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New Study Says Governments Should Ditch Reliance On Biofuels
HughPickens.com writes The NYT reports on a new study from a prominent environmental think tank that concludes turning plant matter into liquid fuel or electricity is so inefficient that the approach is unlikely ever to supply a substantial fraction of global energy demand. They add that continuing to pursue this strategy is likely to use up vast tracts of fertile land that could be devoted to helping feed the world's growing population. "I would say that many of the claims for biofuels have been dramatically exaggerated," says Andrew Steer, president of the World Resources Institute, a global research organization based in Washington that is publishing the report. "There are other, more effective routes to get to a low-carbon world." The report follows several years of rising concern among scientists about biofuel policies in the United States and Europe, and is the strongest call yet by the World Resources Institute, known for nonpartisan analysis of environmental issues, to urge governments to reconsider those policies.
Timothy D. Searchinger says recent science has challenged some of the assumptions underpinning many of the pro-biofuel policies that have often failed to consider the opportunity cost of using land to produce plants for biofuel. According to Searchinger, if forests or grasses were grown instead of biofuels, that would pull carbon dioxide out of the air, storing it in tree trunks and soils and offsetting emissions more effectively than biofuels would do. What is more, as costs for wind and solar power have plummeted over the past decade, and the new report points out that for a given amount of land, solar panels are at least 50 times more efficient than biofuels at capturing the energy of sunlight in a useful form. "It's true that our first-generation biofuels have not lived up to their promise," says Jason Hill said. "We've found they do not offer the environmental benefits they were purported to have, and they have a substantial negative impact on the food system."
Timothy D. Searchinger says recent science has challenged some of the assumptions underpinning many of the pro-biofuel policies that have often failed to consider the opportunity cost of using land to produce plants for biofuel. According to Searchinger, if forests or grasses were grown instead of biofuels, that would pull carbon dioxide out of the air, storing it in tree trunks and soils and offsetting emissions more effectively than biofuels would do. What is more, as costs for wind and solar power have plummeted over the past decade, and the new report points out that for a given amount of land, solar panels are at least 50 times more efficient than biofuels at capturing the energy of sunlight in a useful form. "It's true that our first-generation biofuels have not lived up to their promise," says Jason Hill said. "We've found they do not offer the environmental benefits they were purported to have, and they have a substantial negative impact on the food system."
All of these I've read stories treat "demand" as a fixed quantity that's independent of the commodity's price. There's also no discussion about whether or not the planet explodes if "demand" isn't met.
Am I being pedantic, or are these stories really fatally flawed in this way?
Lets face it, the land is going to be used for corn or soybeans anyway biofuel is just a matter of what you are using the produce for.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/08/16/president-obama-announces-major-initiative-spur-biofuels-industry-and-en
The White House
Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release
August 16, 2011
President Obama Announces Major Initiative to Spur Biofuels Industry and Enhance America's Energy Security
USDA, Department of Energy and Navy Partner to Advance Biofuels to Fuel Military and Commercial Transportation, Displace Need for Foreign Oil, and Strengthen Rural America
WASHINGTON, Aug. 16, 2011 Ã" President Obama today announced that the U.S. Departments of Agriculture, Energy and Navy will invest up to $510 million during the next three years in partnership with the private sector to produce advanced drop-in aviation and marine biofuels to power military and commercial transportation. The initiative responds to a directive from President Obama issued in March as part of his Blueprint for A Secure Energy Future, the AdministrationÃ(TM)s framework for reducing dependence on foreign oil. The biofuels initiative is being steered by the White House Biofuels Interagency Work Group and Rural Council, both of which are enabling greater cross-agency collaboration to strengthen rural America. ...
That is why space-based solar power is very likely the only way to go.
It has worked for about 4.5 billion years, and is expected to work for another 4-5 billion more.
The same logic saying biofuel is inefficient (requires a lot of land for low energy yield) is the same logic saying meat is inefficient (which is true, meat is energy inefficient) because it requires a large amount of crops for the livestock.
Global price pressures on food is probably a good thing, you have places like Mumbai, India with 35,000 people per square mile. Increasing the quality of life is more than just the price of food. World population isn't a problem, but how it is distributed is what keeps poor nations miserable and cheaper food is solving the symptom of the problem, not the problem.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
The reason politicians on both sides of the political aisle push biofuels from corn is because they are pandering to voters in Iowa. A favorite political joke in recent elections is that if Wisconsin held the first primary, we would have major initiatives to make fuel from cheese.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
Darn... saw the article and raced here to post something pithy and brief with 'Duh' in the subject. Too late.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
It takes a much oil to make bio-fuel as you get back out of it. The entire process produces far more air pollution than simply burning the fossil fuels in your car.
Then there are all the pollutants from farming.
Who came up with this brilliant idea?
You would think it was a political scam designed by Iowa farmers trying to suck billions of tax dollars out of us by requiring Presidential Candidates endorse ethanol to get their endorsements.
It never worked in the lab, and they decided to roll it out anyways and use us all as a failed lab experiment, because surely it would improve and make sense after we did that for years. Sure, that's how science works. Fails in the lab, so it will work in the world. That's how we roll out prescription drugs, right?
I understand biofuel may not be very efficient, and that's fair enough - altrhough I'd love for there to be an unlimited, carbon-free supply of cheap energy... there isn't, so we need to be a bit intelligent about it all.
the problem with solar is that you do get energy supply from it, but only during the day, so we need to come up with much more efficient ways of storing that energy. We don't have this yet.
The problem with wind is that it can be quite intermittent, not working on non-windy or too-windy days.
The problem with wave is that its in a corrosive environment so will not be as efficient if you have to continually maintain the equipment.
So what else do we have that can be used. Biofuel, and biomass generation, as part of an overall strategy is something that will help to plug the gaps in the areas when the other renewables stop working. We just need to focus it at an appropriate level rather than thinking its another silver bullet.
vast tracts of fertile land that could be devoted to helping feed the world's growing population
The growing population only increases future demand for fuel, adding to the problem.
and i'm not sure why we haven't focused more on solar and getting that damn fusion going. Promoting use of food land/crops for fuel is dumb, and the market has shown that.
That is why space-based solar power is very likely the only way to go.
My inner nerd wholly agrees with you.
My outer nerd thinks orbital base load energy would be a single point of failure, and the entity that provides it would become the de-facto world government. Better to build autonomous terrestrial plants in sovereign countries fueled by an element present on every continent.
And yes, I have even more layers of nerd underneath. It's nerd all the way down.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
The NYT reports on a new study from a prominent environmental think tank that concludes turning plant matter into liquid fuel or electricity is so inefficient that the approach is unlikely ever to supply a substantial fraction of global energy demand. They add that continuing to pursue this strategy is likely to use up vast tracts of fertile land that could be devoted to helping feed the world's growing population.
Hello, the 1980s are calling with some information for you. There is more than enough appropriate land for biofuel-from-algae production in the USA to replace one hundred percent of our transportation fuel consumption, assuming it could all be done with diesels. And since the average age of a vehicle in the fleet is under 20 years even now when it is at literally its all-time highest level, you could feasibly phase in the diesels on a useful time scale without inconveniencing a single driver.
The short form is that you grow algae in inexpensive raceway ponds and use centrifugal separation to get oil out as a diesel feedstock. This can then be fed to a basically traditional fractionation column distiller and made into green diesel, eliminating the gel-point disadvantages normally experienced with biodiesel.
The longer form is that Gevo, a corporation held by GE Energy Ventures and others, would also like to sell us Butanol — a 1:1 replacement for gasoline made by bacteria which reduces emissions and which is made from any organic material — including the left-over algae from the biodiesel process. But Butamax, a company owned by BP and DuPont, holds the rather obvious patent on taking the gene which has been doing this for us for decades and putting it into basically anything else which might hold it, which is the piece needed to make it commercially viable. Yet, they seem to have no interest in actually selling the fuel.
