Power Hungry (32 page)

The findings of the academy provide more evidence that the era of the internal combustion engine will continue for decades to come. The life expectancy of the internal combustion engine continues to be extended by engineers, who are constantly making incremental efficiency gains. Those gains are particularly apparent in diesel-powered vehicles, which, by 2030, according to the Academy of Sciences, will impose the lowest total costs on society.

A number of automakers have been introducing diesel cars into the U.S. market of late. The 2009 Volkswagen Jetta TDI gets 41 miles per
gallon on the highway.
⁴⁷
BMW now sells two diesel vehicles in the United States, one of which gets 36 miles per gallon on the highway.
⁴⁸
Mercedes-Benz is selling three diesel vehicles that use their “BlueTEC” design.
⁴⁹
Audi is selling two diesels, one of which gets more than 40 miles per gallon.
⁵⁰
And although diesels are relatively rare in U.S. passenger cars, European car owners have been using diesels for decades. Consumers in Australia can buy the Hyundai i30 diesel wagon (cost: about $20,000), which gets about 40 miles per gallon and reportedly has a range of about 600 miles.
⁵¹
Automakers are also developing diesel hybrids, with Mercedes planning a sedan that could get 88 miles per gallon.
⁵²

Source
: National Academy of Sciences, “Hidden Costs of Energy: Unpriced Consequences of Energy Production and Use,” 2009, executive summary,
http://www.nap.edu/nap-cgi/report.cgi?record_id=12794&type=pdfxsum
, 11.

Though diesels are more efficient than gasoline-fueled engines, the long-term prospects for gasoline are also good. The gasoline-powered 2009 Honda Fit gets 35 miles per gallon.
⁵³
It has four doors and a roomy interior, and the base model sells for less than $15,000. Meanwhile, Ford has developed a turbocharged gasoline engine that will soon be the automaker's standard for its light-vehicle fleet. The new design, called EcoBoost, is smaller than conventionally aspirated engines while providing more power, and supplies fuel-economy improvements of up to 20 percent.
⁵⁴

Furthermore, diesel and gasoline vehicles are not overly reliant on rare earth elements such as neodymium and lanthanum—both of which are critical ingredients in the making of hybrid and electric vehicles. There is no way to know how the rare-earth-supply question will evolve. Perhaps China will adopt export policies that allow the goods containing rare earths to flow freely in world trade.

At the moment, it appears that thousands, perhaps millions, of hybrid-electric cars will be manufactured over the coming decades, and that those vehicles will continue to improve the overall efficiency of the U.S. auto sector. But remember that those high-tech vehicles are only part of the story. They will have to compete for market share with cheap, dependable vehicles powered by conventional internal combustion engines, engines that are still ubiquitous, cheap, and easy to maintain. Those hundreds of millions of internal combustion–powered vehicles can utilize a variety of fuels, including natural gas, propane, dimethyl ether, ethanol, methanol, used french-fry grease, soy diesel, and of course, conventional gasoline and diesel.
⁵⁵
While all of those fuels will play a role, the key issue, as always, is the scale of the transition.

The introduction of the Prius about a decade ago marked the beginning of the electrification of the U.S. transportation sector. It's not the full electrification that many people dream of, but it is an important milestone in a process that will take decades. Remember, it took about ten years for Toyota to sell 1 million units of the Prius.
⁵⁶
That sounds like a lot of cars until you remember that the global fleet now numbers about 1 billion vehicles. We can't be exactly sure how the electrification will proceed from here, but the decades-in-the-future transport system may include a fixed-guideway system that allows cars and trucks to be powered by the electric grid. The fixed guideways would allow vehicles to travel much closer together and at higher speeds than today's vehicles.

As the price of oil rises or falls in the coming decades, so will the acceleration/deceleration of the move toward using more electrons in transportation. Although opinions may differ regarding all-electric cars versus hybrids and other alt-fueled cars, we can agree on one basic theme: Electrons are good. The more electrons the better, because electricity is the basic commodity of modern life. And that leads to the last myth I want to debunk: the belief that we can create lots of electricity by burning biomass.

We Can Replace Coal with Wood

E
VERYONE LIKES WOOD. So when it comes to generating electricity, let's just replace coal with wood. Easy, right?

Some of the loudest voices on the Green/Left seem to think so. For instance, in March 2009, Joe Romm, a blogger on climate issues, wrote that “The best and cheapest near-term strategy for reducing coal plant CO
₂
emissions without forcing utilities to simply walk away from their entire capital investment is to replace that coal with biomass.” Romm cited a plan by Georgia Power, a subsidiary of utility giant Southern Company, to convert one of the company's plants so that it would burn wood rather than coal. The coal-fired power plant had 155 megawatts of capacity. After switching to wood, its output would be reduced to 96 megawatts. Romm praised the effort, saying that switching to biomass was “the most practical and affordable strategy for utilities with coal plants.”
¹

In October 2009, the
New York Times
wrote about efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from electric power plants, citing a Sierra Club effort to reduce coal consumption. The
Times
reporter, Matthew Wald, wrote that the promoters of non-coal sources “say that biomass fuels, derived from wood, waste, and alcohol, could offer an even better opportunity” for capturing the carbon dioxide that is generated during the combustion process. He went on to say that using trees could be advantageous, because “if a tree is cut down and burned in a boiler, a new tree
can grow in its place, and absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That makes the process ‘carbon negative;' for each ton burned, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will decline.”
²

