OPINION By ROBERT MCFARLANE and GEORGE PHILIPPIDIS
The unprecedented escalation in oil and food prices is a clear and present danger to our economy and national security. The root cause of this crisis is our dependence on a single commodity, oil, for transportation -- we burn 145 billion gallons of gasoline a year. The only permanent solution is diversity in our fuel supply to ensure competition and choice in the marketplace.
While a number of alternatives to oil are being developed, we already have one strategic solution at our disposal: biofuels, both domestic and from Latin America.
Biofuels like ethanol and biodiesel are cheaper than fossil fuels, and will become even cheaper if we eliminate the senseless tariff on ethanol imports from Brazil. Ethanol can be used safely as a 10% blend with gasoline in all existing cars, and as an 85% blend in the increasing number of flexible-fuel cars on our roads. That means a 10% to 85% potential drop in gasoline use and, hence, freedom from the oil stranglehold.
The public has been bombarded with lies and half-truths about biofuels, especially in the last six months. Americans should realize that biofuels are superior to fossil fuels. Biofuels are renewable, nontoxic and biodegradable. They are also beneficial to the automobile engine, the environment and the economy.
Biofuels are available today by the billions of gallons from a variety of sources: corn, sugarcane and soon from cellulosics. Cellulosic ethanol promises to dramatically boost domestic production in the near future. In the meantime, sugarcane ethanol already produced in Latin American sugar mills can become a key U.S. fuel supply.
Cellulosic biomass, in the form of existing agricultural and wood waste, is abundant (over a billion tons annually), inexpensive and requires no additional land. It has no food or feed value and therefore no effect on food availability and prices. A number of technologies are pursued for production of cellulosic ethanol and other biofuels, such as butanol and biodiesel. Most likely there will be no single technology winner. Rather, technologies will be adapted to the particular characteristics of local biofuel feedstocks.
Lower fuel prices will come only with an ample supply of alternative fuels. Cellulosic ethanol can extend corn ethanol's potential of 15 billion gallons per year, but it will not happen overnight. Resolving commercialization issues, building a large number of plants, and ramping up cellulosic ethanol production to billions of gallons will require a number of years.
To quickly boost its biofuel supply, the U.S. should partner with Latin America. Sugarcane ethanol from Brazil, Colombia, Peru and Central America should become an integral part of the U.S. energy strategy. An increase in Latin American cane ethanol capacity is the fastest, most cost-effective and lowest-risk strategy to secure abundant ethanol fuel. The U.S. needs Latin America for energy security, and Latin America needs the U.S. for capital and technology infusion. It's a classic win-win partnership -- provided U.S. trade barriers to sugarcane ethanol are eliminated.
Biofuel production is sustainable. The U.S. corn ethanol industry is investing in technology improvements to reduce land demand through higher productivity and to minimize its carbon footprint. Cellulosic ethanol will come from existing waste materials, not additional land.
Still, both corn and cellulosic ethanol can learn sustainable business lessons from Brazil. Its sugar mills have become biorefineries that co-produce sugar, ethanol and electricity in a renewable fashion, thus satisfying food, fuel and energy needs at the same time. The plants are self-powered by renewable energy derived from cane fiber and other biomass. As a result, Brazilian ethanol today is cost-competitive with oil at just $70 a barrel ($45 a barrel before the dollar weakened) without government subsidies -- a significant price advantage over gasoline.
The U.S. should immediately pursue a multifaceted biofuels strategy. First, while the corn industry improves productivity and sustainability, the U.S. should treat the commercialization of cellulosic technologies as a matter of national security -- a new Manhattan Project deserving all the necessary resources to accelerate deployment.
Second, the U.S. should pursue closer energy integration with Latin America though regulatory convergence and open biofuels trade, thus encouraging private investment in sugarcane ethanol production. This is the fastest and most efficient means to boost ethanol availability within three to four years, and displace gasoline use to an extent significant enough to cause oil demand and prices to drop.
Third, consumers should be educated and financially incentivized to switch to flexible-fuel vehicles, creating demand for mass production of such vehicles, which will dramatically cut U.S. dependence on foreign oil.
Energy security can not be achieved with a silver bullet. It is not a competition between corn ethanol and sugarcane ethanol or between biofuels and plug-in hybrids. The sooner we realize that U.S. energy security needs all of the above, the sooner our country will be able to commit to a coherent long-term energy policy. U.S. and Latin American biofuels are the kick-start needed to break oil's unbearable monopoly in transportation fuels.
