Energy is both the foundation of modern civilization and the root of some grave global problems. Some might immediately think global warming and spoil for a climate science fight. And no wonder with all the money flowing into the US political discourse from the fossil fuel industry which apparently intends to protect itself whatever the cost. So that argument goes on endlessly so why bother? Indeed, climate change isn’t a necessary point to make the argument that fossil fuel alternatives are enormously important.
Economically and geopolitically, US dependence on largely imported oil is tremendously problematic. With the global oil market driven up by speculative traders, oil purchase increasingly bleeds the US of wealth better invested in our economy. Instead our wealth economically supports nations of questionable political and social character and encourages the US to follow-up with political and military support. Along with progressively tarnishing our moral authority, the practice underlies the Islamic extremist terrorism that has brought us terror, decades-long war, and a monstrous global security apparatus. The US finds itself financing the “war on terror” not just at the cost of increasingly scarce tax dollars but also at the cost of quietly undermining our basic freedoms, the values that define our identity as a people.
Today the race is on for alternatives to fossil fuels, and especially oil, whether the US chooses to run in it or not. Once the US owned 90% of global solar cell production, but now China does. Once the US was on the forefront of wind turbine technology, now Europe is, and China is by far the biggest market. Even the prototype commercial fusion reactor is being built in Europe, and while it is paid for in large part through US funding, the high technology jobs and infrastructure our money funds are all in Europe. Yes, the US has pushed hard for ethanol to offset gasoline use, but not because it’s a good idea, or even viable. (it’s not) No, our tax dollars are supporting the losing ethanol biofuel strategy because the Federal government has had an easy time passing and expanding farm subsidies, and it doesn’t hurt that ethanol will clearly never even dent the demand for fossil fuel. So the strategy makes farmers happy, gives the public the impression the US is doing something about foreign oil consumption, and simultaneously protects the fossil fuel industry.
Despite the US abstaining from the scramble for a piece of the 21st Century energy economy, a bigger truth is that we aren’t falling that far behind. While most alternative energy technologies are, as is, far better than biofuel, no alternative energy is truly viable for replacing fossil fuels. Yet. The race is only partially about engineering, building and deploying capacity for wind, solar and tidal energy. The big outstanding problem is the lack of a cheap and safe medium to put this energy into for easy storage and transportation and for powering vehicles.
The big advantage oil, gas and coal have over every other energy source is they are already in a stored and transportable form when extracted, which gives them a huge cost and convenience advantage. Fossil fuels in the most basic sense represent hundreds of millions of years of stored sunlight, a form of “natural” biofuel production and storage (the “fossil” in fossil fuels can be thought of as fossilized biofuels…). Indeed, every common form of energy, excepting nuclear and geo-thermal, in simplest terms originates from the sun.
Solar photovoltaics is the most direct and obvious example. Biofuels are also fairly straight forward, since its sunlight that provides the energy for plant growth. But wind and wave ultimately come from the sun too. Sunlight drives uneven temperature change across the Earth’s surface resulting in warmer and cooler air masses, the former of which tend to rise and the latter sink, causing huge volumes of air to move around, which we all experience as wind. And wind creates waves. Even hydro-electric has its origin in the sun. Evaporation driven by sunlight rains out over the landscape and fills rivers with runoff which, in the right geographic configuration, are dammed and the energy of downward flowing water is channeled through turbines.
For fossil fuels the cost and efficiency loss from transformation into a transportable and storable medium has already been paid; through hundreds of millions of years of natural chemistry. For human civilization and for the companies that locate and extract these fuels, it’s a “freeby.” But not so with fossil fuel’s competitors. Harvesting wind, wave, solar, and geothermal energy is not particularly difficult, especially in comparison to the task of coal mining or deep sea oil drilling. But changing them into a medium that can be easily stored, transported and used to power vehicles without an excessive loss of efficiency (ie value), is no simple problem. And that’s where the research referenced below finally comes into focus.
