20 thoughts on “Weekend reflections”

  1. Carbonsink

    The January issue of Scientific American has an article on ethanol. The yanks are slowly waking up. They give a very cursory mention to Brazil’s ethanol program but continue to puzzle over cellulosic ethanol, which in this article can only be made using the enzyme technique, which is ultimately the best method, but the sulphuric acid method, which works just fine, is apparently news to them.

    But on page 34 they do a comparison of the fossil energy in megajoules needed to produce 1 megajoule of fuel for each of gasoline, corn ethanol, and cellulose ethanol. Respectively 1.19 (gasoline), .77 (corn ethanol), .1 (cellulose ethanol) (infromation supplied form 6 studies by the California Institute of Technology). They make no mention of the fact that the energy to produce the ethanol (this is the diesel energy for all of the various machines in the whole process) can in fact be from ethanol itself.

    The interesting thing about this is, and this gets routinely overlooked, that to produce one litre of petrol you have to burn another 1.2 litres to get the first. That is putting 1 kilo of CO2 into the atmosphere from your car actually means putting 2.2 kilos of CO2 into the atmosphere.

    Of soarse we do not see how inefficient the oil production process is because it all happens out of sight long before the liquid arrives at the bowser. So when you are despairing about how futile it is to do anything at all, recompute your model with this information. One litre of petrol displacing cellulosic ethanol actually displaces 2.2 litres of fossil fuels.

    Stay tuned the Americans are slowly becoming aware.

  3. Speaking about war crimes and the word denial, the Japanese PM has decided that the Japanese were not involved in sex-slavery in WWII (against all the evidence), which is now splashed across the front of many of the Asian newspapers and websites (like People’s Daily). Apart from being personally insulting to all the people involved, this is completely unhelpful for relationships between Japan and other countries in Asia.

  4. BilB,

    Is this the same Scientific American article that concludes:

    relying on ethanol from corn is an unsustainable strategy: agriculture will never be able to supply enough crop, converting it does not combat global warming, and socially it can be seen as taking food off people’s plates. Backers defend corn ethanol as a bridge to cellulose ethanol, but for the moment it is a bridge to nowhere.

    Americans are becoming aware alright, but lets hope they’re becoming aware that ethanol is a solution nothing, and is really just a bit of pork-barrelling by the Bush Administration.

  5. The one and the same. The “but for the moment it is a bridge to nowhere” is a comment that at the moment in the writers mind not enough enzyme can be made to break down the available cellulose. He is saying that until the enyme production picks up they are stuck with the partial process of starch ethanol. He clearly is not aware that sulphuric acid is routinely used to do the break down in a near fully recovered cycle. Mathew Wald hails from New York, a town which harbours a lot of enviro skeptics. It is a well written article, but either not well researched or intentionally misrepresenting the true picture. We may well have found one of those $10,000 handouts.

    The one useful piece of information was the highlight of the inefficiency of fossil fuel (petrol). Add it up it is a really bad deal for the environment.

  7. I’ve just finished a book titled “Triple Cross”, about the intelligence failures that lead to September 11. The author (Peter Lance), makes many astonishing accusations, including that the FBI and Justice Department covered up evidence that Ramzi Yousef (the original WTC bombing mastermind) may have been involved in the downing of TWA 800 around the time of 1996 Olympics (even though he was in custody at the time), and was probably the architect of the “planes into buildingsâ€? plot.

    Instead the FBI and Justice Department claim that KSM (Khalid Shaikh Mohammad – Yousef’s uncle) was the mastermind, in an effort to reduce their culpability and add credence to the line that they could not have had any idea that large commercial airplanes would be used as missiles.

    In fact the core accusation that Lance makes is that many of the terror attacks that occurred in the late 1990’s (USS Cole, African Embassy bombings) could have been prevented, if evidence from Greg Scarpa Junior (who occupied a prison cell between Yousef and an accomplice) had been acted on. The FBI needed to discredit Scarpa, because of the claim that Scarpa’s father had used his relationship with an FBI agent (Lin DeVecchio) to gain advantage in the mob wars of the 1980’s.

    According to Peter Lance’s web site, FBI Supervisory Special Agent R. Lindley DeVecchio is about to go to trial in Brooklyn on four counts of second degree homicide.

    While there are a lot of “theories� about the events of September 11, Lance seems to have uncovered some credible evidence which suggest that corrupt relationships between intelligence agents and informants played a big role.

