"The Oil We Eat" - Very Interesting Essay From Harper's

[hatrack]

EDIT

"Energy cannot be created or canceled, but it can be concentrated. This is the larger and profoundly explanatory context of a national-security memo George Kennan wrote in 1948 as the head of a State Department planning committee, ostensibly about Asian policy but really about how the United States was to deal with its newfound role as the dominant force on Earth. "We have about 50 percent of the world's wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population," Kennan wrote. "In this situation, we cannot fait to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world benefaction."

"The day is not far off, " Kennan concluded, "when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts."

If you follow the energy, eventually you will end up in a field somewhere. Humans engage in a dizzying array of artifice and industry. Nonetheless, more than two thirds of humanity's cut of primary productivity results from agriculture, two thirds of which in turn consists of three plants: rice, wheat, and corn. In the 10,000 years since humans domesticated these grains, their status has remained undiminished, most likely because they are able to store solar energy in uniquely dense, transportable bundles of carbohydrates. They are to the plant world what a barrel of refined oil is to the hydrocarbon world. Indeed, aside from hydrocarbons they are the most concentrated form of true wealth - sun energy - to be found on the planet.

As Kennan recognized, however, the maintenance of such a concentration of wealth often requires violent action. Agriculture is a recent human experiment. For most of human history, we lived by gathering or killing a broad variety of nature's offerings. Why humans might have traded this approach for the complexities of agriculture is an interesting and long-debated question, especially because the skeletal evidence clearly indicates that early farmers were more poorly nourished, more disease-ridden and deformed, than their hunter-gatherer contemporaries. Farming did not improve most lives. The evidence that best points to the answer, I think, lies in the difference between early agricultural villages and their pre-agricultural counterparts - the presence not just of grain but of granaries and, more tellingly, of just a few houses significantly larger and more ornate than all the others attached to those granaries. Agriculture was not so much about food as it was about the accumulation of wealth. It benefited some humans, and those people have been in charge ever since."

EDIT

http://www.evworld.com/view.cfm?section=communique&newsid=5000

[cprise]

1. Agriculture is the clue

"Enough biodiesel to replace all petroleum transportation fuels could be grown in 11,000 square miles, or roughly nine percent of the area of the Sonora desert."
http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html

[treepig]

7. 11,000 square miles is a huge footprint

that's 11 rhode island's

plus, that's just the algae ponds themselves, i suspect that each pond will require support roads, maintenance sheds, administrative offices (etc) that will require an equal amount of land.

also, they estimate a cost to build the system at $60,000/ha. but they seem to neglect the cost of the land in the first place. since the proposed algal ponds are to be "scattered around the country" some will have to be build on high cost real estate (easily double the construction costs). therefore, the initial capital costs would probably be in the range of $500 billion.

in any event, if the country really wanted to build these, it could afford them (at least on a limited scale, witness the $166 billion down the iraq rathole without anyone batting an eye). plus it would generate some fairly well-paying jobs. however, who has the money to finance them? probably the same old oil companies (but still, if it reduces dependence on foreign oil, it's worth trying on some scale).

[cprise]

10. So is the land used to grow cattle feed

But we know that largely isn't necessary when utilizing natural prarie would be more efficient.

While you are right to ask about infrastructure costs, I encourage you to compare them to the costs of an equivalent H2/renewable/nuclear infrastructure.

The 11K sq. mi. figure for fuel-algae is meant to illustrate the possibility of satisfying all of our current careless consumption. I wonder about the land costs myself (something oil doesn't have to deal with) and whether the ability to clean up agricultural runoff would be a mitigating factor. The fuel may need to cost more at the pump than originally thought, say $2.25 - 3.00 per gallon, which is not bad at all when you consider diesel's better MPGs; another factor in being able to afford land would be the byproduct of valuable organic fertilzer. When you consider such factors, then farming fuel-algae doesn't seem much more daunting than farming soy.

I think its clear what we have in algae farming is a major potential energy source that should be used in concert with other sources. Volkswagen and now Diamler and ADM are now heavily researching using vegetable oil and depolymerization oil together as a next-generation clean fuel called Biotrol; it is a biodiesel with smaller polymer chains. VW has announced they have no intention to even develop electric hybrids in the near future; their lead with existing clean diesels is comfortable enough.

