The Biofuels Dream
Joel Bourne has a very accessible, clearly written story in the October National Geographic on biofuels, which seems to be the subject du jour. As expected, he comes down hard on the (pipe) dream of corn ethanol. The real promise of biofuels, he stresses, lies in cellulosic sources -- stalks, leaves, sawdust -- as opposed to foodstuffs like corn, sugar and soy. Cellulosic ethanol remains a big 'if' both technologically and economically (there is currently no large-scale commercial production of the stuff), but if the potential can be unlocked and cars can be made to burn fuel far more efficiently, then biofuels could one day deliver both independence from petroleum and sharply reduced carbon emissions. That's a good dream to have.
9 Comments:
I think those who predict that the fuel of the future will actual be a hodgepodge of different energy sources have got it right.
Imagine: solar powered garages recharge battery-cars each night; windmills and waterfalls power inland factories, with harnassed sea undulations lighting-up the coasts. Ethanol will be part of the happy mix.
A boy can dream, can't he?
I love solar power. It is so vastly improved than several years ago. My home gets 60-80% of it's power (depending on the season) from solar power. I have had zero problems w/ it. Solar power is a great place to start.
Which means, greenfool, that you've cut your home-based emissions (that is, not counting your transportation emissions) by 60-80 percent, which is exactly the kind of deep cut that needs to be made across industrialized society. You certainly deserve to be proud of that accomplishment. The trick is scaling it up. A sobering figure I read in Scientific American recently was that just 0.038 percent of the world's energy consumption is currently met by photovoltaics -- and that's after 50 years of marketable PV technology! The technology is, as you say, vastly improved and getting better, thanks in part to nanotech. Solar is a great place to start, but it will take a breakthrough to ramp it up significantly in the near-term.
I think Zephyr is also right that the answer to the energy problem will come from one or two technologies, but a whole smorgasbord of technologies. We'll have to pull out all the stops, including wind, solar, wave energy, geothermal, biofuels, etc., while sharply curtailing coal and oil use. The frustrating thing with biofuels has been to watch the initial enthusiasm far outstrip the potential. Biofuels no doubt have a part to play. The quesiton is how much of a part? What is the appropriate level of biofuels production? And what feedstocks make sense in the near term? Corn ethanol, almost everyone agrees, is a bum deal, but will it serve as an important transitional step to cellulosic ethanol. Someone smarter than me will have to answer those questions.
Thanks for commenting.
Too bad the corn lobby has done such a good job of forcing corn ethanol down our throats.
You are so right Pat, solar power is a good place to start because we can easily do it now - but there will need to be so many more ways to fuel our daily lives and we will need to be open to using them all. I'm researching windmills right now - (any good resources you can give me?)
Researching wind as a sector to invest in or as something to actually adopt and implement -- that is, a small-scale wind turbine for your home? Either way, you probably have better information than I do. Best of luck.
I'm looking for wind power for my home, anyone that can help out w/ research sites would be appreciated.
The Natl. Geographic Oct. issue has some very misleading science about fuels and global warming; the main one is in McKibben's article "Carbon's New Math using a graph-chart of Sokolow and Pacala that indicates matter disappearing into thin air. The claim incorporated in the diagram is that in 50 years with a 50% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, a 20-30% reduction in the level of that gas on the globe will be possible.
Somehow the 50% of that gas still being emitted over the 50 years will be lowering rather than raising the level? That is basically ignoring the law of conservation of matter.
On this same sort of vein, we also have an overload of energy on the globe that almost all energy supply systems add to helping raise temperatures and rainfall, and speed up winds to make the worsening weather being experienced. We could be recycling some of the extra energy in the wind by using windmills to get electric power without GHG pollution and without the environmental messes of mining and drilling.
We could also get some power and stop some carbon from recycling back to carbon dioxide by pyrolyzing our massive amounts of organic wastes that needlessly give off the gas and energy as they biodegrade in dump sites. And these have to be maintained at costs in the billions of dollars across the country. Those wastes are a biofuelcrop that do not usurp land and water from food crop production, and pyrolysis converts any plant material and such undesirables as separated sewage solids into charcoal-carbon, a distillate of water and simple organic compounds and perhaps some hydrogen. After the hot charcoal is passed through a heat exchanger for generating steam, it is buried. which is doing what nature did eons ago to make coal, so let's learn from her on how to reduce our level of carbon dioxide on the globe.
One of the problems with biofuel crops is carbon dioxide being given in fermentations and another problem is cellulose and sometimes lignin leftover. Both of these problems are eliminated by using pyrolysis as are problems of germs and hazardous chemicals in our organic wastes. I have detailed some of this in a comment to Mr. Pope's essay "Progress on Global Warming" on his page Sept. 17. Dr. J. Singmaster
From Dr. J. Singmaster: Since my previous comment on this, a major development for clean fuel has been reported that dumps the whole biofuels dream. Scientists at the Max Planck Inst. announced last week that they have found a catalyst to split water to hydrogen and oxygen using the sun radiation for the energy needed.
How ever that does nothing to remove the poisoning excess of carbon dioxide already on the globe melting the ice packs. In order to cut the level of that excess, the program I outlined in my previous comment needs to be put into effect. Perhaps another way to get actaul reduction of the
level can be proposed, but I have not heard of. While getting hydrogen will give us clean fuel, your descendants' survival will need action on reducing the level of the poisoning excess of carbon dioxide on the globe. Dr. J. Singmaster
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