Update on the Progress of the Electrification of Transportation

Graph from Study in Nature Energy Modified by Me to Add Timeline

 Cross posted from Energy Trends Insider

I found this study on Nature Energy, which I subscribe to: Moving beyond alternative fuel hype to decarbonize transportation.

Although I disagree with the study's main conclusion, the above chart they put together (which I have modified) was of interest to me because it suggests that things are finally starting to happen when it comes to electrification of transportation.

The study authors combed through the New York Times archives for stories on energy topics. They summed up negative and positive articles to calculate the number of net positive articles about a given technology which they define as hype.

Had they mined the entire internet instead of just the Times, I suspect the hype about biofuels would have been off the chart, literally. Stories about students piling into biodiesel powered buses to spread the gospel had become a worn out cliché.

They lumped corn ethanol, cellulosic ethanol, and biodiesel into one category. It would be interesting to see which was generating the most hype.

Energy Crops--BTUs Per Acre

Photo Wikipedia

When it comes to energy produced per area of food cropland usurped, corn ethanol and soy biodiesel are the worst options available. If you want to obtain energy from the sun, your best option is to grow a crop of solar panels.

The solar farm above covers 150 acres. It nets sixty times more BTUs of energy per year than a corn crop used for ethanol and about 120 times more than a soy crop used for biodiesel. And you could still graze livestock around these panels to keep the weeds down. From a land use perspective, siting these on farmland is certainly suboptimal, but not nearly as suboptimal as converting food stock into liquid fuels.

I received an email the other day from someone who is an expert on certain market impacts of government policy:

The Connecticut General Assembly last week passed a bill requiring biodiesel to be blended with heating oil starting next year.(1)

He was perplexed by one of the provisions in this bill:

Before the mandate takes effect, the state commissioner of consumer protection, in consultation with a Distillate Advisory Board to be created under this bill, will determine whether there's enough in-state production of biodiesel to comply with the legislation.

Biofuel issues usually revolve around transportation because the portability and energy density of liquid fuels are best suited for things that move around. In this case it involves homes that use oil for heating. It makes no sense, environmentally or economically, for state governments to force citizens to purchase biofuels regardless of cost. If biodiesel cost less, consumers would already be using it. In the summer of 2008 biodiesel was selling for $6 a gallon. This is essentially a hidden tax on citizens and a form of wealth redistribution to farmers. Biofuel lobbyists have obviously gotten the ear of some politicians.

No politician would dream of increasing taxes at this point in time to fund something like this. So, instead, the cost is hidden in consumer fuel bills.

If global warming is the real concern, there is much more bang for the buck in solar or even better yet, home weatherization.

Connecticut is not known as an agricultural powerhouse, so this does not make a whole lot of sense the way it might in corn and soy growing states, where such legislation is being used by politicians to buy votes. The public is largely unaware of the futility and wastefulness of trying to displace oil by turning food into a liquid fuel.

Maria Cantwell recently introduced legislation in my home state to reinstate the dollar per gallon blending subsidy for biodiesel to placate the biodiesel refinery here. A back-room deal was struck where they would pretend to use oil grown in Washington State instead of importing the cheapest oil as the original business plan dictated (and why it is built on a port).

I recently attended a talk sponsored by the Northwest Biodiesel Board. An Eastern Washington professor, who was raised on a farm and had attempted his own biodiesel business, explained that politicians had not considered the Washington State farmer's ability to competitively grow corn and soy. The climate here favors other higher value crops like apples and cherries.

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The Never-Ending Biodiesel Subsidy

Maria Cantwell, U.S. Senator [D-WA]

[UPDATE 12/21/2010] The tax credit of $1.00 per gallon has been officially reinstated. From Biofuels Digest:

John Plaza, CEO, Imperium Renewables:

Today marks a tremendous event for the biodiesel industry. With both the Senate and House including the biodiesel tax credit in the President’s Tax Package, we can get back to the job of supplying our Nation with renewable fuels made in America. We are thrilled that Congress has extended the biodiesel blender’s tax credit and we must thank U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell, U.S. Senator Patty Murray, and U.S. Congressman Dicks along with many others for their tireless support of our industry, and Imperium Renewables in particular. We greatly appreciate the leadership of President Obama and his administration’s efforts to ensure that these job-creating investments in the U.S. biofuels industry were part of the overall bill.

