Different focus on reducing carbon emissions

I have great hope this topic will turn out to be positive. Thanks for the post.

 

what kind of "future to power our civilization?" are you thinking about?

 

Reducing usage of fossil fuels will definitely reduce CO2 emissions and promote Energy independence along with cleaner air and water.

The impact on American jobs is a big unknown. Granted, promoting (most) forms of alternative energy will create new jobs. But the big unknown is how many jobs will be lost in the process. No matter how you look at it, it will be painful for some/many. Then again, the horse and buggy suppliers didn't fare too well when the automobile came into its own either.

Most biofuels are either niche products or wind up using more energy to produce than we gain by switching from petroleum. Some even wind up producing more CO2 than if we had just used gasoline instead.

Solar, hydro-electric, wind, and nuclear are the viable alternative energy solutions; at least so far as the energy grid is concerned. The trucking/shipping industry still doesn't have any viable alternatives to diesel.

I know there are lots of anti-nuke folks out there, but there ARE ways to reduce waste, keep it clean and keep it away from terrorists.

 

Before planning to dismantle the diesel truck transport fleet, we ought to consider improving its aerodynamic efficiency on a large scale. There have been several demonstration projects in US and Europe that show substantial room for improvement there.

Energy efficiency of buildings (industrial business and residential) has large scope for improvement also - I recall studies suggesting more saving per dollar spent there than in the transportation industry.

In instances like those, it obviously costs money to make the things and get them into use. But if you make good widgits (energy efficiency or otherwise) an export market can readily follow.

I see the US investing to lead in several energy efficiency sectors now, but certainly not all.

Efficiency and renewables both boost national Economic output per unit of carbon emission. For several nations, this is considered the best measure of limiting atmospheric CO2 growth.

Biological carbon sequestration is more up my alley, but it is not the stated topic of this thread.

 

Trains leave trucks in the dust for ton/mile efficiency, something on an order of magnitude. A Semi might average 5-8 mpg with a net load of ~50,000 lbs. A single rail car will carry ~200,000 lbs. Clearly you need trucks, but we could use our rail network way more efficiently. (That said, we have made great strides in a generation.)

At the risk of bringing on the wrath, The single biggest/fastest way we can make serious changes to what we do is to begin to price our energy choices in ways that reflect their entire environmental costs. The simplest way to do so, is through a direct, simple per BTU (or some other metric) carbon tax. No manipulatable Cap & Trade system. An up front carbon tax. I can already hear the anti-tax crowd saying it would be nothing but a tax grab. The reality is that a properly designed, properly executed carbon tax can be revenue neutral. Tax carbon at the source, and use the revenue to subsidize lower income energy bills, alternative energy R&D, and installation etc. The increase in energy will spur people on to make greater use of RE, and if history is any guide the price of those energy installations will in all likely hood come down. The price of energy is going to go up in the future, due to diminished supply of fossil fuel coupled with worldwide demand increases. (recession not withstanding!)

We have had a carbon tax for the last 30 years, except that it has been unpredictable and the proceeds have gone to OPEC countries over these years. If we had taken the bull by the horns in ~1973 and had been willing to tax ourselves a few cents a gallon for gas for example, and raised that tax over time, the net result of which might well have been the same price we pay for fuel, but we would be much more efficient in how we use that fuel.

PS. Thanks Drees for trying to drive some positive into this forum!

 

Agree with a carbon tax. But what about taxing it at consumption and doing so with a tiered rate structure. In Colorado, water which is in short supply, is billed relatively cheap for the first 1,000 gallons used and progressively high for larger quanities. The idea being that water is a necessity and should be available at a reasonable price, but if you use more than what is necessary then you pay a penalty.

Easy to impliment with electric and natural gas use in that it is easily metered per building. Each household gets 500 kwh/month at a very reasonable rate and goes up with additional usage.

Could even be done with gas, in that every tax payer would get the card that would allow them to buy 400 gallons of gas per year that is not subject to a carbon tax. Use over that and you will pay.

This type of tier rate structure provides a base amount of affordable energy to everyone and penalty for using more. This will quickly increase the demand for more efficent use of energy.

 

I don't have a fixed opinion on how any carbon tax should be structured. The idea of a progressive, tier tax has an appeal. Of course as with everything, the devil is in the details.

What matters most is to encourage alternatives and discourage consumption in the most effective way. I would ask those from BC to opine as to how their first in N. American Carbon tax is working.

 

I still hold out hope for cellulosic butanol. I completely agree on the foolishness of converting food into fuel. But this would be whatever cellulose-based materials you could get, and other types of wastes from food production and such.

There was a nice thread here a couple of years back on butanol. It's claimed to be essentially a straight replacement for gasoline with little or no fuel system or engine modifications needed up to about 85% butanol/15% gasoline.

What got me thinking about this is that here in the well-watered 'burbs of DC, yard waste (grass, leaves, twigs but not timber) accounts for a large percentage of the waste stream. I just looked up the figures for Fairfax County, and calculated that they collect about 250 lbs of "yard waste" for every county resident per year. Call it an average of 1000 lbs per family of four.

So, in the well-watered East, naturally occurring cellulose is a nuisance in urban areas. If you don't pick up the leaves, it clogs the storm drains, and so on.

If you look at biomass to fuel schemes, one of the biggest problems is the sheer volume of biomass that you'd have to haul around to make an appreciable volume of fuel, let alone make a real dent in US gasoline use. Here, we kind of get a ton/family/year for "free", meaning, we already gather it up.

Seems like that's ripe for use in some way other than generating compost.

The other thing I like is that butanol R and D is that its biotech. If there's any area where we're making advances, and the US has a lead, it's there.

You never can tell how much you read about biofuels is baloney, but here are a few general links. I mean, you've got oil companies running pilot plants now. That's some serious money behind this.

