi would take up almost 14 times as much space as the gas tanks. It is hard to imagine where you could put the two cylindrical, twelve feet long by four feet wide hydrogen tanks. They can’t go in the cargo space because a hydrogen leak in an enclosed area would explode if there were a leak. You can’t put the tanks on top or the truck won’t fit beneath underpasses and make the truck top-heavy. Nor would these tanks fit beneath the truck. (23).
To redesign trucks and build hundreds of millions of new ones would take too much energy and money. Yet keeping trucks moving after fossil fuels disappear is far more important that figuring out how to keep cars on the road. Trucks deliver food and other essentials we can’t live without.
Batteries are smaller, but they’re very heavy. In 2002, Lithium-Metal Polymer batteries could take a truck 500 miles. They weighed 42,635 pounds, using up 85% of the trucks weight capacity (23).
Transport
Canister trucks ($250,000 each) can carry enough fuel for 60 cars (3, 13). These trucks weight 40,000 kg but deliver only 400 kg of hydrogen. For a delivery distance of 150 miles, the delivery energy used is nearly 20% of the usable energy in the hydrogen delivered. At 300 miles 40%. The same size truck carrying gasoline delivers 10,000 gallons of fuel, enough to fill about 800 cars (3).
Another alternative is pipelines. The average cost of a natural gas pipeline is one million dollars per mile, and we have 200,000 miles of natural gas pipeline, which we can’t re-use because they are composed of metal that would become brittle and leak, as well as the incorrect diameter to maximize hydrogen throughput. If we were to build a similar infrastructure to deliver hydrogen it would cost $200 trillion. The major operating cost of hydrogen pipelines is compressor power and maintenance (3). Compressors in the pipeline keep the gas moving, using hydrogen energy to push the gas forward. After 620 miles, 8% of the hydrogen has been used to move it through the pipeline (17).
Conclusion
At some point along the chain of making, putting energy in, storing, and delivering the hydrogen, you’ve used more energy than you get back, and this doesn’t count the energy used to make fuel cells, storage tanks, delivery systems, and vehicles (17).
The laws of physics mean the hydrogen economy will always be an energy sink. Hydrogen’s properties require you to spend more energy to do the following than you get out of it later: overcome waters’ hydrogen-oxygen bond, to move heavy cars, to prevent leaks and brittle metals, to transport hydrogen to the destination. It doesn’t matter if all of the problems are solved, or how much money is spent. You will use more energy to create, store, and transport hydrogen than you will ever get out of it.
The price of oil and natural gas will go up relentlessly due
to geological depletion and political crises in extracting countries. Since the hydrogen infrastructure will be
built using the existing oil-based infrastructure (i.e. internal combustion
engine vehicles, power plants and factories, plastics, etc), the price of
hydrogen will go up as well -- it will never be cheaper than fossil fuels. As depletion continues, factories will be
driven out of business by high fuel costs (20, 21, 22) and the parts necessary
to build the extremely complex storage tanks and fuel cells might become
unavailable. In a society that’s looking
more and more like Terry Gilliam’s “
Any diversion of declining fossil fuels to a hydrogen economy subtracts that energy from other possible uses, such as planting, harvesting, delivering, and cooking food, heating homes, and other essential activities. According to Joseph Romm “The energy and environmental problems facing the nation and the world, especially global warming, are far too serious to risk making major policy mistakes that misallocate scarce resources (3).
When fusion can make cheap hydrogen, reliable long-lasting nanotube fuel cells exist, and light-weight leak-proof carbon-fiber polymer-lined storage tanks / pipelines can be made inexpensively, then let’s consider building the hydrogen economy infrastructure. Until then, it’s vaporware. All of the technical obstacles must be overcome for any of this to happen (18). Meanwhile, we should stop the FreedomCAR and start setting higher CAFE standards (19).
Biomass
Peak
Soil: Why Cellulosic and other Biofuels are
Not
Sustainable and a Threat to
By Alice
Friedemann Last updated
http://www.energyskeptic.com/Peak_Soil.htm
“The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself”, President Franklin D. Roosevelt
There's growing public attention from the people, all the way on down to the President, about biomass potential for energy. There's been a public discussion about many aspects and what the problems might be. But there's one aspect of all of this that is conspicuous by its absence - a national discussion of anything about the soil science - the effect growing row crops like corn and soy have on the land and water.
Whatever biomass we're going to grow, there are important issues about net energy gain and the carbon balance, but we also need to deal with the root of the matter - the soils, and water, and whether growing biomass for fuel can be made sustainable.
The lack of any kind of input on this by soil scientists about how we're mining our soils is a voice that needs to be heard, because if you destroy the soil, you can't grow biomass.
Part 1. The
Dirt on Dirt.
Ethanol is an agribusiness get-rich-quick scheme that will bankrupt our topsoil.
Nineteenth century
western farmers converted their corn into whiskey to make a profit (Rorabaugh
1979). Archer Daniels Midland, a large
grain processor, came up with the same scheme in the 20th
century. But ethanol was a product in
search of a market, so ADM spent three decades relentlessly lobbying for
ethanol to be used in gasoline. Today ADM makes record profits from ethanol
sales and government subsidies (Barrionuevo 2006).
The Department of
Energy hopes to have biomass supply 5% of the nation’s power, 20% of
transportation fuels, and 25% of chemicals by 2030. These combined goals are
30% of the current petroleum consumption (DOE Biomass Plan, DOE Feedstock Roadmap).
Fuels made from biomass are a lot like the nuclear powered airplanes the Air Force tried to build from 1946 to 1961, for billions of dollars. They never got off the ground. The idea was interesting – atomic jets could fly for months without refueling. But the lead shielding to protect the crew and several months of food and water was too heavy for the plane to take off. The weight problem, the ease of shooting this behemoth down, and the consequences of a crash landing were so obvious, it’s amazing the project was ever funded, let alone kept going for 15 years.
Biomass fuels have equally obvious and predictable reasons for failure. Odum says that time explains why renewable energy provides such low energy yields compared to non-renewable fossil fuels. The more work left to nature, the higher the energy yield, but the longer the time required. Although coal and oil took millions of years to form into dense, concentrated solar power, all we had to do was extract and transport them (Odum 1996)
With every step required to transform a fuel into energy, there is less and less energy yield. For example, to make ethanol from corn grain, which is how all ethanol is made now, corn is first grown to develop hybrid seeds, which next season are planted, harvested, delivered, stored, and preprocessed to remove dirt. Dry-mill ethanol is milled, liquefied, heated, saccharified, fermented, evaporated, centrifuged, distilled, scrubbed, dried, stored, and transported to customers (McAloon 2000).
Fertile soil will be destroyed if crops and other
“wastes” are removed to make cellulosic ethanol.
“We stand, in most places on earth, only six inches from
desolation, for that is the
thickness of the topsoil layer upon which the entire life of the planet
depends” (Sampson 1981).
Loss of topsoil has been a major factor in the fall of
civilizations (Sundquist 2005
Chapter 3, Lowdermilk 1953, Perlin 1991, Ponting 1993). You end up with a country like
Fuels from biomass
are not sustainable, are ecologically destructive, have a net energy loss, and
there isn’t enough biomass in America to make significant amounts of energy
because essential inputs like water, land, fossil fuels, and phosphate ores are
limited.
Soil Science 101 – There Is No “Waste” Biomass
Long before there was “Peak Oil”, there was “Peak Soil”.
Productivity drops off sharply when topsoil reaches 6
inches or less, the average crop
root zone depth (Sundquist 2005).
Crop productivity continually declines as topsoil is lost
and residues are removed. (Al-Kaisi May 2001, Ball 2005, Blanco-Canqui 2006, BOA 1986, Calviño 2003, Franzleubbers 2006, Grandy 2006,
Johnson 2004, Johnson 2005, Miranowski 1984, Power 1998, Sadras 2001, Troeh
2005, Wilhelm 2004).
On over half of America’s best crop land, the erosion rate is 27 times the natural rate, 11,000 pounds per acre (NCRS 2006). The
natural, geological erosion rate is about 400 pounds of soil per acre per year
(Troeh 2005). Some is due to farmers not
being paid enough to conserve their land, but most is due to investors who farm
for profit. Erosion control cuts into
profits.
Erosion is happening ten to twenty times faster than the
rate topsoil can be formed by natural processes (Pimentel 2006). That might make
the average person concerned. But not
the USDA -- they’ve defined erosion as the average soil loss that could occur
without causing a decline in long term productivity.
Troeh (2005) believes that the tolerable soil loss (T)
value is set too high, because it's
based only on the upper layers -- how long it takes subsoil to be converted
into topsoil. T ought to be based on
deeper layers – the time for subsoil to develop from parent material or parent
material from rock. If he’s right,
erosion is even worse than NCRS figures.
We've come a long
way since the 1930's in reducing erosion, but that only makes it more
insidious. Erosion is very hard to
measure -- very little soil might erode for years, and then tons per acre blown
or washed away in an extreme storm just after harvest, before a cover crop has
had a chance to protect the soil. We
need better ways of measuring and monitoring erosion, since estimates wildly
differ (Trimble 2000).
Erosion removes the most fertile parts of the soil (USDA-ARS).
When you feed the soil with organic matter, you’re not feeding plants;
you’re feeding the biota in the soil. Underground creatures and fungi break
down fallen leaves and twigs into microscopic bits that plants can eat, and
create tunnels air and water can infiltrate.
In nature there are no elves feeding (fertilizing) the wild lands. When plants die, they’re recycled into basic
elements and become a part of new plants.
It’s a closed cycle. There is no
bio-waste.
Soil creatures and fungi act as an immune system for
plants against diseases, weeds, and
insects – when this living community is harmed by agricultural chemicals and
fertilizers, even more chemicals are needed in an increasing vicious cycle
(Wolfe 2001).
There’s so much life in the soil, there can be 10
“biomass horses” underground for every horse grazing on an acre of pasture (Hemenway 2000). The June 2004 issue of
Science calls soils “The Final Frontier”.
Just a tiny pinch of earth could have 10,000 different species (Wardle
2004) -- millions of creatures, most of them unknown. If you dove into the soil and swam around,
you’d be surrounded by thousands of miles of thin strands of mycorrhizal fungi
that help plant roots absorb more nutrients and water (Pennisi 2004). As you swam along, plant roots would tower
above you like trees as you wove through underground skyscrapers.
Plants and creatures underground need to drink, eat, and
breathe just like we do. An ideal soil is half rock, and a quarter
each water and air. When tractors plant
and harvest, they crush the life out of the soil, as underground apartments
collapse 9/11 style. The tracks left by
tractors in the soil are the erosion route for half of the soil that washes or
blows away (Wilhelm 2004).
Corn Biofuel (i.e. butanol, ethanol, biodiesel) is
especially harmful because:
- Row
crops like corn and soy cause 50 times more soil erosion than sod crops (Sullivan 2004) or more
(Al-Kaisi 2000), because the soil between rows can wash or blow away. If
corn is planted with last years corn stalks left on the ground (no-till),
erosion is less of a problem, but only about 20% of corn is grown
no-till. Soy is usually grown no-till,
but has insignificant residues to harvest for fuel.
- Corn
uses more water than most crops. It takes about 118 gallons of water to
produce 1 pound of corn, and 21 pounds of corn to make a gallon of
ethanol. So you’d need about
2.5 trillion gallons of water to make a billion gallons of ethanol, more
than all the water southern
- Corn
uses more agrichemicals, and fertilizer than most crops (Padgitt 2000, Pimentel 2003). Due to
high corn prices, continuous corn (corn crop after corn crop) is
increasing, rather than rotation of nitrogen fixing (fertilizer) and
erosion control sod crops with corn.
- The government has studied the effect
of growing continuous corn, and found it increases eutrophication by
189%, global warming by 71%, and acidification by 6% (Powers
2005).
- Farmers want to plant corn on
highly-erodible, water protecting, or wildlife sustaining Conservation Reserve
Program land. Farmers are
paid not to grow crops on this land. But with high corn prices, farmers
are now asking the Agricultural Department to release them from these
contracts so they can plant corn on these low-producing, environmentally
sensitive lands (Tomson 2007).
- Crop residues are essential for soil
protection, nutrition, water retention, and soil carbon. Making cellulosic ethanol from corn residues -- the parts of the
plant we don’t eat (stalk, roots, and leaves) – removes water, carbon, and
nutrients (Nelson, 2002, McAloon 2000, Sheehan, 2003).
These practices lead to lower crop production and
ultimately deserts. Growing plants
for fuel will accelerate the already unacceptable levels of topsoil erosion,
soil carbon and nutrient depletion, soil compaction, water retention, water
depletion, water pollution, air pollution, eutrophication, destruction of
fisheries, siltation of dams and waterways, salination, loss of biodiversity,
and damage to human health (Tegtmeier
2004).
