[Energy] On the future of energy

With all the talk lately about moving us away from Middle East oil and the dependence on fossil fuel energy, I though I might run down a list of technologies and see just how they may pan out as viable energy sources in the future. A lot of politicians have been giving lip-service to R&D for energy, oil alternatives, biodiesel, ethanol, and on and on, but few seem to grasp some of the difficulties.

Fisrt of all, evidence has continued to mount that we are at or near peak oil, a condition when the ability to extract oil from the ground plateaus globally, and we begin the downard slope of the bell curve of oil production. Since so much of our economy is dependent on oil, this is very, very bad. This includes not only petrol car ramifications, but also diesel industrial vehicle and trucking system fuels, plastics production, home heating oil (really just diesel), and a myriad of other uses intergral to industrial society.

There is also indications that we are pretty much reaching the limits of regional natural gas production. Natural gas, unlike oil, cannot be easily shipped overseas. The large natural gas pipeline infrastructre that we have exists to pump gas over connected continental land masses. In order to get natural gas to America from the Middle East, or the Caspian, or Russia, we have to turn it into liquid state, called LNG. LNG shipping requires specially designed ships, hugely expensive and quite dangerous regassing terminals at port. It has been pointed out that a terrorist bombing of an LNG regassification terminal could theoretically create an explosion on par with a small nuclear warhead detonation. While Canada has been providing us with only a fraction of our natural gas supplies, that represents over 50% of the annual production in Canada.

So what are the solutions? The first thing I should indiciate is that if there were any easy or simple solutions to these problems, I'd write a book, file a few patents, and make billions. We would likely be using some of them already. But we aren't.

The first thing that people should understand, especially the politicians who will be creating policy and subsidizing certain potential solutions, is that entropy is a very important principle. ENERGY RETURNED ON ENERGY INVESTED (EROEI) is one of the most important concepts to understand when figuring out if any of these energy lifeboats is going to float. Many of the energy solutions that have been proposed require much more energy to create than they actually produce.

I'll start with cars, since so much of our economy has been designed with the car in mind. The costs of running petroleum in internal combustion engines are likely to rise to a level that makes the technology unviable in the near future. The global demand will simply outstrip supplies, and only with huge price increases will demand level off to any extent, as people will simply be unable to afford transportation.

Hybrid cars are an attempt at simply increasing overall efficiency of the internal combustion engine. Right now, they are for the most part, expensive 'statement' cars that are still dependent on gasoline. The price premium on the Toyota Prius is not worth it in the long run, and a small diesel car is a better value and would get better mileage (and could easily be converted to run on biodiesel). The Honda Insight is a better choice in terms of ROI, but the technologies themselves don't really fix the fundamental problem, which is the continuing need for oil supplies, even at a lower rate. I should also point out as a driving-minded thinker, that these are some of the worst handling cars on the road, although that is likely to change over time.

A new take on hybrids has been what is referred to as the 'plug-in hybrid', which is largely an electric car with a small petrol engine to provide boosts in power. While plug-in hybrids can get better mileage than even a diesel, at least potentially, that then takes the large burden of oil dependence and moves it to the electrical grid, which at times has been overextended (esecially at around 4 pm on a 90 degree summer day). One needs to be certain that the costs of electricity and the energy sources of electricity (in this state, that would be largely from coal - yes a plugin hydrid is a car that largely runs on coal) are any better or cleaner than what we currently use. Just as importantly, the large scale switchover to a plug-in hybrid or electric car approach by the bulk of the population would put enormous pressure on electrical production. I'll talk about electrical production later on in this essay. I must also point out that battery technologies require great deal of energy and fossil fuel inputs to build, and are often remarkably toxic, so disposal becomes an issue. EROEI must be calculated carefully to make sure that this will work.

What about biodiesel or ethanol? This depends entirely on where it comes from, where the feedstock comes from, and how efficiently it can be produced. My local politicians would probably like to see our local corn farmers producing ethanol for cars. The problem is that every gallon of ethanol produced from corn is a net energy loser. On average, it takes 54,000 more BTUs of (fossil fuel) energy to produce a gallon of ethanol from corn than you get from the corn (pesticide, fertilizer, collection by farm marchinery, transport, refining). You would have been better off burning the oil and natural gas in your car than trying to make ethanol to burn. Other feedstocks for ethanol may be more efficient (beets, sugar cane). Brazil has been fairly successful in getting off oil with sugar cane production for ethanol. Still, there are some significant problems with biodiesel or ethanol production. Land size is a big one: to produce corn ethanol for every car in the US would require 97% of all the farmland in the US. Feeding the country is not going to be an afterthought, I'm afraid. Using weeds and crops that don't require big fossil fuel inputs (switch grass, etc.) are perhaps a better idea. Similar geometric projections make any kind of agriculturally produced fuel source difficult in country with so many people living in it with an industrial lifestyle. It would be easy to produce fuel for 20 million cars. It becomes vastly more difficult to produce fuels for 200 million cars. Biodiesel feedstocks with high efficiency (like algae) might require the energy to pave the equivelent of a dozen or more San Fransiscos. These are massive projects that we likely will not have the capital to afford.

