OK, I’ll take your word for it. I couldn’t remember the numbers, and wanted to make sure I had enough weasel words in there in case I was wrong.
Don’t discount the value of augmentation. A “flex-fuel vehicle” can use either gasoline or ethanol. If another Katrina hits, the ethanol plants should still be up and running, since they’ll most likely be scattered throughout the Midwest, West, and South. Conversely, if a major crop failure crimps the ethanol supply, we still have gasoline.
Some of the most compelling arguments I’ve heard for favoring biodiesel over ethanol is that biodiesel, by design, can run in the same engines and be transported using the same infrastructure that is already in place to handle regular diesel fuel. Ethanol, IIRC, cannot be piped cross-country the way that diesel and petrol can, and thus one’s access to ethanol would be partly determined by their proximity to an ethanol plant.
Additionally, biodiesel is apparently becoming a “cottage industry” phenomenon, at least near where I live. Some people are literally producing biodiesel in the backs of their houses, and local restaurants are more than happy to donate used grease. So you get the double-bonus of using an environmentally-friendly fuel AND supporting local business, which many people in my area are very keen on. And from what I’ve read, an increasing number of diesel-fuel vehicles are expected on the American market in the near future, so we’ll see how many people embrace another form of alternative fuel.
One big question of mine on the issue of biofuels is: Which industry produces more natural “waste,” agriculture or animal products? It seems to me like an early step toward more widespread biofuel use would be determining how much would be naturally available for biofuel production before allocating large portions of crops/animals for biofuel. And of the two, in which does the waste account for a larger portion of the products? Of course, industry-level biofuel production could not be based on waste products alone, but it’d be interesting to know simply from a springboard perspective.
Using otherwise wasted crop byproducts to produce biofuels can be a splendid and worthwhile thing, assuming gathering and processing it does not use more fuel than it produces. Planting more crops to produce it is worse than useless, it’s actively harmful. Not to mention that most arable land is already in use for food; what food are we going to forego to produce ethanol instead? Brazil are only achieving it by chopping down the Amazon rainforests.
The problem is that Western governments are beholden to rural lobbies (or act as if they are) and so this looks like a win-win for the farmers and their political supporters. The idealisation of farming life by our almost entirely urbanised communities seems to insulate them from rational considerations. We have a similar situation with nuclear power, “clean coal”, and many other hobby horses, like any other bandwagon people jump on board with the slightest excuse.
The only scalable carbon-neutral forms of energy production are solar and geo-thermal. Smaller but significant contributions can come from hydro, wind and tidal. None of those are going to provide enough energy just yet to power our economies as they are, yet we need to start cutting our carbon emissions now - this year. Reducing energy usage and funding research into large, cheap solar, and geo-thermal where available, is all we can do right now. That’s it, folks, concentrating on anything else is a distraction from the main game.
What’s your beef with nuclear? In terms of energy efficiency, conversion, distribution infrastructure, costs, and environmental impact nothing beats electricity. We need to overcome some storage problems for mobile applications, but it’s being worked on. When it comes to production density, nothing beats nuclear.
Everybody talks about creating energy, but to me Bio-fuels from waste are worthwhile simply because it removes all that waste from the landfills. Even if it isn’t totally energy efficient, it at least processes the material and gets back a little something to mitigate the cost.
Nuclear fission also has some serious problems with waste disposal, fuel processing/reprocessing, and operational safety issues. I don’t think we’ll be able to get away from it in the near term–conventional and forseeable renewable sources may be renewable, but they aren’t sufficiently scalable to completely supplant nonrenewable (fossil fuel and nuclear) power sources–but even fission should be considered a stopgap to developing less polluting and more ultimately sustainable energy sources.
Stranger
Abstract from a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (Hill et al. 2006):
My view is that biofuels are excellent in certain situations, but not a viable long-term solution to sustainable transportation fuels. Biodiesel is more promising than ethanol, and the only way ethanol will really work is to find a cost-effective way to generate it from cellulose rather than from corn. Brazil’s ethanol strategy works as well as it does because they produce it from sugar cane, rather than from corn or other grains, with a significant improvement in ethanol yield.
