Funny thing about energy: it’s conserved! At least when the spacetime background is time-translation invariant, which is a very good approximation here in the Solar System. We bring you this reminder because a knowledge of basic physics can occasionally be helpful when formulating public policy.
In particular, biofuels (such as ethanol) and hydrogen are not actually sources of energy — given the vagaries of thermodynamics, it costs more energy to create them than we can get by actually using them, as there will inevitably be some waste heat and entropy produced. Almost all of the useful energy we have here on Earth comes ultimately from nuclear reactions of one form or another — either directly, from nuclear power plants, or indirectly from fusion in the Sun. There is of course direct solar power, but even fossil fuels and biofuels are simply storage systems for energy that can be traced eventually back to sunlight. The question is, what is the best way of capturing and using that sunlight — where “best” is going to be some interesting function of cheapest, cleanest, most easily transportable, and most sustainable.
People seem to be gradually catching on to the fact that biofuels are an especially wasteful and dirty energy storage system. Paul Krugman devoted a column the other day to how ethanol is a boon to Archer Daniels Midland, but terrible for the world’s food supply. (We told you the Farm Bill was a travesty.) And Time has published a cover story on the “Clean-Energy Scam.”
Propelled by mounting anxieties over soaring oil costs and climate change, biofuels have become the vanguard of the green-tech revolution, the trendy way for politicians and corporations to show they’re serious about finding alternative sources of energy and in the process slowing global warming. The U.S. quintupled its production of ethanol–ethyl alcohol, a fuel distilled from plant matter–in the past decade, and Washington has just mandated another fivefold increase in renewable fuels over the next decade…
But several new studies show the biofuel boom is doing exactly the opposite of what its proponents intended: it’s dramatically accelerating global warming, imperiling the planet in the name of saving it. Corn ethanol, always environmentally suspect, turns out to be environmentally disastrous. Even cellulosic ethanol made from switchgrass, which has been promoted by eco-activists and eco-investors as well as by President Bush as the fuel of the future, looks less green than oil-derived gasoline.
As an uneducated guess, I would imagine that in the medium run the world will have to turn to (Earth-based!) nuclear power for its energy needs. In the longer run, solar will be the way to go, although the amount of solar power we can reasonably collect here on Earth is somewhat limited. We’ll likely have to solve the problem of how to efficiently beam power down from orbit, after which we can build big million-square-kilometer solar power collectors in space. Not in my lifetime, I would bet.
Eventually the Sun will run out, of course. But there are other Suns. In the even longer run, once all of the stars have run out and we are all virtual processes running on a computer, perhaps we can tap into the Hawking radiation from the supermassive black hole at the galactic center. Once that is gone and the universe has settled into empty de Sitter space, we’ll be in thermal equilibrium. At that point there’s probably little hope, no matter what optimists like Freeman Dyson might tell you.
Solar will never be anything but a good mechanism to shave some money off ones bills. At least in so far as earth based solar. The numbers are easy to compute, and even with 100% efficiency it will never be able to account for the worlds energy needs.
For instance atm, assuming perfect photovoltaic efficiency, it would take something like 4 or 5 US states worth of land to power the worlds needs. Keep in mind, thats land that you cannot have tree’s or any other carbon sinks. Now, extrapolate the numbers to 50 years (energy demand is on an exponential) and you see the problem. Fundamentally energy space scales as an area here, vs nuclear/gas/coal scaling as volume.
Space based solar with beaming is a bit pie in the sky, but at least you can make the numbers work hypothetically.
Haelfix Re: Solar
70 -75 % of the best land for solar is in North Africa. I suspect that is where this will eventually be deployed.
I agree that the flux is not what you would like but with a DC grid and better storage it should be a reasonable percentage of the mix.
If I were to guess the breakdown in 2100, it would look something like
25-30% solar
30-40% nuclear
15-20% coal/oil
5-10% algae based biofuels
Let’s check back in 92 years to see how close I am.
Obviously the big wildcard is fusion but I am not betting that this will emerge this century.
e.
ethanol is a boon to Archer Daniels Midland, but terrible for the world’s food supply.
Ironic, since ADM’s slogan used to be “Supermarket to the World”.
Ethanol shouldn’t be subsidized but subsidies not responsible for rising food prices. Oil is.
Where I can find some good “state of the fusion” report?
Well, ethanol may be poor. But I’ve read biodiesel is potentially a very good way of storing solar energy. Most especially if we find a good way to make use of algae for the production.
