Ways to Play Cellulosic Ethanol and Advanced Biofuels 26 comments
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There's much excitement about second generation biofuels made from cellulosic feedstocks and algae, be they cellulosic ethanol, biodiesel, biocrude, or electricity from biomass. There will be winners, but they may not be the technology companies.
At the 2009 Advanced Biofuels Workshop, there were two major themes: developing new feedstocks, especially algae, and the development of new pathways to take biomass into products such as biocrude, which can be used in exiting oil refineries.
Big Market, Many Competitors
The current federal Renewable Fuel Standard requires the use of 36 million gallons of biofuels, including at least 21 billion gallons of advanced biofuels by 2022. Advanced biofuels are defined as fuels other than corn-based ethanol and with greenhouse gas [GHG] emissions half that of the fuel they replace. This creates a gigantic market, so large that some industry observers doubt if it can be met.
Many of these fuels will not be ethanol, a fuel which poses problems with the current fuel transport and distribution infrastructure. Even for cellulosic ethanol, there are several different processes that different companies are pursuing: Acid hydrolysis, Thermochemical conversion, Biochemical conversion, and Consolidated Bioprocessing, and combinations of these three used in various combinations by various companies.
Potential products not only include fuels such as ethanol, butanol and higher-carbon alcohols, but biocrude which can be fed into existing refineries. Other potential products include plastics, and many other products currently produced by the petroleum based energy industry.
The bewildering array of potential pathways and products make for a very challenging investment landscape. An investor in any company would need a lot of confidence that the company they are investing in will be able to take their chosen feedstocks to a potential salable product at lower cost than all the competitors out there. Unsurprisingly, nearly every company feels it has the best process.
Lessons From the First Generation
With so many variables, I find it's often better to take a step back to see what impact the development of the advanced biofuels market will have on the larger economy. Will there be impacts on the broader economy which will be independent of the eventual mix of products and processes in the advanced biofuels market?
We can learn from the experience of first generation biofuels.
Below is a chart from William Thurmond, President of Emerging Markets Online and author of Algae 2020: Biofuels Commercialization Outlook, and Biodiesel 2020: A Global Market Survey:
It shows how biodiesel feedstocks (Palm oil, rapeseed oil, and soybean oil) are increasingly following diesel prices. There is a massive overcapacity for biodiesel production in the EU, as shown in the following graph, also from Thurmond:
With this excess capacity, if biodiesel feedstock prices were to fall relative to diesel prices, biodiesel producers would purchase feedstock either until they fill their excess capacity, or until feedstock prices rise again to a point where it is no longer profitable to run additional biodiesel capacity. Put another way, biodiesel producers cannot be more than marginally profitable (and may be unprofitable) so long as there is significant excess capacity. Excess capacity can only be filled if additional feedstock can be found, or plants permanently shut down.
What does this mean for advanced biofuels? As advanced biofuel technologies advance, feedstocks prices are likely to rise.
Why Advanced Biofuels are Different
Unlike with biodiesel and starch based ethanol, many second generation feedstocks are not generally internationally traded; many are actually waste streams from other processes, such as yellow and brown grease (the restaurant industry), corn stover, forest trimmings (the lumber industry,) and even municipal waste. The more that these feedstocks are internationally traded and easy to transport (such as yellow and brown grease), the more likely they are to follow the patterns seen in the feedstocks for first generation biofuels. According to Thurmond, this has already happened with yellow grease, and the rise in price was a surprise to most biodiesel industry participants.
Many emerging biofuels companies have learned this lesson. ZeaChem's strategy specifically includes setting up a long term contract to purchase feedstock from dedicated energy plantations because "the availability of sustainable, cost effective raw materials is essential for an economically viable cellulosic biofuel facility," according to Andy Vietor, ZeaChem's CFO, who spoke at the workshop.
BioFuelBox Corporation is tackling the same problem from a different direction: by developing a biorefinery that they expect can produce biodiesel from a zero-cost waste stream (trap grease), but I'm not sure that they have completely absorbed the lesson. Even trap grease will acquire some value if they can consistently make fuel from it. I think they could improve their business model by selling their technology as a turnkey solution to the waste stream owner.
Investments and the "Everything vs. Fuel" debate
Investors who expect advanced biofuels to be successful should pay close attention to feedstocks. Just as supply constraints for batteries will shape the electric and hybrid electric auto market, limited supplies of biomass will shape the advance biofuels industry.
