Alternative fuels: A more practical approach?

[Grenadier]

Craig Venter, a well-known genomics fellow was interviewed by Newsweek, and has some interesting things to say about alternative fuels.

Unlike most other folks, his methods are actually plausible, although they will take a significant time to implement. Using micro-organisms to generate more complex molecules isn't impossible, since several companies are already doing this to supply isotopically enriched molecules for my research.

 

[MBuzzy]

I'm a big fan of alternative fuels, but I really believe that up to this point, we've been going about it wrong. Corn ethanol is good for a first generation fuel, but there just isn't enough corn....or even crop land to do it.

It really looks like Venter is on the right track. I've heard about using switchgrass as an alternative fuel because of its density.

 

[Big Don]

Wait.



Someone will come up with something REALLY good in time.

Innovation cannot be legislated or rushed.

 

[Live True]

Fascinating. I wish him well. I LIKE the idea of using our problems as the fuel for the solution!

 

[MBuzzy]

Someone will come up with something REALLY good in time.

Innovation cannot be legislated or rushed.

Agree that innovation can't be legislated.

But I beg to differ that it can't be rushed. There have been plenty of inventions that came about due to necessity. War is a perfect example of this. They are the catalyst for invention (ok, maybe not THIS one).

But in the past, the tank, airplanes, jet engines, and plenty of surprisingly non military inventions have been invented simply to "keep up" with the competition or to get that "first strike" advantage. It may be that the current fuel crisis is exactly what we need to spark the invention of a solid alternative fuel.

 

[Big Don]

Agree that innovation can't be legislated.

But I beg to differ that it can't be rushed. There have been plenty of inventions that came about due to necessity. War is a perfect example of this. They are the catalyst for invention (ok, maybe not THIS one).

But in the past, the tank, airplanes, jet engines, and plenty of surprisingly non military inventions have been invented simply to "keep up" with the competition or to get that "first strike" advantage. It may be that the current fuel crisis is exactly what we need to spark the invention of a solid alternative fuel.

Good point.

 

[CuongNhuka]

Corn ethanol is good for a first generation fuel, but there just isn't enough corn....or even crop land to do it.

Actually there is. Farm subsidies are payments to NOT grow food, or do, but burn it. If it wasn't for that, we could feed the entire planet 10 times over (in theory). So really, it would just be a matter of giving farmers money to grow corn, instead of nothing at all. And the part of the corn that's left over is really good cow feed, so there is alot less waste.

Also, there are already some countries that use ethanol. Brazil uses sugar cane, I think South Africa uses mostly ethanol also.

 

[Grenadier]

Also, there are already some countries that use ethanol. Brazil uses sugar cane, I think South Africa uses mostly ethanol also.

The problem is, though, that you can get a lot more ethanol from sugar cane, than you can with corn. Even our most sugar-rich corn species isn't going to be able to put out half as much as sugar cane does, and this includes adding enzymatic mixtures to break down more of the corn's starches into simpler sugars.

The Brazilians can economically generate ethanol, since they use much less energy to make it from sugar cane.

Does this mean that the "ethanol from corn" work has been a complete waste? Not really. We've learned a lot from trying to improve the process, and this knowledge can be used in the next generation of biofuels.

 

[CuongNhuka]

Even our most sugar-rich corn species isn't going to be able to put out half as much as sugar cane does, and this includes adding enzymatic mixtures to break down more of the corn's starches into simpler sugars.

We're actually working on a special breed meant just to make sugar. Atleast from what I've seen.

 

[MBuzzy]

Actually there is. Farm subsidies are payments to NOT grow food, or do, but burn it. If it wasn't for that, we could feed the entire planet 10 times over (in theory). So really, it would just be a matter of giving farmers money to grow corn, instead of nothing at all. And the part of the corn that's left over is really good cow feed, so there is alot less waste.

Also, there are already some countries that use ethanol. Brazil uses sugar cane, I think South Africa uses mostly ethanol also.

What is your source for this claim, please? Feeding the world 10 times over is no small claim. I am quoting a 2006 study completed by Hill, Nelson, Tilman, Polasky, and Tiffany, and published in the Procedings of the National Academy of Science - "Environmental, economic, and energetic costs and benefits of biodiesel and ehtanol biofuels." (Primary source, among several others if you're interested).

