Wood-Paper-Scissors-Butanol-Methanol Biomass Love and Hydro

Water warps wood. Sounds like one of those rock-paper-scissors kids games, or a coded spy message doesn’t it. Sometimes it feels like rock-paper-scissors trying to decide what might be the “best” technology to pursue for future environmental benefits. Not to mention current environmental benefits. Hey, I’d be really pleased if a change could also bring about a rest in the economic disadvantages of using so bloody much energy. It costs most of us plenty every month just to heat or cool our homes and get to and from our place of work. The indirect costs in healthcare, damages to environment and infrastructure are far less obvious in most cases, but as with the dangers of global warming, could end up being the really expensive ones to fix in the long run.

So it bears thinking about our situation, and reviewing from time to time the potential and the state of the art in our green fuels, greener energy effort. What got me started on the “water warps wood” issue is that frankly I am very fond of really luxurious wall-to-wall carpeting. It is pretty expensive to get a truly luxurious closely woven warp and weft (yes, it is odd that one direction of carpet weaving is called a “warp” too, I guess my love of words just led me astray there), so that the resulting piles is so dense the twists of fiber, thousands of them per square foot, support the weight of shoes. High heels are a whole different matter. Stiletto heels can crunch through the best of carpets and if a person is stepping from one grade of carpet to another, the result can easily be a twisted ankle if you are not an experienced wearer of this elegant type of foot garb.

In spite of its dangers to lovely tootsies, good carpeting remains a favorite of mine, except for bathrooms. Bathrooms have a tendency to get wet. Worse yet, toilets have a tendency to splash in rather unsanitary ways, and carpets end up being rather unsuitable (despite the “cute” ugly 3 piece wrap-the-toilet-mat, wrap-the-toilet-seat and bathmat sets that attempt to make it all washable). So as a second choice, I prefer wood for floors. Tile is not my favorite, stone is an upgrade on tile, but not universally suitable either. All of which reveals little except my own bias, which is really the point I intended to expose today.

You see, I have a great fondness for my “pet” project which identified vast quantities of nuisance substance, namely sewage, as a wonderful opportunity to turn a burden into a benefit. I love the idea that we can process sewage into not only methane, through the already widely used digesters that dot both Boston Harbor and Los Angeles coastline, but also the more exciting processes of thermal depolymerization that can zap that crap into bio-diesel, hydrogen, or almost anything in-between with a little fine tuning. The “waste” products of this process are also, potentially at least, relatively simple, easily marketable substances like carbon (possibly pure enough to become graphite pencil lead, or at least charcoal briquettes), phosphates for fertilizers, and other minor quantities of potential feedstock chemicals for traditionally petrochemical-based process industries. It is elegant, simple, economical, innovative, and best of all, turns the traditional “liability” of municipal sewage, landscape wastes and agricultural manure into the “asset” of a highly valuable and readily available fuel source.

But I have also been seeing a lot of publicity in recent weeks for unconventional “hydro” power. That is, water derived power. Biomass power, generally from carbohydrate sources like lignin, cellulose and the whole general family of organically sourced hydrocarbons is a really attractive and fast developing industry. (Some will quibble with my interchangeable use of hydrocarbons and carbohydrates, but frankly as long as both are mainly carbon and hydrogen, reforming and reformulating them amounts to the same challenge when aiming for portable forms of energy.) Like my preference for wood floors, second only to my favorite, carpets, biomass and especially cellulosic biomass is really a second favorite of mine. I am pretty excited that this area will quickly surpass the potential of using feed grains and sugar canes to produce ethanol. It tickles me a lot that sugar beets are so easily (relatively) cultivated and offer such a perceived potential for bio-butanol as an aviation fuel. These are all wonderful developments in the field of greener energy.

