I believe Popular Science had an issue within the last year that discussed “reactor farms”, isolated areas with high security where large reactor projects could be built, and transmit their power into the grid using lossless superconducting cables.
I assume that you are offering up your backyard?
To answer your question, no. The subsidy would an offset against OPEC undercutting it, which could also be done with tariff taxes to maintain a specific cost of gasoline. I would expect it to sell normally between $3.50 and $5 based on what I’ve read but I can’t cite that and any attempt to dig it up leads to wild claims of .50 cent per gallon production cost which is likely impossible.
The US government has been looking at this from a research standpoint since the 70’s and venture capitalists are building pilot plants to test/perfect the technology. The FAA is looking at a certifiable aviation grade version of the fuel. That tells me that people believe the production costs are within a viable range.
What is important to consider is the idea of a stabilized fuel cost. A relatively fixed cost of fuel will lead to a more stable economy and wages will adjust to whatever price that becomes. If the price is indeed $5 a gallon, then it is offset by cars that get 50 miles to the gallon in the short term. That offset would allow an economy to stabilize around any initial rise in the cost of the fuel.
While I discount any claims of 10,000 gallons per acre per year I think the early projections of 1500 gallons are realistic and will probably be doubled. I’ve been looking for pilot plants close enough to drive to and hope to tour one if possible so I can get my list of questions answered. I’ve been talking in terms of gallons per acres because that is the foot print comparison to crops. But in reality, it’s gallons per liter of water that production costs are measured against.
The reference erl is to NIMBY. Where would you locate this concentrated source of all pollutants? Are you willing to have it in your backyard? Who do you think would be?
That “huge” subsidy is approximately 50c per gallon. Not insubstantial, but I think its magnitude is a bit overblown. But even if you extended ethanol’s same subsidy to algae-based biodiesel, you’re not going to get ethanol’s same scale in the near future, because algae-based biodiesel isn’t a production-ready technology. It’s still in the science experiment/proof-of-concept stage. It’s not pie-in-the-sky, but it’s not ready, and it may not ever be.
“Not insubstantial”? The largest direct energy subsidy there is, over $4.7 billion a year, and about a quarter of the price of what we spend on it.
Corn ethanol is not production ready in the sense of making a commercially viable product without supports and may do more net harm visavis global warming than good. Maybe cellulosic will be ready some day, but corn? Likely never.
Algael is indeed not at industrial production levels yet. But corn ethanol never would have been without the market created by subsidies and fiat.
So, like I said, around 50c a gallon.
Corn ethanol requires explicit supports today because it competes against a product (gasoline) that receive implicit supports of being able to discharge its waste carbon dioxide into the atmosphere for free. As we phase in cap & trade, we should phase out subsidies for ethanol, but until then, I can’t get my knickers in a twist about the subsidies that ethanol and other alternatives receive.
“May” is too much of a weasel word here. It’s an unproven and extremely weak case that corn ethanol is worse for global warming than gasoline.
Likely never what?
True, and we wouldn’t have gone to the moon without government support either. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth doing.
Specifically, I think the corn ethanol program was worth starting and is worth continuing because it’s still the only large-scale biofuel program we’ve been able to run in the United States. That statement could well still be true in 20 years.
If we’re seriously trying to wean ourselves off fossil fuels, we could get lucky and hit the jackpot with algae-biodiesel or all electric cars with long range and short recharge times, but those technologies aren’t there yet, and might not be then. I don’t want to rely on getting lucky. On the other hand, large scale corn ethanol and plug-in hybrids are things we can build today. It’s the only ticket out of fossil-fuel dependence for personal transport we can rely on.
Tell me, what would you consider a substantial subsidy?
As for the “may” do more harm than good … remember that means that it only “may” do more good than harm. Besides the CO2 cost associated with “indirect land use changes” and the total CO2 costs associated with production (such that it is an open question whether or not corn ethanol does much better on a net CO2 basis than does oil, see my first cite) there are concerns over nitrous oxide.
Perhaps it is fairest to state that it is a weak case that corn ethanol production is an improvement upon gasoline and that it deserves no subsidy motivated by global climate change considerations until that case is more strongly made.
Corn for ethanol may never be ready to help decrease the amount we contribute to greenhouse gases by of transportation or to compete against other sources in a world in which there are no (including no implicit) subsidies. Cellulosic might be someday but is currently in the “proof of concept stage”.
Staying on the op’s topic: Corn ethanol is far from life cycle carbon neutral and we have as much reason currently to believe that is worse for global climate change than is gasoline as we do to believe that it is better. Cellulosic ethanol source have potential to be closer to carbon neutral. Algael sources avoid the indirect land use change considerations and can be used capture CO2 emitted from other sources. Yup, large scale production of algae for biofuels is not ready for prime time. So as of now we have no biofuel that is close to carbon neutral that is near mass production readiness.
OTOH, we have vehicles gearing up for production that can have a significant amount of their daily commutes powered from the grid. Driving on grid derived power results in a fraction of greenhouse gases than does using the ICE for motive force, even if all electricity was generated by older coal plants, and we have less carbon intensive (to carbon neutral or even better) electricity generation as proven options - from nuclear, to cofiring biomass, to biochar, to wind, to solar, to geothermal, and more.
Given the facts as they currently stand electric cars would be better in regards to climate change considerations than biofuels would be.
It is already in our backyard. That’s the problem.
The super-concentrated site that does not yet exist is?
Yeah, the problem is that some smaller amount of it is in all of our backyards now. And your solution is to choose some one backyard to put it all in instead. So long as it is not yours. Again, good luck finding someone who is willing for it be their backyard. We can’t even get Nevadans to accept Yucca Mountain!
Of course such measures are difficult to put through just like that. But capturing pollution from smokestacks is something that just happens. People want more power. It is surprising what compromises they are willing to accept to get it.