We have the ability to shift to biofuels using technology which is decades old. This report is a dirty and stupid lie, because it completely ignores decades-old technology.
Oh yeah, as an aside, if you put your algae production facilities near coal or oil plants, you can capture up to 80% of their CO2 output in the algae, increasing growth rates and letting you basically use that carbon all over again when you burn the fuel. It's not a solution to the problem of carbon release, but it does mitigate it significantly. Then we can save our oil for making plastics. It's too valuable to burn.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Food production is not a valid argument, IMHO.
We already produce 2700 calories per person per day. That's plenty to feed everyone a healthy diet. The reason so many people don't have enough food has nothing to do with the amount of food available and everything to do with logistics, politics, and inequity: The food simply isn't getting to where it's needed. Growing even more food is not going to solve that problem.
Similarly, biofuel production need not make use of land that is suitable for growing common food crops. Even though I advocate biofuels, even I'm against using food crops to do so.
=Smidge=
The American industry supplying that market says that it uses only waste wood or trees that would be cut down anyway when overgrown forests are thinned, and that it pays close attention to issues of sustainability.
That depends on what they mean by 'sustainability'.
What the loggers do is decimate a forest and then go back in a plat just a couple of the hundreds of different species of plant life that was there before them. And that's not including all the wildlife they chased off and insects they killed.
Industry has no idea what sustainability means - and they don't care.
Profits first; to hell with health and well being.
Firstly inneficient does not matter. What matters is : are we above 1 in energy production(i.o.w. the energy produced is above the energy consumed by the process) and that can in some country actually be the case : Brazil for example with sugar cane alcohol. Secondly the "other country do not have enough food" is not a good argument, as we already have *enough* food for an even bigger population, but that food does not reach those famished, (political factors, monetary or economical factors) and food produced in rich country sold cheap to famished country tend to torpedo/destroy the local farming economy in some cases. Furthermore the trick about biofuel is that we are not *removing* carbon from the atmosphere, the trick is that we attempt to replace fossile carbon with carbon from an atmospheric cycle. Those are two different problems. If that's the quality of the discourse at that institute.... Then I understand now why representative tend to ignore those groups.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
My outer nerd thinks orbital base load energy would be a single point of failure, and the entity that provides it would become the de-facto world government.
The solution is obvious. One entity doesn't design, launch, and/or operate them all. Since we developed the basic technology needed to build cost-effective solar power satellites, nothing else has actually made sense. We could be putting up big satellites made of little more than a big plastic sheet with solar cells printed on one side and ion engines printed on the other, with a rectenna array distributed throughout. We've got the technology to at least make a go of it, do a real trial. But our vision seems to be limited to things which are far away.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I've been suspicious of biofuels for quite a few reasons, but mostly due to efficiency. According to the numbers I saw photosynthetic efficiency is 3-6% but .photovoltaic are 30+%. So covering a field with solar cells would be 10x more efficient than harvesting biofuel from the same field. Don't flame me if I'm comparing apples and oranges, I have done a bit of googling on the subject and not really found much.
It is? Then do us all a favor and quit wasting it posting twaddle like you just did. A lot of valuable electrons DIED so you could post that crap.
Considering that space based solar would make sense and liquid salt Thorium systems would also make sense- and done right the latter would do a good job of things. If it's that dire, quit wasting electricity posting things. Seriously.
Both ethanol and biodiesel are biofuels but they are not the same and the economics are not the same. biodiesel is already proven to work and can be made fairly easily from non-food crops or even waste from processing food crops. Even within ethanol, ethanol from sugarcane is far more efficient than from corn. The stupidity of corn subsidies means we keep out imports of cheap sugarcane while impoverishing countries like Haiti that cant sell its sugarcane crop. It also means coca cola tastes better everywhere else except the US.
Following the link to the study leads to this summary (excerpt):
Bioenergy is an inefficient use of land to generate energy.
Fast-growing sugarcane on highly fertile land in the tropics converts only around 0.5 percent of solar radiation into sugar, and only around 0.2 percent ultimately into ethanol. For maize ethanol grown in Iowa, the figures are around 0.3 percent into biomass and 0.15 percent into ethanol. Such low conversion efficiencies explain why it takes a large amount of productive land to yield a small amount of bioenergy, and why bioenergy can so greatly increase global competition for land.
It seems the study did not even consider any new approaches to making biofuels.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-generation_biofuels promise the ability to use material that would otherwise be waste, such as straw, thus lessening the competition between food and fuel. Any study that claims to make forecasts for the year 2050 (also in TFA) should take a serious look at these too.
The study in TFA only gives a cursory overview over second generation biofuels with an either-crop-or-cellulose point of view. It almost seems that the option of using crop residue was intentionally neglected...
C - the footgun of programming languages
Have we ever figured out how to store megawats of energy from solar and wind power?
"Alister was a dreamer, clean air, free energy, noble concepts, but we live on a planet that's addicted to petroleum. Now what happens if you dump free energy onto the world market, stock markets around the world would plummet, our own economy would collapse overnight, recession, unemployment, war....the world is speeding up too fast, we can barely hold on as it is."
"Power and money. Is that what this was all about?"
"He was a sixty-year-old scientist who did nothing but good and they put a bag over his head."
That's Big Government for you. Instead of various people acting as they see fit — some making mistakes and some not — we have a government, that's big enough to make a mistake for all of us at once...
Competing ideas? To each his own? Personal responsibility? No way, no how — citizen, the Science is Settled[TM] and you are blocking our progress towards the Common Good[TM].
Fat is bad for you — all of you! Until it is not. Except it still is...
Biofuels is about to become the latest example of this. As our benevolent and omniscient overlords in Washington jump from one trend to another, the whole country is supposed to rejig, retool, and reorient itself each time: from "low-fat" to "low-sugar", from growing biofuels to drilling oil. Because they "know" better — and they are 100% confident in that settled "knowledge" of theirs. Until it changes to the exact opposite like some kind of quantum particle — and only the confidence remains.
How about we — the subjects — make our own choices, huh? Leaving only the courts, police and military to you, our beloved government class? Yes, we — some of us — will be making the same mistakes. But, at least, they will be neither coercing nor outright forcing the others to repeat them.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
this study has been brought to you by Saudi Aramco. Buy dead liquid dinos TODAY!
How about...
Common Sense Dictates that Human Beings Should Ditch Reliance on Any One Form of Energy
The people in charge of the study might have saved themselves some time if they'd just thought about it first.
The question raised is why does this decades old mature technology not take off?
Did someone subsidize the wrong pet project or are there still technical issues? If this worked we would see it in some of the greener states even without gov handouts.
So covering a field with solar cells would be 10x more efficient than harvesting biofuel from the same field.
You can't plant a solar panel. Well, you can, but they're called plants. Anyway, covering the field with solar panels would be dumb, unless you had some shade crops that you wanted to grow beneath them. Solar panels can go all kinds of places. Food can only go on arable land, unless you want to build a bunch of equipment to sustain it. And that's the obvious and logical end result of using our topsoil to produce fuels...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Are you now a science denier the second they said something you disagree with?
No, I'm citing science, while the report is ignoring it.
It appears scientists are in agreement on this
Only if you are ignorant. Also, not all scientists are created equal. I don't ask people about things out of their field because it's irrelevant what they think about things they haven't researched. I have done.
I don't believe you are a bio-fuel expert and qualified to question them.
If you have an issue with my citation, then make it. But I note that you're too cowardly to actually do that.
Funny how quickly that happened.
