Renewable Energy Needs To Go with its Strengths
Those of us with a practical concern for the transition from fossil fuels wish that R&D in energy and transportation would be focused on the obvious winners, or at least those that are possible, and away from areas that have no chance of long-term success.
In the latter category I put things like biofuels. Chevron’s having given up on this a few years back was all the data anyone needed to come to this conclusion. Not that we should think a great deal of Chevron from a moral perspective, but we can assume they had assigned some of the greatest minds in the liquid fuels business to try to tackle this problem.
The central issue is one of biophysics, i.e., that life on Earth evolved to absorb sufficient energy to live, grow and reproduce, but not a superabundance to power our cars and trucks.
Making matters worse for the biofuels people is the fact that the competition isn’t standing still. Electric vehicles are offering better range at less cost with each passing month.
Now, unfair criticisms of this piece, not that this is a common occurrence here (kidding) would include:
Why does Craig Shields think he’s God’s gift to renewable energy, and has the authority to pick winners and losers? I don’t, of course. This is a function of levelized cost of energy as it is achievable in the real world, where solar and wind have outpaced everything else. In addition, there are niche applications of hydrokinetics, biomass, and geothermal.
Similarly, from what source does Craig derive the power to tell people what to work on? I don’t have that power; what I have is an opinion, in particular, that it would be great to take all that intellectual horsepower and aim it at the clear winners, and simply abandon biofuels and the scads of other alt-fuels: hydrogen and the boutique hydrocarbons. There are some really smart people out here in California whose life’s work is popularizing butanol, if you can believe that.
I used to have such high hopes for butanol.
🙁
I would anxiously read every new peer reviewed journal article, looking into details of the newest enzymes and their stability and activity rates…
But it wasn’t cost effective, and couldn’t be made so. If it couldn’t compete in the late 00’s, when oil was $100/bbl, it’s not going to compete now, post fracking boom.
Still, I have trouble being upset with additional R&D on the subject..
I really don’t have much trouble with any R&D on any platform that isn’t complete nonsense (like hydrogen fuel-cell sourced transportation, or algal fuels, or space-based solar, or similar absurdities).
Butanol managed to get estimated levelized costs (estimated upon scale-up) down to ~$5-8/gallon. That’s close. It’s not like photosynthetic algae fuels, where they never even dropped below $5000/gallon (or ~$400/gallon in the case of anaerobic digestion of glucose)..
R&D is cheap… it cost very little to have a few labs continuing to try to find a true breakthrough, and the researchers aren’t easily able to switch gears and serve a function for development on an entirely different platform. It might be possible for a person working on PV solar to shift to wind, or a person working on geothermal to switch to either solar thermal or to advanced petroleum research. But you can’t put biofuel researchers into an advanced battery group without a great deal of retraining..
I don’t mind the R&D. I mind the subsidies. If a product doesn’t work in the market without absurd subsidies, then keep it in the R&D phase and keep hoping for a further breakthrough. But don’t offer absurdly large subsidies. That sums up my opinion on bio-energy at large. Our energy needs are far too great for biofuels to supply all of them, but the research can and should continue (with the exception of the ridiculous, like algae) in the hopes that some breakthroughs may occur that can help fill in a small slice of the pie.
It would be nice if, in 30 years, most of what we currently have as ethanol fermenters could be replaced with butanol fermenters… That doesn’t change the need for synthetic fuels from recycled carbon, nor does it change (by that point) the net benefit from increased electric transport… but it would be nice if we could get to butanol as well, and we’re currently only spending a few tens of millions per year worldwide.
The research is cheap, and the chasm between current best tech and potential viability isn’t unimaginably vast.
Craig,
You are quite correct. Turning surplus crops into transport fuel is not economically feasible and poor use of agricultural land.
Politically, it becomes very popular with agricultural enterprises and farmers cultivating corn, sugar cane, beet or palm oil. Environmentally, bio-fuels are a disaster.US ethanol production should be phased out immediately
The only real rivals to Gasoline/diesel for transport use are EV with on board ESD ar Fuel cell EV’s with external ESD. At the moment neither technology is proving to have sufficient momentum to produce a significant transition.
“Electric vehicles are offering better range at less cost with each passing month”. Not really, there are more models on the market, but “range for the dollar’ hasn’t improved greatly. ESD in the form of battery technology has experienced only marginal improvement since the introduction of Lithium-ion technology.