ne dollar dollar one dollar one dollar. Do I hear two dollars? Two dollars to the Texan at the back. Do I hear three? Do I hear three? Who'll pay three dollars for this fine gallon of imported gasoline? Three dollars going once ... three dollars going twice ...
One interesting bit of rhetoric tossed around this year was the complaint that the U.S. needs to invest more money in research on renewable energy and alternative fuels. Now, I'm always a soft sell when it comes to scientific research, but this particular claim got my attention, because it's just plain wrong. In fact, through public and private channels the U.S. already spends over a billion dollars a year on renewable energy research—more than any other country. There's a huge government laboratory in Golden, Colo., that does nothing else. And the results have been impressive; we make the most efficient wind turbines and solar cells in the world. We can build cars that run on crude oil from garbage, diesel from vegetable oil, ethanol from corn waste, methane from sewage or even, yes, electricity from renewable sources. We have more alternative fuels than we know what to do with, and they work just fine.
The problem? These things are all expensive, whereas nature's own petroleum, pumped out from underground reservoirs, is practically dirt-cheap. In bulk quantities, light crude oil currently sells for U.S. $55 a barrel, or $1.74 a gallon. This is 700 times the cost of water from a typical utility company, or 10 to 50 times the cost of fill dirt. But it's cheaper than wholesale milk, and barely one-eighth the price of bottled water from a vending machine. Even now, oil is not expensive stuff.
Similarly, electricity from a coal-fired power plant may cost you around 7 to 10 cents per kilowatt-hour, whereas that same electricity from a hyper-efficient wind farm will run you at least 12 cents. That may not sound like much, but a 20 to 30 percent increase in energy bills is bound to cause headaches. Wind farms also take up about a third of an acre of ground for every kilowatt of average power output. And you get power from the farm only when the wind is blowing 10 mph or faster; sometimes the mills sit idle, and sometimes they jam large, inconvenient spikes of power into the electricity grid. Recent studies indicate today's power grids can't tolerate much more than about 10 percent of their electricity from wind sources; any more than that will require costly enhancements.
I'm not in any way saying I'm opposed to wind power. In fact, according to Colorado Renewables I could wire up my own property for about $6,000, and I think it would be a cool thing to do. But at current energy prices, the system would take at least six years to pay for itself, or possibly a lot longer if the weather didn't cooperate or the components needed regular service.
Solar energy is even worse in this regard; large-scale systems can cost anywhere from 20 to 50 cents per kilowatt-hour, or two to seven times the cost of coal. Wiring my house up for off-grid solar would cost upwards of $20,000, and heaven help me if a bad hailstorm came along. This is unfortunate, because the sunlight itself is free and rains down about a thousand watts of wasted power on every square meter of ground. If only we could harvest it cheaply! Unfortunately, while research and economies of scale can improve the bottom line, they can't change the laws of physics or the human desire for a better deal. We can wish the world were different, but alas, renewable energy simply can't compete with free oil rising up out of the ground.
Or can it?
Recycle garbage into gold
The price of oil, after all, is not fixed. Between turmoil in the Middle East, skyrocketing demand in China and India and ever-smaller supplies worldwide, energy prices have been on a steady climb that shows no sign of slowing down. Really, as demand increases and supply shrinks, there's no limit to how high oil prices could rise. Crude oil prices, that is. The price of wind and sun are not much affected by this, and neither is the price of vegetable oil.
Vegetable oil? Yeah, for $500 to $2,500 you can modify a diesel generator or car engine to run on straight vegetable oil, or SVO, which wholesales for anywhere between $3 and $15 per gallon. Soybean and safflower oils are the cheapest, with corn oil following close behind. The richest oils—the ones with the most energy per gallon, like peanut oil—are twice as expensive but only about 8 percent more energetic, so it makes sense to burn the cheap stuff and use the fancier oils for cooking. Anyway, for a small cost—around 75 cents a gallon—the oils can also be converted into a punchier, diesel-like fuel called biodiesel. Of course, widespread demand for SVO and biodiesel would drive up the cost and drive down the supply, and since SVO is also a food, this would be a double-whammy for the pocketbook of the average family. So it's not a total solution by any means, and since farming is already a hyper-efficient business, more research is unlikely to increase the output very much.
It's also possible to derive power by burning sugar or, even better, by burning alcohol made from sugar. At $1.20 to $2.00 per gallon, ethanol is already a viable replacement for diesel or gasoline. It's also a food, though, and thus subject to the same economic problems as vegetable oil. Gasoline shortages could affect the price of sweets! But a toxic type of alcohol—methanol—can be made from cellulose-rich materials like wood pulp, corn stalks, discarded paper and other refuse. This ends up costing about $2.30 a gallon, and since methanol is lighter than gasoline, it releases only about half as much energy when you burn it, meaning it still can't compete on a straight cost basis. But it's literally made from garbage, whose disposal ordinarily costs about $20 per cubic meter. If garbage companies could turn the refuse into methanol instead of burying it in landfills, it would be a double win for society.
