Solar thermochemical crude oil represents the ultimate recycling process. The fuel is made from atmospheric carbon dioxide and water. Burning the fuel converts it back into carbon dioxide and water.

A practical solar crude oil factory will need a process for capturing atmospheric carbon dioxide. One promising approach is to use a material that naturally adsorbs carbon dioxide under normal temperature and pressure, and then releases carbon dioxide when heated.

A recent scientific paper described lab testing of a promising adsorbent called “polyethylenimine”. Based on those tests, this material would do the trick. It can adsorb about 7.5 per cent of its own mass in carbon dioxide. Heating it to eight-five degrees Celsius releases the carbon dioxide within a couple of hours. A process engineer could work with that.

Solar thermochemical fuel is a “fall-back” technology. Solar fuel facilities covering a tiny fraction of the earth’s surface could produce more than enough climate-neutral crude oil to satisfy global demand. Solar crude oil will be considerably more expensive than crude oil made from wood chips. But it will almost certainly be a lot cheaper than fuel made from algae. If global agriculture and forestry cannot produce enough biomass to satisfy global crude oil demand, overseas fuel consumers will want solar fuel.

New Zealand doesn’t need solar crude oil. We can go ahead with energy forestry, without worrying about competition from Middle Eastern solar fuel producers.

Our home-made crude oil will be cheaper than theirs.

Huffington Post blogger, the Rev. Jim Ball, has criticised President Obama for not implementing a comprehensive plan on climate change. Fair enough. But he’s wrong to say the USA is “on the right path”, simply because US carbon dioxide emissions are expected to level off due to improved fuel efficiency.

That means nothing in the long term. The world needs to completely phase out fossil energy long before humanity burns it all up. That means climate-neutralising every tractor, excavator, bulldozer, helicopter, jet boat, and everything else that depends on liquid hydrocarbon fuels. The vast majority of these non-road machines cannot use alternatives. They must have climate-neutral hydrocarbons: especially diesel and jet fuel. The Rev. Jim Ball is thinking about cars, when he should be thinking about combine harvesters.

Improved fuel efficiency helps reduce the economic impact of climate-neutral fuel. The less fuel we consume, the less we’ll be affected by increasing fuel prices. If President Obama does nothing, he could squander the opportunity. US consumers will face rising fuel costs when they finally decide to phase out fossil fuels.

Better, in my view, to incorporate fuel efficiency into a comprehensive plan, like the plan in From Smoke to Mirrors.

Carbon pricing cannot reduce the effect of human-made climate change.

This probably sounds radical. It’s consistent with the best data I can find.

The idea of carbon pricing goes way back to when scientists where beginning to understand human-made climate change. They didn’t realise 21st and 22nd century carbon dioxide emissions would affect the climate for fifty to a hundred thousand years. They didn’t realise we’d have to leave some fossil energy resources in the ground.

We know that now. And we know we must phase out fossil fuels before they are totally depleted.

Global carbon pricing won’t make this happen.

Carbon taxes, carbon fees, and emissions trading impose a global price on carbon, which, supposedly, encourages everyone to stop burning fossil fuels.

Compared with renewable fuels, fossil fuel production has lower raw material costs and superior economy of scale. That won’t change. Engineers already know how to convert any form of fossil carbon or hydrocarbon into petrol and diesel. Anything they can do with wood chips, they can do with lignite. Anything they can do with biomass gasification, they can do with natural gas. I’ve seen processes that can profitably convert peat into high-quality diesel and jet fuel. There’s a lot out there. If geologists can find it, engineers can make it into fuel.

As I showed in From Smoke to Mirrors, carbon pricing drives up the cost of renewable energy facilities and renewable raw materials. And because alternative-technology vehicles are inferior substitutes, most people will stick with petrol or diesel, regardless of the carbon price. That’s what happened in New Zealand in the 1970s. CNG used to cost about forty percent less than petrol. A CNG conversion would pay for itself in about a year. Very few people converted their cars to CNG because it was rubbish. You had to fill up every second day, you had to use petrol on any worthwhile road trip, it took longer to fill up, and so on. Non-road fuel users have even less choice. Alternatives are out of the question for most of them.

