Another domain in which energy and water concerns collide is in desalination operations. One possible solution to Southern California’s reliance on water pumped over mountains from the north is to make use of the ocean of water breaking onto the local beaches.

A recent blurb in the New York Times announced plans for a desalination facility just north of San Diego that would produce 50 million gallons of water per day — aiming to supply 7 percent of regional demand by 2020. The price tag is roughly a billion dollars. The conversion factor is thus about $20 for every gallon-per-day of capacity (at large-scale; likely fails at the household level).

The estimated cost comes to about $4.80 per hcf, which is higher than the current price of water to the end-user in San Diego. But I’m not knocking it on these grounds: many of our future options will likely be more expensive than the magic carpet ride we’ve enjoyed on the foundation of fossil fuels.

How desalination works

Energetically, the most straightforward approach to desalination is evaporating water and collecting the condensed vapor. Put salt water (or anything moist) in a dark container with clear plastic or glass across the top and place it in the sun. The interior will heat up and evaporate water, which then condenses on the cooler plastic/glass cover. An appropriate sloped-roof geometry allows drip-collection of the water.

A water desalination plant in Brazil

Every gram (mL) of water vapor that escapes its liquid birthplace exacts a toll of 2257 J. This is a bit steep. Heating that same parent gram of water by 1°C only costs 4.18 J — which is why a pot of boiling water takes ages to boil away to nothing (see post on boiling water efficiency). A brute force approach like this would demand 2.4 kWh of thermal energy for every gallon of water produced (or 633 kWh/m³)!

Until I did the math, I dreamed of flowing ocean water through a system of shallow, covered trenches, generating fresh evaporated condensate. Low-tech, solar-driven, lovely! We might optimistically capture 50 percent of the incoming solar energy in the trough-collector, so that each square meter receiving about 5 kWh/day of incident energy could result in one gallon of water. Producing 10 percent of California’s demand would then require an area 60 km on a side, or a strip of land along California’s entire coastline about 2.5 km wide. Let’s call that infeasible. Darn.

But there are back doors. For one, waste heat from power plants (including nuclear) can be used as the source of energy in a form of co-generation. Also, water can be made to boil vigorously at room temperature in a mostly evacuated system once the pressure drops to about one-fortieth of an atmosphere (~20 Torr). In this scheme, it would take about 34 kWh to pump out 1,000 L (1 m³) of water molecules against this pressure differential: a bargain compared to the 633 kWh/m³ from direct heating.

A GE water desalination plant in Brazil

Most desalination plants use the multi-stage flash distillation process, which employs low-pressure chambers and recovers much of the heat of vaporization as the vapor condenses on the feedwater intake pipes, reducing the amount of direct heating required. These devices tend to achieve about 18–25 kWh/m³, which, again, is a bargain compared to direct heating.

Finally, reverse osmosis (RO) is another option, forcing water through membranes that exclude the saline ions. Typical RO installations achieve about 5–7 kWh/m³ (see, for instance, here or here). But the osmosis approach requires high-grade electricity, which if produced in the traditional manner requires about 17 kWh of thermal energy input per cubic meter of water produced. So really these prevalent techniques are not tremendously different energetically, although perhaps the osmosis approach is more finicky in terms of water preparation/filtering, gunked up membranes, etc.  RO wins out energetically if the electricity is from non-thermal sources (wind, solar, hydro).

Large scale desalination in California?

Okay, so now that we have an idea about how desalination is really done, what would it mean from an energetic standpoint if California tried to fulfill a substantial fraction of its water demand from desalination? I’ll use the approximate value of 20 kWh/m³ (thermal) hereafter.

Let’s start with San Diego’s effort to replace 7 percent of water demand in its 50 MGPD plant. This works out to 160 MW of thermal power. For scale, the San Diego region uses electricity at an average rate of 2.3 GW. So we’re talking a noticeable amount. Extrapolating to 100 percent desalination for San Diego, we get to 2.3 GW thermal, which would substantially increase local power generation demand. Economically, about half of the negotiated $4.80/hcf cost is in energy. It works out to 15 years to recoup the construction cost for the plant under the (poor) assumption of constant prices.

Don Pedro Dam, 1970

What about California as a whole? San Diego county is not a heavy agricultural center, so the problem will get harder if trying to satisfy the state’s needs (and therefore the country’s food needs given the national-scale importance of California’s agriculture). California uses 46 billion gallons of water per day. Supplying 25 percent of this via desalination would require 36 GW of thermal-equivalent power. California runs on 30 GW of electricity, and a total energy budget of 262 GW (thermal; from oil, gas, coal, hydro, nuclear, etc.—according to the EIA). That’s a substantial amount for 25 percent of our water needs.

Another way to slice this problem is to ask what fraction of California’s water could be provided by using the amount of energy that currently goes into pumping water around the state. We use 20 billion kWh of annual electricity for pumping, translating to about 6.5 GW of continuous thermal power. This amount of thermal power could meet 4.5 percent of California’s water needs via desalination. When we currently spend 8 percent of our electricity delivering 100 percent of our water, and would only meet 4.5 percent of our water needs by the same energy investment directed to desalination, we can appreciate the crunch.

Will the Nexus Vex Us?

What a surprise — the world is a complicated place with interdependencies. Is the water-energy connection more than an academically interesting tangle? I think so. Water is undeniably important to our physical survival, and energy is the main physical ingredient in our development of modern society. Shortages in either could have major impacts, and their entanglement means that a shortage in one could trigger a shortage in both. Seems like a problem — especially in light of increasing population pressure and intensifying effects of climate change.

Of course my “solution” is frequently to ask why we need as much energy or water or you-name-it-resource as it seems that we do. The fact that I live a perfectly functional life using less than 20 percent as much electricity, gas, and water as my San Diego cohort sure seems to suggest a viable path away from the crunch.

The good news in all of this is that when faced with difficult limitations, economic factors will assert themselves via the beloved mechanism of skyrocketing prices. People will naturally react by cutting back significantly, as my experience indicates is clearly possible. I am confident that San Diego could still function on a drastically reduced water budget, if needed. Every 60 ft² of roof area in San Diego collects enough rain to provide a gallon per day averaged over the year (1.4 m² collects 1 L/day). So thirst shouldn’t be a problem, even for a few million people. I’m not so optimistic about the odds of grass and ornamental plants surviving serious cutbacks. So while survival is not at stake, our accustomed ways of life may well be endangered.

The bad news is that we appear to be incapable as a society of reacting to a looming situation before economic forces drive us to change. By that time, we have often lost precious years to prepare for a new reality. We tend to want proof that something is a problem before we alter course. Not the smartest of approaches, in my book.

Ironically, the political “conservatives” tend to be the most resistant to conserving resources or approaching the future with a conservative, low risk mindset. Growth trumps caution. A key philosophical difference may lie in one’s sense of whether growth solves problems (debt, hunger, unemployment), or creates them. The answer does not have to be static — especially in a world of finite resources transitioning from the “empty” to the “full” state. We may well see an evolution from a world in which “growth the solution” more and more is perceived as “growth the problem.” I think attitudes are already shifting in this direction.