Why are soil scientists absent from the biofuels
debate?
I asked 35 soil
scientists why topsoil wasn’t part of the biofuels debate. These are just a few of the responses from
the ten who replied to my off-the-record poll (no one wanted me to quote them,
mostly due to fear of losing their jobs):
- ”I have no idea why soil scientists
aren't questioning corn and cellulosic ethanol plans. Quite frankly I’m not sure that our
society has had any sort of reasonable debate about this with all the
facts laid out. When you see that
even if all of the corn was converted to ethanol and that would not
provide more than 20% of our current liquid fuel use, it certainly makes
me wonder, even before considering the conversion efficiency, soil loss,
water contamination, food price problems, etc.”
- Biomass production is not sustainable.
Only business men and women in the refinery business believe it is.
- "Should we be using our best crop land to grow gasohol and contribute further to global warming? What will our children grow their food on?"
- “As agricultural scientists, we are programmed to make farmer's profitable, and therefore profits are at the top of the list, and not soil, family, or environmental sustainability”.
- “Government policy since WWII has been to encourage overproduction to keep food prices down (people with full bellies don't revolt or object too much). It's hard to make a living farming commodities when the selling price is always at or below the break even point. Farmers have had to get bigger and bigger to make ends meet since the margins keep getting thinner and thinner. We have sacrificed our family farms in the name of cheap food. When farmers stand to make few bucks (as with biofuels) agricultural scientists tend to look the other way”.
- You are quite correct in your concern that soil science should be factored into decisions about biofuel production. Unfortunately, we soil scientists have missed the boat on the importance of soil management to the sustainability of biomass production, and the long-term impact for soil productivity.
This is not a new debate. Here’s what scientists had to say decades ago:
Removing “crop residues…would rob organic matter that is vital to the maintenance of soil fertility and tilth, leading to disastrous soil erosion levels. Not considered is the importance of plant residues as a primary source of energy for soil microbial activity. The most prudent course, clearly, is to continue to recycle most crop residues back into the soil, where they are vital in keeping organic matter levels high enough to make the soil more open to air and water, more resistant to soil erosion, and more productive” (Sampson 1981).
“…Massive alcohol production from our farms
is an immoral use of our soils since it rapidly promotes their wasting
away. We must save these soils for an
oil-less future” (
Gasohol was made so poorly in the 80's that the name was changed to ethanol.
What the USDA knew
about continuous corn in 1911:
"When the rich, black, prairie corn lands of the Central West were first broken up, it was believed that these were … inexhaustible lands … So crop after crop of corn was planted on the same fields. There came a time, however, after 15 or 20 years, when the crop did not respond to cultivation; the yields fell off and the lands that once produced 60-70 bushels per acre annually dropped to 25 to 30 bushels.
… With the passing years, the soil became more compact, droughts were more injurious, and the soil baked harder and was more difficult to handle. Continuous corn culture has no place in progressive farming...it is a shortsighted policy and is suicidal on lands that have been long under cultivation" (Smith 1911).
Natural Gas in Agriculture
“Fertilizer energy” is 28% of the energy used in
agriculture (Heller, 2000). Fertilizer uses natural gas both as a
feedstock and the source of energy to create the high temperatures and
pressures necessary to coax inert nitrogen out of the air (nitrogen is often
the limiting factor in crop production).
Fertilizers only replace nutrition. They
don't provide the ecosystem services that organic matter does. Organic matter is known as “waste” in the
biofuels industry.
Organic matter slows
erosion and fixes carbon in the soil.
Dead plants and the soil biota that feed on them create channels that
let air and water get to plant roots, which breathe and drink just like we
do. The soil retains water, helping
plants get through droughts.
Organic matter
provides food for the soil biota, which provide an immune system for plants. The mycorrhizal fungi in the soil provide
plants extra nutrients and water in exchange for sugars.
Fertilizer not only provides no ecosystem services, it
harms the ecosystem. Fertilizer disables or kills some of the
creatures in the soil web, which increases the need for agrichemicals in an
increasingly vicious cycle.
Fertilizers increase global warming, acid rain, and
eutrophication.
You can grow
tomatoes on rocks if you dump enough fertilizer on them. But doing so depletes
the soil, we mine it when we do this.
Fertilizer represents 28% of the energy used in
agriculture. So let me get this straight. Fertilizers are made from and with natural
gas which we’re dumping on crops to grow them for biofuel. We’re going to take the biomass waste away,
which means we’ll have to add even more fertilizer. How, exactly, does that
lessen our dependence on fossil fuels?
OK, one good thing, sort of. Fertilizer is part of the green revolution that made it possible for
the world’s population to grow from half a billion to 6.5 billion today (Smil
2000, Fisher 2001). So I’m biting the
hand that feeds me and four billion plus others who wouldn’t be alive
otherwise. But natural gas is limited,
not easily imported, and it’s depleting faster than oil on the North American
continent. Discontinuities clearly lie ahead.
Our national security is at risk as we deplete our
aquifers and become dependent on unstable foreign states to provide us with
increasingly expensive fertilizer. Between 1995 and 2005 we increased our
fertilizer imports by more than 148% for Anhydrous Ammonia, 93% for Urea
(solid), and 349 % of other nitrogen fertilizers (USDA ERS). Removing crop residues will require large
amounts of imported fertilizer from potential cartels, potentially so expensive
farmers won’t sell crops and residues for biofuels.
Improve national security and topsoil by returning
residues to the land as fertilizer.
We are vulnerable to high-priced fertilizer imports or “food for oil”, which
would greatly increase the cost of food for Americans. Return crop residues to the soil to provide
organic fertilizer, don’t increase the need for natural gas fertilizers by
removing crop residues to make cellulosic biofuels.
Part 2. The Poop on
Ethanol:
Energy Returned on Energy
Invested (EROEI)
To understand the concept of EROEI, imagine a magician doing a variation on the rabbit-out-of-a-hat trick. He strides onstage with a rabbit, puts it into a top hat, and then spends the next five minutes pulling 100 more rabbits out. That is a pretty good return on investment!
Oil was like that in the beginning: one barrel of oil energy was required to get 100 more out, an Energy Returned on Energy Invested of 100:1.
When the biofuel magician tries to do the same trick decades later, he puts the rabbit into the hat, and pulls out only one pooping rabbit. The excrement is known as byproduct or coproduct in the ethanol industry.
Studies that show a positive energy gain for ethanol would have a negative return if the byproduct were left out (Farrell 2006). Here’s where byproduct comes from: if you made ethanol from corn in your back yard, you’d dump a bushel of corn, two gallons of water, and yeast into your contraption. Out would come 18 pounds of ethanol, 18 pounds of CO2, and 18 pounds of byproduct – the leftover corn solids.
Patzek and Pimentel believe you shouldn’t include the energy contained in the byproduct, because you need to return it to the soil to improve nutrition and soil structure (Patzek June 2006). Giampetro believes the byproduct should be treated as a “serious waste disposal problem and … an energy cost”, because if we supplied 10% of our energy from biomass, we’d generate 37 times more livestock feed than is used (Giampetro 1997).
It’s even worse than he realized – Giampetro didn’t know most of this “livestock feed” can’t be fed to livestock because it’s too energy and monetarily expensive to deliver – especially heavy wet distillers byproduct, which is short-lived, succumbing to mold and fungi after 4 to 10 days. Also, byproduct is a subset of what animals eat. Cattle are fed byproduct in 20% of their diet at most. Iowa’s a big hog state, but commercial swine operations feed pigs a maximum of 5 to 10% byproduct (Trenkle 2006; Shurson 2003).
Worst of all, the EROEI of ethanol is 1.2:1 or 1.2 units of energy out for every unit of energy in, a gain of “.2”. The “1” in “1.2” represents the liquid ethanol. What is the “.2” then? It’s the rabbit feces – the byproduct. So you have no ethanol for your car, because the liquid “1” needs to be used to make more ethanol. That leaves you with just the “.2” --- a bucket of byproduct to feed your horse – you do have a horse, don’t you? If horses are like cattle, then you can only use your byproduct for one-fifth of his diet, so you’ll need four supplemental buckets of hay from your back yard to feed him. No doubt the byproduct could be used to make other things, but that would take energy.
Byproduct could be burned, but it takes a significant amount of energy to dry it out, and requires additional handling and equipment. More money can be made selling it wet to the cattle industry, which is hurting from the high price of corn. Byproduct should be put back into the ground to improve soil nutrition and structure for future generations, not sold for short-term profit and fed to cattle who aren’t biologically adapted to eating corn.
The boundaries of what is included in EROEI
calculations are kept as narrow as possible to reach positive results.
Researchers who find a positive EROEI for ethanol have not accounted for all of the energy inputs. For example, Shapouri admits the "energy used in the production of … farm machinery and equipment…, and cement, steel, and stainless steel used in the construction of ethanol plants, are not included". (Shapouri 2002). Or they assign overstated values of ethanol yield from corn (Patzek Dec 2006). Many, many, other inputs are left out.
Patzek and Pimentel have compelling evidence showing that about 30 percent more fossil energy is required to produce a gallon of ethanol than you get from it. Their papers are published in peer-reviewed journals where their data and methods are public, unlike many of the positive net energy results.
Infrastructure. Current EROEI figures don’t take into account the delivery infrastructure that needs to be built. There are 850 million combustion engines in the world today. Just to replace half the 245 million cars and light trucks in the United States with E85 vehicles will take 12-15 years, It would take over $544 million dollars of delivery ethanol infrastructure (Reynolds 2002 case B1) and $5 to $34 billion to revamp 170,000 gas stations nationwide (Heinson 2007).
The EROEI of oil when we built most of the infrastructure in this country was about 100:1, and it’s about 25:1 worldwide now. Even if you believe ethanol has a positive EROEI, you’d probably need at least an EROEI of at least 5 to maintain modern civilization (Hall 2003). A civilization based on ethanol’s “.2” rabbit poop would only work for coprophagous rabbits.
Of the four articles that showed a positive net energy for ethanol in Farrells 2006 Science article, three were not peer-reviewed. The only positive peer-reviewed article (Dias De Oliveira, 2005) states “The use of ethanol as a substitute for gasoline proved to be neither a sustainable nor an environmentally friendly option” and the “environmental impacts outweigh its benefits”. Dias De Oliveria concluded there’d be a tremendous loss of biodiversity, and if all vehicles ran on E85 and their numbers grew by 4% per year, by 2048, the entire country, except for cities, would be covered with corn.
Part 3.
Biofuel is a Grim Reaper.
The energy to remediate environmental damage
is left out of EROEI calculations.
Global Warming
Soils contain 3.3 times the
amount of carbon found in the atmosphere, and 4.5 times more carbon than is
stored in all the Earth’s vegetation (Lal 2004).
If we want to reduce global warming, storing carbon in the soil will be essential. But that will be hard to pull off, because Climate change could increase soil loss by 33% to 274%, depending on the region (O'Neal 2005).
Worse yet, we keep building suburbia and shopping malls on top of crop land.
Population in the United States could reach over one billion people by 2100 (U.S. Census Bureau 2000), so what will happen is that we'll need more crop land and have to cut down bottomland forests and fill in wetlands to grow food, which will reduce stored carbon and biodiversity even further.
Intensive agriculture has already removed 20 to 50% of
the original soil carbon, and some
areas have lost 70%. To maintain soil C levels, no crop residues at all could
be harvested under many tillage systems or on highly erodible lands, and none
to a small percent on no-till, depending on crop production levels (Johnson
2006).
Deforestation of temperate
hardwood forests, and conversion of range and wetlands to grow energy and food
crops increases global warming. An
average of 2.6 million acres of crop land were paved over or developed every
year between 1982 and 2002 in the USA (NCRS 2004). The only new crop land is
forest, range, or wetland.
Rainforest destruction is increasing global warming. Energy farming is playing a huge role in deforestion, reducing biodiversity, water and water quality, and increasing soil erosion. Fires to clear land for palm oil plantations are destroying one of the last great remaining rainforests in Borneo, spewing so much carbon that Indonesia is third behind the United States and China in releasing greenhouse gases. Orangutans, rhinos, tigers and thousands of other species may be driven extinct (Monbiot 2005). Borneo palm oil plantation lands have grown 2,500% since 1984 (Barta 2006). Soybeans cause even more erosion than corn and suffer from all the same sustainability issues. The Amazon is being destroyed by farmers growing soybeans for food (National Geographic Jan 2007) and fuel (Olmstead 2006).