MedallionOfFerret writes:
Don’t we all? I look forward to your own kindness in explaining precisely where my reasoning goes off the tracks.
George
Many farmers are already taking land out of the conservation program in order to grow corn, sunflowers, or whatever else can be converted to ethanol. This means that our animal friends out there lose even more habitat. I’ve been hearing proposals to remove dead matter from forests and convert that to ethanol. That sounds innocuous unless you know something about how forests function. Those dead trees with holes and the hollow logs laying on the ground are not only habitat for the animals living in the forest, but insects feed on the fungi on the dead matter, rodents and birds eat the insects, and larger animals eat the rodents, etc. And finally, the rotting wood returns to the soil as nutrients for the new trees. In Brazil, forests are being cleared for sugar cane production. This is the new gold rush, and could eventually lead us to an Easter Island situation.
We should be pursuing fusion power right now with the urgency of the Manhattan Project.
#27 What happened to Wind and Tidal Power?
Both of them can be situated offshore and have very little impact on the local marine ecology. Denmark produces 18% of its electricity from Wind Turbines and Spain is expected to reach 15% soon. Germany has a similar absolute level of wind energy production.
The Seagen tidal stream energy generator is currently undergoing trials in Stangford Lough and has the potential to supply up to 10% of the UK’s energy within a decade. There must be many other sites around the world where such technology could be employed
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/mar/31/tidal.power
There’s plenty of desert land for solar power plants to expand into and with some forms of solar photovoltaic plants it’s possible for animals to graze underneath the panels.
The other point is that we’re tremendously wasteful in how we use energy. Better heat storage could significantly improve this and reduce the need for big baseload coal and nuclear plant – something that should be kept to a minimum given the unsolved issues of carbon capture and storage and dealing with nuclear waste.
Instead of racking your brain trying to figure out alternative forms of energy conveyance, why not ask the question: “Why do we need massive amounts of energy, anyway?” We have brains. Maybe instead of trying to figure out how to use more energy, we can try to figure out how to live meaningful lives without the need of so much energy. How much do you really need to stay alive and be happy?
If you think about it, the answer is “not very much, really.”
We live in cities designed by the automobile, and the automobile was the offspring of the discovery of underground oil. If you compare our city building accomplishments to the accomplishments of colonizing insects such as bees and ants, the bees and ants are ahead of us.
this can’t be serious
beaming down sunlight with millions of acres of orbital mirrors.
and then bullshitting about some co_2 causing global warming.
why then not building some exawatt nuclear power plants and equipping our planet with nice radiators like toe ones in todays computers?
Hey I was just thinking that I wished more science sites would run stories like this–thank you!
Tidal energy ultimately comes from the moon-forming impact, and is a result of the gravitational collapse of the solar nebula. So that and the non-radiogenic fraction of geothermal energy (25-75%) are gravitational, not nuclear.
Here we humans with our minute lifespans worry into infinity – where the truth is: we need so little to be truly happy. Leave no trace of your passing.
toymaker said:
and
Z said:
These are the most important comments made on the topic so far.
If ethanol is the new gold rush, then pack your handheld electric fan and sunscreen, we’re all going straight to hell. Literally. Starving from a lack of land to grow food that we’re already short of as its nutritional value plummets, while warring for resources to compensate our endless thirst to waste until each last one of us burns alive in our own atmosphere. Or until we dig a hole and hide for a thousand years or so. Either way, we’re still in some kind of hell.
Who knew Jesus had it (kind of) right? Just replace the Father by “peace and harmony” and Jesus with “CARING ABOUT SOMEONE ELSE OTHER THAN YOUR DAMN SELF,” and you have “No one comes to peace and harmony except through CARING ABOUT SOMEONE ELSE OTHER THAN YOUR DAMN SELF. Which, by the way, is essentially what Jesus talked about his whopping 3 years of ministry, which, in my opinion, he lacked the proper foresight in realizing humans weren’t ready for all of what he said, and could have cleverly kept his mouth shut when necessary to do more good in the world than 3 measly years of teaching.
Which leads me to this hilarious response to Nehemiah by jeff:
So true. The guy tried to talk some sense and we crucified him for it. The crazy sects sprung out of holes in the ground partly because what he said was incomplete, and because no one really understands what he said. Again, humans are completely unprepared to follow that type of teaching, and still aren’t ready. Shows how open humans are to change, eh? Or how willing they are to accept constructive criticism.
