Biofuel Breakthrough?

I have just been notified by my friends at Talk Polywell of a break through in the biologic generation of liquid fuels. The Globe and Mail reports on the breakthrough (although my friends at Talk Polywell think the report is garbled by a not entirely science literate reporter).

In September, a privately held and highly secretive U.S. biotech company named Joule Unlimited received a patent for “a proprietary organism” – a genetically adapted E. coli bacterium – that feeds solely on carbon dioxide and excretes liquid hydrocarbons: diesel fuel, jet fuel and gasoline. This breakthrough technology, the company says, will deliver renewable supplies of liquid fossil fuel almost anywhere on Earth, in essentially unlimited quantity and at an energy-cost equivalent of $30 (U.S.) a barrel of crude oil. It will deliver, the company says, “fossil fuels on demand.”

Not only that. They can tailor the organisms to produce specific fuels using only CO2, water (fresh or salt), and sunlight.

Joule says it now has “a library” of fossil-fuel organisms at work in its Massachusetts labs, each engineered to produce a different fuel. It has “proven the process,” has produced ethanol (for example) at a rate equivalent to 10,000 U.S. gallons an acre a year. It anticipates that this yield could hit 25,000 gallons an acre a year when scaled for commercial production, equivalent to roughly 800 barrels of crude an acre a year.

By way of comparison, Cornell University’s David Pimentel, an authority on ethanol, says that one acre of corn produces less than half as much energy, equivalent to only 328 barrels. If a few hundred barrels of crude sounds modest, recall that millions of acres of prime U.S. farmland are now used to make corn ethanol.

So is this reputable or just a bunch of scammers?

Joule acknowledges its reluctance to fully explain its “solar converter.” CEO Bill Sims told Biofuels Digest, an online biofuels news service, that secrecy has been essential for competitive reasons. “Some time soon,” he said, “what we are doing will become clear.” Although astonishing in its assertions, Joule gains credibility from its co-founder: George Church, the Harvard Medical School geneticist who helped initiate the Human Genome Project in 1984.

Well how about a look at what Biofuels Digest has to say.

In Massachusetts, Joule Unlimited has won a second key patent for its genetically modified cyanobacteria that directly convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into n-alkanes, and other diesel fuel molecules. The patent is the first awarded for a bacteria that makes fuel directly from water, sunlight and CO2, as opposed to organisms that make fuels from sugar or other cellulosic biomass, such as those engineered by LS9, Amyris or Solazyme.

As reported previously in the Digest, Joule is using a genetically modified form of cyanobacteria. Two weeks ago, Joule received its first key patent for “methods and compositions for modifying photoautotrophic organisms as hosts, such that the organisms efficiently convert carbon dioxide and light into n-alkanes."

Those reporting the death of the US as a world power may have been somewhat premature. Joule is reported to be building a prototype plant in Leander, Tex. At this stage of course nothing is certain. It will probably take a couple of years to prove this out and get the "bugs" out of the system. And probably a couple of decades to scale up the idea until the production becomes a significant fraction of US liquid fuel use. Time will tell.

Here is another possible approach:

Green Algae Strategy: End Oil Imports And Engineer Sustainable Food And Fuel

Welcome Instapundit readers.

Thanks to reader clazy here is a link to the Joule patents.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Sustainable

Any method for doing anything that cannot be sustained for 100 billion years minimum is unsustainable. Nothing is sustainable in the long term. So why not just focus on getting by with an eye towards future requirements?

And let me add that the things people were doing 200 years ago were unsustainable. And 200 years hence?

My definition of sustainable? Can we keep it up for about 100 years? Which is time enough to figure out what to do next.

Which was brought up by a discussion of the Bloom Box fuel cell and water heater.

Now if you want to get more into the technology of the Bloom Box here are a couple of very pricey books that may help:

Biofuels for Fuel Cells (Integrated Environmental Technology)

That came out in 2006. I wonder if The Bloom Boys got some ideas there? Here is one of the latest books in the field:

Solid Oxide Fuel Cell Technology: Principles, Performance and Operations

I haven't read either of them so I can't give any recommendations.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

The Politics Of Biofuels

I recently posted on the Biofuels Scam. So let us see whose fingerprints are on this scam that is starving children and causing the destruction of the rain forests. Time Magazine has the scoop.

...on Nov. 6, at a biodiesel plant in Newton, Iowa, Hillary Rodham Clinton unveiled an eye-popping plan that would require all stations to offer ethanol by 2017 while mandating 60 billion gal. (227 billion L) by 2030. "This is the fuel for a much brighter future!" she declared. Barack Obama immediately criticized her--not for proposing such an expansive plan but for failing to support ethanol before she started trolling for votes in Iowa's caucuses.

