Debt Debate in Congress

[Conan71]

Small amounts from recycling efforts is feasible, but not as a primary replacement for petroleum.

Still costs too much to produce in mass. Plus it poses a dangerous pricing loop. Because in large quantities it would be produced from stocks like corn, rapeseed, soy, and other oil grains, to produce it in mass would inflate food costs.  To further subsidize the production of such food stock, would turn farmers to fuel production over food, further increasing the price of food (as ethanol did). Once the market began to turn to surface energy production as opposed to pumping it out of the ground, we would need to devote ever increasing amounts of surface area to bio-fuel crops. This would increase the cost of production, food, and eat up a lot of land. To be sustainable in the market it would have to be priced competitively with regular diesel, and that would require regulation to artificially increase the price of petroleum diesel as demand for the product fell.

Natural demand is not there, and manipulated demand never turns out well.

This thread will change to a discussion on pot in 3. . .2. . .1

Actually, there is plenty of recycled stock and the technology exists to harness it.  Chicken fat is ideal to use as roughly a #2 grade oil.  You can use yellow grease (fryer oil and bird fats) and tallow as boiler fuel with no refining conversion.  Main issue is making sure you strain solids from it and you use heat exchangers (trim heaters) to pre-heat the oil to get better atomization.  We've designed and installed many of those systems.  

There's plenty of grain production capacity across the nation to produce a significant amount of virgin feed stocks for bio-diesel without upsetting the food chain, it's simply not being utilized at this time.  At some point, bio-diesel and petroleum diesel would eventually find a price equilibrium because as the price would fall on p-diesel, demand would increase and the price would come up accordingly.  At $3.75 a gallon for p-diesel right now, mass scale production of bio-diesel should be very attractive with a pricing advantage of about .25 a gallon.  At least from what my contacts tell me, bio-d is retailing for $3.50 a gallon.  That should create a good demand.  For large-scale production, without subsidy, it should cost about $2.50 a gallon to produce these days.

Perhaps the farmers and processors are simply waiting for their hand-out subsidies to make it much more profitable more feasible.

Even at a 20% blend with p-diesel, that's 20% less dependence on petroleum stocks and it will run in any diesel engine.

[Gaspar]

Actually, there is plenty of recycled stock and the technology exists to harness it.  Chicken fat is ideal to use as roughly a #2 grade oil.  You can use yellow grease (fryer oil and bird fats) and tallow as boiler fuel with no refining conversion.  Main issue is making sure you strain solids from it and you use heat exchangers (trim heaters) to pre-heat the oil to get better atomization.  We've designed and installed many of those systems.  

There's plenty of grain production capacity across the nation to produce a significant amount of virgin feed stocks for bio-diesel without upsetting the food chain, it's simply not being utilized at this time.  At some point, bio-diesel and petroleum diesel would eventually find a price equilibrium because as the price would fall on p-diesel, demand would increase and the price would come up accordingly.  At $3.75 a gallon for p-diesel right now, mass scale production of bio-diesel should be very attractive with a pricing advantage of about .25 a gallon.  At least from what my contacts tell me, bio-d is retailing for $3.50 a gallon.  That should create a good demand.  For large-scale production, without subsidy, it should cost about $2.50 a gallon to produce these days.

Perhaps the farmers and processors are simply waiting for their hand-out subsidies to make it much more profitable more feasible.

Even at a 20% blend with p-diesel, that's 20% less dependence on petroleum stocks and it will run in any diesel engine.

But wasn't that the same argument made for ethanol in the late 90s and early 2ks?   

[Gaspar]

I understand the recycling possibilities and that I am 100% behind, but can we sustain the replacement of petroleum diesel with terrestrial alternatives?

[we vs us]

Fossil fuels (I'm thinking gasoline, but also NG AFAIK) are the still the most efficient medium for energy per unit out there, though competing costs are falling in a variety of different arenas.  Solar is becoming much more efficient and is just starting to rival traditional coal in cost per unit; wind power is an increasingly important supplemental; fission reactors based on thorium are reportedly much more stable and produce much less waste; biofuels are made from everything from switchgrass to cooking oil to poultry offal to algae . . . none of which are perfect fossil fuel replacements but which can diversify our fuel supply; even wave capture technology has made leaps and bounds and there're now underwater turbines getting juice from the tides.  

But as Conan says, fossil fuels aren't some sort of perfectly competing product, either.  Hefty government subsidies are baked into each barrel price.  The market is already not only imperfect but highly skewed towards the existing producers and existing technologies.  

[Conan71]

I understand the recycling possibilities and that I am 100% behind, but can we sustain the replacement of petroleum diesel with terrestrial alternatives?

There's enough land and seed to do it.  Problem is, farmers and producers want their Obama money.