If an advanced biofuel company expects to make biofuel from an easily shippable commodity, such as wood chips, they'd be advised to stay away, unless that company also plans to contract for their supply of feedstock well ahead of time, and such agreements will probably constrain a company's ability to react to changing conditions. Lack of flexibility can be fatal to start-up companies.
Companies which produce easily transportable feedstocks being considered by advanced biofuel companies stand to benefit from new markets for their products. These include forestry companies (wood chips), waste management companies, and most owners of arable or marginal land. Wood chips are likely to see price escalation even without the advent of advanced biofuels based on them. Wood chips and pellets can be cofired in many existing coal power plants with only relatively inexpensive modifications, a process which offsets large amounts of carbon emissions at very low cost. Biomass cofiring was the cheapest renewable energy opportunity identified in California's RETI study last year. For an apples-to-apples comparison, the greater efficiency of electric motors means that electricity produced from biomass can propel an electric vehicle 81% farther than an otherwise comparable ethanol-fueled vehicle running on cellulosic ethanol produced from the same amount of biomass.
Furthermore, the existing biofuel industry may also find better uses for cellulosic feedstocks than turning them into biofuels. I attended a session at the 2009 Fuel Ethanol Workshop the following day where gasification of cellulosic waste streams such as corn cobs or stover was presented as an economical way to reduce the carbon footprint of corn ethanol by displacing natural gas used in the production process.
The flip side of the feedstock equation is that industries which compete for feedstock with the biofuels industry are likely to be hurt by rising prices. Advanced Biofuels may resolve the "Food vs. Fuel" debate, but they will be doing so by, at least in part, replacing it with a new "Everything vs. Fuel" debate. For instance, the paper industry (especially those companies which do not own forestry assets) will likely be hurt by rising pulp prices, like Mexicans who found they could not buy tortillas. Recycled paper pulp is an excellent cellulosic feedstock as well. On the other hand, businesses which produce or collect paper waste may find more robust markets for their products.
This line of reasoning might also give you pause if you're considering warming your home with a wood pellet stove. The advent of biofuels from wood chips will mean that the price of your wood pellets will start to track the price of petroleum, just like the price of vegetable oils are already doing. From an economic perspective, heating with wood pellets may become not much different than using heating oil. We saw the start of this trend last year with wood pellet factories starting to price dairy farmers out of the market for sawdust in the Pacific Northwest.
Algae to the Rescue?
Algae is the only feedstock that has the potential to be productive enough to supply most of our current liquid fuel demand, but it is still unproven. Most current algae to biofuel production methods cost an order of magnitude more than the fossil fuels they hope to displace. This is why most algae biofuel companies are currently targeting higher-value synthetic bioproducts, such as animal feed additives. But Will Thurmond believes that some algae companies may be cost competitive with fossil fuels as early as 2012, but only in his most optimistic scenario; the process of bringing down costs could take much longer.
There are now three publicly traded Algae companies. I've previously written skeptically about PetroSun (PSUD.PK,) and Thurmond told me, "Petrosun appears to [be] doing well in the news, but if you examine their financial statements, it's a different story." More recently OriginOil (OOIL.OB) and PetroAlgae, (PALG.OB) have also gone public. PetroAlgae is the industry high flyer, and is doing some interesting work growing duckweed, at least according to a hallway conversation. Unfortunately, the stock is so thinly traded that it would be difficult for even a small investor to get in without significant price impact. OriginOil shows better volumes, but they, too, are early in their technological development.
Algae has great promise, but the only investments currently available to the retail investor are very early stage. Even if we were to assume that the algae industry will quickly meet its potential, these three companies only amount to a tenth of the current players, and the rigors of being a public company are not the best environment in which to develop an emerging technology. Algae could well be a monumental success story, but that does not mean that any of these three companies will participate in that success.
DISCLOSURE: None.
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This article has 26 comments:
Human beings can eat Algae, breathe in oxygen and drink water and excrete human waste and methane. This is a Space cycle.
I will buy the Algae copanies.
algae when manufactured in space will require additional processing into products palatable to you & me & spacepeople.
algae-to-food will work best in an artificial-gravity situation (rotating space station). i assume the planners have already thought about this.
cellulosic ethanol -
we knew in 1974 that there were micro-organisms in the vietnam jungle that were consuming the soldiers' web belts and letting their pants fall down. at one time it was proposed to isolate these little rascals & develop a grass-to-ethanol industry. it appears this project never got very far.