Mr. McFarlane served as President Ronald Reagan's national security advisor (1983-85). Mr. Philippidis is energy director at Florida International University in Miami
The Chicago Tribune (7/10, Greising) reports that T. Boone Pickens, who "made his name" in the 1980's buying "oil companies that didn't want to be bought," is now "[t]rying to convince the country that the government and private investors should spend $1 trillion over 20 years to erect thousands [of] windmills in hopes of cutting U.S. dependence on foreign oil." Pickens has allocated $58 million of his own money "to promote his ideas and make energy security a top issue in the presidential campaign. With oil selling around $140 a barrel, he said, the U.S. sends $700 billion a year to other countries." However, "[e]xperts on the energy challenge caution against relying too much on wind" power. Judi Greenwald, director of innovation solutions for the Pew Center on Global Climate Change in Virginia, said that "biofuels, new battery technologies and other options might prove more feasible." She explained, "There's only so much wind we can accommodate right now because of the [power] storage issue and the transmission issue."
from the Christian Science Monitor
SAO PAULO, Brazil - Brazil, the world's biggest ethanol exporter, is bristling over criticism of its biofuel. As wheat, rice, and corn prices rise sharply, critics say producing fuel for cars is taking precedence over food for people.
"Ethanol has certainly become the scapegoat for a variety of issues, in particular the current price of food," says Toni Nuernberg, the executive director of the Omaha, Neb.-based Ethanol Promotion and Information Center. "But there is a collection of factors responsible: Drought, population growth, higher demand for protein [i.e., meat] from developing countries, and transportation costs."
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva says the bad publicity is unwarranted and uninformed. Many biofuel experts agree. Critics, they say, fail to distinguish between the different kinds of ethanol. Brazilian ethanol from sugar cane is up to eight times more energy efficient to produce than ethanol derived from corn, beets, wheat, or other temperate crops.
To read more: http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0505/p04s01-woam.html
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Here's a simple solution to global warming: vacuum carbon dioxide out of the air. Klaus Lackner, a physicist at Columbia University, said placing enough carbon filters around the planet could reel the world's atmosphere back toward the 18th century, like a climatic time machine.
After a decade of work, his shower-sized prototype whirs away inside a Tucson warehouse, each day capturing about 10 pounds of the heat-trapping greenhouse gas as air wafts through it. Only a few billion tons to go.
In the battle against global warming, technology has long been seen as the ultimate savior, but Lackner's machine is a clunky reminder of how distant that dream is.
To read more: http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-carbon29apr29,1,5389022.story
April 25, 2008
from BBC News Online
Levels of the greenhouse gas methane in the atmosphere seem to be rising, having remained stable for nearly 10 years. Data from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) in the US suggest concentrations rose by about 0.5 percent between 2006 and 2007.
The rise could reflect melting of permafrost, increased industrialisation in Asia or drying of tropical wetlands. The rise in carbon dioxide levels was significantly higher than the average annual increase for the last 30 years.
Noaa figures show CO2 concentrations rising by 2.4 parts per million (ppm) from 2006 to 2007. By comparison, the average annual increase between 1979 and 2007 was 1.65ppm.
To read more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7364679.stm
Or: http://snipurl.com/25ng8
from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)
WASHINGTON (Associated Press) - The rule of unintended consequences threatens to strike again. Some researchers have suggested that injecting sulfur compounds into the atmosphere might help ease global warming by increasing clouds and haze that would reflect sunlight.
After all, they reason, when volcanoes spew lots of sulfur, months or more of cooling often follows. But a new study warns that injecting enough sulfur to reduce warming would wipe out the Arctic ozone layer and delay recovery of the Antarctic ozone hole by as much as 70 years.
"Our research indicates that trying to artificially cool off the planet could have perilous side effects," said Simone Tilmes of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. "While climate change is a major threat, more research is required before society attempts global geoengineering solutions," said Tilmes, lead author of a paper appearing in Thursday's online edition of the journal Science.
To read more: http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/science/20080424-1100-climatechange-ozone.html
Or: http://snipurl.com/25njf
A global switch to efficient lighting systems would trim the world's electricity bill by nearly one-tenth.
That is the conclusion of a study from the International Energy Agency (IEA), which it says is the first global survey of lighting uses and costs.
The carbon dioxide emissions saved by such a switch would, it concludes, dwarf cuts so far achieved by adopting wind and solar power.
Better building regulations would boost uptake of efficient lighting, it says.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5128478.stm
or
http://tinyurl.com/f6kgg
If hydrogen is the prince of fuels, then coal is the dirty old man.
Hydrogen's promise as the clean fuel of the future has been frustrated by two problems: how to make it, and how to move it.
