This week I got involved in a discussion about peak oil.

Some doom-gloomers reckon we won’t need roads because oil production has peaked.

That’s probably a good way to sell books to people who want to believe the world is about to end. But it’s total fantasy.
Peak oil doom-gloomers twist a theory developed by M. King Hubbert in the 1950s, which says that production from an oil field tends to peak and then drop. The theory is probably sound, as it stands. But as usual it’s being twisted way out of proportion.

Conventional extraction only gets about a third of what is in the oil field. So, when production peaks, oil producers start thinking about investing in technology that can squeeze out more oil. Each oil extraction technology will follow the same pattern: when production peaks, the oil producer starts thinking about more aggressive ways of extracting the oil.

Beyond oil there are plenty of other fossil resources, and engineers know how to convert them all into synthetic crude oil. Right now, high prices for conventional oil are prompting a lot of interest in making synthetic crude oil from natural gas. Some excellent, easily-deployed technology is coming on to the market.

The doom-gloomers gleefully claim oil production peaked in 2008. That’s nonsense. Oil consumption fell in 2008 because there was an economic meltdown and lots of people lost their jobs. Instead of driving to work every day, and taking holidays when they could, they were losing their cars and homes. I don’t think the recession is cause for celebration.

We know that fossil oil production has not peaked. If it had, oil companies would be flat out building nuclear and solar crude oil factories with air capture of carbon dioxide, and reforesting large areas of land for making synthetic crude oil from wood (which is cheaper than solar and nuclear crude oil).

They are not.

All this doom-glooming is very convenient for oil companies and OPEC.

If we are stupid enough to think oil is becoming scarce, we won’t object to rising prices.

A couple of weeks ago I commented on a project that aims to convert wood into crude oil in New Zealand. We need projects like that. They can give us a head start on the rest of the world.

New Zealand can make all of its liquid fuels from locally-grown biomass because of our low population density. So can a lot of other countries. We can get a head start, not because they can’t do it, but because we already know what to plant and where to plant it, and because we know from experience that reversing deforestation in New Zealand is good for our local environment. Other countries are mucking about with agricultural biofuels. They haven’t considered energy forestry.

They’ll soon catch on.

About seventeen percent of the world’s population live in regions that are less-densely populated than New Zealand. They have large areas that have been stripped of natural forest. Some of these regions, perhaps most of them, could get their fuel from purpose-grown energy forests. Before we know it, they’ll be dyeing their petrol green and telling us where we can shove our clean green image.

Heavily-populated regions will need a mix of climate-neutral energy sources, but biofuel will be cheaper than solar fuel, and probably competitive with nuclear crude oil, so they too will be keen to reforest as much land as possible to produce wood chips for biofuel.

As I’ve said before, New Zealand could be the first country in the world to climate-neutralise its energy supply. Right now, we’re not planting anywhere near enough trees to make that happen.

Yesterday the Royal Society released a report on sustainable development. Two of the report’s nine recommendations target population. That seems like a step in the right direction. Many environmental activists have been ignoring population growth for decades.

This report calls for change. Recommendation 4 says: “Population and the environment should not be considered as two separate issues.”

Many environmental groups, especially those with strong left-wing agendas, will find the rest of this report compatible with their existing policies. It will be interesting to see how they respond to the report‘s position on population.

This morning BusinessDay reports that Aquaflow Bionomic Corporation is raising money for a demonstration-scale renewable crude oil facility.

The proposed facility will use the IH² process, developed by Illinois-based GTI. It’s a hybrid of hydrogenation and hydropyrolysis, using a proprietary catalyst.

IH² is currently being tested at pilot-scale in Chicago. GTI claim that their process has been proven on woody biomass, and that the conversion efficiency is up to 70%.

This could be an excellent process for renewable fuel production in New Zealand. If the high process efficiency can be confirmed at commercial scale, this process will need about twenty percent less land for energy forestry than BGFT, which was the benchmark in From Smoke to Mirrors.

More importantly, IH² is claimed to be cost-competitive with fossil liquid fuels. I suspect that is based on the use of “waste” biomass, however it suggests the cost premium we would pay for renewable petrol from purpose-grown energy forests won’t be as high as it would for other processes.

Based on what’s been published, I estimate Aquaflow’s proposed facility will produce about 1800 barrels of crude oil per day (105 million litres per year), about 1.2% of New Zealand’s total requirement. Fully commercial plants may be larger, though we won’t know till developers get some practical experience with demonstration-scale operations.

GTI claim this process will be fully commercial by 2014. That will depend on successful commercial demonstration facilities such as the one proposed by Aquaflow. Other companies may also license this technology, providing competition for Aquaflow. It will be interesting to watch the development of these facilities. I’m especially keen to see where they are built. New Zealand is the obvious location, but the developers will not come here unless we can convince them it will be worthwhile. If they knew we were definitely planning to ban fossil liquid fuels, they’d be falling over themselves to come here.

Do we have the man-parts to make that happen?