Biofuel from coal-burning biomass factories increases global warming (Farrell 2006). Driving a mile on ethanol from a coal-using biorefinery releases more CO2 than a mile on gasoline (Ward 2007). Coal in ethanol production is seen as a way to displace petroleum (Farrell 2006, Yacobucci 2006) and it’s already happening (Clayton 2006).
Current and future quantities of
biofuels are too minuscule to affect global warming (ScienceDaily 2007).
Surface Albedo. “How much the sun warms our climate depends on how
much sunlight the land reflects (cooling us), versus how much it absorbs
(heating us). A plausible 2% increase in the absorbed sunlight on a switch
grass plantation could negate the climatic cooling benefit of the ethanol
produced on it. We need to figure out now, not later, the full range of
climatic consequences of growing cellulose crops” (Harte 2007).
Soil Erosion
There’s an ethanol gold rush going on. More than half the best farmland in the United States is leased by investors. Two-thirds or more of the farmland in the corn and soy growing states of Iowa, Minnesota, Illinois, and Indiana is rented (65, 74, 84, and 86% respectively).
Notice that these mostly investor-owned corn and soybean growing states, are mainly red in the map below. Red represents the areas where farms have the highest erosion rates.
Corn and soy crops have higher erosion rates than most crops. Storms and wind wash agrichemicals (sometimes highly toxic ones that haven’t had a chance to break down) and eroded soil into the air and water. Sediment fills up reservoirs, shortening their life-span and the time dams can store water and generate electricity. Yet the energy of the hydropower lost to siltation, energy to remediate flood damage, energy to dredge dams, agricultural drainage ditches, harbors, and navigation channels, aren’t considered in EROEI calculations.
Owners seeking short-term profits have far less incentive than farmers who work their land to preserve soil and water. They don’t adopt as long-term conservation measures as farm owner-operators do (ERS 1999).
http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/ConservationAndEnvironment/Gallery/sediment.htm
The dark green areas of this map represent where the highest crop subsidy payments go and where the highest nitrogen runoff rates are. Notice that again, these areas correspond with investor-owned farmland. Commodity payments were meant to be a safety net, but the money ends up being used to buy and apply excess fertilizer, which gets into rivers, lakes, and oceans (Redlin 2007).
Farm runoff of nitrogen fertilizers has contributed to the pollution and hypoxia (low oxygen) of rivers and lakes across the country and the 8,000 square mile dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Yet the cost of the lost shrimp and fisheries and increased cost of water treatment are not subtracted from the EROEI of ethanol.
Climate change also appears to be increasing runoff and erosion (SWCS 2003).
http://www.iwla.org/publications/agriculture/Farm_Bill_2007_WEB.pdf
Water Pollution
Soil erosion is a serious source of water pollution, since it causes runoff of sediments, nutrients, salts, eutrophication, and chemicals that have had no chance to decompose into streams. This increases water treatment costs, increases health costs, kills fish with insecticides that work their way up the food chain (Troeh 2005).
Ethanol plants pollute water. They generate 13 liters of wastewater for every liter of ethanol produced (Pimentel March 2005)
Water depletion
Biofuel factories use a huge amount of water – four gallons for every gallon of ethanol produced. Despite 30 inches of rain per year in Iowa, there may not be enough water for corn ethanol factories as well as people and industry. Drought years will make matters worse (Cruse 2006).
Fifty percent of Americans rely on groundwater (Glennon 2002), and in many states, this groundwater is being depleted by agriculture faster than it is being recharged. This is already threatening current food supplies (Giampetro 1997). In some western irrigated corn acreage, groundwater is being mined at a rate 25% faster than the natural recharge of its aquifer (Pimentel 2003).
Do you want to drink,
eat, or drive?
Biodiversity
Every acre of forest and wetland converted to crop land decreases soil biota, insect, bird, reptile, and mammal biodiversity.
Part 4.
Biodiesel: Can we eat enough French Fries?
The idea we could
run our economy on discarded fried food grease is very amusing. For starters, you’d need to feed 7 million
heavy diesel trucks getting less than 8 mpg. Seems like we're all going to need
to eat a lot more French Fries, but if anyone can pull it off, it would be
Americans. Spin it as a patriotic duty and you'd see people out the door before
the TV ad finished, the most popular government edict ever.
Scale. Where’s the
Soy? Biodiesel is not ready for prime time.
Although John Deere is working on fuel additives and technologies to
burn more than 5% accredited biodiesel
(made to ASTM D6751 specifications – vegetable oil does not qualify), that is a long way off. 52 billion gallons of diesel fuel are
consumed a year in the United States, but only 75 million gallons of biodiesel
were produced – two-tenths of one percent of what’s needed. To get the country to the point where
gasoline was mixed with 5 percent biodiesel would require 64 percent of the
soybean crop and 71,875 square miles of land (Borgman 2007), an area the size
of the state of Washington. Soybeans
cause even more erosion than corn.
But not to worry, a
lot is being grown in Brazil, where the Amazon rainforest is being cut down to
grow it.
Biodiesel shortens engine life. Currently, biodiesel concentrations higher than 5 percent can cause “water in the fuel due to storage problems, foreign material plugging filters…, fuel system seal and gasket failure, fuel gelling in cold weather, crankcase dilution, injection pump failure due to water ingestion, power loss, and, in some instances, can be detrimental to long engine life” (Borgman 2007). Biodiesel also has a short shelf life and it’s hard to store – it easily absorbs moisture (water is a bane to combustion engines), oxidizes, and gets contaminated with microbes. It increases engine NOx emissions (ozone) and has thermal degradation at high temperatures (John Deere 2006).
On the cusp of energy descent, we can’t even run the most vital aspect of our economy, agricultural machines, on “renewable” fuels. John Deere tractors can run on no more than 5% accredited biodiesel (Borgman 2007). Perhaps this is unintentionally wise – biofuels have yet to be proven viable, and mechanization may not be a great strategy in a world of declining energy.
Part 5.
If we can’t drink and drive, then burn baby burn.
Energy Crop Combustion.
Wood is a crop, subject to the same issues as corn, and
takes a lot longer to grow. Burning wood
in your stove at home delivers far more energy than the logs would if converted
to biofuels (Pimentel 2005). Wood was
scarce in
Combustion pollution is expensive to control. Some biomass has absorbed heavy metals and other pollutants from sources like coal power plants, industry, and treated wood. Combustion can release chlorinated dioxins, benzofurans, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, cadmium, mercury, arsenic, lead, nickel, and zinc.
Combustion contributes to global warming by adding nitrogen oxides and the carbon stored in plants back into the atmosphere, as well as removes agriculturally essential nitrogen and phosphate (Reijnders 2006)
EROEI in doubt. Combustion plants need to produce, transport, prepare, dry, burn, and control toxic emissions. Collection is energy intensive, requiring some combination of bunchers, skidders, whole-tree choppers, or tub grinders, and then hauling it to the biomass plant. There, the feedstock is chopped into similar sizes and placed on a conveyor belt to be fed to the plant. If biomass is co-fired with coal, it needs to be reduced to ¼ inch or less, and the resulting fly ash may not be marketable to the concrete industry (Bain 2003). Any alkali or chlorine released in combustion gets deposited on the equipment, reducing overall plant efficiencies, as well as accelerating corrosion and erosion of plant components, requiring high replacement and maintenance energy.
Processing materials with different physical properties is energy intensive, requiring sorting, handling, drying, and chopping. It’s hard to optimize the pyrolysis, gasification, and combustion processes if different combustible fuels are used. Urban waste requires a lot of sorting, since it often has material that must be removed, such as rocks, concrete and metal. The material that can be burned must also be sorted, since it varies from yard trimmings with high moisture content to chemically treated wood.
Biomass combustion competes with other industries that want this material for construction, mulch, compost, paper, and other profitable ventures, often driving the price of wood higher than a wood-burning biomass plant can afford. Much of the forest wood that could be burned is inaccessible due to a lack of roads.
Efficiency is lowered if material with a high water content is burned, like fresh wood. Different physical and chemical characteristics in fuel can lead to control problems (Badger 2002). When wet fuel is burned, so much energy goes into vaporizing the water that very little energy emerges as heat, and drying takes time and energy.
Material is limited
and expensive.
Part 6. The problems with Cellulosic Ethanol could
drive you to drink.
Many plants want
animals to eat their seed and fruit to disperse them. Some seeds only germinate after going through
an animal gut and coming out in ready-made fertilizer. Seeds and fruits are easy to digest compared
to the rest of the plant, that's why all of the commercial ethanol and
biodiesel are made from the yummy parts of plants, the grain, rather than
the stalks, leaves, and roots.
But plants don’t
want to be entirely devoured.
They’ve spent hundreds of millions of years perfecting structures that can’t
easily be eaten. Be thankful plants
figured this out, or everything would be mown down to bedrock.
If we ever did figure out how to break down cellulose in our back yard stills, it wouldn't be long before the 6.5 billion people on the planet destroyed the grasslands and forests of the world to power generators and motorbikes (Huber 2006)
Don Augenstein and
John Benemann, who’ve been researching biofuels for over 30 years, are
skeptical as well. According to them, “…severe barriers remain to ethanol
from lignocellulose. The barriers look as daunting as they did 30 years ago”.
Benemann says the EROEI
can be easily determined to be about five times as much energy required to make
cellulosic ethanol than the energy contained in the ethanol.
The success of cellulosic ethanol depends on finding or
engineering organisms that can tolerate extremely high concentrations of
ethanol. Augenstein argues that
this creature would already exist if it were possible. Organisms have had a
billion years of optimization through evolution to develop a tolerance to high
ethanol levels (Benemann 2006). Someone
making beer, wine, or moonshine would have already discovered this creature if
it could exist.
The range of chemical and physical properties in biomass,
even just corn stover (Ruth 2003, Sluiter
2000), is a challenge. It’s hard to make cellulosic ethanol plants
optimally efficient, because processes can’t be tuned to such wide feedstock
variation..
Where will the Billion Tons of Biomass for Cellulosic
Fuels Come From?
The government
believes there is a billion tons of biomass “waste” to make cellulosic
biofuels, chemicals, and generate electricity with.
The
There isn’t enough biomass to replace 30% of our
petroleum use. The potential biomass energy is miniscule
compared to the fossil fuel energy we consume every year, about 105 exa joules
(EJ) in the
Over 25% of the “waste” biomass is expected to come from
280 million tons of corn stover.
Stover is what’s left after the corn grain is harvested. Another 120 million tons will come from soy
and cereal straw (DOE Feedstock Roadmap, DOE Biomass Plan).
There isn’t enough no-till corn stover to harvest. The success of biofuels depends on corn
residues. About 80% of farmers disk corn
stover into the land after harvest. That renders it useless -- the crop residue
is buried in mud and decomposing rapidly.
Only the 20 percent
of farmers who farm no-till will have stover to sell. The DOE Billion Ton vision assumes all farmers are no-till, 75% of
residues will be harvested, and fantasy corn and wheat yields 50% higher
than now are reached (DOE Billion Ton Vision 2005). But none of this corn stover should be
harvested because corn loses more soil than any other crop grown (Pimentel
2007).
Many tons will never be available because farmers won’t
sell any, or much of their residue (certainly not 75%).
Many more tons will be lost due to drought, rain, or loss
in storage.
Only half a percent of a plant can be harvested sustainably every year. Plants only fix a tiny part of solar energy into plant matter annually -- about one-tenth to one-half of one percent new growth in temperate climates.
To prevent erosion, you could only harvest 51 million
tons of corn and wheat residues, not 400 million tons (Nelson, 2002). Other factors, like soil structure, soil
compression, water depletion, and environmental damage weren’t considered.
Fifty one million tons of residue could make about 3.8 billion gallons of
ethanol, less than 1% of our energy needs.
Using corn stover is a
problem, because corn, soy, and other row crops cause 50 times more soil
erosion than sod crops (Sullivan
2004) or more (Al-Kaisi 2000), and corn also uses more water,
insecticides and fertilizers than most crops (Pimentel 2003).
The amount of soy and cereal straw (wheat, oats, etc) is
insignificant. It would be best to use cereal grain straw,
because grains use far less water and cause far less erosion than row crops
like corn and soybeans. But that isn’t
going to happen, because the green revolution fed billions more people by
shortening grain height so that plant energy went into the edible seed, leaving
little straw for biofuels. Often 90% of soybean and cereal straw is grown no-till, but the amount of cereal straw is
insignificant and the soybean residues must remain on the field to prevent
erosion
Energy Crops
Energy crops are
grown specifically for their fuel value.