Funny how quickly some coward without sufficient courage of his convictions to even log in and be counted has raised so many nebulous objections so quickly after my comment rose to the top of the barrel.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Fun Facts:
1) The United States alone produces enough food to feed the entire global population but throws away approximately 65% of all yield (thanks to unnecessary farm subsidies that pay farmers to grow food and throw it away)
2) Brazil has decades of success in using cane as a major fraction of its energy source, a fact that in and of itself disproves the postulate in the "study." Apparently they didn't study too hard for this one.
2nd generation biofuels aren't yet economically feasible, so can how could you even do a study on pure hypotheticals? For algae or biowaste to be viable sources of fuel, we can't be trucking raw materials/fuels from a thousand small operations since that'll reduce efficiency and cost effectiveness. Talk about straw or other waste is a waste of time, the raw production has to be bulk from as few sources as possible and delivered to a central plant. We're talking about plant materials produced specifically to be completely turned into fuel, so food production is going to be substituted.
Please? We're fucking starving here just so GM can sell more "Super green" automobiles.
Thanks,
The ordinary people of England who are actually just a little bit allergic to the field after field of inedible castor.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Biofuel from algae can be produced much more efficiently, should its development be ditched as well? I think there's a future for biofuel from algae.
This is not the sig you're looking for.
Photosynthetic efficiency has tons of varying factors to consider. Chloroplast sensitivity to a given wavelength, the quantum yield each wavelength can provide, etc. General figures for plant efficiency run between 5-10% for full-spectrum light exposure and can go as high as 15% for targeted-spectrum lighting.
the only problem with your post is that it's grounded in the 80s.
I worked in a lab that researched biofuels and turns out that the biggest issue with this setup is that the bacterial populations keep evolving away from the good biofuel-producing genes, reducing the effectiveness of the process as quickly as within a batch.
That, more than anything else, is the biggest issue with algae and biofuel production.
2nd generation biofuels aren't yet economically feasible
That is wrong, and you are either ignorant or lying.
You put the feedstocks in a big bag, basically like the ones they use as water tanks. You run the escaping gases into a system where they're pressurized to appropriate levels, the methane is separated with a membrane, and then compressed. This is already being done at a profitable level on a number of farms across the country. The lowest-hanging fruit is pigshit (what a great sentence) because it is very hot so it cooks quickly, and it is a major environmental problem. The shit is normally just pumped into open ponds where it sits and stinks, and then eventually either flushed into some shitty waterway or flushed out of the pond by flooding.
We're talking about plant materials produced specifically to be completely turned into fuel, so food production is going to be substituted.
Only if the people implementing the system are total assholes. Algae is a plant, and if you put out some water and stir it, you get algae. As it turns out, there's no point in trying to select varieties of it either, which is probably why we aren't spinning up production: nobody has figured out how to profit by patenting the algaes yet. As it turns out, nature has produced more different kinds of algae than we know what to do with, and the most productive algae for your climate just miraculously shows up and colonizes your water for free. What's more, the water can be of any salinity up to oceanic levels, and can contain substantial contaminants.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The worst offender is the flex-fuel E85 crap. If you want to run ethanol, run ethanol, build up an engine that is designed to take advantage of it's anti-det properties and runs dramatically higher compression for waaaaay better efficiency. And we definitely shouldn't be doing it with corn (Corn requires nitrogen fertilizer, largely negating the total energy boon of ethanol). We should be looking at switch grass and other fast-growing high yield options that can generate vastly more ethanol per acre with dramatically less costs.
Bio Diesel I actually like, sulfur is all but forgotten, and the increased lubricity actually makes it easier on your engine. But the idea of trying to convert a soy crop to BD100 is going to be dumb. Recycling waste vegitable oil from the food processing industry on the other hand, reduces waste and taps into an existing supply.
Even looking at different sectors than just automotive. I have a couple of dairy farming buddies that use methane recovery from their manure processing system to power generators for electricity around the farm. Less raw methane escaping to the atmosphere, and again it's a by-product of the existing manure processing system.
The linked article sure reads like a shill for the oil industry, but it doesn't discount the point that we need to look at using the appropriate tool for the job. Sometimes that will be biofuels.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
They are not saying it is impossible to convert biomass to diesel, or even that we shouldn't grow biomass. They are saying that with current technology it is better to use biomass for carbon sequestration and food, and use more technological approaches to capturing solar as energy.
The core issue is the energy cost of conversion to a useful form. Converting biomass to biodiesel, right now, costs more energy than turning solar into charged batteries through PV, wind, or solar furnaces. That may change and we should still be doing research, and batteries still have ground to cover relative to diesel for energy density and refuel speed, but right now it looks like biomass fuel is going to be the losing horse.
We should be putting a larger share of our research budget on non-biomass solar capture than on biomass. We have that flipped right now because biomass looked like it was the better path ten years ago. It hasn't panned out, which doesn't mean we should give up, but we should continuously adjust our bets in favor of the stronger contender.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
But I gotta call bullshit on this report. If biofuels fail, it will be because of political interference in the process, not some inherent shortcoming. Many ways to generate fuel, but The politics involved seem to have us concentrate on corn based fuel, are chosen to send money towards farming interests more than make for efficiency.
There are ways to pretty efficiently generate biofuel that don't use food crops. Problem is, they don't use a biosource that fits in with the political baksheesh process. So we use corn.
There are some elephants in the room anyhow.
We do really need an energy dense fuel source that we can transport efficently with many vehicles. Airplanes, jet fighters, long distance heavy freight trains aren't likely to ever run on batteries. And unless there is really a never ending, hence abiotic supply of oil, we're going to have to find something else. Problem is, petrofuels set a pretty high bar.
Though widely reviled by some, ethanol is here to stay as a fuel additive. Of all the choices in boosting octane, it is about the best. Tetraethyl lead is nasty-ass deadly toxic stuff, and MTBE is capable of tainting groundwater with ease. Ethanol one way or the other is needed. It's interesting that some 6 percent of the nation's fuel supply is now ethanol additives.
So if a certain amount is needed just to keep running our petrofuels in the first place, we should look at generating it efficiently. Drinkypoo notes algae generation. I've seen the reactors (who ever thought I'd be giving a citation to a "drinkypoo" Oh well, when you're right, you're right.
Another thing is as long as we are burning stuff, the concept of what makes for less carbon in the atmosphere ends up just silly arguments. A certain amount of energy is going to be had by burning, so we have on concentrate on burning what we must, and moving away from it for everything else.
A final note - it is irony of the highest order to read in the report about how cheap solar and wind power are making it difficult for biofuels to compete. But there is some wisdom to be gained in that. While we are garroted by having to use food as fuel in our politically based ethanol production system, wind and solar have been much more innovative, and the industries have worked hard at lowering their cost. And they have largely succeeded. The present biofuel system is based on sending money to producers, not efficiency or ecological sense.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
They add that continuing to pursue this strategy is likely to use up vast tracts of fertile land that could be devoted to helping feed the world's growing population
Of course that is assuming that those vast tracts of fertile land would be used to help feed the worlds growing population. Prior to be used to produce biofuel, much of that fertile land was not used for this purpose, so the question for the think-tank would be "Why do they suppose it would be now?"
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
Biofuels are great, as long as they are made with waste products. That is, certain agricultural products create a lot of waste - we eat ears of corn, not the stalks. The countries that have made biofuels work do it by using the waste products of edible plants. There is no plant around that is anywhere close to profitable to grow just for fuel. That kind of agri-energy only 'works' if you give huge government subsidies. But if you happen to be growing an edible plant with a high amount of agricultural waste, you can easily and profitably turn that waste into energy. Note, normally we do other things with that waste - turn it into fertilizer, etc. To be a truly viable bio-fuel, the biofuel creation process must be more profitable than the alternative disposal method.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I worked in a lab that researched biofuels and turns out that the biggest issue with this setup is that the bacterial populations keep evolving away from the good biofuel-producing genes, [...] That, more than anything else, is the biggest issue with algae and biofuel production.