[UPDATE 9/21/2010] From an article on Bright Energy titled:

Democrats blamed as Senate rejects biodiesel tax credits

Senators threw out the amendment to the "small business bill" by 58 votes to 41

But get this:

The "small business bill" passed by a 61-38 vote, with just two Republicans crossing party lines to support the bill.

How do you know when a politician is lying? His or her lips are moving.

[UPDATE 1/24/2010] See Obama's speech lambasting the five goofballs on the Supreme court who may have driven the last nail into our already dysfunctional political process.

Original article written in January 2010 continues below:

Rather than write an email to my senator to air my concerns about her pending biofuel legislation, I'm going air them on this blog because, well, that's what blogs are for.

Does she realize that Seattle and Berkeley dropped food-based biodiesel last year?

Is she unaware of the peer reviewed science demonstrating the links between agricultural expansion, eutrophication of waterways, and biodiversity loss?

Does she know that biodiesel made from Midwest soy does not at this time qualify as a low carbon fuel per the EPA?

Does she know that the food riots in dozens of countries in the summer of 2008 were caused in large part by speculation fueled by government mandates for and subsidization of corn ethanol and soy biodiesel?

Assuming that, as a United States Senator, she must be aware of all of these issues, I'm at a loss as to why she has introduced more legislation to yet again extend the blending credit for biodiesel.

I wrote a short op-ed that was accepted for publication in the latest issue of Subsidy Watch (produced by the Global Subsidies Initiative). Following is an excerpt:

In 2004 the U.S. Congress created a USD$ 1/gallon (US$ 0.264/litre) blenders' tax credit for biodiesel that was slated to expire in 2006. But in 2005 it extended the tax credit through the end of 2008 and, before that year was up, extended it again, through 2009.

Predictably, last autumn, legislation was introduced to extend the tax credit for yet another year, through 2010.

Now this, from Agriculture Online:

Farmer leaders in the soybean industry are asking farmers to tell members of Congress that they support two stand-alone bills that would put the tax credit back into effect for five years.

In the Senate, Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) have introduced S.1589 to do that. In the House, a similar bill, H.R. 4070, has been introduced by Representative Earl Pomeroy (D-ND) and Representative John Shimkus (R-IL).

I know a guy who owns a diesel powered Jeep Liberty. It uses twice as much fuel per mile as the midsized hatchback I drive. Thanks to the dollar per gallon biodiesel blending subsidy, fellow citizens were paying him $15 every time he filled up with biodiesel (95% of which is made out of virgin soy or canola vegetable oil diverted from food processors).

Note that three out of the four senators are from farming powerhouses where corn and soybeans are the dominant crops. They are legally securing future campaign funding from the powerful and well-funded farm lobby.

The big biodiesel refinery here in Washington State only employs a few dozen people and has always bought its vegetable oil from Canada, because it was cheaper, and until the European Union forced them to stop, that same refinery was shipping most of its biodiesel overseas to undercut other producers with the dollar per gallon blending subsidy it was receiving.

Shortly after hoovering up funding from wealthy venture capitalists, as well as ten million dollars from the City of Seattle Employee's Retirement System, this refinery shut down from a lack of operating capital. During the food price crisis in the summer of 2008, soy based biodiesel was selling for $6 a gallon in Seattle as food producers and fuel producers bid against one another over the same feed stock.

It has recently attempted to restart operations thanks to government mandates for biodiesel use in the neighboring state of Oregon.

Making biodiesel from food has proven to be a dead end business model. Why would a politician from a state that provides very little, if any vegetable oil for biodiesel continue to support it?

I can only think of one reason for Cantwell's dedication to this dead fuel walking. She is being lobbied to bring home the bacon by a very small but very vocal minority of wealthy investors, biodiesel producers, and retailers in her state (see Obama's speech).

According to the the book Comeback America (saw it on the Daily Show last night, downloaded it from the Library today), the typical American family's share of our country's foreign debt is over five hundred thousand dollars.

From the Global Subsidies Initiative's about page:

Subsidies are powerful instruments. They can play a legitimate role in securing public goods that would otherwise remain beyond reach. But they can also be easily subverted. The interests of lobbyists and the electoral ambitions of office-holders can hijack public policy ...

