11.16.06
Posted in Uncategorized, Policy, Energy - Renewable at 12:54 pm by steve
“Peak Oil” has recently become the trendy “scare du jour.” Probably much of the hype we hear about “Peak Oil” is designed to promote some hidden agenda item by someone on Wall Street. But even if it is a faddish scare, we might do well to believe it. Oil may or may not be scarce today, but it is certainly getting ever more costly to extract and transport to the west. And the sooner Americans focus like a laser on replacing oil with more dependable locally supplied energy, the more secure our future will be.
In a way, Bush has done us all a favor. He has proven that the US is incapable of prosecuting an effective war in the middle east, one that secures America’s energy resources. And knowing this must necessarily force us to adopt a new paradigm when thinking about energy security. Ever since “Three Days of the Condor,” a movie starring Robert Redford as a CIA agent who has uncovered a rather remarkable plot by the American government to secure oil in the middle east, it has been an axiom of US foreign policy that military intervention in the middle east would save our lifestyle. And that it would do so indefinitely.
But the costs of doing that are astronomical. Given $100 billion per year the US is incapable of securing the oil fields of Iraq. And that is in the absence of overt interference from local powers such as Syria or Iran and in the absence of interference from regional powers such as Russia, China, Pakistan, or India. Think about that for a moment. How much would it cost in the presence of such interference? Ten times as much? Fifty times as much? More?
Now, let us imagine that the US spent $100 billion per year for the next five years developing local sources of power. For the sake of argument, we will assume :
1) The operating cost of the generation facilities will be no more than they would have been for oil-powered facilities.
2) Given an ample supply of primary power at cheap prices Americans will figure out how to adapt from one form to another: gasoline to electric, for example.
We present a strawman proposal. It has several very good properties:
1) it is carbon neutral.
2) it employs a plentiful resource
3) it draws on technologies we already have mastered
4) it does not present many serious opportunity-cost consequences.
Let us examine a simple straw-man or benchmark proposal. The cost of a modest sized nuclear power plant, 1000 MW, is roughly $2 billion. For $100 billion America could buy 50,000 MW of electrical power generating capacity. That amounts to 400 E12 Watt-hours of electricity per year.
By comparison, in our cars Americans use 146 billion gallons of gasoline per year Gasoline contains roughly 60 kWh of thermal energy, but when it is converted in an engine it produces roughly 15 kWh of work. When all of the gasoline that Americans buy is converted to work, it amounts to the equivalent of 9.0 E15 Watt-hours of work.
Dividing the amount of work done by the generating capacity, we see that one year’s expenditure in Iraq would have built us 20% of the generating capacity necessary to do the work done by gasoline in a year. Given what America has spent in Iraq in five years, we could have built essentially enough primary power generating capacity so as not to use any gasoline at all! Had Bush built power plants instead of invading Iraq, we simply would not have to worry any more about Iraq’s oil. Only how to run cars using electricity or hydrogen. And that is not a trillion dollar proposal. That is not an insurmountable problem.
Think about it another way. While you were paying three dollars per gallon at the pump, all the gasoline we bought was being “secured” by the Iraq war. Or not. If we allocate the cost of the war to the gasoline we consumed, it cost an extra $1.37 per gallon.
That would be bad enough had the war been a total success. Had Iraq turned out to be a peaceful, stable, model democracy pumping lots of oil out of the ground, we might look back and still decide that in terms of energy policy the Iraq war was a senseless waste of human and capital resources. But it failed not just to create a happy democracy. It actually made Iraq’s resources unavailable. There is no sane measure by which the Iraq war might be considered anything other than a monumental policy failure.
As we have pointed out, had the same amount been spent on energy generating facilities, we would not have reason to care about Iraq’s oil. We could remain disinterested parties in the middle east. This would give us a lot more leverage when it came to promoting peace. We would be well on our way to being presumed to be a disinterested party.
