Beyond Fossil Fuels
Peter Arkle
Thirty years of research have produced a range of new technologies that
can help turn abundant energy sources - wind, biomass, solar, even
water itself - into alternative fuels.
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By ROBERT B. SEMPLE JR.
Published: October 11, 2006
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Robert B. Semple Jr., an Editorial Board member, writes about
environmental issues.
In This Talking Points
I. A Renewable Called Efficiency
II. The Promise of Biofuels
III. Hydrogen: Hype or Hero?
IV. Here Comes the Sun?
V. Favorable Winds
Previous Talking Points Articles
Additional Reading
A paper from the Worldwatch Institute and the Center for American
Progress on renewable energy sources in the U.S.
PBS interview with Martin Hoffert of New York University.
Willie Nelson's biodiesel Web site.
May 1, 2006 editorial on the benefits of ethanol use.
June 25, 2006 article on the economic impact of ethanol on the American
food supply.
July 13, 2006 article on the relative benefits of both biodiesel and
ethanol.
A Natural Resource Defense Council survey of studies on climate change
published since 1990.
A General Motors study on energy use.
A book by Terry Tamminen, former California Secretary of State,
promoting the use of hydrogen fuel.
Interview with Joseph Romm, a longtime skeptic of hydrogen technology
and author of "The Hype About Hydrogen."
The subject of energy is front-page news these days because of two huge
challenges: oil dependency and global warming.
Sometimes they seem so big, so daunting and so complicated that many
people throw up their hands and walk away.
But admitting defeat is not an option. And it doesn't have to be an
option. Not since the Arab oil embargo of the early 1970's have the
times been more propitious for a major shift in the way America uses
energy.
Thirty years of research at the private and government level, here and
abroad, have produced a range of new technologies that can help turn
abundant energy sources - wind, biomass, solar, even water itself -
into alternative fuels. These fuels, in turn, can help keep our cars
running and our power plants humming, while reducing both our reliance
on unstable Middle Eastern oil producers and our contributions to
dangerous climate change.
Some of these technologies are in their infancy; others, if not wholly
mature, are at least frisky teenagers. Global wind generation, for
instance, has more than tripled in the last five years alone (PDF). The
price of solar power has dropped dramatically. The production of fuel
ethanol doubled between 2000 and 2005, and it could double again in the
next three years.
Overall, renewable energy sources - mainly hydropower - provide
just over six per cent of total U.S. energy, and about 10 percent of
our electric power. But as technology improves and the price of
conventional fuels like oil and natural gas skyrockets, newer forms of
energy will become increasingly competitive and, inevitably,
increasingly important.
Even so, bringing these technologies into the commercial mainstream,
where they can make a real difference, will require public and private
money and, particularly in the United States, a sense of urgency and a
great deal of political will.
The inertia in the present energy delivery system is staggering. The
infrastructure is huge and it has been constructed at great cost. Its
basic ingredients - the millions of cars and trucks and the many
thousands of power plants that deliver electricity - have been built
pretty much the same way for years and years. Turning things around
will not be easy.
But turn they must, and soon. As the Arab oil shocks 30 years ago
demonstrated, as the terrorist attacks of 9/11 confirmed, and as $2.50
gasoline reminds us almost daily, our continuing dependence on the
politically fragile nations that control most of the world's oil
reserves jeopardizes our national security and drains billions of
dollars from the American economy. It is not a healthy relationship. It
is probably unsustainable. And it is incredibly expensive.
The United States consumes one-quarter of the world's oil - 20
million barrels - every day; about 12 million barrels of that is
imported. Assuming a price of $60 a barrel, that means that $720
million is flowing out of this country every day to finance what
President Bush himself called our oil "addiction."
The global warming picture is no less gloomy. Just in the last few
weeks, a group of NASA scientists, headed by climate specialist James
E. Hansen, argued that global warming has been more rapid over the last
30 years than anyone thought - about 0.2 degrees Celsius over each of
the past three decades. If the trend continues unchecked, the group
asserts, 60 percent of species around the world could die by the end of
the 21st century and sea levels could rise several feet, enough to
completely transform coastlines.
Many scientists regard Mr. Hansen's conclusions (although not his
data on warming) as far too alarmist. But there are few mainstream
scientists left who dispute the need for moving quickly to slow,
stabilize, then reduce the human contributions to the accumulated
carbon load that already exists in the atmosphere. And what they
usually mean by "moving quickly" is to begin making major changes
in the way we use energy in the next ten years .
