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The following guest essay is by Frank Weigert, who is a retired DuPont chemist.

1) Biofuel Definitions.

Non-chemists all too often get confused by the differences in chemical nomenclature and more conventional terms. Oil as an ingredient in salad dressing is not the same as oil as a synonym for petroleum.

Green plants make nucleic acids, proteins, hydrocarbons, carbohydrates, and lipids. Only the latter three need concern us as fuel precursors. Hydrocarbons have only carbon and hydrogen in their structure. Examples include natural rubber and other materials made from isoprene oligomerization.

Carbohydrates have formulas around (CH2O)n: Carbo (C) - hydrates (H2O). Glucose, C6H1206, is a monomer. Sucrose is made from glucose and another sugar fructose with the loss of one water molecule. Both sugars are soluble in water. Polysaccharides such as starch and cellulose are insoluble in water. Yeasts ferment soluble sugars to ethanol, an alcohol. The technology to ferment insoluble carbohydrate polymers practically does not yet exist.

Lipids are esters of the alcohol glycerin and long-chain fatty acids. Transesterification with a short chain alcohols such as methanol or ethanol converts these lipids to glycerine and esters generically known as biodiesel. Biodiesel is not a hydrocarbon.

Hydrocarbon reactions are generally many orders of magnitude faster than the reactions of polar molecules such as those involving alcohols or esters. That means that the equipment required to reform hydrocarbons is much smaller than that required to ferment carbohydrates to ethanol or transesterify lipids to biodiesel. Hydrocarbon chemistry does not require a solvent. Fermentation must be carried out in water, and yeast generally can only produce an ethanol concentration of 10% or so. The ethanol must then be separated from a large excess of water. Transesterification to make biodiesel is an equilibrium process that will not go to completion without a large excess of the small chain alcohol. That means large equipment for separation and recycle. While a hundred or so refineries provide all the transportation fuel America uses, many thousand fermentation or biodiesel facilities would be needed to produce the same amount of fuel.

The new investment required to convert from a hydrocarbon economy to one involving either ethanol or biodiesel is going to be very high. Why bother? Use hydrocarbons. Hydrocarbons such as gasoline or diesel are global warming neutral if produced entirely from biological materials.

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2) What defines a Climate Change / Hubbert’s Peak solution.

Four precepts should guide our work in solving the world’s Climate Change and Hubert’s Peak problems.

a) These are world problems. An expensive solution that works for the United States but not for China, India or Kenya is not a valid solution. America might be the Saudi Arabia of coal, but coal is not a solution for the Hubbert’s Peak problem because it exacerbates the climate change problem. Where is China going to get the land to grow corn to make ethanol? Solutions that depend on local conditions such as desert sunlight or constant high winds are not solutions to the global problem. Venture capitalists who want to get rich selling high investment solutions are part of the problem.

b) Consumers should not have to change anything.

The precept needs to be considered separately for electricity and transportation fuels.

Electricity is easy. Consumers don't care whether the electrons that power their lights, televisions or computers come from falling water, burning coal, or splitting atoms. An electron is an electron.

Transportation fuels are harder. Hybrid cars like the Prius come closest to meeting the criterion. Consumers fill up their gas tank and don't have to worry about the battery until it wears out. The cost of the replacement battery has not sunk in yet. A typical battery pack costs $5000 and will last five years. Thus during the life of the electric car, owners will have to pay $10,000 to replace their battery twice. You can buy a lot of expensive gasoline for that amount of money.

Plug-in hybrids WOULD be different. Suppose you live in an apartment and park 100 feet away. That's an awfully long extension cord. A better option is to continue making gasoline and diesel, only from renewable resources. Cars powered by fuel cells or hydrogen are even more far out. People like personal transportation. Walking is not a solution. Shutting down the airline industry is not a solution.

c) Use existing investment when at all possible and minimize the need for new investment.

This is where most of the pundits get it wrong. Venture capitalists love high investment projects because they earn their fees as a percentage of the capital required. The November cover story of Scientific American is about sustainable fuels. It limits the discussion to Big Physics projects. Only toward the end do the authors offer an estimate of the capital investment required: $100 TRILLION. Ain't gonna happen. Many of the proposed remediation projects are also horribly capital intensive and will never fly.

