Upon graduation in 1962, most of my close friends joined the first full-year of the Peace Corps. They were to get paid $99/month to spend two years in some God-forsaken location, literally, like French Guinea and Cameroon. My "sacrifice" to toil for the Hutchinson sugar company in Naalehu on the Big Island as a biomass process engineer paid $500/month, and, more importantly, changed my whole life. I bought my first car, a Triumph TR-3. I married Pearl, who was a nurse in the next town, Pahala. We later also spent some time in Kilauea, Kauai, where I met an elderly gentleman who knew my grandfather, leading to The Search for Kenjiro's Grandmothers nearly half a century later.
However, my next few assignments, all in the 1970's, dealt with biomass and biofuels. First, I built a raceway (I'm here at an upgraded facility) to grow microalgae, linked to the emission from a small powerplant. The purpose was two-fold: grow algae which could be processed into a biofuel and utilize the carbon dioxide to reduce climate warming. In the mid-1970's very few had any inkling of this potentially serious environmental problem. There was uneasiness about fluorocarbons affecting the ozone layer and air pollution, but nothing yet about the dangers of carbon dioxide.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates that, in 2015, around 12% of world marketed (bought and sold) energy consumption came from renewable sources (biomass, geothermal, hydropower, solar, and wind).[1] EIA projections suggest that this will increase to 17% by 2040.
In other words, fossil fuels and nuclear fission will continue to provide 83% of our energy usage more than two decades from today.
Biomass has historically supplied a significant share of the world energy consumption, for the period before the Civil war, wood was by far the dominant fuel of choice. That thin gold sliver in the pie chart below? All the wind, solar, geothermal and other clean energy supplied. So much hoopla, but so tiny. Note how large the pie piece is for biomass.
The most promising future biomass is marine algae. We will re-visit this option in Chapter 4 on the Blue Revolution, but to quote a colleague, Jaw Kai Wang, from personal notes (gallons oil / year / acre):
o Corn 18
o Soybean 48
o Sunflower 102
o Palm oil 635
o Marine algae 10,000
What about trees and forests? Sure, they consume carbon dioxide and release oxygen. However, keep in mind that they don't suck up any carbon dioxide when there is no sun. In fact, plants then release carbon dioxide, and worse, they also give off methane, which is 25 times worse than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. And the part no one really says much: trees eventually die, and give back the carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, plus, depending on environmental conditions, release even more methane, so the net balance to global warming is contributory. There is that bridge of time you gain when trees are growing, but there is a limit to that lifetime. Thus, there is some concern about the relative goodness of trees.
More recently, Honua Ola, which wants to burn biomass to generate 21.5 MW on the Big Island, has again run into problems. There is a NIMBY (not in my back yard) syndrome that is plaguing Hawaii, and and world, too. We last week saw this in wind power. But Governor David Ige is supportive and they recently hired as president Warren Lee, former president of HELCO.
What about hydrogen? Read:
THE FUTURE OF CARBON-FREE NEXT GENERATION AVIATION (Part 3: Hydrogen Planes)
The latest seems to be from Singapore. Only a four passenger Element One using a hydrogen fuel cell.
Okay, so what about microalgae, for if Jaw Kai Wang is right, this should just be a matter of time. Well, as difficult as the economics are for simple biomass to biofuels, the complexity expands for microorganisms. Read pages 49-68 of Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Volume 94, October 2018. This option, too, is awaiting the exponential rise of oil prices.
Okay, so what about microalgae, for if Jaw Kai Wang is right, this should just be a matter of time. Well, as difficult as the economics are for simple biomass to biofuels, the complexity expands for microorganisms. Read pages 49-68 of Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Volume 94, October 2018. This option, too, is awaiting the exponential rise of oil prices.
After I retired, I led another team about a decade ago in a five-year study to evaluate for the Department of Energy how competitive marine algae could be for biofuels production. After five years of analysis, we chose not to publish, for the cost was prohibitive. While the more optimistic thought that this technology could be commercialized if oil reached $125/bbl, a couple of respected pessimists thought something over $200/bbl would need to be the target. Oil prices have been depressed now for nearly seven years. Last month petroleum was down below $43/barrel, and is today at around $52/barrel (note the right column).
So what about biomass? It is a green source well-utilized today around the world, especially in undeveloped nations for cooking and such. If, somehow, progressive minds with good financing can develop an effective direct methanol fuel cell, and, in parallel, an efficient catalyst can be found to gasify methane into methanol, I see this pathway as the bridge to an eventual hydrogen economy for ground transport. My discussions with Toyota and Honda representatives tell me that they have decided to go directly to hydrogen, which, I think, is premature.
But the overwhelming factor is the price of oil, which is totally unpredictable. Look at those spikes in the above graph. Yet, if the Chicago Mercantile Exchange is right, you can look forward to $54.46/barrel oil...in December of 2027!
-