If biofuels are the new dotcoms, Iowa is Silicon Valley, with 53,000 jobs and $1.8 billion in income dependent on the industry. The state has so many ethanol distilleries under construction that it's poised to become a net importer of corn. That's why biofuel-pandering has become virtually mandatory for presidential contenders. John McCain was the rare candidate who vehemently opposed ethanol as an outrageous agribusiness boondoggle, which is why he skipped Iowa in 2000. But McCain learned his lesson in time for this year's caucuses. By 2006 he was calling ethanol a "vital alternative energy source."

Members of Congress love biofuels too, not only because so many dream about future Iowa caucuses but also because so few want to offend the farm lobby, the most powerful force behind biofuels on Capitol Hill. Ethanol isn't about just Iowa or even the Midwest anymore. Plants are under construction in New York, Georgia, Oregon and Texas, and the ethanol boom's effect on prices has helped lift farm incomes to record levels nationwide.

Someone is paying to support these environmentally questionable industries: you. In December, President Bush signed a bipartisan energy bill that will dramatically increase support to the industry while mandating 36 billion gal. (136 billion L) of biofuel by 2022. This will provide a huge boost to grain markets.

In other words they are all in cahoots on this. And guess what. All three candidates for the Presidency want to Do Something about Global Warming.

God help us all.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

The Biofuel Scam

When Time Magazine starts discussing the current incarnation of the Biofuel Revolution as a scam you know it is all over for another Greenie Fantasy. What is the essence of the fantasy? That by getting Congress to pass laws the laws of supply and demand can be repealed.

From his Cessna a mile above the southern Amazon, John Carter looks down on the destruction of the world's greatest ecological jewel. He watches men converting rain forest into cattle pastures and soybean fields with bulldozers and chains. He sees fires wiping out such gigantic swaths of jungle that scientists now debate the "savannization" of the Amazon. Brazil just announced that deforestation is on track to double this year; Carter, a Texas cowboy with all the subtlety of a chainsaw, says it's going to get worse fast. "It gives me goose bumps," says Carter, who founded a nonprofit to promote sustainable ranching on the Amazon frontier. "It's like witnessing a rape."

And what is driving this bungle in the jungle? It looks like the heros of the left are out to reap windfall profits in cahoots with corporations just trying to make a buck from Government mandates.

This land rush is being accelerated by an unlikely source: biofuels. An explosion in demand for farm-grown fuels has raised global crop prices to record highs, which is spurring a dramatic expansion of Brazilian agriculture, which is invading the Amazon at an increasingly alarming rate.

Propelled by mounting anxieties over soaring oil costs and climate change, biofuels have become the vanguard of the green-tech revolution, the trendy way for politicians and corporations to show they're serious about finding alternative sources of energy and in the process slowing global warming. The U.S. quintupled its production of ethanol--ethyl alcohol, a fuel distilled from plant matter--in the past decade, and Washington has just mandated another fivefold increase in renewable fuels over the next decade. Europe has similarly aggressive biofuel mandates and subsidies, and Brazil's filling stations no longer even offer plain gasoline. Worldwide investment in biofuels rose from $5 billion in 1995 to $38 billion in 2005 and is expected to top $100 billion by 2010, thanks to investors like Richard Branson and George Soros, GE and BP, Ford and Shell, Cargill and the Carlyle Group.

So a lefty mega hero is in the thick of this? Why am I not surprised? He promotes socialism by stealing food out of the mouths of hungry children. But you know. He only has their best interests at heart.

But several new studies show the biofuel boom is doing exactly the opposite of what its proponents intended: it's dramatically accelerating global warming, imperiling the planet in the name of saving it. Corn ethanol, always environmentally suspect, turns out to be environmentally disastrous. Even cellulosic ethanol made from switchgrass, which has been promoted by eco-activists and eco-investors as well as by President Bush as the fuel of the future, looks less green than oil-derived gasoline.

Meanwhile, by diverting grain and oilseed crops from dinner plates to fuel tanks, biofuels are jacking up world food prices and endangering the hungry. The grain it takes to fill an SUV tank with ethanol could feed a person for a year. Harvests are being plucked to fuel our cars instead of ourselves.

What a brilliant idea.

And did I hear that right? The oil companies are going to save the planet? From Time Magazine? Say it isn't so. Please. Next thing you know they will be touting the benefits of nuclear power. What is the world coming to? The Green religion is turning out to be a false god? Who could have predicted it? Believers are going to be devastated.

Biofuels do slightly reduce dependence on imported oil, and the ethanol boom has created rural jobs while enriching some farmers and agribusinesses. But the basic problem with most biofuels is amazingly simple, given that researchers have ignored it until now: using land to grow fuel leads to the destruction of forests, wetlands and grasslands that store enormous amounts of carbon.

The Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again. Because in the real world (where is that?) you can't just do one thing. It is all connected. Slow changes based on real economics and not government subsidies and mandates we can adapt to. Changes forced at the point of a (government) gun don't work nearly as well.

