Adventures in Biofuels
A colleague asked for my two cents’ worth on Joule Unlimited, a biofuels company that taps into the strength of cyanobacteria. I spent some time on their website and have the following to report:
There’s nothing theoretically impossible about this, but I’m skeptical that it will ever become practical. Not only do I doubt the credibility of the company and its claims, on the basis of certain things they said in some of their videos that contradict one another or are contrary to basic science, but I’m not a believer in the biofuels industry as a whole. I’m SO skeptical in fact that when the video voice-over guy said, “The CEO is a biologist who’s spent his life in search of an effective approach to biofuels,” I said to myself: “No, the CEO is a shyster who’s spent his life in search of gullible investors.” I admit that is a totally unfair statement and I’m sure it’s not true, but it just goes to show how jaded we can become when we look at thousands of concepts in clean energy.
The problem is largely thermodynamic efficiency. The game in renewable energy, by and large, is to maximize the efficiency with which can one convert a given area, say one square meter, of incident sunlight into usable energy. For solar, that answer, right now, is a bit under 25%. (The capacity factors for both solar and this “engine” for biofuels are identical, btw; both are doing their thing only when the sun is shining.
Now the claim here is that there exists a living organism, albeit a modified one, that has impressive characteristics in this space. I’m dubious. In the first place, I wonder about the modifications that require removing the organism’s ability to reproduce itself, meaning that all of that living material generating ethanol will be dead very quickly, and will need to be replaced by new bacteria. That in itself seems horribly inefficient to me. Then one has to believe that the production of ethanol occurs in a highly efficient manner. That’s also hard to swallow insofar as biological and chemical synthetic processes do not behave like this. They produce an entire column of hydrocarbons, some of which are valuable (in addition to ethanol): methanol, butane, octane, pentane, etc, and some are of no value at all.
Summarizing, I will be very impressed and surprised if this ever scales to the dimensions its progenitors suggest.
The real kicker in terms of efficiency is that living organisms evolved to store a minimum of extra energy. Yes, they need energy stored in their cells to maintain metabolic processes, to grow, and to reproduce, but there is no evolutionary benefit to storing more energy than that. In other words, living organisms did not evolve so that we could suck extra energy out of them and put it into our gas tanks.
While I am not an expert in this area, I think this is the fundamental flaw in the entire concept of biofuels. Note also that the processes of converting sunlight into usable energy are getting more efficient and less expensive with each passing year. I just can’t imagine how, in the long run, biofuels can compete. How long will it be before we’re using wind power at ridiculously low prices to charge the batteries of our EVs. At that point, hydrocarbon fuels will have the same utility to us as typewriters. OK, that’s an exaggeration, insofar as we still will have Class 8 trucks and aircraft, but you get my point.
By the way, in addition to incident sunlight upon the earth there are other low-carbon ways of generating energy, even other sources of renewable energy, like geothermal and tidal. In addition, nuclear is also available to us and is making great strides in terms of cost effectiveness, operational safety, waste disposal, etc.
Chevron famously gave up on biofuels in 2014. I’m sure it’s for the reasons stated above.
As has been continually acknowledged here, there has been very good news in the significant drops in $/kWh that have already occurred for various forms of solar and wind, and the further improvement in cost and efficiency is expected in the near term. Energy storage tech is already significant and improving at a similar pace.
Massive externalized costs are associated with fossil energy that don’t appear in consumer prices, or commodity trading prices (now set at a historic low point for oil). These are costs paid by society as a whole, nonetheless – many of them on a global as well as local scale, and often unjustly paid by non-users.
All currently operational and currently scheduled construction of commercial electricity generation by nuclear power is of conventional fission reactor design. Also, as has been repeatedly discussed here, these designs have been demonstrated to be both a) less than cost effective compared with modern wind and solar tech, and b) less than carbon neutral, when factoring the construction, insurance, the end to end operations from fuel mining and refining to permanent waste storage and management, plant life-span, and plant decommissioning.
The earliest commercially viable next-gen nuke tech is, as has also been observed here, expected to be a couple of decades away. Given the extent and nature of the externalized costs associated with fossil fuels, can/should we afford to even partially delay our transition to various proven forms of modern sunlight energy and storage in favor of devoting significant fiscal resources to likely-but-as-yet-unproven commercial next-gen nuke viability?
Well, this one I can answer: that’s a big negatory. Referring again to Glenn Doty:
But to discount renewable energy is a fool’s gambit. Wind is less than 1/3rd the cost, on a LCOE basis, than the most optimistic assessments for current technology nuclear power. I couldn’t care less if it’s less energy dense… that’s baked into the cost, and it’s still less. Will thorium cycles allow cheaper energy? I would bet against that.
Nuclear is cheaper than solar, but solar can be generated at the point of demand, so it needs to compete with the delivered price, not the generation price. As of now, solar wins, but that’s only because of numerous subsidies… without the subsidies, in a decade…? Who knows? Both energy sources will be needed, so both should be invested in and built out.
Without thorium cycles, however, nuclear power is a few decades-long luxury before fuel costs begin to become prohibitive.. and again, I have my doubts that thorium cycle plants will be delivering electrical power for at least 2 decades.