Last night I talked about From Smoke to Mirrors at a meeting of Transition Towns Kapiti. It was a very interesting audience. Some people were well-informed about energy and sustainability issues, one person wanted to find out why there’s such a fuss about climate change.

One person mentioned they’d heard at a public presentation that the EROI of hydrogen is “negative”.

That’s nonsense.

EROI can NEVER be less than zero.

Some people use incorrect EROI calculations to push a case against hydrogen. Many of these folk should know better. Anyway,  here’s how they cheat.

First, they talk about making hydrogen by electrolysis (“Forecourt Electrolysis”). They don’t tell their audience about thermochemical processes such as biomass gasification or solar thermochemical hydrogen production.

Forecourt electrolysis is never likely to be the best system for making automotive hydrogen in New Zealand, but it might be useful in some smaller villages.

An electrolyser uses electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Like any energy conversion process, it is less than one hundred percent efficient. That means that the energy content of the hydrogen (in kilowatt-hours) will be less than the electricity consumption (also in kilowatt-hours).

A forecourt electrolysis system running off the national grid for refuelling hydrogen-powered cars will have an electrolyser, a pump, a compressor, and some ancillaries. The process efficiency is at least 66%. This means that the system uses 1.5 kilowatt-hours of electricity to make one kilowatt-hour’s worth of hydrogen (That’s about 25 grams of hydrogen).

This includes the electricity consumed by the anciliaries, pump, and compressor. Let’s assume for simplicity that the energy used to make the hydrogen production facility is small enough to be negligible, compared with the energy supplied as hydrogen. Also, assume the electricity at that location has EROI = 8 to 1.

The EROI for the hydrogen comes to 5.28 to 1. ( EROI = 8 x 0.66 = 5.28 )

EROI measures “energy profit”. It’s a way of accounting for the energy that goes into supporting a process. For example, in a bioenergy system, EROI takes account of the diesel used for harvesting and transporting the biomass. EROI does not include the energy stored in the resource, whether that resource is biomass, wind, or water in a dam. If we want to measure the efficiency with which the resource is being used, we calculate the overall system efficiency. In the case of forecourt electrolysis, we must consider the entire system from power station to car. The fact that the energy is transmitted from power station to gas station as electricity is not relevant. We are making hydrogen.

Hydrogen-haters cheat. They count the electricity in their EROI calculation. They say, EROI = 1 x 0.66 = 0.66 to 1.

Actually, that’s the efficiency of converting electricity into hydrogen. It is NOT EROI.

EROI is a ratio that is always greater than zero to 1 . If it is less than one, the process is burning more energy than it produces. EROI should be significantly greater than one, but there does not seem to be any ideal figure. The benchmark in From Smoke to Mirrors is fossil liquid fuels in New Zealand, for which the EROI is 5.18 to 1.

So, anytime someone tells you the EROI of hydrogen is negative, you know immediately they’re misleading you. If they say it’s always less than one, they are cheating.

There’s a tremendous battle going on between battery-car developers and hydrogen-car developers. This competition drives engineers to improve both technologies, driving cost down and performance up. Many vehicle manufacturers seem to be encouraging competition between engineers within their own research and development departments by supporting both technologies.

There’s no need for anyone in New Zealand to take sides. New Zealand can climate-neutralise its supply of petrol and diesel without either of these technologies. However, we do need to keep abreast of all the options. If hydrogen-powered cars or trucks eventually become so attractive that Kiwis buy them in large numbers, we must make sure we can make enough climate-neutral hydrogen to support them. We can do that.

Here’s a third proposal for banishing fossil fuels from the world economy.

According to Will Parker, Bard Harstad of Illinois’ Northwestern University reckons developed countries should buy the extraction rights to fossil resources and then lock them way so they can never be developed. He says it’ll be cheapest to buy the marginal deposits and I think he’s right. He’s talking about resources such as deeply buried coal. These deposits tend to be expensive to develop. Some of them produce lots of carbon dioxide relative to the amount of fuel or electricity we get out of them.

Harstad’s idea could certainly help prevent fossil carbon dioxide emissions exceeding the one trillion tonne limit.
Here’s the best bit: This proposal stops poorly-governed countries trying to develop these resources on the sly. Harstad’s proposal overcomes a key weakness of the other two practical possibilities I’ve already seen. The trouble with the Myle’s Allen’s SAFE proposal, and an outright ban, is that corrupt governments might simply ignore them. If their fossil resources are purchased and locked up, we might hope that the owners will make sure they are not developed.

This idea can be implemented alongside SAFE or an outright cap on fossil resource extraction. The really cool thing is that it does not require international agreement. Countries and individuals can just get on with it.

Fairfax reported today that Solid Energy is firing up an underground coal gasification pilot plant. This facility will convert coal into syngas (carbon monoxide and hydrogen), from which Solid Energy could produce electricity, liquid fuels, or hydrogen.

New Zealand does not need this nonsense.The world must limit total fossil carbon emissions to less than one trillion tonnes. New Zealand already knows how to do its part. We know how to make more than enough petrol, diesel, hydrogen, or electricity to totally eliminate coal from our economy. The only way to stop further fossil fuel development in New Zealand is to ban fossil fuels. We know how to do that without stuffing the economy or crimping the Kiwi lifestyle.

