ethanol redux

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
21

Thank you for the rich information you’ve brought, joema, and for your important point that transportation is less than half of the petroleum issue. However, what is missing from this discussion is a mention of economics.

Higher petroleum costs will push companies to do what I think they have had little incentive to do up till now: actually research and develop alternative materials and sources for their currently petroleum-based products. Ditto for transportation as well. I do not believe that there is any cause for great alarm that civilization will grind to a halt. Now of course these alternatives will almost certainly be more expensive than the petroleum methods we use now (or else we’d be using them already), and the R&D will be a big expenditure too. Uprooting industries, installing hydrogen pumps, algea ponds, and whatnot will be more money down the drain. No doubt that our industry-derived proportion of GDP will be lower than it would have been had we limitless oil.

But who cares? Oh no, the world GDP will be 5-10% less than what it might’ve been. GDP is meaningless. The world isn’t any happier today than it was when total GDP was a thousandths of what it is now. Everything is relative, and it’s the relatives that matter. Employment matters. Equality matters. Yet both those things are due to much more subtle economic forces that are largely orthogonal to petroleum and total GDP.

What matters is psychology, and the biggest thing we have to fear is us running around reiterating to ourselves how must mourn the passing of cheap oil.

The only thing we have to conern ourselves with is that the price increases due to dwindling oil come on gently and gradually. Not that I think we’ll be plunged into a Great Depression if they don’t. Not at all, the global economy now is too fluid for that (er…i’m already bracing myself for a discussion of economics on that point). Simply, it’d be condusive to not strain people’s nerves (and god knows it no longer takes a Great Depression to do that… in good times the mounds become the mountains… everything is relative).

Anyway, I’m not disagreeing with joema that there aren’t any quick solutions that we could implement and never even notice the passing of the peak. I’m saying that, firstly, it is passing the peak that itself will bring about solutions. And secondly, if the solutions are imperfect (as they’ll likely be), there’s absolutely no reason we can’t just shrug it off and get on with our lives.

Then again… this thread was about discussing cellulose ethanol and not philosophizing about petroleum in general. My apologies. Though I think the OP question has already been well answered and the discussion can be permitted to evolve.

22

I agree with some of your points. However my point (and Cecil’s) is that some of these will be money down the drain, and it’s even now it’s possible to know some solutions which likely won’t work. As Cecil mentioned corn ethanol or any other solution that takes more energy to produce than the result contains won’t work. Likewise any solution that’s not scalable to huge industrial levels won’t work.

How do we know which solutions will and won’t work? As Cecil pointed out, basic math shows corn ethanol just won’t work. That doesn’t mean all ethanol is bad. He failed to consider cellulosic ethanol, also didn’t consider the yield per acre issue.

Likewise hydrogen fuel cells just won’t work on a large scale. Hydrogen isn’t an energy source – it requires energy to make, and huge quantities of it. Where does that energy come from? Before anybody answers, do the basic math (inc’l all losses and realistic real world efficiencies) to find what’s required to produce 100 quadrillion BTUs (world transportation energy) in hydrogen.

The point isn’t to be defeatest and say nothing will work, but to avoid spending time and money on what are almost certainly blind alleys. Some things may work, and some things almost certainly won’t work. Even now it’s possible to determine the viability of some of those with fairly high confidence.

There are two perspectives here: conventional peak oil vs tapping nonconventional oil.

If you discount nonconventional oil sources, and if peak oil theories are true (and there’s good basis for that), hitting peak oil will be dramatic. It would easily cause a lingering great depression. It would be like the 1973 and 1979 oil crisis, except it would never end and just progressively get worse. Would the world economy eventually adapt? Yes, but the world economy also adapted to the great depression of 1929, but it wasn’t pleasant.

The other viewpoint is tapping nonconventional oil (tar sands, oil shale), and other hydrocarbons such as methane hydrates. There are huge, vast energy reserves in these. At current high oil prices, these are already economically feasible. Energy companies are hesitant to make the infrastructure investement for these because they’re afraid oil prices might collapse, leaving them with huge losses, as already happened in the late 1990s.

However as you pointed out, sustained high oil prices will provide economic incentive to tap these nonconventional sources, plus develop other energy sources.

With few exceptions, non-petroleum sources cannot possibly be refined and scaled to meet demand in time before peak conventional oil. That’s why non-conventional oil is so important. It provides a buffer period during which non-petroleum sources can be developed, refined, and made scalable.

23

Wow. Great discussion. Maybe you could answer a question for me.

My husband is an 8th grade science teacher. He’s kicking around the idea of doing an ongoing biodiesel project, either with his students or as part of one of the extracurricular activities that he’s involved in. It may not be feasible, but it’s worth considering, right?

He was assuming that part of the project would be growing the agricultural product that will be used. This is not a great area for grain corn, so he was expecting to use some other grain or legume. But we never considered algae.

Is it possible to grow the required algae on a small scale? How much knowhow do you need? How high are the initial costs.

Growing soybeans or something would be easy enough. We could probably get the school district to lend us a little patch of land. After that, we know what to do. Of course, we would incur costs, but they’d be relatively low. Most equipment we would need could be begged or borrowed, and labor would be free.

Would algae be very complicated? Could they even grow it indoors? (My husband has a large classroom and an enthusiastic principal.) Would it be harder to extract the raw material from the algae than it would be from the grains or legumes?

Do you know of any websites that give instructions for do-it-yourself biodiesel (or even ethanol?)

Thanks in advance!

