Fixing the Energy Crisis

Emergency First Aid for Global Warming

• BLS needs to revise their Occupational Outlook Handbook to provide "Telecommute - OK" "Telecommute - unworkable" for each job title/description. Examples: construction laborer, plumber, field service tech would be unworkable. OK? Almost any office job except on-site receptionist.
• A tax break per telecommute position for companies who fill "telecommute -OK" jobs with American telecommuters. (either employees based in America or American expat nationals)
• Carbon tax and road usage taxes assessed against employers per position deemed suitable for telecommuting where employers force people to show up in person based on an "average" commute in a metro area.
• Tax deductions for employers who pay for employee public transit

• Banning incandescents in favor of CFL/LED/etc has already happened, it simply hasn't taken effect yet. It probably should be accelerated to make the phase-out of incandescent start NOW. We might also want to look at banning anything less efficient than the superefficient Luxim plasma lights or high-efficiency (some aren't all that efficient) LEDs for street and parking lot lighting.
• We need to ramp up wind and solar NOW, starting with getting some wind turbine and solar panel factories in the USA capable of handling the demand an aggressive wind and solar electrification program. This would be a first step towards Scientific American's Solar Grand Plan. IIRC, we can get to about 30% of power from intermittent sources before we start running into load-balancing problems because of them, we're a long way from that point.
• We can also get to work on starting to replace the regional power grids with the national smartgrid the Grand Plan envisions... we can plan it for hydro or compressed air storage and if the ultracap electric energy storage is ready in time, we can use it instead of more conventional storage.

• In areas where the electricity has been greened, we can mandate electric heat pumps for new building construction, that oil-based building heating where used be replaced only with electric heating and provide incentives to do this before oil heaters actually wear out.
• We need anti-NIMBY Federal legislation that says essentially if state / local / HOAs can't prove that a proposed environmental energy-related project has a tangible and real negative environmental impact, that they MUST approve permits and that any specific local laws that prohibit such a project are null and void.
• We also need to find a way for all US building codes to require "best practices" energy efficiency for all new building construction and a way to encourage retrofitting for existing construction.
• Phase out the sale of non-Energy Star appliances over the next 2 years in categories where Energy Star certifications exist.

• We need new CAFE standards that can't be met by anything but electric, gas-hybrid, diesel, or alternative combustion technologies and a program that will make existing gas vehicles disappear from the roads as soon as they're turned in as trade-ins... something like the current buy-back programs some states have.
• We need a law requiring biofuels to be carbon-neutral or better with an EROEI of 2+ and be environmentally sustainable to qualify for government subsidies, and that they be certified as such by a government agency or designated NGO. Palm oil is climate neutral until one considers the slash and burn method of preparing land for palm crops by turning the local vegetation into CO2. Corn/soy ethanol would fail the EROEI test. Using ag waste as biofuel feedstock instead of plowing it back into the soil has a long-term negative effect on soil fertility. I'm fairly certain that sewage-based algae biofuel feedstock can be made to work, but the problems are difficult and the measures discussed will buy us time to get them fixed.

• There's enough crap in the atmospheric pileline that even if we managed to cut carbon emissions to zero today, things will still get worse for decades to come.
• We're going to wind up having not only to transition off fossil fuel, but we're going to have to put major research funding into large-scale tests to find out which geoengineering proposals actually work.
• We also must prepare for rising waters and crop failures and population migrations from low-lying areas, but that isn't a "100 days" project, this can start a few years from now when the need for this preparation is more obvious.

For discussion of global climate change discussion by real scientists rather than attractively packaged corporate and right-wing propaganda, go to Real Climate. If you want to discover who is behind bogus "facts" that say that "global warming is imaginary", go here. Short summary: the "scientific anti-global warming consensus" is an ExxonMobil public relations program and anything that looks like "grass roots" opinion is either astroturf or people repeating ExxonMobil-funded talking points and too clueless to realize it. Anti-global warming "science" is just as good as "creation science" or "intelligent design". . . i.e. right-wing superstition labeled as science for people not bright enough to know better. More information on ExxonMobil shi lls here.

