Whatever happened to algae as a biofuel?

It turns out that there are many more practical problems than one would assume. For example, algae gets energy from the sun in order to grow. At more than six inches deep, algae cannot get enough light to grow. So in order to maximize space, some people run algae water through clear pipes, which maximizes sunlight exposure.

The problem is that the pipes are petroleum-based. So the higher oil prices go, the higher the cost of construction becomes, and one can never catch up. It is not rocket science.

Why will biofuels from palm oil, kukui nuts and jatropha not succeed? Farmers look at the equation in a very straightforward way. How much could a farmer expect to make when oil is $200/barrel? Oil weighs approximately 6.8 lbs. per gallon, and there are 42 gallons in a barrel, so each pound of oil is worth approximately 70 cents.

How many pounds of nuts will it take to squeeze out one pound of oil? One could guesstimate that it would take at least four pounds of nuts to squeeze out one pound of oil. That means a farmer could expect to get no more than 18 cents for each pound of raw product.

No farmer would farm palm oil, kukui nuts or jatropha for 18 cents. Not rocket science.

Check out this article about algae and biodiesel.

Here on the Big Island, we are fortunate that we have access to geothermal power. Its base power characteristics will help to stabilize the grid, and will allow more and varied renewable sources of energy to be brought onto the electric grid. Here is an interesting article about electric cars:

Read the rest of the article.

Project Better Place, which has partnered with the state of Hawai‘i to bring electric vehicles powered by renewable energy here by 2012, and which we wrote a lot about recently, just unveiled a video of what battery changing stations might look like and how they work.

Watch the video here.

You drive into a special battery changing bay, and one minute and thirteen seconds later, your car’s discharged battery has electronically been removed and a fully charged one put in its place – so you can drive away. One minute later!

From Gas2.com:

Also, Shai Agassi, founder of Project Better Place, was just named to a pretty impressive list. It’s the Scientific American 10: Guiding Science for Humanity, defined as “ten researchers, politicians, business executives and philanthropists who have recently demonstrated outstanding commitment to assuring that the benefits of new technologies and knowledge will accrue to humanity.”

This Project Better Place is fascinating to me, and how interesting that we here in Hawai‘i are about to become one of the “Better Places.” I look forward to seeing how it all unfolds.

Thanks to Damon Tucker for calling this video to our attention.

Did you read Part 1, The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class? That tells an interesting story of what’s happened to the middle class since the 1970s, and how much harder it is for people to keep up now.

With that background in mind, I think the price of oil rising to $147 per barrel was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Once that happened, some folks could no longer make their house payments, and from there everything started to come apart. People blamed the greedy bankers, hedge fund people, the slicing and dicing of credit instruments, etc. And to a large extent that was true.

But the people on the bottom of the pyramid, the middle class, were already stretched too thin. They had no place to turn. So foreclosures started.

Here in Hawai‘i, we have many of the same problems as the nation as a whole. But, to their credit, our banking institutions stuck to the old-fashioned requirement of qualifying lenders to make sure they could make payments before they lent money. Had they not done that, it would have been much worse.

Now we have to figure out what we are going to do to help our people, and to make Hawai‘i a place our children and grandchildren will be able to afford when they grow up.

The most important consideration is that we depend on oil here for most of our power. We know that we need to get off foreign oil.

Electric cars are an idea that do seem feasible here in Hawai‘i, and we think they will work.

Another idea that keeps being discussed, and one that concerns me, is replacing fossil fuel oil with biofuels. Several years ago, a bunch of us farmers sat in a meeting where biofuels were discussed as a possible new crop for Hawaii’s farmers.

We were told that palm nuts could generate x amount of production per acre and that jatropha could generate x amount of production per acre. We knew these were a soft answer at best.

I believe that oil was close to $100 per barrel then. We did this simple, back-of-the-napkin calculation:

If oil was $100 per barrel, this equals 35 cents per pound. We farmers made a quick calculation: What if it took four pound of stuff (palm nuts, jatropha, kukui nits, whatever) to squeeze out one pound of oil. At $100 per barrel oil, no farmer in his right mind would grow biofuels to get 9 cents/pound for their crop. At $200 per barrel for oil, the farmer would only get 18 cents per pound.

The conclusion then is that by growing jatropha, kukui nut, macadamia nut and palm nuts for biofuel, farmers lose money. No farmer would grow these crops for these returns!

How about the second generation cellulosic biofuels? A couple of things bubble up. They can be produced for $10 – $20/gallon. But the required volume throughput needs to be huge, and the plantings need to be close to the refinery to be efficient.

The Hamakua Coast is very hilly and its high rainfall took a toll on sugar companies; that’s why sugar went out on the Big Island. The location was just not competitive relative to other places in the state of Hawai‘i.

As much as we want to get a liquid biofuel source, we do not think it will work in the long run. Biofuels are not the answer.

Stay tuned for Part 3, where we’ll discuss what the answer might actually be.

An article in The Oil Drum makes some sense of President Obama’s recently announced energy policy, which does look logical and doable to me. It doesn’t chase after hair-brained schemes.

The article starts like this:

The Obama-Biden comprehensive New Energy for America plan will:

• Help create five million new jobs by strategically investing $150 billion over the next ten years to catalyze private efforts to build a clean energy future.
• Within 10 years save more oil than we currently import from the Middle East and Venezuela combined.
• Put 1 million Plug-In Hybrid cars – cars that can get up to 150 miles per gallon – on the road by 2015, cars that we will work to make sure are built here in America.
• Ensure 10 percent of our electricity comes from renewable sources by 2012, and 25 percent by 2025.
• Implement an economy-wide cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2050.

The Obama energy agenda focuses on – and these are not mutually exclusive – efficiency, electrification and the promotion of alternative energy resources. Its five main goals are set up in a way so that success in any one of the five individual areas will reinforce the other four, helping the overall agenda achieve success.

For example, creating 25 percent of the U.S. electricity production from renewable resources (Goal #4) will aid in decreasing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent (Goal #5).

The energy agenda is a welcome change, showing a future outlook that is based, at least to some [small] extent, on the physical realities of the natural resource world. However, from the perspective of net energy, some potential problems do exist. My goal here is to discuss some possible shortcomings of the new administration’s energy agenda from the perspective of net energy….

See the rest of the article here.

The more energy it takes to produce energy, the poorer our society becomes.

The concept of “Net Energy Return on Energy Invested” is one of the most important concepts that will lead us to a safe future.

One of its precepts is that: “Social complexity is based on surplus energy.” The amount of energy left over from what it takes to get that energy is surplus energy – and that surplus energy is what makes our society complex and interesting.

This is why I keep asking why we aren’t trying to force more geothermal energy use. It doesn’t take much energy to produce geothermal energy, and that relationship would be stable for a very long time.

It seems like we should be bringing geothermal online faster, rather than slower. The more we do, the more we learn how to use it.

Chris Martenson describes this whole concept in two short, easy-to-understand videos. Here’s his introduction to the videos:

Here are the two short videos. They are well worth watching.