There are numerous other problems with biofuels that need to be addressed - increased fertilizer and pesticide runoff, decreased land in conservation programs (leading to likely decreases in agricultural productivity and loss of topsoil), widely distributed feedstock sources (in terms of energy content per area as opposed to the relatively high energy content per area for fossil fuels), and significant variability in feedstock production potential (severe energy impacts during drought years, for instance).
These are the technical issues, and don’t address problems like we’re now seeing with significant increases in prices for corn and corn-based foods (including meat).
Biofuels have a lot of promise, and do have the potential for reducing petroleum consumption. IMO, though, the first thing we should be looking at is significantly increasing our efficiency. The technologies and approaches are much more well developed, but people still want to drive the big dogs, and will as long as gasoline prices don’t increase significantly.
The flaw in this argument is that it requires throwing out the internal combustion engine and the entire kajillions of dollars of infrasturcture that has grown up around fossill fuels over the last 125+ years. What’s the environmental cost of junking every car, truck, bus, airplane, ship, oil refinery, natural gas pipeline and filling station in the entire world and replacing them with solar and geothermal-powered electric vehicles?
Biofuels are a viable replacement/supplement for fossill fuels precisely because they fit into the current system with only minor modifications.
Which approach is better – small but meaningful improvements to the current technology that have immediate impact, or letting the current technology plod along while we try to come up with giant, revolutionary breakthroughs?
That’s it, folks, concentrating on anything else is a distraction from the main game.
Face it, even if it was technically the best option it’s just not going to happen, too many people are too scared of it (not matter what your opinion on how valid that fear is). No community is ever going to put up with a new nuke near them ever again, let alone welcome one.
But factually:
i) there isn’t that much available uranium. If all electricity in the world today was produced by nukes we’d have maybe 10-15 years’ worth of economically recoverable uranium (mostly in Australia, Canada and Russia) then we have to start looking for another power source; we may as well skip that step and do that now.
ii) the last good hope for permanent storage of high-level waste, Synroc or its equivalents, has recently been shown to degrade hugely faster than theory said and so we are left with no economic way of dealing with it.
iii) a whole-cycle evaluation of carbon emissions for nukes will surely show it emits less than a coal plant, but still sizeable and I believe comparable to a natural gas powered plant. The amount generated in the building, operation, transport, and waste disposal (however you plan that) is surprisingly large; with gas all you need is a well and a pipeline, with nukes you need a huge and secure transport infrastructure.
iv) a nuke plant takes a minimum of 10 years to build, average more like 15. The number we would need to build to make a difference starting right now would be prohibitive, and would not start to reduce carbon emissions until they came online in over a decade - when it will substantially too late to help (and don’t forget all the emissions of construction - pretty much all fossil fuel powered - have just contributed to making the problem worse before they come on line).
v) it’s not as cheap as you think. Not a single nuke plant has been built anywhere in the world without substantial government subsidy, mostly in the form of free disaster insurance but also significant tax breaks especially during the long construction phase. Factor that cost in and suddenly electricity from nukes shoots up to be enormously expensive.
vi) I hardly need detail the security risks of having all that concentrated uranium shipped around the world, the expense of guarding it, and the proliferation that can result (as it is right now in Iran).
Really? France have been getting something like 80% of their electricity from nuclear for years. Apparently their most serious ever nuclear mishap was three doofuses walking into a particle accelerator without putting their moon suits on and getting fried. I can’t imagine they have the same level of fear as e.g. the US.
Turpenes 9distlled from pine tree wood0 resmebel gasoline. The japanese used turpene-based fuels as a substitute for aviation gasoline, during WWII. Could we produce adequate motor vehicle fuel, from fast-growing pine trees?
Also, (during WWII), there was serious interest in producing fuels from the (desrt0 guayule plant-is this feasible?
My own view is that we need to forget about food crops as a source of biofuel in the long term. Aparently, the most energy dense feedstock is algae and also the only one with the necessary scalability potential. I don’t know what it costs to make a barrel of this stuff, nor the energy investment, nor the freshwater investment, nor the NOx or CO2 footprints (if anyone does know, please post), but I do know that it addresses a lot of the problems cited above. One really signifigant one remains, however, and that is that the feedstock is widely distributed, although not as widely as with ethanol.
