February 2008 Archives
I have encountered a number of people who have expressed opposition to corn ethanol because they feel that it is wasting food by turning it into a fuel. You can imagine my surprise when I found an advertisement for a ‘multi fuel’ stove that that actually burned whole corn kernels. What made it all the more astonishing was that dry corn kernels are the cheapest fuel available, costing even less than natural gas per BTU. I think that says something about the productivity of the American farmer or perhaps the low value we have for using corn as food.
Burning wood to heat a living space goes back to the discovery of fire. However, it’s not without its inconveniences, the primary one being the need to tend the fire. One needs to put the right amount of fuel on the fire and continue to feed it on a regular basis so that the heat it produces is consistent and so that the fire doesn’t go out and need to be restarted. The advent of the wood pellet stove made it possible to reduce the need for a fire tender by feeding the pellets from a hopper automatically as needed. It can even adjust the fuel supply depending on the heating requirements. In some ways, the arrival of the pellet stove made burning wood nearly as convenient as oil or gas for heating. It does require another step be taken in the preparation of the wood, namely grinding it up and forming it into a consistent pellet size so that it will feed automatically into the wood stove. It’s not quite as convenient as a gas furnace because you still have to buy, store, and schlep heavy bags of wood pellets to the stove and fill the hopper about once a day, but it’s much better than a traditional wood burning stove from a convenience standpoint.
When I visited an ethanol plant recently, I was gratified to know that about 1/3 of the corn by weight that was not converted into ethanol was used as animal feed in the form of wet distiller’s grain. Not only that, but since all of the hollow calories of the corn, namely the starches, had been removed, it was a quality feed with high concentrations of protein, fat, and other nutrients. So the guilt of seeing food being turned into fuel was somewhat offset by realizing that about 1/3 of it was still going to be used as food, albeit as an animal feed. It’s important to recognize that about 70% of all corn produced in the U.S. is used for feeding livestock.
I had never felt too strong an objection to using corn for fuel. I tend to look at all biomass as a form of energy and whether you eat it, burn it to stay warm, or make fuel out of it, the effect is the same. If anything, it should make us appreciate how much energy we use in forms other than food to support our modern lifestyles. Much to the chagrin of many Americans, our average citizen has an energy consumption rate of 333M BTU/yr, or about twice what most modern cultures have. If our population were more densely arranged, making mass transportation more practical, or if we all lived closer to the equator, making home heating less necessary, we would likely have a smaller per capita carbon footprint.
In any event, with corn prices skyrocketing past 1/3 of their historic high adjusted for inflation, we’re hearing a lot of objections about wasting food by turning it into fuel. I haven’t heard anyone expressing relief for the farming communities that had to endure sub $2/bushel prices for their corn for the past decade. At one time, a bushel of corn had the same value as a shirt. We’re still a long way from that even with $5/bushel corn. Corn hit a high $14.60/bushel in 1974 adjusted for inflation in terms of today’s dollars.
Let me get back to the corn stove. Natural gas has historically had a price advantage for heating homes. Except for a short period of mismatch between supply and demand, the cost per BTU for natural gas has been more favorable than for oil or electricity. But corn seems to trump them all. Imagine that, burning food is less costly than burning fossil fuels or wood. It really made me wonder what was going on. You can see the values in the table below:
** recent prices (Feb 08'); subject to variation
I should also mention that the column for electric heating assumes resistive heating, but better performance can be achieved with a heat pump, assuming that the climate will favor the use of a heat pump.
The table above is very interesting because it shows corn is not only cheaper than wood to burn, but it’s cheaper than every other fossil fuel on a cost/BTU basis. The only thing that’s cheaper is coal, which at $60/ton comes out to be about $2.50/MBTU and that price is only if you can buy it by the train car load. You’d have to double or triple that price for residential delivery. That speaks volumes about whether corn is priced appropriately. Any food substance that can be burned as a heating fuel more cheaply than virtually any other common fuel tells me that society doesn’t place much value on it. So instead of worrying about increasing corn prices, it could be that corn prices over the past decade have been incredibly low and are just catching up with where they should have been.
This brings up an interesting question. If a human can live on a diet of 2400 kcal (i.e. food calories) per day, how does that much energy compare with what is needed for heating one’s home? Knowing that there are roughly 4 BTU/kcal, a normal food budget for one person is 9600 BTU/day. This means that there are enough food calories in a bushel of corn to sustain a person for 52 days, but only enough to heat his home for 12 hours, on average.
Should we be using corn as a heating or transportation fuel? I guess if you are of the opinion that ‘biomass is biomass’, then it shouldn’t matter whether a farmer grows corn, switchgrass, or trees. It’s all the same process of turning sunlight into carbon and so one should not be so concerned with corn’s other potential uses if the cost per BTU makes it an economical choice as a fuel. I know that there are other issues involved, such as the need for herbicides, pesticides, water, and fertilizer. All these costs get amortized over the price of corn grown per acre and if you can get more usable BTUs per acre from corn than you can from an energy crop then it may be the most efficient way to produce biomass energy, at least for today.