That might be true for butanol production, and if so, you should say so. But as for Algae grown in open ponds, it's a complete falsehood, and the linked report makes this clear. In a reactor, where it doesn't have to compete with other strains, it might work. But if you put it in a pond, another algae is going to come along and outcompete it, since it's not putting its effort into producing what excessive lipids (for its purposes, anyhow.)
The linked report is especially relevant to the particular point you raised because the goal of the program on which it reports was to study the breeding and application of high-lipid-production algaes for the purpose of production of biodiesel fuel, and what they determined (and indeed the thrust of the summary) is that there was simply no point. You put out the water, the algae shows up, you stir the algae, you achieve peak production with very little effort. The only thing that's really changed is that peak insolation has increased since the report was written, so you might need to shade your ponds.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
They are not saying it is impossible to convert biomass to diesel, or even that we shouldn't grow biomass. They are saying that with current technology it is better to use biomass for carbon sequestration and food, and use more technological approaches to capturing solar as energy.
In order to come to that conclusion, they only included technologies known to support it, and completely ignored well-known and proven technologies which disprove their point. Therefore, there is no validity whatsoever to the study, and you should summarily ignore it in turn.
Converting biomass to biodiesel, right now, costs more energy than turning solar into charged batteries through PV, wind, or solar furnaces.
[citation needed]
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The short form is that you grow algae in inexpensive raceway ponds and use centrifugal separation to get oil out as a diesel feedstock
That sounds like a huge waste of water lost through evaporation. The environmentalists have really been cracking down on cooling ponds for power plants lately, for exactly this reason. It is going to have to be in closed systems in order to be better than turning corn into ethanol.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Using corn to produce ethanol is about the worst possible way to do it, it actually takes more energy to produce x amount of E85 corn ethanol than you get out of it when you use it.
Using sugar cane to produce ethanol is a little bit better but still inefficient.
Using something like switchgrass on the other hand is much better, you can grow it in places where other stuff wont grow, you dont need anywhere near as much energy inputs or chemicals to produce it and with a little R&D and the right kind of processing plants you could get more output per hectare than either corn OR sugar cane.
ok, we can grow enough algae to power all our diesel road fuel consumption. what about the energy to mine all the iron and to electro-magnetically extract it. what about to power all the computers, every iphone requires an infrastructure that is the equivalent of one refrigerator worth of power per user. what about computers that do jobs for humans, what about buildings necessary to shelter humans. what about roads, what about air transit?
sustainability is great, proving the technology works is great. but as long as sustainability isn't on the political agenda then we will never see it happen. as for the plastic, plastic can be made from corn, methane and a lot of other things besides oil. plastic also usually recycles well.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Your inner nerd failed high school.
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
And if you think global warming is bad with just natural sunlight, just imagine gathering MORE of it and beaming it to Earth!?
Please note that 5.5% of our arable land covered in solar panels (with the necessary auxiliary systems to buffer the energy till we need it) could supply ALL energy (not just electrical) needs of the USA.
It should further be noted that only 17% of the USA is "arable". Which means less than 1% of our total land area needs to be covered in solar panels to get the desired result*.
*Assuming that the "desired result" is energy independence and elimination of fossil fuels (which are much more valuable for making plastics than burning).
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Tell it like it is brother !
The Big Government acts on behalf of its clients. It is subject to the bribery and corruption of campaign "contributions" that define public policy that benefits the insiders, the cronies and contributors. Solyndra....
Ethanol does not make sense . But farm state senators love it.
First save our farm land and make it illegal to use any land once used for farming for any other purpose. Next make it illegal to raise non food crops on farm land. Then stop all exports of any food what so ever. That way our soil will be presrved and the price of food in the US will go down. Then plant large areas with bamboo. Bamboo is super fast growing and sequesters carbon for the first five years of its life. Harvest bamboo every five years as it is useful for many products. And then, above all else, allow one child to be born to a female for life. By doing that we can shrink the population instead of reproducing until we exterminate all humanity by over population. It is so easy to implement but an ignorant public will never allow it.
That's only relevant if you use the fossil fuels to make electricity. If you use the fossil fuels to power your car biofuels get far more interesting.
In the end we will have a mix. A combination of solar panels/solar towers, wind farms and biofuels has my vote but it will always be a mix of different sources.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
...because we were doing it wrong? Obviously we should have given up on space exploration because chemical rockets are so inefficient.
Corn and ethanol are used because the people who stand to profit from them have significant political sway, not because they make any sense whatsoever to do. It's too soon to give up on biofuels. Energy crops should be part of an integrated agricultural solution. The idea that not growing crops for fuel means energy production won't increase food prices is ridiculous. Energy is a large part of what we pay for when we buy food. Fertilizer, pesticides, farm machinery, and distribution. What we do need are incentives to put idle agricultural land back into production before using forested land. Also, around me a fair amount of land is still used to grow tobacco. Only good can come from repurposing that.
Biofuels are nifty, but they will never scale to run an industrial civilization at current levels without creating an ecological disaster.
You didn't actually need a "think-tank" to figure this out. A hand calculator and the ability to use Google would have done just as well.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Tree huggers would shit bricks if you tried it. Algal blooms are a big enough problem that encouraging them would absolutely devastate native aquatic life. Not to mention the impact on sport and commercial fishing.
What "it"? Hydrogen? Yup, it's a huge failure.
What else? Oh, the space-based solar power fantasy that just won't die?
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
And electrons don't "die"...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
(But I wish stupid sci-fi masquerading as real engineering would die.)
You seem to have a very muddled understanding of basic physics that has been known for over a hundred years. You're the one peddling "twaddle" if you seriously think space-based solar makes any sense at all.
Hey, how's the Solaren deal working out? You'd think there would be weekly updates on /. if it was so important?
We don't even have the Concorde anymore and you guys are still masturbating to 1960s cheap energy delusions!??
bahahhahaaaaaa
If we *did* have the capacity to manufacture, launch, and use space solar, we wouldn't have a resource problem in the first place!
Ohahahahahhha ha ha ha ahahaaa
IDIOTS
You and Mr Murphy both need to take a course in logical thinking.
Space based power has it's problems but heating up the world more than existing energy use is not one of them.
Heat is heat. It doesn't matter where it comes from or how it is created. Burning a gallon of gas on the ground. or beaming 144000 BTU from orbit, is going to put the same amount of energy into the biosphere. The differences come from how efficiently the energy is utilized not their source. Seeing as space based energy would be very efficiently converted into electricity most of the loss happening outside the atmosphere we would likely use less of it, reducing the impact to the environment overall.
And everyone always seems to forget that CONSERVATION and EFFICIENCY are part of the equation. Over the past 5 years I have reduced my demand for fossil fuels by MORE THAN HALF without degrading my lifestyle. In fact I live and drive in more comfort than ever.
Smart building practices (proper insulation, double paned glass, low heat gain roof), newer technologies for building energy efficiency and more efficient cars, if adopted on the national scale, cut this problem in half, if not more.
Now that I generate solar power, have high efficiency heat pump AC, an Energy Star Fridge, Washer, TV and Heat Pump Water Heater, LED lighting, etc. my demand for electricity is only 1/3 of what it used to be. A few years from now I expect my total annual electric demand from the grid to be zero due to continued increases in efficiency and a modest investment to increase my generation capacity by 10 - 20%.