Anyone who needs talking points on global warming or hasn't quite gotten that the scientific consensus says it's going on and that the "scientists" providing the ExxonMobil side of the debate are as out of step as "creationist" biologists should go here.

Research into alternative energy has been going on for generations. We should know what the best answers are by now. What is needed to make renewable energy a viable replacement for fossil fuels is to deliberately and consciously pick a handful of the best technologies which are closest to reality and push them the rest of the way. The main purpose of this document is to spot the most viable ones and call attention to them.

I recommend using algae biomass technology to literally turn sewage into biodiesel as is discussed below. Sewage and carbon dioxide aren't exactly scarce natural resources, and biodiesel is inherently eco-friendly.

The most expensive thing with respect to algae biomass would be retrofitting a sewage treatment plant to grow algae the way the City of Sunnyvale did, though they are simply using it for secondary treatment, not for growing strains suitable for biomass.

The fact that the Bush Adminstration does not think we need space power satellite solar energy (see below) should not discourage anybody else who knows we need to think "outside the box" if we really want to turn the energy crisis into a solvable problem.

Blimp-to-space technology is at the point where a good push should make it commercially viable, and it can be used to move solar cells into orbit cheaply. While JP Aerospace may have the edge regarding ultra-high altitute blimp-to-space technology cheap enough to make solar power satellites affordable, I believe that this is only by default and any large corporation or government can match or beat what they are planning. Or alternately, a large corporation or government can buy the company and move it out of the USA.

One interesting possibility is Pulse Detonation combustion engines. This basically uses supersonic fuel detonation to replace ordinary subsonic combustion. There is ongoing research into this area, as it can drastically increase the efficiency of jet engines and reduce their impact on global warming. The second goal of this project is to reduce the cost of delivering a payload to LEO by a factor of 10 by 2010 and another factor of 10 by 2025. There is ongoing research in this area by both NASA and aerospace contractors. Definite dates on this are impossible to project at this point, there are difficult engineering problems to solve here. Wikipedia article.

I will be reviewing pyrolysis from cellulose wastes some time in the future.

I am currently researching the feasibility of putting together a startup company for the purpose of research and development in the area of more efficient processes for extracting oil from algae to reduce the cost of the final oil product, hopefully drastically.

The intent is to create marketable products and technology. Potential investors willing to fund this kind of project in the Canada (developing in Canada is the easiest R&D cost-cutting measure for an English-speaker) should go to the SvoTech site. Since this is for a commercial venture, the technology under development will be discussed only under NDA, not displayed or discussed on the site.

Yes, I know about Aquaflow's apparent success in converting sewage to biodiesel and I congratulate them (or you if anyone from there is reading this), my comments are here. I'll just say my plans are unchanged unless I find out certain things about their technology I don't expect to see, my comments in the link just before this sentence should explain why. If they've got unbeatable technology, I'll say so. . . and there won't be any need for me to start a company in this area, I'll find other projects to pursue.

oil independence - closer than you think (Score:5, Informative)
by alizard (107678) <my_email_address> on Wednesday June 30, @09:49PM (#9578580)
(#9578580: original slashdot post this is based on)
(http://www.ecis.com/~alizard)

The numbers for replacing foriegn oil with home-grown algae biodiesel are:

• $308,000,000,000 to build the algae farms (from Briggs cited below based on doubling the NREC numbers - my own analysis says $600,000,000,000 based on hypothetical 20,000 20K/barrel/day facilities and hard numbers wherever available, which they mostly aren't.)
• $46,200,000,000 / year operating costs ($38,000,000,000)

