The Ethanol Alternative  

The ABC's "Catalyst" program tonight had a segment on ethanol - not the low efficiency, food burning grain-to-ethanol sort, but ethanol generated by microbes (Bruce Sterling talked about this sort of approach in his "Clutching at Straw" viridian note). While there are obvious drawbacks to converting too much organic matter into fuel, this type of approach will become an important part of the energy mix during the next few decades I'm sure.

If we converted Australia’s entire sugar cane crop into ethanol, using conventional techniques, we still wouldn’t have anywhere enough fuel to drive our cars. So does ethanol really provide an effective replacement for rapidly diminishing oil?

Two Australian scientists have developed yeast that can extract more sugar from the same amount of cane. It’s so effective, that in the future, they claim they will be able to extract sugars from waste paper and agricultural and forestry waste.

With this new technology, could ethanol become a truly viable alternative to oil?

Narration: The world is heading, full speed, for a fuel crisis. Some oil experts predict we’ll hit the bottom of the barrel within 30 years.Ethanol, a form of alcohol, could be the answer a cleaner, greener fuel made from sugar and starch rich plants. Unlike oil, it’s a renewable fuel source.
But current ethanol production makes up less than one per cent of our fuel needs. The problem is, even if we converted the whole of the Australian sugar cane crop into ethanol, using conventional techniques, we still don’t have anywhere near enough fuel to drive our cars.

Narration: Dr Paul Attfield and Dr Philip Bell might have the solution. They’ve actually managed to unlock more sugar within sugarcane almost doubling the ethanol yield.

Paul Attfield: This will open up the possibility to produce vastly more quantities of alcohol.

Narration: It’s a breakthrough that’s sure to surprise the world of science. The sugar source they’ve unlocked was considered impossible to ferment using non-GM – genetically modified – yeast.

Philip Bell: One of the first thing's we expect to see is maybe one of disbelief.

Narration: Ethanol is not a new fuel source. In fact, when the Model T Ford was first built in 1908, it ran on both petrol and ethanol.
However, the duel fuel system was phased out when oil prices plummeted, making ethanol uncompetitive. But only recently has Australia taken ethanol for a test drive.

Paul Attfield: We’re lagging considerably behind, Brazil went into this in the 1970s after the first oil shock and is arguably the leader in the world in terms of turning sugar cane into alcohol. And they even run cars on 100% alcohol, proving the technology is viable in cars.

...

Narration: Phillip and Paul’s revolutionary new yeast has the potential to make ethanol a truly viable alternative fuel to petrol.
Because it can unlock xylose sugar, we’ll no longer be limited to sugarcane, corn and wheat. Believe it or not, xylose is found in waste paper and other plant bi-products. It seems like science-fiction, but this could actually become the fuel of the future.

Paul Attfield: There’s something like a 150 to 200 billion tonnes of plant material made per annum in agriculture and forestry processes and that would be more than we need to make total replacement of petrol.

Narration: This new technology has amazing potential. But Paul and Phillip say they’re still a couple of years off converting our old newspapers and garden clippings into fuel.

Paul Attfield: I think ultimately, as oil depletion becomes worse we’re going to have replace more and more of the gasoline or petrol with ethanol, this is why we’re going to have to find alternative sources to making the ethanol.

Tom Whipple's latest peak oil column is out - The peak oil crisis: turning points.

From a peak oil perspective, the last couple of weeks seemed pretty quiet. Oil prices continued to drift down into the $50s amid gloats from peak oil skeptics. The Dow Jones climbed to all-time highs, in part, due to optimism the "oil bubble" had finally burst and there would be lower inflation and lower interest rates ahead. Alaskan oil production returned to normal levels and financial analysts spoke enthusiastically about the "new frontier" of deep-water oil. The geopolitical world was quiet. Iran, Lebanon, Nigeria, and Venezuela— everywhere one looked there were no imminent threats to oil supplies.

Even the SUV dealers were in a better mood with commercials prattling on about the end of high oil prices and the great deals could that could be had.

However, events move quickly these days and during the last couple of weeks there were a number of new developments that may, in the long run, turn out to be more detrimental to our future well-being than we have yet perceived. Some of these developments took place well below the radar of the popular media. Others were well reported, but it will be awhile before their import sinks in.