Now that I only need 240 gallons of gas a year (50 MPG Hybrid) instead of 700 gallons (17 MPG standard car), the amount of land needed to grow the bio fuel for my car is correspondingly less. Even with 1st generation fuels, it would take less than 3/4 of an acre of sugar beets or 1 acre of corn to fuel my car for the year with ethanol. A few years from now, I expect to be able to get 100 MPGe by having a plug-in car and powering it partially from my solar generation system. This will cut my demand in half again.
Now all you nitpickers will say "but what about me--I have to drive mammoth SUV for work or I live in Alaska" or some other bullshit excuse for being lazy and not caring about the big picture. And yes, we will never get 100% adoption; there's too many assholes out there and too many idiots who can't do many and calculate ROI numbers. But I do believe a substantial fraction of the population will adopt green technologies--once they figure out that these technologies will fill their pockets with green.
I also believe we will be having these same bullshit arguments 20 years from now but there will be millions of people like me who will be able to provide 20 years of data proving our side of the argument with actual empirical measurements.
[citation needed]
You first. You made the first claim; you show me your resource showing the energy efficiency of algal microbiofuel from sun to tank. Cite the page, please.
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Because high school was all about running cost benefit analyses on space based solar power.
... because "fracking."
Fossil fuel price has tanked to the point that people are gearing up with muscle machines again.
Even the Hummer H2 saw a jump in sales on the used car market, according to Kelley Blue Book. General Motors (GM) discontinued the line as part of its 2009 bankruptcy.
Biofuels is a panic solution for an energy crises that has (for now) disappeared.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Yeah you've repeated the rah rah promising sounding stuff from the decades old NREL reports. It sounds really great, I've read those too. But read them carefully--they're very initial studies that never scaled up. They are full of statements to the tune of "when scaled up to commercial volumes". Excepts it's been decades and no one has been able to do it. I've followed a number of the experiments of people trying and it doesn't seem to be as easy as the NREL papers made it sound. The open raceway ponds get contaminated with lower oil strains and don't produce the oil at the rate the papers hypothesized and the closed systems are expensive and difficult to operate. I'm not saying it's not possible, but the magical oil from algae to produce 100% of our transportation fuel isn't going to be nearly as easy as it seemed. Possible? Maybe yes, but probably not economical anytime soon. Think of it this way, if it worked, oil companies would be pouring billions into making it work rather than spending those billions drilling underwater or paying despotic dictators. They don't care where their oil comes from and if biodiesel from algae worked they'd be all over it to sell that to you cheaper than the other oil companies. They are researching it and possibly when crude oil is 4, 10, 20 or more times more expensive than it is now then algal biodiesel will be cost competitive. It wasn't when oil was over $100 a barrel, but it's possible something will be figured out that hasn't been in the last few decades to make it feasible by the time it gets back there. Or maybe it won't.
" What is more, as costs for wind and solar power have plummeted over the past decade, and the new report points out that for a given amount of land, solar panels are at least 50 times more efficient than bio fuels at capturing the energy of sunlight in a useful form."
1. Wind and Solar do not complete with bio fuels. You can not run a truck, ship, or airliner on electricity effectively because of battery technology.. Even cars are limited today by cost. Now if you are talking about bio fuels to run generators then maybe, but for transportation not at all.
It is kind of like that big huge lie that people like to tell about wind and solar reducing our dependence on foreign oil.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Algasol's photobioreactor technology requires less than 1/10th the land of other biofuel technologies and, in fact, it requires no land at all, preferring to be located on saline water. The largest photobioreactor, the 250m^2 Alga6, sells for $3,375 retail. When the numbers are all run, Alga6 biocrude is competitive with $40/bbl oil -- and that includes all costs including the cost of insuring the photobioreactors against hail, the power cost of centrifugal separation, the power to drive the wave mixing when natural wind is too low, etc. Right now the market emphasis is on algal biomass for fish feed, simply because the signal to noise level in the biofuels industry is so low that (combined with recent declines in crude price) no one can be bothered to sit down and do the arithmetic for Alga6 biocrude.
Seastead this.
Heat goes into space if you don't have an abundance of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Yeah you sound like you know what you're talking about, except you don't. I know the studies you read make it sound easy, except it didn't turn out to be so easy. If it were that easy people would be investing billions into it to earn the profits that the oil companies are currently earning on petroleum. The studies you read, I read too, and they are smaller scale, talking about hoping to scale up. Optimistic pilot studies are practically legend and this seems to be a case. When trying to scale up, difficulties seem to have arisen. When you look into the companies that are trying to scale it up, it isn't working out as well. The contaminants are happening, the yields are lower, the costs are higher, etc.
You made the first claim; you show me your resource showing the energy efficiency of algal microbiofuel from sun to tank.
I didn't make a specific claim about algal microbiofuel from sun to tank.
Cite the page, please.
First, you cite the comment which justifies your claim. And, your laziness. I provided a citation. It's a summary, and it contains its own summaries, and you can search it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
they're very initial studies that never scaled up.
Yes, I've read them, I know they only did one decent-sized test.
Excepts it's been decades and no one has been able to do it.
Who has the land? Who has been trying to do it?
I've followed a number of the experiments of people trying and it doesn't seem to be as easy as the NREL papers made it sound. The open raceway ponds get contaminated with lower oil strains and don't produce the oil at the rate the papers hypothesized and the closed systems are expensive and difficult to operate.
Clearly you and all the people you have allegedly been following [citation?] failed to read and understand the report, which specifically says that this will happen if you try to seed the ponds with specific strains, but also that it's a fat waste of time because the strains which are most efficient in the laboratory are not going to be the strains which are most efficient in your pond, year over year. The strains which are most successful in your region will naturally dominate the ponds no matter what you do. The only way to select for strains that produce a lot of oil is to make producing a lot of oil a survival strategy, and it isn't that. Maybe someone will come up with some kind of additive that convinces the algae that it is, and then you can have your even-more-efficient-than-necessary strains.
Think of it this way, if it worked, oil companies would be pouring billions into making it work rather than spending those billions drilling underwater or paying despotic dictators.
They have a system that works. They're not interfering with it. Indeed, BP is suing GE to prevent them from interfering with it.
The thing which prevents biodiesel-from-algae from happening even though it would be profitable now is that you can't get the permits you'd need to do it. Even if you did, by the time you actually got moving, the next administration would come along and quash it. It takes cooperation from government to enact such a massive project, and government is currently cooperating with Big Oil — indeed, it's peopled by it to sufficient degree to permit them undue influence. In the past the federal government has been happy to permit BLM land (for example) to be exploited for coal and oil in extremely destructive ways, to say nothing of the clear-cutting that goes on in the parts which still have soil enough to support trees. But they've been resistant to solar projects, citing concern over environmental impact. Now that is comedy.
There's nothing magical about oil from algae as a feedstock for transportation fuel, and it would make a significant positive difference, and we can do it. We do have the technology. Moving water around between ponds is a well-solved problem. We do more complicated things all the time, and for much more specious reasons than to reduce environmental impact.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
the best one can do to save environment and protect against global warming at least in that part that is caused by humans* - condoms for free. The main reason we use so much energy is because there are so many of us. Most of us are completely useless (I agree republican party members are even more so) so there is no issue of having fewer useless farts. Bonus is - less STDs (including herpes hepatitis and other nice ones) around.The biofuels were a nice try - now we know better. We shall revisit the subject when the standard fuels run out which they eventually will
* - some humans doubt if humans at all can cause any significant global effect and say compare our CO2 production to a huge vulcano erruption. Yet 1 more vulcano eruption on top of 20 others is increase by 5% and this goes on every year. Then cutting trees all over the place has a significant effect on local weather patterns and increase of surface temperature and as humans live everywhere now they cut the trees everywhere. Concrete is significantly hotter in the middle of the sunny day than a forest surface. There are few other small and big items but certainly constant activity of 7b humans has a significant and accumulating effect on weather. We can discuss how big this effect may be but it is there.