Directory:Butanol - PESWiki

Did you know, for example, that the DOE has a genome institute? I sure didn't. But it's for developing the engineered organisms to produce stuff like this.

Here's the DOE page:

Alternative Fuels and Advanced Vehicles Data Center: Biobutanol

DOE actually refers you to green car congress for most recent developments:


Green Car Congress: Biobutanol

The final thing I like about it is that you can easily convert ethanol plants to butanol. Pretty much the same equipment and such. So if somebody can make this work at a profit, there's an installed manufacturing base ready to be used.

So, I'm not foolish about this. Looking at the numbers, I don't think you can get any biomass-based scheme that could fully or even mostly replace the gasoline we burn today. Just looked up the data at DOE: We burn about 140 billion gallons of gasoline per year, or about 1800 gallons per family of four, or about 6 tons of gasoline, per family of four, per year. So my half-ton of yard waste isn't going to make much of a dent in that.

Still, I'd rather see us go this route, to the extent possible, than start gasifying coal, which is what we're going to do if we can't get enough liquid fuels to run our cars.

Actually, now that I think on it, with the Hymotion-converted Prius, we're down around 150 gallons of gas per year with essentially unlimited driving (call it 12,000 miles/year at maybe 80/gallon average). And I don't feel deprived for it. And it wouldn't kill us to drive less. So long as there's a little bit of liquid fuel around, we'll do just fine. If we do get a real crunch in oil production, maybe it'll just be a question of how quickly US lifestyles can change, moreso than how quickly we can ramp up alternative fuel production.

 

I think that Bio-mass can serve a niche' contribution to help reduce carbon emissions but only a niche'. Denis Hayes, current president of the Bullit Foundation in Seattle and former undersecretary of energy (amongst other credentials) has cited the following. The earth in toto, grows ~20 Terrawatts of biomass every year. That is all the corn, all the grass, all the alga, all the animals, 20 TW.

At current course and speed, humans burn the equivalent of ~16 Tw per year. So it is pretty easy to see that trying to cover the energy nut with Bio fuels is, at best a niche' solution, along with others.

 

...that our burn rate is totally unsustainable. The solution is not more of anything - more power, more hybrids, more stuff - it's LESS.

Ah, but that's not good for business, is it? Goodness me, what was I thinking?

 

I get that. What I'm about here is what economists call diminishing marginal utility, or diminishing returns, or whatever.

No liquid fuels makes for a lot of hardship. Fifty gallons a year of liquid fuels makes my life a whole lot more liveable; 150 or so means little change in lifestyle; 1800 gallons is morbid obesity.

At 1800 (status quo) gallons per year, biofuel is niche. At 50, maybe not.

Butanol-producing bacteria that reproduce themselves, in a town-sized plant that handles our half-ton of yard waste per family, generating (say) 50 gallons of butanol per family -- that might be a reasonable part of a sustainable future.

 

Chogan,

You and I are on the same page. By burning less of everything net/net and by burning more efficiently works on two levels. It reduces emissions and conserves fossil fuel for as long as possible. (Hopefully allowing time for alternatives to come into their own in terms of economic viability).

I don't think anyone feels we can stop burning fossil overnight, but each gallon we don't burn is a gallon available later (and it's carbon emission and it's results are also delayed!)

 

Good discussion guys. A refreshing change from those lame threads which I avowed never to read/post in again. You know the ones....

 

A lot of collected urban yard waste gets composted. This is good in terms of 'fertilizer' (N,P,K, Ca etc.) but the cellulosic carbon becomes CO2 by bacteria and fungi. There is room for more innovation in that area, for sure.

Among other things, the DOE Genomics Institute is sequencing fungi that decompose lignin. They want to boost this process to convert wood (lignocellulose) to cellulose for the fermenting bacteria. For wood decomposition in forests (my angle) the goal is opposite - slow down the lignin breakers. The same transcription and gene regulation information is useful for both approaches, so I'm happy for DOE to spend 1 million per genome.

That price is plummenting, by the way.

 

It just seems silly that with the sun providing ~1300 watts/sq meter hitting the earth that we have to continue to think about burning stuff.

Right now Pv solar has a pretty good conversion average of ~10-15% typically, Solar water heat ~30%. I don't mean to be one tracked on all of this, but doesn't it make sense to use what is completely natural and happens virtually every day!

If for example we burn ~16 TWH of power every year world wide , how many sq meters would we have to cover with 20% average solar conversion devices to meet that demand? (My math is not strong enough to do that calc with so many zeros) The average suburban lot might be ~5-10,000 sq ft. or 500-1000 sq meters.

In addition, the question is, what should we be looking towards? Increasing efficiency? Increasing storage media and efficiency? Increasing delivery efficiency? (grid).

I don't mean to imply that we can do this overnight, but it seems intuitive to me that instead of spending resources (and especially time) on exotic bio fuel technology, we might be far better off working to make dramatic improvements in both solar efficiency, but even more importantly, solar production capacity, leading to lower costs. It seems that if we could put a man on the moon in under a decade, we could increase the Pv capacity in this country in a decade to a point where it makes a real difference.

What always drives me crazy, is that there has never been the sense of urgency to tackle energy/environmental issues until there is a disaster. The reality is that it is usually much cheaper to act proactively early. Even if you deny the issues of global warming, I don't think there is a rational argument to be made that energy is going to cheaper or more readily available as we go forward.

 

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Completely agree, safe unlimited nuclear energy, at a safe distance!

How about, reducing consumption?

Disagree here. I think we need to pursue many solutions because any one solution has limitations.

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We need to separate the discussion of a sane, sustainable energy policy, from the discussion of climate change. Solving our energy addition has many upsides other than climate change. Number one is the political and economic freedom that would result from energy independence.