Moving away from the unsustainable practice of digging up and burning biomass that has been buried for millions of years toward living on a balanced energy budget will help humanity to understand that the energy used for food, transportation, and heating fuel is all inter-related. Today one cannot make that connection because oil, natural gas, and coal cannot be eaten. Someday they will be exhausted, and any fuel will likely originate from biomass that can be a food, or otherwise competes with food for land on which to be grown.
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Burning wood to heat a living space goes back to the discovery of fire. However, it’s not without its inconveniences, the primary one being the need to tend the fire. One needs to put the right amount of fuel on the fire and continue to feed it on a regular basis so that the heat it produces is consistent and so that the fire doesn’t go out and need to be restarted. The advent of the wood pellet stove made it possible to reduce the need for a fire tender by feeding the pellets from a hopper automatically as needed. It can even adjust the fuel supply depending on the heating requirements. In some ways, the arrival of the pellet stove made burning wood nearly as convenient as oil or gas for heating. It does require another step be taken in the preparation of the wood, namely grinding it up and forming it into a consistent pellet size so that it will feed automatically into the wood stove. It’s not quite as convenient as a gas furnace because you still have to buy, store, and schlep heavy bags of wood pellets to the stove and fill the hopper about once a day, but it’s much better than a traditional wood burning stove from a convenience standpoint.
When I visited an ethanol plant recently, I was gratified to know that about 1/3 of the corn by weight that was not converted into ethanol was used as animal feed in the form of wet distiller’s grain. Not only that, but since all of the hollow calories of the corn, namely the starches, had been removed, it was a quality feed with high concentrations of protein, fat, and other nutrients. So the guilt of seeing food being turned into fuel was somewhat offset by realizing that about 1/3 of it was still going to be used as food, albeit as an animal feed. It’s important to recognize that about 70% of all corn produced in the U.S. is used for feeding livestock.
I had never felt too strong an objection to using corn for fuel. I tend to look at all biomass as a form of energy and whether you eat it, burn it to stay warm, or make fuel out of it, the effect is the same. If anything, it should make us appreciate how much energy we use in forms other than food to support our modern lifestyles. Much to the chagrin of many Americans, our average citizen has an energy consumption rate of 333M BTU/yr, or about twice what most modern cultures have. If our population were more densely arranged, making mass transportation more practical, or if we all lived closer to the equator, making home heating less necessary, we would likely have a smaller per capita carbon footprint.
In any event, with corn prices skyrocketing past 1/3 of their historic high adjusted for inflation, we’re hearing a lot of objections about wasting food by turning it into fuel. I haven’t heard anyone expressing relief for the farming communities that had to endure sub $2/bushel prices for their corn for the past decade. At one time, a bushel of corn had the same value as a shirt. We’re still a long way from that even with $5/bushel corn. Corn hit a high $14.60/bushel in 1974 adjusted for inflation in terms of today’s dollars.
Let me get back to the corn stove. Natural gas has historically had a price advantage for heating homes. Except for a short period of mismatch between supply and demand, the cost per BTU for natural gas has been more favorable than for oil or electricity. But corn seems to trump them all. Imagine that, burning food is less costly than burning fossil fuels or wood. It really made me wonder what was going on. You can see the values in the table below:
| Fuel Type |
Fuel Price Per Unit** |
Unit Type | Units for 1M BTUs |
Cost @ 100% Eff. |
Efficiency of heater |
Cost to Produce 1M BTUs |
Avg. monthly cost assuming 90M BTU/yr |
| Dry Corn | $4.61 | Bushel | 2 | $9.22 | 80% | $11.53 | $86.44 |
| Natural Gas | $1.17 | 100 cu ft | 10.3 | $12.05 | 85% | $14.18 | $106.33 |
| Wood | $200.00 | cord | 0.0607 | $12.14 | 70% | $17.34 | $130.07 |
| Wood Pellets | $0.12 | lb | 125 | $15.00 | 80% | $18.75 | $140.63 |
| LP Gas | $1.64 | gallon | 11 | $18.04 | 80% | $22.55 | $169.13 |
| Fuel Oil #1 | $2.82 | gallon | 7.1 | $20.02 | 80% | $25.03 | $187.71 |
| Electricity | $0.09 | kWh | 293 | $26.37 | 100% | $26.37 | $197.78 |
** recent prices (Feb 08'); subject to variation
Cost comparisons of various heating fuels.
I should also mention that the column for electric heating assumes resistive heating, but better performance can be achieved with a heat pump, assuming that the climate will favor the use of a heat pump.
The table above is very interesting because it shows corn is not only cheaper than wood to burn, but it’s cheaper than every other fossil fuel on a cost/BTU basis. The only thing that’s cheaper is coal, which at $60/ton comes out to be about $2.50/MBTU and that price is only if you can buy it by the train car load. You’d have to double or triple that price for residential delivery. That speaks volumes about whether corn is priced appropriately. Any food substance that can be burned as a heating fuel more cheaply than virtually any other common fuel tells me that society doesn’t place much value on it. So instead of worrying about increasing corn prices, it could be that corn prices over the past decade have been incredibly low and are just catching up with where they should have been.