That sounds like a huge waste of water lost through evaporation.
It's okay, because algae doesn't care if you use salt water. So you use wind, solar, and solar thermal pumps to move seawater inland. There's no shortage of that.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Sea water. It come (these days) fully loaded with everything needed for algae.
Enough land to replace 100% of gasoline with drop-in biofuel from algae, perhaps, but not enough water. A couple of issues have emerged since 1998, water budget and heat build-up. Algae farms rely on desert-like irradiation for mass production but at the same time accumulate the heat. However, current open pond production processes need to evaporate water for cooling, and so are based on a water budget with a negative balance. Closed photobioreactors that conserve water and protect strains from contamination absorb heat, and then require expensive balance of system costs for cooling. The various demonstration technologies have a long way to go to overcome these two basic issues.
I don't know why we of The Future insist on ignoring 200 years of perfectly useful industrial era history, but the biofuel debacle has already happened at least once, in 1944 and 1945, when Germany sacrificed its potato and beet crops in order to make fuel by the Fischer-Tropsch process. It kept Germany fighting for about another 100 days, with some annoying and surprising success in the Ardennes and Hungary, but it would have condemned most of the German population to starvation in the early summer of 1945, had not emergency food shipments from the US saved their lives. Biofuels consume food faster and less efficiently than people do, and probably always will.
That sounds like a huge waste of water lost through evaporation.
Yep. We better get rid of all those lakes too! They are so wasteful! And what about all those open air water reservoirs?!
So, a field of solar panels is more efficient. Hurray!
Lemme just stop by and get a gallon of solar!
Oh wait!
Maybe, if we had a grid and road system that supported wholesale, on-the-go electrification of cars, this would be more important.
But, with our current infrastructure, while biofuels offer less energy density, they result in a product that's appropriate for the uses required.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
So you're saying you have no basis for your belief that algal microbiofuel is energy efficient. Pretty much what I figured. Lots of semi-literate technobabble about the components, but you don't know shit about the efficiency, which is the entire focus of this article.
I haven't looked at any of the research since 2009, when I looked into setting up an algae system with a friend who ran his family's vehicles on biodiesel and was buying from a company 20 miles away. We figured we could take all the hipster business on the South end of San Jose. We decided not to do it because it was only cost effective with government subsidies, because the energy conversion was so awful. Which is to say; I don't have any of the materials anymore and don't really care if you want to keep being ignorant, so I'm not going to go find them for you. If you want to not be wrong, you should do the research.
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If you define space based solar as solar that uses a light source in space then you are right.
But putting the collectors in space will be stupid and uneconomic for the foreseeable future.
Until the cost of launch and the lower service life on orbit match the efficiency loss on earth (call them 1/2 from atmospheric losses and 4/24 (1/6) for night time based on 'equivalent hours maps') land based solar is cheaper. At a really rough chop, assuming $1 peak watt installed on earth, you'd have to get orbital cost down to under $12 watt installed, on orbit. 2000 watts/meter, 20% efficiency, 80% transmission efficiency. 320 watts/meter of panel, using generous assumptions. $4000 to orbit a square meter of solar cells and support equipment, just to match capital costs with $1/peak watt terrestrial solar.
That's ignoring the %1/year expected degradation on orbit and station keeping costs for the satellite.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The only argument for space-based is "it's a way around NIMBY". PG&E did some serious research into it, as there's just no where in Northern California they're allowed to build a new power plant, and demand keeps rising. The main reason the plan failed is still NIMBY: They'd need a 1-block receiving station for the incoming power, and could never get that approved. Fuck California.
It's also useful in Northern latitudes. In Texas, ground-based makes perfect sense: lots of land, far enough south. In Seattle, not so much - even on the 12 clear days each year, you're too far north for much efficiency.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Soylent Biofuel is people.
Let's see, this is where we spend big bucks raising *crops*, on *cropland*, to turn into fuel, as opposed to the original proposals to use biomass - that's waste, that's *weeds* (that need *zero* bucks on fertilizers and watering and pesticides to raise....
mark
Mack Reynolds agrees with you (The Lagrangists).
No, it was about learning the basic math that should let you do it by yourself like a big boy.
The focus on ethanol was never about the bio-fuel aspects, but about corn subsidies and pork-barrelling.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I think it really depends on what you are using the fuel for. Baring massive change to culture and how we do things, it will never really be an alternative for mainstream automotive fuel. It is a niche market. So I like your farm example. That makes sense. There is also pretty much a net zero cost for fuel distribution (as it is produced where it is generated). So the same could be true for a number of industries. But these would all be limited use.
Using it as fuel for transportation (unless we drastically stop physically transporting) or for general energy distribution (i.e. a power plant), isn't really all that reasonable. The only reason to do it now is for subsidies, payoffs, political favors, etc...
I think transportation except for airplanes and hot air balloons will switch to electricity power. I think solar cells have far more potential than biofuels for optimized output as well much lower operating costs. Long term biofuel seems like a waste of time.
- Plants don't need to be built, they can build themselves with local resources
- Biofuel is easy to store, solar panels are only efficient when connected to a power grid. Batteries are still too expensive and lacking in energy density in many cases.
The ten or so new power plants in CA during the last 10 years prove you wrong. Granting utilities have learned to site them with or replacing existing plants.
PG&E doesn't own any generation. They are a load serving entity and have been for over a decade. They still own some very valuable transmission lines.
Even is an overcast shithole like Seattle, ground based solar is more cost effective then orbital.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
If it were that easy people would be investing billions into it to earn the profits that the oil companies are currently earning on petroleum.
Yeah you sound like you know what you're talking about, except you don't. BP is patent trolling to prevent Butanol from happening, when they could be selling it. Why wouldn't biodiesel be subject to the same sort of machinations?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Less than 1% is still more land than is covered with pavement in the entire US. That includes all the roads, highways, parking lots, etc. That's a huge amount of land.
Oh, sure, for now, but Solar for now can't be baseload anyhow. Orbital can. It will be a while before panels get cheap enough and enough not reliant on scarce materials to scale. It seems inevitable now, but it's still a ways off. Meanwhile, private space efforts keep making progress. In 50 years, when solar has wide adoption and we're struggling with baseload at night, and in bad climates, I think orbital will be a viable choice vs nuclear or gas.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Solar can't do base load due to transmission issues. Transmitting power to the other side of the planet is non-trivial.
But a small part of making orbital solar work is transmitting power down from orbit.
More fundamentally; the only reason to insist solar do baseload is quasi religious.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
What about salt buildup when the water evaporates?
We should not be using corn or sugar to make fuel. Here in Florida we have the Gulf of Mexico with frequent Algae blooms. Those blooms should be turned into oil laden algae, and harvested. We have left over phosphate gypsum that causes algae. Mix them up for oil.
This is going to be road kill for the coming EV revolution - - - - google "Tony Seba energy"
More fundamentally; the only reason to insist solar do baseload is quasi religious.
It's the only thing that can scale, unless fusion ever stops being "just 20 years away". Think of the energy needs of 11 billion people at American consumption levels (~40 TW), which isn't at all a far-fetched projection and of course it won't stop there. Even ground-based Solar hits scaling issues there - it's one thing to shade everything that's already paved, and maybe all the salt flats, but at some point you get significant ecological effects.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The only argument for space-based is "it's a way around NIMBY". PG&E did some serious research into it, as there's just no where in Northern California they're allowed to build a new power plant, and demand keeps rising. The main reason the plan failed is still NIMBY: They'd need a 1-block receiving station for the incoming power, and could never get that approved. Fuck California.
