Power Hungry (29 page)

Consider this claim: “From our cellulose waste products on the farm such as straw, corn-stalks, corn cobs and all similar sorts of material we throw away, we can get, by present known methods, enough alcohol to run our automotive equipment in the United States.”

That sounds like something you've heard recently, right? Well, fasten your seatbelt because that claim was made way back in 1921. That's when Thomas Midgley, an American inventor, proclaimed the wonders of cellulosic ethanol to the Society of Automotive Engineers in Indianapolis. Though Midgley was excited about the prospect of cellulosic ethanol, he admitted that there was a significant hurdle to jump before his concept would be feasible: Producing the fuel would cost about $2 per gallon.
¹
That's about $24 per gallon in current money.

Alas, what's old is new again. Over the past few years, cellulosic ethanol has been promoted by a Who's Who of American politics, including Iowa
senator Tom Harkin,
²
President Barack Obama,
³
former vice president Al Gore, former Republican presidential nominee and U.S. Senator John McCain, former president Bill Clinton, former president George W. Bush, former CIA director James Woolsey,
⁴
and Rocky Mountain Institute cofounder Amory Lovins.
⁵
In August 2009, billionaires Ted Turner and T. Boone Pickens added their names to the list of cellulosic boosters when they co-wrote an opinion piece for the
Wall Street Journal
, in which they declared that “advanced biofuels from cellulosic material ... can play a key role in reducing the vulnerabilities, emissions and costs associated with imported oil, while also providing new economic opportunities for America's farm communities.”
⁶

Of the people on that list, Lovins has been the longest-running—and the most consistently wrong—cheerleader for cellulosic fuels. His boosterism began with a 1976 article in
Foreign Affairs
, the piece that arguably made his career. In that article, called “Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?” Lovins declared that American energy policy was all wrong. What America needed was “soft” energy resources to replace the “hard” ones (namely, hydrocarbons and centralized power plants). Regarding biofuels, he wrote that “exciting developments in the conversion of agricultural, forestry and urban wastes to methanol and other liquid and gaseous fuels now offer practical, economically interesting technologies sufficient to run an efficient US transport sector.”

Lovins went on: “Presently proved processes already offer sizable contributions without the inevitable climatic constraints of fossil-fuel combustion.” And he claimed that, given better efficiency in automobiles and a large enough installation of cellulosic ethanol distilleries, “the whole of the transport needs could be met by organic conversion.”
⁷
In other words, Lovins was making the exact same claim that Thomas Midgley had made fifty-five years earlier: Given enough money—that's always the catch, isn't it?—cellulosic ethanol could provide all of America's transportation fuel needs.

Almost thirty years after Lovins made his claims in
Foreign Affairs
, the United States still did not have a single biofuel company producing significant quantities of cellulosic ethanol for sale in the commercial market.
⁸
And yet, in 2004, Lovins and several coauthors wrote a book called
Winning the Oil Endgame
that, once again, said that advances in
biotechnology would make cellulosic ethanol viable. And in doing so, claimed Lovins and his peers, it “will strengthen rural America, boost net farm income by tens of billions of dollars a year, and create more than 750,000 new jobs.”
⁹
Two years later, Lovins was at it again. In 2006, while testifying before the U.S. Senate, he claimed that “advanced biofuels (chiefly cellulosic ethanol)” could be produced for an average cost of just $18 per barrel.
¹⁰

Alas, Lovins isn't the only one drinking the cellulosic Kool-Aid. In his 2007 book,
Winning Our Energy Independence
, S. David Freeman, the former head of the Tennessee Valley Authority, said that to get away from our use of oil, “we must count on biofuels.”
¹¹
And a key part of Freeman's biofuel recipe was cellulosic ethanol. Freeman claimed that there was “huge potential to generate ethanol from the cellulose in organic wastes of agriculture and forestry.”
¹²
Using some 368 million tons of “forest wastes,” he said, could provide about 18.4 billion gallons of ethanol per year, yielding “the equivalent of about 14 billion gallons gasoline [
sic
], or about 10% of current gasoline consumption.”
¹³

Cellulosic ethanol gained acolytes during the 2008 presidential campaign. In May 2008, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi touted the passage of the subsidy-packed $307 billion farm bill, stating that it was an “investment in energy independence” because it provided “support for the transition to cellulosic ethanol.”
¹⁴
Pelosi and her fellow members of Congress are such big believers in cellulosic ethanol that they have mandated that U.S. fuel suppliers blend no less than 21 billion gallons of the nonexistent product into the American gasoline pool every year, starting no later than 2022.
¹⁵
(That volume of fuel is equal to about 1.37 million barrels per day, which is approximately equal to the volume of oil the United States imported from Venezuela in 2007.)
¹⁶

Pelosi is just one of many Democrats who love the idea of cellulosic ethanol. In August 2008, Obama unveiled his “new” energy plan, which called for “advances in biofuels, including cellulosic ethanol.”
¹⁷
In January 2009, Senator Tom Harkin, the Iowa Democrat who has been a key backer of the corn ethanol industry for years, told PBS that “ethanol doesn't necessarily all have to come from corn. In the last farm bill, I put a lot of effort into supporting cellulose [
sic
] ethanol, and I think that's what you're going to see in the future.”
¹⁸

In April 2009, U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu wrote an article for
Newsweek
in which he said the United States “can develop new liquid biofuels that will be direct replacements for gasoline and diesel fuel.” He claimed these fuels could be produced from grasses and “agricultural wastes” and that there was “an achievable strategy” for “using biomass to replace 30% of our transportation fuels.” Once those fuels are ready, he declared, “the importance of oil as a strategic resource will plummet.”
¹⁹
In late October 2009, Obama was still touting biofuels. But instead of singling out cellulosic ethanol for praise, he was talking about the need for “sustainably grown biofuels.”
²⁰
Exactly what that term means no one seems to know.