This brings up an interesting question. If a human can live on a diet of 2400 kcal (i.e. food calories) per day, how does that much energy compare with what is needed for heating one’s home? Knowing that there are roughly 4 BTU/kcal, a normal food budget for one person is 9600 BTU/day. This means that there are enough food calories in a bushel of corn to sustain a person for 52 days, but only enough to heat his home for 12 hours, on average.
Should we be using corn as a heating or transportation fuel? I guess if you are of the opinion that ‘biomass is biomass’, then it shouldn’t matter whether a farmer grows corn, switchgrass, or trees. It’s all the same process of turning sunlight into carbon and so one should not be so concerned with corn’s other potential uses if the cost per BTU makes it an economical choice as a fuel. I know that there are other issues involved, such as the need for herbicides, pesticides, water, and fertilizer. All these costs get amortized over the price of corn grown per acre and if you can get more usable BTUs per acre from corn than you can from an energy crop then it may be the most efficient way to produce biomass energy, at least for today.
Moving away from the unsustainable practice of digging up and burning biomass that has been buried for millions of years toward living on a balanced energy budget will help humanity to understand that the energy used for food, transportation, and heating fuel is all inter-related. Today one cannot make that connection because oil, natural gas, and coal cannot be eaten. Someday they will be exhausted, and any fuel will likely originate from biomass that can be a food, or otherwise competes with food for land on which to be grown.
At one point in my career, I worked in a division of HP (now part of Agilent Technologies) that made gas chromatographs and other exotic chemical analysis equipment. Gas chromatographs have many uses such as analyzing compounds in the chemical processing industries and for testing air and water quality.
There was a man who would visit our division periodically by the name of James Lovelock. In exchange for providing him with equipment to measure atmospheric concentrations of gases, he would provide us with fascinating lectures on his findings and theories. James Lovelock is perhaps best known for his Gaia hypothesis, which suggests that the Earth is a living organism, governed by the same feedback mechanisms that govern plants and animals. In our own solar system, the earth appears to be the only living planet, that is, one that supports species of plant and animal life. It’s possible other planets in the solar system may have lived at one time but now appear to be dead because they have temperatures and atmospheres that would not support life as we know it.
When I was a student at Penn State, I had the good fortune to take some computer simulation classes from a professor who had written several general purpose simulation languages. A simulation language can be used to predict a state of a dynamic system over time. For example, if you’re trying to determine optimal timing of traffic signals for series of intersections, you can describe the signal timing mathematically and traffic arrivals statistically. This will allow you to adjust the timing and algorithms to see the effects it has on the overall flow through the system and determine whether you may experience traffic congestion or grid lock. Generally speaking, computer simulations are used to describe the behavior of systems too complex to describe with a simple set of mathematical equations.
Not long after the first computer simulation languages appeared, people began using them to describe the behavior of ecosystems. For example, you could simulate the state of a pond that contained only plants and herbivores and how the populations of each species would change as dissolved gases and nutrients were introduced in the water as the seasons changed. Then you could see what happened to the population of the plants and herbivores if you introduced a change to it such as the introduction of carnivores. Sometimes a simulation model would predict the complete destruction of the ecosystem after such a change. If so, it could be that the model was correct, and if you performed the actual experiment and confirmed that it did in fact occur, then you know the model was accurate. But if you ran the actual experiment and the outcome was different than the simulation, then you could assume that the simulation model was flawed. Not content to work with small ecosystems, ambitious researchers began to attempt to simulate the earth’s entire ecosystem. The main problem they ran into was that they could never come up with a model that did not eventually show the complete annihilation of the planet. Even if they took their models and ran them during a period of history, the model would predict an outcome that we could tell from the historical record did not actually occur. This outcome suggests that there are feedback mechanisms at work in our planet that we don’t fully understand. In other words, it gives credence to the Gaia hypothesis.
For any dynamic system to achieve stability, one or more negative feedback mechanisms are required. A negative feedback mechanism is the name for using one or more output parameters of the system to control its state. For example, the thermostat in your house forms part of a negative feedback system since as the temperature rises above a setpoint, it shuts off the furnace, which causes the temperature to fall. At some threshold value, the falling temperature causes the furnace to come back on again. This is what’s meant by negative feedback, that is, a regulating mechanism ordering the opposite of what caused a condition to occur in order to achieve some stable set point. All living organisms have negative feedback mechanisms that are necessary to ensure the organism’s health and survival. For example, when a person is hungry, it causes him to eat. When a person has had enough and feels full, he eventually stops eating. Without this feedback mechanism, he'd either starve or eat himself to death. Similarly, your body temperature is controlled by a negative feedback loop to maintain it at a very constant temperature despite changes in the environment’s temperature.