At some point in time, the electricity will get so expensive only the 5%ers will be able to afford to keep the lights on; about that time being a NIMBY will become as un-PC as being a Terrorist, a Racist or a child molester.. Trust me everyone will either forget about Agenda 21, or fit new power plants into it!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Who finances this 'prominent environmental think tank'?
Oil and gas lobby sues EPA over biofuel mandate
CREW seeks EPA docs to uncover undue oil lobbying pressure
Using basic math to pretend you can solve complicated problems again, boy?
What if someone pretends to solve a complicated problem with an even more complicated solution, and simple math shows it makes no sense, does it matter if it's high-school level math?
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
There is a very simple example in nature (which you have used without noticing it's real lesson) that illustrates why vegitation-based "biofuels" will NEVER be efficient: Plants are so low in energy density that animals that live off of them spend all day of every day of their lives grazing on them. These animals (cows, deer, etc) are in-turn the food that other animals get their more-energy-dense food from. Big cats, wolves, etc spend very little of their daily time eating because when they eat they get a lot of concentrated energy.
For "biofuels" to be energy-dense and efficient they would either have to be meat-based (like animal fat... whale oil perhaps? (as we once used)) OR they would have to be highly-concentrated compressed super-dense processed (using massive heat and pressure) plants ... which the Earth does for us for free deep down below our feet... the results of which we can easily get by drilling, pumping, and refining. OIL IS THE BEST, AND ONLY SUPER-EFFICIENT, BIOFUEL AVAILABLE
Given the better options, the only reason for governments to push biofuels is an offensive (both meanings) weapon for rich countries to use on poor countries. Rich countries can raise food prices significantly globally, and import somewhat less oil. Just think how high corn prices would go if we could use 200% our annual corn production for ethanol rather than just 50%.
> You and Mr Murphy both need to take a course in logical thinking.
This aught to be good...
> It doesn't matter where it comes from or how it is created
Oh yeah, here we go...
> Burning a gallon of gas on the ground. or beaming 144000 BTU from orbit, is going to put the same amount of energy into the biosphere
Lolz. Look up "greenhouse effect".
I wish I could post the "not sure if trolling... or just stupid" graphic, but I'm too stupid to figure it out. And apparently I'm still smarter than this guy.
A science fiction author? Faint praise indeed.
It's not like the math is complex. If you feel it's being misrepresented, fine, post your numbers. Here's mine:
https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2012/03/17/the-maury-equation-redux/
> PG&E did some serious research into it
Their "serious research" consists entirely of a blog post and giving some money to a "company" consisting of two guys and a dog who promptly disappeared.
> The main reason the plan failed is still NIMBY
The main reason the plan failed is...
1) it never actually existed beyond a press release that succeeded in getting the techno-nerds to blogroll their advertising for free
2) Any reasonable input numbers return LCoE on the order of $35 per kWh. That compares to about 0.10 to $0.20 for ground-based PV
> but Solar for now can't be baseload anyhow
Baseload power is currently selling for 1.8 cents/kWh. Peak is selling for about 25 cents.
> I think orbital will be a viable choice vs nuclear or gas.
Numbers please.
You didn't read what I was replying to did you ?
And if you think global warming is bad with just natural sunlight, just imagine gathering MORE of it and beaming it to Earth!?
Oh and next time you start screaming denier at someone like the good little sheeple you are, remember this and how it illustrates that you not only know nothing about the climate models but aren't even well acquainted with the basic physics you would need to understand them.
the processes to turn biomass into biofuel are anything but eco-local-natural. when scaled out they will look as bad as the current petro-industry. As far as storage goes, the power grid is a very practical way to store solar power, especially since daytime is peak electrical usage.
Paid for by Venezuala, Russia, and the Middle East
Only thing?
Nonsense. To make orbital solar a reasonable solution you have to posit cheap orbital transport.
It could posit room temperature superconductors and solve the same problem with a world wide electric grid and rooftop solar. America could supply it's energy needs with infinite capital and it's roof tops (in gross, not time specific).
Adults understand that energy supply will continue to be from a mix of sources and that there is no magic bullet.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Grumpiness Warning. Pedantry Warning. If you're not in the mood for either, you may want to skip this.
Did a real-world, grownup newspaper actually use this headline: "New Study Says Governments Should Ditch Reliance On Biofuels"?
It was the New York Times, so YMMV. I'd say most people think it is. It's not the "Weekly World News", a parody produced by National Lampoon, or a middle school student newspaper, at any rate.
Let's break it down, shall we?
It assumes more than one government has a reliance on biofuels.
I wasn't aware of this. I thought governments almost always used conventional fossil fuels or nuclear fuels for their tanks, jet fighters, aircraft carriers, cop cars, cop tanks, letter-carrier vehicles, etc. While it's possible I'm wrong about this, typically when my understanding and the New York Times are in conflict, the NYT is off the mark.
Let's assume that instead of what it actually says, the headline writer meant it to be about government actions to dick with the incentives markets provide people, using subsidies, punitive taxes, fines, prohibitions, mandates, and the like. (Yes, I peeked a little.)
Governments have (occasionally vigorously) pushed people towards using ethanol, wood, and such (and petroleum and coal feedstock materials a few million years prematurely), and away from using fully-processed fossil fuel feedstock. There's no "reliance" here.
Grump, grump, grump.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
Batteries are a joke for this application - the ones with best performance are expensive and fragile, and ALL of them wear out. People can live with super-cheap batteries that wear out annually (like in smoke alarms) or more expensive ones that wear out in a decade because they spend most of the time charging rather than discharging (like in standard cars, or UPS systems). Batteries with the massive capacity to supply entire TOWNS and the durability to do this EVERY NIGHT while lasting for any reasonable time however do not exist. The Space Station has the sort of long-life high-capacity super-reliable batteries needed BUT it only has the demands of a large home with up to 7 residents and it required a space agency sized budget.
Compressed air storage is a promising (in some ways) alternative; you compress air into massive high pressure tanks when you have surplus power and then vent it through turbine generators when you need power. This is cheaper than city-sized batteries and would last much longer, but compressed air is notoriosly "lossy" as an energy storage and transport mechanism. It would require super-tanker-sized high-pressure air tanks probably underground. None of this exists today.
Pumped water is another option that might work in some places. You buid two holding ponds, one up high and one far below. When you have surplus energy you pump water into the upper pond, and when you need energy you let water fall through turbines into the lower pond. This is probably the most promising, but you need the appropriate physical location and in places like California a drought would mean BOTH the loss of potable water AND the loss of grid capacity. This system COULD be most-quickly built; All the tech is the same as in hydroelectric dams, so the supply chain and trained personnel already exist, all the tech is well-understood, and the scalability is already proven.
The basic problem with all of this is that you need more than double the energy generated by the "green" energy source so you can BOTH supply normal demands AND store the same amount of energy for the time when the "green" source is not available. For example: even in optimal locations, solar generated full power for much less than half of a 24 hour day (in the morning and evening the sun angle is lower and the sunlight therefore passes through more atmosphere). The other major thing most advocates for storage never seem to want to consider is LOSSES. There are losses every time you convert or transmit energy. Losses when you convert in order to store. Losses while stored. Losses when you convert from stored energy back to electricity...
All those electric cars lack the battery capacity to even satisfy the needs of most car owners.
If you tried to use them as standby power get you though the periods when your eco-dream power source was not able to power your home, then they'd have no charge left for you to use driving the car, AND you'd wear them out even faster. Just how often do you want to throw out thousands of dollars worth of electric car batterypack and buy and install new ones? Have you seriously PRICED a Tesla car battery?
Most people are not going to go e-car until the battery capacity gets to about double what's currently available and charging takes as little time as filling a gas tank. For your idea of using cars as UPS systems, that capacity would need to double again for even owners of modest homes. The price tag for this is prohibitive for anybody not a champaign liberal.
