Joule Biotechnologies (www.joulebio.com) announced on July 27, 2009 that they have developed an algae based process that can produce 20,000 gallons per acre of a refinery ready hydrocarbon (i.e. it is a direct oil replacement not a near substitute like ethanol). This far exceeds any other technology. Ethanol grown from corn produces fewer than 1000 gallons per acre.

As with any announced breakthrough it remains to be seen if the technology is practicable in the field and at what cost. But even if Joule’s technology ultimately falters there is alot of work in this area. It seems very likely that we will be able to engineer microbes or single cell creatures such as algae to directly produce an oil replacement. This will greatly simplify switching to a biofuel economy.

Read the companies press release here.

Researching what’s in the Stimulus bill agreed to by the house and senate is quite a chore given that the bill is over 1,000 pages long. It can be downloaded as a PDF in two parts part1, part2. Much of the money of interest to readers of this blog appears to be in part 1 under Title IV (Energy).

One of the few clear wins for people approaching climate change rationally is $2 billion for advanced battery research. Batteries are one of those core technologies that all other advancements are based on. So this is welcome news. Other than that I do not find funding for any specific research projects although there is $1.6 billion allocated for alternative energy research in addition to the above battery research allocated through ARPA.

There is $3 billion for energy conservation, which, while welcome, is not in the long term going to matter much.

There are also tax credits in the bill (in total over $300 billion) but how they are allocated in terms of green energy and climate change are not clear. There does not seem to be any new incentives for research into alternative energy or for electric or hybrid cars. Hopefully as the details of this gigantic bill become clear we can also celebrate some significant tax cuts which will stimulate research and jump start consumer demand.

Tim O’Reilly has a great post up on why everyone should support action on climate change even if they don’t think it’s man made or a significant problem. There is a lot of truth here, energy independence and a lifestyle focused on reuse and not waste are objectively good for everyone regardless of the reason. Please read Tim’s post.

Many scientists have reported that the Arctic environment is particularly vulnerable to global warming. The polar bear was recently protected under the Endangered Species Act reflecting the best judgment of biologists that the bears habitat is being severely damaged by warming. See here for the official Alaskan information on this issue. There are numerous indications of permafrost melting. So it was no real surprise that last spring a report came out showing a dramatic decline in polar sea ice levels. The famed, and heretofore fictional, northwest passage actually opened up. There was some fear that we were on the verge of losing the north polar ice cap entirely in the next couple of years.

But now there is some good news. In the last couple of months of 2008 sea ice returned to its historical levels. The current state of sea ice can be monitored via a great website run by the University of Illinois. A graph of the anomaly and its recovery can be seen at the same site here.

What does this mean? I don’t think we can say yet. The obvious question will be is this some sort of annual cycle? Because it’s hardly surprising the ice is making a comeback during the winter. What happens next summer? For the global warming deniers this is surely good news and will be used to confuse people, ignoring the many pieces of evidence that remain unaffected. For instance the rate of melting of glaciers in Greenland continues to accelerate. A profoundly worrying event (Evidence here and here).

For this website I want to be sure that all evidence is presented. The issue of arctic ice is a very important measure of our planets temperature and any evidence the problems of global warming are not as severe as they could be is welcome news.

Dr. James Hansen, head of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies has written an open letter to President-Elect Obama to be personally delivered by appointed White House science advisor Prof. John Holdren.

Dr. Hansen’s letter (available here) is a call for immediate and urgent action to address climate change. I will not attempt to paraphrase such an important document, please read the full text for yourself, but I did want to make a couple of comments.

First his suggestion that carbon should be taxed at the source (i.e. the mine or drill hole before it is refined in any way) makes a lot of sense. This will keep people from simply reducing their use of one form of carbon by increasing another. It also lets the cost naturally filter through the rest of the market where its use will be optimized to those places hardest to substitute. An appropriate near-term goal for fossil fuel usage. For example, the fossil fuel costs of fertilizers will be baked into ethanol production, making it much clearer how good an alternative that fuel is. Similarly if a way to produce ethanol without relying on fossil fuels is found, it makes that form of ethanol automatically cheaper by comparison.

As discussed previously in this blog he also recommends that the carbon tax be largely refunded to taxpayers in a dividend scheme. Further allowing market forces to select the best green winners as consumers will be both incentivized and rewarded for purchasing highly fuel efficient or electric vehicles for instance. As I’ve written before this is an astonishingly good idea and should be a cornerstone of a carbon tax and much preferable to a complex cap and trade regime.

Finally he calls for our support for nuclear power, arguing that the damage a coal plant is known to do far outweighs the risks of nuclear energy. I think the evidence is there to support a national effort to stop coal production now and use wind, solar, or nuclear as appropriate for the region. As a last resort, natural gas is still way better than coal.

I’m happy to have a discussion of cap-and-trade vs. a direct carbon tax. Who wants to argue for cap-and -trade?

It wouldn’t be New Years without at least one top 10 list and Wired.com has outdone itself with a great roundup of the best green technology breakthroughs of 2008.

I have to respond to William Tucker’s editorial in the Dec 29th Wall Street Journal. His opinion piece entitled Carbon Limits, Yes; Energy Subsidies, No contains a few reasonable ideas about how to approach internalizing the cost of carbon emissions, but he also wrote

The idea that it [wind power] can replace significant quantities of coal or natural gas in electrical generation is a fantasy.

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Well Mr. Tucker it is you who are living in a fantasy world. The United States has 20 gigawatts of wind power on the grid already, enough for over five million people. This power is being provided with no green house gas emissions and with no fuel costs. The price is dropping rapidly and is now cheaper than coal (see my previous post here).