In addition to negative feedback loops, there are also positive feedback loops. Positive feedback loops are usually considered bad, because they cause the system to become unstable and ‘run to the rail’ in engineering parlance, and that usually ends in some cataclysm. Wealth accumulation appears to be its own positive feedback mechanism, because the more you acquire, the easier it is to get more of it. Similarly, the less you have, the more likely you are to remain in that state. Taxes help to reverse this condition today in a slightly more civilized manner than periodic revolutions and the overthrowing of monarchs did in the Middle Ages. Therefore, taxation is a form of negative feedback to achieve some acceptable limits on wealth accumulation and poverty.
It appears that the Earth does have a number of interacting feedback loops that work to regulate the life on the planet and we are not completely sure how they all interact. A major concern today is that human behavior of pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels that have been sequestered for millions of years could be straining these feedback mechanisms in a way that will eventually turn the earth into a place that can no longer sustain the human species. If we push the limits of these regulating mechanisms too far, some fear we may turn the earth into a dead planet, unsuitable for life of any kind and not even another billion years of evolution would cause humans or some similar intelligent species to reappear. This could happen if the negative feedback loops are no longer able to cope with increased atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. When a negative feedback mechanism fails, it usually causes a system to enter into a regime where a positive feedback loop arises and ‘runs to the rail’, so to speak. We don’t have a way to know if we’re in the process of doing this or if we may have already done it and just don’t know it yet due to time lags in the system.
While contemplating these feedback loops, I realized that the earth naturally sequesters its carbon in the form of oil and coal, and that this is not a sustainable long term behavior because all living species need to exchange carbon for survival. If the earth sequesters carbon for a long enough time, it will be likely to cause the planet to die and remain dead like the other planets in our solar system. I wondered if there were any mechanisms the earth used for returning sequestered carbon to the surface to insure it doesn’t all get buried eventually. Nature’s only other way get carbon buried in the earth back to the surface is volcanic activity. However, volcanoes don’t move very much carbon back to the atmosphere. In fact, the estimates are that they only release a small fraction of sequestered carbon in comparison to human activity. Humans are responsible for 200,000 times more carbon release to the atmosphere than volcanoes.
For the first time in history, a species has evolved on earth that can reverse this sequestration of carbon by digging it up and burning it. It made me wonder if humans have arrived on the scene to perform this necessary task. After all, we are the only force of nature capable unburying massive amounts of carbon. Are humans helping the earth replenish atmospheric carbon levels to insure the survival of life on earth? Is our seeming inability to conceive of a way to stop using fossil fuels all part of this plan? If this is the case, what would be the eventual outcome of the human species when the job is done? Perhaps we will find out. If we are on a course to make the planet inhospitable for mankind, it should take only a few decades to find out. The peak oil theory states that we’ve already extracted about half of the petroleum there is to find and have put it back into the atmosphere. Even if we were able to curtail the growth in fossil fuel consumption levels to get back down to 1990 consumption rates, we’ll still continue to put the rest of the accessible sequestered carbon into the atmosphere in just a century or two. This is a blink of an eye in geological time.
I realize how far-fetched this theory must sound. But it may not be that much of a stretch to those who find the Gaia hypothesis plausible in the first place. Examples of long term symbiotic relationships between parasites and hosts are numerous, even essential, in nature. But so are examples of hosts that eventually succumb to pathogens.
The human population explosion that has occurred in the last few centuries can be traced in part to our ability to understand and deal with pathogens that had historically limited human population growth. Another important factor has been the discovery of energy in the form of fossil fuels that allows us to inexpensively feed and sustain this growing population. This begs the question of whether the rise of humanity is a net asset to the viability of the planet and other species on it or if we are a new pathogen that has grown too clever and too quickly for the earth to survive us.
There was a man who would visit our division periodically by the name of James Lovelock. In exchange for providing him with equipment to measure atmospheric concentrations of gases, he would provide us with fascinating lectures on his findings and theories. James Lovelock is perhaps best known for his Gaia hypothesis, which suggests that the Earth is a living organism, governed by the same feedback mechanisms that govern plants and animals. In our own solar system, the earth appears to be the only living planet, that is, one that supports species of plant and animal life. It’s possible other planets in the solar system may have lived at one time but now appear to be dead because they have temperatures and atmospheres that would not support life as we know it.
When I was a student at Penn State, I had the good fortune to take some computer simulation classes from a professor who had written several general purpose simulation languages. A simulation language can be used to predict a state of a dynamic system over time. For example, if you’re trying to determine optimal timing of traffic signals for series of intersections, you can describe the signal timing mathematically and traffic arrivals statistically. This will allow you to adjust the timing and algorithms to see the effects it has on the overall flow through the system and determine whether you may experience traffic congestion or grid lock. Generally speaking, computer simulations are used to describe the behavior of systems too complex to describe with a simple set of mathematical equations.
