Biofuels

You've no doubt heard that Congress passed the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 and W signed it. I'm not too excited about it. I'd hoped for more. Instead, it leaves subsidies to mature energy industries alone (score one for the oil companies) and does little to reform them.

Why not take advantage of this opportunity and require all new coal plants to use "clean coal" and carbon sequestration technology? Score one for the coal lobby.

The increased CAFE standards are nice. It's strange how the automobile manufacturers fought it (including hybrid leader Toyota) and yet advertise heavily how fuel efficient their cars are. Is it greed? The technology is already out there for them to implement yet they complain about having to re-tool their assembly lines.

In a clear nod to Iowa (no surprise with the presidential primaries coming up), ethanol subsidies got a boost. Readers of my blog know that I'm not a fan of ethanol so I'm not psyched about this either. I'm hoping that corn-based ethanol loses out to other biofuels.

One of those potential alternate sources is cellulosic ethanol. Cellulose is the stuff that makes up the cell walls of plants. Unfortunately for clean fuel developers (but fortunately for plants), it's a tough nut to crack. Hundreds of millions of years of evolution has made the stuff formidable to break down. Research continues, but a marketable product is still a long ways off. Chemists are still trying to find the right bug or enzyme to efficiently break the stuff down. In a doomsday scenario, I worry that a genetically engineered organism escapes the lab and reduces our forests to goo. Not likely, but maybe something for Bill Joy to worry about.

Biodiesel made from algae is another idea. Algae would convert sunlight into vegetable oil, which would be harvested and transformed into diesel fuel. While diesels are more popular in Europe than the US, there are plenty of trucks that could utilize it right now. Of course, we have to find the right species and figure out the optimal time to harvest their fatty bodies.

Here's something to chew on (from Popular Science):

"About 140 billion gallons of biodiesel would be needed every year to replace all petroleum-based transportation fuel in the U.S. It would take nearly three billion acres of fertile land to produce that amount with soybeans, and more than one billion acres to produce it with canola. Unfortunately, there are only 434 million acres of cropland in the entire country, and we probably want to reserve some of that to grow food. But because of its ability to propagate almost virally in a small space, algae could do the job in just 95 million acres of land. What's more, it doesn't need fertile soil to thrive. It grows in ponds, bags or tanks that can be just as easily set up in the desert — or next to a carbon-dioxide-spewing power plant — as in the country's breadbasket."

A test facility is scheduled to be built next to another microbe utilizing industry: a brewery. With CO₂ a by-product of fermentation, the algae guys can get a pure source feed for their test subjects.

Beer, helping America to find clean sources of energy. I'll drink to that!

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