  8. BilB, Cellulosic ethanol strikes me as very similar to “clean coal” — an unproven technology that’s held up by its proponents as a solution to everything.

  9. We have had a recent announcement in the Canberra Times that the number of parking spaces per office worker is to be reduced in the central city area. This is to encourage workers to take public transport.

    What would be wrong with the following idea? Rather than decreasing the number of parking spaces increase the cost of parking but give the increased income to people who come to work with others (ie. in a car pool). The amount of money available from the extra parking fees can be paid by the passengers to the person who drives their car and who has to pay the extra parking. That is, the money from parking can only be spent by passengers and given to the people who drive. It would be relatively easy to find who attempts to rort the system.

  10. Kevin
    Your proposal has merit but if too successful it would threaten the more-people-on-public transport aim. It is worth pursuing if you could get the bus authority to benchmark numbers and dates by which they would rate themselves a success. Failing these benchmarks, go for it with the car pooling. Financially it has some appeal in parking returns.

  11. Good point Smiley. There is a lot in what you say.

    Our intelligence agencies dropping the ball is one thing, however the blame for the deed still lies with the perpetrators.

    That is, lunatic fringe islamists.

  12. Gosh, thanks SATP for your informative and definitive analysis.

    Guess if we all sat at your favoured bar stool, we would not need to think for ourselves.
    Lunatic fringe islamists are to blame for bucket loads of badness. Possibly even the demise of Australian cricketing prowess.

  14. The gubmint’s emissions reduction plans are a mixed bag so far. Apart from the wonders of ‘clean coal’ arriving any day now Malcom Turnbull has just repeated the porky about being ‘on track’ to meet Kyoto targets. Recall that this fortuitous factoid required not one but two administrative decisions; to allow Australia an emissions increase when other countries had to cut and then a spectacular revision on tree clearing credits.

    I’ve lost the link but I’m sure that Bob Brown just suggested that instead of a cap and trade scheme that Howard would impose a levy to fund clean coal research. This could be a ploy for Big Coal to put up and deliver or shut up and get ‘nuked’. Now there is to be an official website on calculating household emissions. Let’s have one on what it takes to run a marble palace in Canberra and fly to constituents every few days.

  15. Yes Megan, first they came for the plastic shopping bags and then the light globes and then…..

  16. Has Quiggin ever met with Brian Burke? If so was either a guest of honour? an djust how much slime can Howard dish up on the Ruddster?

  19. In fact, the whole enzyme approach to making alcohol from cellulose is doing a bait and switch. You can actually ferment ethanol directly, it’s just a lot slower and lower yielding. I distinctly remember a biology lesson at school many decades ago, in which the teacher (also a chemist) reminisced about a friend of his who had fermented a pair of rope soled sandals just to see if it could be done.

    Making the process “efficient” is only improving one leg of the system, which is why the enzymes or acids are needed with their own energy inputs in turn. But if you allow larger stocks of work in process, taking their time, you don’t need the other less efficient legs. And, of course, anything not converted still has fuel value for the process itself.

    Incidentally, some reading around has suggested that a good approach might be to make butyric acid by fermentation, then make propane from that (like making methane from acetic acid by destrcutive distillation with caustic soda).

  20. BilB, RR has another thumping debunking of ethanol on his website:
    The Handy-Dandy Khosla Refuter

    VK: According to the majority of studies, corn ethanol has an energy balance between 1.3-1.8 while gasoline is substantially worse, at about 0.8 (since it takes energy to extract, transport, refine and handle gasoline).

    Doesn’t it take energy to plant and harvest corn, ferment the ethanol, refine it, and transport it? Of course it does. Except with gasoline, the planting and fermenting have already been done by nature. The harvesting involves drilling a hole in the ground and extracting an energy rich, water-insoluble mixture that takes a fraction of the energy to refine that ethanol takes.

    …

    VK: Energy balance is the wrong question. Greenhouse gas emissions per mile driven is the right question.
    Those questions go hand in hand. In fact, they are inversely proportional. The lower the energy balance, the higher the overall greenhouse gas emissions for the process. For an energy balance of 1.06, you have a 6% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Along with that, we get more pesticide and herbicide runoff into our waterways, increased soil erosion from expanded corn production, and we all get to pay more for our food.

    We can do better. If we put half the effort into supporting conservation measures that we do into supporting corn ethanol, we could make a significant reduction in our fossil fuel usage. But, there isn’t any money to be made in that, so this option tends to be ignored.

    Remember that George W. Bush is a big supporter of ethanol.

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