Posted on 11/16/2005 1:46:45 PM PST by dangerdoc
I am disgusted as I read the news. We buy oil from petty tyrants. South American thugs bad-talk us and threaten to shut off the tap. Middle-East royalty, two generations from living in mud huts fund jihadists who want to cut off our heads. We compete with communist slave-workers for oil driving up the prices. We may or may not be running out of the stuff creating the real possibility that we are going have to find a replacement anyway.
Honestly, our oil economy is going to hurt us at some point. I don’t know if it will be now in the form of sending our wealth out to people who want to harm us or from having to go off the stuff cold turkey at some point in the future. I personally believe it will be the former. I am concerned about oil funded nuclear technology going to oil funded terrorists brought into our country because of our lack of foresight.
Last century a petrochemical economy made sense. This century things are changing and we need to stay ahead of the curve.
If we need to replace oil what should we replace it with?
Hydrogen? Don’t believe what you hear. The best source of hydrogen is petrochemicals. It is not economical to produce, transport or store. Hydrogen fuel cells are not very efficient when you figure in the inefficiency in getting to the vehicle and trying to store enough in the car to get anywhere.
Ethanol? Corn farmers love it but it is too inefficient to produce and we would need to actually give up food production to provide enough.
Biomass? I have spent a few weeks google searching biomass, synthesis gas and associated chemistry. It seems like a reasonable approach. Synthetic gasoline and diesel should be fairly easy to produce on a commercial scale. It would be no more obtrusive than an oil refinery and would use fairly similar technology. It has not been commercially pursued because of the cost. Although synthetic fuels could probably be produced for less than $2 a gallon, the concern is that OPEC would respond by flooding the market with oil and bankrupt any company that invested in this type of technology. I’ve seen some conspiracy theories that the oil companies are trying to suppress biomass but I don’t think that makes sense. The oil companies’ expertise would lead them to dominate the field. Almost every step in conversion exists in modern petrochemical cracking plants. As an added bonus, it would divert money from overseas and back to the farm economy.
I’ve read that Saudi Arabia can deliver oil at less than $10 a barrel and would deplete their reserves as quickly as possible if a reasonable oil replacement were ever seen on the horizon. This is not a conspiracy, just simple economics. They have a limited supply and will work to get as much for it as possible. If a their product will be made useless, they will try to sell all they can while they can. All of this prevents companies from investing in alternative fuel technology even though the prices keep going up.
I really don’t like the government getting involved in economics and I know that the free market will solve the problem eventually but I am very concerned about where our oil dollars are going. I see this as a security issue. Can we begin development of a replacement strategy in a step-wisemannor. Do we need some sort of a price support structure to encourage the development. Do we need to summon the resolve and stop or ban the import of oil. I see real problems with almost any strategy that involves the government.
I am curious about people’s thoughts. I have numbers showing biomass is reasonable from an economic standpoint based on current oil prices.
Specifically I am curious if there are any petrochemical engineers, economists or even politicians out there with an opinion. I can share specifics but there are literally hundreds of pages and everything I have is available on the internet.
That is what the guy in the link in #3 says, you have got to think big, really big.
My point was that you still have the problem of the same inefficiency -- see #80.
Thanks for the link, it will take quite a while to get thru everything on this guy's blog. His links to other blogs are interesting also.
No problem... it was a very sad day for the Internet when that guy stopped blogging.
I agree with you regarding farmers. Part of my interest in biomass is getting money back into the farm economy. My only concern is that it be done in a better mannor than government subsidized ethanol fermentation and distallation.
I am more familiar with ethanol, see above post.
I think the problem with biodiesel is that they are using the heat value of the seed oil as the final measured product, ignoring the other products produced. It's late, let me clarify. You start with a whole plant, take the seed and throw away the rest. You then squeeze the seed and get a little oil, ignoring the left-over protein and carbohydrate. You then treat the oil with a little alkali and end up with a little biodiesel. By the time you calculate planting, fertilizing, pesticide, harvesting, hauling, processing, there is alot of energy and money invested is that tiny fraction of the plant.
But that doesn't mean the oil can be shipped to its point of consumption for $10/barrel. When OPEC tries to raise oil prices by cutting production, all they do is sell less oil at the higher price than they would have sold at the lower price. Restricting output in an attempt to raise prices is one of the more idiotic approaches to doing business. If there was a demand for 100,000 widgets in the world and you could produce them for $1 apiece and your competitors could produce them for $2 apiece, why in the world would you produce only 50,000 of them if you are capable of producing all 100,000?
Not all crude oil is equal either. There are different grades. Some takes significantly more refinement than others. So even thought the cost per barrel may be lower the actual cost of making it usable is higher.
At some price, however, it becomes economical to refine the heavy oil extensively instead of using the light oil.
Ironically, high oil prices introduce an additional negative element to Middle East oil -- because high oil prices result in higher fuel prices, making it more expensive to ship oil from the Middle East to North America via tankers. That's an odd circular effect of prices, isn't it?
The energy required to produce ethanol from grain is substantial. That is true.
But ethanol is not the only useful by-product obtained from grain. Take into consideration the high protein corn mash that makes excellent livestock feed and other food by products. The energy required for producing ethanol is significantly less because ethanol is not a stand alone product and the rest of the process is not waste material. The same goes for soybeans. The study assumes there is only one usable by-product of ethanol and soy diesel production, which is not the case. Significant amounts of the energy used in processing would have been used anyhow to process the grain even if ethanol was not figured into the process.
And the assumption of the study is that only fossil fuel is used solely as the processing energy. Supplementing the fossil fuel with biomass plant waste like corn stalks and wood chips reduces the fossil energy considerably.
Every solution has it's imperfections, including oil.
"The engine doesn't have to be designed to supply those short periods of high demand and then run most of the remaining time at a significantly lower output level - a significantly less efficient operating level."
Ideal for a diesel engine, in other words. The internal combustion engine is being run more like a generator than the motive force behind the drivetrain. That task falls upon the electric engine(s).
"Government price controls to "smooth" it out are even worse."
I was advocating something more akin to a sliding scale "floor" on the price, at $40.00/bbl as opposed to price controls, with any excess dedicated solely to furthering energy independence, whether that would be research, infrastructure or what have you. If the price exceeded this "floor," there would not be any mechanism to stop the price from rising, just as there would be no mechanism to stop crude from falling below that price, the logic of which is based upon the level for break-even or profitability for oil shale. The distribution of these monies, if any, would of necessity have to be divorced from government meddling, fraud, "diversity" mongering and favoritism, in order to reward only the most promising avenues. Assuming the price of crude dropped in response, that would only add more to this fund, creating a virtuous feedback cycle, fueling further research, technological advance and independence from risky sources of supply outside of the country. It may be pie-in-the-sky thinking, but we are very vulnerable at present, as we have seen post-Katrina. This could help transition from an untenable situation. I'm sure there are problems with this, but we have problems now.
Given the time (~10 years) it takes to bring a new area like ANWR online and how quickly the oil market changed in the last 5 years, that does not make any sense. Develop our resources and use the federal royalties and lease sale profits to further the oil shale production and technologies.
1 Trillion Barrels Recoverable of Domestic Transportation Fuels
Please, next time read the report. The use of mash and other by products is factored into the numbers.
Makes sense to me
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