Tall perennial grasses such as switchgrass and miscanthus are being
proposed as potential energy crops. Although
grasses cause less erosion and need less fertilizer, they still suffer from the
problems that all plants have:
- Most non-food energy crops require as
much water as corn, per unit weight (Pimentel 2007). And they need a lot of water to be processed
into a biofuel. The Great Plains
are the most likely place energy crops would be planted. Yet the Ogallala aquifer is depleting
fast and won’t replenish until after the next ice age. Where’s the water to process tall grass
prairies into biofuels going to come from?
- Plants have low density compared to
fossil fuels. If you try to
palletize or compact them, that takes energy, and they’re still low
density. Hay bales are like
mattresses – you can only get so many on a truck, and you can’t force them
into a pipeline, which would be far less expensive.
- The larger the biorefinery, the better
the economies of scale. Biofuels
need to be created at a large scale for any hope of a positive energy
balance and enough purity to be used in combustion engines, which are
extremely fine-tuned for diesel or gasoline, fuel injection, etc.
- Plants aren’t concentrated – they grow
diffusely and require a great deal of energy to harvest and deliver to the
refinery.
- Plants are hard to store. They rot and
turn into mulch or can catch on fire. Storing them wet adds weight,
leading to higher transportation costs and high water use.
- All plants succumb to pests and
disease. Miscanthus is from
Poor, erodible land. There aren’t enough acres of land to grow significant amounts of energy
crops. Potential energy crop land is
usually poor quality or highly erodible land that shouldn’t be harvested. Farmers are often paid not to farm this
unproductive land. Many acres in
switchgrass are being used for wildlife and recreation.
Few suitable bio-factory sites. Biorefineries can’t be built just anywhere – very few sites could be
found to build switchgrass plants in all of
No energy crop farmers or investors. Farmers won’t grow switchgrass until
there’s a switchgrass plant. Machines to harvest and transport switchgrass
efficiently don’t exist yet (Barrionuevo 2006). The capital to build
switchgrass plants won’t materialize until there are switchgrass farmers. Since “ethanol production using switchgrass
required 50% more fossil energy than the ethanol fuel produced” (Pimentel
2005), investors for these plants will be hard to find.
Energy crops are subject to Liebig’s law of the minimum too. Switchgrass may grow on marginal land, but it hasn’t escaped the need for minerals and water. Studies have shown the more rainfall, the more switchgrass you get, and if you remove switchgrass, you’re going to need to fertilize the land to replace the lost biomass, or you’ll get continually lower yields of switchgrass every time you harvest the crop (Vogel 2002).
Bioinvasive Potential.
These fast-growing disease-resistant plants are potentially bioinvasive,
another kudzu. Bioinvasion costs our
country billions of dollars a year (Bright, 1998). Johnson grass was introduced as a forage
grass and it’s now an invasive weed in many states. Another fast-growing grass, Miscanthus, from
Sugar cane: too
little to import.
Sugar Cane: can’t
grow it here. Although we grow some sugar cane despite tremendous
environmental damage (WWF) in
Sugar cane has been touted as an “all you need is sunshine” plant. But according to the FAO, the nitrogen, phosphate, and potassium requirements of sugar cane are roughly similar to maize (FAO 2004).
Wood ethanol is an
energy sink. Ethanol production
using wood biomass required 57% more fossil energy than the ethanol fuel
produced (Pimentel 2005).
Wood is a nonrenewable resource. Old-growth forests had very dense wood, with a high energy content, but wood from fast-growing plantations is so low-density and low calorie it’s not even good to burn in a fireplace. These plantations require energy to plant, fertilize, weed, thin, cut, and deliver. The trees are finally available for use after 20 to 90 years – too long for them to be considered a renewable fuel (Odum 1996). Nor do secondary forests always come back with the vigor of the preceding forest due to soil erosion, soil nutrition depletion, and mycorrhizae destruction (Luoma 1999).
There’s not enough
wood to fuel a civilization of 300 million people. Over half of
Energy crop limits.
Energy crops may not be sustainable due to water, fertilizer, and harvesting
impacts on the soil (DOE Biomass Roadmap 2005). Like all other monoculture crops, ultimately yields of energy crops will
be reduced due to “pest problems, diseases, and soil degradation” (Giampetro,
1997).
Energy crop monoculture. The “physical and chemical characteristics of feedstocks vary by source, by year, and by season, increasing processing costs” (DOE Feedstock Roadmap). That will encourage the development of genetically engineered biomass to minimize variation. Harvesting economies of scale will mean these crops will be grown in monoculture, just as food crops are. That’s the wrong direction – to farm with less energy there’ll need to be a return to rotation of diverse crops, and composted residues for soil nutrition, pest, and disease resistance.
A way around this would be to spend more on researching how
cellulose digesting microbes tackle different herbaceous and woody
biomass. The ideal energy crop would be
a perennial, tall-grass prairie / herbivore ecosystem (Tilman 2006). Tilman recommends harvesting “all grassland
in the
Farmers aren’t Stupid: They won’t sell their residues
Farmers are some of the smartest people on
earth or they’d soon go out of business.
They have to know everything from soil science to commodity
futures.
Crop production is reduced when residues are removed from
the soil. Why would farmers want to sell
their residues?
Erosion,
water, compression, nutrition.
Harvesting of stover on the scale needed to fuel a cellulosic industry won’t
happen because farmers aren’t stupid, especially the ones who work their own
land. Although there is a wide range of
opinion about the amount of residue that can be harvested safely without
causing erosion, loss of soil nutrition, and soil structure, many farmers will
want to be on the safe side, and stick with the studies showing that 20%
(Nelson, 2002) to 30% (McAloon et al., 2000; Sheehan, 2003) at most can be harvested, not
the 75% agribusiness claims is possible.
Farmers also care about water quality (Lal 1998, Mann et al, 2002). And farmers will decide that permanent soil
compression is not worth any price (Wilhelm 2004). As prices of fertilizer inexorably rise due
to natural gas depletion, it will be cheaper to return residues to the soil
than to buy fertilizer.
Residues are a headache. The further the farmer is from
the biorefinery or railroad, the slimmer the profit, and the less likely a
farmer will want the extra headache and cost of hiring and scheduling many
different harvesting, collection, baling, and transportation contractors for
corn stover.
Residues are used by other industries. Farm managers working for distant owners
are more likely to sell crop residues since they’re paid to generate profits,
not preserve land. But even they will
sell to the highest bidder, which might be the livestock or dairy industries,
furfural factories, hydromulching companies, biocomposite manufacturers, pulp
mills, or city dwellers faced with skyrocketing utility bills, since the high
heating value of residue has twice the energy of the converted ethanol.
Investors
aren’t stupid either. If farmers
can’t supply enough crop residues to fuel the large biorefinery in their
region, who will put up the capital to build one?
Can the biomass be harvested, baled, stored, and
transported economically?
Harvesting. Sixteen ton tractors harvest corn and spit
out stover. Many of these harvesters are
contracted and will continue to collect corn
in the limited harvest time, not stover.
If tractors are still available, the land isn’t wet, snow doesn’t fall,
and the stover is dry, three additional tractor runs will mow, rake, and bale
the stover (Wilhelm 2004). This will
triple the compaction damage to the soil (Troeh 2005), create more
erosion-prone tire tracks, increase CO2 emissions, add to labor costs, and put
unwanted foreign matter into the bale (soil, rocks, baling wire, etc).
So biomass roadmaps
call for a new type of tractor or attachment to harvest both corn and stover in
one pass. But then the tractor would
need to be much larger and heavier, which could cause decades-long or even permanent
soil compaction. Farmers worry that
mixing corn and stover might harm the quality of the grain. And on the cusp of energy descent, is it a
good idea to build an even larger and more complex machine?
If the stover is
harvested, the soil is now vulnerable to erosion if it rains, because there’s
no vegetation to protect the soil from the impact of falling raindrops. Rain also compacts the surface of the soil so
that less water can enter, forcing more to run off, increasing erosion. Water
landing on dense vegetation soaks into the soil, increasing plant growth and
recharging underground aquifers. The
more stover left on the land, the better.
Baling. The
current technology to harvest residues is to put them into bales of hay. Hay is
a dangerous commodity -- it can spontaneously combust, and once on fire, can’t
be extinguished, leading to fire loss and increased fire insurance costs. Somehow the bales have to be kept from
combusting during the several months it takes to dry them from 50 to 15 percent
moisture. A large, well drained, covered
area is needed to vent fumes and dissipate heat. If the bales get wet they will
compost (Atchison 2004).
Baling was developed
for hay and has been adapted to corn stover with limited success. Biorefineries need at least half a million
tons of biomass on hand to smooth supply bumps, much greater than any bale
system has been designed for.
Pelletization is not an option, it’s too expensive. Other options need to be found. (DOE
Feedstock Roadmap)
To get around the
problems of exploding hay bales, wet stover could be collected. The moisture
content needs to be around 60 percent, which means a lot of water will be
transported, adding significantly to the delivery cost.
Storage.
Stover needs to be stored with a moisture content of 15% or less, but it’s
typically 35-50%, and rain or snow during harvest will raise these levels even
higher (DOE Feedstock Roadmap). If it’s
harvested wet anyhow, there’ll be high or complete losses of biomass in storage
(Atchison 2004).
After catastrophic
fires, the pulp industry learned to only use wet feedstock. If residues are stored wet, as in ensilage, a
great deal of R&D will be needed to see if there are disease, pest,
emission, runoff, groundwater contamination, dust, mold, or odor control problems. The amount of water required is unknown. The
transit time must be short, or aerobic microbial activity will damage it. At the storage site, the wet biomass must be
immediately washed, shredded, and transported to a drainage pad under a roof
for storage, instead of baled when drier and left at the farm. The wet residues are heavy, making
transportation costlier than for dry residues, perhaps uneconomical. It can
freeze in the winter making it hard to handle.
If the moisture is too low, air gets in, making aerobic fermentation
possible, resulting in molds and spoilage.
Transportation.
Although a 6,000 dry ton per day biorefinery would have 33% lower costs than a
2,000 ton factory, the price of gas and diesel limits the distance the biofuel
refinery can be from farms, since the bales are large in volume but low in
density, which limits how many bales can be loaded onto a truck and transported
economically.
So the “economy of
scale” achieved by a very large refinery has to be reduced to a 2,000 dry ton
per day biorefinery. Even this smaller
refinery would require 200 trucks per hour delivering biomass during harvest
season (7 x 24), or 100 trucks per day if satellite sites for storage are used. This plant would need 90% of the no-till
crop residues from the surrounding 7,000 square miles with half the
farmers participating. Yet less than 20% of farmers practice
no-till corn and not all of the farmland is planted in corn. When this
biomass is delivered to the biorefinery, it will take up at least 100 acres of
land stacked 25 feet high.
The average stover
haul to the biorefinery would be 43 miles one way if these rosy assumptions all
came true (Perlack 2002). If less than
30% of the stover is available, the average one-way trip becomes 100 miles and
the biorefinery is economically impossible.
There is also a
shortage of truck drivers, the rail system can’t handle any new capacity, and
trains are designed to operate between hubs, not intermodally (truck to train
to truck). The existing transportation system has not changed much in 30 years,
yet this congested, inadequate infrastructure somehow has to be used to
transport huge amounts of ethanol, biomass, and byproducts (Haney 2006).
In Summary: Plants are Hard to Make into Fuels
- Not
enough water for people, industry, and biofuel refineries now. By 2100,
the U.S. Census projects potentially 1.1 billion people in the
- Plants have low density. They’re like big mattresses when you bunch them up into bales. If you try to compact them further by turning them into pellets, it takes so much energy that you’re entering negative energy land.
- Truck transportation is expensive compared to pipelines. You can’t stuff plant mattresses into a pipe – you have to load them onto oil-burning trucks, nor can you load them up with as many as you’d like, because they take up a lot of space.
- Plants grow diffusely across the landscape -- a biorefinery needs plants delivered from the surrounding 7,000 or more square miles for a 2,000 ton/day refinery.
- Every processing step takes energy. Plants must be planted, harvested, delivered, stored, milled, liquefied, heated, saccharified, fermented, evaporated, centrifuged, distilled, scrubbed, dried, stored, and transported to customers.
- Biorefineries need to be enormous for economies of scale --100 acres of hay stacked 25 feet high.
- You can’t do this at home – biofuels need to be pure or combustion engine life may be shortened, and used within 3 months before microbes chew them up. Some of the gasohol made in the 1980's had so much water in it that gasohol got a bad name, that's why it's called ethanol in it's new reincarnation.
- Plants are hard to store. They rot and turn into mulch or can catch on fire. If stored wet, that adds to transportation costs and water use at the storage site.
As a systems architect and engineer, I looked at projects from start to end, trying to identify the failure points.