And cellulose isn't the only thing you find in the garbage; there's also plastic, animal fat, rancid oils and inedible greases, plus assorted bones, proteins, sugars and starches, and human and animal sewage. And metal, yeah, but that can be lifted out with magnets, leaving a slurry that can be fed into a new process called Thermal Depolymerization, or TDP. Already under construction in several states, the next generation of TDP rendering plants are expected turn household/industrial/agricultural waste into biodiesel or light crude oil for well under $1 a gallon. As long as the garbage is "clean" when it goes in (i.e., no toxic waste), the only significant byproducts are methane (which is burned to power the machinery), water (which is flushed down the sewer) and pellets rich in elements like calcium and phosphorus, which are used as fertilizer to grow more food.
Indeed, we may soon see the day when energy companies buy their way into the sanitation business, when landfills are strip-mined for their precious resources, when waste is carried away for free and almost nothing is actually thrown out. In this strange future, oil from the ground is too expensive to pump out. This is a huge boon for people who worry about greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, because this loop (agriculture -> industry -> waste -> fuel -> CO2 -> more agriculture) can repeat indefinitely. It becomes a normal part of the Earth's carbon cycle, with no net gain or loss of greenhouse gas.
As another strange side effect, asphalt—a mildly toxic waste product from the refinement of heavy crude—will start to become rare and expensive. Right now we use it to pave our roads, not because it's the best choice for the job but because it's free. Really, in fact, our highway system is a dumping ground for the petroleum industry's most troublesome byproducts. In the future, our roads will probably be made out of concrete, and although they'll be more expensive than asphalt roads, they won't need nearly as much maintenance. They may last for hundreds of years!
As I've mentioned here before, FORGET HYDROGEN AS AN ALTERNATIVE FUEL! It burns clean, but it takes energy to produce and transport. It comes from oil, or from water molecules split by costly solar power. Thus it isn't an energy source at all, but a storage medium like the battery in your cell phone. It will never be cheaper (or safer) than biodiesel, so who needs it? Anyway, I think my point is made: What we need here is not alternative energy research, but alternative energy consumption by people like you and me. The prices are already competitive, and with hefty government incentives and tax rebates, it may already be cheaper to drive a Green car than a traditional one.
The future is now—and cheap
Certainly, 2005 is the year to start shopping around; if you live in North America, there's probably an alternative fuel supplier somewhere near you already. Diesel vehicle owners can switch to biodiesel right now, and start enjoying stable prices. If you're looking at upcoming vehicles, a diesel-electric hybrid is an excellent choice, although you may save almost as much money by switching to gasohol. For years the Big Three auto makers have been producing, for no extra money, models of their popular vehicles that burn "E85," an 85 percent ethanol, 15 percent gasoline blend. And when you can't find an E85 filling station, don't despair; the vehicles run just fine on pure gasoline, too. For more information on any of this, check the U.S. government's alternative fuel page at www.eere.energy.gov/afdc/afv/models.html. Truthfully, though, I don't think it'll be long before alternative fuels are advertised on TV. Here's why:
No matter how expensive crude oil gets, the U.S. will never run out of alcohol, veggie oil or garbage. So while it might seem painful to contemplate rising fuel prices, we can at least predict a leveling-off around $3 a gallon, followed by a sudden demand for biodiesel and E85 hybrid engines. As a bonus, these will actually cost less per mile than we're paying right now! And when that day arrives, if we play our cards right we may see our energy dollars stop flowing overseas, and instead begin circulating and recirculating through our own economy. Just like the carbon, yes. So instead of fearing the gas pump, I think we should actually look forward to the day when cheap fuels are produced and recycled in every state of the union. Like our Native American forefathers using every part of the buffalo, we can learn to live in harmony with nature, cheaply, while still enjoying our high-tech gadgets. And if our garbage output keeps increasing, hey, we'll just solve the problem by driving more cars. How's that for environmentalism?
Sources used for writing this column can be found here.
Wil McCarthy is a rocket guidance engineer, robot designer, nanotechnologist, science-fiction author and occasional aquanaut. He has contributed to three interplanetary spacecraft, five communication and weather satellites, a line of landmine-clearing robots and some other "really cool stuff" he can't tell us about. His short writings have graced the pages of Analog, Asimov's, Wired, Nature and other major publications, and his book-length works include the New York Times notable Bloom, Amazon "Best of Y2K" The Collapsium and most recently Lost in Transmission. His acclaimed nonfiction book, Hacking Matter, is now available in paperback.