But the case for scrutiny goes further. Even when subsidies are legitimate instruments of public policy, their efficacy - their fitness for purpose - must still be demonstrated. All too often, the unintended and unforeseen consequences of poorly designed subsidies overwhelm the benefits claimed for these programs. Meanwhile, the citizens who foot the bills remain in the dark ...

When subsidies are the principal cause of the perpetuation of a fundamentally unfair trading system, and lie at the root of serious environmental degradation, the questions have to be asked: Is this how taxpayers want their money spent? And should they, through their taxes, support such counterproductive outcomes?

Consider sending the senator from Washington an email, or just post something on your blog like I just did.

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Transgressing identified and quantified planetary boundaries

[Update 10/9/2010: A study was just published in Science (click here for full text--$ub reqd) that parallels a study published in Nature earlier]

Apparently, we've punched through three of those boundaries already, two of them big time. See here. You can read the entire paper in the journal Nature here.

Now, largely because of a rapidly growing reliance on fossil fuels and industrialized forms of agriculture, human activities have reached a level that could damage the systems that keep Earth in the desirable Holocene state.

Note that of the two causes listed, one of them is industrial agriculture, which is also wholly dependent on fossil fuels. I don't have the answer but it surely isn't mixing the products of industrial agriculture with fossil fuels and burning the unholy union in our SUVs.

What image does the term "industrialized forms of agriculture" conjure-up in your mind? I suspect that for most Americans it's corn. For me it is biofuel, which in America is synonymous with corn ethanol and soy biodiesel. In Europe it might be wheat (Hunger for biofuels will gobble up wheat surplus), in Kenya it might be jatropha (How a Biofuel 'Miracle' Ruined Kenyan Farmers), in Tanzania it could be just about anything (Public Fury Halts Biofuel Onslaught On Farmers), in Indonesia, the world's fourth third largest GHG emitter, palm oil will soon drive the wild orangutan to extinction and in South America, sugarcane is king.

We have tried to identify the Earth-system processes and associated thresholds, which, if crossed, could generate unacceptable environmental change.

The nine processes that define these planetary boundaries are as follows:

1) climate change
2) rate of biodiversity loss (terrestrial and marine)
3) interference with the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles
4) stratospheric ozone depletion
5) ocean acidification
6) global freshwater use
7) change in land use
8) chemical pollution
9) atmospheric aerosol loading

Items 1, 2 and 3 have already exceeded the boundaries, and not by just a little bit.

Records of Earth history show that large-scale ocean anoxic events occur when critical thresholds of phosphorus inflow to the oceans are crossed. This potentially explains past mass extinctions of marine life.

The air we breath is about 80% nitrogen, 20% oxygen. The nitrogen is mostly inert, just taking up space in our lungs. We 6.7 billion human beings (soon to be 9 billion) have been grabbing this harmless nitrogen gas in the air and turning it into harmful nitrogen compounds. Sewage from both human beings and our domesticated animals and agricultural runoff from nitrogen fertilizers (another form of sewage) all ends up in our rivers, lakes, and oceans.

We are killing the oceans:

At about 400 locations worldwide, agricultural fertilizer and other pollutants flowing into rivers and deltas have created underwater conditions so low in oxygen that aquatic life can't survive. These locations are called dead zones …If we did no biofuels, and we just allowed for food production to increase …you still can't meet the hypoxia goals in the Gulf of Mexico. You still need to take mitigation actions even if we didn't produce biofuels.

The above photo shows trails of mud behind fishing trawlers as they scrape the bottom of the Gulf.

You can't kill the oceans and expect life on land as we know it to survive. It has happened before. The geologic record has shown that. It is called anoxia. The oceans lose their ability to hold enough oxygen to keep anaerobic bacteria at bay. These organisms emit things like sulfur compounds (the rotten egg smell) instead of CO2 as metabolism waste products and will kill all oxygen breathing lifeforms in the oceans.

Today's biofuels simultaneously exacerbate biodiversity loss and the nitrogen putrefaction of oceans and waterways, all the while releasing massive amounts of greenhouse gases that had been locked up in forest and grassland carbon sinks to boot. How stupid is that? If you've been holding your breath waiting for politicians to save us, well, you can at least exhale now.

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Don't Need No Stinking Biodiesel

Did you know that the carbon intensity (the ratio of carbon dioxide to energy) of natural gas is lower than the average intensity of Brazilian and American soy biodiesel? And that is without counting land displacement impacts (carbon put into the atmosphere by burning a forest to plant soy).