Stuff’s reporter, Maryanne Twentyman, gave Catherine Delahunty and Gareth Hughes a chance to tell the public about this fantastic opportunity. They blew it.

Why did Delahunty and Hughes waste their time grizzling about the problem instead of promoting a practical solution?

Maybe they should read From Smoke to Mirrors.

Today I took in a presentation by Myles Allen, one of a group of researchers who have very convincingly shown that peak global warming depends only on the amount of fossil carbon pumped into the atmosphere. Allen says that carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide should be removed from the Kyoto Protocol. He says that total fossil carbon emissions, since the beginning of the industrial age, should be capped at one trillion tonnes of carbon. Carbon pricing won’t do that. “Reducing the rate of flow of carbon into the atmosphere doesn’t help unless it is a means of limiting the total stock,” said Dr. Allen. In other words, it makes no difference whether you or I drive a Dodge Viper, aggressively, or pussyfoot around in a Toyota Prius, unless pussyfooting around in a Toyota Prius somehow helps New Zealand climate-neutralise its supply of petrol.

I proposed, in From Smoke to Mirrors, that New Zealand introduce a progressive ban on fossil fuels. That may not work so well for the rest of the world. Dr. Allen proposes something he calls: “Sequestered Adequate Fraction of Emissions” (SAFE), which is effectively a cap on fossil carbon dioxide emissions. Energy companies would only be allowed to emit fossil carbon dioxide if they permanently bury an “adequate fraction” of the total carbon they extract from fossil energy resources such as oil-fields. This would allow high population density countries to use technologies we don’t need in New Zealand. For example, they can make hydrogen from natural gas. The waste from this process is pure carbon dioxide, so 100% sequestration is technically feasible and not particularly difficult.

Dr. Allen’s proposal would pretty-much force energy companies to fully commercialise synthetic crude oil production from biomass by the mid-twenty-first century. That would probably satisfy non-road liquid fuel users. As I pointed out in From Smoke to Mirrors, these folk cannot use batteries or hydrogen, they need petrol, diesel, or jet fuel, and there’s no chance of sequestering their tailpipe emissions. I suspect Dr. Allen’s proposal will also force the commercialisation of synthetic crude oil using “air-capture” of carbon dioxide and solar or nuclear energy.

I don’t think Dr. Allen’s proposal changes the liquid fuel situation in New Zealand. We would still have the world’s cheapest renewable petrol, diesel, and jet fuel, based on energy forestry. They’ll be more expensive than fossil fuels, but I doubt they’ll be as expensive as fuels made with “air-capture” of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

In any case, Dr. Allen’s idea beats the crap out of carbon pricing and the Kyoto Protocol. The regulations would affect only energy companies. The proposal does not require consumers to “change their behaviour”. It does not generate any new revenue for governments. It does not require the transfer of wealth from well-governed countries to corrupt, low-performing states.

What’s not to like?

From Smoke to Mirrors number plate frames are now available.

By installing a pair on your car you tell the world you want New Zealand to rapidly phase out fossil liquid fuels without antagonising motorists, irritating boaties, ruining truckers, bankrupting farmers, or grounding aviators. Click here to find out more.

Last week a reader telephoned to discuss carbon dioxide emissions. He agreed with From Smoke to Mirrors. But, he wants to know how to achieve short-term greenhouse emission reductions.

We don’t need to do anything special. Planting energy forests will knock an enormous and immediate dent in New Zealand’s greenhouse emissions, even before we start making renewable fuels. Energy forests will permanently sequester about 1.3 times the amount of carbon emitted from liquid-fuelled engines over the twenty-five years the forests will take to reach maturity. This is only the carbon that remains sequestered in the forest after energy companies begin harvesting biomass for renewable petrol, diesel, and jet fuel.

This is so humongous I previously posted a far more conservative estimate. But it’s true. If we totally immobilised every moped, scooter, motorcycle, car, truck, train, bus, taxi, train, tractor, bulldozer, excavator, train, helicopter, powerboat, yacht, train, aircraft, ship, chainsaw, and everything else that burns liquid fuels, we still wouldn’t reduce greenhouse emissions by anywhere near this much.

This sets an interesting benchmark. For example, some anti-car activists reckon we might reduce greenhouse emissions by deferring motorway construction. Even if they could unequivocally prove this will work, they also need to prove the emission reduction compares favourably with planting energy forests. And then they must placate the people who need those new roads.

They haven’t got a bolter’s chance.

The primary purpose of renewable petrol, diesel, and jet fuel is to reduce the effect of elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide over the next few millenia.

New Zealand can also achieve a quick and very dramatic greenhouse emission reduction by aggressively phasing in renewable liquid fuels. Most importantly, we can do this without antagonising the many thousands of small business-people who spend their work-days behind the wheel of a car or van.

Climate change is a very serious and urgent problem. The data clearly show New Zealand can address climate change without postponing roading investment.