It is in this context of early action that alternative fuels - by
which we mean, largely, renewable fuels - must be viewed. There are
all sorts of marvelous, futuristic (and plausible-sounding) ideas out
there, including space-based solar systems, advanced biomass, worldwide
electricity grids, and the like, nicely summarized by Marty Hoffert of
New York University in a paper for the Pew Center on Global Climate
Change. But these are huge, enormously expensive projects, requiring a
global budget, and none is likely to do much good in the near term.
There is, however, a lot that we can and should be doing right now.
I. A Renewable Called Efficiency
A quick but necessary word here on something that will do a lot of good
in the near term - energy efficiency, that is, making much better use
of the fuels we already have.
Amory Lovins, who runs the Rocky Mountain Institute in Aspen, Colo.,
and who has been preaching the virtues of energy efficiency and the
promise of new technologies for years, is fond of pointing out that the
United States uses 47 percent less energy per dollar of economic output
than it did 30 years ago, lowering costs by about $1 billion a day.
Renewable fuels played only a small role in this transformation. What
happened is that we took existing products and made them better. We
manufactured more efficient light bulbs, built more efficient homes,
streamlined our factories and, perhaps most important, got more work
out of a gallon of gasoline by imposing strict fuel economy standards
(which, regrettably, have not been seriously updated for three
decades).
There is a lot more efficiency to be wrung out of the system. Anyone
who has suffered recently through a blackout or brownout knows
first-hand how old and inefficient much of the nation's transmission
grid is. The same is true of things we do not normally regard as old or
inefficient.
Take, for instance, the automobile. Lovins points out that despite 119
years of refinement, the modern car remains "astonishingly
inefficient" , with only 13 percent of the energy even reaching the
wheels. Constructing cars from light-but-strong materials like advanced
polymer composites, he argues, would increase mileage dramatically.
Make that same car a plug-in hybrid, running partly on gasoline and
partly on advanced batteries that can be recharged at home overnight,
and pretty soon consumers could be driving cars capable of well over
100 miles per gallon.
Overall, Mr. Lovins insists, full adoption of efficient vehicles,
buildings and industries could shrink projected U.S. oil use in 2025 by
more than half (that is, about 14 million of a projected 28 million
barrels a day), lowering consumption to pre-1970 levels. And we
wouldn't even need renewable fuels to get there.
But wouldn't it be wonderful if we had such fuels? Without
renewables, we'll still end up burning (albeit much more efficiently)
the same coal and natural gas that we burn today in our power plants
and the same fuel oil that we burn in our cars and trucks. And it is
precisely these carbon-based fossil fuels that we must distance
ourselves from if we really want to come to grips with our dependence
on foreign oil and with global warming.
II. The Promise of Biofuels
The commodity that may be best positioned to help the United States
break its addiction to oil is already growing in America's fields and
forests - plants and trees, known collectively as biomass. Fuels
derived from biomass can be produced either by converting sugar or
starch crops to ethanol, or by converting soybean and other plant oils
to biodiesel.
Of these two biofuels, ethanol is the most promising. Despite
biodiesel's growing popularity (the country and western singer Willie
Nelson promotes it assiduously), only about 75 million gallons were
produced in 2005, compared to nearly 4 billion gallons of ethanol.
President Bush mentioned ethanol in his State of the Union address this
year. Entrepreneurs like Bill Gates have begin investing in it. Every
blue ribbon commission on energy has embraced it as a fuel of the
future. And both the government and several leading environmental and
public policy groups, including the Natural Resource Defense Council
and the Energy Future Coalition, have suggested that ethanol -
combined with other strategies like plug-in hybrids - could reduce
the need for imported oil to zero.
Until recently, there were only two kinds of ethanol that were at all
well-known: ethanol made from sugar cane, which accounts for
approximately 40 percent of Brazil's non-diesel automotive fuel; and
corn ethanol, which, at nearly 4 billion gallons annually, and used
mainly as an additive, accounts for between two and three percent of
America's automotive fuel.
Corn ethanol's image has suffered from its association with the
agribusiness lobby - in particular a politically connected company
called Archer Daniels Midland - and with presidential candidates
hustling support every four years in the Iowa primaries. It has also
suffered from the widespread belief that it takes more energy to make
corn ethanol than the end product gives back, as well as from the
belief that corn ethanol can't compete with gasoline without a
generous federal subsidy.