But something I heard on my television recently nearly knocked me out of my seat. Okay, admittedly the sage and time honored advice that “you can’t believe everything you read in the newspaper” not only applies, it also goes double for television. Yet, even allowing for the hype that was probably inherent in the fact that this “fact” came from a company representative, it still left me stunned. An Australian company that was installing an ocean-wave-harnessing generator claimed that by their calculations a hundred square miles of ocean off of California’s coast could provide enough electrically generated energy to fulfill the needs of the entire state. Now if you think that is a lot of real estate, soggy though it may be, to produce energy, consider that there are already probably more acres than that committed to wind-farm generation already in California alone. Clearly the energy density of water in motion is far greater than that of ephemeral air. And not only does the rise and fall of waves concentrate more energy in one place than a windy valley, but waves are more consistent and more readily predictable. The television item I was watching claimed that you could reasonably estimate wave action days in advance from satellite images of the distant ocean surface. Ummm, well, let’s take that with a ton of sea salt, since marine meteorologists are not especially more prescient than their land-based counterparts. But the fact remains, that if 10 miles by 10 miles (yes, that’s 100 square miles) of ocean could fuel the energy needs of the world’s fourth largest economy (that’s how California usually ranks when compared to the largest national economies of the world) then isn’t this another case of an investment crisis being misconstrued as an energy crisis?

There has been talk, since I was just a young lad, of harnessing the tremendous energy in the tidal flow into and out of the Bay of Fundy. For the geographically impaired among you, that’s the big bay just northwest of the state of Maine that is surrounded by the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick on the North West side of the bay and the province of Nova Scotia on the South East side. Tides there are the highest in the world and in many places that means as much as 40 feet difference between high tide and low tide. And I don’t mean forty feet further from shore, either, I mean, 40 feet HIGHER on the land at high tide. That’s the kind of tide that would swamp most of Florida as you may have seen in some of those “disaster” maps projecting 30 foot rise in global ocean levels if we don’t get control of global warming. All of ground level Manhattan, most of Queens and Atlantic City all would disappear if the ocean rose 40 feet unexpectedly one day. The point here is not to paint some scary disaster scenario, but rather just to point out that it is a monstrous amount of water that moves every day, twice a day. Yes, EVERY day. Perfectly predictable (no weather men required). And there are many methods of extracting huge amounts of power from those movements of very large masses of, well, mass.

Doubtless, part of this crisis of investment (i.e. energy inertia crisis) is just lack of political will. Say, for instance, that we had decided that it was urgent to obtain energy self-sufficiency from the Middle East and other OPEC countries, and that we had determined to do it without the loss of a single life. Do you imagine that 200 or 300 BILLION DOLLARS loaned to Canada to develop an environmentally suitable tidal power solution for the Bay of Fundy would not have been sufficient to get the job done? We could have turned Canada into a pollution free zone (well, almost, let’s not quibble about how much of our pollution leaks across their border), run entirely on an electric (make that CHEAP electric) economy, in exchange for all of their oil for the next 30 years while we develop our own electric economy. Sounds naïve, doesn’t it? Of course, it is intended to be oversimplified, but the point being that the transfer of economic power from petro-interests to hydro-interests does not suit the political will of the powers that be at the present time.

Speaking of “hydro-interests”, we are back to that myth that electric energy from nuclear power is “clean” energy. Here’s a quick peek at what’s happening in electric rates in Arizona (not the biggest consumer of nuclear generated power, but we do have a fairly significant component in the mix from that type of generation).