The Department of Energy Biomass Roadmaps and the Energy Biosciences Institute Proposal have taken a similar approach and identified the barriers to cellulosic fuels.
In business you’re limited by money, in science, you’re limited by the laws of physics and thermodynamics.
When it comes to biofuels, you’re also limited by ecosystems. To grow plants sustainably, the soil ecosystem and water supply need to be taken into account.
All of the steps from A to Z must succeed or a project fails. Just solving the cellulosic issues within the biorefinery won’t do any good if the other steps fail. There are major challenges in harvesting, storing, transporting biomass, and delivering cellulosic fuels to customers as well.
Cellulosic
Biorefineries (see Appendix for more barriers)
There are over 60 barriers to be overcome in making
cellulosic ethanol in Section III of the DOE “Roadmap for Agriculture Biomass
Feedstock Supply in the
“Enzyme Biochemistry. Enzymes that exhibit high thermostability and substantial resistance to sugar end-product inhibition will be essential to fully realize enzyme-based sugar platform technology. The ability to develop such enzymes and consequently very low cost enzymatic hydrolysis technology requires increasing our understanding of the fundamental mechanisms underlying the biochemistry of enzymatic cellulose hydrolysis, including the impact of biomass structure on enzymatic cellulose decrystallization. Additional efforts aimed at understanding the role of cellulases and their interaction not only with cellulose but also the process environment is needed to affect further reductions in cellulase cost through improved production”.
No wonder many of the issues with cellulosic ethanol aren’t
discussed – there’s no way to express the problems in a sound bite.
It may not be possible to reduce the complex cellulose digesting strategies of bacteria and fungi into microorganisms or enzymes that can convert cellulose into ethanol in giant steel vats, especially given the huge physical and chemical variations in feedstock. The field of metagenomics is trying to create a chimera from snips of genetic material of cellulose-digesting bacteria and fungi. That would be the ultimate Swiss Army-knife microbe, able to convert cellulose to sugar and then sugar to ethanol.
There’s also research to replicate termite gut cellulose breakdown. Termites depend on fascinating creatures called protists in their guts to digest wood. The protists in turn outsource the work to multiple kinds of bacteria living inside of them. This is done with energy (ATP) and architecture (membranes) in a system that evolved over millions of years. If the termite could fire the protists and work directly with the bacteria, that probably would have happened 50 million years ago. This process involves many kinds of bacteria, waste products, and other complexities that may not be reducible to an enzyme or a bacteria.
Jay Keasling, Director
of Physical Biosciences at LBNL, proposes to do the above in a synthetic
biology factory. You’d order up the
biological bits you need to create a microbial machine the way electronics
parts are obtained at Fry’s electronics stores. At U.C. Berkeley on April 21,
2007, he said this could also be used to get past the 15% concentration of
ethanol that pickles micro-organisms, which results in a tremendous amount of
energy being used to get the remaining 85% of water out. Or you could use this technology to create a
creature that could convert miscanthus and switchgrass to create biofuels that
can be put in pipelines and burned in diesel engines (Singer 2007).
Biologists roll
their eyes when reductionist physicists pat them on the head and tell little
ol’ biology not to worry, living organisms can be reduced to atoms and enzymes,
just take a piece of algae here, a bit
of fungi or bacteria there and voila – a new creature that produces vast
volumes of biofuels quickly. But
biology is a messy wonderment. Creatures exist within food webs and don’t
reproduce well if surrounded by their own toxic wastes. The research is well worth doing, but public
policy shouldn’t assume synthetic biology is a “slam dunk”.
But meanwhile we’re
stuck with corn and ethanol, which in the end must be delivered to the
customer. Since ethanol can’t be delivered cheaply through pipelines, but must
be transported by truck, rail, or barge (Yacobucci 2003), this is very
expensive for the coastal regions.
Alaska and Hawaii have managed to get out of having to add ethanol to
gasoline, but California’s Senator Feinstein has not been able to do the same.
The whole cellulosic ethanol enterprise falls apart if the energy returned is less than the energy invested or even one of the major stumbling blocks can't be overcome. If there isn’t enough biomass, if the residues can’t be stored without exploding or composting, if the oil to transport low-density residues to biorefineries or deliver the final product is too great, if no cheap enzymes or microbes are found to break down lignocellulose in wildly varying feedstocks, if the energy to clean up toxic byproducts is too expensive, or if organisms capable of tolerating high ethanol concentrations aren’t found, if the barriers in Appendix A can’t be overcome, then cellulosic fuels are not going to happen.
If the obstacles can be overcome, but we lose topsoil, deplete aquifers, poison the land, air, and water, what kind of Pyrrhic victory is that?
Scientists have been trying to solve these issues for over thirty years now.
Nevertheless, this is worthy of research money, but not public funds for commercial refineries until the issues above have been solved. This is the best hope we have for replacing the half million products made from and with fossil fuels, and for liquid transportation fuels when population falls to pre-coal levels.
Part 7.
Where do we go from here?
Subsidies and
Politics: Now, and for the Foreseeable Future, Ethanol Will Only be Made from
Corn
Biofuels from biodiverse, tall grass prairie are far preferable to ethanol from corn and soy, but there are no commercial level cellulosic biorefineries - and we are a long way from being able to deliver cellulosic fuels to customers. Even if all of the barriers to cellulosic fuels could be achieved before oil shocks hit, they’d bankrupt our soils so quickly that there’d be no biomass to feed the maws of the biorefineries.
How come there are over 116 ethanol plants with 79 under construction and 200 more planned? Government subsidies and tax breaks.
Federal and state ethanol subsidies add up to 79 cents per liter (McCain 2003), with most of that going to agribusiness, not farmers. There is also a tax break of 5.3 cents per gallon for ethanol (Wall Street Journal 2002). An additional 51 cents per gallon goes mainly to the oil industry to get them to blend ethanol with gasoline.
In addition to the $8.4 billion per year subsidies for corn and ethanol production, the consumer pays an additional amount for any product with corn in it (Pollan 20005), beef, milk, and eggs, because corn diverted to ethanol raises the price of corn for the livestock industry.
California Senator Feinstein calls ethanol a transfer of wealth to the Midwest, where 99% of ethanol is made. She points out it can't be shipped through gasoline pipelines, only by truck, boat, or rail, which is extremely expensive to transport from the Midwest to California. She notes that any shortfall in supply or manipulation could drive prices even higher (Feinstein 2003, Washington Post 2002).
Coming to a theater near you: Enron Part 2.
The subsidies may never end, because Iowa plays a leading role in who’s selected to be the next president. John McCain has backed off on his criticism of ethanol now that he’s running for president (Birger 2006).
“Once we have a corn-based technology up and running the political system will protect it,” said Lawrence J. Goldstein, a board member at the Energy Policy Research Foundation. “We cannot afford to have 15 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol in 2015, and that’s exactly where we are headed” (Barrionuevo 2007).
Let’s stop the ethanol subsidies and see if this elephant can fly on its own.
Conclusion
President Carter asked us to put our sweaters on, and had plans for a soft landing, but Americans chose Reagans' "Morning in America" and having our military do whatever was necessary to maintain the "non-negotiable" American way of life. Now we’re in for a much harder landing.
Soil is the bedrock of civilization (Perlin 1991, Ponting 1993). Biofuels are not sustainable or renewable. Why would we destroy our topsoil, increase global warming, deplete and pollute groundwater, destroy fisheries, and use more energy than what’s gained to make ethanol? Why would we do this to our children and grandchildren?
Perhaps it’s a combination of pork barrel politics, an uninformed public, short-sighted greedy agribusiness corporations, jobs for the Midwest, politicians getting too large a percent of their campaign money from agribusiness (Lavelle 2007), elected leaders without science degrees, and desperation to provide liquid transportation fuels (Bucknell 1981, Hirsch 2005).
But this madness
puts our national security at risk.
Destruction of topsoil and collateral damage to water, fisheries, and
food production will result in less food to eat or sell for petroleum and
natural gas imports. Diversion of
precious dwindling energy and money to impossible solutions is a threat to our
nations’ future. In an oil-less future,
prime farm land is a nation’s number one resource.
We are upset at
mountain tops being blasted off to produce coal, and the damage done by mining
for metal, yet mining footprints pale in comparison with the hundreds of
millions of acres being mined to grow food. Regardless of the energy crisis, agriculture
needs reforming.
Let's use the limited energy we have left to fix what's
wrong with agriculture.
Fix the unsustainable
and destructive aspects of industrial agriculture. At least some good would
come out of the ethanol fiasco if more attention were paid to how we grow our
food. The effects of soil erosion on crop production have been hidden by
mechanization and intensive use of fossil fuel fertilizers and chemicals on
crops bred to tolerate them. As energy declines,
crop yields will decline as well.
States can play an
important role. California is putting the brakes on coal with Global Warming
bill AB32. This bill should also try to
force needed agricultural reforms by buying only sustainable biofuels from biodiverse
grassland crops to protect our soils and water, plus put more carbon into the
ground.
Jobs. Since part of what’s driving the ethanol insanity is job creation, divert the subsidies and pork barrel money to erosion control and sustainable agriculture. Maybe Iowa will emerge from its makeover looking like Provence, France, and volunteers won’t be needed to hand out free coffee at rest areas along I-80.
Continue to fund cellulosic ethanol research, focusing on how to make 500,000 fossil-fuel-based products (i.e. medicine, chemicals, plastics, etc) and fuel for when population declines to pre-fossil fuel carrying capacity. The feedstock should be from a perennial, tall-grass prairie herbivore ecosystem, not food crops. But don’t waste taxpayer money to build demonstration or commercial plants until most of the research and sustainability barriers have been solved.
Take away the E85 loophole that allows Detroit automakers to ignore CAFE standards and get away with selling even more gas guzzling vehicles (Consumer Reports 2006). Raise the CAFE standards higher immediately. Pass laws to favor low-emission vehicle sales and require all new cars to have energy efficient tires.
There are better, easier ways to stretch out petroleum than adding ethanol to it. Just keeping tires inflated properly would save more energy than all the ethanol produced today. Reducing the maximum speed limit to 55, consumer driving tips, truck stop electrification, and many other measures can save far more fuel in a shorter time than biofuels ever will, far less destructively. Better yet, Americans can bike or walk, which will save energy used in the health care system.
Reform our
non-sustainable agricultural system
- Give integrated pest management and organic agriculture research more funding
- The National Resources Conservation Service (NCRS) and other conservation agencies have done a superb job of lowering the erosion rate since the dustbowl of the 1930’s. Give these agencies a larger budget to further the effort.
- We need to make sure that the budget given to the Natural Resources Conservation Service in the 2007 Farm Bill isn't diverted to corn and ethanol subsidies. The farm bill should have a much larger budget for conservation of land and water.
- To promote land stewardship, change taxes and zoning laws to favor small family farms. This will make possible the “social, economic, and environmental diversity necessary for agricultural and ecosystem stability” (Opie 2000).
- Make the land grant universities follow the directive of the Hatch Act of 1887 to improve the lives of family farmers. Stop funding agricultural mechanization and petrochemical research and start funding how to fight pests and disease with diverse crops, crop rotations, and so on (Hightower 1978).
- Don’t allow construction of homes and businesses on crop land.
- Integrate livestock into the crop rotation.
- Teach family farmers and suburban homeowners how to maximize food production in limited space with Rodale and Biointensive techniques.
- Since less than 1 percent of our elected leaders and their staff have scientific backgrounds, educate them in systems ecology, population ecology, soil, and climate science. So many of the important issues that face us need scientific understanding and judgment.
- Divert funding from new airports, roads, and other future senseless infrastructure towards research in solar, wind, and cellulosic products. We’re at the peak of scientific knowledge and our economic system hasn’t been knocked flat yet by energy shortages – if we don’t do the research now, it may never happen.
- And vote with your fork – buy local, organic food.
- Above all, we need to elect leaders who understand the gravity of the situation and have planned for what to do when oil shocks hit.
There are many institutions and people who have been working on these issues for decades. What we need is a grass roots movement to enact reforms while we still have plentiful energy.
It’s not unreasonable to expect farmers to conserve the soil, since the fate of civilization lies in their hands. But we need to pay farmers for far more than the cost of growing food so they can afford to conserve the land. In an oil-less future, healthy topsoil will be our most important resource.
If we do nothing, dustbowls will return. Erosion and other ecological damage is insidious, it doesn't happen overnight. We should try to manage our soils to last at least two thousand years. There's no excuse not to - we know how to do this.
Responsible politicians need to tell Americans why their love affair with the car can’t continue. Leaders need to make the public understand that there are limits to growth, and an increasing population leads to the “Tragedy of the Commons”. Even if it means they won’t be re-elected. Arguing this amidst the church of development that prevails is like walking into a Bible-belt church and telling the congregation God doesn’t exist, but it must be done.