You can look at them for yourself at the University of New Hampshire site here [unh.edu] This is largely based on research successfully completed at DOE in 1998 and shelved because cheap oil looked like forever back then. You can find the DOE reports from the UNH link. Biomass algae is a more efficient biodiesel source than food grains, etc. because a single-cell organism doesn't require wasting energy and nutrients on making the rest of the plant (stalks, roots, etc.) and grows in hours, not months. The difference between food grain biomass and algae biomass is the difference between 1-3 barrel / acre / year and 91-360 barrels / acre / year. (see the UNH site for detail) Biodiesel you can burn in a car / truck / plane. I've heard reports that even food grain-based biodiesel is now sold in some places at prices comparable to "bin Laden's best" Middle East-produced diesel fuel. How much cheaper is sewage-grown biodiesel going to be in mass production?. I think we need to find out. NOW. NEWS: A New Zealand company claims to have an industrial scale process extracting usable quantities of biodiesel from random natural algae strains. Interesting as proof of concept, though their use of natural algae should reduce capitalization costs balanced against what I would expect to be a MUCH higher extraction cost. I suspect that this will be much more useful for wastewater cleanup, i.e. a niche market like Greentech's, than it will be for producing ultra-high industrial volumes of biodiesel. But it's an interesting start.

Other than that, remember $250/ton shipping to LEO? (Low Earth Orbit) using blimps as orbital launch vehicles? Counter-intuitive, but what they've got looks very workable. Hint: air resistance is pretty negligible over 200K feet. [slashdot.org] This matters because most of the projected cost for a SPS is getting the solar cells to orbit, so if the launch cost drops drastically, so does the SPS price. Follow the links from the slashdot article, to JP Aerospace and to evaluations by experts. From what I saw at the JP Aerospace site, the only reason why it's going to take 7 years for them to get to orbit is lack of funding. They're getting DOD experimental contracts for high-altitude surveillance vehicles, but even with this, they're bootstrapping and depending largely on volunteer labor. The NASA space power satellite (SPS) [nasa.gov] system was planned on a basis of $400/kg shipping cost. $250/ton is a lot cheaper than $400/kg. A solar power satellite network could replace coal and oil wherever it is being burned for electric utility power. No pollution, and no quantum jump in technology required for either building solar cells or getting to orbit. No fuel costs, some fixed maintenance costs. The SPS project can replace the coal burning contribution to global warming and oil in the places which are buying it from the Middle East to turn generators as well as run vehicles. Note on NASA URL. . . it's moved to the Wayback Machine, since apparently, somebody at NASA noticed that a good idea the Bush Administration killed was still available on the Web and tried to dump it down the memory hole.

The only thing keeping these technologies from becoming a viable alternative in the very near term is bad habit on the part of what passes for our business and governmental leadership.

Our "leaders" are obsessed with the ideas that:

• the only way to get energy is the traditional method of drilling/digging it out of the ground.
• that the only places to get it are Third World locations we would be better off being completely uninvolved with.
• they are so emotionally invested in the idea of doing business as they consider usual that they are willing to spend trillions of dollars of our money in order to continue this absurdity.
• they are happy to ignore the environmental impacts of burning the rest of the world's available oil, other than to contract for band-aid fixes which will coincidentally make money for the people who get the contracts.

Even if the cost estimates for biomass oil and the SPS are off by a factor of 10, they look awfully good next to the projected $16T (yes, that's $16,000,000,000,000 - and yes, that's supposed to be 12 zeroes) dollar cost of "business as usual"... based on an unproven and unlikely assumption that "enough" oil is there to be found. (see below) This is an assumption even the International Energy Agency, the people who were calling on spending $16T on new oil development no longer buys into.

The Bush Administration's idea of helpful energy strategy was defunding the Space Power Satellite project back in 2001, and anyone who follows the news knows that their energy strategy based on Middle East oil becomes more irrational as time goes on.

Concrete steps to replace fossil fuel permanently?

For the oil side, how about:

• "The UNH Biodiesel Group is working on improving the technology for growing algae on waste streams for biodiesel production. UNH has filed a provisional patent application and is seeking partners to develop the technology." Where are the Feds? What we need to do is get this working and start building lots and lots and lots of these facilities. What UNH is doing is essentially, development, not research. This is the kind of thing that needs funding, not research that might make it possible to replace some imported oil or reduce its consumption in a generation or so.
• Federally mandating conversion of sewage treatment plants to use biomass algae as a treatment stage for sewage as soon as this is packaged and ready to go.
• tax credits for oil companies that buy / process / resell biodiesel.
• temporary price supports in case the oil cartel gets desperate enough to try to put the new energy replacements out of business by dropping their oil prices.
• A promise to the rest of the world that the algae oil biomass production technology and other biomass technology that might be more suitable to the Third World will be exported as soon as it is ready to go.