Now, researchers report they may have a solution to both. In a serendipitous discovery, they found that coal, the dirty but abundant fuel of the past, traps hydrogen when milled with cyclohexene, a common chemical. Ground coal is cheap and easy to transport and appears to be reusable, making it a possible candidate for practical hydrogen storage.
Hydrogen is certainly abundant. Oodles of hydrogen atoms float in the ocean bound up in water molecules, and many more are trapped in hydrocarbons such as natural gas and oil. Prying the hydrogen loose from those molecules takes a lot of energy, though, and storing it once it has been extracted also poses major problems.
http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2006/627/1
or
http://tinyurl.com/lfk4l
IMPERIAL, Neb. -- Just outside this town in the middle of the great American prairie, 37 miles from the nearest traffic light, stands a huge pile of cornstalks and leaves. It looks like a 35-foot mountain of yard trash, yet black cables snake into the pile, attached to sensors that monitor its vital statistics by the minute.
If ambitious plans taking shape in Washington and in state capitals come to fruition, this pile of stalks and many more like it will become the oil wells of the 21st century. The idea is to run the nation's transportation system largely on alcohol produced from bulk plant material, weaning America from foreign oil and the risks that go with it, including wars, global warming and terrorism.
Farmers have pushed for years to get more people using gasoline mixed with ethanol made from corn kernels, but so far such ethanol has replaced only about 3 percent of the nation's gasoline, and by most estimates, the country would never be able to grow enough corn to replace more than 10 or 12 percent of its fuel supply.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/21/AR2006062101769.html
May 24, 2006
There is a deafening, unearthly howl as if a jumbo jet was firing up its engines in the Albert Hall. On the screen in the control room a ghostly pinkish glow whips round the edges of the inside of the nuclear reactor. At its core it is 10 times hotter than the centre of the sun.
This, according to some physicists, is the solution to the energy crisis - a future with cheap, reliable, safe and nearly waste-free power. Today, after years of false starts and political wrangling dating from the cold war, they will get their chance to make that dream a reality. A 10 billion dollar project, called Iter, to build a prototype nuclear fusion reactor will be signed off in Brussels by the EU, Japan, China, South Korea, India and the US.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,1781601,00.html
or
http://tinyurl.com/hkxb6
President Bush has pointed to hydrogen technology as the ultimate solution to the nation's fuel supply problems, but one big question waits to be answered: Where will all the hydrogen come from?
Even if manufacturers can produce affordable hydrogen-powered vehicles that people will want to buy, energy experts say the nation's petroleum addiction -- a key source of carbon emissions contributing to global warming -- won't end until an environmentally sound hydrogen supply and distribution system is at hand.
"If we don't generate hydrogen in an environmentally responsible way, we'd be going five steps backward, rather than forward," said Scott Samuelsen, director of the National Fuel Cell Research Center at UC Irvine, where he is also an engineering professor.
Samuelsen calls for a comprehensive national effort, backed by the kind of resources and coordination that resulted in the first moon landing, to map out a clean and sustainable energy future. The administration's $1.2 billion, five-year hydrogen initiative is a useful step, he added, but not nearly enough.
"We need to invest a lot more," he said. "I think it's doable, but it will take a unified strategy."
Making cars that work well on hydrogen may be the critical step needed to spur development of any new energy infrastructure. The reason there's no supply system readily apparent now is not so much a problem of technology, but simple economics, said Julio Friedmann, who runs a research program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory involving carbon emissions.
"There's still no demand for hydrogen," he said. "Until you have hydrogen cars, there's no reason to have pipelines and production."
Even if a storage scheme is found, it's still not entirely clear where all the hydrogen would come from to run any significant part of the national transportation system.
It's not that hydrogen is so hard to find. It's the most abundant element in the universe, the H in H2O -- ordinary water -- and the "hydro" in "hydrocarbon" -- as in natural gas or other fossil fuels. Hydrogen today, in fact, is produced almost entirely from natural gas.
The trouble is that it takes energy to get hydrogen in pure, usable form. That's why it's really not considered a fuel at all, but rather an energy carrier -- a method of storing power generated any number of ways.
The question is which way, and at what cost.
"It's just like electricity -- it's as clean or expensive as what you make it from," said Gene Berry, an engineer at Lawrence Livermore who analyzes hydrogen technologies.
Energy companies, academic scientists and government researchers are beginning to investigate the possibilities. Early outlines of a California "hydrogen highway" of refueling stations call for the first ones to carry hydrogen made from at least 20 percent renewable energy sources.
But no large-scale supply and distribution network will emerge until there's enough demand -- and that's going to take a while.