Interesting aside: Honda was so concerned about offering a high-tech diesel car, they designed an engine from scratch and invented a new aluminum-casting technology for it. The new i-CTDI engine does 0-60 in about 9.3 sec and still gets an average of 52 MPG... that's in the mid-size Accord:
http://www.honda.co.uk/diesel/engine.html

http://www.topgear.com/honda/

I think it will be interesting to see how all the recent payoffs in these technologies will play out. Europe and Japan have considerable public-sector support for actual renewable technology while the US does not.

[NNadir]

9. Assuming there is water, fertilizer, transport, tolerance for smog,

efficient conversion of the biomass into products, acceptable means of disposing of the waste products, good weather, a decline in salt accumulation owing to irrigation, no pest investations, no blights, no natural disasters...

Sounds easy.

Everything sounds easy until you set out to do it.

I strongly suspect that there is NO such magic bullet as safe and reliable biodiesel.

[cprise]

11. If you had read the article

...and the material it links to, you would know these issues have mostly been addressed.

Water can be supplied by the ocean, and salt returned to it.

Smog is addressed by a uniform code for clean diesel fuel, allowing modern emission controls on the vehicles (we still must wait until 2006 for this here in the US). It's already been addressed in other developed countries.

Waste products? Fertilizer? This farming method is intended to reduce those problems from the start, putting algae farms down stream from agricultural runoff and using sewage as feedstock. You end up with a modified form of waste-treatment, or a source of organic fertilizer.

Natural disasters? Good weather? I suppose a tornado could eat up all my algae. That would, um, suck. :)

I'll grant there's no magic bullet, but the most successful solutions may be ones that closely follow the energy cycle of of life itself. Compared to H2, all this actually is easy and very efficient. Europe has no sizable fuel-algae investment, yet in a country like France over 5% of all diesel fuel sold is already biodiesel and the share is still growing... that's in a country where over 60% of all new passenger cars sold are diesels.

Biodiesel displaces large amounts of fossil fuel now. Fuel-algae is just a means to greatly increase yield over existing feedstocks rapeseed and soy; It is the latter two crops currently in use, if anything, that would have already prevented the viability of biodiesel due to the kind of concerns you mention.

[NNadir]

12. So you are going to pump seawater into the sonoran desert?

How much fuel will that enterprise eat up. You will (truck?) the salt back to the sea I assume. Will you just dump it in the surf to make a local dead sea on the shore, or will you load it on barges and dump it way out sea. How much energy will that enterprise consume?

I can sort of undertand that open pit sewer that the algea will grow in, and hopefully this will have no disease implications, especially in a case where there is agriculture nearby to provide this runoff. I mean just think what a pleasure real windy day might bring to our tomatoes. Mmmmmmm. I'm sure too that no NIMBY will come up since the eco-system in the sonoran desert is not really important to anyone and the people who might live there now can just move.

Then of course we have to refine all of this biodiesel and I'm sure that the word "bio" in the diesel will make this a safe and pleasant process for those living near the refineries. I'm sure too that the recovery of energy will be 100%.

As for waste, yes this is a problem for bioreactors everywhere. If you heat organic materials you get toxic, often carcinogenic materials. This is the general reason that inhaling smoke is not good for you.

I'm sure too that the vast open desert sized sewer for biodiesel will never have die offs owing to contamination by parasitic species, but if they do, presumably we can all stay home for a year while we drain and refill the sewer.

No, to me this seems like a particularly dirty and dangerous of making a dirty burning fuel.

It is much much much better to harvest existant biomass, add organic garbage (plastic, cardboard and paper), and wet sludge, and subject the whole mess to supercritical water oxidation to get CO and hydrogen, run it over a Co catalyst to get MeOMe and really live clean. This existing technology is almost certainly more efficient and safe that the sonoran septic pit.

Even better we might succeed to develop a biotin mimicing system for electrolytically reducing carbon dioxide to make organic acids that can be hydrogenated to give light fuels. This technology will not be very far off, I think.