Hill et all say that "... In 2005, 14.3% of the U.S. corn harvest was processed to produce 1.48 X 10^10 liters of ethanol energetically equivalent to 1.72% of the U.S. gasoline usage. Soybean oil extracted from 1.5% of the U.S. soybean harvest produced 2.56 X 10^8 liters of biodiesel which was 0.09% of U.S. diesel usage. Devoting all 2005 U.S. corn and soybean production to ethanol and biodiesel would have offset 12% and 6.0% of U.S. gasoline and diesel demand, respectively. ..."

This equates to a Net energy gain equivalent to just 2.4% and 2.9% of U.S. gas and diesel consumption.

So basically, unless the U.S. has increased their crops by 16.6x or 8.33x in the last 3 years, I doubt that we could feed the world or fuel much of anything for a long term operation. Even before ethanol and biodiesel were on the scene and our crops were devoted solely to food, we were still not bulging at the seems with corn or food. The kind of world food production that you are talking about is far beyond our capability.

 

[MBuzzy]

We're actually working on a special breed meant just to make sugar. Atleast from what I've seen.

Though this may be true, there are still plenty of plant species with much higher net energy balances. The problem is that distilling them into a useful fuel is still economically beyond our technology. I referred to switchgrass, which is extremely rich in the sugars needed to make biofuels (from Science Journal; Ehrlich and Kennedy, 2005).

I agree with Grenadier here, corn ethanol is by no means a waste, it is the endeavor that has really jump started the research into the alternative fuels world. We have learned volumes from it, but it is time to move on and start working on other sources. We've taken enough of our food crops away. It has been proven that the government biofuel subsidies didn't work.

 

[tellner]

There are already several in the pipeline. Cellulosic ethanol from fungi and bacteria is already under development. Diesel from lipid rich algae is getting close to commercial exploitation. Corn-based ethanol was a scam from the beginning. Even the Administration's Department of Energy admits it was purely welfare for Archer Daniels Midland.

Better alternatives are coming.

Don's comment that "innovation can't be legislated or rushed" is, of course, nonsense and demonstrates complete ignorance of the history of science and engineering. Technology doesn't just spring up magically from the Earth when the Sacred Market demands it. And it doesn't hide in the shadows simply because the money comes from the government - his usual spinal-reflex dogma. The one tiny kernel of truth is that you can't order specific miracles on demand and you can't dictate that Nature will give you the results you want.

But here is what is undeniably true.

It takes years to train a scientist or development engineer. And it takes a lot of time and money to assemble the right team and the infrastructure to get the work done. If you don't have those you won't get ****. If you do and the system is set up at all rationally and you have some idea of what you're trying to develop and a system for changing direction if you realize you want something else it's a pretty straightforward process.

You need trained competent people. You need facilities. You need stable predictable sources of funding. You need direction or the ability to change direction in response to changing needs. You need communication between customers, researchers and developers. You need a way for new developments to reach the customers. You need to support inventions. You need an efficient way of getting those inventions to the innovators and from them to the people who exploit the new products and processes. You need to be willing to pursue quite a few lines of inquiry which will not yield exploitable results for a long time, and some that never will.

If you have these, success is not guaranteed. You still can't order specific miracles on demand. But you have a darned good shot at getting what you need quickly and efficiently. If you don't have all of that, and I do mean all of that, it's a crapshoot at best. Most likely what you'll get will not be what you need, let alone want. And it will be done poorly. If it gets done right it will almost certainly be done elsewhere where people understand how applied science is done.

That's the peril of Don's sort of thinking. The magical thinking types have a blind faith that "what we need will just kind of happen because we need it to" and that largesse will miraculously flow from the teats of their tribal fetish-gods like mar-ket. If it "can't be legislated or rushed" there's no reason to do all the icky expensive work of setting up labs, providing grant money, building extension agencies for technology transfer or coordinating projects between different private, government and academic groups. It's all pointless because these things appear by magic, not the collective effort of real people. Cthulu and Yog-Sothoth save me from that sort of short-sighted primitive stupidity and enforced helplessness.

Let's take a couple examples:

There is no doubt at all, none, not an iota, that American agriculture became the world's best because innovation was legislated and rushed. The land grant universities and the USDA extension agent system set up a huge nationwide system with stable funding, a clear grant process, efficient technology transfer and a very effective ways for the people who used the technology - mostly farmers - to provide feedback.

Our agriculture went from really pretty crappy by the standards of the day to the world technological leader. Improved seed, improved stock, improved methods, a constant flow of improved machinery, and most of all the ability to change things with changing conditions became the world gold standard. We abandoned that starting in the mid to late 1980s, and have paid a high price. But that's a story for another day.