Not long after the first computer simulation languages appeared, people began using them to describe the behavior of ecosystems. For example, you could simulate the state of a pond that contained only plants and herbivores and how the populations of each species would change as dissolved gases and nutrients were introduced in the water as the seasons changed. Then you could see what happened to the population of the plants and herbivores if you introduced a change to it such as the introduction of carnivores. Sometimes a simulation model would predict the complete destruction of the ecosystem after such a change. If so, it could be that the model was correct, and if you performed the actual experiment and confirmed that it did in fact occur, then you know the model was accurate. But if you ran the actual experiment and the outcome was different than the simulation, then you could assume that the simulation model was flawed. Not content to work with small ecosystems, ambitious researchers began to attempt to simulate the earth’s entire ecosystem. The main problem they ran into was that they could never come up with a model that did not eventually show the complete annihilation of the planet. Even if they took their models and ran them during a period of history, the model would predict an outcome that we could tell from the historical record did not actually occur. This outcome suggests that there are feedback mechanisms at work in our planet that we don’t fully understand. In other words, it gives credence to the Gaia hypothesis.
For any dynamic system to achieve stability, one or more negative feedback mechanisms are required. A negative feedback mechanism is the name for using one or more output parameters of the system to control its state. For example, the thermostat in your house forms part of a negative feedback system since as the temperature rises above a setpoint, it shuts off the furnace, which causes the temperature to fall. At some threshold value, the falling temperature causes the furnace to come back on again. This is what’s meant by negative feedback, that is, a regulating mechanism ordering the opposite of what caused a condition to occur in order to achieve some stable set point. All living organisms have negative feedback mechanisms that are necessary to ensure the organism’s health and survival. For example, when a person is hungry, it causes him to eat. When a person has had enough and feels full, he eventually stops eating. Without this feedback mechanism, he'd either starve or eat himself to death. Similarly, your body temperature is controlled by a negative feedback loop to maintain it at a very constant temperature despite changes in the environment’s temperature.
In addition to negative feedback loops, there are also positive feedback loops. Positive feedback loops are usually considered bad, because they cause the system to become unstable and ‘run to the rail’ in engineering parlance, and that usually ends in some cataclysm. Wealth accumulation appears to be its own positive feedback mechanism, because the more you acquire, the easier it is to get more of it. Similarly, the less you have, the more likely you are to remain in that state. Taxes help to reverse this condition today in a slightly more civilized manner than periodic revolutions and the overthrowing of monarchs did in the Middle Ages. Therefore, taxation is a form of negative feedback to achieve some acceptable limits on wealth accumulation and poverty.
It appears that the Earth does have a number of interacting feedback loops that work to regulate the life on the planet and we are not completely sure how they all interact. A major concern today is that human behavior of pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels that have been sequestered for millions of years could be straining these feedback mechanisms in a way that will eventually turn the earth into a place that can no longer sustain the human species. If we push the limits of these regulating mechanisms too far, some fear we may turn the earth into a dead planet, unsuitable for life of any kind and not even another billion years of evolution would cause humans or some similar intelligent species to reappear. This could happen if the negative feedback loops are no longer able to cope with increased atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. When a negative feedback mechanism fails, it usually causes a system to enter into a regime where a positive feedback loop arises and ‘runs to the rail’, so to speak. We don’t have a way to know if we’re in the process of doing this or if we may have already done it and just don’t know it yet due to time lags in the system.
While contemplating these feedback loops, I realized that the earth naturally sequesters its carbon in the form of oil and coal, and that this is not a sustainable long term behavior because all living species need to exchange carbon for survival. If the earth sequesters carbon for a long enough time, it will be likely to cause the planet to die and remain dead like the other planets in our solar system. I wondered if there were any mechanisms the earth used for returning sequestered carbon to the surface to insure it doesn’t all get buried eventually. Nature’s only other way get carbon buried in the earth back to the surface is volcanic activity. However, volcanoes don’t move very much carbon back to the atmosphere. In fact, the estimates are that they only release a small fraction of sequestered carbon in comparison to human activity. Humans are responsible for 200,000 times more carbon release to the atmosphere than volcanoes.
For the first time in history, a species has evolved on earth that can reverse this sequestration of carbon by digging it up and burning it. It made me wonder if humans have arrived on the scene to perform this necessary task. After all, we are the only force of nature capable unburying massive amounts of carbon. Are humans helping the earth replenish atmospheric carbon levels to insure the survival of life on earth? Is our seeming inability to conceive of a way to stop using fossil fuels all part of this plan? If this is the case, what would be the eventual outcome of the human species when the job is done? Perhaps we will find out. If we are on a course to make the planet inhospitable for mankind, it should take only a few decades to find out. The peak oil theory states that we’ve already extracted about half of the petroleum there is to find and have put it back into the atmosphere. Even if we were able to curtail the growth in fossil fuel consumption levels to get back down to 1990 consumption rates, we’ll still continue to put the rest of the accessible sequestered carbon into the atmosphere in just a century or two. This is a blink of an eye in geological time.