All three complaints are outdated. A.D.M. is no longer the only big
player in the field, which is growing rapidly to meet a Congressional
mandate contained in the 2005 energy bill to expand the production of
ethanol and biodiesel to 7.5 billion gallons by 2012, a target that
almost surely will be met much earlier. Meanwhile, nearly every
reputable study of corn ethanol's net energy balance (the value of
inputs like plowing, planting and fertilizing vs. the value of the
outputs) show net benefits of 25 to 40 percent.
Finally, even accounting for its lower energy content, corn ethanol is
competitive with gasoline in the United States when the price of oil is
at $45 or above. That is well below the price of oil today , and also
below where the U.S. Energy Information Agency expects the oil price to
befat over the next 25 years.
There is an added benefit. The corn ethanol studies also show that corn
ethanol has a net benefit in greenhouse gas emissions of up to 20
percent.
So we are getting what we want: a competitive substitute for Middle
Eastern oil that could also make a positive difference, albeit modest,
in greenhouse gas emissions.
The real problem with corn ethanol is simply that there isn't enough
of it, and for all sorts of good reasons having to do with sensible
land use and the food supply, there never will be. By one estimate,
devoting the entire U.S. corn harvest in 2005 to ethanol would have
offset less than one-sixth of the nation's gasoline consumption,
which exceeds 140 billion gallons a year, and nobody is talking about
converting anything close to every kernel of corn to fuel.
What the experts are talking about is another kind of ethanol:
cellulosic ethanol. This type of ethanol can be derived from a range of
crops, including native grasses like switchgrass, trees like poplar,
and even the waste components if farming and forestry - in short,
just about anything rich in cellulose.
This is where the real promise of ethanol lies. Crops that yield
cellulosic ethanol can be grown specifically for energy, in some cases
on agriculturally marginal land without pesticides or fertilizer. And
the energy-in energy-out balance is terrific: it gives back about five
times more energy than it takes to produce, according to most studies.
One reason for this is that the manufacturing process consumes the
entire plant, including lignin, a non-fermentable component of the
plant that can be burned to run the ethanol refinery. And while both
forms of ethanol are better than gasoline for reducing greenhouse gas
emissions (since the CO2 they absorb from the atmosphere while growing
helps offset the CO2 they produce during combustion), cellulosic
ethanol is far superior on this score because so little carbon-based
fuel is used to produce it.
The rub is this: at the moment, there is no commercial production of
cellulosic ethanol in the United States. A Canadian company called
Iogen, a leader in the field, makes its ethanol from wheat straw, and
is planning a major facility in BP and DuPont are getting into the
game. A Spanish company called Abengoa could have its operations up and
running by next year. Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman recently
announced a goal of making cellulosic ethanol a practical and
cost-competitive alternative by 2012, with sufficient commercial
production to displace 30 percent of the nation's gasoline
consumption by 2030. These are not impossible goals, but a national
commitment and big money will be needed to meet them.
III. Hydrogen: Hype or Hero?
President Bush did not really start paying attention to energy problems
until 9/11, when it became clear that our usually reliable sources of
Middle Eastern oil were seriously at risk.
In addition to the predictable supply-side policies (drilling in the
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, for instance) Mr. Bush offered up, as
the ultimate savior, a hydrogen economy. The centerpiece would be a
zero-emission fuel cell vehicle powered by hydrogen - a "Freedom
Car," in Mr. Bush's words, running on "Freedom Fuel." Such a
vehicle would not only end our dependency on oil. It could also have
payoffs in terms of global warming (a benefit that went largely
unmentioned by Mr. Bush, who does not like to acknowledge the dangers
of climate change).
Hydrogen cars are not a new idea. People have been dreaming of them for
years, and the Clinton administration invested in hydrogen fuel-cell
technologies that could be used for both mobile energy-users, like
cars, and stationary ones, like buildings. Mr. Bush has ramped up that
investment considerably. He has also ramped up the rhetoric, holding
out hope that by the early 2020's - when today's newborn will be
getting their first driver's licenses - motorists will be able drop
by their local dealer and drive a hydrogen car off the lot.
An appealing prospect, and certainly one worth pursuing. But the
obstacles are daunting. One is figuring out how to make the stuff.
Hydrogen doesn't just sit there, like oil; it needs to be extracted
from something. It can be extracted (or "reformed") from natural
gas, oil and coal. But that requires a lot of energy and produces a lot
of carbon dioxide, so the global warming benefits are minimal - even
though the hydrogen itself, once produced, burns cleanly.