We are betting the farm on making cellulosic fuels work at a time when our energy and financial resources are diminishing. No matter how desperately we want to believe that human ingenuity will invent liquid or combustible fuels despite the laws of thermodynamics and how ecological systems actually work, the possibility of failure needs to be contemplated.
Living in the moment might be enlightenment for individuals, but for a nation, it’s disastrous. Is there a Plan B if biofuels don’t work? Coal is not an option. CO2 levels over 1,000 ppm could lead to the extinction of 95% of life on the planet (Lynas 2007, Ward 2006, Benton 2003).
Here we are, on the cusp of energy descent, with mechanized petrochemical farms. We import more farm products now than we sell abroad (Rohter 2004). Suburban sprawl destroys millions of acres of prime farm land as population grows every year. We’ve gone from 7 million family farms to 2 million much larger farms and destroyed a deeply satisfying rural way of life.
More people will need to go back to the land during energy descent, so let's start now, and encourage small family farms.
There need to be plans for de-mechanization of the farm economy if liquid fuels aren’t found. There are less than four million horses, donkeys, and mules in America today. According to Bucknell, if the farm economy were de-mechanized, you'd need at least 31 million farm workers and 61 million horses (Bucknell 1981).
We need to start on "Plan B" now in case biofuels aren't invented before oil shocks strike. We don't want to experience the same discontinuities as Cuba (Oxfam 2001) and North Korea (Williams 2000) did.
The population of the United States has grown over 25 percent since Bucknell published Energy and the National Defense. To de-mechanize now, we'd need 39 million farm workers and 76 million horses. The horsepower represented by just farm tractors alone is equal to 400 million horses. It’s time to start increasing horse and oxen numbers, which will leave even less biomass for biorefineries.
If we wait, the consequences will be Stalinesque. You can’t just do this overnight, and with the ownership of land concentrated in so few hands, you’re automatically heading towards feudalism rather than the Jeffersonian ideal our nation was founded on.
We need to transition from petroleum power to muscle power gracefully if we want to preserve democracy. Paul Roberts wonders whether the coming change will be "peaceful and orderly or chaotic and violent because we waited too long to begin planning for it" (Roberts 2004).
We're facing Peak Oil, Peak Natural Gas, Peak Coal, and global warming. As we go down the energy ladder and go up the thermometer, what is the likely carrying capacity of the United States? Is it 100 million (Pimentel 1991) or 250 million (Smil 2000)? Whatever carrying capacity is decided upon, pass legislation to drastically lower immigration and encourage one child families until America reaches this number. Or we can let resource wars, hunger, disease, extreme weather, rising oceans, and social chaos legislate the outcome.
Do you want to eat or drive? Even without growing food for biofuels, crop production per capita is going to go down as population keeps increasing, fossil fuel energy decreases, topsoil loss continues, and aquifers deplete, especially the Ogallala (Opie 2000). Where will the money come from to buy imported oil and natural gas if we don’t have food to export?
There is no such thing as “waste” biomass. As we go down the energy ladder, plants will increasingly be needed to stabilize climate, provide food, medicine, shelter, furniture, heat, light, cooking fuel, clothing, etc.
Biofuels are a threat to the long-term national security of our nation. Is Dr. Strangelove in charge, with a plan to solve defense worries by creating a country that’s such a salty polluted desert, no one would want to invade us? Why is Dr. Strangelove spending the last bits of energy in Uncle Sam’s pocket on moonshine? Perhaps he’s thinking that we’re all going to need it, and the way things are going, he’s probably right.
Appendix
Department of Energy Biofuel Roadmap
Barriers
This is a partial summary of biofuel barriers from Department of Energy. Unless otherwise footnoted, the problems with biomass fuel production are from the Multi Year Program Plan DOE Biomass Plan or Roadmap for Agriculture Biomass Feedstock Supply in the United States. (DOE Biomass Plan, DOE Feedstock Roadmap).
Resource and
Sustainability Barriers
1) Biomass feedstock will ultimately be limited by finite amounts of land and water
2) Biomass production may not be sustainable because of impacts on soil compaction, erosion, carbon, and nutrition.
3) Nor is it clear that perennial energy crops are sustainable, since not enough is known about their water and fertilizer needs, harvesting impacts on the soil, etc.
4) Farmers are concerned about the long-term effects on soil, crop productivity, and the return on investment when collecting residues.
5) The effects of biomass feedstock production on water flows and water quality are unknown
6) The risks of impact on biodiversity and public lands haven’t been assessed.
Economic Barriers (or
Investors Aren’t Stupid)
1) Biomass can’t compete economically with fossil fuels in transportation, chemicals, or electrical generation.
2) There aren’t any credible data on price, location, quality and quantity of biomass.
3) Genetically-modified energy crops worry investors because they may create risks to native populations of related species and affect the value of the grain.
4) Biomass is inherently more expensive than fossil fuel refineries because
a) Biomass is of such low density that it can’t be transported over large distances economically. Yet analysis has shown that biorefineries need to be large to be economically attractive – it will be difficult to find enough biomass close to the refinery to be delivered economically.
b) Biomass feedstock amounts are unpredictable since unknown quantities will be lost to extreme weather, sold to non-biofuel businesses, rot or combust in storage, or by used by farmers to improve their soil.
c) Ethanol can’t be delivered in pipelines due to likely water contamination. Delivery by truck, barge, and rail is more expensive. Ethanol is a hazardous commodity which adds to its transportation cost and handling.
d) Biomass varies so widely in physical and chemical composition, size, shape, moisture levels, and density that it’s difficult and expensive to supply, store, and process.
e) The capital and operating costs are high to bale, stack, palletize, and transport residues
f) Biomass is more geographically dispersed, and in much more ecologically sensitive areas than fossil resources.
g) The synthesis gas produced has potentially higher levels of tars and particulates than fossil fuels.
h) Biomass plants can’t benefit from the same large-scale cost savings of oil refineries because biomass is too dispersed and of low density.
5) Consumers won’t buy ethanol because it costs more than gasoline and contains 34% less energy per gallon. Consumer reports wrote they got the lowest fuel mileage in recent years from ethanol due to its low energy content compared to gasoline, effectively making ethanol $3.99 per gallon. Worse yet, automakers are getting fuel-economy credits for every E85 burning vehicle they sell, which lowers the overall mileage of auto fleets, which increases the amount of oil used and lessens energy independence. (Consumer Reports)
Equipment and Storage
Barriers
1) There are no harvesting machines to harvest the wide range of residue from different crops, or to selectively harvest components of corn stover.
2) Current biomass harvesting and collection methods can’t handle the many millions of tons of biomass that need to be collected.
3) How to store huge amounts of dry biomass hasn’t been figured out.
4) No one knows how to store and handle vast quantities of different kinds of wet biomass. You can lose it all since it’s prone to spoiling, rotting, and spontaneous combustion
Preprocessing
Barriers
1) We don’t even know what the optimum properties of biomass to produce biofuels are, let alone have instruments to measure these unknown qualities.
2) Incoming biomass has impurities that have to be gotten out before grinding, compacting, and blending, or you may damage equipment and foul chemical and biological processes downstream.
3) Harvest season for crops can be so short that it will be difficult to find the time to harvest cellulosic biomass and pre-process and store a year of feedstock stably.
4) Cellulosic biomass needs to be pretreated so that it’s easier for enzymes to break down. Biomass has evolved for hundreds of millions of years to avoid chemical and biological degradation. How to overcome this reluctance isn’t well enough understood yet to design efficient and cost-effective pre-treatments.
5) Pretreatment reactors are made of expensive materials to resist acid and alkalis at high temperatures for long periods. Cheaper reactors or low acid/alkali biomass is needed.
6) To create value added products, ways to biologically, chemically, and mechanically split components off (fractionate) need to be figured out.
7) Corn mash needs to be thoroughly sterilized before microorganisms are added, or a bad batch may ensue. Bad batches pollute waterways if improperly disposed of. (Patzek Dec 2006).
Cellulosic Ethanol
Showstoppers
1) The enzymes used in cellulosic biomass production are too expensive.
2) An enzyme that breaks down cellulose must be found that isn’t disabled by high heat or ethanol and other end-products, and other low cost enzymes for specific tasks in other processes are needed.
3) If these enzymes are found, then cheap methods to remove the impurities generated are needed. Impurities like acids, phenols, alkalis, and salts inhibit fermentation and can poison chemical catalysts.
4) Catalysts for hydrogenation, hydrgenolysis, dehydration, upgrading pyrolysis oils, and oxidation steps are essential to succeeding in producing chemicals, materials, and transportation fuels. These catalysts must be cheap, long-lasting, work well in fouled environments, and be 90% selective.
5) Ethanol production needs major improvements in finding robust organisms that utilize all sugars efficiently in impure environments.
6) Key to making the process economic are cheap, efficient fermentation organisms that can produce chemicals and materials. Wald writes that the bacteria scientists are trying to tame come from the guts of termites, and they’re much harder to domesticate than yeast was. Nor have we yet convinced “them to multiply inside the unfamiliar confines of a 2,000-gallon stainless-steel tank” or “control their activity in the industrial-scale quantities needed” (Wald 2007).
7) Efficient aerobic fermentation organisms to lower capital fermentation costs.
8) Fermentation organisms that can make 95% pure fermentation products.
9) Cheap ways of removing impurities generated in fermentation and other steps are essential since the costs now are far too high.
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Solar
Solar generation is about .06
percent -- six hundredths of 1 percent (.0006) -- of renewable energy
consumption in the
According to Hoffert, in
Science (
·
Primary power
consumption today is 12 TW, of which 85% is fossil-fueled. The electrical equivalent of 10 TW would require
a PV array of 85,000 square miles, more than all the land in
·
Even if PV and
wind turbine manufacturing rates increased as required, existing grids could
not manage the loads. Present hub-and-spoke networks were designed for central
power plants, ones that are close to users. Such networks need to be
reengineered.
At the rate of production
Hoffert cites above, it would take over a million years to produce enough PV
cells. The land required, 85,000 square
miles, would be unavailable for ranching, farming, forests, and might cause
unknown climate changes and certainly a large environmental impact.
The areas used for centralized
solar farms are limited geographically to the desert areas of the Southwest,
and would require very expensive transmission investments.
While the sun is shining,
you need to store the energy in batteries (which require other intermediary
components) so you can use the energy later and in a more powerful and
concentrated way. And you need to
deliver the energy to customers. The solar energy to build and maintain the
grid, -- the batteries, inverters, generators, substations, transmission lines,
and so on, exceeds the energy these components will produce in their lifetime.
Photovoltaic Solar
PV isn’t ready yet. NREL
(National Renewable Energy Lab) lists the technical barriers below: PV Roadmap.
U.S. Dept of Energy National Center for Photovoltaics.
- Lack of widespread availability of low-cost
feedstock and packaging materials
- Performance and manufacturing costs of
high-efficiency silicon, thin-film, and concentrator cells and modules
- Improved reliability of modules and, especially,
of balance-of-systems components
- Lack of standard products, packages, and service
offerings
- Need for
- Lack of knowledge of high-throughput processes
- Lack of standard module electrical/ mechanical
"interfaces"
Photovoltaic (PV)
performance in the real world is often much less than what the manufacturer
claims. There are losses due to:
- Panels accumulate dust.
- In winter, the angle of the sun in winter is
lower, so sunlight has to travel a greater distance through the
atmosphere.
- The further north you go the more solar power
diminishes.
- The air is often clogged with dust, pollution,
or water vapor.
- PV takes a beating under the sun all day, the
thin-film variety, which it’s possible to produce in large quantities, and
efficiency declines, producing less electricity.
Large-scale solar PV farms
need to be located in desert areas, where there’s very little water to rinse
off the dust that accumulates. Sand
storms would scour the surfaces of panels, leading to reduced power and
efficiency.
The amount of energy
embodied in the full solar structure is far more than PV panels. It’s the energy required to build the PV
manufacturing plant, to mine and deliver the silicon and copper, solar tracking
systems, aluminum frames, concrete foundations, transmission subsystems, inverters,
batteries, cement platforms, cabling, transformers, control systems, storage
subsystems, backup power, the energy costs of delivering the PV components to
the site where they’ll be used.
Photovoltaic cells are made
from silicon not pure enough to make computer chips. Computers need one of the most pure
substances ever made – silicon that’s 99.9999999% pure, or “seven nines” of
purity. That means if you had jars with
ten million pennies, only one could be a misplaced nickel. Solar panels require less purity – “six
nines”, which means you could have ten nickels.