Thanks for your help,
Rob
Yes, but the fuel cost is not a very large part of the equation. After the cheap uranium is exhausted, we have thorium, nuclear weapon pits, high-level waste and breeder reactors available as fuel sources.
It will be useful when cheap uranium runs out.
Integrated facilities would go a long way to mitigating this problem.
My hope is that technologies such as commoditized pebble-bed reactors can help mitigate this.
The Iranians themselves are enriching it and that is the crux of the dispute. If you want to ship fuel that gets around the proliferation problem, there is always MOX. Radiological terrorism remains a problem, however.
That said, I think that it will be at the minimum 20 years before we could convert to grid-based transportation and that is if they unveil the perfect battery powered car tomorrow.
FWIW,
Rob
This seems a very peculiar ordering. Hydro is already the cheapest power, and accounts for a significant fraction of generation. The only sense in which it’s “not scalable” is that it’s already scaled up to near its maximum: There are only so many places where it’s economical to put in a dam. But the same is true, to a much greater degree, of geothermal. To my knowledge, the only places in the US with enough geothermal activity to make energy generation practical are Yellowstone and Hawaii. Meanwhile, photovoltaics can only just barely break even after decades of operation, and non-photovoltaic solar electricity generation can never seem to get off the ground, yet you put solar as your #1 scalable non-carbon source.
Coal mining and other fossil fuel extraction kills thousands or tens of thousands of dudes yearly. Smog kills maybe 10X as many.
So far, nuclear power has yet to directly kill even one person in America. True there was Chernobyl but Chernobyl will never happen again- that sort of plant was on itway out when it happened.
We should keep in mind that biofuels are essentially ways to store solar energy. When you look at the efficiencies of biological conversion of solar energy to plant material, then from plant material to fuel, then fuel to motion, the overall solar-to-motion efficiency is pretty bleak. I’ve done a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation comparing solar energy/acre to biodiesel/acre, and that comes out to something on the order of 1%. And that’s prior to any fuel-to-motion conversion.
In the long run, there will have to be a more efficient approach to producing motive power for transportation. (I haven’t been able to figure out the solar-to-dinosaur-to-motion efficiency, but it seems to take a long time 
)
Yes, but switchgrass is a lot cheaper to install and maintain than solar cells or mirrors and boiler towers. And that 1% is energy in a form that’s easy to store and to fill up cars with. You have to compare that efficiency with the efficiency of turning solar energy into some other practical vehicle fuel. Biodiesel may not be the best use of that acreage, but it’s not as dismal (compared to other options) as you make it out to be.
Cite and cite.
While it’s that no one has ever been killed in a commercial power generating reactor in the United States (though there have been several “excursions” aside from the dramatic one at Three Mile Island, and a number of cases of radioactive leakage from fuel processing facilities) it’s not true that the type of graphite moderated reactor used at the Chernobyl facility (the graphite moderated RBMK) was “on it’s way out”; indeed, aside from the four reactors at Chernobyl, only one additional one of the total of thirteen constructed has been shut down, and there are at least two others still under construction.
I’m not inherently opposed to energy production by nuclear fission–I think that with more modern, failsafe designs it can be less hazardous and less expensive to operate than current plants, and reprocessing of fuel (rather than vitrification and burial) fuel supplies can be expended almost indefinately–but there are some definite techincal drawbacks in additional to the (understandable) political NIMBY issues. Ultimately, fission is not sustainable or renewable; it’s a step, and a somewhat messy one, between fossil fuels (which have been instrumental in getting civilization to the point of being technically capable of recognizing the harm that carbon emissions do) and some other, more sustainable source (fusion, some kind of direct solar, et cetera). It also behooves us, in the interim, to develop more efficient habitable structures, distribution methods, and transportation systems. Waving nuclear fission as a magic wand that’ll solve all problems harkens back to the good old days of HUAC, Cadillacs with ginormous tail fins, and Jackie Gleason threatening to knock his wife to the Moon.
Stranger