Fuelish Goodness

In comments, Odograph writes:

I think it will be interesting to see how:

coal fired coal-to-liquids
coal fired oil-sands
coal fired ethanol distilation

all peform, with hard numbers.

Interesting question. Some links I've come across in the last little while: Mike Milikin from Green Car Congress summarizes an alternative-fuel debate:

Dr. Dale, a supporter of ethanol, would rather see the entire net energy balance issue go away. He commented that the concept of net energy is “dangerous...a convenient fiction, an academic toy.... [The net energy balance] treats all energy as equal. That’s simply not true. It ignores energy quality and deals only with quantity."

Using Pimentel’s and Patzek’s method, Dale calculated the net energy value of other fuels. By his calculations, ethanol, with an energy balance of -29%, is better than converting crude oil to gasoline at -39% and coal to electricity at -235%....

Both Pimentel and Patzek are encouraging different renewables as an approach to sustainability—and conservation. That latter point came most strongly from Patzek.

Pimentel, while defending his anti-ethanol stance, is optimistic about the potential of biomass for thermal energy, as well as Coal-to-Liquids processes for fuel generation.

(Dale pounced on that statement several times as evidence that Pimentel was giving up on the net energy balance issue, as, by Dale’s calculations, the net energy balance of CTL is -100%—i.e., much worse than ethanol.)

Of the four, however, it was Patzek (who earlier in his career had been a petroleum engineer with Shell) who delivered the most sobering assessment, on a larger scale, of the energy situation facing the US." Look. No matter what numbers are thrown your way today by any of us, the biofuels are a tiny, tiny little addition to the runaway energy consumption we have...."

Meanwhile, ethanol looks less and less likely as an outright replacement for gasoline. Engineer-poet has a few links on why ethanol ain't happening. Short version: even in the best case, we can't make enough of the stuff. Now, I've read other estimates - but those rely on assuming a) ethanol can be made profitable from switchgrass, and b) large areas of rural but currently unused land are opened up for switchgrass farming. Meanwhile, in the worst case scenario, we're wasting other precious fuels to make ethanol out of corn, when it would make more sense to convert cars to run on natural gas.

So the case for abandoning liquid fuels altogether gets stronger and stronger. At the very least, we need to be working towards plug-in hybrids. Better yet to set a national goal of all-electric transportation by 2020.