The solar industry feeds off the rejected scraps. Only a few firms make purified silicon, because
these manufacturing facilities cost over two hundred million dollars and three
years to build.
Tom Abate.
To make silicon this pure, a
lot of energy is used. Quartz rocks must be ground up and then heated to 2500
degrees Farenheit. It takes 800 kWh of electrical energy to make a 200-mm
semiconductor wafer. If we assume this
cell has an efficiency of 10% and don’t even count the energy to deliver it to
a site or store the energy and retrieve it at 100% efficiency, it will take 145
years to produce as much energy as was used making it. (Assuming the PV cell produces an average of
20 watts per square meter of surface, and the cell is .031 square meters, which
makes it capable of producing .63 watts.
In one year, it can generate 5 kWh of energy).
[Huber and Mills] Peter W.
Huber and Mark P. Mils, "No Limits: Energy and Technology," (Banc of
The most efficient solar
cells are made from expensive materials.
No one has yet figured out how to build very efficient PV from cheap
material. Cheap, thin, PV has a short
lifespan as it grows less efficient while breaking down in the sun.
The direct current generated
by solar cells can’t power a typical household’s appliances. First it has to be converted by an inverter
to alternating current. For a home to be
completely self-sufficient, a battery bank is required. Acid and hydrogen gas batters are heavy,
expensive, and potentially dangerous.
A PV plant that could
produce 5.5 TWh of power (what the
Ted Trainer estimates that
building a PV power plant would cost at
least 48 times as much as building a coal power plant. 2003.
Renewable Energy: What are the Limits?
If the PV panels use a
tracking system to capture as much sunlight as possible as it arcs across the
sky, it may not track properly, and the energy to build and to move the solar
panels to track the sun must be subtracted from the energy gains.
PV for home use is still far
too expensive for the average household to afford, and very complex to maintain
and repair. And a PV system isn’t merely
PV panels, there are many other components involved, such as Charge
Controllers, Inverters, Fuse Blocks, devices to feed the power to the grid, or
if it’s an off-grid system, batteries and an oil-based generator to keep the
batteries from being drained. All of
these products can break down, requiring maintenance or replacement, and
require energy to build.
The amount of PV that can be
effectively used on buildings is limited by how much of the roof faces south
and whether trees shade the roof.
Non-PV Solar Farms
Solar farms of any kind are
vulnerable to high winds, hail, tornadoes, storms, hurricanes, and sand storms
scouring the mirrors. Large amounts of
water are needed to rinse off the mirrors.
Howard Hayden estimates
Solar Two would need to take up 127 square miles to produce as much energy as a
1000-MWe power plant does in one year. (Solar Fraud, p. 187).
According to Robert Bradley
Jr, Solar One was very disappointing.
This solar thermal 10-megawatt project was mainly funded by the Dept of
Energy and run by Southern California Edison for high demand periods. It closed in 1988 after six years. The
facility was so experimental and expensive that no cost per kwh was publicly
revealed (Robert Bradley, Conversation with Mark Skowronski, former project
director, Solar One Project, Southern California Edison, January 19, 1996). Robert Bradley. Why Renewable Energy is not cheap and not
green. NCPA.
Here’s what Bradley has to
say about Solar Two, a $48 million, 10-megawatt demonstration project that
began producing electricity in 1996: “In
place of a parabolic dish, this project uses a receiver tower where the
concentrated heat from the field mirrors (called heliostats) is converted to
electricity. Its $4,000 per kilowatt installed cost -- which would have been as
much as $14,000 more per kilowatt if Solar One's equipment had not been
utilized -- is still between five and 10 times greater than a gas-fired plant
under current technology. An annual
operating cost of $3 million virtually ensures a shutdown in 1999, the year
federal subsidies are scheduled to terminate”. Robert
Bradley. Why Renewable Energy is not
cheap and not green. NCPA.
“Solar Two looks good on
paper, and it is expected to provide steady baseload electricity as well as
late afternoon peaking capacity, but the future of all the central solar
generators is in doubt. They are expensive to build, their very scale escalates
financial risks -- as with nuclear power -- and their massive height (in excess
of 200 meters) may attract opposition”. Christopher Flavin and Nicholas
Lenssen, Power Surge, p. 143.
Solar Two took up quite a
bit of land for the power being generated.
There were 1,900 mirrored panels, each one over 100 square yards, and
the results were only one megawatt per 17 acres of capacity. A natural gas facility taking up that much
space would generate 150 times as much power.
Robert Bradley. Why Renewable Energy is not cheap and not
green. NCPA.
Central-station solar
requires between five and 17 acres per megawatt, and more than 1,000 times the
material of a gas-fired power plant. A
1,000 MW solar plant needs 35,000 tons of aluminum, 2 million tons of concrete,
7,500 tons of copper, 600,000 tons of steel, 75,000 tons of glass, 1,500 tons
of chromium and titanium, and other materials.
The energy that goes into the
construction of a solar thermal-electric plant is, in fact, so large that it
raises serious questions of whether the energy will ever be paid back. (Petr Beckmann. 1979. Why
"Soft" Technology Will Not Be
Orbiting Solar
- To make enough power to replace the10 trillion
watts of power we use would require about 660 space solar power arrays,
each about the size of
- Futron estimates it “would take about $42
billion in launch vehicle costs to put a 3,055-ton satellite in the
geosynchronous orbit, and another $4.2 billion for every refueling run.
That is just for one 2,500-megawatt satellite”. Ron Patterson.
- “What happens when the triple redundant onboard
mission computer allows the downlink beam to drift off target by a few
degrees, slewing the beam across the countryside adjacent to the ground
station and barbequing same with a few gigawatts of microwave radiation ? It is also difficult / impossible to maintain against the backdrop of a
global decline in energy availability and the concomitant economic
dislocation imposed by same. Keeping the flight hardware operating at peak
efficiency would let's just say require 2 shuttle flights a year”. Mark Petrie.
Conclusion
Plants have spent billions
of years perfecting solar power, and yet they’re only able to use a small
fraction of the suns energy. Is it
perhaps a big grandiose to think we can invent better solar machines in a few decades
than evolution accomplished over billions of years?
Solar energy is renewable,
but the equipment to implement solar energy is not renewable. It is built with fossil fuels from mining and
fabrication to delivery. The weighty
infrastructure to harvest solar radiation would be a parasite on the remaining
fossil fuel, upon which it is utterly dependent, and would subsist only as long
as its “host” fossil fuels survived.
Solar power would be most
effectively used in new home construction, or retrofitting older homes to be as
“passively solar” as possible, so they remain cool in the day and warm at night
to minimize the need for heating or air conditioning. Fifteenth century stone homes with shutters
require far less energy to heat and cool than shoddily built McMansions and
manufactured homes (“trailers”) in the
Despite all of my hazing of
solar power, if there is ever a
Wind
Like solar, wind accounts
for only a tiny fraction of renewable energy consumption in the
Globally we use about 12
terawatts of energy a year. There’s 85
terawatts of wind, but most of it is over the ocean (thus impractical from an
infrastructure cost/benefit point of view).
When you capture wind in a
windmill, you can’t get any of the wind above the windmill, so you can really
only capture a very small part of the wind that’s blowing.
The wind needs to be at
least force level 4 (13-18 mph) for as much of the year as possible to make it
remotely economically possible. This
means that a great deal of land is not practical for the purpose.
Much of the land in the
Wind varies greatly
depending on the weather. Often it hardly blows at all during some seasons.
We don’t have EROEI-positive
batteries to store energy and concentrate it enough to do useful work and
generate power when the wind isn’t blowing.
Wind surges, dies, stops,
starts, so it has to be modulated in order to be usable by power companies, and
ultimately, homes and businesses. This
modulation means that the power grid can only use a maximum of 10% of its power
from wind, or the network becomes too unstable and uncontrollable. Because of this problem, even windmills are
built to capture wind only at certain speeds, so when the wind is light or too
strong, power is not generated.
For example, in 1994,
If the best possible wind
strip along the coast between San Francisco and LA were covered with the
maximum possible number of windmills (an area about 300 miles long by one mile
deep) you’d get enough wind, when it was blowing, to replace only one of the
dozens of power plants in California. Hayden. Solar Fraud.
A wind farm takes up 30 to
200 times the space of a gas plant (Paul Gipe, Wind Energy Comes of Age, p.
396). A 50 megawatt wind farm can take
up anywhere from two to twenty-five square miles (Proceedings of National
Avian-Wind Power Planning Meeting, p. 11).
Wind farms require vast
amounts of steel and concrete, which in terms of mining, fabrication, and
transportation to the site represent a huge amount of fossil fuel energy. The Zond 40-45 megawatt wind farm is composed
of 150 wind turbines weighing 35 tons each -- over 10 million pounds.
There’s been a great deal of
NIMBYism preventing windmills from being built so far. Some of the objections are visual blight,
bird killing, noise, and erosion from service roads.
The 1997 US EIA/DOE study
(2002) came to the remarkable conclusion that "…many non-technical wind
cost adjustment factors … result in economically viable wind power sites on
only 1% of the area which is otherwise technically available…"
According to the American Wind Energy
Association, these are the challenges of small windmills: they're too
expensive for most people, there's insufficient product reliability, lack of
consumer protection from unscrupulous suppliers, most local jurisdictions limit
the height of structures to 35 feet (wind towers must be at least 60 feet high
and higher than objects around them like trees, etc), utilities make it hard
and discourage people from connecting to the grid, the inverters that modify
the wildly fluctuating wind voltages into 60-cycle AC are too expensive, and
they're too noisy.
Large scale wind farms need
to "overcome significant barriers":
Costs overall are too high, and windmills in lower wind speed areas need
to become more cost effective. Low wind
speed areas are 20 times more common than high wind areas, and five times
closer to the existing electrical distribution systems. Improvement is needed in integrating
fluctuating wind power into the electrical grid with minimal impact on cost and
reliability. Offshore wind facilities
cost more to install, operate, and maintain than onshore windmills. NREL
Fusion
Fusion is not likely to work
out, yet it is the only possible energy source that could replace fossil fuels
(Science).
Time was wasted over where
to site the ITER fusion project, and if all goes well with construction, it
won’t be built until 2014. Then another
twenty years of research are required, with no guarantee of a successful fusion
model to build a power plant with in the end.
Many physicists wish that other approaches to developing fusion had been
taken, they don’t believe that ITER is likely to work out.
Congressman Roscoe Bartlett
(R-MD) puts it best: “…hoping to solve our energy problems with fusion is a bit
like you or me hoping to solve our personal financial problems by winning the
lottery. That would be real nice. I think the odds are somewhere near the same.
I am about as likely to win the lottery as we are to come to economically
feasible fusion.”
Richard Wolfson, in
"Nuclear Choices: A Citizen's Guide to Nuclear Technology" has this
problem with fusion: "But in the long run, fusion itself could bring on
the ultimate climactic crisis. The energy released in fusion would not
otherwise be available on Earth; it would represent a new input to the global
energy flow. Like all the rest of the global energy, fusion energy would
ultimately become heat that Earth would have to radiate into space. As long as
humanity kept its energy consumption a tiny fraction of the global energy flow,
there would be no major problem. But history shows that human energy
consumption grows rapidly when it is not limited by shortages of fuel. Fusion
fuel would be unlimited, so our species might expand its energy consumption to
the point where the output of our fusion reactors became significant relative
to the global input of solar energy. At that point Earth's temperature would
inevitably rise. This long-term criticism of fusion holds for any energy source
that could add to Earth's energy flow even a few percent of what the Sun
provides. Only solar energy itself escapes this criticism". page 274
Unlimited energy would lead
to unlimited human population growth which already is leading to depletion of
many other things besides fossil fuels, such as water, topsoil, fisheries,
forests, etc. In fact, fossil fuel
depletion may not be the tipping point of ecological disaster – the burning of
it has changed the chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans, which could bring on
sudden climate change and extreme weather: another ice age, droughts and
floods, powerful hurricanes and storms – perhaps even another Permian-level
extinction, with 90% of species vanishing (including us). The past 10,000 years have had the most
stable weather in the past 250,000 years, which allowed agriculture to be
invented, the foundation of any civilization above the hunter-gatherer
level.
Energy
Efficiency And Population Growth
Energy efficiency is always
mentioned as a “solution.” But
efficiency without a reduction in population cannot succeed. Immigration or other forms of population
growth will negate any gains made through efficiency. This is known by some as The Jevons Paradox.
Since one of the main problems with fossil fuel decline is that food production
will also decline, the need to reduce population growth is the most critical
and important next step our society can undertake. This is also the least likely issue to be
addressed by environmental groups or politicians.