A common argument I hear from biodiesel enthusiasts is that heavy machinery must use diesel engines because of the high torque required. Take a look at that garbage truck above. It is about as heavy as you get and it runs on natural gas. Not only is it producing less GHG than biodiesel, it is producing a tiny fraction of the local air pollution (especially soot, which also contributes to global warming) at the tailpipe. It's also a lot quieter.

Fleets of vehicles with known routes (like buses and garbage trucks) where range is accounted for and where they can all be fueled at their depots are ideally suited for using natural gas. Combine this idea for fleets with today's gasoline hybrid technology for personal transport (that is achieving gas mileage improvements in excess of 100% over average mileage) and one can see how the rush to food-based biofuels is over-hyped.

A recent post by Robert Rapier suggests that America could in theory, replace all gasoline with domestically produced natural gas for roughly the next half-century.

[UPDATE] Here's an interesting article on GAS2.0 claiming that there is enough biomethane (methane from decomposing garbage and manure) to power up to 20% of our diesel fleet. Methane is 20 times worse than CO2 as a GHG. Burning this waste methane instead of letting it escape into the atmosphere would reduce GHG emissions a few orders of magnitude more than running all of our diesel fleet on soy biodiesel.

[ANOTHER UPDATE] Here's an article in the New York Times Green Inc. blog about a company near Seattle called Prometheus Energy that is developing a way to capture waste methane and store it as a liquid. The advantage of this idea is that the methane does not have to be burned at the source of methane production. As a liquid it can be transported and used for other things. You can't do that with the gaseous form because it is too bulky.

[MORE UPDATES] I recently stumbled upon two studies from Australia that were done almost six years ago that show natural gas is worse than diesel on a life cycle basis when it comes to GHG emissions.

The Greet model done by Argonne labs showed a 5 to 25% improvement in GHG over gasoline for natural gas produced in North America but did not compare natural gas to diesel. Natural gas shipped here via tanker is not better than gasoline.

On the other hand, natural gas vehicles produce very little soot, and soot is thought to account for roughly 18% of global warming. Future studies comparing diesel trucks and buses to natural gas versions need to account for soot when evaluating global warming impacts.

http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_vehicles/technologies_and_fuels/gasoline_and_diesel/natural-gas-vehicles.html#gw

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080323210225.htm

http://www.environment.gov.au/settlements/transport/publications/lifecycle.html

http://www.environment.gov.au/settlements/transport/publications/lightvehicles.html

(Photo credit Jeff Youngstrom via the Flickr Creative Commons license).

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Dead as Latin

Michael Kanellos said the following in his Greentech Innovations Report last week:

"A tour of its portfolio shows it has made some pretty good bets, and also nabbed some major clunkers.

...On the other hand, it also put money into Imperium Renewables, the dead-as-Latin biofuel maker." …

Down in the comment field, the CEO of Imperium lambasted him for telling the truth and then gave us his version of reality:

"…[biodiesel is] a real tangible asset that can help drastically reduce our CO2 output of our vehicles."

According to Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen and his crack international team of researchers, Imperium's version of biodiesel is actually about 70% worse for global warming than regular diesel and that is not counting land displacement impacts! Ah screw the science. Global warming isn't real anyway, right? It's energy independence we are after:

"…we are working on real solutions for our energy needs in this country."

I have two problems with the above statement. First, according to this link, Imperium was one of several biodiesel companies slapped with a tariff for exporting their product to Europe where they could undercut other producers thanks to a loophole that allowed them to take the dollar per gallon blending subsidy even if the fuel is not used domestically. The energy independence argument bandied about by biofuel publicists takes a distant second fiddle to profit.

And second, last time I checked, they were not even using American grown crops to produce it. The canola oil came from Canada, got refined into biodiesel, and was shipped off to Europe. God bless America, energy independence here we come.

Oh, and that is not a picture of the Imperium refinery. It's a picture of Gas Works Park in Seattle, just a few blocks from my house. These are the rusting remains of yet another energy technology that pressurized coal and piped the resultant gases throughout the city for heating and lighting, which is the very same technology being proposed by the "Clean Coal" advocates--nothing new under the sun. The pipe from that processing plant still protrudes from my basement wall.

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(photo credit Sea Turtle via the Flickr Creative Commons license).