Barnett on Yergin on China/US Energy Competition

Actually, Tom Barnett doesn't say much here besides endorsing Daniel Yergin's take. But his finding and highlighting these nuggets of energy wisdom is of great value: see here. Take away is that there's little to fear in the contention for fossil fuels (namely oil) from the world's great and rising powers as our economies are so interdependent.

What concerns me (and others) more is China's tremendous push on renewable technologies. It's not a bad thing at all, globally speaking. But if it leaves the US in the dust, unable to capitalize on renewables innovation and the huge global market for clean energy products, that would signal a major lost opportunity for us. Let's make sure we win the competitions that matter most, and not fret over those that don't.

Photo: NY Times

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.

Reducing Army Fuel Convoys = Saving Soldiers

I wasn't there, so didn't hear the narrative that accompanied this Army Energy Security deck presented earlier in October. But Mr. Paul Bollinger, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army, put together a great presentation that includes a slide that communicates very clearly with numbers. I'm not sure what period it's covering, but "Tactical Fuel Protection & Logistics" speaks pretty plainly all by itself:

• Kuwait Fuel to FOB: 431 millions of gallons
• Fuel trucks needed: 140,075
• Convoys needed: 9,332
• Soldiers per convoy trip (Fuel trucks, protection, other support): 120
• Soldier trips: 644,360
• Each 1% Fuel Savings: 6,444 Fewer Soldier trips (my italics)
  

Remember, each of these trips puts our soldiers in harm's way and keeps them out of other roles where they might be, well, more "proactive" with adversaries. So it's not a stretch to say that reducing demand for fuel at the FOBs (via process changes and/or energy efficiency improvements) is directly correlated with saving soldiers' lives.

Switching gears from tactical fuel issues to installations, slides 13 - 17 are also good and show hypothetical Army deployment locations for solar, geothermal, wind, and biomass. Sure it's just a Powerpoint dec, but it certainly gives the impression that Bollinger and his staff are thinking through the energy security issue and generating plans to turn things around.

Photo Courtesy of Dan at Taxson.net

Innovator's Hell: Frontline's "Heat" Burns Fossil Energy Co's

Harvard Business School prof Clayton Christensen's seminal 1997 book: The Innovator's Dilemma demonstrated how large successful companies, ever mindful of being responsive to their best customers' needs, can sometimes be taken down by disruptive technologies that re-order the dynamics of the certain market segments. And shows that this happens right in front of the large co's eyes because they simply cannot make themselves retire business models that have worked so well for so many years.  

Enter PBS's Frontline special aired last night: "Heat," and its visually stunning treatment of environmental carnage wreaked by the world's largest coal, oil and automotive companies, including AEP, ExxonMobile and GM, with obedient US politicians in their pockets. One thing is clear: there's no innovation happening in these companies that doesn't involve improving yields from their core lines of business. When asked about renewable energy tech or other innovations to help reduce CO2 emissions or improve energy efficiency, robotic VPs of PR utter canned greenwashed statements that communicate only disdain for having to respond to these questions at all.

It's safe to say that the game-changing tech breakthroughs that are going to markedly improve the energy posture of the DOD are not going to come from these lumbering dinosaurs, but rather from innovators and nimble new co's working towards entirely different goals with entirely different assumptions. Because of its size and culture of innovation, DOD has a big say in whether this happens sooner or later ... or too late.

Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress

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