One solution described in the article is the use of sunlight to directly split water into molecular hydrogen and oxygen. The structure used is referred to as an artificial leaf and it effectively does what natural photosynthesis does; transform sunlight into a usable fuel. But the advantage the artificial leaf has over natural leaves is that the fuel produced is in a liberated, energy dense, transportable, and storable medium. Unlike corn or grass, no harvesting and fermenting into alcohol is required, and there is no reliance on a growing season. Artificial leaves can directly produce fuel year round so long as there is sunlight available. And the best part is the experimental leaves are made from cheap and available materials.
The second solution described is an efficient means to convert carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide, an energy medium with all the advantages of hydrogen and more. Carbon monoxide can also be used as a source material for producing organic compounds like plastics and oils. And because carbon dioxide is the source material, this primary culprit in the greenhouse effect could conceivably be transformed into a valuable commodity, driving the development and use of carbon capture technology and resulting in a cost effective offset to climate warming. Furthermore, carbon dioxide can be captured and converted into carbon monoxide at any time or place, eliminating the significant disadvantage of requiring the sun to be shining (or the wind to be blowing or the presence of nearby crashing waves, for that matter).
I’ve long supported the need for, but been skeptical of a future reality of, a civilization powered entirely by the alternative technologies in the form we know them today. For this reason I’ve long supported alternative energy research. I believe without a doubt that viable, cheap, and safe alternatives to fossil fuels exist and identifying them and using them is just a matter of the will and the time to research the technology and engineer the infrastructure. Success once the real effort begins, supported with the resources dictated by sincere and earnest need, is a forgone conclusion. And the benefits for the US, if we develop this technology, will be economically and geo-politically priceless.
Solar Fuels Take Two Steps Forward
Two independent research teams report today in Science that they’ve taken key strides toward harnessing the energy in sunlight to synthesize chemical fuels. If the new work can be improved, scientists could utilize Earth’s most abundant source of renewable energy to power everything from industrial plants to cars and trucks without generating additional greenhouse gases.
Today, humans consume an average of 15 trillion watts of power, 85% of which comes from burning fossil fuels such as oil, coal, and natural gas. That massive fossil fuel consumption produces some nasty side effects, including climate change, acidified oceans, and oil spills. These problems are likely to grow far worse in coming years, as worldwide energy use is expected to at least double by 2050.
Renewable power sources, such as solar photovoltaics and wind turbines, aim to fill this demand, and they are making steady progress at providing electricity at ever cheaper costs. But electricity has a key drawback as an energy carrier. It’s difficult to store in large quantities, which means it can’t be used for most heavy industry and transportation applications, such as flying planes or driving heavy trucks. So researchers have long sought to use the energy in sunlight to generate energy-rich chemical fuels, such as hydrogen gas, methane, and gasoline, that can be burned anytime anywhere. And though they have demonstrated that this goal is possible, the means for doing so have been inefficient and expensive.
That’s where the new advances come in. In the first, researchers led by Daniel Nocera, a chemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, report that they’ve created an “artificial leaf” from cheap, abundant materials that splits water into molecular hydrogen (H2) and oxygen (O2), somewhat similar to the way plants carry out the first step in photosynthesis. *snip*
In principle, the H2 can then be stored and either burned or run through a fuel cell to generate electricity.
In the second study, a team led by chemists Richard Masel of Dioxide Materials in Champaign, Illinois, and Paul Kenis of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, report that they’ve come up with a more energy-efficient approach to converting carbon dioxide (CO2) into carbon monoxide (CO), the first step to making a hydrocarbon fuel. Other researchers have worked for decades to devise catalysts and the right reaction conditions to carry out this conversion. But converting CO2 to CO has always required applying large electrical voltages to CO2 to make the change. That excess voltage is an energy loss, meaning it takes far more energy to make the CO than it can store in its chemical bonds.
*snip*
“These papers are nice advances,” says Daniel DuBois, a chemist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, who works on catalysts for both splitting water and reenergizing CO2. But he cautions that neither solves all of their respective issues. The oxygen-forming catalyst in the artificial leaf, for example, remains slow, DuBois says. And the efficiency of the overall leaf is only 4.7% at most, and just 2.3% in its most simplest design. The catalyst in the CO2 system is even slower. But DuBois says that because other researchers in the field now have a good examples of systems that work, they can now focus on designing improved catalysts to speed them up.