Part of the problem here is that although electric rates are regulated by the Arizona Corporations Commission, that so-called “incentives” for renewable energy sources are pretty much mythological in nature. Arizona Public Service (one of several power companies in the state), has published rates that allow for cogeneration (from “qualified” sources). One rate card for a buy/sell agreement to supply energy to a source that also supplies energy to Arizona Public Service by efforts at cogeneration is designated as specifically applying to facilities rated at 10Kw (kilowatts) or less using “renewable source” fuels. This rate card specifies that with a firm commitment to a fixed minimum amount of power every hour that APS will pay $0.05433 per kilowatt hour during peak times (12 hour a day, weekdays only) and will pay $0.03453 per kilowatt hour off-peak during the “high rate” season of summer’s 153 days, less in the off-season. This kind of small generation unit is likely the kind a consumer might install for support of her own home. The great advantage in this is that power us by the homeowner is, in effect, free, except for the fuel cost to generate the power. The other benefit is that by entering into this kind of agreement, they avoid the kind of rates that APS charges “regular” residential customers, which range from outrageous highs of $0.18200 per kilowatt in high season, on-peak for “Time Advantage” customers during the noon-to-seven-PM peak times, to a low of $0.04167 Time Advantage, 9:00 PM to 9:00 AM, off-peak, off season. Okay, so they are taking some pretty attractive markups on their purchase costs. Let’s see $0.04167 selling versus, purchase of $0.03453 in the worst off-peak, whoops no, that’s not right to compare the off-peak to off-peak, off season the number is more like $0.02862 for purchase. So that’s a 45% markup against their energy cost. Let’s not begrudge them a “reasonable” operating margin, and assume that most of that gets eaten away by other costs, including transmission and billing and such. But let’s also look at on-peak purchase versus sale prices. Those numbers are: buy at $0.05433 per kilowatt hour; sell at $0.182 per kilowatt hour. Now granted that’s intentionally a disincentive to residential customers using more “optional” consumption during on-peak times, thus helping prevent or reduce brown-outs, black-out, and other problems associated with under-developed power delivery systems (which the utilities blame on excessive regulations on profits) (though Arizona Corporation Commission has approved a surcharge of an additional $0.01155 per kilowatt hour to adjust for increased fuel costs to APS for having to purchase power from outside sources and increasing costs of petroleum based fuel supplies). But let’s look at that markup: at $0.0182 per kilowatt hour sold that is 250% of costs of energy purchased, in addition to the $0.05433 to recover the cost (and that doesn’t include the $0.01155 surcharge on top of the top rates, nor does it mention the $0.493 a day administrative charge to residential customers).

The highest rate under a flat-rate residential plan is $0.12314 per kilowatt hour all 24 hours of the day (minus discounts on the first few hundred kilowatts), and as low as $0.07394 on the flat-rate service plan, but that is not including the aforementioned surcharge nor the $0.253 per day service charge.

Now why all these statistics, rate and mathematical gymnastics (or gynasties, if you prefer to avoid math)? Well, that is because I wanted you to be aware of the fact that the above cogeneration purchases are from a schedule one might assume was a “preferred” source, being as how you have to be using a renewable energy source to even qualify to receive those purchase rate prices for the energy you provide. Surprise!

The rates on the table entitled,


RATE SCHEDULE EPR-2


CLASSIFIED SERVICE


PURCHASE RATES FOR QUALIFIED FACILITIES


UNDER 100 kW


(note, no reference to renewable energy sources) are not only the same penny for penny as the renewable energy source rates, they are the same to the 1/1000th of a penny in every category. The published renewable energy source table was originally approved and effective in 1996, but the numbers today reflect adjustments effective as of April 1, 2005. The EPR-2 rates date back, originally to 1981, but again reflect updates to April 1, 2005.

Am I alone in seeing this as near zero incentive to cogenerate electric power in Arizona, and less than zero to do so from renewable energy resources?

Now for a little good news. Although the Energy Information Administration of the US Department of Energy reports that future prices for January delivery of natural gas have increased somewhat, by as much as $0.30 per million BTUs, actual spot prices are only rising a very modest $0.03 per million BTUs in some places while actually declining in production zones. All of which is so much “inside baseball” as to be mostly meaningless chatter in reflect more on the weather speculations for a cold winter coming on than any real market forces at work. The good thing about longer range predictions, though not historically more reliable, necessarily, are that they are less volatile and less likely to miss the mark by large market margins. So the really good news is that the Energy Information Agency’s “short term outlook” shows a chart indicating an expectation that natural gas prices will not rise significantly in the short term. Indeed that following a 19% rise in the 2004-2005 period and subsequent additional rise of 6% in the 2005-2006 term, their 2006 to 2007 forecast is for a modest 3.8% decline in prices. I am not rushing to try to cash that promise at any bank I know, but it is at least somewhat encouraging. Why?

In the first instance, those figures are from November 7 , 2006, and we have seen a national average rise in gasoline prices of $0.05 per gallon across the country. Those same figures are predicting a decline in gas prices, apparently based on the quick fall prior to the election. A $0.09 a gallon decline in gas prices over 2007 seems overly optimistic to me at this point. However, price stability in the longer “short” term is attractive to the economy generally, as well as me personally.

On the other hand, as Hilary Clinton said recently, “Hope is not a strategy.”

Love

Stafford “Doc” Williamson