That’s why the world will continue using fossil liquid fuels until humanity has burned up every skerrick of fossil energy.

What about cap-and-trade?

Theoretically, emissions trading schemes are supposed to have two parts: A carbon price; and an emissions cap. The idea is that fossil carbon dioxide emissions would be limited to some fixed value (the cap). The cap would be progressively lowered until fossil carbon dioxide emissions were totally phased out, or until some bottom limit is reached.

This is fundamentally flawed.

Such a scheme establishes a vast global network of private and government bureaucracies. Like all bureaucracies, the global emissions trading establishment would quickly focus on its own survival.

An early, complete phase-out of fossil fuels would eliminate the need for these bureaucracies, depriving a global army of cubicle warmers of their livelihoods. They won’t let it happen. In the short-term, they might lower the emissions cap, but as time goes on they’ll make up ever-more complex, ever-less-intelligible, stories about why it’s too hard to reduce fossil fuel consumption to zero. They’ll fight tooth and nail to ensure fossil consumption continues until every last gramme of fossil carbon has been pumped into the atmosphere. If they don’t, they’ll do themselves out of their jobs. Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry will keep “discovering” new forms of fossil energy, just before the latest “energy crisis” stuffs the global economy.

The “fee-and-dividend” scheme promoted by some US activists is just as bad.

All these carbon pricing schemes suffer the same defect. They set up a global carbon pricing establishment that will fight to against the very thing it was set up to achieve: A rapid, early phase-out of fossil fuels.

We know how to replace fossil fuels with perfectly serviceable climate-neutral drop-in replacements (it’s in the book).

The world is better off without carbon pricing.

New Zealand can lead the way. We can scotch our emissions trading scheme.

This week I’ve caught up with some of the more important scientific papers from 2011.

Niel Bowerman and his colleagues looked at thousands of different fossil carbon dioxide emission scenarios, leading to total warming up to four degrees Celsius. They reached two very important conclusions:

1. The peak global temperature depends on the cumulative total CO2 emissions between 1750 and 2200.
2. The peak rate of global temperature change depends on the peak emission rate.

An earlier study by Gary Shaffer and others showed that 21st century fossil carbon dioxide emissions will continue to affect the global climate for many thousands of years. At the level of emissions studied by Bowerman et al., Shaffer and his colleagues found that global average temperatures would stay 2-3 degrees above nineteenth century levels for eight thousand years. They’d remain above nineteenth-century levels for at least a hundred thousand years.

That would not be so bad if climate models included all the potential runaway effects that could cause global temperatures to soar out of control. They do not. That’s the trouble.

The twenty-first century is an eye-blink on these timescales.  By the early twenty-second century, humanity will have burned up all the fossil resources unless positive action is taken to phase out fossil fuels. Bowerman’s paper strongly suggests it makes no difference whether we burn up all the fossil fuels by 2050, or 2070, or 2112. The critical long-term issue is the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere. That is a mathematical function of fossil fuel consumption.

Slowing fossil fuel consumption will make no difference in the long term.

I’ll say that again.

Reducing fossil fuel consumption makes no difference to long-term climate change.

Bowerman and his colleagues found that slowing fossil fuel consumption might defer some changes. But that simply postpones the inevitable by a few decades at most. It makes no difference to my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren. The only factor that matters to them is total cumulative emissions. The more fossil resources we leave untouched, the better.

Jim Hansen has pointed out that we can’t guarantee the climate’s long-term stability. The more fossil fuels we burn up, the greater the risk.

We know what to do about carbon-dioxide emissions from fossil fuels. Here in New Zealand, we can start planning immediately.

The main conclusion from these studies is that we MUST completely phase out fossil fuels. Fast.

Before I write about the thinking behind my radical New Year targets, here’s one of the best ideas I’ve seen in 2011.

Watt & Sea hydrogenerator on transom of Pogo S2 Class40 "Campagne de France". Queens Wharf, Wellington, 2 Jan 2012.