Currently, the most important oil story is the impending OPEC production cut of 1 million barrels a day (b/d). This plan, however, has been in the works for the last two weeks without an official announcement, thus leading to suggestions that OPEC cannot reach an actual agreement on a production cut. Several OPEC members —Iran, Venezuela, Indonesia, and Nigeria— are already producing well below their quotas. As these countries are straining to maintain production, many doubt they would actually cut exports by an amount necessary to drive up prices.

Other OPEC members are currently above their quotas and could easily afford some temporary revenue loss. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE, however, are highly dependent on the US for their security in a very dangerous part of the world. Washington is adamantly opposed to OPEC cutting production at this time as higher gas prices is the last thing the Administration wants to see prior to the mid-term elections.

Thus, current efforts at a quota cut may or may not result in actual production cutbacks and higher prices, at least for the next month. What is interesting in all this is that there seems to be the beginnings of a consensus within OPEC that $60 a barrel is the new price floor to be defended by quota cuts. There are, however, major implications of a $60 a barrel price floor on oil. While $60 oil may sound great to Americans, prices like this effectively make petroleum products unaffordable in many poorer countries. For people living in these countries, the oil age is nearly over.

TreeHugger has a post on the potential of using Thorium for nuclear power. This topic seems to recur once a year - personally I'll believe Thorium power is feasible when I see a working reactor...

According to a news release this past week Professor Egil Lillestol has been trying to convince Norway that a nuclear reactor based on thorium would be a viable solution to the worlds growing energy demands without the environmental impact of coal, or the hazards of traditional nuclear energy. Is he onto something? Read on to see the gory details.

From the article:

•There is no danger of a melt-down like the Chernobyl reactor
•It produces minimal radioactive waste
•It can burn Plutonium waste from traditional nuclear reactors with additional energy output
•It is not suitable for the production of weapon grade materials
•The energy contained in one kilogram of Thorium equals that of four thousand tons of coal
•The global Thorium reserves could cover the world’s energy needs for thousands of years
•Norway has an estimated 180 000 tons of Thorium which based on the current price of oil is equivalent to 250 thousand billion US$, or 1000 times the Norwegian oil fund.

It seems Woodside and the WA state government are still haggling about the Pluto project and reserving some gas for local consumption.

RESOLUTION of the dispute between Woodside and the West Australian Government concerning the planned $US5 billion ($6.7 billion) development of the Pluto gas reservoir is in the balance.

Woodside's CEO Don Voelte has warned the Pluto export LNG development will not go ahead if the Government persists with a mandatory gas reservation policy restricting LNG development to 85 per cent of its estimated 4.1 trillion cubic feet of reserves.

The Australian understands a compromise proposal that would allow Woodside to meet the reserve requirement by swapping gas from other reservoirs was considered by the Woodside board on Tuesday.

"Negotiations are continuing," a Woodside official said yesterday. It is understood Woodside is concerned by the wording of the agreement that says the Government "may" consider offering a better deal if one is struck with another offshore gas reserves developer. Woodside is understood to want the wording changed to "will".

Woodside is fast-tracking Pluto, which was found in April last year, to supply LNG to Japan by 2010.

The Age has an article on the value of healthy gardens - which Adam at Energy Bulletin points out demonstrates the problem with imposing water restrictions on suburban houses but not industrial agriculture. That said most homeowners in Sydney would be more even more likely to fill their pools, wash down their boats and cars and water their lawns during the day if there weren't restrictions - and few people grow food in their gardens - for the time being.

while someone who works long hours outside the home - or who lives in an area rich in public parks - might feel the loss of their garden less than someone home with young children or a disability, they are much more likely to be able to afford equipment to help bypass the restrictions. Tanks and greywater systems, for instance, aren't really options for people who rent or are on low incomes.

Indeed, restricting outside use seems to have been chosen not because watering your garden is in itself, or is necessarily, the most wanton use of water in our society, but simply because it is the only one that can be cheaply policed (by eliciting a charming and community-building, deeply Australian, dob-in-your-neighbours system).