> jack
Why it does not get more play is a mystery.
Obviously, if it is then OOIL is sitting on a goldmine. It is just so hard to separate fact from fiction with these small companies.
A fairly good article until the algae part. Algae for many reasons will never be a fuel.
Gasifying biomass into syn gas, H2-CO, and by the F-T process turn it into gasoline or clean diesel and electricity is by far the best way to make biofuels from crop, forest, yard waste or growing energy crops like hemp or other grasses.
Any fermentation process leaves much waste and little product.
Since all these require local feedstock sources from within 10 miles by far the best market play would be companies that sell F-T units and the catalysts they need.
As for the battery comment there are many viable EV batteries. We just need to build EV's and the batteries will be there. The current favorite is Lithium which everyone thinks is in limited supply but many sources underground many of which are already tapped in the form of oil, gas wells as moist of them were trapped by salt domes and a good number of them will be found once checked to contain Lithium.
But even without lithium other batteries like Sodium, zinc-air, alum-air have no constrictions on materials and only need orders to ramp up. Even lead can be done to make 100 mile range low cost EV's without a problem. There are many others but they use things like nickel, ect that are too expensive or rare.
And it's EV's that will cap fuel prices once they have a good market share so don't go real long on oil, biofuels, ect as in 10 yrs EV's will keep their price down as will renewable electricity from wind, solar, river/tidal.
Fischer-Tropsch process has been around for over 80 years, and is well tried and well proven. Germany used F-T during WW2 to power everything from submarines to panzer tanks to V1 and V2 rockets, even the Me-262 Swallow---the world's first operational jet fighter. South Africa has been producing jet fuel and diesel fuel from coal using F-T since 1980---and F-T is easier to use with biomass than coal for a couple of reasons, 1) biomass is already a hydrocarbon 2) biomass does not contain sulphur compounds that destroy the catalyst conversion beds like coal does.
The part about ethanol in pipelines is a reference to a trade journal article by a pipeline association whose main business is shipping petroleum products. The fact that ethanol is hydroscopic is only a problem to them because petroleum is not. That means that water which gets into the system from petroleum is trapped in the system and a contaminant. Ethanol can burn down to 56.7% water mixture. Alcohols are what is used to remove water from petroleum storage and and pumping systems. Ethanol is seldon pumped by pipeline however. Since it can be mixed at the point of sale and is generally produced close to the point of usage, it does not require the long range transport that petroleum does. It just makes more sense to buy and store the ethanol seperately, and use a mixer pump to blend the ethanol/petroleum when it is dispensed. If in the future, ethanol demand becomes high enough to warrent pipeline shipping---it is no harder to ship ethanol by pipeline than it is petroleum.
Uh, no. When you are making biofuels, you are working with nature. Biofuel is a food. The same as we eat---we run on biofuels. With farming, food is renewable, petroleum is not---there is no way to "make" petroleum, all we do when we "produce" petroleum is to use up a finite(and unknown amount) faster.
We can make biofuels out of any plant source---to be sustainable, all we need to do is select plants sources to use that are easily adaptable to large scale use and have rapid growth rates, like switch grass, wood or algae for instance. We already have the technology to produce the biofuels. Nature will take care of the recycling when we burn them thanks to photosynthesis and the carbon/energy exchange cycle. If we use wood from forests, all we need to do is insure that we plant a tree for every tree we cut down, we will always have forests---if we plant two trees for every tree we cut down, we'll have more forests than we had when we started. Driving an 18 wheel diesel tractor-trailer rig down the highway using biofuel is no different biologically than pulling a load with an ox cart----just faster and you can pull a heavier load, the effect on the environment is the same. Driving your car with biofuels is the same in the natural energy cycle of nature as riding a horse---you are using solar energy, stored chemically in plants, then recycled back into plants when it is used. And it has been happening over and over for about 4.5 billion years.
------" The only natural biofuel is methane."--------
No, wood is a biofuel, or any other biomass plant material.
Ethanol or any other alcohol is a biofuel. Internal combustion engines were originally designed to run on alcohol and plant oils. Gasoline had not been invented yet---there is no need for gasoline if there are no engines to use it. The first engine Rudolf Diesel designed and built in 1893 ran on peanut oil. Diesel engines still can run on biodiesel fuels with no modifications.