Although the hype continues unabated, cellulosic ethanol is scarcely closer to widespread commercial viability than it was when Midgley first began promoting it back in 1921. A September 2008 study on alternative automotive fuels done by Jan Kreider, a professor emeritus of engineering at the University of Colorado, and Peter S. Curtiss, a Boulder-based engineer, found that the production of cellulosic ethanol required about forty-two times as much water and emitted about 50 percent more carbon dioxide per unit of energy produced than standard gasoline. They also found that—as with corn ethanol—the amount of energy that could be gained by producing cellulosic ethanol was negligible.
²¹

The underlying problem with cellulosic ethanol takes us back to the Four Imperatives. Cellulosic ethanol and other biomass-focused energy projects are plagued by their low power density. No matter how much the promoters want to talk about the merits of wood chips and switchgrass, they are fighting an uphill battle, because the power density of biomass production is simply too low: approximately 0.4 watts per square meter.
²²
Even the best-managed tree plantations can only achieve power densities of about 1 watt per square meter.
²³
For comparison, recall that even a marginal natural gas well has a power density of about 28 watts per square meter.

Fighting the inherently low power density of biomass production means that entrepreneurs must corral Bunyanesque quantities of the stuff in order to make even a small dent in America's motor fuel market. Let's assume that the United States wants to replace 10 percent of its oil use with cellulosic ethanol. That's a useful percentage, as it's approximately
equal to the percentage of U.S. oil consumption that originates in the Persian Gulf.
²⁴
Let's further assume that the United States decides that switchgrass is the most viable option for producing cellulosic ethanol.

Given those assumptions, here's the math: The United States consumes about 21 million barrels of oil per day, or about 320 billion gallons of oil per year.
²⁵
Ten percent of that volume would be about 32 billion gallons of oil. But remember, ethanol's energy density is only about two-thirds that of gasoline. Thus, the United States would need to produce about 48.5 billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol in order to have the energy equivalent of 32 billion gallons of oil.

So how much biomass would be needed? Cellulosic ethanol companies like Coskata and Syntec have claimed that they can produce about 100 gallons of ethanol per ton of biomass. Therefore, producing 48.5 billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol would require about 485 million tons of biomass. How much is that? If we assume that a standard 48-foot trailer holds 15 tons of material, then we would need 32.3 million trailers to hold that 485 million tons of biomass. That's a lot of trailers. Arranged in a line, that column of trailers (not including any trucks attached to them) would stretch about 293,600 miles—long enough to reach from the Earth to the Moon and about one-fifth of the way back again.
²⁶

But let's continue driving down this road for another mile or two. Sure, it's possible to produce that much biomass, but how much land would be required to make it happen? A report from Oak Ridge National Laboratory suggests that 1 acre of switchgrass can produce 11.5 tons of biomass per year.
²⁷

Given those numbers, producing 485 million tons of biomass from switchgrass would require 42.1 million acres to be planted in nothing but switchgrass. That's equal to about 65,800 square miles, an area nearly equal to the size of Oklahoma.
²⁸
Now, some wags might suggest that paving the Sooner State with nothing but switchgrass would be a significant improvement. But making room for all of that switchgrass would pinch America's ability to grow food. The 42.1 million acres needed for the switchgrass would be equal to about 10 percent of all the cropland now under cultivation in the United States.
²⁹
Thus, for the United States to get 10 percent of its oil needs from cellulosic ethanol,
it would need to plant an area equal to about 10 percent of its cropland in switchgrass.

And none of those calculations account for the fact that there's no infrastructure available to plant, harvest, and transport the switchgrass or other biomass source to the refinery. The U.S. farming sector has invested billions of dollars in all types of tractors, planters, and harvesters to grow and manage food crops. But none of that equipment—made by John Deere, Kubota, and other companies—has been designed to handle the gargantuan volumes of biomass that would be needed to make cellulosic ethanol viable.

Even if there is a breakthrough in ethanol production that allows the production of large quantities of alcohol fuel from biomass, it does not necessarily mean that the United States will see a corresponding drop in its imported oil needs. Why? The answer is simple: Ethanol only replaces one of the myriad products that refiners extract from a barrel of crude oil. And that leads to another heretical notion: Increased ethanol use won't cut oil imports.

H. L. Mencken once remarked that there is always a “well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.”

That quote comes to mind when considering the vocal group of politicos and neoconservatives who claim that the best way to cut American oil imports, and thereby impoverish the petrostates (and, in theory, reduce terrorism), is to require automakers to manufacture “flex-fuel” cars that can burn motor fuel containing 85 percent ethanol. (For more on this claim, and the people who are promoting it, see my book
Gusher of Lies
.)

Their rationale is that using more ethanol made from corn, switchgrass, or other biomass will create competition in the motor fuel market and thereby depose oil as the world's primary transportation fuel. Once that is done, they claim, oil will no longer be a strategic commodity; its price will fall, the petrostates will be bankrupted, and a newly energyindependent United States will race back to the head of the line as the world's undisputed sole superpower. The rhetoric put forward by these
underinformed-but-persistent sophomores has proved so irresistible that several members of Congress have introduced legislation aimed at requiring automakers to produce flex-fuel cars. Fortunately, none of their proposed bills have passed.