I'm all for telling people to give up their exotics and summer annuals, choose water-efficient and hardy plants, allow their lawns to die off and their gardens to be naturally browner and more muted. But even natives in a harsh season may need the occasional squirt, and even well-mulched vegies need to be watered more often than twice a week.

Instead of encouraging people to garden differently, the restrictions seem to be encouraging people to give up the idea of having a garden at all and, in the present climate, I'm not sure this is a good thing.

The significance of backyard gardens for greener, cleaner, more temperate cities and towns, and their function in harbouring and feeding the surprising amount of native wildlife that still lives among us is being increasingly recognised.

The bottlebrush in my garden, still finding its feet in clay soil, is not a luxury to the birds, nor is the tiny pond a luxury to my local frogs. We could save a bit by abandoning these, but maybe in the long run we'd use more water producing the extra chemicals to control the insects that proliferate in their absence.

George Monbiot has another particularly gloomy article out - this one looking at the impact of global warming on water supplies. The prognosis is for depleted aquifers and "global drying".

The global climate model used by the Met Office still needs to be refined. While it tracks past temperature changes pretty closely, it does not accurately backcast the drought patterns in every region. But it correctly reproduces the total global water trends over the past 50 years. When the same model is used to forecast the pattern over the 21st Century, it uncovers “a net overall global drying trend” if greenhouse gas emissions are moderate or high. “On a global basis, drought events are slightly more frequent and of much longer duration by the second half of the 21st century relative to the present day.” In these dry, stodgy phrases, we find an account of almost unimaginable future misery.

Many parts of the world, for reasons which have little to do with climate change, are already beginning to lose their water. In When the Rivers Run Dry, Fred Pearce, who is New Scientist’s environment consultant, travels around the world trying to assess the state of our water resources. He finds that we survive today as a result of borrowing from the future.

The great famines predicted for the 1970s were averted by new varieties of rice, wheat and maize, whose development is known as the “green revolution”. They produce tremendous yields, but require plenty of water. This has been provided by irrigation, much of which uses undergound reserves. Unfortunately, many of them are being exploited much faster than they are being replenished. In India, for example, some 250 cubic kilometres (a cubic kilometre is a billion cubic metres or a trillion litres) are extracted for irrigation every year, of which about 150 are replaced by the rain. “200 million people [are] facing a waterless future. The groundwater boom is turning to bust and, for some, the green revolution is over.”

In China, 100 million people live on crops grown with underground water that is not being refilled: water tables are falling fast all over the North China plain. Many more rely on the Huang He (the Yellow River), which already appears to be drying up as a result of abstraction and possibly climate change. Ninety percent of the crops in Pakistan are watered by irrigation from the Indus. Almost all the river’s water is already diverted into the fields – it often fails now to reach the sea. The Ogallala aquifer which lies under the western and south western United States, and which has fed much of the world, has fallen by 30 metres in many places. It now produces half as much water as it did in the 1970s.

All this was known before the new paper was published. While climate scientists have been predicting for some time that the wet parts of the world are likely to become wetter and the dry parts drier, they had assumed that overall rainfall would rise, as higher temperatures increase evaporation. At the same time – and for the same reason – soils could become drier. It was unclear what the net effects would be. But the new paper’s “drought index” covers both rainfall and evaporation: overall, the world becomes drier.

Wired has an article on making water from thin air. If Monbiot is right we might all want to install some of these gizmos in the back yard and get them to share the solar panels with the Tesla in the garage...

A company that developed technology capable of creating water out of thin air nearly anywhere in the world is now under contract to nourish U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq.

The water-harvesting technology was originally the brainchild of the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which sought ways to ensure sustainable water supplies for U.S. combat troops deployed in arid regions like Iraq.

"The program focused on creating water from the atmosphere using low-energy systems that could reduce the overall logistics burden for deployed forces and provide potable water within the reach of the war fighter any place, any time," said Darpa spokeswoman Jan Walker.

Speaking of Iraq, today's news included reports that the death toll from our invasion of Iraq is now 665,000 - I wonder just how many people will end up dying in the futile quest for the greatest prize of all...