Many physics solutions claim they will be competitive with oil “soon.” But oil at what price? In the Middle East, countries can pump oil to the surface for a COST $5 a barrel. Americans VALUED that oil at $150 a barrel in 2008. Europeans and Japanese are willing to pay twice that, including taxes. So what is the free-market PRICE of oil? OPEC can set it anywhere within that range. If photovoltaics become competitive with oil at $100 a barrel, OPEC can lower the price to $90 a barrel until the venture capitalists give up. They then buy up the investment for pennies on the dollar, destroy it, and raise the price again. I don't see any way to compete with $5 a barrel Middle East oil. I would be hopeful that biofuels could compete with $25 or $30 a barrel oil.

d) Biofuels should not compete with food production or cause land use issues.

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3) The algae Botryococcus braunii can potentially meet all my criteria for a solution to the Climate Change / Hubbert’s Peak problem.

Nobel Prize winner Melvin Calvin discovered a shrub growing in the Brazilian rain forest related to rubber tree in the 1970s. When tapped, this shrub exuded a latex. Calvin collected the material, (a mix of isoprene trimers) broke the emulsion, dried the organic layer, poured it into the fuel tank of a diesel powered car and drove off. No refining necessary! He correctly realized there was not enough land in the Brazilian rain forest to grow this crop. Genetic engineering did not exist back then.

Calvin made a bad mistake when he attempted to breed a modification that would grow in the desert. Making hydrocarbons needs more water than making carbohydrates. He should have been experimenting in a swamp.

Later, Calvin found the pelagic algae genus Botryococcus and studied the hydrocarbons they produce.

A summary of his work is available online, but cannot be accessed directly. You have to link through a bridge site. Here is it's URL.


http://www.osti.gov/bridge/product.biblio.jsp?osti_id=7286

Click on the 1 MB PDF file icon. The discussion of algae begins on page 15.

Calvin reports that 86% of the dry weight of the algae is hydrocarbons, isoprene oligomers averaging n = 6 degree of polymerization. The structures include linear oligomers and cyclic structures related to steroids. They are not directly useable as transportation fuels.

The algae Botryococcus is among the slower growing breeds. It has a reported doubling time of two days. Presumably, producing hydrocarbons is harder than producing carbohydrates. Nevertheless, it is an interesting exercise in powers of 2 to calculate how quickly 1 g of algae can turn into the 100 million barrels of oil needed each day. Once you have the ocean surface carpeted with the algae, you can then harvest half the crop every doubling period in a self-sustaining manner.

One of your discussions laments the fact that useful algae cannot generally compete with trash species. True, but farmers have learned how to grow crops and eliminate weeds. Farmers of the ocean will have the same incentives. Agricultural chemical companies have been very successful at finding selective herbicides for important crops. If growing algae becomes important, they will attack this problem as well.

Another possibility is to begin with an invasive species and modify it genetically to produce the hydrocarbons we want. Caulerpa taxifolia is an algae that escaped from a Monaco aquarium and now carpets the northern edge of the Mediterranean sea. When it also got loose from the Monterrey aquarium outside San Francisco, the U.S. government spent $8 million chlorinating the Pacific Ocean to eliminate the infestation. While it doesn't make useful hydrocarbons, it does make a toxin caulerpenyne, which presumably is the secret to it success. The structure is available in Wikipedia. As the name suggests, it includes both double and triple bonds. It also has 2 acetates which according to biochemical studies are added last. The main chain contains 15 carbon atoms arranged in a way that suggests derivation from an isoprene trimer. Inhibit the acetylation steps and you have a precursor to diesel fuel. Adding the gene sequence to produce the hydrocarbons or disabling the genes that acetylate the product and you have another way to get at hydrocarbons from algae.