Biomethane(for instance, captured in anaerobic digestion of sewage) is exactly the same chemically as the methane in natural gas---it can be mixed in NG in any proportion with no loss of performance. Or, it can be used in place of NG altogether.
-------"We just need to quit wasting the resources we have, but that is too simple and there is no money in it."----------
It seems to me that buying petroleum and transfering wealth overseas to often politically hostile sellers for a resource that we just burn is a waste of resources. Using things we often just discard or burn now(like wood logging waste) makes a whole lot more sense to me----and it seems to me what makes sense is to turn waste into resource. There is money in that. That is how we came to be using gasoline in our vehicles instead of alcohol. Now, the situation that built Big Oil is reversed.
William Taylor: Jatropha is no panacea... it's more productive than many crops, but still only produces about 250 gal/acre, and uses much more water than expected. Algae is the only crop I know of with the potential for 1000's of gallons per acre, the level we'd need to substaintially replace current oil use.
We will need a few days to digest and comment back to you all.
Thank you again.
vicdezen.ca
vicdezen.net
Which is why I said.......
------" Now, the situation that built Big Oil is reversed."-------
--------"Fred When we use food for fuel (this is what I meant by from scratch), we are not working with nature, you are taking away."---------
How much dead tree limbs and pond scum do you eat a day?
Even when we produce ethanol from corn---the end product is DDG,(dried distiller's grain)---a high protein animal feed supplement. Which is what the corn was raised for in the first place. Field corn has a protein content of 2-4%----DDG has a protein content of 20-30%. DDG is a low cost replacement for soy mash in animal feed because you get over 3 times the yield per acre that you get with soy beans. The ethanol is just an added bonus---you have to remove the ethanol anyway because if you don't, you will herds of drunk cattle or pigs on your hands.
Right now, Range Fuels is finishing construction of a plant in Soperton GA, with a final capacity of 100 million gal/yr ethanol and methanol to be made from logging and millwork waste(wood) using Fischer-Tropsch process.
www.rangefuels.com/
PetroSun already has a facility up and running in Rio Hondo TX to produce 4.4 million gal/yr of biodiesel from algae grow in open ponds in what used to be a shrimp farm. The remaining biomass after the oil is extracted can be used as animal or fish feed. Or it can be made into ethanol.
www.petrosuninc.com/al...
The USDA Forestry service estimates that cull wood from managed timber lots(the saplings are planted close together then thinned later to reduce competition for light, water and nutrients---so that trees will grow tall, straight and faster) provide about 2,000 to 3,000 tons of pulpable wood per acre depending on species and climate. That means between 140,000 and 300,000 gallons of ethanol per acre at current yield rates for ethaol using the Fischer-Tropsch or the Scholler process. And that does not count lumber, or any other products we use the forest to produce. Right now, cull wood from managed lots is simply stacked up and burned to reduce losses to fire and insect infestation. There are hundreds of thousands of acres of managed forest----and millions of acres of unmanaged land that we can make into forest by making them into managed forest land. We can farm trees just the same as we farm corn, soy beans, sugar cane or any other crop. And you improve the land, and have recreational areas with all sorts of benefits while the crop(forest) is growing.
Conceptually its a brilliant solution, but we need the costs to come down, difficult for a mature technology.
Right now, Range Fuels is finishing construction of a plant in Soperton GA, with a final capacity of 100 million gal/yr ethanol and methanol to be made from logging and millwork waste(wood) using Fischer-Tropsch process.
www.rangefuels.com/
The USDA Forestry service estimates that cull wood from managed timber lots(the saplings are planted close together then thinned later to reduce competition for light, water and nutrients---so that trees will grow tall, straight and faster) provide about 2,000 to 3,000 tons of pulpable wood per acre depending on species and climate.
That means between 140,000 and 300,000 gallons of ethanol per acre at current yield rates for ethaol using the Fischer-Tropsch or the Scholler process. And that does not count lumber, or any other products we use the forest to produce. Right now, cull wood from managed lots is simply stacked up and burned to reduce losses to fire and insect infestation. There are hundreds of thousands of acres of managed forest----and millions of acres of unmanaged land that we can make into forest by making them into managed forest land. We can farm trees just the same as we farm corn, soy beans, sugar cane or any other crop. And you improve the land, and have recreational areas with all sorts of benefits while the crop(forest) is growing.
