In August last year when the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, announced a $1.576 billion funding package over eight-years to promote alternative fuels in particular ethanol I received an email from Ray Wilson with the comment that:
“Ethanol is not a good fuel because a standard petrol engine needs to be extensively modified to use 100% ethanol as it has only half the energy density of petrol.
However, just as one can produce petrol and diesel from coal using the Fischer-Tropsch process, one can use cellulosic (Wood, leaves, grass, grains, etc) matter too to make petrol and diesel by this method. This can be done profitably and the process is well-known…
“The Fischer-Tropsch process is normally used to convert coal to fuels, but it works equally well with cellulosic matter as a feedstock.
So instead of just using the sugar cane juice to make ethanol and discarding the residue, one can convert the entire plant into diesel and petrol and discard very little. Any plant material will do too.
The subsides are available for anyone who wants to proceed with this R&D and the project itself, provided one has the collateral to cover 50% of the Federal loan. I do not have this, so it is very difficult for me to do anything myself. I actually looked into this in some detail recently.
Plant oils are suitable for use as a diesel fuel, but the rest of the plant is discarded as waste. For example, oil-palm nuts are crushed to yield their oil, but the pulp is discarded. Not very efficient." [end of quote]
Today I received another email from Ray Wilson, this time with comment, “the Germans are using FT [Fischer-Tropsch process] to produce diesel from wood commercially; precisely what I was trying to get going here in Queensland.”
You can read about it at Times Online:
“Ken Fisher, vice-president for strategy at Shell, expects full-scale production on a commercial basis by the middle of the next decade.
“We would like to be the leading provider of second-generation biofuels,” Mr Fisher said. …
All the technologies are based on the Fischer-Tropsch process, invented in Germany in the 1930s to synthesise liquid fuels from coal. The process was initially uneconomic, but was used in Nazi Germany and in South Africa under apartheid when the country lacked access to crude oil.
"The discovery of better catalysts and the rising price of crude is improving the commercial equation…
"Shell has a second BTL [biomass to liquids] investment in Iogen, a Canadian company that this week secured an $80 million (£41 million) grant from the US Government to build a plant in Idaho, which will produce cellulosic ethanol from plant waste and straw. [end of quote]
Ian
"The IPCC has not even bothered to run a scenario with this sort of highly probable outcome."
Do you have any evidence of this claim?
Quick answer - (1) you have to "round up" the methane or other emissions - how easy is that ? can you capture the emissions easily (2) how much sulfur hexafluoride etc is there anyway ?
Indeed pumping CO2 into wells and aquifers is the subject of research. Long as it stays down there.
So perhaps Motty, you are demonstrating is that doomsday scenarios are commonly based upon business as usual into the future. Many doomsday scenarios are avoided because we change our behaviour in response to the anticipated problem. If you jump out of the plane you will make a mess when you hit the ground, so you take a parachute.
But if we didn’t have doomsdayers, would we just jump out of the plane and think about the parachute idea on the way down?
The interesting aspect of the above link to the NY Times article on new oil reserves is the use of CO2 as the gas being pumped into the ground to flush out more oil.
In this case, the resulting oil may have already have an off-setting carbon credit due to the sequestration. And note that this technology has increased the known recoverable resource from 3.3 trillion barrels to 4.8 trillion. And as 1.1 trillion of the original 3.3 trillion has already been used, it means that 1.5 trillion (40.5%) of the remaining 3.7 trillion may be a long way towards being carbon neutral.
But what about some of these other gases that are much more GH unfriendly than CO2? Given that methane, for example, is 20 times the CO2 equivalent, would the pumping of methane back into the well produce an oil product that is actually in carbon surplus?
Luke has suggested at another post that,
"Nitrous oxide has an atmospheric lifetime of 120 years and a GWP of 296 over 100 years.
CFC-12 has an atmospheric lifetime of 100 years and a GWP(100) of 10600.
HCFC-22 has an atmospheric lifetime of 12.1 years and a GWP(100) of 1700.
Tetrafluoromethane has an atmospheric lifetime of 50,000 years and a GWP(100) of 5700.
Sulfur hexafluoride has an atmospheric lifetime of 3,200 years and a GWP(100) of 22000".
So if these gases were pumped into an old oil well the resulting oil could be sold as being completely carbon neutral with loads, and loads of change.
And this raises an interesting issue in respect of the IPCC climate projections. For if 40% of all future oil emissions are even anywhere near carbon neutral then the whole range of scenarios are off the planet. The IPCC has not even bothered to run a scenario with this sort of highly probable outcome.
Anna
20% efficiency is pretty ordinary and fuel cell/electric may be the way of the future. But some costs produce benefits indirectly. If you use long distance road transport and pay more for the diesel that it consumes compared to rail transport, you may more than make up for the transport costs by saving time.