What about synfuel? Yes, using the Fischer-Tropsch process, you can produce what is essentially diesel from coal. This doesn't get us off fossil fuel dependence, although the US has coal supplies that will last a hundred years or more. These processes are also quite expensive, and are not likely to replace any significant portion of our motoring fuel needs anytime soon.

How about hydrogen? Let me tell you right now, hydrogen is a sick joke. To create a hydrogren fuel cell car, you need to first create hydrogen. Where are you going to get the hydrogen from? The simplest way is to split water molecules using electricity. This itself requires huge amounts of energy. The cheapest way right now is to use natural gas as the hydrogen feedstock. This is not viable since we are running out of natural gas as well, and we still end up with dependence on fossil fuels. Unless we can determine a catalytic way to produce hydrogen at a much higher efficiency, it takes more energy to produce hydrogen than we will get out of the hydrogen. Again, EROEI, or net energy, needs to be our watchword. Lets say, though, that we can get some hydrogen. How will you store it? An automobile that runs on compressed hydrogen gas will need to have a physically huge tank pressurized to thousands of pounds per square inch to get any realistic travel distance. What do you think will happen to a person in a car who gets into an accident? Crash your car with a 5000 psi hydrogen gas tank into another car? The police will mop up what is left of you with a sponge. Hydrogen also leaks out of almost every container we put it in due to the small size of the atoms. The other major method is to cool the hydrogen down to a liquid state. This has its own myriad of problems and will be quite expensive and potentially dangerous. Then how do you produce electricity from the hydrogen. Well, right now you use a fuel cell. The cheapest fuel cell car that has been produced by a major manufacturer has a current cost of about $1,000,000 per car. Even if that price can come down by a factor of 10 (which would be a lot, and the car still costs $100k), the fact is that fuel cells require platinum as a catalyst. All the platinum ever mined in the history of humanity would provide enough platinum to create a fuel cell car to replace every car on earth...once. Even with recycling, platinum supplies make fuel cells for a mass motoring technology difficult if not impossible.

I'll set aside highly unlikely scenarios, like converting cars to run on propane or natural gas. The latter especially is unlikely due to a likely peak in natural gas production and in the far greater difficulties in transport.

Moving on to electrical generation, half of all electricty produced in the United States comes from coal. While our coal supplies might be equal to the oil supplies of Saudi Arabia in their heyday, coal is dirty, and it is a fossil fuel in any case. Cleaning up coal with technologies is a good stopgap approach, but coal is not a viable long term technology, especially given the threat of global climate change with carbon dioxide emissions. It is interesting to note also that coal plants produce more radiation than nuclear power plants do, as the burning of coal releases radioactive isotopes naturally found within the coal itself. In fact, if coal plants were regulated under the same rules that nuclear plants were, every coal plant in the United States would be shut down.

Obviously, if oil and natural gas are problematic by price for cars, they will be for electrical production. About 10% of Minnesota's energy comes from these sources. The overwhelming number of energy plants built in recent years have been natural gas, and with the industry beginning to realize that natural gas supplies are going to be tight, with nothing to fuel the plant there is no profit to be made on huge capital investments.

Nuclear fission is, I think, a viable option, if only as a stopgap. I know this is not what many environmental crusaders and anti-nuclear activists want to hear, but nuclear power is reliable, clean for the most part (the process of obtaining uranium is not so much), and safe when used properly. A lifetime of energy for a family of four would consist of uranium fuel that could fit into a beer can. Is nuclear fision great? No, it has many problems. One problem is waste disposal, which is a very real problem for very long term storage and also security in transport and storage. Still, all the nuclear waste ever produced on earth could be placed into an area the size of a high school gymnasium. Future technologies may make it possible to reprocess nuclear waste into a useful form as well. There are security issues with a 9/11 style attack on a plant, but good design for reinforced structure and containment make this better than many alternatives. There is the problem of fuel - uranium is not an infinite source, and the stress internationally on U235 reactors (non-breeder) makes it a fuel source that could vanish within a hundred years or so. Breeder reactors (U238) are much better for fuel supplies, and can be used to synthesize more fuel. The unfortunate side effect of this is that breeder reactors produce Plutonium, which is what you use to make nuclear weapons. In fact, some regard breeder reactors are nuclear weapon production facilities first and electrical generators second. Close watch and a strong IAEA would be neccesary, especially in regards to nations like Iran. A potentially untapped, but hugely difficult form of nuclear fission that could stand for a significant injection of R&D money is thorium reactors. Radioactive thorium is in huge supply and could provide us with significant energy, but the difficulties are significant.