The Manhattan Project and the Apollo Program are two of the most dramatic examples. The sycophantic flock of Gilded Age brown-nosers shuffles its feet and says "Oooh! Look at the pretty flowers over there," because it represents a total demolition of their cherished icons. But that stops them for about a minute and a half. They pick themselves up and say that it had something to do with killing people or at least lantern-jawed White guys in snappy uniforms so that makes it okay.

Bottom line? A huge amount of new science, new technology, several significant inventions and a bewildering array of innovations based on the inventions - the difference between the two is crucial - was developed in a very short time. In the case of the moon shots the basic inventions in ballistics, electronics, rocket technology, high-altitude suits and so on were there in at least primitive form. And there was already an infrastructure in place to encourage invention and facilitate innovation.

For all the ragging the Army Corps of Engineers gets it has mostly done a remarkable job of dredging and building dams, levees, roads, aqueducts and so on. The technological advances aren't as dramatic as the other examples. But they've been steady and impressive over time. They've been very good at working with their suppliers so that the experience they got from building all that stuff got translated into the tools that they needed. John Deere and Caterpillar benefitted tremendously. Things got built. Systems were created that facilitated changes in the way things were done. And it was done with an eye to the long term. Dams don't last forever. Floods happen. The mission will change some day.

The National Laboratory system worked very well. Unfortunately it was largely dismantled in the 80s and 90s. It was assumed that corporate research facilities would take up the slack. It was further assumed that The Market would naturally create whatever infrastructure, funding, facilities and R&D were needed in a timely efficient manner because that's just the way it's supposed to happen.

It didn't. Instead of setting up a private system that would provide long-term support for these things the private labs mostly went away or never really got started. Monsanto, Cargill, Dow and so on do quite a bit of research. But it is almost all short-term and focused entirely on very specific projects. They turned to academia, and universities became contract research labs working mostly for short-term projects whose research is increasingly proprietary. Long-term and exploratory research, especially pure and basic, has suffered terribly.

Even DARPA has announced that it will no longer fund "blue sky" projects. It will concentrate on research and development which is most likely to yield specific near term results.

In other words, we've killed the goose that laid the golden egg just in time for the really big problems that would benefit from an efficient, broadly based agile R&D system.

 

[MBuzzy]

I would like to retract my statement about agreeing that innovation can't be legislated. I was looking at it from the stand point of: you can't simply make a law and expect the technology to magically be there, but you know, I'm really wrong about that too. Tellner has given some excellent examples. I suppose it is true that innovation can be legislated - look at the Clean Air Act; many of the filtering and air cleaning technologies that we use today didn't exist before the CAA...they were created to bring companies into compliance.

It is definately true that innovation can be bought - and government funding is a type of legislation.

Now, the question is whether enough money will be thrown at the problem or enough resources devoted to research to ensure a timely, economical solution to the fuel problem.

 

[tellner]

That, Buzzy, is the sixty four trillion dollar question. Nobody knows the answer.

 

[CuongNhuka]

What is your source for this claim, please? Feeding the world 10 times over is no small claim.

A teacher, and like I said, that's IF every farm/ranch in the U.S. grew max capacity, no cash crops (like tobbaco) and there was no destruction of excess. But, it does make sense that the U.S. grows alot more food then we need. If we didn't, we wouldn't need farm subsidies. If you're going to question the legitmacy of my teacher, he's been a reliable source in every other matter.

 

[Rich Parsons]

Craig Venter, a well-known genomics fellow was interviewed by Newsweek, and has some interesting things to say about alternative fuels.

Unlike most other folks, his methods are actually plausible, although they will take a significant time to implement. Using micro-organisms to generate more complex molecules isn't impossible, since several companies are already doing this to supply isotopically enriched molecules for my research.

I am confused by some of this research myself.

A bio organism that produces and oil like substance that can be used.

A bug like creature that will eat CO2.

In the first one, I see a spill into the water supply and this could be bad. I mean could it infect the water supply?

In the second one, CO2 is natural in the environment. What will control the bug that is after the CO2? What will plants use to absorb "C" - carbon and produce O2?

I am not saying do not look. I am not saying do not do it. I am asking if I am missing something here. I see controller labs with the correct level of security being able to test this out. I hope they come up with a way and a way to control. Bug unable to reproduce, so once they die they have to be replaced by us, so we can control what is in the environment?


As to technology and legislation and being rushed.

I agree it should not be legislated until it is proven to be capable. Otherwise someone could pass a law telling companies that 2% of all companies sold must be zero emissions at the tail pipe. Oh wait California did this in the past already.