For the space side:

• direct government funding or Federal loan guarantees. How long would it take if JP Aerospace to get to orbit with the entire budget they project for their orbital program in the bank? I think that a party with the money might be pleasantly surprised by the answer. (if I were doing this for real, release of funding would be staged and based on project milestones, of course)
• payload guarantees (e.g. the government will guarantee payment for X-million pounds per year of payload to any vendor(s) who can prove the ability to get it to LEO for, say, under $10/pound?) would be a good start.
• start contracting for lots and lots of space-rated full-wafer solar cells to several semiconductor fabs and designate JP Aerospace as the prime contractor to get them to orbit.
• build some rectenna stations to receive the power and find a good optimum design or range of design choices.

The alternative: The International Energy Agency wants $16 TRILLION DOLLARS [softcom.net] to be spent on new oil exploration and development and facilities to "prevent" energy crisis. This makes the happy assumption that there's enough oil to solve the problem. A look at these charts peak oil will convince you that there isn't. Here is more cheery news about our energy future with oil from the Oil Depletion Analysis Centre,

The $16T does NOT include the military / security (including "homeland" security) costs of dealing with the Middle East or other Third World locations where what's left of the world's oil is sitting. It makes more sense to work towards leaving the oil in the ground than to deal with the natives who live on top of it.

Personally, I'd rather see a lot less than $16T spent on something useful that will create a lot of jobs across both a wider range of vendors and a wider range of skill levels, prevent global climate change from getting worse (biomass is carbon-neutral, as is space solar power)and using resources renewable by their very nature. Putting 500,000,000 acres under cultivation on land marginal for any other kind of agriculture (this is less than 1% of the area of the USA) and/or converting sewage treatment plants and/or building facilities to grow algae in ag runoff will take a lot of people. Enough to create full employment in America, I think. For a few years, anyway.

Why should we have to put up with running out of energy when we can grow it or passively extract it?

When do we need to do this?

I believe that the solutions discussed here are the right ones. They are all based on things we know how to do.

• We know how to grow algae and turn it into a sort of crude oil. This can be turned into biodiesel or processed further into gasoline or propane using conventional oil refineries and can be distributed through the regular service station infrastructure.
• We know how to build blimps, and building extremely high-altitude cargo blimps isn't all that much of a stretch of current technology. The JP Aerospace people are already working with the stuff at the experimental level, they are building high-altitude blimps, not just talking about what they might look like someday. That's why I think they deserve help to get them to orbit. . . and us the rest of the way to cheap space transportation.
• We know how to build solar arrays workable in space.
• We know how to transmit electric power as microwave energy.
• NASA doesn't have the final word on the structure required for a space power satellite. Perhaps millions of these modules strung together with cables might do the trick.

This is the price of "business as usual", plus the chance that your oil money may be returned to you in the form of a terrorist nuke or biowar device in your back yard. While there is still discussion of global climate change and even argument about what effect human activites have on it, one thing is certain. If we continue to burn fossil fuel at the current and projected rates, we will find out just how true the warnings we have been getting from the scientific community are. That's the other price of "business as usual".

$182/barrel oil in a few years is the best form of "business as usual" our political and business leadership can come up with. That does not make it your patriotic duty to go along.

Personally, I'm not all that interested in finding out from experience what will really come out of continuing "business as usual". We need to start implementing better alternatives while there is still time to pursue them. When "business as usual" goes catastrophically sour, we will need immediate proven alternatives, otherwise the lights go out and food production grinds to a halt. If the only choice was between "business as usual" and civilization grinds to a halt, $182/barrel and pollution might be acceptable. We should be willing to try almost anything else at this point. Instead, we have access to technologies which just might solve the problems of both energy availability and pollution simultaneously. What's not to like?

