Green Options

Yesterday the U.S. Senate voted to renew a one year extension for renewable energy tax credits worth $18 billion dollars. Absent from the package was a tax credit aimed at helping food giant Tyson and oil giant ConocoPhillips turn a profit by converting fats leftover from Tyson’s processing of beef to the so-called “renewable diesel” that ConocoPhillips blends with regular diesel (for a look at what renewable diesel is, check out Jason Burroughs comment below).

The legislation enacts a $1 per gallon credit for biodiesel production, but the “renewable diesel” made from waste fat, or tallow, would only be eligible for a 50 cent per gallon credit. According to Tyson and ConocoPhillips, without the $1 per gallon credit for making “renewable diesel” from tallow, their proposed project is a no go.

The European Union decided pull of the accelerator of its fairly ambitious bio-fuel plans for the future.  Nearly two thirds of the European population feels that climate change is a big issue, yet the EU itself is not planning on holding up its end of the bargain.

Editor’s note: Part three of Alexis Madrigal’s series on California’s ethanol mandate focuses on the challenges of transporting the fuel.

III. How to Move A Billion Gallons of Fuel from Iowa to California

Back in the 1980s, with smog choking American cities, the government decided to tinker with the gasoline hydrocarbon formula to create cleaner burning fuels. The easiest way to do that is to add a little oxygen to the gas. Adding O2 is a little like blowing on a flame: the controlled fire inside your car’s engine burns a little more efficiently and thus a little cleaner, reducing toxic air pollutants, carbon monoxide, and ozone.

Spurred by state and Federal regulations but committed to selling the most petroleum they could, oil companies found the cheapest oxygenate they could, a crude-derived chemical called MTBE. Subsequent environmental impact studies determined that MTBE was a groundwater pollutant, and in 1999, then-Governor Gray Davis ruled that all MTBE had to be removed from California’s gasoline by the end of 2002 (though the phase out was extended).

That left the state casting around for an alternative way to get extra oxygen into its gasoline blend while maintaining the smog-control benefits of the previous blend, and quick. They settled on ethanol, the only scaleable oxygenate available.

“This actually was a major shift in a lot of different things. The phase out was something extremely rapid. It required [the oil industry] to use the only other oxygenate alternative, which was ethanol,” says Rahul Iyer, a founder of the biofuels infrastructure startup Primafuel.

Editor’s note: On July 10th, I asked if you’d be interested in “crowdfunding” a feature article on meeting ethanol mandates in California.  You were: within two days, enough money was donated so that Spot.us, a new venture dedicated to crowdfunded reporting, was able to commission Wired.com staff writer Alexis Madrigal to move forward with his article.

We’re proud to be the first media source to publish Alexis’ article.  It will run as a five-part series: three parts published here on Gas 2.0, and the other two on Ecolocalizer.

I. How to Take Some Oil Out of An Energy System — Fast

“Don’t change horses in midstream.”
–aphorism based on 1864 Abraham Lincoln speech

What happens if, all of a sudden, you need to change the entire energy infrastructure on which California’s transportation system runs?

Most Californians probably haven’t noticed, but that’s exactly what a combination of Midwestern farmers, Big Oil companies, railroad operators, and fuel terminal owners have done over the last decade.

In switching out MTBE, a former component of California gasoline, in favor of ethanol, a behind-the-scenes change of huge proportions took place. The state and its industrial infrastructure companies managed to start putting a billion gallons of ethanol into our gas tanks a year, without anyone really noticing.

“Gasoline is just one component in what is legislated to be motor fuel. You can’t sell it without the ethanol,” says John Mahon, who runs renewable fuels for Kinder Morgan, a key player in California’s liquid fuels market. “Ethanol becomes a critical path.”

The “Economist” debate involves journalists, industry gurus, investors, bureaucrats, and of course economists who have all long been involved in renewable energy. The question:

“Can we solve our energy problems with existing technologies today, without the need for breakthrough innovations?”

This is the defining question of our time.

New innovations, improvements, or breakthroughs are happening all the time in clean tech, especially among renewable energy technologies. Yet technological limitations still plague the various industries. These hurdles include energy storage, energy efficiency, transmission infrastructure and technology, hydrogen power, CO2 capture and sequestration, and producing bio-fuels at an industrial scale. Economics is also a potent issue that both hampers and launches these technologies, hence the host of this debate.

The Sustainable Biodiesel Alliance (SBA) is a non-profit organization created to promote cradle-to-grave biodiesel practices for verifying that all points in the production and distribution chain are sustainable.

And now they want your input on what those sustainable practices and standards should be — they’ve released the first draft of their “Principles and Baseline Practices for Sustainability” (PDF) to the public under a 45-day comment and review period.

So, if you’ve ever questioned the wisdom of growing our own fuel, or you’ve wondered how biofuels can be considered sustainable at all given other seemingly cleaner options like solar, wind and geothermal, now’s your time to speak up.

Earlier this month, Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama outlined an ambitious energy plan to drive the United States toward a self-sufficient green economy. From fuel rebates to carbon cap-and-trade to vehicle fuel efficiency, the Obama plan has been widely accepted as the most comprehensive energy package released by a Presidential candidate to date. There is one specific section of the Obama energy plan which has the biofuel community abuzz: a flex fuel mandate for all new vehicles in the United States.

“Sustainably‐produced biofuels can create jobs, protect the environment and help end oil addiction – but only if Americans drive cars that will take such fuels. Obama will work with Congress and auto companies to ensure that all new vehicles have FFV capability – the capability by the end of his first term in office.”

Obama’s mandate would require that every new vehicle sold in the United States would be capable of running on gasoline, ethanol, methanol and other alcohol-based fuels. While this is exciting news to the biofuel world, Obama’s plan only effects new vehicles– leaving only a tiny portion of the 250,851,833 cars on the road in the US ready for Biofuels. This mandate would only stimulate biofuel production as new cars are sold, ignoring the opportunity of converting the existing fleet to flex fuel ready vehicles.

Watching the news is a dangerous enterprise for those of us trying to maintain a clear picture of this election season’s most important issues. Despite all the chatter, it seems relatively obvious that our most fundamental problem is American energy policy, or more specifically: oil prices and our dependence on cheap energy.

If you buy that premise, which I’m prepared to debate elsewhere, then this election should really only be decided by one evaluation criterion: which candidate has a better plan [...]

According to an article in the Jakarta Post, an official from the Indonesian government has spilled the beans on Samsung’s plans to invest up to $1.63 billion dollars in what’s sure to be a controversial acquisition of land for growing oil palms and construction of a biodiesel plant in Indonesia.

This is another of those studies that, though perfectly necessary, pretty much just get categorized in to the “Well… duh!” category of my reporting. Sadly, just because something can be so categorized, doesn’t mean it was unnecessary. Too often humanity will overlook the blatantly obvious until it is thrust directly in front of their faces.

In a report (pdf) compiled by the International Council on Human Rights Policy (ICHRP) entitled ‘Climate Change and Human Rights: A Rough Guide’, the authors argue that human rights have the ability to act as a compass to determine what research must be done and what policies must be implemented, as a result of climate change.

The current rate at which biofuels are falling out of favor is largely founded on biased ideologies, which have been shaped by widespread political and corporate agenda-pushing from all sides of the fence.

But first, a digression.

Part 1: When an egg was just an egg

I remember a time when an egg was just an egg. Nobody argued about that. It was a blissful time. Yet, for all its strengths, it was a fragile time held together by unsupported conclusions and limited knowledge.