In November 2009, Romm was again singing the praises of using wood to produce electricity, with a blog post that cited a news story about a biomass power plant to be built in Ashland, Wisconsin.
³

Those biomass-to-electricity pronouncements follow the unanimous 2008 vote by the Austin City Council to approve a plan put forward by the city's utility, Austin Energy, to spend $2.3 billion over twenty years to buy all of the power produced by a 100-megawatt wood-fired power plant to be built in East Texas.
⁴
Just before the Austin City Council voted on the wood-burning power plant, the city's mayor, Will Wynn, told the
Austin Chronicle
that the deal was a “strategic ‘no brainer' that will keep our electric costs lower than the alternatives.”
⁵

While Romm, the Sierra Club, and Austin's environmentalists love the idea of biomass-fueled power plants, it appears that few of them have bothered to do the basic calculations that show just how much wood will be needed to replace even a small fraction of our coal needs. Here's the myth-busting reality: To replace just 10 percent of the coal-fired electricity capacity in the United States with wood-fired capacity would mean more than doubling overall U.S. wood consumption.

The math, as usual, is straightforward. The wood requirements for the Georgia Power facility and the East Texas generation project are about the same: 1 million tons of wood per year.
⁶
Thus, both projects will require 10,000 tons of wood per year to produce 1 megawatt of electricity.

The United States now has about 336,300 megawatts of coal-fired electricity generation capacity.
⁷
Let's assume that we want to replace just 10 percent of that coal-fired capacity—33,630 megawatts—with wood-burning power plants. Simple math shows that doing so would require about 336.3 million tons of wood per year.
⁸
How much wood is that? According to estimates from the United Nations Environmental Program, total U.S. wood consumption is now about 236.4 million tons per year.
⁹
Given those numbers, if the United States wants to continue using wood for building homes, bookshelves, and other uses—while also replacing 10 percent of its coal-fired generation capacity with wood-fired generators—
it will need to consume nearly 573 million tons of wood per year, or about 2.5 times its current consumption.

These numbers apparently don't bother Romm and other cheerleaders of this concept. In lauding the Georgia Power plant's move to burn wood rather than coal, he wrote that “the key, of course, [is] to make sure this is all done in the sustainable fashion. That will be the job of regulators and the Obama administration.”
¹⁰

But regulators, try as they might, can't overcome basic physics. The problems with biomass-to-electricity schemes are the same ones that haunt nearly every renewable energy idea: power density and energy density. Wood is a wonderful fuel for roasting marshmallows and keeping warm on a cold night. But its energy density is less than half that of coal's. That's why few people in the United States and in other developed countries use it for their cooking and heating needs. When you combine that low energy density with the low power density of wood and biomass production, the challenges become even more apparent. As discussed earlier, the power density of the best-managed forests is only about 1 watt per square meter.
¹¹
And when a particular energy source, in this case, wood, has low power density and low energy density, that leads to problems with the other two elements of the Four Imperatives: cost and scale.

Alas, when it comes to discussions of “green” energy, too many advocates and politicos simply decide that it's a “no brainer.” The result: Little critical thinking gets done about the issues of scale and the long-term impacts of the sources that are supposed to be making things better.

As I showed with just a bit of math, the myth that biomass provides a viable replacement for coal was easy to debunk. Now that many of the myths about green energy have been addressed, I will show, in the next section, why natural gas and nuclear hold so much promise for the future.

Why N2N? And Why Now?

 

 

 

 

I
N AUGUST 2009, Fatih Birol, the chief economist for the International Energy Agency, did something that has become almost commonplace: He predicted a date for peak oil. In an interview with the British newspaper, the
Independent
, Birol said that his agency now believes “peak oil will come perhaps by 2020.”
¹

Birol is one of dozens of prognosticators who have offered an opinion on the question of peak oil—the moment when the world reaches the limit of its ability to produce ever-increasing amounts of petroleum. Is Birol right? Maybe. We won't know for certain until about 2020 whether his prediction was right or wrong.

The importance of Birol's prediction is not that he picked a date for peak oil; rather, it's that he and so many other leading energy analysts are forecasting a peak. Indeed, when that peak is hit, it will be a milestone in our energy use—but it will not mean that we will quit using oil. As discussed in Part 1, the world will continue using oil for decades to come because no other fuel source provides such incredible versatility, ease of handling, and energy density. That said, it's also clear that oil's share of the primary energy market is declining. Back in 1973, oil provided 48 percent of the world's total energy. By 2008, that percentage had declined to 35 percent. And over the coming decades, the percentage will likely continue its slow decline.

It is true that this decline is part of a significant energy transition; it's just not the rapid move to the “green” sources that Al Gore and many other boosters have been hyping. The big challenge for today's policymakers is to make the ongoing transition away from oil and coal to other energy sources as easy as possible; and in doing so, they should be encouraging energy sources that benefit both the environment and the economy. That brings us to the questions posed by the title of this chapter: Why N2N? And why now?