24

Here’s a detailed PDF document on the DOE’s biodiesel from algae project, called the “aquatic species program”. Don’t know if there’s sufficient detail for what you need. Bioenergy Technologies Office | Department of Energy

More info: http://www.oilgae.com/

However in general I’d suggest not getting bogged down in the actual production of feedstock material. You don’t want the students to go away remembering trying to grow stuff, but not the educational specifics about how that’s used.

It might be easier and just as educational to make your own biodiesel from waste vegetable oil. Here are some web sites that discuss how: Make your own biodiesel: Journey to Forever
http://www.diyfuel.com/

25

Joema gave some great advice, but I just thought that I’d mention that your husband may get into trouble if he is distilling ethanol in school.

Rob

26

Thanks to joema for his informative answers. What kind of work do you do?

Anyway, I was glancing at an article in Technology Review that mentioned work on organisms to increase the efficiency of the cellulose-to-ethanol process. These projects are still very early in the R&D phase, but I was wondering what were the best possible results they could achieve? In other words, if you had some magic bug which if you fed it chopped up plant matter and get ethanol, what is the maximum yield you could hope to achieve? I can’t think of a good way to calculate this. I suppose you could figure out the amount of cellulose in a bushel, figure out how many carbon, hydrogen and oxygen molecules were in there and if all these were arranged into ethanol molecules, that would be the maximum possible yield, but my chemistry is pretty rusty. All I can remember is that C2H5OH would have a mass of about 46 g/mol. Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Rob

27

I very much disagree. The economic downturns in the 70s were more the result of monetary, fiscal, and government policy. They were also the result of a frictioned and far-less-than-ideal economy in which vibrations would cause undue damage.

For example, unemployment is never caused by a true inescapable reason. There is no immutable principle by which willing people cannot work. It is rather the subtle mechanisms of searching for jobs, inflexible wages, falsified resumes, poor competition (favoring larger companies with more market power), and other imperfections which cause people to not find a place in society to do work.

Now sure, it could be that such imperfections would add up such that a lack of oil would trigger them to grind the economy to a halt (or, as happened in the 70s, they might add up to cause inflation which would induce the government to remove money from the economy which, by means of those imperfections again, cause the economy to slow down).

However, both the economy and the Federal Reserve’s (ie the people who get to take out and put money into the economy) understanding of economics have advanced greatly. Primarily, it is the internet and other communication technologies that have taken much of the frictions out. People no longer buy from a company just because that’s the company they know. Before, that allowed that company (eg a travel agent) to hike up prices to its repeat customers. Now, it is much easier to comparison shop. Thus, the big airlines can’t charge more just because they feel people have more money, but little airlines are able to easily enter the market. On the one hand this process in itself creates jobs and connects employees with them (through resume sites or whatnot). More importantly, it greatly reduces the magnitude and risk of inflation, giving the Fed the option to throw a bunch of money into the economy to stimulate things the more traditional way.

Thus, a conventional peak simply won’t be able to deliver the aftershocks these days that it once might have been capable of. Without these aftershocks, the actual decrease in productivity that less oil would inescapably bring is much more subtle (corresponding to us physically not being able to produce as many goods), and would probably not even be worth caring about if the employment stays good.

aanyway… back to biofuels. What about South America? With its three harvests of sugar beets a year, it might be a bit more productive. Also, what about bioengineering (either through conventional selective breeding or genetic engineering) of faster-growing plants? Lastly, why can’t we use fission to create hydrogen and power the grid? Wouldn’t that go most of the way? The rest, for materials and such, could be made up with bio-derived chemicals or substitutes (or those tar pits or whatever).

28

Discounting non-conventional petroleum, peak oil would be economically disastrous. The Federal Reserve Board estimates even mild oil price increases just from 2003 to present have cost 1.5% in US annual GDP. These price increases (and associated economic impact) are tiny next to those likely under peak oil.

Petroleum is the life blood of industrial society, and not just for transportation energy. Heating oil, bookshelves, fertilizer, road asphalt, car tires, cosmetics, drugs, etc. A constant concern for economists is the economic drag caused by higher petroleum prices – and this is for moderate price increases. Each year, petroleum consumption increases by about 2%, because the world economy increases by 2%. The economy runs on energy. Up to now, world petroleum production has mostly kept pace with demand. Beginning with peak oil, production will decline, yet demand will continue increasing. Anytime you have a major mismatch between production and consumption of a key commodity, the impact is huge. The result would be titanic price increases, likely causing a prolonged world recession.

In actuality, this probably won’t happen because of non-conventional petroleum (tar sands, oil shale). Those vast resources will simply be tapped, albeit with environmental and extraction costs.

However IF non-conventional petroleum didn’t exist – the above scenario – peak oil would likely be economically devastating.

Regarding using fission to produce hydrogen, it would take THOUSANDS of additional reactors to fuel world transportation need via the hydrogen fuel cell technology. The world consumes 100 quadrillion BTUs of transportation energy per year, (2.9E16 watt hours). The hydrogen production, transport and fuel cell end-to-end efficiency is about 30%. A 1GW nuclear reactor produces 8.76E12 watt hours per year. So very roughly, you’d need (2.9E16 * 3.33) / 8.76E12 or 11,023 new 1GW fission reactors. To provide 1/2 world transportation energy you’d need about 6,000 new reactors. To provide 1/2 of US transportation energy (roughly 4.39E15 watt hrs) you’d 1,670 new reactors. Currently there are about 100 reactors on line in the US.