I believe conventional oil refineries could process this hydrocarbon mix to produce gasoline and diesel. Refineries could shut down much of their catalyst guard investment because these hydrocarbons have no nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorus, metals, or ash. This is an extremely sweet crude. These hydrocarbons should be able to replace coal as a fuel in electricity generating plants. Similarly, because it is a high quality fuel, much of the pollution abatement equipment at the back end could be shut down.

Check out the MIT Website Whatmatters for more details The URL is:

http://alum.mit.edu/news/WhatMatters/Archive/200111/

Performance Governing

Performance Governing; Getting Lucky and Staying Lucky

Our infrastructure caused Peak Oil and Global Warming, both civilization killers. We built it. We can build better. What can replace it? I believe we can discover that what if we shift to Performance Governing; unleashing ingenuity in a process of relentlessly improving what we know and do.

Conclusion

• Performance Governing sets standards to be achieved, allowing anyone who can meet or beat that standard to implement.


• How Governing, government's current dictation of how infrastructure should be built is unsustainable. Power generation is 69% inefficient. Urban transport is more than 96% inefficient. Governments are simply not great inventors. Govenment control over infrastructure has created brittle and fragile structures completely addicted to finite and depleting oil.

Example of How verses What:

• Biofuels, How verses What:




• How: The President and Congress directed and subsidize ethanol production:




• Corn prices jumped from $2/bushel in 2005 to $7/bushel in Jun 2008.


• US Secretary of Agriculture expects 43% increase in food prices in 2008.


• Growing food riots in the world.


• Likely, first SUV famine in 2008-2009 as burning food in cars at less than 4% efficiency causes the first biofuel famine.




• What: Define sustainable efficiency standard, such as 100 miles per gallon.



• Efficiency, How verses What::




• How: Congress passes a 50% increase in CAFÉ standards (gas mileage). For simplicity consider they are 20 miles per gallon. Government directing this efficiency improvement will:




• Start in 2012.


• Require about 20 years to rotate out the current car fleet.


• Require everyone to borrow money to buy a car.




• What: Set a standard and allow anyone beating that standard to implement. For example, inventors at JPods, SkyTran, SkyWeb, ULTra, MISTER and others easily beat 100 miles per gallon. A summary of their capabilities are:




• Provide urban transport as a service (no loans required)


• Achieve efficiencies from 100-400 miles per gallon. See CSX commercial for 423 miles per gallon.


• Operate at 1/14th the cost of oil-based transport.


• Move people and cargo 24 x 7.


• Zero-emissions, some are solar powered.


• Convenience of a chauffeured car at the cost to operate an elevator.


• Based on riders per day, the elevator is the most successful form of public transportation. Yet these inventors of a physical-Internet, of horizontal-elevators are not allowed access to rights of way. What is possible is disallowed by the current How. There is no conspiracy. Far worse, there are well-meaning rules and regulations based on unsustainable assumptions.








• Oil, How verses What:




• How: Presidents and Congress directed and subsidize oil production. Subsidies distorted free market innovation.




• Econonic Growth equals Energy Growth times Efficiency Growth
  
  Subsidies and government refusal to respond to Peak Oil (watch comments from EIA Administrator Caruso) distored the end of Energy Growth in May 2005.
  
  
  
  


• Borrow $700 billion a year to consume oil.


• We are 3 decades late in responding. We were warned of the geology in 1956. It was confirmed in US Peak Oil in 1970.



• Foreclosures are an example of the consequences.
  Here is a graph updated from EIA. They stopped updating it in 2004.
  
  
  


• CO2 from automobiles contributes to Global Warming.

  Global Warming is the destruction of human and biosphere habitat. Yet governments are building more highways. Arctic ice loss in 2007 was horrific. Much worse than models predicted. Arctic ice flow in the winter of 2007-2008 indictate risk. Pentagon Study on Abrupt Climate Change. Cracks in oil ices indicate more risks.





• What: Tax oil for its true cost to secure and cleanup after use. This would have made alternatives finacially attractive since the 1973 Oil Embargo. We would have had 38 years from the 1973 Oil Embargo to have iterated alternatives.