King George, of course, thinks all these people amount to "just a comma".

Forget, for the moment, that the proposed "compromise" torture legislation effectively abrogates the Geneva Conventions. Forget that it effectively licenses torture in the name of every American. Focus instead on the fact that it "vests in the administration the singularly most tyrannical power that exists - namely, the power unilaterally to decree someone guilty of a crime and to condemn the accused to eternal imprisonment without having even to charge him with a crime, let alone defend the validity of those accusations." Focus on this language from the proposed law:

...(N)o court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider any claim or cause of action whatsoever, ... including challenges to the lawfulness of procedures of military commissions under this chapter.

...

No court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the United States who has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination.

The language of the new Enabling Act is a bit more baroque than that used seventy years ago. And, to be sure, it is not as far-reaching as that of its predecessor. But make no mistake: Just as the 1933 Enabling Act created the context for dictatorship, so does this one. The German legislature told the executive that it had the power to make law and ignore the constitution. If Congress passes this bill, the American legislature will second the motion.

It is just one bill, you may object; it only applies to terrorists, you may say; we are not Nazi Germany, you may insist. And yet. The forthcoming FISA bill extends Enabling Act thinking to additional unreviewable executive powers. The slippery slope has been well-oiled. The Niemöller poem stands waiting.

It is probably unrealistic to expect bright lines to be obvious at the moment they are crossed. But they don't get much brighter than this: Congressional leaders have agreed to suspend habeus corpus, grant the President of the United States the power to torture, and allow the executive branch to operate beyond judicial review. The Administration will be free to dispense with the pretense that Abu Ghraib was a rogue operation of unsupervised underlings. Like a black hole, an Administration exercising unprecedented power accretes still more, with the blessings of those who cede it. We are on our way back to the nightmare that Nietzsche foresaw (but did not advocate) in which all is permitted.

President Bush, in yet another dog whistle callout to his faithful, has claimed that the disaster of Iraq will eventually be seen as "just a comma," a reference to a sermon urging that followers not "put a period where God puts a comma." The first Enabling Act was one such comma. There can be little doubt as to the kind of sentence Bush wants to write.

Robert Fisk has an article in The Independent on the Bush era in the middle east - The Age of Terror.

Beirut is a good place to reflect on the tragedy through which the Middle East is now inexorably moving. After all, the city has suffered so many horrors these past 31 years, it seems haunted by the mass graves that lie across the region, from Afghanistan to Iraq to "Palestine" and to Lebanon itself. And I look across the waters and see a German warship cruising past my home, part of Nato's contribution to stop gun-running into Lebanon under UN Security Council Resolution 1701. And then, I ask myself what the Germans could possibly be doing when no guns have ever been run to the Hizbollah guerrilla army from the sea. The weapons came through Syria, and Syria has a land frontier with the country and is to the north and east of Lebanon, not on the other side of the Mediterranean.

And then when I call on my landlord to discuss this latest, hopeless demonstration of Western power, he turns to me in some anger and says, "Yes, why is the German navy cruising off my home?" And I see his point. For we Westerners are now spreading ourselves across the entire Muslim world. In one form or another, "we" - "us", the West - are now in Khazakstan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Egypt, Algeria, Yemen, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Lebanon. We are now trapped across this vast area of suffering, fiercely angry people, militarily far more deeply entrenched and entrapped than the 12th-century crusaders who faced defeat at the battle of Hittin, our massive forces fighting armies of Islamists, suicide bombers, warlords, drug barons, and militias. And losing. The latest UN army in Lebanon, with its French and Italian troops, is moving in ever greater numbers to the south, young men and women who have already been threatened by al-Qa'ida and who will, in three of four months, be hit by al-Qa'ida. Which is one reason why the French have been pallisading themselves into their barracks in southern Lebanon. There is no shortage of suicide bombers here, although it will be the Sunni -- not the Hizbollah-Shiite variety -- which will strike at the UN.