This post originally appeared on Tom Murphy’s blog, Do the Math: Using physics and estimation to assess energy, growth, options.

Tom Murphy is an associate professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego. An amateur astronomer in high school, physics major at Georgia Tech, and Ph.D. student in physics at Caltech, Murphy has spent decades reveling in the study of astrophysics.

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In this post, I offer a rosy vision for what I think we could accomplish in the near term to maximize our chances of coming out shiny and happy on the tail end of the fossil fuel saga. I’m no visionary, and this exercise represents a stretch for a physicist. But at least I can sketch a low-risk, physically viable route to the future. I can — in part — vouch for its physical viability based on my own dramatic reductions in energy footprint. I cannot vouch for the realism of the overall scheme. It’s a dream and a hope — a fool’s hope, really — and very, very far from a prediction or a blueprint. I’ve closed all the exits to get your attention. Now we’ll start looking at ways to nose out of our box in a safe and satisfying way.

The Chief Problems

To recapitulate, the principal challenges we face in confronting our transition from fossil fuels while living on a finite planet are (with links to earlier posts):

• The growth paradigm must end. A finite world with finite resources will not continue to support growth. Fossil fuels enabled a growth explosion, but those days are closing out. Even futuristic energy sources cook us in mere centuries on a continued growth trajectory. Folks who think the solution is to expand into space can step off the train now, since my primary interest is in addressing this century’s problems. Adios, space-migos.
• Conventional oil production will soon begin terminal decline. Our most important energy currency will no longer keep up with demand. This will quite possibly be accompanied by instability and loss of confidence in long-term growth, bringing damaging economic consequences.
• Alternatives do not stack up to the practical perks of fossil fuels. We will not simply migrate to the new sources without discomfort (in part, higher or even unaffordable costs).
• Transportation is hard. Most alternatives allow direct production of heat and/or electricity, but few result in liquid fuels to perpetuate our mobile economy. Electric vehicles offer expensive work-arounds for some parts of the transportation sector, but not without sacrificed capabilities.
• The Energy Trap exacts a toll on a late realization that we really should take energy resource shortages seriously. Given the tendency of societies to react to crises, rather than anticipate them, we will likely find ourselves wishing we had started decades before the crisis—preparing for a transition of unprecedented scale.
• Complexity cannot be ignored. Before we actually get off our duffs to address a decline in liquid fuels, economies may already be reeling from energy shortfall, and may not be in a position to carry out an expensive, large-scale build-out of a new energy infrastructure. This is exacerbated by the likely situation that we will not collectively agree on the route forward, and market omniscience will be similarly confused by volatility and the inability of a high-unemployment society to afford the more expensive alternatives.
• Many people point to the global population boom as the fundamental problem that must be addressed. I have not covered this directly in Do the Math, except in the context of evaluating exactly what sustainability means. I see the population explosion as a predictable reflection of surplus energy, which revolutionized agriculture and promoted more mouths in the world. On the flip side, energy scarcity translates to ugly population pressures via reduced food production and possibly hoarding.

Be Positive, Dude!

There I go again. I promised to offer a rosier picture of the future, rather than keep pounding the problematic side. But what I am going to propose may not sit well with the average citizen, so it is important to remind everyone what we are up against: a host of interrelated problems that are not easily waved off. I like the characterization that what we face here is a predicament, rather than a problem. Problems call for solutions. Predicaments must settle for responses. Our predicament is that we rode the fossil fuel bonanza to the highest possible heights, without a plan for what to do when the inheritance tapers off. Surely we mustn’t entertain the notion of getting a job when the inheritance wanes!

So imagine a world where we responded to these challenges: not by technology fixes, but by altering our expectations and behaviors.

If we elect to abandon growth as a central tenet of our existence, we would immediately veer from our collision course. We would still likely need to reduce our physical throughput of natural resources and services, but adopting a steady state economic platform would be a vital first step.

At the same time, we would be wise to take deliberate steps to arrest population growth—for instance by consciously deciding not to have kids, recognizing that the world of the future may not share the prosperity and stability of today. Maybe it doesn’t seem fair that we should cede part of the core nature of being human. Perhaps it helps to consider that we didn’t choose to come along just in time for the biggest transition humanity has faced, but oh well—here we all are. Are our brains big enough to offset our primal directive? Many Americans huff at the suggestion that we need alter our own population trajectory, when it is the developing world that hosts dangerously high birth rates. Yet a newborn American will use 100 times as much energy as an infant born to a poor village, leveraging the resource burden squarely back on home soil.

Continuing our adjustments, if we suddenly made choices that resulted in half as much transportation, we would just as suddenly put off concerns over oil decline at the level of a few percent per year. Much of our transportation is discretionary or can be consolidated (pooled) without ruinous consequences.

If we tended to focus more on needs vs. wants, we could eliminate unnecessary and resource-wasting consumerism. Ideally, the things we buy would last decades, and would be built to support repair rather than disposal. No more planned obsolescence.

If we did not demand as much electricity and heat at home and at work, we could more easily tolerate the relative shortcomings of alternative energy sources, while taking our foot off the fossil fuel gas-pedal. It is generally far short of debilitating to reduce home energy use by a factor of two or more (I’ve done a factor of 3–4, and could easily do more). It’s not what we’re used to, but no matter what choices we make, we’re going to be dealing with new challenges we’re not used to. I, for one, want to be in control of my adaptations.

If we changed our diet expectations, so that meat is a treat reserved for special occasions, or as an accent in our dishes rather than a main course, we would dramatically ease pressure on our lands, water resources, and the energy required to support our food industry. Many people in the world live this way already, without shriveling up.

By voluntarily adopting substantial reductions in energy in the manner described above, we free up significant amounts of energy to dedicate toward building an alternative energy infrastructure of solar, wind, etc.—thereby evading the jaws of the Energy Trap. It’s only a trap if energy shortages are imposed by failure of the supply to meet demand. But if demand melts away faster by voluntary means, we’re fine.

The secret for the raccoon to get out of the nail-in-hole trap described in Where the Red Fern Grows is to first let go of the shiny trinket inside. Unrelenting demand is our enemy here, and completely under our own control.  Want phenomenal gas mileage?  Slow the truck down.  The velocity-squared term in drag/energy matters.  There’s a gas pedal.  We have control.

What’s Rosy about this Picture?

Maybe this “future” doesn’t sound all that great to the average reader. But consider it in this light. If we step off the growth train and simultaneously reduce our material demands, we won’t have to work quite as hard to keep life on an even keel. The competitive urge for a business to grow disappears, so that employees would spend less time slaving for the boss in the name of profit, and more time enjoying friends and family. In this world, people are interested in satisfying their needs rather than their wants, and people already know what they need, so there is no need to advertise in order to create demand for a product. The economy settles down into a system where needs are met by normal (more often local) market forces, but the ambition to grow for the sake of growth (and shareholder dividends, etc.) is gone.  The 99% take the driver’s seat.