Ingenuity

There is no mystery to breakthrough insight or ingenuity. Ingenuity is a personality trait:

• Edison, find 4,000 ways not to make a lightbulb.


• Goodyear, after decades of work, dropped a latex blob on a sooty stove and instantly recognized what had been missing to vulcanize rubber.


• Einstein, spend a decade unemployed and as a patent clerk refining ideas.


• Wright Brothers, relentless study matched by insightful testing.


• Pasteur, “chance favors the prepared mind”.

The process is relatively simple. Invest and mortgage everything you have for very long periods of time without reward. If you are lucky you will clarify a breakthrough concept. Then find someway to navigate the commercial requirements to churn that clarity of thought into commercial acceptance. Vast numbers of truly brilliant ideas are weeded out. The process is simple and ruthless. It is an effort driven by passion, not a government job.

Government control over infrastructure adds three barriers, each nearly 100% efficient at stopping ingenuity:

• Innovators must convince government people averse to risk, for whom there is no reward in taking risk, to take professional risk.


• Churning a concept into insight and breakthrough have many failures and occasional success. Embracing failure is harder for bureaucrats and policy makers than taking risk.


• Iterative process, churning ideas into commerce requiring years to decades. It requires passion that is rare in individuals and extremely rare in organizations larger than a couple of people. This is beyond the event horizon of governments.




• The short event horizon of government and iterative nature of infrastructure deployment is indicated by the automobile replacing the horse over a period of 70 years


• Quote from West Point's Decision Making in Systems Engineering and Management
  
  by, Gregory S. Parnell, Ph.D., Editor
  
  by, Patrick J. Driscoll, Ph.D., Editor
  
  by, Dale L. Henderson, Ph.D., Design Editor
  
  

  In fact, one of the most significant failings of the current U.S. transportation system is that the automobile was never thought of as being part of a system until recently. It was developed and introduced during a period that saw the automobile as a standalone technology largely replacing the horse and carriage. So long as it outperformed the previous equine technology, it was considered a success. This success is not nearly so apparent if the automobile is examined from a systems thinking perspective. In that guise, it has managed to fail miserably across a host of dimensions. Many of these can be observed in any major US city today: oversized cars and trucks negotiating tight roads and streets, bridges and tunnels incapable of handling daily traffic density, insufficient parking, poor air quality induced in areas where regional air circulation geography restricts free flow of wind, a distribution of the working population to suburban locations necessitating automobile transportation, and so on. Had the automobile been developed as a multilateral system interconnected with urban (and rural) transportation networks and environmental systems, U.S. cities would be in a much different situation than they find themselves in today.

  
  

  What is important here is not that the automobile could have been developed differently, but that in choosing to design, develop and deploy the automobile as a stand alone technology, a host of complementary transportation solutions to replace the horse and buggy were not considered.

Organizational Methods for Encouraging Ingenious Personalities

Two books outline some key concepts and mechanics of greatness and uncertainty:

• Good to Great defines the process of forging excellence from mediocrity, of transforming a good organization into a great one. We have good infrastructure and good government based on unsustainable assumptions of cheap oil. Building a great sustainable culture requires leveraging the Stockdale Paradox and exuding greatness from our commercial entities, our governments and our lives.


• The Black Swan is about rare events and getting lucky. This book is about how not to be a “sucker” in the face of uncertainty. We face the uncertainty of civilization killers.

Government Actions, Changing What

Leadership must define what we need and inspire everyone to do what they can. As a starting point, here are three simple actions leaders can take to nurture ingenuity, self-reliance, getting lucky and staying lucky.

Self-reliance: Disciplined people, Discipline Thought, Disciplined Action.

Start simple. Self-reliance starts with things as simple as planting a garden then disciplining ourselves to grow 1/3rd of our own food. Small steps, relentlessly taken will create durable people and communities, economic lifeboats. There may not be time to save everyone, but there is time for everyone to save themself.

Excite that we can and will prevail. We need only exercise our liberty and responsibility.

Getting Lucky, Finding Rare Events and Odd People

Ingenuity is a personality trait. Forging ingenuity into insight and breakthrough require great personal investment with improbable chance of success. For governments and businesses to exploit such rare and extreme behavior requires organizations adapt their rules to be susceptible to such individuals.