As to being rushed, in times of warfare technology for war and medicine move forward. But, the largest improvements to our society have been around the technology around the space race and or exploration. If you spend the money on the research then many times there are applications that might not have been seen initially.

 

[MBuzzy]

A teacher, and like I said, that's IF every farm/ranch in the U.S. grew max capacity, no cash crops (like tobbaco) and there was no destruction of excess. But, it does make sense that the U.S. grows alot more food then we need. If we didn't, we wouldn't need farm subsidies. If you're going to question the legitmacy of my teacher, he's been a reliable source in every other matter.

I mean no disrespect to your teacher, but if he has nothing to back this up. Meaning something written...documented research from a respectable source, then he is wrong. Teachers are fallible. ALL teachers are fallible. That is why in higher education institutions and in many places on this site, we refer so often to "Peer reviewed literature." That means that real research was done, validated, then reviewed by a board of "peers" or other experts in the area to be published. The people who did this research are respected in the industry, they are specialists within the biofuel and environmental fields, this is their LIFE'S WORK. They devote their lives to research and furthering the creation of new knowledge.

And unfortunately "He's been a reliable source in every other matter" means nothing. 1) You would have to go back and prove every previous claim to say that with any reliability 2) That is an appeal to authority (logical fallacy), basically saying that he is right because he's a teacher, not because he is correct.

This particular article was published in a very rigorous journal. VERY difficult to get into - basically if it appears, its a pretty good bet that it is true.

So on topic, I would LOVE to see the research or documentation to back up this claim. If every US farm grew to capacity and there were no cash crops, I still do not believe that we could "feed the world." It isn't simply a matter of land space. It is land usage, logistics in transportation, farmers to do the work, etc. There are a lot of other issues - including customer demand. Destroying excess is not done for no reason....bad crops, doesn't meet standards, etc...and this is a FACT of any manufacturing process. There is always waste.

As to the question of farm subsidies....we need them because farming IS NOT a very high earning industry. We offer subsidies to keep farmers growing food. If there were no subsidies, many farmers would simply pack up and become bankers. I really can't say that I understand the argument either, that "But, it does make sense that the U.S. grows alot more food then we need. If we didn't, we wouldn't need farm subsidies." If we are growing more than we need, how does it make sense that we need to pay farmers to continue to be farmers?

The subsidies in question here are for farmers to switch their crops OVER to biofuel crops. This was a government move to try to increase the pool of crops to help grow the biofuel industry. The main point here is that those subsidies may have moved the biofuel industry along, but they've hurt the food crops.

So Cuong, what is your argument? That we should continue to switch more crops to corn for biofuel production? Or that we should switch all biofuel crops back to food production?

Please understand, the thing to take away here is that you should question claims like this. When someone says "the US could feed the world 10 time over," this should set off alarms in your head - no matter who they are. That is your cue to go and RESEARCH! Forumulate an argument, then go back and challenge the professor. Go in there and quote the "Procedings of the National Academy of Science" and even if he disagrees....he will respect that you took the time to go review a real peer reviewed journal on the subject.

 

[CuongNhuka]

I didn't mean that as "an appeal to authority" statement (I know a bit about fallacies myself), I meant it as "he hasn't been wrong as of yet, so I considered him a credible source". I do know that he has some form of source (he has said it, I just cann't remember what his source was). I'm also not sure what my oppion is. I do know that we need to either force much higher fuel effiecnies, or alternative fuels, or both.

 

[Phoenix44]

I'm really baffled as to why more people aren't going solar for their electricity and heat. I put solar panels on my home 2 years ago. It was easy and affordable--it cost a lot less than a car or a bathroom renovation. And this year, the electric company owed me $12.00! I see endless streets of roofs without solar panels, and I just don't get it.

Oh wait...I DO get it. Once you go solar, you don't have to pay anyone ever for a fill-up. No wonder it's not being encouraged.

 

[Kacey]

I'm really baffled as to why more people aren't going solar for their electricity and heat. I put solar panels on my home 2 years ago. It was easy and affordable--it cost a lot less than a car or a bathroom renovation. And this year, the electric company owed me $12.00! I see endless streets of roofs without solar panels, and I just don't get it.

Oh wait...I DO get it. Once you go solar, you don't have to pay anyone ever for a fill-up. No wonder it's not being encouraged.

I would love to go solar - I have a nice south facing roof section, and another, longer one that faces west, and there's a park across the street to the south, so no one will build a house there that blocks the sun... I'm still working on saving for the start-up costs, with an eye toward the shingle-replacement solar cells in a few years when I need a new roof anyway.