Nuclear fusion is a technology that needs R&D money right now. The US should throw money at the ITER project, JET, and any significant project working on making nuclear fusion a net-energy gain technology. Nuclear fusion would be safe, reliable, and would likely be able to produce energy indefinitely in large amounts. I've even heard rumors about mining the moon for Helium³ supplies, since HE³
would be a much better fuel for fusion.

Methane clathrates, or natural gas in crystalized forms in deep, cold ocean depths, represent a potentially significant form of fossil fuel energy that has been untapped. These deposits represent huge amounts of natural gas supplies that could be used. The great, and significant danger of trying to mine methane clathrates is that every attept to disturb their resting places has offgassed orders of magnitude more gas than one would be able to capture, and since methane is a far more effective greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide is, any attempts to mine these sources commercially could accelerate global warming out of control in very short order. Thus, for now, I would say these already problematic sources are simply too dangerous to attempt to use.

Hydroelectric energy has been largely tapped. We've dammed just about every river that can be dammed, and the effects on the ecosystem have been significant. In the end, hydroelectric is just not a growth form of energy. A form of hydroelectric, tidal power, may be. The power of the ocean tides is significant (a form of energy that comes from the moon instead of the sun), and tapping them could help provide energy to coastal regions, but of course, this too may have significant effects on the ecosystem and the life in tidal bays.

Wind power is a great potential source for growth, is in abundance, is clean, quiet, and a useful way of harnessing the sun's power. We should build wind farms anywhere they are viable. Don't like what they'll do to your view? Suck it up. That includes all the rich Mass. citizens with beach property who don't want offshore wind turnbines.

Solar electricty and solar heat are huge potential resources, and R&D should be thrown at them, but solar is also inconstant, and any project that would make solar a significant source of electricty would be one of the most awesome and expensive engineering projects in human history. All the solar panels ever built in history provide only a fraction of the energy we consume. The materials required, energy required for investment, and sheer land space required would be beyond any previous project. Energy storage (batteries, capacitors) in a large solar production environment would themselves require quite a lot of energy. Right now, renewable energy sources are only 2% of Minnesota's electricity. Increasing that to even 20% will cost enormous sums.

There are a few other off-the-wall ideas, but these represent the bulk of ideas in energy thinking right now, and each has difficulties. When one realizes that a single gallon of gasoline contains the equivelent of 500 hours of hard labor of a human being worth of energy (think about this: one gallon of gas moves my 3700 pound car 22 miles at 60 miles per hour, and that is at less than 100% efficiency), you realize how this amazing resource, now in decline, cannot easily be replaced. Our ingenuity in figuring out how to wring such energy out has been clever, but we have significant challenges ahead of us.

So what should we do?

1) Conserve energy as much as possible. The longer we have to work on this problem, the better likliood we will come up with a good and working solution.

2) Don't cut the gas tax. Gas should be expensive, lest we disincetivize the needed development of renewable energy technologies. I know it is eating into your budget, but we have long-term problems here, and giving you a fuel refund isn't going to help solve them.

3) Stop trying to secure the last vestiges of cheap, reliable oil with military force. Your lifestyle is over. Get used to it. That money is better spent fixing and developing a more dense infrastructure and creating transit technologies that will let us keep some vestige of what we have. The faster we admit that things have changed, the better off we'll be. Right now we're in the denial stage (blame the oil companies), we need to get past even bargaining and into acceptance.

4) Throw money at nuclear fusion research and R&D for renewables. Pay very close attention to net energy from start to finish. If it doesn't work with EROEI, then it won't work.

5) Move into a city or town that is more sustainable. Don't live in the burbs. Suburbs have no future. Build or live in a house that is energy efficient, with lots of natural light. Avoid high celings and single pane windows. Make sure the roof can handle passive soalr orientation for panels. Live in a condo if you can. Live near mass transit, and be able to walk or bike to work, to the grocery store, to the places you go every day. Try to live in a place where heating and air conditioning needs are limited. Insultate your house. Use compact florescent, metal halide, and LED lighting.

6) Support candidates for political office that get this kind of stuff. Throw out demagogues who think everything is fine, or that everything will just take care of itself if we let the free market dictate the rules.

7) Don't get behind any energy source if it is going to spew lots of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. We shouldn't kill off the ecosystem just to run the lights at the mall.

8) Get used to having less. Get used to travelling less, and staying where you are.

9) Most of all, get talking on these kinds of issues with people you know. Our myopia up to this point has been fine when we had cheap energy to burn, but now things are different, and we need to get serious about these problems, and fast, because our lives are going to depend on the choices we make.