For every breakthrough, there is vast “silent evidence,” failures that we do not pay attention to. Without failures we cannot find breakthrough. These failures cannot be avoided but they can be contained in scope by requiring attempts to be privately funded. People risking their own money are much more sober about the managing risks than governments. Biofuels verses JPods in the examples above.

• Performance Governing. Establish standards for infrastructure. Define what is needed and allow anyone willing to risk their capital to beat that standard a franchise to profit from performance forged from their ingenuity.




• Government grants should be very limited, or better, not used at all. There are several problems with grants and government funding for research:
  
  
  
  • Breakthrough concepts are abnormal and are not likely to be funded. Example, Einstein could not get a teaching job until 5 years after publishing the Special Theory of Relativity, Quantum Mechanics via the photoelectric effect, and the other breakthrough clarities of 1905. Establishments like iterations of how not changes in what.
  
  
  • Refining a breakthrough concept to clarity costs about as much as chasing a government grant. The passion for creating should focus on creating not chasing permission to create.
  
  
  • Innovators of breakthroughs are not personally wired to wait for government handouts. Example: Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are both college dropouts. Their breakthrough ideas on personal computers did not wait for the government or academia,
  
  
  • Dependence on government money conditions capital markets to wait for such money. Venture capitalists are almost as risk averse as bureaucrats and policy makers. It also conditions innovators, always desperate for cash, to chase permission not insight.
  
  
  
  


• Government backed loans can be effective if:




• Private risk builds infrastructure. This keeps focus on what is practical.


• Infrastructure achieves public policy objectives.


• Infrastructure provides profitable service and can repay loans. Then low cost government back loans can refinance the infrastructure. These loans can be paid back from profitable operation of the infrastructure. The loans free the private capital to build more infrastructure.


• Care and transparency are required to get the benefits but not the corruption of a Transcontinental Railroad model.

Staying Lucky, Honestly Accruing All Costs

There are no lasting victories. Winning today yields the opportunity to compete again tomorrow. Embracing responsibility will enable us to compete again tomorrow:

• Accept that excellence is the process of relentlessly improving,


• Open our institutions to the odd personalities that find breakthrough.


• Assure all costs are accounted for and resources accrued to compensate.

Performance governing requires honestly accounting for all costs. That is not easy. We have a tendency to shove long-term costs off on the future. The failure to prepare is illustrated by: The collapse of the I-35W Bridge. The American Society of Civil Engineers grades US infrastructure as a D. The collapsing, 100-year oil sewers in Atlanta. The average age of electrical transformers is at the end of their design life. Long-term maintenance was sacrificed for short-term rate reductions. The average age of farmers is 54. Soon we face a loss of farming art. Long-term skill building was sacrificed for short-term gains. Borrow $700 billion a year to consume oil.

Preparation and self-reliance are simple and tough standards. We need only return resources use in a condition we are proud to hand to our grandchildren’s child. She has no voice; defenseless she depends on our reasonable care. If unsure our actions cause harm, we must assume harm and collect estimated costs to compensate as honestly as possible. If industries do not reserve these costs, then to protect the general welfare and common defense, it is the duty of government to assess, collect and exercise such funds to provide a sustainable habitat.

As a conservative, I am amazed that conservative political leaders seem the least interested in the conservative principle that all costs should be accounted for. Had we been accounting for pollution, security and maintenance we would not be facing energy crisis today. Had governments declared what is needed instead of how to build only what they can imagine, we would not be facing infrastructure crisis today. The civilization killers of Peak Oil and Global Warming would have been preempted.

Peak Oil, being thrown on our own resources, may help us change the lifeblood of our economy from oil to ingenuity. Defeating civilization killers requires open minds, performance governing, de-monopolizing government planning of how, will allow a new what.

Benjamin Franklin:

“To be thrown upon one's own resources, is to be cast into the very lap of fortune; for our faculties then undergo a development and display an energy of which they were previously unsusceptible.”