As part of the rubric for achieving a steady state economy (see Herman Daly’s ten-step plan), labor is not taxed, but resource extraction and disposal carries a stiff charge. Incentives shift to providing quality goods that will last a lifetime, since buying new items will invoke the resource charge, and it is simultaneously costly to dispose of the old. Repair returns as an industry, since labor is cheaper than new materials. The satisfaction that accompanies quality and craftsmanship return, in lieu of mass production.

More people would occupy their time with the art of living well. They would farm their yards (rather than mow grass?) and feel more intimately connected with the land. The world would become less abstract and more rooted in intrinsically meaningful activities (investment, marketing, office work, etc. occupy less attention).

Rather than isolating ourselves in self-sufficient castles, we would work together more often to complement each others’ talents, resources, or tools. The emergent sense of community may make us happier people and more resilient during tough spells. We would more often see neighbors gathering for community projects, potlucks, and inevitably more games of horseshoes and croquet.

In many ways, what I describe is a return to a simpler time. But with some key differences. We have made important advances in science, medicine, and technology that we treasure and would work hard to maintain and improve. The future I imagine does not give up on all our pursuits—just the ones aimed at growth and commanding a high resource throughput. Those activities centered on developing knowledge, and understanding what it means to be human, would thrive.

Yeah, Right

I know. What I describe may cut against human nature. What business owner would not want to expand territory, income, power, etc.? What about the people who would not welcome a simpler lifestyle? What about the folks who already live in a manner somewhat like what I describe and would actually prefer a more go-go lifestyle? Politically, what competitive party would adopt no growth (or negative growth) as a primary platform? Okay, the Green Party has done so, and hats-off to a courageous stance—attracting 0.2% of registered voters in the U.S. (although implementing instant runoff voting would unmask more true supporters). Business interest—which finances both political and advertising campaigns—would be hard-set against this folding-the-tents approach. There are all kinds of reasons why this future path has little chance of deliberate adoption.

Yet, from a physical point of view, I feel very strongly that we should ease pressure on the system and free up resources to make a more viable, sustainable, long term plan. That’s the first necessary condition to meet: a future compatible with physical and resource constraints. I know from personal experience that it’s possible to cut energy use substantially and still be a scientist doing real research. Whether this is possible to maintain on a societal scale, I am not able to say.

One key point about reducing demand is that it becomes far easier to accomplish a transition to alternative energy if we ratchet down the target level. Many posts that exposed shortcomings of wind, battery storage at a national or personal level, etc. were predicated on maintaining our current scale. Reduce the scale by a goodly factor and suddenly an alternative energy future is vastly more feasible.  I am not going to be specific about a technology prescription that accompanies this future, but decentralized resources fit most naturally.  So solar and wind do well (and other backyard-compatible approaches, as described in the alternative matrix).  Self-sufficiency—at least at a community level—is most attractive to me in this “vision.”

But if a physically viable future is fundamentally incompatible with human nature, we may be fated to boom and bust cycles. To say this is to proclaim that humans are incapable of achieving the feat called “sustainability”—a disappointing shame, if true. We’ve seen civilizations boom and bust repeatedly through history, but the civilizations were always somewhat isolated, preventing the busts from being global. This time, more is at stake in a bust. Frustratingly, I know there is a way for us to do better. I hope we find ourselves to be capable of taming our expectations and desires and moving in a smart direction.

A Values Shift

So if we want to guarantee our ability to cope with physical constraints, we increase our chances of success if we change our values first. Today, we admire the individual who rises to the top of the corporate ladder—owning mansions and yachts and a business empire. What if our values shifted so that we considered such extravagance to be immoral? Today, we esteem the premier status of the frequent flyer racking up 100,000 miles each year. What if we considered this level of travel inexcusable? No red carpet for you! You must board the plane through a gauntlet of passengers swatting at you with boarding passes! Presently, we feel that eating meat at every meal means we’ve earned a desired status in the world. But what if it was considered indulgent to do so, unless you or your immediate community raised the livestock yourselves. Today, driving solo at freeway speeds is seen as an inalienable right and a reflection of our freedom. What if the prevailing attitude was that such activities on a routine basis were wasteful and selfish? Rearing families of two children is currently considered to be a responsible, replacement practice. If replacement is ultimately understood to be too taxing, we may come to value numbers like zero or one more than we do two. Consider the leisure activities of jet skiing, motorcycling, or snowmobiling and compare to kayaking, mountain-biking or cross-country skiing. Now imagine that the former activities are not considered to be responsible ways to enjoy yourself in nature.

Sure, some people have similar sets of values already today. We have names for such people. Surely I’m not suggesting that a world filled with “those people” would be a better place? Well, if the only way to assure that we do not overshoot and collapse is by adopting less obtrusive behaviors, then I would rather those behaviors stem from within as part of a values system than be imposed on us by some authority—even if said authority has our best interests at heart. The latter situation is unstable, albeit often effective.

Along the same vein, I initially wrote this post as a set of rules that, if adopted, may put us on a sustainable path. Then I realized that if I were a reader confronted with a list of rules for how I should modify my behaviors, I would likely chafe at being told what I should do, and dismiss the “rules.” It’s much better to set out the goals and the rationale, and let people invent for themselves ways in which they can meet those goals if they decide that the rationale is desirable. In this way, the responses become personal ones, bringing with them a vested interest in seeing them succeed. In posts to follow, I will outline some of the adjustments I have made that may serve to seed ideas for others: suggesting rather than bossing. I recognize that I’m falling into the classic mind-trap: if everyone would just behave like me, the world would be a fine place.

Worth a Try?

If we alter our values and behaviors, only later to develop technologies and solutions that obviate the need to maintain such a lifestyle, then fine: get on with the new ways—to the extent that the proposals are sound. A population sharing the new value set will be better able to judge the sustainable nature of some new direction (fusion, or what have you). Perhaps the very act of easing off the pressures on society are the thing that frees us up to find better ways or technologies. And as long as I’m dreaming—more time devoted to living well may also mean a better-educated, better-read, critically-thinking society; less obsessed with maintaining a frantic pace of life.  Taking the growth imperative out of life will shift focus to content rather than profit. News will be about substance and informed debate rather than about entertainment for bucks. We could build on the better angels of our nature, rather than appealing to base instincts like greed.

And in the end, what would be the downside of slowing down for a bit? The natural world will obviously thank us. We may be more fulfilled as humans because we are operating in a community-oriented mode harnessing traits of the tribal crucible in which we evolved. As long as we do not lose valuable knowledge/lessons in the process (as we risk doing in a collapse scenario), what is the harm?

When the World Trade Towers were attacked on September 11, 2001, I was at a technical conference on Maui. Air travel stopped for the next several days, silencing the skies. Only then was I aware of the absence of the drone that had been a companion of normal life. I felt stuck, and no one knew what might happen next. But pretty soon, people realized there was nothing to be done, and lived in the moment. I spent a lot of time breathing through a snorkel. The pace instantly slowed, and this brought with it a few perks.