If any creature were on the outside looking in at us, they would weep at how we ravage such a perfectly gorgeous planet. Hell, I’d want to exterminate humans too, but the ironic thing is, we’ll end up doing it ourselves (but not entirely, just enough to maintain Earth’s equilibrium). We obviously don’t think about changing ourselves, but only changing everything else more to adapt to everything that we changed already. Instead of realizing, holy shit, WE DID THIS! Somehow, in the absolute insanity of it all, we still putz along doing the same thing, minding our own little orb of the present, mindless to anticipate what is inevitable. The only way we can fix the present energy/warming/nuclear threat conundrum is by fixing our personal lifestyles. No one wants that though, too hard.
Perhaps that’s why humanity’s civilizations continue, over and over again, to collapse and die, managing always to crawl back out of their shameful hole when everything else is dead and all the radiation dissolves. Then again, who cares if it’s shameful? The only ones here to judge us are us, and apparently we don’t care that much. I wonder how many times we’ve done this on a global scale. They say the Earth regenerates its oceanic crust every 150 million years. If you extrapolate this to continental crust, even triple the time, and assume geologists, paleontologists, and archaeologists don’t quite get everything that’s going on (having hardly a mile of crust to ponder for the past couple hundred years for all of their educated guesses about history and past geology), we could have started over at least a couple times (also assuming evolutionary theory’s time scales aren’t accurate either, which they aren’t).
Not bad eh? Screw it all up and your species hides in a hole for a few thousand years (just like paleontologists say the first rodent mammals did when whatever catastrophe hit the dinosaurs) then like a Groundhog (another rodent) poke your head out after all’s regenerated, and screw it up again.
The bit at the end of Sean’s post about the (absurdly science fictitious) transformation of humans to computer processes, which I’ll assume was to be funny and sarcastic, was also hilarious. Humans wish they were so cool to do something like that. In fact, they wish they were so cool that they could fix this mess. Almost seems like they can’t, or won’t, or don’t choose to. Thank the cosmos for evolution. Perhaps there’s something else on this planet that can peacefully live here in humanity’s stead, while still being able to traverse the cosmos and find others that were as cool as they who could live sustainably on such a great planet.
I think that’s enough. I apologize for any offense made about Jesus. Hey, I really like the guy and I respect him, but he didn’t do as much as he could’ve even though what he did was definitely on the right track. In this way, he can’t be as divine as most say he is. I don’t apologize for any offense made about humanity.
Flame on.
Wayne
Hemp oil is actually a very good source of biodiesel. I rode in a hemp-powered car a few years ago (for info, see http://www.hempcar.org/ .) Hemp does not need the maintenance and energy input of corn, it can “grow like a weed.” Conversion is not hard. Industrial type hemp (like some rope is made from) is, or can be bred to be, very low in THC drug content. There is little excuse not to use it, except prejudice about the “drug issue” and political interests vested in more wasteful alternatives.
#10 Carl Brannen: Barley is a food crop. Guinness is a food group all its own. (“,)
Seriously, though: if the big point was biofuels whatever the cost… Why has the USA a tariff on Brazilian ethanol?
Wayne, what do you mean about the following, and what reference have you to give info on the last point?
… we could have started over at least a couple times (also assuming evolutionary theory’s time scales aren’t accurate either, which they aren’t).
Interesting. I’m not sure that that can be said to be the ultimate source of the energy. Gravitational collapse essentially converts the potential energy of masses at a distance from each other into kinetic energy — angular momentum. But where did that potential energy come from? Again, the Big Bang?
very disapointing post for a scientist.
no citations to any studies.
and the obvious criticism that you and Krugman
are close minded to possible near-term
improvements in biofuels.
I agree with many of the above commentators that this critique of bio-fuels goes too far. Yes, corn ethanol is problematic, but the even Bush has recognized that there are probably better sources of ethanol. Also, bio-diesel lacks many of the problems ethanol does. Nobody things that these things alone will guide us to our new petroleum free future, but they do help. With many bio-diesel source plants, it may be possilble to squeeze the oil out of them for the bio-diesel and then ferment the left over plant matter for ethanol. Or process it into fertilizer. There are many ways to make the process more efficient. Algae are another good possibility – some contain droplets of oil in ever cell which could be used for bio-diesel.