This simple but highly effective hydrogenerator has really caught on among round the world racers. It’s pretty-much impossible to find out if they help or hinder sailboat performance. On the positive side, they don’t create upwind-performance-sapping windage, they don’t explode, and they don’t smash yachtie’s heads open, like wind generators. Unlike solar PV panels, they produce more than enough power to run a raceboat in the southern oceans. They eliminate the need to run the engine just for battery-charging, which makes it easier to sleep. On the negative side, they absorb up to a horsepower that would otherwise drive the boat forward.

So, the only way to find out if these hydrogenerators make a raceboat go faster would be to compare the performance of a large number of boats, some with hydrogenerators, and some without.

That might be difficult. Every boat in this year’s Global Ocean Race has a hydrogenerator. At six thousand Euro, a hydrogenerator takes a serious chunk out of a GOR competitor’s sail budget. Obviously they think these things are worth the money. I’m not at all surprised. But don’t expect me to tell you whether they’ll make your boat go faster. I wouldn’t have a clue. And as I mentioned in an earlier post, the mounting system probably needs work. What I can say is that they get the job done, and for most cruising yachtsmen they’re certainly a better investment than wind generators.

Several times in 2011, people asked me what needs to happen to climate-neutralise New Zealand’s economy. The short answer is: We must phase out fossil fuels and stabilise population.

Many thousands of scientific studies point to one simple, undeniable fact: Human-made emissions of fossil carbon dioxide in the twenty-first century will boost global average temperatures for many centuries into the future. If anyone could prove this won’t destabilise the earth’s biosphere, humanity could burn up all the earth’s fossil energy resources before switching to renewable energy such as solar synthetic crude oil (p. 142, From Smoke to Mirrors). James Hansen describes the risk in his book, Storms of My Grandchildren. If he’s right, runaway heating would gradually evaporate the oceans. Water vapour is a powerful greenhouse gas. So, the more the earth heats up, the more solar energy it will absorb. This leads to a runaway effect that would eventually drive global temperatures so high that nothing could survive, except perhaps some very hardy microbes. No-one has identified any natural phenomenon that can counteract this effect. No-one can prove Hansen right or wrong. He is one of those practical guys who can test his ideas on simple mathematical models that don’t need supercomputers. That’s why so many people take him seriously.

New Zealand can lead

The world needs leadership. New Zealand can provide that leadership. We must create a business environment in which consumers use renewable energy, not because they are green, and not because it’s the socially acceptable thing to do, but because it’s the only practical option. People don’t think about where electricity comes from when they switch on a light, nor do they think about where petrol comes from when they drive to the beach. They just do it.
The first step is to scrap the Emissions Trading Scheme. Like all carbon pricing schemes, it is fatally flawed. Any carbon pricing scheme creates a widespread bureaucracy that depends for its existence on greenhouse emissions. Eliminate greenhouse emissions and carbon bureaucrats lose their livelihood. It makes no difference if they are tax collectors or traders. Without greenhouse emissions they’re out of a job.

If that’s not a good enough reason to avoid carbon pricing, technical links between commodity prices pretty-much guarantee that fossil fuels will always be cheaper than renewables. From Smoke to Mirrors, Chapter 20, shows why a global carbon price cannot change that.

Carbon pricing schemes pretty-much guarantee the world will burn up all its fossil fuel resources before switching to alternatives. That is the very scenario we are trying to avoid.

Liquid Fuels by 2040

From Smoke to Mirrors shows how to phase out fossil liquid fuels by 2040. The transition plan is based on realistic surveys of New Zealand resources. It accommodates relevant technical innovations, provides certainty for energy investors, and as a side-benefit, creates habitat for many threatened indigenous species. It really is a win-win for conservationists and petrol-heads.

Crucially, we begin with non-road liquid fuel for aviation, agriculture, construction, marine, and other non-road liquid fuel consumers. Then we climate-neutralise commercial road transport. We won’t need to think about cars until about 2030. It doesn’t matter what kind of cars people buy.

Benchmark technology is a critical element of this plan. Energy forestry is by far New Zealand’s best source of renewable hydrogen and crude oil. Energy forestry can also support large-scale biomass-powered electricity production. The total land area used for energy forestry will not depend on our choice of road transport technology: It doesn’t matter whether cars and trucks run on hydrogen, or batteries, or petrol and diesel, we need the same total area of plantation forest.