In Brazil, for instance, only a tiny portion of the Amazon is being torn down to grow the sugarcane that fuels most Brazilian cars. More deforestation results from a chain reaction so vast it's subtle: U.S. farmers are selling one-fifth of their corn to ethanol production, so U.S. soybean farmers are switching to corn, so Brazilian soybean farmers are expanding into cattle pastures, so Brazilian cattlemen are displaced to the Amazon. It's the remorseless economics of commodities markets. "The price of soybeans goes up," laments Sandro Menezes, a biologist with Conservation International in Brazil, "and the forest comes down."

Now who could have predicted that? Certainly not the socialists/communist who think a command and control economy can work better than individuals responding to real price signals. Hayek in his book The Road to Serfdom predicted this over 60 years ago. Not this exact crisis but, the general outlines of why command and control doesn't work.

The growing backlash against biofuels is a product of the law of unintended consequences. It may seem obvious now that when biofuels increase demand for crops, prices will rise and farms will expand into nature. But biofuel technology began on a small scale, and grain surpluses were common. Any ripples were inconsequential. When the scale becomes global, the outcome is entirely different, which is causing cheerleaders for biofuels to recalibrate. "We're all looking at the numbers in an entirely new way," says the Natural Resources Defense Council's Nathanael Greene, whose optimistic "Growing Energy" report in 2004 helped galvanize support for biofuels among green groups.

Several of the most widely cited experts on the environmental benefits of biofuels are warning about the environmental costs now that they've recognized the deforestation effect. "The situation is a lot more challenging than a lot of us thought," says University of California, Berkeley, professor Alexander Farrell, whose 2006 Science article calculating the emissions reductions of various ethanols used to be considered the definitive analysis.

My guess is that because he was a believer he cooked the books and ignored side effects. But that is the problem with command and control. No government or "smarter than the market" fool can predict all the ramifications of a policy. Despite what policy makers tell you.

Well Time goes on for pages more but let me leave you with the next stupid idea they are promoting.

The experts haven't given up on biofuels; they're calling for better biofuels that won't trigger massive carbon releases by displacing wildland. Robert Watson, the top scientist at the U.K.'s Department for the Environment, recently warned that mandating more biofuel usage--as the European Union is proposing--would be "insane" if it increases greenhouse gases. But the forces that biofuels have unleashed--political, economic, social--may now be too powerful to constrain.

Yeah. That is the ticket. Mandate something different. Which we have not got.

Why not just end the mandates and let the natural evolution of technology and the market handle the change? Not going to happen. Why? The elitists do not trust the market or the people to make the "right" decisions. It would be a joke if people weren't going hungry because of socialist stupidity.

The fall of the Soviet Union has taught these idiots nothing. You can just hear the voices in their head. "We are smarter than the stupid Soviets. We have Degrees from Harvard."

Which of the Presidential candidates had their fingers in this pie? See The Politics of Biofuels.

Thanks to Just One Minute for the link.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

The Biofuel Future

Interesting bit on using cow manure to make alcohol. Sort of.

E³ BioFuels inaugurated the world's first closed-loop ethanol plant fueled largely by biogas from animal waste instead of coal or natural gas on June 28. The energy-efficient, low-cost Genesis Plant, located in Mead, Neb., began commercial operation in April 2007, doesn't contribute to global warming and actually reduces air and water pollution.

E³ BioFuels' patented technology brings together three proven components into a single, closed-loop system:

1. A large cattle feedlot or dairy that produces large quantities of cow manure needing treatment.
2. An anaerobic digester that transforms the cow manure into biogas.
3. An ethanol plant that runs on the biogas instead of natural gas or coal, and whose leftover wet grain is fed back to the cattle.

Now the reason for doing all this is to reduce the net CO2 output of man's various activities.

As I see it, if we are going to get a major portion of our energy from biomass higher atmospheric CO2 will be an advantage. Plants become more efficient. Both in collecting solar energy and in water use. It seems like that might be helpful.

Burn Or Starve

It looks like the biofuels guys have plans for our future. Biofuels are supposed to be the great panacea for the burning problem of the day - man made global warming. Hey not so fast. It turns out biofuels could cause food shortages.

Climate Feedback tells us of the new threat.

Warnings that switching to biofuels as a ‘clean’ energy source could threaten food security and increase deforestation have become increasingly stark this week.

A UN report, released last Monday concluded that, despite offering considerable benefits such as clean energy for millions and the creation of wealth and jobs in poorer countries, biofuel production also has the ability to cause real destruction.

The report warned that increasing production of liquid biofuels, such as ethanol and biodiesel, could increase the price of agricultural commodities with negative economic and social impacts, especially for the world’s poor who spend a large proportion of income on food. It also raised the issue that, where forests are cleared to make way for energy crops, GHG emissions may actually be higher overall from biofuels than from fossil fuels.

Uh oh. Biofuels could make things worse. You mean the answers to our problems may provide more problems than answers?

Some one is going to have to answer for this.

Cross Posted at Classical Values and at The Astute Bloggers