"You need to see a clear path to a commercial market," said Tim Lipman, a research engineer at UC Berkeley's Institute of Transportation Studies.
Optimists insist the technology problems can be solved -- eventually -- but nobody believes it will be easy.
Hydrogen already is being used to power reconfigured Prius hybrids, 30 of which are being delivered now to local-government fleets in pollution-sensitive Southern California, in a five-year demonstration project designed to help spread the word about hydrogen's potential.
These early hybrids may help prime the market, but they clearly aren't the ideal vehicles for mass consumption. The Irvine supplier, Quantum Fuel Systems Technologies Worldwide Inc., said the cars go only 70 to 80 miles before needing a refill, and cost $60,000 to equip -- not counting the cost of the Prius.
Vehicles equipped with hydrogen fuel cells -- quickly rechargeable battery-like units -- could someday replace internal-combustion engines altogether. That's only if engineers can find a way to make the fuel cells efficient enough to drive long distances, and cheap enough to be affordable. Fuel cell cars now cost on the order of $1 million apiece.
Efficient hydrogen storage is one of the toughest technical problems blocking headway.
"You have to have cost-effective hydrogen storage technology to cram enough on board a vehicle to get adequate driving range," said Jason Mark, vehicles director in Berkeley for the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group.
Say what you want about high prices at the pump. Gallon for gallon, nothing on the horizon even approaches the power and portability of gasoline.
"Gasoline is an incredibly, astoundingly energy-dense material," said Charles Chamberlin, co-director of the Schatz Energy Research Center at Humboldt State University. "We are going to be hard-pressed to find something that matches that. We've been incredibly fortunate, or damned, by our easy access to petroleum."
The advantage of hydrogen is that it offers another avenue, besides electric batteries, to load energy onto a moving vehicle. Although electric-car battery technology has improved, results have been disappointing even after decades of trial and error.
Many experts argue that the hydrogen production problems can be surmounted, possibly with refined versions of existing technologies. Friedmann, for instance, argues that serious attention be devoted to cleaner coal technology, an idea that involves capturing and sequestering all the carbon emissions underground.
Others doubt if coal can ever be made truly clean, and argue that novel energy sources have to be developed. At the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo., government scientists are working on possibilities such as using a type of bioengineered algae to convert light into usable energy, which might then be fed into a hydrogen storage network.
"I truly believe this is going to work, but it's going to take time," said Maria Ghirardi, a senior scientist at the energy laboratory working on that project.
Wind and solar power are the most obvious clean energy sources for a hydrogen economy, but they come with their own well-known disadvantages, most notably the intermittent nature of the sun and wind and relatively low efficiencies. Still, most experts agree that renewables will have to play a role, touting hydrogen as the most promising way to store the power and smooth out the supply cycles.
Ultimately, experts said, the answer should be some combination of windmills and solar installations, if not high-tech algae and scrubbed-up coal, backed up by more efficient forms of current technology.
Just what sort of combination will depend on how the various technologies develop, and thus which one deserves the largest investment of scarce resources. Advocates like to tout the fact that hydrogen can be made from ordinary water. But as Californians can attest, even water can be hard to come by.
E-mail Carl Hall at chall@sfchronicle.com.
By Matthew Miller
Lansing State Journal 4/12/06
EAST LANSING - Kris Berglund's research helped make small-scale distilling a viable industry in Michigan. He laid the foundation for the state's only gourmet mushroom production facility.
And now, his work could be the key to a new biotechnology park in Wayne County that would produce ethanol and a "green" version of a molecule called succinic acid, which is used in chemicals ranging from runway de-icers to pharmaceuticals.
The biotechnology park is a joint effort between Wayne County, Michigan State University and Diversified Natural Products, a Scottsville company that has licensed many of Berglund's patents.
It also still is in the development stages.
But if it becomes a reality, Berglund, a professor of chemical engineering and materials science at MSU, said it "will put the state ahead in this overall bio-economy race."
Wayne County Executive Robert Ficano went a step further in his state of the county speech last month, saying this bio-economy initiative "when developed with care and due diligence, can do for us what the microchip did for Silicon Valley."
The promise of the coming bio-economy is of a future when the basic building blocks for fuels, synthetic materials, industrial chemicals and a host of other products can be taken from plants, when agricultural products replace oil.
For Michigan, it is also a promise of a cutting-edge industry that can go some way toward replacing the state's ailing auto industry.
It's a promise that is being taken seriously at MSU.
The university has approximately 400 researchers working on some facet of this growing field.