I realize how far-fetched this theory must sound. But it may not be that much of a stretch to those who find the Gaia hypothesis plausible in the first place. Examples of long term symbiotic relationships between parasites and hosts are numerous, even essential, in nature. But so are examples of hosts that eventually succumb to pathogens.
The human population explosion that has occurred in the last few centuries can be traced in part to our ability to understand and deal with pathogens that had historically limited human population growth. Another important factor has been the discovery of energy in the form of fossil fuels that allows us to inexpensively feed and sustain this growing population. This begs the question of whether the rise of humanity is a net asset to the viability of the planet and other species on it or if we are a new pathogen that has grown too clever and too quickly for the earth to survive us.
As biomass interest begins to take hold as gas and fossil fuel prices continue to rise, one might wonder; why is biomass better than fossil fuels? This question first crossed my mind when I realized that burning wood chips, corn, ethanol, or switchgrass (all common biomass fuels) releases Carbon Dioxide (CO2) just like burning gasoline or natural gas.
Yes, it is true that burning biomass fuels releases CO2, and yes CO2 is a primary concern for global warming and pollution. The real differences in sustainability, and the "clean tech" nature of bio mass, is that it can be produced locally which saves on transportation costs, it doesn't have to be drilled out of the ground or strip mined like coal, and most importantly that the CO2 being released from biomass is not new to the atmosphere. Lets expand on this last point. When I say that biomass does not release new Carbon Dioxide I mean that the CO2 in plants that are being burned is a part of our life sustaining balanced atmosphere, and that it was recently absorbed from the atmosphere by those same plants that are now being burned. There is no net gain in CO2 from growing plants and then burning those same plants, the Carbon Dioxide being stored and then released is going through a balanced cycle.
The real concern with burning fossil fuels is that CO2 that is not a part of our balanced ecosystem is being drilled up and released into the atmosphere which creates unbalance and global warming. For hundreds of thousands of years there has been a process of sequestration of CO2 by the mass die offs of dinosaurs, plants, and other living matter. As humans mine, burn, and release these fuel sources CO2 is added to the system in a non cyclical way that our current plant life cannot sustain and convert through photosynthesis. The primary fear is that we will reach a tipping point where CO2 levels become unsustainable for human life to exist. This process will also induce changes in weather patterns, water levels, and ecosystem destruction.
By burning biomass CO2 levels remain constant and net out in a way that does not significantly alter the earth's environment. Every year there is a pattern of CO2 levels rising and falling globally, and this can be attributed to the life cycles of plants growing and then dying off. This ebb and flow is purely natural on an annual basis, the concern is that over the past hundred years as man has begun introducing CO2 from fossil fuels there has been a steady increase in addition to the ebb and flow of seasonal CO2 emissions. This increase could be limited if biomass products came into mass production and use. The stipulation is that they would have to be created using non-fossil fuel energy which ultimately means that we would be using plants to harvest solar energy.
Yes, it is true that burning biomass fuels releases CO2, and yes CO2 is a primary concern for global warming and pollution. The real differences in sustainability, and the "clean tech" nature of bio mass, is that it can be produced locally which saves on transportation costs, it doesn't have to be drilled out of the ground or strip mined like coal, and most importantly that the CO2 being released from biomass is not new to the atmosphere. Lets expand on this last point. When I say that biomass does not release new Carbon Dioxide I mean that the CO2 in plants that are being burned is a part of our life sustaining balanced atmosphere, and that it was recently absorbed from the atmosphere by those same plants that are now being burned. There is no net gain in CO2 from growing plants and then burning those same plants, the Carbon Dioxide being stored and then released is going through a balanced cycle.
The real concern with burning fossil fuels is that CO2 that is not a part of our balanced ecosystem is being drilled up and released into the atmosphere which creates unbalance and global warming. For hundreds of thousands of years there has been a process of sequestration of CO2 by the mass die offs of dinosaurs, plants, and other living matter. As humans mine, burn, and release these fuel sources CO2 is added to the system in a non cyclical way that our current plant life cannot sustain and convert through photosynthesis. The primary fear is that we will reach a tipping point where CO2 levels become unsustainable for human life to exist. This process will also induce changes in weather patterns, water levels, and ecosystem destruction.
By burning biomass CO2 levels remain constant and net out in a way that does not significantly alter the earth's environment. Every year there is a pattern of CO2 levels rising and falling globally, and this can be attributed to the life cycles of plants growing and then dying off. This ebb and flow is purely natural on an annual basis, the concern is that over the past hundred years as man has begun introducing CO2 from fossil fuels there has been a steady increase in addition to the ebb and flow of seasonal CO2 emissions. This increase could be limited if biomass products came into mass production and use. The stipulation is that they would have to be created using non-fossil fuel energy which ultimately means that we would be using plants to harvest solar energy.