As any Electrical Engineer (and I am one) can tell you, the equipment already exists to synchronize power generation with the grid. Any form of electrical production has some variation, hydroelectric for example has significant moment to moment variations that are easily absorbed and smoothed by sophisticated electronics.

It is true that wind can be subject to very large swings, but there are ready engineering solutions to this. Simply adding an energy storage system in the form of batteries will completely level out the power output.

Just as a coal plant can go offline for maintenance for a day, so a wind farm can be dropped off the grid if local climate conditions preclude efficient power generation. However, the average wind power across the country will be a smooth constant. And in any event no one is expecting us to rely solely on wind.

While other alternatives continue to grow there will be an abundance of traditional fossil fuel sources. Existing hydroelectric generation will continue (80 GW of hydroelectric power is on the grid in the US representing 20 to 25 million people). Even nuclear may have a role to play especially in parts of the country lacking in good wind or solar resources such as the North Eastern United States.

The only fantasy here is wishing for the days when we didn’t have to worry about how much carbon we are pouring into our atmosphere.

A new wind farm in northern Nebraska is coming on-line at the end of the month with 81 megawatts of power, generated by 27 turbines. Enough power for about 25,000 people. The project, a joint private/public partnership, cost $140 million to construct. The power generated has been leased by a variety of Nebraska public utilities for the next 20 years.

Let’s compare this new wind farm to a coal plant being considered for construction near Milwaukee Wisconsin. The coal plant will generate 300 MW of power but cost $1 billion, just to construct.

Wind farms and coal plants both require maintenance of course, but the wind farm does not require any fuel purchases, ever. Even ignoring the cost of coal and ignoring the green-house gas emissions from the coal plant, the cost of electricity from the wind farm is HALF the cost of electricity from coal.

Dr. Mark Z. Jacobson, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford has just completed a scientific analysis of the relative merits of a variety of alternative energy sources including wind, solar, nuclear, ethanol, and capture and store coal.

Not surprisingly, to people with a more scientific and less political bent, wind and solar thermal (where the solar power is collected by mirrors and heats water to steam for conventional turbine generators came out on top by a large margin. Here is what Dr. Jacobson has to say about ethanol (all bio-ethanol, not just corn based).

“Ethanol-based biofuels will actually cause more harm to human health, wildlife, water supply and land use than current fossil fuels.”

His results for cellulosic ethanol are quite disappointing, but this is what science is for. Making the right choice, not just a choice that feels right.

“Cellulosic-E85 ranked lower than corn-E85 overall, primarily due to its potentially larger land footprint based on new data and its higher upstream air pollution emissions”

Standford has the press release here and the full study is available online.

Thank you Stanford, The Journal of Energy & Environmental Science, and Dr. Jacobson for making important research papers like this available in full online and for free.

Corn based ethanol is a complicated topic that will be revisited many times in this blog I’m sure. On the one hand it does provide a partial solution to non-renewable fuels and allows us to keep our existing transportation infrastructure. On the other hand turning food in to fuel may not be a good idea and it turns out it takes a lot of oil to grow and manufacture ethanol so the emissions savings aren’t that great either.

The purpose of this site is to foster discussions about a sustainable future with a good standard of living for all. Given that, does it make sense to use food for fuel? Proponents of corn based ethanol claim their product has had a negligible impact on world food prices, while common sense would tend to indicate the opposite. Let’s take a closer, reasoned look and see if we can discern any truth in one direction or the other.

This is a chart of corn production in the United States and the amount of that corn going to ethanol production. It takes about 1 bushel of corn to make 3 gallons of ethanol.

Corn Production in the USA

As you can see the amount of corn devoted to ethanol production has been steadily increasing and in 2008 represents a little over 20% of production. The current economy will probably stabilize this amount for the near future. This corn produced almost 9 billion gallons of ethanol fuel. Pretty impressive actually. The US uses roughly 140 billion gallons of gasoline per year so this amount represents 6% of domestic gasoline usage. This figure makes sense given how common it is to fuel up with E10 gasoline (10% ethanol).

But the question at hand is will this usage affect food prices? The US population is growing, by we are increasing the amount of corn used for fuel far faster than an increase in corn. It is true that other grains could be substituted, but many of those grow on the same land as corn resulting in no net increase in grain available for food. Supply is roughly the same, demand for fuel is taking away corn for food, the result is rising prices.

What’s even worse is that devoting 20% of all corn grown in the United States has reduced our need for gasoline (not oil) 6%. Better than nothing yes, but unsustainable much beyond 6%. especially because we haven’t yet considered how much oil is used to grow corn.

I know that the Midwest has invested heavily in ethanol plant infrastructure and as a result there is always opposition to anything that says maybe corn isn’t the best answer. But those ethanol plants can be adopted to new technologies that do not depend no corn. These new technologies are not yet ready for mass production but will be far better for the environment.

Based on my analysis we should resist pushing corn based ethanol production any higher than its current 20%. If moderately higher corn prices do in fact produce a giant glut of corn on the market than this can be reconsidered, but it is unlikely our very productive farmers can push production that much higher without taking away from other food crops like wheat.

Ethanol does have some advantages, and being able to produce it using sources other than corn, particularly sources that do not compete for corn for agricultural land makes a lot of sense. It’s still a tough sell though if we can’t grow it without petroleum based fertilizers and oil burning equipment.

Sources: USDA and Renewable Fuel Assocation