At that point in the war, the regime circulated pamphlets and films instructing German women to bake breads and cakes with sawdust instead of flour (I have seen the films). Food shortages which were already extreme as a result of the basic needs of war were made far worse without the beet and potato crops - which eliminated not just actual beets and potatoes from the menu, but also derived things like beet sugar and potato flour. The government solution was to provide the wives and mothers of Germany with cellulose (bags of sawdust) which was generated as an unavoidable waste product of many of the manufacturing processes of the nation's war industries.
Sawdust wasn't much nutritionally, but it DID bulk-up the foods and fill stomachs while also making foods LOOK somewhat normal.
Incidentally, your post was an excellent one related to this overall subject and one which is usually overlooked/forgotten. I'd have modded you up if I'd had the ability.
That is why space-based solar power is very likely the only way to go.
My inner nerd wholly agrees with you.
My outer nerd thinks orbital base load energy would be a single point of failure, and the entity that provides it would become the de-facto world government. Better to build autonomous terrestrial plants in sovereign countries fueled by an element present on every continent.
And yes, I have even more layers of nerd underneath. It's nerd all the way down.
Yeah, OK, I can agree that thorium is probably the way to go for standing reactors. But not for transportation needs. We are gonna need fuels for cars, planes, trucks, and trains. Running 1000 mile extension cords is PROBABLY not the way to go here .
But seriously, multiple SPSes, built of space-born materials, would help limit the load needed for the baseline energy needs. Some local solar/wind installations will help knock the baseline loads even lower. But we'll still need liquid/solid fuels.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
If you define space based solar as solar that uses a light source in space then you are right.
But putting the collectors in space will be stupid and uneconomic for the foreseeable future.
Until the cost of launch and the lower service life on orbit match the efficiency loss on earth (call them 1/2 from atmospheric losses and 4/24 (1/6) for night time based on 'equivalent hours maps') land based solar is cheaper. At a really rough chop, assuming $1 peak watt installed on earth, you'd have to get orbital cost down to under $12 watt installed, on orbit. 2000 watts/meter, 20% efficiency, 80% transmission efficiency. 320 watts/meter of panel, using generous assumptions. $4000 to orbit a square meter of solar cells and support equipment, just to match capital costs with $1/peak watt terrestrial solar.
That's ignoring the %1/year expected degradation on orbit and station keeping costs for the satellite.
That's if you build them on Earth and launch them. Better solution is, launch a few bots to mine, refine, and manufacture them on the Moon and launch from there. The American West would have NEVER been settled if the pioneers demanded every gram of food, water, and construction materials be packed with them from the East. We need to use the local resources.
And who says solar cell SPSs are the way to go? You could just as easily use solar concentrators heating up black iron pipe with sodium as a coolant or something of that nature, then use the vapor to spin a turbine or 3. Yeah, it's simplistic, and not taking into account the engineering problems of turbines in space using corrosives as sodium as the working fluid. But these are engineering challanges, and can be solved. Solar cells have an advantage of no moving parts above the atomic level, but turbines and generators may end up being cheaper, especially if built in space.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Solar can't do base load due to transmission issues. Transmitting power to the other side of the planet is non-trivial.
But a small part of making orbital solar work is transmitting power down from orbit.
More fundamentally; the only reason to insist solar do baseload is quasi religious.
It all depends on how many power sats you want in orbit, and what those orbits are. A single monster sat beaming down to one rectenna is probably NOT the way to do it. Several power sats in varying orbits, beaming to multiple rectannae is a damned sight closer. Keep in mind that the further out the orbit is, the longer the 'day' the satellite sees. At geosync, the Earth occludes a sat for only a couple hours a day. Shift to a sat 20 or 30 degrees away, and you can hit that rectenna no problem.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrocurrency#Currencies_used_to_trade_oil
Casteism
Yeah, OK, I can agree that thorium is probably the way to go for standing reactors. But not for transportation needs. We are gonna need fuels for cars, planes, trucks, and trains. Running 1000 mile extension cords is PROBABLY not the way to go here .
What I'm hoping for is some form of pulse-charging track built into roadways, so that electric vehicles could maintain charge while traveling and even arrive at their destinations with a surplus of energy.
But when it comes to practical transportation liquid fuel reigns supreme today. Ammonia has been proposed as an alternative for vehicle fuel, though it has its problems, such as being only half the energy density of gasoline. And it would be stinky and hazardous in a new way. But it does provide liquid fuel while taking carbon out of the equation altogether. Elemental hydrogen is really dangerous but some form of solid encapsulation to ensure its slow release would help.
Barring some Jetsons miracle invention, I think the eventual winner for cars and airplanes as oil and gas runs out might be the very same gasoline and jet fuel. All you would need is an economical and massive source of heat or neutrons to separate hydrogen from water, to be bound with carbon to make our own 'fossil' fuel, as nature does. If you sequester that carbon from CO2 in the atmosphere you at least achieve break-even what it burns.
But that sequestration process to extract carbon from the thin atmospheric ~0.04% carbon dioxide would itself be a massive endeavor requiring additional energy. Would you run this Dr. Seuss Carbon-Gallomper with its giant sucking mechanical lungs for an hour to get a lump of carbon... or when no one is looking, feed trees and grass into it and get a dozen lumps a minute? Or sneak into a coal mine for a hundred? In the end the best way is to electrify transportation to the greatest extent possible, and pursue a sequestration strategy that operates independently of the fuel producers --- making use of plants and farmed algae as well as direct feats of applied chemical engineering.
Some calculations showing actual energy/thermal output of some ~2.5Gwt for a year from tonne of Thorium. This is an amazing, unprecedented amount of carbon-neutral energy for a fuel source that is present on every continent, and can be mined with a very small footprint.
We deserve the chance to discover what we could accomplish with such a win-win energy source. So many environmental 'solutions' come down to (you first) conservation or outright malicious sabotage of modern lifestyle. I want no fewer options for my own children than I have, and a whole lot more.
Got to go work on the blueprints for the Dr. Seuss Carbon-Gallomper. Because there really ought to be such a thing.
___
"Oh dear! We're late!" Down the nuclear rabbit hole we go.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
"But putting the collectors in space will be stupid and uneconomic for the foreseeable future."
Maybe and then again, maybe not.
I don't think there is any point in making the investment for power satellites unless the cost of power produced from them is less than that from coal.
If you can get the cost of power down to $2400/kW, then the cost of power gets down to 3 cents, undercutting coal at 4 cents per kWh.
The cost of the parts and the rectenna is expected to be around $1100/kW. That leaves $1300/kW for transport. I *think* the mass of a kW reference to the ground will stay under 6.5 kg/kW (a thermal, not a PV design). That means the cost to lift large amounts of cargo to GEO can't exceed $200/kg.
Reaction Engines thinks Skylon will put cargo in LEO for $120/kg, leaving $80/kg for the cost of the LEO to GEO leg. That can't be done with chemical propulsion, but it looks like a ground powered arcjet tug that moves about 15,000 tons at a time could get the cost down to perhaps $65/kg. The arcjets exhaust velocity for this cost is around 25 km/s.
There is an IEEE paper that goes into the details here https://drive.google.com/file/...
End MGM. Get prospective parents of boys to Google: Men do complain
Yeah, but you can't win the Iowa presidential primary unless you support massive federal subsidies for ethanol corn. Politics trumps science yet again.
Yeah, the main problem with these has been getting the algae to keep producing oil at a decent rate. We don't have a selection scheme to keep them happy while making oil, and the ones that make less oil tend to also reproduce faster, which means your production keeps going down over time. It's also sort of hard to distribute nutrients appropriately in large volumes.