Fuel Maker Start-Up Making Strides

Re: my depressing previous post on the DOD's as yet unsuccessful attempt to make a fuels market via vehicle and aircraft certification, here's a local company (local to my home town of Boston, that is) that's making some early but significant progress towards becoming a future fuel provider.

GreatPoint Energy is taking a run at turning the coal-to-fuel gasification process into a real business. This CNET article by clean tech reporter Martin LaMonica provides a good overview. Note: the end product GreatPoint is shooting for here is natural gas, not jet fuel or diesel. But they still provide a good example of some of the challenges, as well as the potential rewards, that await companies that pursue similar paths.

Potential Coal to Liquids (CTL) Game Changer?

The DOD consumes 75% of the energy used by the Federal government, and the Air Force is by far the largest consumer of energy in the DOD.  Hence, the Air Force and DARPA have been searching for alternatives to jet fuel derived from oil for several years and the work continues. Among the challengers to oil are fuels derived from oil's biomass precursors like foliage, wood, food waste, sugar cane, switch grass, algae, etc. Nature would eventually turn these things into oil for free, as long as we could wait a couple hundred of million years. However, we don't have quite that much time.

 The Air Force has turned its attention to making fuel from other fossil forms, including natural gas and coal, and almost (but not quite) constructed a CTL fuel facility at Malmstrom AFB (covered here). 

The problems with CTL processes to date are several, and include price and the amount of pollution (including CO2) created by the process, even before the fuel is burned. This Wired magazine article describes a breakthrough made by Professor Ben Glasser in Johannesburg, South Africa. Here's the short take:

The traditional process uses carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and hydrogen as the ingredients in the molecular soup that gets turned into hydrocarbons. The process uses just CO2 and hydrogen. Glasser's new production method allows them to set a lower limit on the amount of energy that would be needed to transform solid coal into fuel. The very best possible CTL process would require 350 megawatts of input to make 80,000 gallons of fuel; the current process uses more than 1,000 megawatts.

Glasser's work may make CTL more cost competitive with regular oil ... and thereby make things harder on biomass-based fuels from an economic point of view.  But it's important to keep things in perspective. Whenever renewable energy or synthetic fuels come up, oil industry types like to keep things real by invoking the S word. S stands for Scale. The Air Force uses 2.5 billion gallons of jet fuel per year, and that's only 10% of US yearly jet fuel use. You do the math.

No Go for Air Force Coal-to-Liquid at Malmstrom

The Air Force is betting the house it can find non-oil forms of liquid fuel to power its planes, manned and unmanned. As you're probably well aware, over the past 18 months it has been busy certifying that the entire inventory is OK running on a mix of 50/50 JP8 and synthetic fuel derived from natgas. Having our planes be able to run on other other fuels is one thing, having enough of the alternate fuel to make a difference is quite another.

To that end, the Air Force had been trying to stand-up a plant to test the feasibility of turning coal into liquid fuel in high volume. Unfortunately, it appears that initiative is dead, at least for now. Here are the reasons the AF gave for why they decided to kill it, according to this Air Force Link article: 

• Possible conflicts with the wing's mission, including degradation of security in the vicinity of weapons storage area; 
  
• Interference with existing missile transportation operations; and,
  
• Issues with explosive safety arcs and operational flight safety
  

What I'd like to know is: other than these issues, was the plant going to work? How much fuel was it going to make and how much would it have cost per gallon when all the costs of construction and operation were factored in? The reasons given for termination mask information on what the Air Force thought of the utility of this proposed facility. It's not a good sign.

Real DOD Energy Progress ... or Beating Heads Against Walls?

I love breakthroughs as much as anyone, be they technology or policy based. But while I enjoy exciting evidence of progress, I place an even higher value on realism/pragmatism so we don't fool ourselves. And this is where I often find myself on this blog: shuttling back and forth between enthusiasm (when a bold move is made like last week's announcement of 4,000 electric cars for Army bases) and concern (when the Air Force seems to place all its hopes in the synth fuel basket) to fear, when DOD leaders continue to refuse to acknowledge the most basic new energy concepts: FBCF and EEKPP.