A Conservative Road

The picture of the world I paint here is unfamiliar, and quite frankly, unlikely. But my motivation is to devise a strategy that is not a game of chicken between growth and finite resources. I advocate swerving away—the sooner the better: what have I got to prove? Otherwise we are destined to lose the fight with nature. My suggestions may not represent an optimal response, but the benefit is that it’s an approach to life that I believe is far more likely to succeed than is the current path of trying to maintain business as usual. In that sense, the plan is a conservative one. Pulling back on the throttle gives us the opportunity to take stock, collectively assess what a viable future looks like, and plot some sensible course. It’s a plea to use our big brains rather than enslaving ourselves to a trajectory out of our control.

As pointed out in the post on sustainability, while I focus most of my attention on energy as a tangible physical concept, our challenges extend far beyond energy into long-term maintenance of fisheries, forests, soil, fresh water, climate stability, and other vital natural services that we may not yet appreciate.

When we reflect on the fact that we are at a special place in history approaching the peak rate of our one-time fossil fuel inheritance, it is hard to swallow overconfident statements about how our amazing ingenuity will propel us into a spectacular high-tech future beyond our dreams. The narrative is an attractive one, I’ll admit. The fact that we cannot plot an assured map along this route even for the rest of this century could either tell us that we lack faith, lack foresight, lack imagination, or that perhaps we should call for a timeout and regroup. I’m gonna vote for the timeout. But enough of us need to heed the call to make it effective. Future posts will explore specific ways in which we might collectively give our future a better chance at a fulfilling life.

A Better Future; More or Less

I’ll leave with a montage to illustrate why the slower world I describe may in fact be more fulfilling than the current scheme: emphasizing the good of one and the bad of another. One could naturally make up an inverse set. If you’re looking for utopia, you’ve come to the wrong shop—sorry.

Expect More:

Reading; story-telling; gardening; connection with nature; community; fishing; whittling; lemonade; sitting on the front porch; cross-breezes; seasonal adjustment; blankets; wool socks; sweaters; connection to sunrise/sunset; local governance; mom & pop stores; crafts; goats and chickens; bicycles; train rides; pies cooling on the sill; music; singing and playing musical instruments; rain catchment; canning; craftsmanship; repair; durable goods.

Expect Less:

Waiting for airplanes; commuting; abstract/meaningless jobs; Wal-Mart; fast food; strip malls; four-car families; climate change; dominance of banks; capital gains; disposable junk; junk mail; species extinction; minibar charges; traffic jams; identity theft; freeway noise; advertisements; consumerism; faddish gizmos; cheap plastic crap; outsourcing; industrial effluent; credit card debt.

This post originally appeared on Tom Murphy’s blog, Do the Math: Using physics and estimation to assess energy, growth, options.

Tom Murphy is an associate professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego. An amateur astronomer in high school, physics major at Georgia Tech, and Ph.D. student in physics at Caltech, Murphy has spent decades reveling in the study of astrophysics. He currently leads a project to test general relativity by bouncing laser pulses off the reflectors left on the moon by the Apollo astronauts, achieving one-millimeter-range precision. Murphy’s keen interest in energy topics began with his teaching a course on energy and the environment for nonscience majors at UCSD. Motivated by the unprecedented challenges we face, he has applied his instrumentation skills to exploring alternative energy and associated measurement schemes. Following his natural instincts to educate, Murphy is eager to get people thinking about the quantitatively convincing case that our pursuit of an ever-bigger scale of life faces gigantic challenges and carries significant risks.

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Fossil fuels are presently used in abundance — 85 percent of current energy use — but this is a short-term prospect, ending within the century. The first effects of decline may be close at hand. Do I hear talk of nursing homes?

The gulf between fossil fuels and their alternatives tends to be rather large in terms of utility, energy density, practicality, ease of use, versatility, energy return on energy invested, etc. In other words, we do not merrily step off the fossil fuel ride onto the next one by “just” allowing the transition to happen. The alternatives come at a cost, and we will miss the golden days of fossil fuels. But wait…what’s that murmur?  Not dead yet?

Still Got It?

Before we leave fossil fuels for dead, we should understand that peak oil happens around the time that the resource is half-depleted. So we’ll have many decades of conventional oil, albeit at dwindling rates. Likewise for gas and coal, whose peaks may be decades away still (but likely this century all the same). My main concern is how we cope with the decline stage of fossil fuels, which is not as final as being dead, but effectively forces us into a new era of energy transition.

Because conventional oil will begin its decline first, a chief concern is how we might replace its function for transportation. Rather than write off fossil fuels completely, some see promise in what alternative fossil fuels might offer.

Indeed, a number of non-conventional fossil fuels may represent our most convenient next step in energy. The low-hanging fossil fuel fruit has been plucked, so that the conventional sources get progressively harder and more expensive to acquire. Meanwhile, the ground is full of sub-prime fossil energy that becomes exploitable as the conventional resources wane (and become more expensive). If inferior replacements for conventional oil turn out to be exploitable at scale, our concern may shift more to the climate change side of the story: many fear that we may run out of atmosphere before we run out of hydrocarbons — and they could be right.

In a strictly quantitative sense, the notion that we have an abundance of hydrocarbons yet may be accurate enough. I used the following plot in the post on peak oil, adapted from Brandt & Farrell. Dark shades indicate reliable resources, while light shades represent increasingly speculative holdings.

We are about halfway through the conventional oil endowment — thereby near the production peak assuming the usual symmetric performance history. But perhaps we can recover a much greater fraction of the oil in the ground through advanced oil recovery technologies. Then we have tar sands and heavy oil from Canada and Venezuela. Or we can liquefy natural gas to cover the oil shortage. And as the Nazis and Apartheid South Africans demonstrated, liquid fuel can be produced from coal. Finally, we have a potential option in oil shale. Resource estimates vary, but even taking the dark green segments in the picture above (reliable lower-bounds), we at least triple the remaining “liquid” hydrocarbon resource available.

By the way, I recommend totally ignoring the vertical axis on the plot.  Cost of extraction tends to rise as energy prices rise, and these estimates are rooted in a cheap energy economy.  At the very least, the lines should slope upward, as the tail end of a resource is always more costly to extract than the early stuff.  In any case, I consider the cost estimates to be unreliable.

Let’s just put a timescale on this resource. Three trillion barrels, at today’s rate of petroleum use, would last about 100 years. But it does not work this way. In most aggregate resource situations, the peak rate of production is reached when half the resource is gone. In this case, our total 4 trillion barrel “liquid” resource would be halfway depleted in 30 years, assuming the alternative fossil fuels can step up to the rates we enjoy today.

And this does not allow for competing uses for gas and coal, acting to reduce the time-to-peak if fully exploited. By another measure, if we resumed our growth track of energy use, for instance at 2 percent per year (more modest than historically typical 3 percent per year), we would burn through three trillion barrels of liquid fuel in 55 years. Either way you cut it, chasing after sub-prime hydrocarbons is another short ride that has the ill side effect of putting us deeper in the climate hole.

The Hirsch Report

In 2005, the U.S. Department of Energy commissioned a study of peak oil and its ramifications. Called the Hirsch Report (summary) after its lead author, the focus centered not on when the peak would occur, but rather on what we could do to mitigate the damaging effects. The report rightly identified the peak oil predicament as a liquid fuels problem, since electricity and heat are more easily substituted by alternative means—though not trivially so.