Ironically, ExxonMobil is the greenest company in the U.S. based on actual results. They will soon produce 5 gigawatts of power (now 4.5) per year from waste heat. They have reduced GHGs every year, while increasing fuel output at ever decreasing cost. They soon will produce electric cars. They have produced many technical improvements to reduce fuel usage. What do we drivers do in return? We waste more and more each year.
Finding new fuels to supply our insatiable appitite to waste fuel is like applying for a new credit card because we maxed out the ones we already have. We have many companies willing to fill the people's supposed need in order to make money. Our children will have to pay the penalties for these maxed out "credit cards."
Conservation is the only answer.
They are not producing power---they are recycling heat from another source. Conservation is good---but it does not produce new power.
------"They have reduced GHGs every year,"--------
By pumping billions of barrels of oil out of the ground to burn, creating greenhouse emissions? I don't think so.
--------" , while increasing fuel output at ever decreasing cost"--------
Only for themselves, not for consumers, taxpayers, or the environment. Exxon has been posting the highest profits ever recorded---at the same time their army of lawyers managed to get the court judgement of damages reduced to a mere pittance of the actual damage from the wreck of the Valdez and fouling of over 1,000 miles of prime fishery and coastal habitat, and consumers were paying the highest prices ever at the pumps.
-----"They soon will produce electric cars."-------
We've had electric cars for over 170 years. The first was built in 1838. And they still suffer from the same problem that the very first one did, limited range.
------" They have produced many technical improvements to reduce fuel usage."-------------
Like what?
------"What do we drivers do in return?"---------
Buy their product so that they can stay in business and keep posting high profits?
------"We waste more and more each year."-------
Ungrateful consumers! It's awful they way they treat that green and charitable Exxon Mobil.
------"We have many companies willing to fill the people's supposed need in order to make money."----------
Not if Exxon Mobil can do anything about it, and they have, many, many times.
-------"Conservation is the only answer."--------
Conservation is only a short term bandaid. However, it you want to take it far enough----we can go back to horses, and wood to power steam locomotives and paddlewheelers. Hitching up 4 in hand horse teams does not work very well with airplanes.
I can think of a lot of adjectives to describe Exxon Mobil---but green and charitable are not on the list.
Conceptually its a brilliant solution, but we need the costs to come down, difficult for a mature technology."----------
OR, the cost of petroleum to come up due to diminishing reserves that become increasing difficult and expensive to tap into, such as tar sands in Canada, or oil shales in the Bakken formation, or drilling in ever deeper offshore waters. That is difficult to do for a mature technology like petroleum. We've been drilling for oil for 150 years.
Just by their shear size, ExxonMobil has given more to charitable entities, such as the United Way, than the majority of companies combined and helped more people than the U.S. government. ExxonMobil, just like every other corporation, is in business to make money. Being green and charitable is good business. Spending billions of dollars per year for education and potable water and disease-control, etc around the world is good business sense. XOM is not good nor evil. But, if XOM disappeared overnight, the U.S. would be in a world of s***. XOM pays more in taxes than they make in the U.S. This is while the majority of the money spent in the U.S. goes out of the country. I'm not defending XOM, it's just a corporation. But, we the people blame everyone and everything else for our own stupidity. There wouldn't be an XOM if we didn't send them a large percentage of our money. Then again, just think if XOM had the same markup as any other profitable product. Comparing gasoline to Oreo cookies, gasoline would be $20/gallon. XOM sells $140 billion worth of petroleum products to make $10 billion. If XOM hadn't spent the last 20 years reducing their expenses & overhead, they would be in the same boat as everyone else.
Going back to horses and wood is not conservative. We progressed from them because they are 10 times more polluting and inefficient than what we have now. Though back then we didn't waste 25-40% of the fuel to feed our egos. It's not not what we use as a fuel it's how we use it. $4/gal gasoline saved 1700 lives and billions in healthcare last year.
I agree with you that conservation would be a very good thing.
On Jun 24 04:32 PM Fred Linn wrote:
> By pumping billions of barrels of oil out of the ground to burn,
> creating greenhouse emissions? I don't think so.
Biofuels and advanced will do the exact same thing plus the GHGs expended to create the biosource.
> Exxon has been posting the highest profits ever recorded---at the
> same time their army of lawyers managed to get the court judgement
> of damages reduced to a mere pittance of the actual damage from the
> wreck of the Valdez and fouling of over 1,000 miles of prime fishery
> and coastal habitat, and consumers were paying the highest prices
> ever at the pumps.
