Zell, Chris wrote:
Since we are in the realm of mythology, you can believe
whatever you wish about oil companies - but their LEADERS
explicitly state that NIMBYism is behind the fact that the US
hasn't built a refinery since 1976.
Oil company leaders are remarkable people, but they are not
celebrated for their fastidious honesty. Their estimates of reserves
have been called into question. Their hypotheses about global warming
are not widely shared by atmospheric scientists. When they were
called upon to testify before the Senate a few months ago, the
chairman of the committee insisted that they not be sworn in. That
turned out to be a a wise precaution, because they would have been
committing perjury otherwise.
Again, this objection has been widely published (in Reason magazine and
Barrons)
I think Deffeyes has more credibility.
Studies from academics that are "garbage in, garbage out" do
little to enlighten anyone about energy.
In my opinion, the studies by Pimentel and Patzek are not garbage.
They seem well documented and carefully researched. In any case, as I
said, even if they are wrong and we accept the industry spokesmen's
numbers instead, it is still a losing proposition with present-day technology.
As I pointed out, there's an enormous amount of heat going to waste
that could benefit alcohol distillation - from utilities all the way
to geothermal to solar - and that strongly affects the outcome of
any efficiency projected, academic studies be damned.
The academic studies take this into account of course. The problem
with utilizing waste heat is that you cannot transport it. The raw
materials for ethanol are very bulky and heavy and they are processed
far from population and industry centers, where the waste heat is
needed. You need waste heat for industry in places like New York City
or Rome Georgia (where they manufacture carpets). I suppose you could
bring the corn and all the way from Iowa to Georgia and then
manufacture ethanol in a cogeneration plant where you use the waste
heat for industrial heating. But I think any energy savings you
accomplished by this method would be lost transporting the corn.
It is possible someone will make a breakthrough based on something
like bioengineering which greatly reduces the energy needed to make
ethanol. If that happens, obviously the numbers will change. However,
such research should not be supported with hundreds of millions of
dollars from the taxpayers. A small contribution from the government
might be in order, but not hundreds of millions.
Agribusiness in the US has plenty of money, and they can afford to
pay for this research. Between 1995 and 2004, federal corn subsidies
averaged $4.6 billion per year. That's enough to pay for plenty of research.
In addition, the feedstock could involve material that's largely
going to waste, right now - a far cry from corn based production.
Define "going to waste." Biomass does not go to waste when you leave
it in the ground. It is essential to the health of the land. If you
keep extracting a year after year and burning it after a few hundred
years the US will look like Iraq does today -- the whole country will
go to waste! Present-day corn production is rapidly destroying the
topsoil and the water table. It is not sustainable. Add to that the
burden of producing switchgrass and other biomass and you have the
makings of the largest ecological catastrophe in human history. It is
beyond me why any environmentalist thinks this is a good idea.
Extracting more biomass out of North American land is lunacy. We
should be putting it back, letting forests regrow and leaving more
fields fallow.
At the very least, we need to see a cold fusion unit that can
cheaply heat a house. Electric generation can wait.
If cold fusion can be made to work at all, it will not be "cheap," it
will be many orders of magnitude cheaper than any other energy source.
- Jed
