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it would be possible to produce about half of all transportation fuels by growing a plant like Miscanthus on about 1 percent of the terrestrial surface area. This from the Biosciences Institute.

What Fuel Should We Use?

Nuclear Power

World energy demand increases about 1 gigawatt, one billion watts (1,000,000,000 watts) every two days.  A nuclear power plant produces 1 gigawatt.  To simply hold carbon emissions at the level they are now, we must build a nuclear power plant every two days for 50 years.

Notice that Solar is the highest bar.  The sun gives us 90,000 terawatts.   A terawatt is a trillion watts, 12 zeros.

Here is one way to use the energy from the sun.

Plants store energy that they get from the sun.  We can use the energy that plants store to meet our transportation energy needs.  Right now we can use the sugar, starch, and oil that plants store to make fuel for our cars.  We don't need oil companies to send us gasoline.

When research and development finds how to make ethanol from cellulosic plant materials, we can use that to make fuel for our cars.  We can start making our own fuel now.

If we grow crops for fuel, where will we grow these crops?  (A Ha (hectare) is about 2.5 acres. One hectare is 10 000 square meters, approximately 2.5 acres)

We have enough land to grow the feed stock, without using any of the farm land we use now, if we can use cellulosic ethanol.

This is where research and development may find the answer to cellulosic ethanol or cellulosic gasoline.

Clostridium phytofermentans is one of the bacteria making ethanol on the forest floor.  This is another way to get ethanol from cellulosic parts of plants.  The USDA is paying for research on Clostridium phytofermentans.

The government says we have enough feedstock to make cellulosic ethanol now:

We have enough farm land to grow feed stock now.  32,000 acres are not farmed because the government pays people not to farm those 32,000 acres.  This and other factors are causing agricultural land to decrease, as production is increasing.  For example, about 60 million acres of former US farmland are no longer in use because the cropland wasn't fertile enough or is located in areas where the weather is less suitable for farming. But such cropland could be fine for hearty, fast-growing cellulosic crops such as Miscanthus.

Close to 100 million acres of land in the United States alone could be made available for second-generation biofuel crops.

Worldwide, a recent study by Stanford University ecologists estimated that there is more than 1 billion acres of abandoned cropland that could be used for biofuels.

More recently and expected to continue:

More farm land use here.

What feedstock should we grow and use now?

Sugar cane is the best.  Sugar beets are the next best.  Corn is third.

Why did the USA choose corn?

What about biodiesel?

We can't make enough biodiesel.

This is how much ethanol we are supposed to make.

USA corn (grain in the picture) can give us 15 billion gallons.  Experts like Chris Somerville say that the additional ethanol has to come from cellulosic sources.

This is what Chris Somerville and others do not know:

If small rural towns made their own fuel, from sugar beets, corn, soy beans, or other feed stock, we could probably get to the year 2020 on the above diagram. 

Assume a town of 5000 uses 150,000 gallons of motor fuel per year, which 300 acres of sugar beets can produce. 

We can use farm land that is not in production now.  For example, farmers in Salmon, Idaho grew potatoes 20 years ago.  That land can grow a feed stock for ethanol production today.  Sugar cane produces the most ethanol, sugar beets are next, then corn, wheat, and barley.  Sugar beets are a good feedstock at northern latitude because of their hardiness and ability to produce 500 gallons per acre, at 20 tons per acre.

 That could give research and development ten years to find how to get ethanol from cellulosic plants, which is the cellulose part of the line above.  These towns need only change their feedstock then, and continue to make ethanol at the rate they were.  The only difference is that the feedstock will be cheaper.

How Much Energy Do We Use? 

According to DOE:

The world uses 14 terawatts, 14 trillion watts, (14,000,000,000,000 watts), the world instantaneous energy use rate. 

USA uses 3.3 terawatts, about a quarter of the world use of energy.

Where Can We Get This Energy?

Hydro Electric: 2 terawatts; installed is .6 TW, maybe .9 TW can be built economically.