While traveling through the Colorado mountains on the way to Steamboat
Springs this winter, I noticed that a growing number of the evergreens
have taken on a rusty shade of brown. This is a result of mountain pine beetle damage
which has claimed more than a million acres of lodgepole pine trees in
Colorado and threatens to kill virtually all mature lodgepole pines in
the state in the next 3 to 5 years.
I was curious about the eventual outcome of these trees because dead trees pose a significant wildfire threat as they allow fires to quickly spread out of control. I thought that the state should provide some incentive for the trees to be harvested and used either for heating or some other commercial use before they go up in smoke and take mountain properties with them. So I asked my friend, Dan Bihn, a leading expert in renewable energy and biomass, if there were any plans along those lines. I was surprised to find that despite the fact that these trees are dead and would be better off harvested, the cost of doing so makes it impractical. Part of it stems from the fact that Colorado doesn’t have much of a logging industry and there are no access roads to go in and remove the trees once they have been cut. And building logging roads is controversial because it induces people to go 4-wheeling in areas that were previously off limits.
In this week’s Rocky Mountain News, there was an article about converting these dead trees to ethanol with a new cellulosic ethanol plant near Denver to be built by Lignol Innovations and Suncor. The cost of the plant will be $88 million, including a $30 million grant from the Department of Energy. The annual output will be 2 million gallons per year (MGPY) of ethanol from processing 100 tons of wood per day, including lodgepole pine trees that have been killed by the mountain pine beetles. I began to do the math on this and realized that this plant, despite costing nearly 50% more than the $60 million Front Range Energy corn ethanol plant I wrote about previously, will produce ethanol at only 1/20 the rate of the corn ethanol plant. Of course, the wood should be nearly free, which would help with profitability. The price per bushel of corn is starting to approach the ethanol price that can be produced from it. If there wasn’t a ready market for the wet distiller’s grain as livestock feed, it might be difficult to make a profit from corn-based ethanol. Firewood in this area costs around $200/cord and each dry cord of pine weighs about a ton, so if the plant had to pay that much for wood, it would exceed the value of the ethanol produced by a factor of two.
In the case of the cellulosic ethanol, I thought I’d
do a quick comparison to the BTU ratio of energy in vs. energy out just
to see as a percentage how much wood is being converted to ethanol. At
2 MGPY, the daily output of the plant would be about 5500 gallons per
day. This is equivalent 420 MBTU/day in ethanol. The input to the
process in the form of 100 tons of wood, using a value of 6500 BTU/lb,
would represent an energy content of about 1300 MBTU/day. This means
that the ethanol energy coming out is about 1/3 of the wood energy
going in. It makes one wonder if it wouldn’t be more advantageous to
grind up these trees into pellets and use them for home heating,
although the potential demand for wood pellets is not as high as for
ethanol. There is another byproduct of this process called lignin
which is used to make lubricants, but I’m not sure how much value that
adds overall to the process. Also not stated in the article or on
Lignol’s website is whether the plant uses an external source of fuel
like natural gas, or if a portion of the wood can be used to generate
the heat required by the process. If all the heat and electricity
could be generated by a portion of the wood that is used as input to
the process, it can have a very high overall energy balance. That’s
particularly important because critics of the ethanol industry like to
point out that there are fossil fuels used in its production, so energy
balance and carbon dioxide from fossil fuels works to counteract the
benefits of the renewable nature of the ethanol’s raw materials.
Making 2 million gallons (approximately $4M worth) of ethanol per year would have a very long payback on $88M investment even if the raw materials were free. Not taking into consideration paying the plant’s staff or the interest on the investment, it would take over 20 years to pay for itself. If the investment had only a 5% interest rate that would require more than $4 M/year in debt service, so it would not even be a break even endeavor. I’m pretty sure that much of the justification behind this plant is as a proof-of-concept since the Lignol technology has only been demonstrated at a pilot-scale facility in British Columbia previously.
Range Fuels of Broomfield, Colorado was also mentioned in the article. Range Fuels has a process for converting cellulosic material to ethanol, but decided that the source of wood in Colorado was not reliable enough to locate a plant in Colorado because the wood is spread over thousands of square miles. The reason they located their first plant in Georgia was to be where raw materials from the forestry industry are more readily available. The initial production at the Soperton, Georgia plant is expected to produce at 20 MGPY initially and is planned to ramp to 100 MGPY eventually. The cost of the Range Fuels initial plant is expected to be $225M so although it will cost 2.5 times as much as the Lignol plant, it is expected to produce 50 times as much ethanol per year when at full capacity.
Ethanol has perhaps the best potential to transition society from its gasoline addiction. E85 ethanol can be used today in any flex-fuel vehicle as a gasoline substitute. E85 is available for 20 to 30% less than the price of gasoline at some gas stations in Colorado. It is hoped that with increased ethanol demand there will be an increase in cellulosic ethanol research to help stimulate the supply. Using cellulosic material to make ethanol would remove a common objection people have to using corn-based ethanol, i.e., it is made from a food source which increases food prices. Having said that, I’ll explain in a future article why corn today represents a reasonable feedstock for the ethanol industry while working toward cost breakthroughs on cellulosic ethanol production.