One potentially non-polluting source of hydrogen does exist -
electrolysis, the use of electricity to break water into hydrogen and
oxygen. So the ideal scenario would look like this: An electric current
would be produced by a non-polluting source like wind power. The
current would be applied to water to produce hydrogen. The hydrogen
(the "Freedom Fuel") would be transported to a hydrogen filling
station and pumped into a special car (the "Freedom Car") stacked
with fuel cells that would then recombine the hydrogen with oxygen to
produce an electric current that - voila! - runs the car.
It's basically a mirror image of the process used to produce the
hydrogen in the first place. The only residue is water vapor - no
Co2, no smog-forming gases, no acid rain gases. And, of course, no need
for Middle Eastern oil.
Our policymakers should keep after this. But they should also fully
appreciate the obstacles - making the stuff, storing it, transporting
it to a national network of filling stations and building those filling
stations (itself a $500 billion proposition, by one estimate). And then
there's the car itself, with all that new tank capacity and all those
fuel cells. By some estimates the cost of that car has to come down
50-fold before a consumer will even think of touching it.
Hydrogen may well be the fuel of the future. But the operative word is
"future." Did anyone say 2050? Whatever the target date, the dream
of hydrogen cannot relieve us of the grittier, real-life task of
quickly developing more fuel-efficient cars as well as cost-effective
fuels to run them.
IV. Here Comes the Sun?
Finding new fuels for the world's transportation fleet is only part
of the energy equation. The other big part is figuring out how to keep
generating the power that a growing world needs without trashing the
planet.
This is not primarily an oil problem, since very little oil, relatively
speaking, is used to turn the lights on. More than 50 percent of
America's electric power is supplied by coal; natural gas and nuclear
energy supply about 20 percent each, and the remainder, just under 10
percent, comes from renewable sources like wind, solar, geothermal, and
especially hydroelectric power. The main reason we need to increase the
percentage of renewables is to reduce the amount of carbon we are
putting into the atmosphere.
Here again, it would help matters if we made better use of the tools we
have. For one thing, we need to build a super-efficient grid. For
another, we almost certainly need more and better nuclear plants, since
nuclear energy is low-carbon energy. No new nuclear plant has been
built for decades, mainly for cost reasons. But many people, including
some environmentalists who once recoiled from the nuclear option, are
now persuaded that global warming cannot be tackled without a new
generation of cheaper, safer and more reliable nuclear plants.
Finally - since we're going to be living with coal for a long time
to come - we have to figure out some way of stripping the carbon
dioxide from the waste stream and putting it somewhere besides the
atmosphere. There's great hope that it can someday be sequestered
underground.
But renewables will also play a useful role. Geothermal energy is one
possible source, though limited in scope. Ocean tides could be another,
if someone could figure out how to harness them. The two that are most
talked about are solar energy and wind energy.
Solar is particularly popular among environmentalists. Solar cells
(also known as photovoltaic cells, or PV's) that covert sunlight
directly into electricity could yield large benefits down the road; the
energy they produce is essentially emissions- free. Solar energy also
holds out almost magical promise: by one estimate, a 90-square-mile PV
generating station in the western United States could produce enough
electricity to meet the entire country's peak demand if you could
figure out how to distribute it economically.
And here's more good news: The price of solar cells is coming down,
dropping almost 20-fold since the mid-1970's and resulting in a
six-fold increase in global annual production over the last five years
alone. In percentage terms, solar energy is the world's fastest
growing source of power.
Now for the bad news: Solar power provides an almost invisible
fraction, far less than one percent, of America's energy. The main
reason is cost. Despite remarkable improvements in the technology -
especially in the crystalline energy chips that are at the heart of it
- the cost per kilowatt hour (kWh) of utility-scale PV's is still
four to five times the cost of power generated by coal or natural gas
or, nowadays, wind.
Costs are lower for so-called end-use PV's - those attached to,
say, individual houses or office buildings. And for some remote
locations far from the grid, PV's are often the least-cost source of
power. As William Sweet observes in his recent book, "Kicking the
Carbon Habit," solar power remains "one of those irritating
glass-half-full, glass-half-empty stories - or maybe two-thirds
empty, one third full." Even though prices may someday fall to
competitive levels, and even though hardly a week goes by without
someone announcing the construction of yet another PV on the top of
some visible public building, Mr. Sweet insists, "the economic case
for photovoltaics has yet to be demonstrated."
V. Favorable Winds
Fortunately, the same cannot be said of wind power. Mr. Sweet argues
that of all renewable energy sources, "the really sensational story
of the last decade has been wind."
As indeed it has. Encouraged by generous subsidies from benevolent
governments, and by rapid improvements in technology, wind turbines
have been popping up around the world, and especially in Europe, at a
steady clip.