Geothermal
- Only a few urban areas are near potential
sources such as volcanoes,
- Maintenance costs are high because the steam is
corrosive and deposits minerals, which clogs pipes and destroys valves.
- When you extract energy from just about anything
it decreases, the same is true for geothermal. So you endlessly need to keep looking
for more prospects. For example,
the “Geysers” area of
- Geothermal areas need to be recharged with huge
amounts of water, and this water isn’t always available.
- We need a breakthrough in materials that won’t
melt to drill deeply enough to get significant power in non-geothermal areas.
- You can lose a significant amount of steam
because the water you pour down the hole is so hot it fractures rocks and
escapes into cracks before it can return up the steam vent. Over time, less and less steam for power
generation is produced.
- If you wanted to tap the heat without any
geothermal activity, it becomes energy intensive, because you have to
drill much deeper (geothermal sources are already near the surface), the
rock below has to be fractured (which it already is in geothermal regions)
to release steam, and fracturing and keeping the rock fractured takes far
more ongoing energy than the initial drilling.
- No one has figured out how to do hot dry rock
economically – time’s running out.
- Even if Geodynamics succeeds in scaling their
experiments into a real geothermal power plant, it will in huge part be
due to the location: "This is
the best spot in the world, a geological freak," Geodynamics managing
director Bertus de Graaf told Reuters. "It's really quite
serendipitous, the way the elements -- temperature, tectonics, insulating
rocks -- have come together here."
Wave Energy
Around thirty wave energy
ventures have failed in recent years.
The
“The basic problem with using wave energy to
generate electricity via turbines and the like is that the primary energy
source in the waves has a low potential energy that is also variable with the
weather – only a small hydraulic head of 2 or 3 meters. Hence large volumes of water have to be
processed which means large structures relative to power output. Furthermore,
it is intrinsically difficult to get a high and consistent energy conversion efficiency
to electricity from potential energy in water elevated by waves. There is a threshold potential energy level
for such processes to be viable. I think
getting electricity from waves on any scale is not worth pursuing for these
reasons”.
Brian
Fleay.
Some of the problems that
need to be overcome to make wave power viable:
“cost reduction, efficiency
and reliability improvements, identification of suitable sites, interconnection
with the utility grid, better understanding of the impacts of the technology on
marine life and the shoreline; and demonstration of the ability of the
equipment to survive in the marine environment, as well as weather effects,
over the life of the facility”. 7 May
2003. Hawaii Economic Development Department study.
It would take
“The trouble with wave
energy is that it's even more variable than wind energy, in terms of the
difference between average conditions and those in which most of the power is
present. And no design that's been investigated is very good at capturing a
very large fraction of the energy over a range of wave conditions. If they're
designed to efficiently capture wave energy in "average" sea conditions,
they'll be totally overwhelmed in high sea conditions. If they're designed for
efficient energy capture in high sea conditions, they'll be almost totally
insensitive to the energy present in average conditions. The "Wave
Dragon" design is interesting, in that its floatation height can be varied
to suit wave conditions. However, it only captures a modest percentage of the
wave energy at any sea condition. More than half would run back down the
incline and be dissipated as turbulence”.
Roger
Arnold.
It would take about 81 miles
of wave machines to produce as much power as a typical power plant (1000 MW). Even
if you built wind machines as far north as
Tidal Energy
Tidal power work a bit like
dams, directing falling water through turbines.
Unfortunately, the areas where there’s high enough tides to generate
meaningful amounts of power occur in far northern latitudes, far from any
cities that could use the power. The
infrastructure requires massive dams and turbines, which need to cope with
corrosive sea water. Potential
environmental issues are flooding of wetlands and harming marine life.
You’d only get power twice a
day at high tide.
Other Sources of Power
Perpetual Motion. Robert Park.
Playground. Mike Wendland. 3 Mar 3, 2003. Kiddie
Power.
Soap. Michael Steen.
Sugar. Teresa Riordan.
Thermal depolymerization. Garbage in, less garbage out (as
fuel) is an energy sink as well as a perpetual motion machine.
Tires-to-oil. Jeff Clark. 2 May 2000. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/energyresources/message/715
Tornados.
manure, turkey guts, etc.
Emergy – Embodied Solar
Energy
This should have been at the
top, but it’s difficult to explain. Here’s Bruce Thomson’s definition:
“A
solar embodied joule (sej) is one joule of ancient sunshine falling on the
earth millions of years ago. The concept enables us to compare different fuels
in terms of sun fall needed to produce them in the future when our underground
stores of energy have all run out.
We
are particularly interested in discovering whether technologies like windmills,
solar photovoltaic plants, or other energy generation technologies will
actually, in the future, deliver more energy in their whole-of-life than they
require to create, maintain, and dispose of them.
It
takes 50,000 joules of sunshine falling on plant material in ancient times to
create the fossil fuel that today delivers one joule of energy in your
fireplace or your car.
When
you use the same fossil fuel to create electricity, the efficiency is not 100%.
It works out that 170,000 joules of original sunshine are needed to deliver one
joule of fossil-fuel based electric heating in your fireplace.
That's
what we mean when we say that the fuel "quality" (that is, the
particular type of fuel), is important when trying to determine whether a
desired technology is in fact sustainable in a non-fossil fuel future.
When
we are adding up the "energy inputs" to the desired technology, we
have to use the 50,000 multiplier for each joule of oil or coal or natural gas,
but we have to use the 170,000 multiplier for each joule of fossil-based
electricity we consume.
Once
we have calculated the embodied ancient sunshine joules correctly for each type
of input energy, then we can compare that with the output energy to see if we
truly get more out than what went into it.
The
fatal mistake in almost all net energy calculations in today’s literature, is
that people totally disregard the multipliers.
They
simply assume there will be joules of fossil fuel available, and count them in
as single joules, without any thought that it takes 50,000 joules of solar
energy to actually produce those fossil fuels.”
This is also a reason why
biofuels are so energy intensive to make – you’re trying to do the work of
condensing the energy in plant matter quickly, it’s inherently energy
intensive.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/energyresources/message/
numbers:
177 468 482 507 553 716 747 1357 1404 1421 1483 2202 2220 3246 3325
5091 18267 20272 20310 20705 28205 32340
33737 35178 36115 36263
36296 36786 37385 37404 37533 38310
38327 47224 48175 48207 52180 55977 61792 62259 68027 85455 20343 23960 70715
i.e.: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/energyresources/message/177
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergy
Conclusion
We all know there’s a
hurricane coming, we can talk about whether it’s likely to miss us or not, and
if we can divert it by dropping billions of whirligigs into the vortex, but
let’s discuss it while we put up the storm shutters.
You’re the most bright,
aware people on the planet, your community is going to need you when times get
harder.
And it would be terribly
unfair if superstitious scientifically-illiterate TV-drugged couch potatoes somehow
made it through the Darwinian selection ahead, and you, who had advance
warning, didn’t.
References
Non-technical
Challenges
Howard Bucknell III. 1981.
Energy and the National Defense. 1981 University Press of
Everything
- Martin Hoffert, et al 2002 Advanced
Technology Paths to Global Climate Stability: Energy for a Greenhouse
Planet, Vol 298
- Howard Hayden. 2002. The Solar Fraud: Why Solar Energy Won't Run the World.
- Howard T. Odum. 1995. Environmental Accounting: Emergy and Environmental Decision Making.
John Wiley
- Ted Trainer. 2003. Renewable
Energy: What are the Limits?
Population
- Garrett Hardin. 1995. Living
Within Limits: Ecology, Economics, and Population Taboos. Oxford
University Press
- Roy Beck & Leon Kolankiewicz. The
Environmental Movement’s Retreat From Advocating U.S. Population
Stabilization (1970-1998). The years surrounding 1970 marked the
coming of age of the modern environmental movement. As that movement approaches its fourth
decade, perhaps the most striking change is the virtual abandonment by
national environmental groups of
- Garrett Hardin.
1999. The Ostrich Factor: Our
Population Myopia.
- Virginia Abernethy. 2000. Population
Politics. Insight Books.
Fossil Fuels and
Food
- David & Marshall Fisher
"The Nitrogen Bomb"
April, 2001 www.discover.com
- David Pimentel "Food,
Energy, and Society" 1996 University
Press of
- John Gever "Beyond Oil:
The Threat to Food and Fuel in the Coming Decades" 1991 University Press of
Coal
- Mark Clayton.
Tar/Oil sand
- Alfred J. Cavallo May/June 2005 Oil:
Caveat empty.
Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists pp. 16-18 (vol. 61, no. 03)
- Brendan I. Koerner July 2004. The
Trillion-Barrel Tar Pit.
- Marianne Lavelle
- Gal Luft. July
2003. Can
Canadian sands Replace Arabia’s? Energypulse.
Shale
- Randy Udall, Steve Andrews. The
Illusive Bonanza: Oil Shale in
- S. Raabe.
- J.T. Bartis, T LaTourrette. 2005.
Oil
Shale Development in the United States. RAND Corporation
Methane Hydrates
- Michael J. Benton. 2003. When
Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time. Thames
& Hudson.
- BBC.
- Permian-Triassic
Extinction Event
- Damian
Carrington .
- Office
of Naval Research.
Hydrogen
(1) Michael F. Jacobson Waiter, please hold the hydrogen
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/09/08/EDGRQ8KVR31.DTL
(2) Martin I.Hoffert, et al "Advanced Technology Paths to Global Climate Stability:
Energy for a
Greenhouse Planet" SCIENCE VOL 298
(3) Joseph J. Romm The Hype About Hydrogen: Fact & Fiction in the Race to Save the
Climate 2004
(4) Howard Hayden The Solar Fraud: Why Solar Energy Won't Run the World
(5) D.Simbeck and E.Chang Hydrogen Supply: Cost Estimate for Hydrogen Pathways
Scoping Analysis National Renewable Energy Lab
http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy03osti/32525.pdf
(6)
http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/renewable_energy/page.cfm?pageID=84
(7) What's in a Gallon of Gas? http://www.discover.com/issues/apr-04/rd/discover-data/
(8) David & Marshall Fisher The Nitrogen Bomb www.discover.com April 2001
(9) Vaclav Smil Scientific American Jul 1997 Global Population & the Nitrogen Cycle
(10) Julian Darley
High
(11) Rocks in your Gas Tank http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2003/17apr_zeolite.htm
(12) fill'er up—with hydrogen Mechanical Engineering Magazine
http://www.memagazine.org/backissues/feb02/features/fillerup/fillerup.html
(13) Wade A. Amos Costs of Storing and Transporting Hydrogen
http://www.eere.energy.gov/hydrogenandfuelcells/pdfs/25106.pdf
(14) Omar A. El kebir, Andrzej Szummer Comparison of hydrogen embrittlement of
stainless steels and nickel-base alloys International Journal of Hydrogen Energy
Volume: 27, Issue: 7-8 July - August, 2002
(15) Fuel Cell Engine Safety
Energy http://www.avt.nrel.gov/pdfs/fcm06r0.pdf
(16) Dr. Joseph Romm Testimony for the Hearing Reviewing the Hydrogen Fuel and
FreedomCAR Initiatives Submitted to the House Science Committee
http://www.house.gov/science/hearings/full04/mar03/romm.pdf
(17) Ulf Bossel and Baldur Eliasson Energy and the Hydrogen Economy
www.methanol.org/pdfFrame.cfm?pdf=HydrogenEconomyReport2003.pdf
(18) National Hydrogen Energy Roadmap Production, Delivery, Storage, Conversion,
Applications, Public Education and Outreach
http://www.eere.energy.gov/hydrogenandfuelcells/pdfs/national_h2_roadmap.pdf
(19) Dan Neil Rumble
Seat :
http://www.latimes.com/la-danneil-101503-pulitzer,0,7911314.story
(20)
http://www.tdn.com/articles/2004/07/02/biz/news03.prt
(21)
http://www.forbes.com/business/newswire/2004/05/24/rtr1382512.html
(22)
Are Closing, And Jobs Are Vanishing
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64579-2004Mar16.html
(23) “Fuels of the Future for Cars and Trucks” Dr. James J. Eberhardt
Energy
Efficiency and Renewable
2002 Diesel
Engine Emissions Reduction (DEER) Workshop
Wind
- E.ON Netz Corp. Wind
Report 2004.
- Renewable Energy
Foundation. E.ON Netz Wind
report 2005 shows UK renewables policy is mistaken.
- V. Mason. 2005. Wind power in West Denmark.
Lessons for the UK.
Randy Udall. How many wind
turbines to meet the nation’s needs? Energyresources message 2202
Solar
See Hayden
(above).
Geothermal
Robert L. Bradley, Jr. Geothermal: The
Nonrenewable Renewable.