There is no reason to believe that nuclear power is the whole answer. Wind power, for example, is more cost effective right now. We would advocate that at least one third of the $100 billion in question be spent for wind power generation systems, transmission lines, and power storage systems to take advantage of wind power. Wind power is cost effective now. And we should use it. Similarly, solar power is cost effective as a peak-shaving device in areas with large air conditioning loads through much of the year. Many of these are areas where sunlight is likewise plentiful. Solar power ought to be deployed to the point where at least ten percent of America’s electrical needs are met by solar technologies. It costs more than wind and more than nuclear, but it has a role to play as a renewable source.
We wish we could advocate biofuels. They seem like such a logical idea. Unfortunately ethanol, under the current technological practices, is not a breakeven energy proposal. And there is quite a bit of uncertainty that the arable land in the US can sustain both food production and energy production at the levels we now use both those resources. To press the land too hard is to invite disaster on both fronts. Read Jared Diamond’s Collapse.
Energy is of critical importance to our civilization. It is simply foolish to pretend otherwise. We cannot afford to leave energy supplies to the outcomes of war: as Elizabeth I suggested to Walsingham “the outcome is uncertain.”
America’s use of military force to get oil represents a broken paradigm. That paradigm is the use of force to partition existing resources in a way that is favorable to ourselves when, instead, the same level of investment in manufacturing and technology would produce a more durable way of creating enough for everyone.
When will we stop grabbing the weaker kid’s toys because we can? When will our leaders begin to behave better than a spoilt two year old? When will we start facing resource shortages like adults, planning and investing wisely? Or are we incapable of that?
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11.09.06
Posted in Energy - Renewable at 10:28 pm by steve
A report issued by Shapouri for the USDA in 1995 concluded that the net energy balance for turning fossil fuels to ethanol was positive, 1.25 to 1.0. Publication of this number would have amounted to a kind of watershed moment in the production of ethanol, establishing it as a ‘renewable’ fuel source. Since that date, the ethanol-from corn business has been growing steadily, with over 12 billion Liters of ethanol produced in 2004. Most of this is used as an additive to gasoline to boost its octane and help it burn cleaner.
Since 1995 a number of other workers have taken on the work of estimating the net fuel output of the corn-to-ethanol system. The author with the most press is Patzek who wrote Thermodynamics of the Corn to Ethanol Fuel Cycle. (Google it for the PDF) In this 120 page report Patzek argues that the amount of energy that goes into the production of corn and the refining of corn into ethanol is greater than what Shapouri estimated. And if he is correct, the production of ethanol from corn may represent a net loss of energy: ethanol derived from corn could actually speed the depletion of oil and natural gas. In the mean time, ethanol has become a big business, and the financial stakes of being right or wrong about these issues gets bigger every year.
The devil, of course is in the details. There are lots of niggling ways in which energy crops up in the cost of a bushel of corn. And it is easy to forget all of them. Similarly, it is easy for a person unfamiliar with the process of turning corn into ethanol to look at corn going in one end, ethanol coming out the other, and imagine that it all happens like magic. But there are a lot of things along the way that eat up energy.
In a strictly mathematical sense, it is vital to know whether the energy yield is greater or smaller than 1.0. If it is smaller, you use more energy than you produce. But in a practical sense, if the number is not greater than 2 or 5, it’s probably not a great primary source of energy. Coal, once, was 300. Low quality coal, according to Jared Diamond in Collapse, is around 20. So while people are quibbling whether corn-to-ethanol is .8 or 1.25, it is essential to realize that so long as the number is less than some pretty big number, 2 or 5 or 10, corn will probably not be an economically viable primary energy source. End of discussion.
This, however, may not necessarily be the the only determining factor in whether it becomes successful as a commercial product. For instance, if the energy inputs required to create it are cheap but not portable, but ethanol’s portability has certain advantages, ethanol might still represent a good fuel for some purposes, such as operating automobiles or farm machinery.
Patzek goes to great lengths to provide details about all the places energy is used in the process of growing corn and of making ethanol. But at the end of the day, there are several areas that gobble up most of the energy: Fertilization of the fields, tilling and harvesting of the corn, and distillation of the ethanol.