Electricity and Heat by 2030

Peak generating capacity is the main problem. New Zealand has more than enough renewable resources to satisfy current electricity demand. But we need rapid-start power stations to cope with sudden increases in demand. Some interesting innovations will probably emerge between now and 2030. But as with liquid fuels, we need a benchmark technology: something we know will work, that we can put into practice if nothing better comes along.
That benchmark is renewable diesel. To satisfy five percent of electricity demand would require an extra 240,000 hectares of plantation forest. This is certainly feasible, provided we stabilise population very soon.
Industrial heat is the other significant fossil energy consumer. This can be satisfied with by-products such as lignin from renewable fuel factories. Some industrial heat consumers can use waste heat from renewable fuel factories.

We can do it

None of this requires any new inventions. Technical improvements in the pipeline will reduce car and truck fuel consumption, more than enough to offset increased fuel prices without downsizing vehicles. The same goes for domestic electricity. Switching to renewables should not crimp the Kiwi lifestyle.
We can do this. Our great-great-grandchildren face serious difficulties if we don’t.

Goals for 2012

1. Scrap the emissions trading scheme.

2. Establish concrete national targets for eliminating fossil energy (except in cement and steel production), in a series of steps. Electricity should be fully climate-neutral by 2030. Liquid fuels, industrial heat, and land transport, should be fully climate-neutral by 2040.

3. Establish a practical set of incentives for converting steep, previously forested farmland into plantation forestry, and for producing interim biomass such as short-rotation forestry.

4. Develop training programmes covering the relevant topics in engineering, forestry, and other disciplines.

5. Get serious about stabilising New Zealand’s population. No-one needs more than two kids. And we need to think seriously about how much immigration we can cope with.

“Why do you like trees, granddad?” said the small boy.

The old man sat down in the armchair by the Christmas tree and smiled: “That’s where our petrol comes from. When I was a small boy, we had trams running back and forth on every street. To go surfing, I’d ride the tram down to the railway line, ride the train into Wellington, tram-hop from Thorndon to Hataitai Beach to ride the break over the old airport. You could hop on or off, anytime, anywhere. Trains and trams shuttled back and forth, day and night, at six kph. It took seven or eights hours each way, depending on the trams.”

“Why so slow, granddad?” said the boy, sitting cross-legged under the tree.

“The government said it was unnatural to go faster. High speed was bad for us.”

“Yesterday I went 95 on my bike, downhill. My guts didn’t fall out.”

The old man laughed: “It was really because trams and trains can’t stop, especially in the wet. Steel wheels on steel rails. No friction worth a g.

“The trams would shuttle back and forth, bristling with robot arms waving about like hordes of drunken Hiabs, delivering mail and groceries, loading and unloading wheelchair and mobility scooter users, moving stray pets and children out of the way, collecting rubbish and recycling, mowing verges, trimming trees, sweeping streets, collecting lawn clippings and fallen leaves and dead cats and random biomass for the hydrothermal power stations. At the railway, the robot arms transferred freight and disabled passengers between trams and trains.

“Security cameras in the trams continuously uploaded mugshots for analysis by the Department of Social Homogenisation’s computers, to make sure the tram-using population accurately reflected national demographics: gender, race, age, disability status, social affiliation, BMI, dental inventory, tattoo density and content, shoe preference, PPP…”

The boy screwed up his face: “PPP?”

“Personal piercing profile.”

“What changed?” said the boy.

“The coal ran out. Trains and trams wear out shiploads of steel wheels and rails. The steel came from countries where, according to international climate treaties, carbon dioxide from coal-fired steel mills did not cause climate change. In those days, New Zealand had seven million hectares of energy forests producing wood for biomass-fired power stations, plus wave-power stations all around the coast and a vast fleet of tidal turbines under Cook Strait.

“New Zealand Rail revived an old steel mill near Auckland, using hard dry lignin from hydrothermal power stations, instead of natural coal.

