I am scheduled to deliver two presentations at this year’s ASPO conference in Sacramento. You can see the agenda overview here. I will be speaking on the EIA, IEA and CERA on the 21st, and then I have a presentation on biofuels scheduled for the 23rd.
For the first talk, the draft of my slides is heavily slanted toward the EIA. I will discuss what they do well (in my opinion they are the best source of energy data around) and what they historically haven’t done so well (forecast). I will also devote some space to This Week in Petroleum.
For the biofuels talk, my slides are roughed out. Below is the outline. If you think I missed something important, let me know. I only have about 20 minutes, so I will be limited to 20-30 slides. I want to cover a lot of ground, which means I can’t delve too deeply.
Here is the outline of what I have prepared. Comments or suggestions are welcome:
Stacking up the contenders
•Ethanol
– Crop-based (corn, sugarcane)
– Cellulosic and Lignocellulosic (gasification)
•Diesel
– Biodiesel
– Green diesel (hydrocracked, Fischer-Tropsch)
•Miscellaneous
– LS9
– DME
– Butanol
Can we emulate Brazil?
•The truth about Brazil
•The truth about the U.S.
•Those pesky differences
Separating fact from fiction
•Anything Into Oil
•Algae to biodiesel
•Ethanol for $1/gal
How Politicians Screw Things Up
Solutions
How about biomethane?
Also it'd be nice to compare: biomass –> electricity –> PHEV vs
biomass –> ethanol
I think a simple slide that graphically shows BTU inputs and outputs for corn ethanol would help people understand what's really going on. Everyone gets tangled up in the different EROEI calculations. A simple graphic showing natgas, diesel, etc. BTUs flowing in and ethanol BTUs (plus DDGS) flowing out could help a lot.
On biofuels:
* Good to see discussion of gasification, which you’ve covered well here over time.
* Important are the impacts of the sources of oils for biodiesel, as in palm oil (highest oilseed yield per acre?) from cleared rainforest.
* Good to see algae — is it as productive as its proponents claim (which you’ve also discussed)?
On biofuels, I assume you will discuss the huge jatropha plantations underway in Indonesia, China, and under cruel and terrible conditions, Burma. The reports are of millions of hectares. India is doing a lot of talking about jatropha, but not much doing.
Also worth noting are the large increases in output per hectare at the much-maligned palm plantations.
http://www.biodieselmagazine.com/article.jsp?article_id=2662
the above article cites 19 tons of oil (roughly 133 barrels) per hectare, and the webpage below posts of increased yield through selective and perhaps genetic breeding.
http://www.palmplantations.com.au/oil-palm-trees.htm
There seems to be a rough consensus in the industry that potential yields have doubled in last 10 years due to better stock. As older trees die, and are replaced…also, reports from the Malay government each year note average rising yields per hectare, for the whole country.
It is a remarkable accomplishment: A doubling of oil output is possible without a single additional acre being ploughed under.
With new stock, one million hectares of palm trees will yield 133 million barrels, or about 6 days US consumption. So 60 million hectares would give us all we need, unless we wisely reduce our consumption.
That’s about 23,000 square miles, or roughly 10 percent of the land mass of Texas.
A nice thing about palm is not too much fuel is used in their cultivation. You do not plow under every year like corn, and the seeds are collected by hand.
Palm oil can be converted into diesel. At today’s prices and yields, it would actually make sense to plant palms along the southern rim of Texas. It looks like yields in excess of $4,500 an acre gross.
Hi Robert,
Maybe not related to your original post too much, but an interesting article on the effect of biofuels on Africa.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,576548,00.html
– forecasts from the EIA is a key point. policymakers and efforts are based on information, and bad quality information can lead to dangerous decisions. it’d be interesting to describe the EIA’s methodologies for their forecasts, and how they maintain and generate information in their databases.
– regarding EIA forecasts, compare their forecasts for coal with the presentation David Rutledge makes on coal (google his website). his point is that the most widely used coal estimates are based on very old USGS data.
– examples of how bad information on energy and the environment has let to bad policy decisions.
– bio-electricity should be brought up, and examples where it has and hasn’t worked should be brought up (europe, etc).
– patzek and pimentel – where do you think their conclusions are questionable, and which ones are with a high probability correct. i think the points they make about soil and agricultural practices are right on the mark, and they are often not included in estimates of biomass for fuels potentials.
– compare the theoretical potential of total solar energy flux that covers 100m^2, and describe the difference between solar thermal, PV, bioelectricity and biofuels (photosynthesis). just so at a high level people know how efficiently they are capturing energy from the theoretical maximum.
– forecasts from the EIA is a key point. policymakers and efforts are based on information, and bad quality information can lead to dangerous decisions. it’d be interesting to describe the EIA’s methodologies for their forecasts, and how they maintain and generate information in their databases.
– regarding EIA forecasts, compare their forecasts for coal with the presentation David Rutledge makes on coal (google his website). his point is that the most widely used coal estimates are based on very old USGS data.