[Gaspar]

Fossil fuels (I'm thinking gasoline, but also NG AFAIK) are the still the most efficient medium for energy per unit out there, though competing costs are falling in a variety of different arenas.  Solar is becoming much more efficient and is just starting to rival traditional coal in cost per unit; wind power is an increasingly important supplemental; fission reactors based on thorium are reportedly much more stable and produce much less waste; biofuels are made from everything from switchgrass to cooking oil to poultry offal to algae . . . none of which are perfect fossil fuel replacements but which can diversify our fuel supply; even wave capture technology has made leaps and bounds and there're now underwater turbines getting juice from the tides.  

But as Conan says, fossil fuels aren't some sort of perfectly competing product, either.  Hefty government subsidies are baked into each barrel price.  The market is already not only imperfect but highly skewed towards the existing producers and existing technologies.  

I like the idea of underwater turbines.  I had a dream as a kid about hooking generators to floating buoys that would turn with every wave.  I even made a crude diagram (I think I was 10).  I wonder if I can file a claim for royalties?

[Gaspar]

There's enough land and seed to do it.  Problem is, farmers and producers want their Obama money.

What if they each gave $50,000 to the Obama2012 campaign?  Perhaps. . .

[RecycleMichael]

I would agree with conan and disagree with gaspar on this issue. Alternative sources don't have to be food. Switchgrass has excellent potential to be grown, refined, and consumed locally and at an affordable price. I also believe there is plenty of unrecovered material that could be used in many types of engines.

I collect both used motor oil and spent cooking oil at each of our thirteen recycling centers. I spend a lot of money on tanks, spill kits and hauling, but now I get paid by the gallon. It varies in amount and value, based on local demand. I have been paid up to $2 a gallon for cooking oil and at little as zero. For motor oil I have paid the recycler as much as $1 a gallon and been paid a$1 a gallon.

I have collected as much as 58,000 gallons in a year and as little as 20,000 gallons in a calendar year.

The issues are mostly around sophisticated demand. Entreprenuers come into the marketplace with grand ideas and sometimes the federal or state government will offer a few incentives, but we have yet to have a well-funded and experienced national player vertically integrate the entire system under one set of goals. This seems to me to be a simple fix, but I don't see the political leadership to push this agenda. There is so much mistrust and political agendas to anything energy related that simple ideas become weapons.  

[Gaspar]

I would agree with conan and disagree with gaspar on this issue. Alternative sources don't have to be food. Switchgrass has excellent potential to be grown, refined, and consumed locally and at an affordable price. I also believe there is plenty of unrecovered material that could be used in many types of engines.
 

I understand that but if I am Jim the farmer and I raise soy beans for feed and food, and the opportunity for me to grow switchgrass with less maintenance than soy, and more profit, I am going to naturally choose to turn my fields to switchgrass, as will many of my fellow farmers.  The result is a drop in soy production and increase in price.  We've already seen this with feed corn vs. ethanol corn.   Subsidies off the table, if there is more profit in growing energy than growing food, farmers will grow energy.

There's not anything essentially wrong with that because as food demand increased, more farmers would enter the market and clear cut additional land to grow soy beans.  Unfortunately that is never the case.  Government will see an opportunity to interject, subsidize, and regulate because the opportunity to purchase votes will simply be to great.  So subsidies have to be put back on the table, and the imbalance maintained.

Either way, food crops will be diverted, and additional land will be claimed for production.

I don't fully understand the variables but there simply cannot be enough recycled oil laying around to satisfy the 42 billion gallons of diesel we use every year.

[RecycleMichael]

The key word is satisfy. Yes, we cannot do it today.

But if we can get a three-pronged attack of reducing consumption, making plant-based fuel, and investing in better battery technolgy, then we can make it quickly away from foreign oil.

The third one is my favorite. The man who can invent a high output, long life and lightweight battery is the new Bill Gates. 

[Gaspar]

The key word is satisfy. Yes, we cannot do it today.

But if we can get a three-pronged attack of reducing consumption, making plant-based fuel, and investing in better battery technolgy, then we can make it quickly away from foreign oil.

The third one is my favorite. The man who can invent a high output, long life and lightweight battery is the new Bill Gates. 

I agree. 

The demand is growing.  Our choice is wether we promote the idea through force or free-market.

[nathanm]

The demand is growing.  Our choice is wether we promote the idea through force or free-market.

What you fail to understand is that there is presently no free market in fossil fuel energy. If the price of fossil fuels included the cost of the negative externalities that get pushed onto the commons instead of being paid for by users, we'd have moved to renewables 30 or 40 years ago and we'd be arguing about something else. Instead, fossil fuel producers get subsidized by the rest of us and here we are.

There is no free market if the cost of the good doesn't include all of the cost, whether that cost is paid for by consumers directly or by a mix of consumers and transparent government subsidies. Read some economics textbooks, and I don't mean those of Keynes and his ideological offspring.

[Gaspar]

What you fail to understand is that there is presently no free market in fossil fuel energy. If the price of fossil fuels included the cost of the negative externalities that get pushed onto the commons instead of being paid for by users, we'd have moved to renewables 30 or 40 years ago and we'd be arguing about something else. Instead, fossil fuel producers get subsidized by the rest of us and here we are.