For liquid fuel replacement, biofuels, electric cars, and hydrogen-based transport were considered not to be technologically ready and/or of insufficient scale. The five options deemed to be ready for large-scale implementation were:

1. Increased vehicle efficiency
2. Enhanced oil recovery
3. Heavy oil & oil sands
4. Coal liquefaction
5. Gas-to-liquids

Note that not one of these options represents a departure from fossil fuel transport. At some level, this speaks to a desperation in our predicament: we simply are not ready to be weened from the fossils, even as it becomes ever more imperative that we do so.

So what? If the resources are abundant enough, as the figure above suggests, then why not adopt this list of mitigation strategies and just get started?

I’ll make a few global comments before discussing each option in turn.

The most significant point is that the declining fossil fuel supply will be experienced not according to the total amount in the ground, but rather according to how quickly that resource is extracted and made available. We face a rates shortage more so than a resource shortage. To illustrate, in 1973, the U.S. was experiencing a declining rate of domestic oil production and got slapped with a Middle-Eastern oil shock that more than tripled the price of oil practically overnight. At the time, approximately 100 billion barrels of oil sat below American soil, most of it already known to exist, and with thousands of wells already accessing many of the deposits. 100 billion barrels would have been enough to satisfy all of domestic demand for over 15 years. Yet imports increased over the next several years while domestic production continued to decline.

Was this some sort of masochism, or the anagrammatically similar machismo? No. All the incentives were there for increasing domestic production, but nature did not care. Real oil wells—as opposed to the hypothetical ones conjured by economists—struggle to move viscous oil through porous rock, and are not amenable to extraction at arbitrary rates set by human demand. There is no spigot: no straw in some underground lake of oil.

Similarly, the raw amount of hydrocarbons in the ground is only part of the story. Can they be extracted and processed at a rate that makes up for conventional oil decline? That’s the key question.

The second global point, as stressed in the Hirsch Report, is that the scale of oil consumption is so breathtakingly large that even a modest decline rate of a few percent per year represents a staggering energy shortfall. Globally, a 3 percent annual decline in a resource that constitutes a power consumption of 5.5 TW means a yearly decline of 165 GW, or about 40 GW in the U.S. It is a tall order to scale the mitigation strategies up to a point that they could backfill this annual shortfall. For this reason, the report advocated starting a crash program 20 years before the onset of decline in order to assure sufficient scale in time to match the decline when it starts.

The report concluded that a lead time of only 10 years risks major disruptions to economies. Beginning the crash program at the onset of decline was considered to be a catastrophic option. And a show of hands: who here thinks we would start an all-out mitigation program at the scale of World War II mobilization before resource decline sets in? If I weren’t typing, I’d be sitting on my hands, even while hoping that I am being too cynical.

A third point is that many of the scales I discuss below are based on a 3 percent annual decline of conventional oil. For a net oil importer like the U.S., the available oil may go down even faster if any countries reduce their export rate. At least one major oil-exporting country will make the calculation that at double the price, they can afford to sell half as much oil and still keep their economy humming (observing that they are not hurting at present). Oil prices rise higher as a result, tempting others to preserve their black gold for their own uses, only exacerbating the problem. How long will this go before military seizure takes place? In any case, oil importers may face an even steeper decline rate at the hands of geopolitical factors. Such things are not unknown to humankind.

Collecting some thoughts, the mere existence of alternative hydrocarbons in the ground does not translate to a storehouse of resources ready to satisfy our demand at the time and scale we need without decades of steady preparation. Think of a farmer in the flush of late summer waving off concerns of the coming winter because there’s lots of corn on the field, but not bothering to spend the fall preparing for the winter by actually harvesting the grain. An imperfect analogy, but the point is that the scale of the problem requires substantial preparation well ahead of our time of desperate need.

Now let’s look at the Hirsch Report options, recognizing that at best, all but the first are stopgap “solutions” based on a finite resource.

Improved Efficiency

Not technically a finite fossil fuel resource, improving the efficiency of our current automotive fleet does not represent a departure from fossil fuels, but aims to slow down their rate of use. I am a big fan of efficiency gains, and think there are always places to cut. On the other hand, efficiency gains tend to be slow, and do not have unlimited potential, as detailed in the post on limits to economic growth.

Consider that improved efficiency has been an ever-present goal of our car industry. Few people want their vehicle to be explicitly inefficient: an SUV that got 50 MPG would sell like hotcakes. Indeed, we have seen a steady improvement in the fuel economy of a typical family car, amounting to a factor-of-two improvement over the last 3–4 decades. This translates to an annual rate of improvement of 1 percent per year. As explained in an earlier post, fuel efficiency boils down to aerodynamics and speed. Embracing smaller, slower, more streamlined cars is the only obvious path forward for improved economy. The Prius is primarily as successful as it is because of its small, wedge-shaped form.

Largely, efficient transport is a well-squeezed lemon. Sure, we’ll get more drops out and should make every effort to do so: 1 percent per year can make a respectable dent in a 3 percent decline. Accepting behavioral changes could bring a fresh lemon to the scene. Another way to say this is that we will only see substantial improvements in vehicle efficiency if we change our expectations about what a car is supposed to do (or migrate away from personal cars as a primary means of transportation).

Enhanced Oil Recovery

A number of techniques exist to improve the fraction of oil in a well that can be brought to the surface. Of course oil developers use every practical tool at hand to stimulate oil flow: pressurized water injection, horizontal drilling, hydraulic fracturing, and injection of gas like CO₂ to dissolve into the oil and allow it to flow more easily. This last technique generally goes under the heading of Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR), and can improve the extraction of oil by about 10 percent of the original in-ground amount. It runs a bit on the expensive side, but future energy will be expensive anyway. So this technique will help offset the decline, if employed at large scale, and has the advantage of delivering light crude oil that our infrastructure is geared to process.

Heavy Oil and Tar Sands

Some oil, like the stuff in Venezuela, is substantially more viscous than conventional oil, approximating tar. Additionally, tar sands in Canada offer similar raw material for making synthetic crude oil. These two resources combined may supply something like half-a-trillion barrels of feedstock. California has a bit as well. Presently, Canadian production is a little over 1 million barrels per day (Mbpd), while Venezuelan production is a little less than this. Optimistic projections expect 3–4 Mbpd by 2020 in Canada. For scale, ten years of conventional oil decline at 3 percent per year will leave a shortfall over 20 Mbpd. Venezuela is not expected to move so quickly. Put together, these might be able to offset a quarter of the conventional decline—having a head start over other options.

Heavy oil and tar sands require more effort to extract and process than conventional oil, lowering the energy returned on energy invested (EROEI) to something in the neighborhood of 5:1 (reference). At least it’s net-positive, but nowhere near the 100:1 originally enjoyed by conventional oil, or even the 20:1 levels we find in conventional fields of today’s caliber.