> I can think of a lot of adjectives to describe Exxon Mobil---but
> green and charitable are not on the list.
There are 100's of millions of dollars of unclaimed dollars for damage from the Valdez spill.
What was reduced was punative. This is allowed only in the US. Every other country in the world thinks punative civil charges are unconstitutional or against their religion. The people that would have maybe received this money (after the lawyers got most) have killed more animals than the Valdez spill on purpose. They have polluted the water more than the Valdez spill, just spread out over years. Looking at their own webpage, most of these people planned to buy polluting vehicles. Exxon could have been fined more and that money put to good use.
Not quite. Petroleum or coal takes carbon from deep underground and releases it into the atmosphere. Plants take CO2 from the atmosphere, and use the radiant energy from sunlight to combine it chemically with water to produce sugar. That sugar is then used to make starches, proteins, lipids and all the other molecules we get from plants, including cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin. It is impossible to raise atmospheric CO2 using biofuels----every atom of carbon in the fuels first had to be removed from the atmosphere by plants, it it were not---then you would have no plants to make the biofuel from.
You are refering to using fossil fuels to grow, harvest, and process the plants to make biofuels. In which case, you are correct. However, the solution is fairly simple. Don't use fossil fuels. Use biodiesel to run the farm equipment or trucks etc.----diesels need no modification, in fact, they were designed to run on biofuels in the first place. The first engine Rudolf Diesel built in 1893 ran on peanut oil. Use corn stalks, cobs etc.(stover) or wood to fire the stills to distill the mash. That is what is done in Brazil---bagasse is the left over cellulose(woody) part of the cane after the juice is squeezed out. Bagasse is dried and burned to heat the stills and generate electricity to run the mill. There is even enough left over to feed into the electrical grid. Bagasse is a biofuel. Biofuels are solar energy that is captured by the plants and stored in chemical form. We can even make biomethane using anaerobic digesters from animal waste. Biomethane is exactly the same chemically as the methane in natural gas. We can make ammonia fertilizer with biomethane exactly the same way that we do with methane from natural gas.
As for Exxon, you have your opinion, and I have mine. It seems to me that logically it would make sense for XM to get into the biofuel market. Instead, they seem more intent in being obstrucionist and trying to squeeze every last dime they can out of oil. It seems to me that if they spent as much money positioning themselves to converting to biofuels, we'd all be a lot better off. I'd be much more impressed if the amount that they have spent on advertising how "green" they are had actually been spent on producing renewable biofuels. They'd still be in the fuel business, and we'd all be a lot better off. Petroleum and biofuels can be mixed in a wide variety of ways.
As for XOM, I have a lot of their stock (bought in 80s), and agree with their getting out of the oil business slowly and into the natural gas business. They never do anything fast. Actually, in the 70's and early 80s they were into every alternative energy available at the time. They learned their lesson to stay out of alternative energy then. After this is when I started to buy their stock.
I think so too Wayne.
-----" But, I think that becoming more efficient with the energy we have now is more important than reinventing new energy sources that have been done before."----------
I completely agree with that statement. One reason that I am in favor of ethanol is that it is a better fuel than gasoline. If we have high ethanol blends available everywhere---it is possible for us to build internal combustion engines right now, using all off the shelf technology with no change in manufacturing, that can more than double thermal efficiency. Typically, gasoline engines get about 20% of the BTUs put into the tank back as actual work. With pure ethanol, or high ethanol blends, we can easily get get back 45% actual work from the BTUs we put in the tank. This is not new or unproven technology---we've been doing it for years. We've always known that biofuels make better fuels. Henry Ford's Model T was originally designed to run on ethanol. Rudolf Diesel's first engine ran on peanut oil.
Name any other technology available that would allow us to more than double the thermal efficiency of the internal combustion engines we now have in use. Not only that, by using turbochargers, we could retrofit existing engines to high compression engines. It's been done for years.
Environmentalists complain about large SUV's as wasteful excess. If they have their way---everyone will be forced to have shoe boxes with bicycle wheels. Well, what I am telling people is that large SUV's are not the problem---large inefficient engines are the problem. Using high ethanol blend fuel, we can build large SUV's---and instead of using 5-7 liter displacement V8 engines, we can easily get as much power from a 2.5 to 3 L 4 or 6 cylinder engine. We can easily double the mileage(adjusted for BTU content) with no loss in power. People can still have the SUV's they want, and use about 1/2 the fuel doing the same things they do right now. This seems a preferable solution to me.