When will the bombers arrive? After further massacres in Iraq? After the Israelis cross the border again? After Israel - or the US - bombs Iran's nuclear facilities in the coming months? After someone in the northern city of Tripoli, perhaps, or in the Palestinian camps outside Sidon, decides he has seen too many Western soldiers trampling the lands of southern Lebanon, too many German warships off the coast, or heard too many mendacious statements of optimism from George W Bush or Tony Blair or Condoleezza Rice. "There will be no 'new' Middle East, Miss Rice," a new Hizbollah poster says south of Sidon. And the Hizbollah is right. The entire region is sinking deeper into bloodshed and all the time, over and over again, Bush and Blair tell us it is all getting much better, that we can all be heartened by the spread of non-existent democracies, that the dawn is rising on Condi's "new" Middle East. Are they really hoping that they can distort the mirror of the world's reality with their words? There is a kind of new dawn rising in the lands from the old Indian empire to the tides of the Mediterranean. The only trouble is that it is blood red.

It is as if the Bushes and Blairs do not live on this planet any more. As my colleague Patrick Cockburn wrote recently, the enraging thing about Blair's constant optimism is that, to prove it all a pack of lies, a journalist has to have his throat cut amid the anarchy which Blair says does not exist. The Americans cannot protect themselves in Iraq, let alone the Iraqis, and the British have twice nearly been defeated in battles with the Taliban, and the Israeli army - counting it as part of the "West" for a moment -- were soundly thrashed when they crossed the border to fight the Hizbollah, losing 40 men in 36 hours. Yet still Blair delayed a ceasefire in Lebanon. And still - be certain of this - when the fire strikes us again, in London or New York or wherever, Blair and Bush will say that the attack has nothing to do with the Middle East, that Britain's enemies hate "our values" or our "way of life".

I once mourned the lack of titans in the modern world, the Roosevelts and the Churchills, blood-drenched though their century was. Blair and Bush, posing as wartime leaders, threatening the midget Hitlers around them, appear to have gone through a kind of "stasis", a psychological inability to grasp what they do not want to hear or what they do not want to be true. And they have lost the thread of history.

In the past, we - the "West" - could have post-war adventures abroad and feel safe at home. No North Korean tried to blow himself up on the London Tube in the 1950s. No Viet Cong ever arrived in Washington to assault the United States. We fought in Kenya and Malaya and Palestine and Suez and Yemen, but we felt safe in Gloucestershire. Perhaps the change came with the Algerian War of Independence when the bombers attacked in Paris and Lyons, or perhaps it came later when the IRA arrived to bomb London.

But it is a fact that "we" cannot take our armies and warships and tanks and helicopter gunships and para battalions for foreign wars and expect to be unhurt at home. This is the inescapable logic of history that Bush and Blair will not face, will not acknowledge, will not believe - will not even let us believe. All across the Middle East, we are locked in battle in our preposterous "war on terror" because "the world changed forever" on 11 September, even though I have said many times that we should not allow 19 murderers to change our world. So we live in a darker world of phone-taps and "terror plots" and underground CIA prisoners whose interrogators set about victims in secret, tearing to pieces the Geneva Conventions so painfully constructed after the Second World War.

And to close, an old Bush joke...

George Bush goes to a primary school to talk to the kids to get a little PR.
After his talk he offers question time.
One little boy puts up his hand and George asks him his name.

"Stanley," responds the little boy.

"And what is your question, Stanley?"

"I have 4 questions:

First, why did the USA invade Iraq without the support of the UN?
Second, why are you President when Al Gore got more votes?
Third, whatever happened to Osama Bin Laden?"
Fourth, why are we so worried about gay-marriage when 1/2 of all Americans don't have health insurance?

Just then, the bell rings for recess.

George Bush informs the kiddies that they will continue after recess.

When they resume George says, "OK, where were we? Oh, that's right:
question time. Who has a question?"

Another little boy puts up his hand. George points him out and asks him his name.

"Steve," he responds.

" And what is your question, Steve?"

"Actually, I have 6 questions.

First, why did the USA invade Iraq without the support of the UN?
Second, why are you President when Al Gore got more votes?
Third, whatever happened to Osama Bin Laden?"
Fourth, why are we so worried about gay-marriage when 1/2 of all Americans don't have health insurance?
Fifth, why did the recess bell go off 20 minutes early?
And sixth, what the hell happened to Stanley?"