Heavy oil and tar sands will no doubt relieve some pressure on declining conventional oil, but they are capable of only partial relief. In other words, just because we believe the resource to be half-a-trillion barrels, rate-limited extraction will limit its ability to mitigate conventional oil decline. Did anyone notice that the U.S. does not own either of the large heavy deposits? Hey. Don’t discount Canada: last time we were in a war with them they burned down our White House!

Coal Liquefaction

When pressed, societies have in the past resorted to synthesizing gasoline out of coal, in a method known as the Fischer-Tropsch (F-T) process. Coal, which is mostly carbon, is partially combusted, or “gasified,” to make carbon monoxide. The CO is combined with hydrogen gas to make long-chain alkanes like octane, spitting the oxygen out in the form of water. One typically uses CO also to create the hydrogen gas from water via CO + H₂O → H₂ + CO₂. Thus only one of every two carbon atoms winds up in the synthetic fuel, the other lost to CO₂.

The National Mining Association, strongly advocating our using more coal as fast as we can, estimates a refinery cost pushing $1B, yielding 10,000 bpd production. For scale, a 3 percent per year conventional oil decline would leave the U.S. short by 600,000 barrels per day, requiring 60 such new plants to be built every year to plug the gap — each costing about the same as a 1 GW coal-fired plant (and processing 0.6 GW-worth of liquid fuel energy per day). It’s a big deal. Obviously, I’m not suggesting that coal liquefaction — or any of these alternatives — carry the full weight of replacement, but simply use full-scale numbers to establish the bounds and set the scale.

Compounding the problem of the required rate at which new processing plants would have to be built, consider the numerous downsides of coal. We would desperately like to shake our addiction to the dirtiest, most CO₂-intense fossil fuel. How’s that workin’ out for us? Mountaintops razed flat, mine tailings, sulfur, mercury, and other toxins leaching into streams and rivers: expanding coal production is not high on the list of things we want to do.

We should also be careful about assuming that we are up to our ears in coal. It’s true that the U.S. has ample coal resources compared to its remaining oil endowment. But consider that the estimated total U.S. resource has declined from about 3000 Gt (gigatons) prior to 1950 to half that amount around 1960, lately sitting around 300 Gt. This isn’t due to depletion of the resource (70 Gt so far), as the number I’m quoting is total resource: past production plus estimated resource.

A similar story unfolded in the UK—whose leading role in the industrial revolution owed to vast amounts of coal in the ground. For over fifty years leading up to 1970, British coal was repeatedly estimated to total about 200 Gt. Over the next few decades, the estimates collapsed to about 30 Gt. The biggest shock is that this happened when 25 Gt had already been consumed, suddenly leaving about 5 Gt of recoverable coal when it had been imagined to be about 170 Gt. Imagine you’ve got $17,000 in the bank and you are contemplating buying a new car—only to realize that your latest bank statement puts you at $500: 3 percent of what you thought you had, and maybe not enough to even buy a old beater that still runs. As we’ve learned more about what kind of coal seams are accessible, downgrading estimates has been a global systematic phenomenon. Many folks, unfortunately, still carry around the old concept that we’ve got more coal than we could possibly know how to use (to the chagrin of the climate-concerned).

To date, the U.S. has used 70 Gt of coal, at a current rate of about 1 Gt/yr. If the current official estimates are right, then we have about 230 Gt left. Simple math suggests this means 230 years, or 86 years at a 2 percent annual increase. But other compelling evidence put together by David Rutledge suggests that we are now about halfway through the resource, having only 60 Gt left. The same analysis puts remaining global coal at 370 Gt, having used about 310 Gt to date. This estimate of remaining global coal is a little less than half of conventional estimates. I’m not prepared to judge which estimate is correct, but take seriously the possibility that we have much less coal than is assumed—especially in light of the dramatic trend of reduced resource estimates over the decades. If you’re going to err, it’s best to err on the safe side.

How do these numbers translate into oil production? One kilogram of coal, containing perhaps 0.7 kg of carbon, via Fischer-Tropsch, will commit 0.35 kg of carbon to about 0.4 kg of octane (C₈H₁₈), producing about 0.6 liters of fuel. One barrel (160 ℓ) of fuel then requires about 250 kg of coal, leading to the association that each ton of coal yields 4 barrels of fuel. Replacing a 3 percent shortfall of about 200 million barrels per year in the U.S. requires an annual uptick in coal production of 50 Mt/yr, or a 5 percent increase, year over year, for a doubling time of 14 years. In a related measure, if the U.S. wanted to (or were forced to) cease oil imports, it would mean doubling coal production, giving the U.S. perhaps as little as 30 years of resource.

Could we imagine ramping up coal production at anything approximating this scale? Again, it could certainly contribute to easing the decline, but is likely incapable of carrying the load on its own—if we would even want it to do so, given the many downsides of coal. We are presently striving to use less, not more.

Gas to Liquids

As with coal, methane gas can be synthesized into liquids like octane via the Fischer-Tropsch method. In this case, steam is mixed with methane (CH₄) to produce CO and hydrogen gas. Then the CO is combined with hydrogen in the usual F-T dance. This time, all the carbon goes into the fuel since the necessary hydrogen is provided by methane, and is therefore a more efficient process. In either the coal or natural gas route, all the carbon ends up in the atmosphere after combustion anyway (unless one of the carbons is captured in the coal version), so no big difference there.

The U.S. uses about 20 tcf of natural gas per year, where a tcf is a trillion cubic feet. One cubic foot is 28 liters, and at 16 grams per mole, 22.4 liters per mole at standard temperature/pressure, methane has a density of 0.7 g/ℓ. Each liter of methane can create 0.64 g of octane, so that a liter of octane (at 700 grams) requires 1100 liters of natural gas. Replacing a 3 percent annual shortfall of 200 million barrels (at 160 ℓ/bbl) would then require 35 trillion liters of methane, or 1.2 tcf: a 6 percent annual increase in natural gas production—similar to the impact on coal. This isn’t too surprising since we currently get comparable amounts of net energy from gas and coal, and each being roughly half what we get from oil. So a 3 percent decline in energy from oil would need to be replaced by something like a 6 percent uptick in either replacement.

Estimates of how much natural gas is available is all over the map. Conventional natural gas development is in decline in the U.S., but a recent surge in hydraulic fracturing (fracking) has many folks giddy over the prospect of a seemingly inexhaustible resource. But beware of the low-hanging fruit phenomenon. If we base our enthusiasm on the earliest, easiest to exploit examples (akin to gushers in the early days of oil), we may find ourselves disappointed. See the illuminating report by David Hughes for a more sober assessment of our likely natural gas resource.

For example, the U.S. Energy Information Agency projects that shale gas—currently at about 15% of domestic gas production— will nearly triple by 2035 to be our single biggest resource for natural gas. This is on top of a conventional supply that falls by 29% over the same period. In aggregate, the rapid expansion of shale gas allows a slow net growth rate of 0.4% per year. The faith in shale gas to deliver already seems stretched a bit, so that it is difficult to assess the likelihood of net gas production growth at all. And even if it does grow, the 0.4% per year projection falls far short of the 6% level that would be needed to offset a 3% per year decline in oil.