There are probably several other workable combinations of solutions as well, though I think I've found the most cost-effective ones. Prove to me that you have a better integrated solution and I'll probably push yours instead. Why aren't our leaders looking for "anything" which might work? Better ask them this question.

Personally, I think it's because our leaders are the kind of people who only know what their "experts" tell them about technology instead of understanding it themselves, and they frequently pay these "experts" to tell them what they want to hear. And the experts they listen most carefully to are the ones packaged by the same corporations where their campaign money comes from. Ultimately, we need to be led by people who understand how technology works, not people who need to have it explained to them, but that's another article. What's here is cool stuff that doesn't have major corporate backing, even though it is something of rather vast potential private sector profit. I've believed for many years that the first trillionaires will be the people early into space industrialization and exploiting asteroid resources. Perhaps one of those future trillionaires is reading this article now.

The weirdest part of the "invest in American energy" scenario described above, the majority of businesses based in America prosper, especially "big oil".

Major oil companies switch refinery capacity to biodiesel and keep right on doing business as usual, no longer concerned with future supply and no longer concerned about a possible conversion to a hydrogen economy. Whether or not they want to invest directly in energy farms is up to them.

Yes, they've got big investments in the Middle East. They can write them off and carry their losses forward for the next few years... i.e. it's very possible that they could escape paying corporate income taxes completely over this for several years. (disclaimer: I am not an accountant, if you need numbers on this, hire one.) If current law doesn't permit this, laws can be changed.

Plus, their capital might show a very significant ROI on a space power satellite network soon enough to make a difference to the compensation for oil industry CEOs *currently in office*. How long would it take to get a return on investment on a Space Power Satellite project shipping solar cells to L5 or L7 as quickly as they can be manufactured by wafer fab houses? Particularly since stock in such a project would probably be valued in multiples of the capital invested in ways we haven't seen since the dot.com boom.

We can push these into the tarpits now.

• The Space Elevator is obsolete. Projected per-pound payload costs for the elevator are much higher than $250/ton. Remember the Art Deco conceptions of "the future", complete with flying cars and domed cities? That's where the elevator belongs. It will probably never be built, because there's no special reason to build it.

• Forget hydrogen. Hydrogen is NOT an energy source. It's an energy storage and distribution medium for energy, which can be fossil fuel or from any energy source that can be turned into electricity. It's an EXPENSIVE distribution infrastructure and vehicle conversion, and given that biodiesel can be readily made available, I can't think of any reason to do this on a national scale that doesn't involve the search for campaign contributions. Hydrogen fuel cells have some interesting niche applications... backup power generation, for instance. But hydrogen's not a great way to store power for motor vehicles. Biodiesel provides more energy per volume, and does not require high pressure or exotic hydrides for storage. This means a biodiesel-fuelled car is a lot less likely to blow up if crashed into than a hydrogen-fuelled car and will be making fewer stops at service stations for refueling. A diesel car isn't all that different from a gasoline engine vehicle, and existing gas engine assembly lines can be realigned to make diesel engines.

  The key to making a hydrogen infrastructure make sense is to reduce the cost of electricity to a fraction of its current level, to the point where converting the natural gas infrastructure and the service station infrastructure and motor vehicles to run on hydrogen makes sense.

  I believe making universal hydrogen conversion cost-effective to be impossible, and might be even at a zero cost per KWh. It's a really cool set of technologies, but that doesn't mean we're better off using it for everything. The vision of universal hydrogen energy is just another blind alley, like tar sands or the Space Elevator. Or the War in Iraq. Just another idea that didn't work out.

  Anyone who would needs to wade through the numbers to be utterly convinced that hydrogen is not a solution should click here.

• Forget conservation as the long-term energy solution. It is justified for relatively scarce materials that can be recovered through recycling or dangerous materials we don't want in our landfills, but saving power is not a viable long-term energy strategy. The money that could be put into more expensive / higher efficiency illumination, etc. is better invested in alternatives which will create new energy supply, not save energy. We need to extract more terawatts (1,000 gigawatts, or 1,000,000 megawatts) of energy from the sun, not save gigawatts of fossil fuel.
  