“They could only make enough lignin for the local market. Without the export coal trade, New Zealand Rail went bankrupt.

“The Energy Department converted some biomass-fired power stations to make renewable petrol and diesel. A group of former railway engineers found an HQ Monaro in a container hidden in a forest on Motiti Island. They built a factory and knocked out a couple of million copies, using steel from melted down wave power generators, railway wheels, and rails. Some other railway engineers founded Southern Trucks. And a group of boat-builders came out of retirement to help build the network of earthquake-proof, fibre-reinforced-plastic four and six-lane motorways we enjoy today.

“What about the rest of the energy forests?” said the boy.

“Didn’t need them. Some have been left to go back to native forest, and others have been converted to farmland. But we still have more than enough for all our renewable petrol, diesel, and aviation fuel.”

The boy leaned forward and stared intensely into the old man’s eyes: “Granddad,” he said.“Why didn’t they do that in the first place?”

“My grandfather’s generation unwittingly elected a government of autophobes. Autophobia wasn’t always considered a psychiatric condition. Back in your great-great-grandpa’s day, it was considered a virtue. By the time he died, they’d phased out road transport.”

“Über-Fail!” shouted the boy, leaping up and knocking a shock-pink bauble off the Christmas tree.

 
Merry Christmas!
 

If you have been offended by anything in my Christmas blog, or, indeed, by anything else on kevincudby.com, I sincerely apologise. This blog and website present raw facts, technical analysis, and occasional satire. It is inevitable that some people will find this material offensive. If you are one of those people, please avoid this website in future.

If you like this blog, be sure to put a wrapped copy of From Smoke to Mirrors under your tree for someone you love. Don’t forget to check back in the New Year for more practical information about totally eliminating greenhouse emissions from fossil liquid fuels.

Right now the five-boat Global Ocean Race fleet is flat out in a Force 9 gale way down in southern Indian Ocean, surfing enormous swells and going about as fast as a 40 foot monohull has any right to go.

Race-blogger Ollie Dewar reports the punishing conditions have precipitated an energy crisis for the Italian/Spanish crew of Marco Nannini and Hugo Ramon, driving Financial Crisis. Nannini and Ramon have been using a hydrogenerator to charge their batteries. This looks like a small outboard motor, the propeller trailing in the water beneath the yacht. The water flow forces the propeller to rotate, driving a generator. Hydrogenerators are simple and effective. Polish yachtsman Zbigniew Gutkowski told me in January this year that the hydrogenerator on his 60-footer Operon worked flawlessly all the way across the southern Indian Ocean. After leaving Cape Town, he did not start his engine until after he crossed the finish line south of Wellington Airport.

Nannini and Ramon may not be so lucky. Their hydrogenerator has come adrift, and they can’t even attempt to repair the broken mounting bracket unless the wind drops. They are relying on a diesel-burning heater to keep their boat liveable. Now, they’ll need what little diesel they have to charge their batteries.

Leg 2 of the Global Ocean Race started from Cape Town, South Africa, on 29 November. Nannini and Ramon are currently in fourth place. They face another 3400 nautical miles (6300 km) of hard sailing, with no heater and limited electricity, before they reach the leg 2 finish line in Wellington.

Hydrogenerators should catch on, if the manufacturers can come up with a decent mounting system. Solar panels are rubbish in the southern oceans. The combination of low temperature, overcast skies, ice, and salt, effectively shuts them down. Wind generators tend to explode in southern ocean gales. Hydrogenerators just keep on keeping on.

From an engineering perspective, the problem of keeping a hydrogenerator on the back of a yacht is not all that different from the problem of keeping a rudder on the back of a yacht. Rudder failures account for a good proportion of withdrawals from round the world yacht races. Some yacht designers are making a serious effort to solve the problem. The lessons they learn should also apply to hydrogenerator mountings.

Meantime, Nannini and Ramon will be piling on every piece of clothing they can find. They’ll need to hold as much diesel as possible in reserve, in case they need engine power to get the boat out of trouble. They can’t afford to let those batteries run down, so they’ll be running that diesel every day or two – which makes it hard for the “off-watch” co-skipper to sleep.