Wind: 2-3 terawatts; may develop off shore for 2 TW

Geothermal: 12 terawatts, if we can sequester the carbon dioxide.

Solar: potential 1.2x105 TW; practical > 600 TW

90 TW from photosynthesis may be achieved.0 TW

Where We May Not Get This Energy.

Algae:  Right now we have a moratorium on using Federal Desert Land for Algae. The desert as it is, is valuable to some folks.  Although algae are productive, they do use a lot of land and water.  Sun gives 200 watts per square meter; algae are 9% efficient, which gives 20 watts per square meter. One kilowatt hour (one 100 watt light burning for one hour) is 5 cents to 25 cents in the USA.  Can algae match that? 

Photo voltaic energy: We need 26,000 square kilometers of photo voltaic devices.  World has 4 square kilometers.  We have 6,500 fewer square kilometers than we need. 

What growing crops like corn or sugar beets for fuel does:

Plowing soil causes off-gassing of carbon dioxide and of nitrous oxide.  If we burn trees in clearing land, carbon emissions increase further.  If we divert corn use from food to fuel, for example, somewhere in the world somebody will produce more corn for food, because the demand for food is inelastic.  If they clear land, burn the wood, and plow the soil, the carbon emissions are increased.

Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007  subsidizes corn farmers 50 cents per gallon up to 15 billion gallons of ethanol.    Advanced fuels (cellulosic ethanol, biodiesel, algae) are to be 35 billion gallons by 2022.  Longer term goal is 30% of our transportation fuel by 2030, which is 65 billion gallons.  Large biomass ethanol plants can make about 100 million gallons per year and use 1 million tons of biomass.  This means we need 650 large plants, which cost 325 billion to build.

Where might this energy come from?

Billion Ton Vision

What About Brazil?

Brazil produces 40% of its transportation fuel on 4 million hectares.  Of the 7 million hectares total, they use about half for fuel. 

Sugar cane or Energy Cane (less sugar) as cellulosic fuel (40 million hectares) can produce 1/3 to ½ of all the energy the world needs for transportation. 

Brazil can do all this without using more land for fuel production, regardless of what we do in the USA.

Only 14% of the sugar cane is used now, the sugar.

 If not energy cane?

Carbon Dioxide in air was 200-300 ppm for centuries (670,000 years).  Now look where it is: 387 ppm

Carbon dioxide in air can double by 2020 to 650-750 ppm.

These conditions have never existed on the earth.

The fossil record shows that when carbon dioxide and methane increased, then the mean temperature increased 6-7 degrees--and 90% of the species went extinct. 

 We don't know if the carbon dioxide and methane increase caused the temperature rise of 6-7 degrees.  We do know that our carbon dioxide will increase by a factor of 10, not the factor of 2 of our model, if the polar ice melts, which is releasing carbon dioxide and methane.

Recent observations of warming support the theory that greenhouse gases are warming the world. Over the last century, the planet has experienced the largest increase in surface temperature in 1,300 years. The average surface temperature of the Earth rose 0.6 to 0.9 degrees Celsius (1.08°F to 1.62°F) between 1906 and 2006, and the rate of temperature increase nearly doubled in the last 50 years. Worldwide measurements of sea level show a rise of about 0.17 meters (0.56 feet) during the twentieth century. The world’s glaciers have steadily receded, and Arctic sea ice extent has steadily shrunk by 2.7 percent per decade since 1978.

Read more at NASA

We will find out if we do nothing about the carbon dioxide increase starting today. 

We need 10-30 TW of energy that does not put carbon dioxide into the air.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that Earth will warm between two and six degrees Celsius over the next century. The range in estimate comes from running different emission scenarios through several different global climate models. Scenarios that assume that people will burn more and more fossil fuel provide the estimates in the top end of the temperature range, while scenarios that assume that greenhouse gas emissions will grow slowly give lower temperature predictions. The orange line provides an estimate of what global temperatures would have been if greenhouse gases had stayed at year 2000 levels. (©2007 IPCC WG1 AR-4.)