– examples of how bad information on energy and the environment has led to bad policy decisions.
– bio-electricity should be brought up, and examples where it has and hasn’t worked should be brought up (europe, etc). I don’t think the US has as much exposure and focus on this than other countries – possibly because we have tried this earlier than many especially in California, and many have failed.
– patzek and pimentel – where do you think their conclusions are questionable, and which ones are with a high probability correct. i think the points they make about soil and agricultural practices are right on the mark, and they are often not included in estimates of biomass for fuels potentials.
– compare the theoretical potential of total solar energy flux that covers 100m^2, and describe the difference between solar thermal, PV, bioelectricity and biofuels (photosynthesis). just so at a high level people know how efficiently they are capturing energy from the theoretical maximum.
Robert, would you be able to post the slides you used?
Mike, historically the slides have been in the conference proceedings. You can see last year’s presentations here.
Cheers, Robert
Two suggestion to address pet peeves of mine: 1) energy security and 2) the uncertainties surrounding biomass ethanol technology. I’ll deal with #2 in a separate post.
For EIA, please please be sure to cover the topic of energy independence, or more specifically, how / what role biofuels (e.g., corn ethanol and soybean diesel) play in any actual ‘displacement’ of ‘foreign oil’.
RFA still hugely distorts the displacement of crude oil by ethanol, and it creeps into the claims made by some USDA and DoE and politicians when they discuss national energy legislation. If we want effective energy programs, we are not well served by relying on inaccurate assessments of the role of biofuels. For example: DoE webpage on ‘National Energy Security’
http://www1.eere.energy.gov/biomass/national_energy_security.html
“In 2006, U.S. production and use of nearly 5 billion gallons of ethanol reduced dependence on imported oil by 170 million barrels equivalent, valued at more than $11 billion.”
And here’s RFA on 2007 ethanol and crude oil imports “The production of nearly 6.5 billion gallons of ethanol means that the U.S.
needed to import 228.2 million fewer barrels of oil in 2007 to manufacture gasoline, or
roughly the equivalent of five percent of total U.S. crude oil imports.”
For an industry that lives and dies on the merits of coproduct contributions that is a stunningly ignorant analysis.
You may want to add DMF and Virent to the misc. section.
Maybe propane and hexane (and its derivatives) from fermented butyrate should be among the miscellaneous? Also, some while back the Economist had an article on one of the furfurans as a biofuel, dimethylfurfuran I think it was (but I’m not sure – a quick google didn’t find the article). Those are all more remote possibilities than the others, of course.
To me, it seems that the best approach would be to improve EROI on current approaches by using farm waste and/or easily grown and harvested “rubbish crops” in gasifiers to power farm and processing machinery (tractors, stills, whatever), with ash recycled via nitrogen fixing pondweed in settling ponds to make green manure.
For an emergency bridging technology available to eke out conventional fuel sources if a shock hit right now, use butanol made the inefficient fermentation way with byproducts to buy time for something better, stockpiling the byproducts and selling them off over time once the something better arrived. That’s what they did when they used it to get acetone for the First World War, only then the butanol was the main byproduct stockpiled and sold off after the war.
It appears that I was thinking of an Economist article on dimethylfuran, but I can’t find it. I did find this Economist article on biobutanol and others.
Robert,
It would be interesting to hear your ideas as to *why* do you think the EIA get their forecasts wrong. Political pressure? Methodology?
It’s a fairly basic question, but one that never ceases to perplex me. How is it that we see such a divergence between those forecasts and the Oil Drum megaprojects counts, e.g.?
*why* do you think the EIA get their forecasts wrong.
“Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future”.
— Niels Bohr
doggy-
Niels Bohr, whoever he is, stole that from Casey Stengel.
Re Biofuels: I think you also need to mention sources. You need to distinguish between:
1. Waste
2. Crops
a. Edible
b. Inedible
If you frame it that way, you already expose a big problem with corn ethanol – before you even say anything.
As we discussed before (and before that) there is plenty of waste available. Not enough to get us off foreign oil, but enough for a good start, and enough for us to learn much about the feasibility of biofuels. Once we have exhausted the available waste products (assuming biofuels still look good), we can start thinking about fuel crops. I’m partial to ocean based algae, but that’s just my opinion.
Methanol from coal?
Strictly speaking that’s not a biofuel — unless you consider the million-year old biomass that turned into coal. (Which I do.)
How Politicians Screw Things Up
1. The Big Picture
a. Hyper-partisan politics: Re-election is all I care about
b. How lobbyists tilt the playing field: We finance your re-election
c. How special interests tilt the playing field: We vote for your re-election
2. Biofuel myths that sell
a. Let Farmer Brown replace Sheik Omar
b. We can grow ALL our food AND energy
c. After 5,000 years ethanol is an immature industry
d. Blame Big Oil
Etc. Etc.
Benny, Casey Stengel may have said it but the quote is generally attributed to Danish physicist Niels Bohr or Danish writer Robert Storm Peterson. Although only a few years older, both men were famous long before reporters started following Casey Stengel around.