President Lou Anna Simon has been crisscrossing the state, trying to convince the public of the potential for what she's called the "post-petroleum bio-economy."
And, just last month, the university set up a new Office of Bio-Based Initiatives, essentially a central coordinating point that will help the university capitalize on its intellectual strengths and their economic potential.
Director Steve Pueppke said MSU has first-rate programs in areas such as basic plant research, engineering, and agricultural economics.
"What's been missing," he said, "is the linkages."
Composite materials
The work of Lawrence Drzal and his colleagues at MSU's Composite Materials and Structures Center is an example of the way that connections between researchers can pay off.
Part of the center's work is on bio-based sustainable structural materials that could be used for anything from furniture to auto parts to flooring.
Many of the materials they make are composites, something like the carbon fiber-reinforced plastics used to make tennis rackets.
Only, instead of using carbon fibers to add strength to the final product, Drzal and his colleagues are using fibers from grasses and plants. Other researchers on campus are working to design plants with stiffer, stronger fibers.
"With a little genetic engineering, they might be able to do that," Drzal said.
Success stories
The compelling part of this equation for people outside of the university, though, is the potential that some of MSU's work will be the ticket out of the state's economic doldrums.
"What we're seeing now as we move into the information age is ... that all these closely held intellectual properties of universities and businesses and these patents they have are ripe for commercialization," said Jim Epolito, president and chief executive of the Michigan Economic Development Corp.
MSU has no shortage of contenders.
Or success stories.
Researchers have gone to the marketplace with simpler ways to turn biomass into fuel, foam packaging made from corn starch, and plants bioengineered to make drugs for human consumption.
Roll that potential together with shifting state priorities and the rising price of oil, Pueppke said, and the bioeconomy "seems like an idea whose time has come.
"People and societies are saying we need to get serious about this renewables and bio-economy business," he said.
"In a very honest sense, what we're trying to do is to respond to that, to do our part as an institution.
March 8, 2006
from BBC News Online
British and Norwegian oil companies have announced plans to bury carbon dioxide under the bed of the North Sea.
Statoil and Shell plan to take CO2 from a power station in Norway and pipe it to an oil field, where it will be used to force oil to the surface.
The $1.2bn-1.5bn scheme will require major investment from governments.
The process of carbon sequestration is viewed by some as a partial solution to climate change, but can also help companies exploit oil reserves further.
from the New York Times (Registration Required) http://tinyurl.com/evps6
Nestled away in a small room on DuPont's 150-acre research center in Wilmington, Del., robotic arms fill tiny tubes with gelatinous material that was extracted from corn and soybean plants. Other metallic arms will soon dip and measure and deconstruct each sample, spewing forth a list of its attributes and traits.
Only a fistful - maybe one of every 50 - will move on to the fermentation lab, a few buildings away. There, researchers will see how the samples react to different mixtures of air, glucose and microbes. Down the hall, other researchers will tinker with the microbes themselves.
All of them are chasing the same holy grail: bio-based substances that can replace oil and gas as building blocks for chemicals. "We figure out what works in theory, and then we see what works in practice," Alexander D. Kopatsis, a research associate, said.
from the New York Times (Registration Required) http://tinyurl.com/mhhwo
February 22, 2006
GOLDEN, Colo. - President Bush acknowledged on Tuesday that his administration had sent "mixed signals" to the Department of Energy's primary renewable energy laboratory here, where government budget cuts forced the layoff of 32 employees who were then hastily reinstated just before Mr. Bush's visit.
"I recognize that there has been some interesting, let me say, mixed signals when it comes to funding," Mr. Bush said at the start of a panel discussion at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which researches solar and wind power as well as energy from plants, like ethanol.
Mr. Bush added: "The issue of course is whether or not good intentions are met with actual dollars spent. Part of the issue we face, unfortunately, is that there are sometimes decisions made as a result of the appropriations process, where money may not end up where it is supposed to have gone."
from the New York Times (Registration Required) http://tinyurl.com/kbhd3
February 15, 2006
It's hard to be in a business where you literally - as well as figuratively - are tilting at windmills. But that business may have just gotten its biggest tail wind yet.
When President Bush called last month for more effort in alternative energies, a business that last year attracted only about $7 billion in investment nationwide, the 300 engineers and financiers at GE Energy Financial Services were already in the game. But that does not mean they were not happy that the White House acknowledged the sector.
"The president's speech changed zero for us; it was simply a recognition of what we already knew," said David L. Calhoun, vice chairman of GE Infrastructure, the group that includes both turbine manufacture and energy financing.
from the New York Times (Registration Required) http://tinyurl.com/9wusc