Germany, where "greens" have considerable influence, aims to
replace all of its nuclear power with renewables; it already gets about
one-tenth of its power from wind. Denmark, which gets about one-fifth
of its energy from wind, plans to meet fully half of its power
requirements with wind by 2030. (Denmark has also become the leading
producer of advanced turbines, further confirmation of the argument
that those who are willing to fight global warming with cutting-edge
technologies stand to profit from them, as Japan hopes to with solar
cells). Britain, where global warming has become a big issue under
Prime Minister Tony Blair, hopes to produce 20 percent of its energy
from renewables, mainly wind, by 2020.
Measured against these grand ambitions, America seems unadventurous. As
of 2005, according to the American Wind Energy Association, there were
9,149 megawatts of installed wind capacity in the United States, enough
to power 2.3 million homes. With the industry forecasting another 3,000
MW this year, America's capacity could soon be about one-fourth to
one-third of Europe's. That's good but not great, and still less than
one percent of total output.
But those number are sure to grow. Improved technology (mainly in
turbine construction) plus the rising costs of natural gas have made
wind power increasingly economically competitive. The cost of wind
power has fallen from 80 cents per kWh 25 years ago to between 3 and 6
cents today. In some parts of the country it's even cheaper than
natural gas. And while today's price includes a government production
subsidy of 1.9 cents per kWh, it still represents a huge drop over the
last quarter-century, and a further affirmation of technology's
promise.
Like almost any energy source, however, wind power brings concerns with
it. Except in places where the wind seems to blow all or most of the
time, in coastal areas and states like the Dakotas, wind power is
intermittent. The places where wind power is most reliable are often
the places furthest from the urban centers most in need of it. Costs
can be high, especially when the turbines are placed offshore.
The towers themselves are huge, the length of a football field measured
from their base to the tips of their blades; and conservationists, who
otherwise love clean power, worry about the damage to bird life. And to
some people, they are just plain ugly. The bitter dispute over a wind
farm planned for Nantucket Sound off of Cape Cod, which the Kennedy
family has famously opposed, is mainly about aesthetics.
Still, wind power is here to stay. The Department of Energy estimates
that the wind resources between 5 and 50 nautical miles from
America's coastline could support 900,000 megawatts of wind
capacity-a good chunk of the nation's total needs. And that's not
counting the Great Plains, sometimes called the "Persian Gulf" of
American wind power.
Given its rich technological heritage, the United States should be a
leader in renewable energy. It was, but is no longer, in part because
we have become so comfortable with inexpensive conventional fuels and
in part because the country's leadership has only lately begun to
take renewables seriously.
John Podesta, a Clinton adviser now with the non-profit Center for
American Progress, noted in a speech in California the other day that
as recently as 1996 - to take just one example- the United States
held 44 percent of the global solar cell market. By 2005, that figure
had fallen to 9 percent. Add that to Brazil's dominance of the
ethanol market and Europe's dominance in wind turbines and America is
plainly missing some economic bets.
But that, too, could change, thanks to a recent upsurge in private
investment. Mr. Podesta notes that worldwide, $38 billion in private
venture capital flowed into renewable energy investments in 2005, a
number that could nearly double by 2010. And much of this was American
money from big players like Goldman, Sachs and the California Public
Employees Retirement System. Where America lags is at the federal
level. It's hard to figure out how much of the federal budget is
devoted to energy, especially renewable energy, since so many programs
are scattered in so many parts of the budget. And tax breaks complicate
matters, because they come and go. But according to one Energy
Department official, the department's total research and development
budget for renewable technologies last year was a mere $416 million.
In his Feb. 20 Advanced Energy Initiative, Mr. Bush recommended
increases in all major programs. But compared to other government
outlays- and measured against the need - these are pitiful numbers.
That, however, may be changing. Although complete "energy
independence" may be a distant and even unattainable dream, the
phrase is becoming increasingly central to the nation's political
discourse, reflecting public anxiety about high gas prices, economic
competitiveness, and terrorism all at once. We are hearing it in this
season's Congressional campaigns, and we are sure to hear more of it
as the 2008 presidential campaign begins.
This attention will, no doubt, eventually start translating into
policy, and the American government will start to catch up with
America's private sector.
After a slow start, renewable energy's time may finally have arrived.
Lela Moore provided research for this article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/11/opinion/11talkingpoints.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin
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> Peter Arkle
> Thirty years of research have produced a range of new technologies that
> can help turn abundant energy sources - wind, biomass, solar, even
> water itself - into alternative fuels.