If we use Patzek’s numbers. A hectare of cornfield will produce roughly 30 GJ of energy in the form of ethanol. Of that, 11.6 GJ would be used in distillation, and 3.5 GJ would be used as electricity. That leaves 14.9 GJ. But if one totals up the energy that goes to fertilize the field, till it, and harvest it, one finds that this uses about 15.5 GJ. At this point, we have used up all of the energy provided to us by the corn, and then some. Patzek goes on to charge for depreciation of farm capital; and this sets the net for the whole activity firmly in the negative zone. At this point the ethanol product contains roughly eighty percent of all the energy inputs. He also charges for ’soil mining.’ That’s an issue that’s worth raising, but he fails to make a strong case for it.
Patzek has come under heavy fire from pretty much everyone who has the smallest interest in ethanol production, whether financial, political, or intellectual. But he has done us a great favor, because now when we make arguments for or against ethanol we can make them with an informed opinion. Instead of simply trashing his work, we might ask the question “How could we sidestep the problems he points out?” There are two huge areas that deserve treatment. The biggest single energy expenditure comes in the distillation process. If it could use waste heat from some primary energy generation process such as a coal-fired or nuclear electric utility plant then much of the 11 GJ distillation debit would disappear. That would shift the economic equation significantly.
The second biggest single loss comes from nitrogenation of the soil. This, it turns out, is an extremely energy intensive activity. Patzek allocates almost 8 GJ to this activity. This does not seem unreasonable. Some plants release up to 20-30% of the sugars they manufacture into the soil to support beneficial flora, of which much is to fix nitrogen. In current commercial agriculture, nitrogen arrives at the cornfield as ammonia or as a derivative of ammonia. Ammonia is made from natural gas. So important is nitrogenation in terms of energy, that Michael Pollan in a Carnivore’s Dilemma suggests that 15 percent of Americans’ food calories are traceable directly to ammonia derived from natural gas. This number roughly parallels Patzek’s. So important is nitrogenation to the success of corn as a crop, that Aztecs held annual mass human sacrifices and used the carnage to fertilize the fields.
Now, it is possible to fertilize the soil in other ways. One is through crop rotation. People did this before nitrogen fertilizers became available after WWII. But corn yields then were 20 percent of what they are today. To get the same amount of corn we would have to plant five times the acreage. But we would use five times the fuel per liter of ethanol to cultivate and harvest the corn, leaving us worse off than we are now.
But even that plan will not work because we would have to use rotation more intensively, making a large portion of the land unavailable for corn. Rotation of crops can help nitrogenate the soil. Certain bean crops fix nitrogen. One of them is soybeans, which are another important crop in commercial agriculture. Other nitrogen-fixing crops include lentils and alfalfa. The problem, of course, is that a field committed to growing lentils cannot grow corn. And that begins to be a problem once we commit vast portions of America’s farmlands to the task of fueling our cars. So we face a trade-off: if we want more sustainable corn agriculture, we might have to settle for less corn, perhaps 80 percent less or 90 percent less.
Other significant sinks of energy in the process include the other nutrients that are in fertilizers - calcium, potassium, and phosphorous. Also significant are the fuels that are used to till and harvest the fields. Even the pesticides and herbicides applied to fields are derived from petroleum, so these are accounted for in his model.
We do not know whether Patzek’s numbers are right or not. We do know that they are reasonable. And we do know that they are not far afield from numbers produced by quite a number of other workers. To those who are making a business of it today, ethanol from corn may seem like a good deal, but all of the authors of the several papers suggest that it is so only by virtue of various agricultural subsidies that artificially depress the cost of corn.
When we look at the big picture, ethanol derived from corn might be a very attractive gasoline additive, but as a primary source of fuel - given the current state of the refining technology, it is a bad deal. In simple terms, if today we had to make ethanol from corn and we had to make corn from ethanol, we would be screwed.
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