There is no free market if the cost of the good doesn't include all of the cost, whether that cost is paid for by consumers directly or by a mix of consumers and transparent government subsidies. Read some economics textbooks, and I don't mean those of Keynes and his ideological offspring.

I have no doubt that subsidy, and regulation though taxation have completely corrupted the fossil fuel market.  We may not agree on the exact direction of that corruption, but none the less, the outcome is the same.  Artificial manipulation creates artificial levels of demand ALWAYS, and eventually leads to either collapse or additional subsidization. 

I do disagree with your 30 - 40 year estimate on renewables.   The technology did not exist for any renewable energy source at that time to feed growing demand.  In fact we are still behind the curve.  The innovation necessary to move to renewables requires the energy from current sources to power industry and build enough capital to push research and development. 

RM is on point with his observation of Batteries as our weakest link.  We do not currently have a method of energy storage that would allow our existing renewables to be very useful to us.  If we could produce a battery with a capacity to weight ratio and an efficiency that was decent, we could live with the inefficiency and inconsistency of solar and wind.  Unfortunately, we are not capable of storing energy very well except for hydrocarbon states.

A lithium battery gives you about 1-1.4 megajoules per KG of power and it's efficiency is greatly affected by temperature.
Our very best battery technologies are lithium air batteries and can provide about 9 megajoules per kg of storage, but lithium batteries are too dangerous to use in things like automobiles, so they are relegated to your cell phone or your computer.  Lead Acid is the preferred battery for automobile use, but it will only store about 2.6 megajoules of power.

This is rather ridiculous when you consider that Diesel and Gasoline store 45-48 megajoules per KG in their native chemical form, and hydrogen is well over 100.  All of these are rather silly when you consider that a single KG of Uranium stores 20,000,000 megajoules of energy.

So, no matter what the power source, safe and efficient storage is our primary hurdle.  Overcome that, and where the energy comes from becomes far less important. 

[Red Arrow]

If we could produce a battery with a capacity to weight ratio and an efficiency that was decent, we could live with the inefficiency and inconsistency of solar and wind. 

Weight and volume are obviously important for mobile applications but wouldn't be as important as efficiency in a stationary application.  There have been some attention getting stories about lithium-ion batteries catching fire.  Could that danger be mitigated for a large stationary battery?  Do we have an efficient really large scale inverter to convert back to AC to go back on the grid?

[Conan71]

Sorry for the snarky reply earlier when I was leaving my office yesterday.  The relative small size of many bio-diesel plants doesn't represent a jobs windfall.  IIRC, the Prarie Pride plant in Deerfield, Mo. employed about 65 workers at full production.  It's also a soybean processing facility so I don't have any idea how many jobs were directly related to bio-diesel.  Not real sexy numbers when it comes to job creation figures when there's so much pressure to create jobs. 

The government mis-handled the issue during the Bush years, IMO.  They tried to lead with micro-plants capable of only doing about 2 million gallons a year.  A plant that size only needs a staff of three to five to operate. There was one which lasted all of 6 months in Chelsea, if that.  It was operated by a couple of AA mechanics on their spare time.  They got grants and loans as well as a supposed contract to sell the fuel to the military.  In other words, somewhat of an incubator-type project for small, disadvantaged businesses, regardless of their experience or qualifications.  I believe peak employment was maybe 3 workers, one full time and the other two guys part time.  They had really no resources and left behind a huge mess when they locked the doors and walked away.  That's hardly an isolated story.

Earth Bio-Fuels, the company associated with Willie Nelson skipped out owing my company around $7K for some work getting equipment up and running for them.

I worked with another plant in Colorado, owned and operated by a construction company.  The state of Colorado gave them incentives to make their own bio-d as they burn about 5000 gallons a day of road and off-road diesel in their trucks and heavy equipment.  The state felt it would help reduce emissions which is a real problem on the front range.  I believe that went along okay for about a year until they realized there was really nowhere to go with the glycerine which was a by-product of the refining process, plus the operating cost of running their own micro-refinery and transportation really didn't make it an economical option even with incentives.

I believe the focus should have honed in on larger refineries with companies which already had a lot of the agricultural purchasing, transportation, and distribution networks in place which would make the business have a whole lot better chance at survival.  I believe encouraging cooperative efforts between big oil and ag giants like ADM or Cargill would have made a whole lot of sense as well as it would have brought a whole lot more stability to the industry. 

Oh, and doing further research on what's happened to the Deerfield plant?  ADM bought it earlier this year.  I need to ask my customer whose office is just down the road if he knows if they are actually producing bio-d again.

Not sure about the veracity of this but the Navy is paying stupid money for bio-fuel if there's truth to the article and Tulsa's Syntroleum is getting a piece of the action.

http://hotair.com/archives/2011/12/11/navy-buys-biofuel-for-16-a-gallon/