Finally, nuclear power is still a very good option. Even uranium cycle fission is much cleaner and safer than people think; however, the leftover waste will need to be dealt with somehow. Thorium cycle fission remains an untapped possibility. It’s harder to do (it requires stimulus by an external source of protons), but has no possibility of meltdown and leaves no long-lived radioactive wastes.
Information is conserved too. Although in the distant future the universe will be in thermal equilibrium, it is still true that the wavefunction of that state is related to the wavefunction of the current state via a unitary transformation.
Even the Hawking radiation emitted by a black hole contains in it the exact information of the matter that formed the black hole, despite the fact that the entropy of the radiation is far greater than that of the matter that formed the black hole.
Now, I would find myself to be alive if I were simulated using a computer, no matter how that simulation is implemented. So, given that in the de Sitter era the universe will continue to “compute” today’s unverse (because the information of today’s universe will still be present then), we would still find ourselves alive at that time, subjectively experiencing a 13.7 billion years old universe living on good old Earth.
Related: Farmers back away from growing corn…
We may have fusion in 5 years:
WB-7 First Plasma
A physicist looking back through the replies on this thread, and on the original post, you will see that there are very few numbers or references. That’s because there is almost no informed comment on this subject. If you make a post on Clifford algebra few people will comment because they know they are ignorant about the subject but for some reason, everyone’s an expert on ethanol and biofuels.
“#10 Carl Brannen: Barley is a food crop. Guinness is a food group all its own. (“,)”
Yes, however, about 67% of the land formerly used to grow barley in Washington State is now fallow. This is due to lack of demand for barley. So any demand for barley by our plant will not impact food production; the land is currently not used for food. This is annoying to the greenies because they want all land back in its natural state so our little wild animal friends can have full and complete lives. They really don’t give a damn about the poor but just use their plight as an arguing point to help achieve their political goals (which are anti industrial).
“Seriously, though: if the big point was biofuels whatever the cost… Why has the USA a tariff on Brazilian ethanol?”
There never was a “big point”. The US tariff on Brazilian ethanol is there for the same reason that the US has a tariff on so many other agricultural imports. It’s to keep agricultural prices in the US high. It has nothing to do with “biofuels whatever the cost”, nor have I ever suggested that “biofuels whatever the cost” is a good idea, LOL. With a sufficiently low valued US dollar, the need for farm support will decrease and these sorts of things may go away. (And I hope they do, they are a waste of money.)
Even if there were no subsidies or tariffs on ethanol, heck, even if there were no ethanol production whatsoever anywhere in the world, the US would still have steeply rising agricultural (note difference between this and “food”) prices because the US dollar is dropping drastically (largely due to falling interest rates which are due to banking problems which are due to excessive mortgages, but also partly due to the fact that billions of dollars have been exported from this country over the last 20 years and now need to be imported back).
US corn exports last year were 2.25 billion bushels, 0.13 billion more than in the 2006-2007 export year, according to the USDA forecast. It’s impossible to explain an increase in corn exports while simultaneously blaming high corn prices on US ethanol policy. If corn prices are so damned high in the US because of its use in ethanol, then how come the US isn’t importing corn to feed those greedy ethanol producers? No, the US is a corn exporter and exports are increasing.
The crashing dollar makes everything the US can send abroad more attractive to foreign buyers who bid the price up. Of the things the US exports, corn is a great export crop, a commodity and easy to ship. What’s more, there were crop failures in the major southern hemisphere grain producers, Australia and Argentina. So the worldwide price of corn goes up, and with the falling dollar, the US price of corn goes way up. Blaming high food prices on ethanol is silly.
And when they talk about “30% of US corn” crop going to ethanol, remember that the distiller’s grain byproducts will replace 1/3 of that so it’s really only a net 20% reduction in corn. Furthermore, that is corn that was not used for human consumption, it was being fed to animals.
The effect of high feed prices on meat prices is much more direct than the effect of high grain prices on vegetarian food prices like bread. The reason for this is that grain is cheap, meat is expensive. So the real effect on human diet of ethanol production is, if anything, to reduce the amount of meat consumed by making the price of meat rise relative to the price of things made directly from grains. It’s probably good for our health.
And as far as starvation, the poorest parts of the world are the agricultural regions that people abandon in order to get jobs in the city. Rising agricultural prices will make rural regions wealthier and that is where the bulk of humanity lives. Look at the revolution in living standards in rural China as an example.