[treepig]

13. i suppose the sonoran desert was just proposed rhetorically

like you mention, there are problems with using it for algae pond purposes. plus, it's a rather environmentally sensitive area, and the putative backers of this technology (i.e., environmentally conscious persons) would never allow the desert to be desecrated in this manner.

i think even the authors of the unh website recognized that the sonoran desert site wasn't going to be the answer for large-scale adoption of this technology. instead they proposed sites closer to the organic waste (perhaps sewage from nyc, manure from factory-farmed chickens in maryland or pigs in nebraska?). anyhow, i believe that nnadir may have already addressed my question - and that's why wouldn't the organic waste be directly converted into oil, using the "anything into oil" technology that has been mentioned in this forum several times? (and there was an article in discover magazine i'm too lazy to find a link to right now - but that's basically the "supercritical water oxidation" method you refer to right?)

i remember one post, once again probably by nnadir, describing a number of drawbacks of the swo technology. one of them i believe was generation of hazardous, and basically unusable because of a lack of market, side products. sulfuric acid, i believe was one - now i'm wondering if perhaps the algal method would avoid this problem (for example, the sulfur would be used for incorporation into amino acids and other metabolic molecules by the alga, instead of being oxidized to acids?)

in any event, it would be nice to see some small scale demonstration plants built, using various of these technologies, so that "real-world" evalution could be done - because now there seems to be endless hypothetical pros and cons that will probably never be sorted out in theoretical discussions.

[cprise]

18. You haven't read any of the details

...the links off the UNH paper, which is just a summary and extrapolation of the linked-to studies. The "environmentally sensitive area" is currently a dumping ground for agricultural run-off. The proposal is to use that run-off to produce renewable energy (easily used NOW) and an organic fertilizer. The DOE already ran a successful research algae farm. No doubt we will see some moderately-sized commercial farms soon.

And don't forget, there is a vast dead-zone in the Gulf of Mexico as a result of agricultural run-off. We need studies to see how much land on the Mississippi could be used with this aproach.

Don't freak-out.. The 11k sq km figure was just to illustrate the potentency of the technology, that as a renewable it could meet all current demand. Of course, trying to meet the current demand is a bad idea since we are too wasteful and there should be a mix of energy sources. But compare fuel-algae to other renewables toward meeting today's transportation needs; it's a world of difference. You would have to cover 95% of the U.S. landmass in corn fields for ethanol to match the current gasoline demand alone!

Thermal depolymerization isn't a shortcut, esp. if your wastes are largely phosphates and nitrates. Farming fuel-algae uses waste to realize a net energy increase from photosynthesis. Using soybeans as is common now, 3.2 units of energy are obtained for every 1 unit put into the process; Fuel-algae could raise this by an order of magnitude.

The atmosphere becomes a battery by using plants to exchange oxygen and CO2, just as plants and animals do together. So the vehicles become 'animals' living on fats :)

[jmcgowanjm]

16. Agreeing with NNadir, we can't get enough water to our rice

here in Arkansas. We're building a $319 M pumping station
to take water out of the White River-the MidAmerica's
Everglades according to Bruce Babbit.

Grain production/per capita(and I think overall)
is falling now. Salinization is destroying prime acres now.

Without fertilization-read natural gas to fix nitrogen,
grain production falls from 130bu/acre to 30 bu/acre.

I'll be back with more on this.

BTW-I really want biodiesel to work.

[cprise]

19. Algae grows in salt water, too

Biodiesel already works. Production has been doubling each year since 1999.

It can't be produced everywhere, but it can be scaled up far beyond what we have now with a minimal impact on the land.

You might be interested to read up on the European's experience with biodiesel from rapeseed (related to canola), which they use lots of. They get an energy return of 4.2:1 and farm it specifically for producing renewable energy.

[jmcgowanjm]

20. So we put biodiesel in locomotives/ use trucks for local delivery

http://energycrisis.org/schoolhouse/quest.asp?id=2293

I'm all for it. But the agriculture-no subsidies- of rapeseed cannot be an energy sink.

energy return of 4.2:1 sounds good.

[ixion]

2. This disparity has existed ever since

the separation of State and Agriculture. That is, at one point labor diversified into one group of people who were doing the work, and one (smaller) group of people who were 'managing' the harvest, allegedly for the good of the whole. The problem is that it was never in the best interests of those laboring in the field, but only of those who were managing the harvest.

