Hope in the energy crisis
I was listening to NPR's environmental podcast, and they have a series of stories about alternative energy sources for the future. Some are rather depressing, like the notion of mountaintop removal to get at oil shale, using new methods to process it into oil at $30 a barrel. In one sense, these ideas alleviate my concerns about "Peak Oil" being a huge problem anytime soon, or even in my lifetime (there's far more oil shale in the US than there is oil in the middle east). But in another sense, if we keep on burning oil long after the liquid oil is depleted, that's going to make global warming that much worse.
So, here's the hopeful part. A canadian firm has demonstrated the viability of turning grass into ethanol using a process that is ten times more efficient than our corn to ethanol production. E85 is a fuel made of 85 percent ethanol, 15 percent traditional gasoline, and it can be burned by a growing number of vehicles. In fact, you can even retrofit many existing vehicles to use it. The biggest problem has been efficiency in getting it, with a big debate over whether you actually spend more energy than you get out of corn based ethanol production, especially if you consider having to mitigate all the adverse environmental impacts of corn farming. The new canadian method uses a kind of fungus originally discovered eating away fabric in Vietnam. It has the ability to break down strong bonds in grass and other plant fibers to produce ethanol. If it really is ten times more efficient than corn ethanol production, it sounds to me like a viable replacement for oil, and the global warming impacts are zero because the carbon that is released by burning the ethanol is the same carbon that was absorbed from the atmosphere to create the plant that yielded the ethanol.
Ironically, the oil shale and grass ethanol technologies were both pioneered in the 70s during another oil price spike, and have been simmering on the back burner all this time waiting for oil prices to rise enough to make them viable alternatives. Even wind technology is picking up momentum. I wonder what else might be out there waiting in the wings, unnoticed. "You'll have innovators and entrepreneurs and people trying ideas that may seem sensible today or may seem way out. But out of that whole soup will emerge some new ways of doing things," - Daniel Yergin
So, here's the hopeful part. A canadian firm has demonstrated the viability of turning grass into ethanol using a process that is ten times more efficient than our corn to ethanol production. E85 is a fuel made of 85 percent ethanol, 15 percent traditional gasoline, and it can be burned by a growing number of vehicles. In fact, you can even retrofit many existing vehicles to use it. The biggest problem has been efficiency in getting it, with a big debate over whether you actually spend more energy than you get out of corn based ethanol production, especially if you consider having to mitigate all the adverse environmental impacts of corn farming. The new canadian method uses a kind of fungus originally discovered eating away fabric in Vietnam. It has the ability to break down strong bonds in grass and other plant fibers to produce ethanol. If it really is ten times more efficient than corn ethanol production, it sounds to me like a viable replacement for oil, and the global warming impacts are zero because the carbon that is released by burning the ethanol is the same carbon that was absorbed from the atmosphere to create the plant that yielded the ethanol.
Ironically, the oil shale and grass ethanol technologies were both pioneered in the 70s during another oil price spike, and have been simmering on the back burner all this time waiting for oil prices to rise enough to make them viable alternatives. Even wind technology is picking up momentum. I wonder what else might be out there waiting in the wings, unnoticed. "You'll have innovators and entrepreneurs and people trying ideas that may seem sensible today or may seem way out. But out of that whole soup will emerge some new ways of doing things," - Daniel Yergin