It seems to me that ethanol fits perfectly into your vision of what needs to be done.
-------" As for XOM, I have a lot of their stock (bought in 80s), and agree with their getting out of the oil business slowly and into the natural gas business. They never do anything fast. Actually, in the 70's and early 80s they were into every alternative energy available at the time. They learned their lesson to stay out of alternative energy then. After this is when I started to buy their stock. "--------
It's a different ballgame now than the '70's. Maybe you do not believe in Peak Oil, or global warming, climate change, global weirding or whatever you want to call it. OK, I won't argue the the finer points of certainty/uncertainty-... fact is, a great number of people DO believe this. Personally---it seems to me that there is a lot of questions about GHG that still need to be adequately answered---but I do think it is highly possible. Exploiting the Canadian tar sands that were considered too uneconomical and environmentally damaging ten years ago is now in full swing. It seems to me like a solid indication that we have past Peak Oil as I think we have.
Anyway----from my point of view, the fact that biofuels are old technology means that they are well known and well proven. We can easily implement them in gradual stages in combination with what we already have with a bare minimum of change. We aren't starting all over from scratch---and finding ourselves facing problems we had no way of predicting when we started.
The main reason I support biofuels is as a solution to the economic damage caused by oil imports---and the environmental damage caused by strip mines and spills. Ethanol and biodiesel are very benign in terms of damage to the environment. Ethanol is safe enough that people drink it everyday. Hospitals use it as a standard sanitizing handwash. You can put out an ethanol fire with plain water. You can't do any of that with gasoline.
"It seems to me that ethanol fits perfectly into your vision of what needs to be done."
In the 70s I bought gasohol exclusively from Shamrock. The farmers in my area were growing corn and making their own ethanol in arid NM. I think gasoline engines are horribly inefficient. I now own a one-ton diesel pickup I need to pull my 7.5 ton trailerhome (I'm retired). But, when I have to drive it to the store to get a gallon of milk or a dozen 12' 2X10s, I get 23 mpg. Mostly we drive a Buick LeSabre that averages 30 mpg. I have nothing against "biofuels" as long as they make sense and not just money making. If the supply of cheap fuels goes up, the demand follows or excedes the supply. Also, I remember how the government reneged on their promises to back alternative energies in the 80s and the hundreds of thousands of people who lost their jobs overnight.
Indy League Circuit race cars use Honda 3L V8 engines(the same size or smaller than your Buick I'd bet). They run their engines on 100% ethanol. Yet they get 1200 to 1600 horsepower out of them----that is more horsepower than 3 or 4 typical 18 wheel diesel over the road rigs. Granted, a LOT hotter tuning than we'd use for street cars---but can you see why I say we can easily build large SUV's with small engines and still have all the power we need?
There are people who have been running diesel engines for years on waste cooking oil that would otherwise have just been discarded. It is easy enough that they can do it from their backyard.
You can run your diesel on biofuel with no modification at all. The only thing is, don't start with a high bio blend---start with B20 or lower. Biofuel is an excellent solvent and will quickly remove sludges and varnishes left behind by petroleum. This can clog the fuel filter if the change is too quick(not exactly a huge problem, after all, that is what fuel filters are for and need to be changed once in awhile anyway). Starting with a lower % blend will clean the system, then you change to a higher blend. You won't need any fancy equipment to measure the difference in particulate emissions, even on 20% blend, after the first tank you will easily be able to see the difference by just looking at the tailpipe when you start up or accelerate----no clouds of black smoke, no smoke at all. If you are using discarded cooking oil---you'll even be able to smell the french fries or whatever the oil was used to cook. LOL, it might take YOU a little while to get used to a truck that smells like french fries instead of brimstone from hell. LOL!
We'll be needing petroleum for sometime to come. But biofuels can be blended with petroleum in many ways---and the blending overcomes some problems with biofuels. I think we'll be needing both in the future, and that is fine with me. But we should be using the biofuels that we can make renewable, and reserve the petroleum that is not renewable for blending it seems to me. BTW---using FischerTropsch, we can also make gasoline from renewable sources such as wood.
If you'd like to hear more or get links to investigate for yourself, email me, flwetdog@hotmail.com