I was curious about the eventual outcome of these trees because dead trees pose a significant wildfire threat as they allow fires to quickly spread out of control. I thought that the state should provide some incentive for the trees to be harvested and used either for heating or some other commercial use before they go up in smoke and take mountain properties with them. So I asked my friend, Dan Bihn, a leading expert in renewable energy and biomass, if there were any plans along those lines. I was surprised to find that despite the fact that these trees are dead and would be better off harvested, the cost of doing so makes it impractical. Part of it stems from the fact that Colorado doesn’t have much of a logging industry and there are no access roads to go in and remove the trees once they have been cut. And building logging roads is controversial because it induces people to go 4-wheeling in areas that were previously off limits.
In this week’s Rocky Mountain News, there was an article about converting these dead trees to ethanol with a new cellulosic ethanol plant near Denver to be built by Lignol Innovations and Suncor. The cost of the plant will be $88 million, including a $30 million grant from the Department of Energy. The annual output will be 2 million gallons per year (MGPY) of ethanol from processing 100 tons of wood per day, including lodgepole pine trees that have been killed by the mountain pine beetles. I began to do the math on this and realized that this plant, despite costing nearly 50% more than the $60 million Front Range Energy corn ethanol plant I wrote about previously, will produce ethanol at only 1/20 the rate of the corn ethanol plant. Of course, the wood should be nearly free, which would help with profitability. The price per bushel of corn is starting to approach the ethanol price that can be produced from it. If there wasn’t a ready market for the wet distiller’s grain as livestock feed, it might be difficult to make a profit from corn-based ethanol. Firewood in this area costs around $200/cord and each dry cord of pine weighs about a ton, so if the plant had to pay that much for wood, it would exceed the value of the ethanol produced by a factor of two.
In the case of the cellulosic ethanol, I thought I’d
do a quick comparison to the BTU ratio of energy in vs. energy out just
to see as a percentage how much wood is being converted to ethanol. At
2 MGPY, the daily output of the plant would be about 5500 gallons per
day. This is equivalent 420 MBTU/day in ethanol. The input to the
process in the form of 100 tons of wood, using a value of 6500 BTU/lb,
would represent an energy content of about 1300 MBTU/day. This means
that the ethanol energy coming out is about 1/3 of the wood energy
going in. It makes one wonder if it wouldn’t be more advantageous to
grind up these trees into pellets and use them for home heating,
although the potential demand for wood pellets is not as high as for
ethanol. There is another byproduct of this process called lignin
which is used to make lubricants, but I’m not sure how much value that
adds overall to the process. Also not stated in the article or on
Lignol’s website is whether the plant uses an external source of fuel
like natural gas, or if a portion of the wood can be used to generate
the heat required by the process. If all the heat and electricity
could be generated by a portion of the wood that is used as input to
the process, it can have a very high overall energy balance. That’s
particularly important because critics of the ethanol industry like to
point out that there are fossil fuels used in its production, so energy
balance and carbon dioxide from fossil fuels works to counteract the
benefits of the renewable nature of the ethanol’s raw materials. Making 2 million gallons (approximately $4M worth) of ethanol per year would have a very long payback on $88M investment even if the raw materials were free. Not taking into consideration paying the plant’s staff or the interest on the investment, it would take over 20 years to pay for itself. If the investment had only a 5% interest rate that would require more than $4 M/year in debt service, so it would not even be a break even endeavor. I’m pretty sure that much of the justification behind this plant is as a proof-of-concept since the Lignol technology has only been demonstrated at a pilot-scale facility in British Columbia previously.
Range Fuels of Broomfield, Colorado was also mentioned in the article. Range Fuels has a process for converting cellulosic material to ethanol, but decided that the source of wood in Colorado was not reliable enough to locate a plant in Colorado because the wood is spread over thousands of square miles. The reason they located their first plant in Georgia was to be where raw materials from the forestry industry are more readily available. The initial production at the Soperton, Georgia plant is expected to produce at 20 MGPY initially and is planned to ramp to 100 MGPY eventually. The cost of the Range Fuels initial plant is expected to be $225M so although it will cost 2.5 times as much as the Lignol plant, it is expected to produce 50 times as much ethanol per year when at full capacity.
Ethanol has perhaps the best potential to transition society from its gasoline addiction. E85 ethanol can be used today in any flex-fuel vehicle as a gasoline substitute. E85 is available for 20 to 30% less than the price of gasoline at some gas stations in Colorado. It is hoped that with increased ethanol demand there will be an increase in cellulosic ethanol research to help stimulate the supply. Using cellulosic material to make ethanol would remove a common objection people have to using corn-based ethanol, i.e., it is made from a food source which increases food prices. Having said that, I’ll explain in a future article why corn today represents a reasonable feedstock for the ethanol industry while working toward cost breakthroughs on cellulosic ethanol production.
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