This post is about all three: enthusiam, concern and fear. And as usual, former IEA official Dr. Sohbet Karbuz does a better job of bringing it all together than I do. Like this, from his recent piece in National Defense Magazine:

... the Pentagon does not have a coherent and viable long-term strategy on energy. Its efforts on energy concentrate on three issues: supply oriented (alternative and renewable fuels and nuclear); demand oriented (energy efficiency technology options such as turbine and engine technologies, material and aerodynamic design etc); and cross cutting technologies (conversion of waste to energy). Efficient use and conservation of energy deserves much more emphasis. The Air Force’s efforts to increase the use of flight simulators, modifications to flight routes, efficient cargo loading, more en route fuel stops instead of in-flight refueling, and culture change constitute good examples. Similar efforts should be adopted by the other services.

It's not too long and I recommend reading it all if you get a chance.  BTW, on the eve of the inauguration of President Barack Obama, I found a great image of the Jefferson Memorial. Lincoln's been getting a lot of visibility lately, and for very good reason. But I'm also counting on thinkers and visionaries in the mode of Jefferson to help guide us as we seek exits from the tremendous holes we've dug for ourselves, in energy and many other areas. He seems full of hope and potential; now let's see what Obama can do. With the rest of us helping, of course. With the rest of us helping.

Photo by Trey Ratcliff

Update on USAF Oil Reduction Strategies

The Admiral Moorer Energy Security Forum held at NDU last December began with a fantastic talk from  an oil industry insider, PFC Energy's Chairman and Founder Robin West. His presentation included many sobering insights for eager advocates of renewable energy. In particular, one word from West communicated more than any other spoken that day, and it was "Scale" ... as in a current global appetite for oil of "85 million barrels/day." Nothing on the new energy road map looks like it's anywhere close to being a replacement for a tenth of that, let alone the expected peak supply of 95 million barrels/day.

Well, while some of that oil, especially for electricity production, can eventually be replaced by other means including nuclear, wind, solar, etc., the majority of it is consumed by the transportation sector, including autos and trucks, airlines, commercial air freight and the largest single user in the Federal government: the US Air Force.  Nothing else has the energy density of petroleum. Sohbet Karbuz's recent piece called "US Air Force Energy Plans" provides an early/mid-course update on how the service is doing with its efforts to reduce its oil demand. In particular, he goes into detail describing the ill health of syn-fuels companies who are trying to create jet fuel out of other sources like coal, natural gas and biomass. Short take: at this point in time, there's not much reason for optimism that a solution is anywhere close. Better keep at it.

Photo courtesy of Rob Shenk @ Flickr

More on Fuel Efficient AF Engine Development

Until this puppy evolves into a much bigger dog capable of carrying 10-20 tons of weapons 2,500+ miles, we're going to need fuel to keep our larger flying machines in the air. For energy and financial security, it means figuring out how to use less fuel and/or how to use a different fuel.

Let's table the Coal-to-Fuel discussion for minute, as it remains unclear how much overall utility the early attempts at this approach provide at present. Since the US has huge coal reserves, I agree CTF is a win for energy security, though we'd have to build a heck of a lot of news plants to scale up to current AF demand levels. However, a true home run tech advance gets you energy security, and performs either neutral or better on two other important axes: financial and environmental.

Efficiency technologies, such as the geared turbofan engines discussed here previously, are clearly a move in the right direction on all three fronts. And here's another new engine tech approach: designing engines that can switch their personalities in flight from drag-racers to econocars and back again. That's the goal of the ADVENT program, which stands for Adaptive, Versatile Engine Technology, run by AFRL at Wright Patterson AFB, with help from Rolls Royce, Lockheed, Northrop Grumman and GE. Note: most of the news on this program is over one year old, so I've got calls into the Wright Pat program office for a refresh. Will post update as soon as I hear back.

New DARPA Funding Fuels Better Coal-to-Fuel

Coal-to-Fuel (CTF) sounds great, because we have lots of coal and need lots of jet fuel to keep our jets in the air.  We'd love it if we could make more fuel ourselves, and have to buy fewer barrels of oil from less-than-friendly sellers. Trouble is, according to DARPA, current CTF processes are: 

"extremely expensive to implement, consume large amounts of water and produce unacceptable amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and other pollutants."

Now DARPA is putting up some money with the belief that there must be a better way. My guess is, 60 years later, with supercomputers, scanning electron microscopes and a slew of other breakthroughs in pocket, some innovators will soon do much, much better. Stay tuned.

F-15E over Afghanistan photo courtesy of: USAF