Our Mid-oil Crisis

We are finite. We know at some point we will run out of time. But when we are young, we act like we will live forever, and we do things we may regret later. Half way through life, we start to realize our limitations. We may look back disappointed with the time we’ve wasted and look forward anxious to make the remaining time meaningful. Some of us emerge with sports cars or mistresses, others with renewed purpose and new possibilities.

On this planet, our oil supply is finite. So far we’ve been using it like teenagers, like we will have oil forever. But we are slowly realizing we might be half way through it, and we are starting to regret the pollution and global warming our oil burning is causing. Looking back we accomplished a lot with oil, from powering our economic growth to making plastics that have transformed our way of life. Looking forward we see a need to find substitutes that don’t burden the planet. There are some who are ready to take on this challenge and others who don’t think we should just yet.

In his Wall Street Journal op-ed on January 23, 2007, Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and a venture capitalist, called to unleash our entrepreneurs and researchers to develop biofuels. He asserted that if we set policies to build a market for alternatives to oil, in ten years we can transform how we use and fundamentally think about energy. He is so clear and committed to this possibility, he’s bet on it with his own time and money.

In another Wall Street Journal op-ed published on January 18, 2007, Flemming Rose and Bjorn Lomborg challenged Al Gore to a verbal duel over how to handle global warming. They did not deny its existence, or its anthropogenic sources. Instead they disputed some of the facts Al Gore uses in his message, ultimately concluding that the impacts of global warming do not justify the investment to fight it. They argued, “we will live in a warmer but immensely richer world."

Energy is integral to most everything we do; it is vital to our way of life. In the US, oil accounts for 40% of our total energy consumption, which is sobering when you consider we may have already used half of world’s supply. We are at a turning point. We can choose to buy that sports car and push the snooze button as Rose and Lomborg suggest, or we can choose to embrace the possibility of a new energy platform that will take us further than the remaining oil we have could.

Sources:
Wall Street Journal Thursday, January 18, 2007, page A16 "Will Al Gore Melt?"
Wall Street Journal Tuesday, January 23, 2007, page A18 "The War on Oil"
EIA Petroleum Products Information Sheet

The Earth's Solar Energy Bank Account

We are energy trust fund babies. We can chose to exhaust what we have or we can choose save it and pay our own way.

Most of our energy comes from burning fossil fuels like oil, natural gas, and coal. When we burn them, we are converting the chemical energy stored in the fuels into heat energy. We use this heat energy to heat our homes or convert it to electrical energy in our power plants or to mechanical energy in our cars. But the chemical energy in these fuels originally came from solar energy. Hundreds of millions of years ago, plants on the earth absorbed light energy from the sun and stored it as chemical energy. Then they died, got buried for millions of years under pressure and heat, and now we dig them up and use the energy they stored.

This description is quite simplified, but it still illustrates that our main source of energy took millions of years to make. We have been tapping into this huge store of energy we inherited, an energy bank account or trust fund, if you will. Deposits were made long ago and have been accruing interest. Now we are burning the savings, literally.

Over a hundred years ago, we withdrew a part of this energy account to invest in the Industrial Revolution. Thanks, in part, to this investment we developed new manufacturing and transportation methods, transforming our lifestyles completely. Since then we've fueled countless innovations and have made a considerable dent in our energy account in the process. This is especially true for crude oil. Many experts argue that we are near or have even passed our peak oil production rates. Though we are still discovering new oil deposits, they will be harder and more expensive to get to, and we'll burn more oil in doing so.

Since the Industrial Revolution, we have become complacent about our energy account and we are no longer really investing, just simply spending. We tend not to think of this energy account as a blessing or a “breathing spell”(1), but as a right or worse, a given.

To sustain our lifestyles and set aside a “safety net” for the future, we must work toward controlling our spending through energy efficiency and finding other income streams. These income streams could come from the energy we currently get from the sun instead of the energy the sun provided millennia ago. The sun provides light energy we can to convert to electrical energy with our photovoltaics and wind and water turbines or to chemical energy with our biomass crops. Perhaps at some point we could generate more energy than we consume and recharge our energy account.

We might have needed the silver spoon a hundred years ago, but we've outgrown it by now.


1. Reference to quote by “the First and Greatest Chemurgist” George Washington Carver: “I believe the Great Creator has put oil and ores on this earth to give us a breathing spell... As we exhaust them, we must be prepared to fall back on our farms, which is God’s true storehouse and can never be exhausted. For we can learn to synthesize materials for every human need from the things that grow.”

News: Progress toward running cars on plants

Before leaving office, Gov. Pataki (NY) helps make it a good week for cellulosic ethanol.

Mascoma Corporation of Cambridge, MA received a $14.8M award from NYSERDA to build a 500,000-gallon-per-year cellulosic ethanol pilot plant in Rochester, NY. The company is teaming up with Genencor and will be getting support from International Paper Co., Cornell University, Clarkson University, and the NRDC. The plant will be able to test processing of multiple feed stocks such as wood, switch grass, paper sludge, and corn stover.

In addition, the state provided SUNY ESF and Catalyst Renewables Corporation of Dallas, TX with a $10M grant to build a 130,000-gallon-per-year cellulosic ethanol facility in Lyonsdale, NY near Syracuse. The feedstock for this facility will be wood.

The efforts of these companies, universities, and of NY state is bringing US commercial cellulosic ethanol closer to reality. Currently, the only other plant of this kind is Iogen's Canadian facility in Ottawa, Ontario. They use agricultural feedstocks such as wheat, oat, and barley and can make up to 3 million liters or almost 800,000 gallons of ethanol per year.