Rail freight is good in its place but the infrastructure costs are very high and government funded, capital that is not paid for by the users. There are also high levels of inefficiency in other respects, particulalry time. It’s not the speed of the trains, it’s the amount of handling required to deliver and retrieve loads to and from the railheads. Rail infrastructure is in a hole because the taxpayer doesn’t want to close hospitals to maintain or expand it. Imagine the amount of aluminium cable it would take to electrify the Perth to Port Augusta rail line and the enormous losses in transmission of electricity over such huge distances. It may be better stay with diesel trains for energy efficiency reasons.
Energy efficiency is very important, but if the energy is renewable and its production and use has a low impact on the environment, then how much you use surely becomes a question of cost. It may be more efficient in economic terms to use a bit more energy and make savings in other ways. Then energy efficiency improves as a way of reducing operating costs, a process that happens naturally.
But fear not happy motorists, I heard anecdotally that there is a coal to liquid project under consideration for Victoria that could have the capacity to replace our nation’s petroleum fuel imports. And there are others. Sasol’s technological expertise will save us from having to fight over oil fields in the future. Now that will save a lot of lives and huge amounts of energy and cash, especially for the USA.
The "scientific consensus" on AGW also proves that there's intelligent life on Neptune’s moon Triton, Jupiter, Pluto, and Mars. They show the same pattern of AGW as Earth. Quite conclusive evidence!
http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/3434
Link for above quote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_Brazil#Electricity_from_bagasse
All the technologies are based on the Fischer-Tropsch process, invented in Germany in the 1930s to synthesise liquid fuels from coal. The process was initially uneconomic, but was used in Nazi Germany and in South Africa under apartheid when the country lacked access to crude oil.
===
My grandfather, Gordon Sizer, was a chemical engineer at the Sasol and Sasol II plants for 20 years, which converted coal to petrol and strategically gave South Africa energy-independence during the oil embargo of the 70s and 80s.
You are on the right track with sugarcane. Bargasse - the cellulose byproduct of sugarcane, and sugarbeet ethanol - is used to generate electricity for the ethanol conversion plants, and the excess electricity is sold. Best of all itis environmentally friendlier than many other energies.
"Presently, it is economically viable to extract about 288 MJ of electricity from the residues of one tonne of sugarcane, of which about 180 MJ are used in the plant itself. Thus a medium-size distillery processing 1 million tonnes of sugarcane per year could sell about 5 MW of surplus electricity. At current prices, it would earn US$ 18 million from sugar and ethanol sales, and about US$ 1 million from surplus electricity sales. With advanced boiler and turbine technology, the electricity yield could be increased to 648 MJ per tonne of sugarcane, but current electricity prices do not justify the necessary investment. (According to one report, the World bank would only finance investments in bagasse power generation if the price were at least US$19/GJ or US$0.068/kWh.)
Bagasse burning is environmentally friendly compared to other fuels like oil and coal. Its ash content is only 2.5% (against 30-50% of coal), and it contains no sulfur. Since it burns at relatively low temperatures, it produces little nitrous oxides. Moreover, bagasse is being sold for use as a fuel (replacing heavy fuel oil) in various industries, including citrus juice concentrate, vegetable oil, ceramics, and tyre recycling. The state of São Paulo alone used 2 million tonnes, saving about US$35 million in fuel oil imports."
Then again , maybe we're not that close to running out of oil anyway....
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/05/business/05oil1.html?_r=2&hp=&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
Boxer, totally take your point about the inertia of current fuel supply systems. also the point that it takes a long time to change over a country's vehicle fleet, i drive a 21 year old car myself. though i get about 7.5l/100km so i'm not to unhappy about that. but i certainly don't have the cash to buy a prius or civic, so at the moment i simply drive as little as possible and buy offsets (not trees!) for what driving i do have to do.
as for hydrogen, well, seeing as it takes more energy to produce hydrogen than you get from the hydrogen, i really don't think it is an efficient option.
i reckon that bio-ethanol/diesel in a fuel cell electric vehicle would provide the best of both worlds. efficient mechanism and we can use the current fuel supply systems still. as far as heavy transport i must admit i'm less well versed. though aren't trains more efficient per kilo of freight than trucks? unfortunately rail infrastructure is up the creek at the moment.
i'm not suggesting that any of this could happen quickly, i.e., in the next five - 10 years. these things take a lot of time, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be planning for change in the future. and not just in terms of *what* fuel we use, but also *how* we use it. 20% efficiency is pretty poor, for example if you spent $100 on marketing and only saw a $20 increase in business you'd fire your marketing people. so why should we accept this extreme inefficiency from technology?