You can bet they’re looking forward to some warm Wellington weather come early January.

The Kyoto Protocol is blocking progress toward a climate-neutral economy, not only because it can’t work, but also because it has created a twenty-year gravy train for the new establishment. Thousands of diplomats, environmentalists, journalists,  scientists, climate-deniers, and bureaucrats, have travelled the world on other people’s money, courtesy of the annual circus known as the Conference of the Parties (COP).

They’d all be out of work if engineers stepped in and fixed the problem. That’s probably why they steer clear of anything that would eliminate human-made greenhouse emissions. Fossil fuel consumption is the largest source of greenhouse emissions. There’s more than enough evidence that engineers know how to replace fossil fuels, but that can only happen if fossil fuels are banned. Carbon taxes, emissions trading, fee and dividend, and other carbon pricing schemes cannot work, because of the technical links between commodities. Perhaps that is why environmentalists and their supporting cast tend to focus on carbon pricing schemes. They cannot threaten the gravy-train.

Population stability or reduction would reduce emissions from deforestation and agricultural emissions. That too would threaten the gravy train. Is that why environmentalists avoid talking about small families?

The world needs to phase out fossil fuels before they become economically depleted. We need a ban, phased in over a period of twenty to thirty years, starting as soon as possible. It’s been done with ozone-depleting substances. Some cities ban open fireplaces to reduce local air pollution. Without a ban, the climate conference gravy train can go on well into the twenty-second century, providing guaranteed world travel for climate negotiators and their entourage of cheerleaders and denialists. All paid for by ordinary people who have to work for a living.

Global consensus is not required. It is vital that the world’s major economies simultaneously phase out fossil fuels. Trade sanctions would bring most smaller countries into line, regardless of whether they agree to phase out fossil fuels or not. The Kyoto Protocol made this impossible, by allowing major economies such as India and China to pump out greenhouse emissions, while pressuring other major economies to cut back.

The COP circus has become the new establishment, a cadre of grey-haired campaigners whose entire careers have been built upon arguing about greenhouse gases and theorising about changing public behaviour without crashing the gravy train.

Frank McDonald, who by his own admission is a veteran of the COP circus, unwittingly captures the problem in this week’s issue of Nature.

Canada has pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol.

Canadian Environment Minister Peter Kent said that transferring billions of dollars from Canadian taxpayers to other countries, as required under the Kyoto Protocol, will have “no impact on emissions or the environment”.

Mr. Kent says the Kyoto Protocol “is not the path forward for a global solution to climate change; instead, it is an impediment.”

Right on the money, Mr Kent.

The Kyoto Protocol ignores the major problem: rapidly increasing greenhouse emissions from so-called developing nations. By the mid-twenty-first century, most of the fossil carbon released into the biosphere by human activity will have come from the so-called developing countries. Already, they produce 58% of global emissions. The combination of rampant population growth, and economic ambition, pretty-much guarantees that emissions from these countries will continue increasing. The Kyoto Protocol does nothing to stop or reverse this.

Scientists are calling for fossil fuels to be phased out early, that is, before they become economically exhausted. To make that happen, Canada needs to invest billions in climate-neutral power stations, fuel factories, and heating plants. No matter if this comes from public or private investment, ultimately, it comes out of the pockets of taxpayers, either directly through taxation, or indirectly, when they buy petrol, diesel, electricity, plane tickets, or anything other product or service that consumes energy.

Peter Kent’s statement says nothing about how Canada will phase out fossil fuels. He talks about reducing emissions. Perhaps he does not know about the technical possibilities. Perhaps he should read From Smoke to Mirrors, and then challenge Canadian engineers to do a similar analysis based on Canadian conditions.

Whatever.

The global risk can be reduced only if fossil fuels are phased out, globally, before they are totally consumed. The Kyoto Protocol could never achieve that. The editors of the scientific journal “Nature” said in November that “The Durban meeting should be where the Kyoto Protocol, as we know it, goes to die.”

It’s not dead yet. But if other countries follow Canada’s lead, then perhaps humanity might yet avoid the worst consequences of human-made greenhouse warming.