That was 5000+ years ago.

Do you think we've learned anything since then?

Not really. :-(

[Kolesar]

4. You sound like the interpretive ranger at Mesa Verde NM

--the national park facility near Cortez, Colorado with several eras of prehistoric dwellings.

He maintained that people were better off in the hunter-gatherer sociey. When people developed agriculture, those who guarded the graneries acquired the supreme power to dispense food at the rate they desired. They were the best fed, too.

There was another detail that a diet of beans, corn and squash is not as nutritious as hunting and gathering, so people had vitamin-deficiency diseases.

[ixion]

8. there is defintely something to be said for the hunter

gatherer way of life. Unfortunately, it has all but been made extinct by corporate agriculture. That said, modern 'civilized' society would not have been able to evolve under a nomadic type of communal organization.

Would that be a bad thing? Well, yes and no. It would be bad because technology would not have evolved nearly as fast, but it would be good because I think that it's a more natural way of life, albeit more dangerous.

[NNadir]

17. All we need to revert to a hunter gatherer society is for a few billion

people to volunteer to commit suicide. Anyone here volunteering?

The current population, probably 80% or more is maintained by industrial means.

Experience has shown us an alternative to mass suicides though. The most sucessful means of controlling (and/or) reducing population is the elimination of poverty. This is why much of Europe has a birth rate below the replacement rate. (The solution to this problem, that of decreasing populations, would be to open borders, but that might conflict to the almost universal human fondness for racist thinking.)

That's the trick, how to eliminate poverty and thus reduce population. This is not an easy one to solve, and not one high on the agenda for the Bushies...

[jmcgowanjm]

21. This is not an easy one to solve

And yet it will be.

We are looking at the death of economics which will
be followed by its antecedent, religion.

Ex.-Economists think that an epiphenomenon, currency,
will be able to overcome all physical limits.

The price goes high enough, we'll have all the energy
we need.

And-name one religion that doesn't believe in growing
the population.

[Dissenting_Prole]

22. In the meantime...

"And-name one religion that doesn't believe in growing
the population."

In the meantime...many religions subscribe to some kind of apocalyptic vision of the end of the world, which is exactly the kind of delusional thinking we are going to be better off without in the coming Oil Peak era.

Global Oil Peak doesn't scare me nearly as much as the people who aren't ready for it.

[jmcgowanjm]

23. Yes indeed

[jmcgowanjm]

15. anthropolgy can exactly place ag societies by teeth

With corn/maize the teeth go bad.

Only benefits go to top of hierarchy.

I don't know the links to info though.

[Fovea]

3. A theorist of great brilliance

And much of what he says about the effect of the concentration of wealth is spot on. On the subject of energy, however, Kennan was not able to envision a renewable energy economy and that does skew the argument.

Yes, some needed resources are indeed scarce, but much scarcity is artificially enhanced, such as the price of oil in Chicago currently.
That being said, we should look at what wealth really is.

Some views of wealth do favor the granary and the home acre, but some forms of wealth are harder to quantify. The effect of a peaceful society, the effect of good food, clean water, good health all make the other persistent forms of wealth more salutary.

The granary is not a storehouse of gold, and it is a different flavor of wealth, it is wealth as survivability against the vagaries of nature.

It would take a world effort, but I disagree with Kennan on this dismal strategy. Indeed, the Clinton presidency could not prevent the blow back of policy in the Middle East based not as much on ideology as avarice.

Now China is following our lead. And the demands of Chinese materialism will produce interesting times indeed. We have to unite the world under the banner of sustainability. The fight starts here.

[ramapo]

5. Sobering....There's a book on the subject

Heard the author, Richard Manning, on our local NPR station last week. His book is "Against the Grain". Have it on order from the library. I look forward to a good and scary read.

[BlueEyedSon]

6. Great stuff... here's his book:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0865476225/qid=1076355578//ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i4_xgl14/102-1430902-0620957?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

"Against the Grain : How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization"

[jmcgowanjm]

14. been looking for this article, thanx for posting Hatrack