Where Does this Leave Us?

We built this world on fossil fuels. It is distressing to realize that our primary fuels will begin an inexorable decline this century. The result is that we will have difficulty even maintaining our current energy expenditure rate — let alone continuing our historical 3 percent annual energy growth rate. A major adjustment is in the offing.  Economic growth, look out!

Yes, we can re-purpose other fossil fuels (coal, gas, heavy oil/tar) to help plug the gap in liquid fuels, meanwhile accelerating their depletion. We can use liquid fuels more efficiently. We can try every trick to tease more oil out of depleted wells. All these things will happen. Their collective effort will ease the pain (and bring on new hurts), but it is not clear whether all efforts in tandem can arrest the decline, given practical, political, end economic realities.

They are all more expensive, all lower EROEI, all harder, and with the exception of efficiency improvements keep pumping CO₂ into the atmosphere. Although the pain may be eased, the problem does not go away. I’ve never had a hangover, but I imagine this is what such an existence would feel like: a fossil fuel hangover. When will we decide to pull the plug?

My cynical prediction is that concerns over climate change are unlikely to hold sway over energy scarcity. Heck, climate change has had little influence over our current energy mix even when energy is cheap and abundant. In some sense, this track record only highlights the difficulty we have in finding suitable alternatives to fossil fuels. Maybe declining fossil fuels will provide the impetus that climate change has not succeeded in delivering: for us to finally embark in earnest in a deliberate departure from our old friends.

But we may decide instead to cling to the lowborn cousins of the royal fossil fuels: the kings of old. No matter what mix we decide to pursue, if we wait until the decline starts before seriously ramping up all viable efforts in tandem, we will find economic hardship, job loss, energy volatility as demand flags and then resurges, etc. The unpredictable environment will not be conducive to large investments in risky alternatives. In short, we could get caught with our pants down. And if you’ve ever tried to run in this state, you know what happens next.

So I don’t look at the hydrocarbon resource figure above and feel cause to breathe (cough?) a sigh of relief. If we’re going to try following that route, though, we’d best hold our noses and get on with it. Failing this, an advisable strategy is to start transforming our personal lives to be less dependent on energy—because then we’ll be less disappointed with failure and skyrocketing energy prices when that comes.

This post originally appeared on Tom Murphy’s blog, Do the Math: Using physics and estimation to assess energy, growth, options.

Tom Murphy is an associate professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego. An amateur astronomer in high school, physics major at Georgia Tech, and Ph.D. student in physics at Caltech, Murphy has spent decades reveling in the study of astrophysics. He currently leads a project to test general relativity by bouncing laser pulses off the reflectors left on the moon by the Apollo astronauts, achieving one-millimeter-range precision. Murphy’s keen interest in energy topics began with his teaching a course on energy and the environment for nonscience majors at UCSD. Motivated by the unprecedented challenges we face, he has applied his instrumentation skills to exploring alternative energy and associated measurement schemes. Following his natural instincts to educate, Murphy is eager to get people thinking about the quantitatively convincing case that our pursuit of an ever-bigger scale of life faces gigantic challenges and carries significant risks.

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The Malaysian Life Sciences Capital Fund, formed by the Malaysian government and Burrill & Co., led the Series C funding round. Other investors included Malaysian’s national oil company, PETRONAS, and Malaysian engineering firm Dialog Group. The company has raised just over $85 million and counts Khosla Ventures and Qiming Venture Partners as investors as well.

The money will enable LanzaTech to continue developing processes for converting the carbon monoxide from waste gas from industrial operations and other sources into biofuels and chemicals. The company, founded in 2005, originally hailed from New Zealand and uses microbes and fermentation to produce products.

The startup is building demonstration projects and targeting China, which has become the largest car market and whose government has been promoting policies to promote cars that run on alternative fuels. LanzaTech is already working with two steel manufacturers – Baosteel and Capital Steel — to turn waste gas from their operations into ethanol. LanzaTech said it has installed equipment for a demonstration plant at Baosteel and plans to start production later this year. Last November, the biofuel company also announced a plan to work with a large Chinese coal producer – Yankuang Group — to produce fuels and chemicals from synthesis gas produced by Yankuang’s gasification equipment.

LanzaTech also is working on similar projects in India, where it has teamed up with Indian Oil and Jindal Power and Steel to produce ethanol. In addition, it’s working with Concord Blue to turn municipal solid waste into ethanol in India, LanzaTech said.

The biofuel company added a project in the U.S. recently when it bought a biofinery plant from the ill-fated Range Fuels during a liquidation sale earlier this month. Range Fuels, also a Khosla Venture-backed company, built the plant in 2010 to produce ethanol from wood chips but closed it in 2011 after it ran into trouble with its production process and needed more money to continue. LanzaTech told Bloomberg it plans to use the Georgia plant to develop a process for converting biomass into chemicals. The company has named the Georgia plant the Freedom Pines Biorefinery.

Photo courtesy of PETRONAS

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In a detailed interview in Forbes, venture capitalist Ravi Viswanathan, a partner with NEA, tells interviewer Yoni Cohen that in recent years, NEA has focused a much stronger emphasis on bringing in execs that can lead scaling, commercialization and operations at its cleantech interests:

A few years ago, we built our team and our network to add a lot more operational horsepower and talent. Seven or eight years ago, if you asked who would be worth their weight in gold in cleantech companies, it would have been CTOs and technology folks. Now it is really COOs and operations executives.

Viswanathan says the execs that have been in the global supply chain industries in Asia are particularly “very valuable.” Many of the cleantech startups that previously focused on the U.S. market are turning to China and India for customers, investors and partners.

Still, Viswanathan tells Cohen NEA is still looking to remain committed to investing in cleantech:

The [cleantech] market is in a tough spot. But in the long-term – and we are long-term investors – we are very bullish. There are a lot of exciting companies that are getting created and we are very excited about our portfolio. We are still excited about the space.

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The opportunity

The U.S. military is the No. 1 consumer of oil in the entire world and also the biggest spender. The organization has initiated a goal to consume 25 percent of its power from renewable sources by 2025. Pike Research projects that renewable energy spending will grow from $1.8 billion a year today to $26.8 billion in 2030, and recently the U.S. military established the Energy Initiatives Office Task Force, specifically for large-scale renewable energy projects, which will invest an estimated $7.1 billion over the next ten years.

This comes at a time when renewable energy is at a crossroads. The popular Treasury Grant could expire this year, and many statewide incentives are drying up. On top of that, the economy is looking unpredictable at best, and with massive cuts to government spending likely to hit all federal agencies, the DOD may suddenly become the most important agency to renewable energy adoption.

Where does solar fit in?

The military is inking deals across the entire cleantech industry. One obvious technology is biofuels, which the Air Force and Navy are developing for their fleets. The army is also adopting solid state lighting and next-generation batteries.

Domestically, military bases are working to test wind and solar. The technology they use may ultimately replace trucking drums of fuel to military bases in the Middle East, the aforementioned cause of many casualties. Although wind may prove tactically insecure, solar could be a perfect fit for many military bases.