  Stopgap Conservation Measures
  However, there are easy, low cost stopgaps that can be used to reduce energy consumption while a replacement strategy is pursued to which there is no significant downside.
  • Banning incandescent lights in favor of fluorescent/compact fluourescent lighting or white-light LEDs. When I say banning, I mean by creating energy efficiency standards that current generation incandenscents can't meet. here is an example of why a standards based approach instead of banning specific technologies is in order.
  • banning permanently installed electric heating except for heat pumps for residential / commercial
  • banning electric ranges and ovens are a good start.
  • Require that all new residential and commercial construction be superinsulated, R-100 or better. Require that current construction be retrofitted over a decade, with government-guaranteed loans and grants for low-income rental housing to offset the cost. One thing which would help a lot would be R&D for the purpose of making Aerogel(tm) cheap enough to use as building insulation. R-1000+ building insulation would make the problem of heating / cooling building far simpler and less energy intensive, for practical purposes, heat leakage either inward or outward would be a thing of the past.
  • Do the same with respect to high-efficiency heating and cooling systems.
  • We should look at banning CRTs in computers and televisions, except for special cases where commercial graphics artists and others have a business or research-based need for the kind of superaccurate color rendering only high-end CRT monitors can provide.
  • telecommuting:

    Out of the cars that clog American roads every rush hour, how many go to jobs which could just as well be done by telecommute from anywhere with Internet access?

    The fastest and most direct method for reducing fuel consumption would be a carrot and stick approach... employers whose office jobs can be done by telecommute who implement this get a tax break, employers whose office jobs can be done by telecommute get a tax increase in the form of having a good chunk of their externalized costs show up in their tax bills... employers who can't have employees telecommute (say a onsite service and repair business... or a manufacturing business) get exempted for the portion of their employees who MUST be onsite. Of course, no tax breaks under this program should go to employers who want to meet the telecommute requirements by offshoring the jobs or by phony reclassification of in-house jobs to ones that must be done in person. Other advantages would be that with traffic jams basically a thing of the past, the need to upgrade urban highways and transit systems would also be part of history, and after a few years, a part of history nobody will want to return to.

    DOL could add a line to each of the job description in their "Dictionary of Occupational Titles"... suitable (NOT suitable) for telecommuting. Any employer who doesn't want to pay tax penalities for having employees come to work in person who don't need to as determined by this has to fill out forms to justify this and the tax penalities only get waived if the explanation makes sense.

    That would reduce the share of oil used in work-related transportation a hell of a lot faster than reimplementing and enforcing CAFE and beyond would.

  • Reintroduce CAFE, and crank up fuel efficiency standards to the point where no conventional internal combusion engines (with the possible exception of Honda CVCC) can meet them to force manufacturers to go beyond the conventional internal combustion engine. Little known fact: modern diesel auto engines have fuel efficiency comparable to gasoline hybrids, and these diesel engines don't require huge, expensive, hard to recycle battery packages. Of course, a diesel hybrid might be a very interesting thing.

The rules we grew up with were designed to make it unnecessary to build new power plants. We have to force the construction of renewable energy power production infrastructure a bit faster than humanly possible to make it possible to replace only the parts of the current fossil-fuel based infrastructure which are giving us both environmental and political trouble. In the future I describe here, you'll continue to pull up to gas pumps whose fuel comes from tanker trucks from oil refineries, you'll probably want a diesel SUV to replace a gas SUV, you'll get your solar-powered electricity from the grid instead of your rooftop solar cells or fuel cells. I think that ultimately, we will wind up with unlimited non-polluting energy cheaper than it is today.

If you want to "save mankind", or possibly, your own ass from the consequences of global climate change or the oil running out, push algae biomass and a space power satellite network, not recycling. Actually, cheap energy is a good thing for materials recycling anyway, since it reduces the cost of the physical processes used in recycling.

With a program such as described here, SUVs will be running on bio-diesel in the future instead of going away.