I have my doubts that a fusion plant may be operational and delivering consumer energy before the death of my children (who have not yet been conceived).
But wind and solar, and soon likely geothermal… are all cost viable in certain regions of the U.S. TODAY… we don’t have to wait for R&D, nor do we have to wait for NRC approval, nor do we have to struggle to overcome NIMBYISM for a novel nuclear reactor… etc..
We can just keep building wind farms and solar panels, and slowly change the world while waiting for the magic option that the (pro-nuke people) in your forum – along with many other reasonable and mature nuclear enthusiasts (myself included) believe will move the ball more quickly.
Thanks, Craig, for communicating the perspective. I believe I’ve read that current nuke tech enjoys significant government subsidy in the form of insurance support, does it not? I believe I’ve read that no commercial insurer is willing to cover the risks the tech presents from day one of operation onward.
Yes, that’s all completely true. But I would argue that this isn’t a reason to lose interest in advanced nuclear.
We absolutely agree on that.
My concern is the extent to which financing such research serves (and may yet serve) to impede the conversion onto proven tech for harvesting modern sunlight energy, and therefore our transitioning maximally away from the prehistoric stuff.
All legitimately promising areas of research into future clean energy tech should proceed apace, with this caveat: to the extent they don’t interfere with the accelerated adoption of existing proven clean tech to replace the dirty fossil stuff wherever and as soon as it makes holistic sense.
I just want to avoid the potential that the ‘future-possible’ may become (or be used as) the enemy of the ‘now-achievable.’
To apply an adage communicated by Teddy Roosevelt “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”
You have a terrific point, but I would point out that there are many smart people who doubt that wind and solar can scale in time to make all this happen.
I’m not including you in this, but in general, the people who are rapidly anti-nuke are simply uninformed.
Biofuels (3% to 11%) are less efficient than PV 10% – 20%+. They also produce fuel which must be burned in a less efficient engine than the combined electricity + electric motor efficiency. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency
But the US military and the aviation industry is seriously considering them as a method to fuel planes. Their primary advantage is the ability to step into the existing infrastructure. Similar to fossil fuels, biofuels represent a way to not only supply but store energy. This suggests at least a transitional role for biofuels.
However growing crops also tends to involve fertilizer and pesticides which are largely supplied by the petrochemical industry. There is also the issue of water and land resources that must be used, possibly to the exclusion of food crops.
So along comes genetic engineering that promises to modify algae that will crap out fuel possibly without then even needing to use a refinery. They promise to use salt water and open oceans to grow the crops.
At this point I am beginning to wonder what happens if some of this algae “escapes” into the wild as so much of Monsanto’s product seems to have done. GMO’s in the wild tend to be dominant and essentially become an invasive species. Will such organisms essentially poison oceans with a massive biofuel slick?
It may be a disaster for the oceans and the life found there. But millions of years ago it could have been a now extinct microscopic plant that scrubbed the air of carbon. It would be ironic if the only legacy of the human race was to recreate an organism that cleaned the air of carbon we put there leading to the present imbalance.
The key point is that a biological system reproduces itself, so you don’t have to make it.
If that doesn’t happen, forget about it.
The other point is if the system makes a chemical you need, usually for its own reasons.
One example is certain marine phytoplankton that reproduce reasonably well and make hydrocarbons in order to increase their buoyancy, as well as to store energy.
They might be a good candidate because buoyancy requires more hydrocarbons than energy storage, but there are always other issues…
For more than 100 years a bio-fuel replacement for oil has been sought. The diesel engine was originally designed to operate on agriculturally based oil products.
For nations without oil, but sparsely populated land and agricultural surplus, turning surplus crops into substitutes for imported fossil fuels seemed to be economically wise.
In practice, like bio-mass from waste, the value all bio-fuels are limited to localized situations where special circumstances provide the right conditions.
Brazil is a good example. Bio-fuel production allows Brazil to avoid paying excessive amounts for oil imports and allows a base second market for it’s vast surplus sugar production, thus helping to stabilize the price of sugar, while helping Brazil’s balance of trade.
However, the US the 40 year policy of turning corn into Ethanol, has created an environmental disaster with global ramifications. US policies have created a hugely uneconomic industry, that for political reasons must be supported by the taxpayer.
Investment in Bio-fuels originated because of a belief “peak oil” was creating ever increasing scarcity and high prices in the imminent future. When technology proved the concept of “peak oil” inaccurate, the justification switched to “climate change”. Unfortunately, large scale bio-fuel production has proved to have its own environmental problems.
The most promising of all bio-fuel feedstock is attempts to genetically modify a fast growing tree that produces suitably high calorie “oily” fruit. The tree would be sterile and grown on semi-desert arid waste land. Using desalinated water and supplied with nutrient by root watering, the tree would enjoy a productive life of more than 50 years and yield harvests every 4 months.
Anti-desertification, and other environmental benefits make such a project attractive, especially to impoverished over populated regions. The disincentive is these regions usually lack the long term political stability required to implement such projects. (and of course, the “tree ” doesn’t exist ! (although the bio-technology isn’t as difficult as bacteria, algae etc ).
Advanced Nuclear, Solar and advancing battery technology all have much greater potential to provide large scale solutions for economical, environmental energy production.