At Skyline Solar we believe concentrating photovoltaics (CPV) are the best fit for military bases in the American Southwest. CPV utilizes sun-tracking technology and mirrors to concentrate the sunlight, which when combined take advantage of the strong sun throughout the day and can be built in projects from a few hundred kilowatts to multiple megawatts. These military bases not only have flat, open land perfect for midsize solar installations but also provide a good test site for similar bases established in the Middle East.

Other types of solar technology, while not without their advantages, have issues that may be detrimental to military bases. Concentrating solar thermal (CST) technology, which uses concentrated sunlight to heat a fluid and spin a conventional turbine, requires more than 100 times more water per watt than CPV, which is not realistic for desert settings.

Furthermore, CST plants are only economical on a large scale and usually take years to build. In contrast, CPV can be built in modular pieces of a plant quickly. Smaller plants distributed in various areas — also known as distributed generation (DG) — are more secure for the military’s purposes and also less financially risky. On the other hand, standard silicon PV has seen reduced costs and has the longest track record, but it doesn’t provide the same cost per watt that CPV can deliver in desert environments.

Obstacles

There are still some considerations for solar to work for the military. Storage will need to advance and become cheaper and more powerful to make solar viable without backup sources of power. The U.S. DoD is working on this, but it is still something the CPV industry will look to solve. Furthermore, the military adheres to the Buy American Clause, so any solar panel manufacturer must be delivering a product manufactured in the U.S. for consideration.

The military’s continuing advocacy for renewable energy is a boon for the entire industry and could potentially save thousands of lives in future combat scenarios. Smart solar pros are already learning how their technology can work for the military, to fight for a greener and more secure tomorrow.

Bob MacDonald is the Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer for Skyline Solar. MacDonald has a proven track record of driving revenue growth, building market focus and optimizing operational efficiencies with emerging high-tech ventures. He led the product marketing program at SolFocus; prior to SolFocus he co-founded and served as VP of Sales and Marketing for Onetta, a leading optical amplifier company. During his tenure, he secured funding from Sequoia Capital and Matrix Partners. Earlier in his career, MacDonald started the telecom components division of New Focus, a division of Newport Corporation, a leader in photonics development and manufacturing, which enabled the company’s successful IPO and secondary offerings. He holds a BSEE from Brown University, MSEE from Stanford University, and MS and Ph.D. in Physics from Brown University.

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Enerkem gasifies various forms of waste — everything from old telephone poles to mixed municipal garbage — and then turns that syngas into various fuels including methanol and ethanol. Valero is on one side of Enerkem’s supply chain, and could work with Enerkem on commercial relationships to process and sell the fuels. Waste Management is on the other side of Enerkem’s supply chain, and we could envision Enerkem working with Waste Management’s trash supply.

Enerkem has a couple of facilities in the works. One in Westbury, Quebec, which at one point was expected to produce about 1.5 million gallons per year of methanol from old telephone poles, with ethanol next on the list of biofuels to produce. Another plant, which is expected to cost $70 million and could crank out about 10 million gallons of ethanol per year, is being planned with Greenfield Ethanol, Canada’s largest ethanol producer, right next to an Edmonton, Alberta municipal composting facility. And there’s also a 10 to 20 million gallon per year, $200 million plant, in the works in Pontotoc, Miss., adjacent to a municipal waste dump, which Enerkem expects to break ground on this year.

Enerkem has received significant U.S. government support for that last Mississippi plant. In January, the USDA awarded Enerkem a conditional commitment for an $80 million loan guarantee to build it, which also followed on a $50 million Department of Energy grant. With this latest funding, Enerkem has raised about $130 million in equity funding, and received $130 million (combo of grant and loan guarantee) from the U.S. government. Trash to fuel technology seems to have gotten more attention in 2011, compared to making cellulosic ethanol from energy crops and agriculture waste.

However, even with this bright funding spot, the next-generation of biofuel production has been creeping forward. There have been three biofuel IPOs in the last 12 months — Gevo, Amyris and Solazyme — but these three companies are not yet producing biofuels at scale, and are instead making sales either off of specialty bio products like cosmetics, or reselling standard corn-based ethanol.

It will ultimately be the giants like Valero and Waste Management that will be able to get these biofuel products to scale. Both Valero and Waste Management are investing in quite a few biofuel and waste product companies. Valero has backed Mascoma, and has also taken stakes in algae fuel maker Solix Biofuels, and cellulosic ethanol maker ZeaChem.

Waste Management strategically invested in German company Agnion Energy, which invented a waste gasification process based on something called the heatpipe-reformer design. Waste management has backed startup Agilyx, which has developed technology that can turn plastic otherwise headed for the landfill, into a synthetic crude oil. And earlier this year, Waste Management announced a partnership with Genomatica, a San Diego, Calif.-based startup with a platform to create genetically modified organisms to turn biogas into a variety of industrial chemicals.

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Hunt said Thursday it will buy renewable gasoline and diesel blendstocks and fuel oil from KiOR’s yet-to-be built plant in Colombus, Miss. The two will also “collaborate on information and resources aimed at optimizing the performance of their products and services,” according to a press release.

KiOR says its “Biomass Catalytic Cracking Process,” aided by a catalyst developed from a precursor company called BIOeCON, can aid the process of pyrolysis: super-heating organic matter in the absence of oxygen to break it down into a substitute for crude oil. The company was created in 2007 as a joint venture with Khosla Ventures, which provided the company’s $1.4 million Series A round.

KiOR has since raised $40 million as part of a planned $95 million Series B round of funding, and is seeking $75 million in Mississippi state grants for its Columbus plant. The Mississippi cash was dependent on KiOR landing a contract with a refinery; KiOR’s process doesn’t yield a final fuel product like ethanol or biodiesel, but rather a “biocrude” very similar to crude oil, which then can be refined into various products like gasoline, diesel and fuel oil. The deal with Hunt Refining would appear to help move KiOR’s negotiations for the Mississippi grant package closer to fruition, though the company didn’t mention that in its Wednesday press release.

Eventually, KiOR wants to build four plants capable of a combined 250 million gallons per year of production. To get there, it announced its intent in February to seek a $1 billion loan guarantee from the Department of Energy, an amount that would dwarf the loan guarantees DOE has so far given to biofuel projects. The company has a term sheet from the DOE.

Then there’s the potential for an IPO. Vinod Khosla told a conference earlier this month that one of the biofuel companies he’s backing will be “filing another IPO within the next four weeks or so.” While he didn’t name the company in question, KiOR is one of the more promising of the Khosla-backed biofuel startups — Coskata or LS9 are other contenders — that hasn’t yet gone public, and would follow fellow biofuel startups Amyris and Gevo that have in the past several months.

KiOR’s deal with Hunt is the third big biofuel partnership to be announced this week. On Tuesday, Monsanto announced an equity investment in and partnership with algae biofuel company Sapphire Energy. Earlier today, algae biofuel startup Solazyme announced a deal with Dow to sell the chemicals giant products to be used as insulation for transformers and other industrial equipment.

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