About the mid 1960’s my Grandfather, Ralph A. Hamilton held patients to nearly ten inventions, one being a downward Heat pipe energy storage system that he try in the late 70’s and early 80’s to market. It was in many people’s eyes one alternative to solving the needs of this country. However the time was not right, and it was not commercially viable.
There are many people in today’s world with so-called alternatives to heating our homes, running our cars and fueling the basic needs of our society. Not all are reasonable, but not all are practical.
We have discovered that government creates more problems in solving our basic energy needs than can be help. The Current Market system is our solution and running to government as some of our Liberal friends is fallacy just creates more problems. The real solution is to cut these oil, and energy companies loose, giving them one assignment and one assignment only and that is provide our needs in this country.
In someways, you can see what the end product a government mandates. Years ago government requires the oil industry to blend 2 to 10 percent ethanol into our gas for what they claim was for the environment. This requirement they did not recognized that corn to ethanol would interfere with food sources.
We face complicated challenges in switching to ethanol, which has numerous logistical difficulties in its transport. Unlike MTBE, ethanol cannot be shipped through pipelines. Ethanol is also currently more expensive than gasoline.
Of course, they are many other types of Non food crop fuels some claim would help. Many biofuel companies are trying to develop methods for making ethanol from wood chips, grasses, or agricultural wastes, rather than corn. And One being algae among others.
A very good liberal friend mine, who I respect ask me to look into algae. Yes, that pond scum or algae has a relatively high energy density compared to soybeans, and it's a non-food crop, removes large amounts of carbon dioxide from the air, and it grows fast.
But for all of algae's promise, the technology to make fuel still remains experimental. And the biggest challenge facing any biofuel company is cost. Anybody can grow algae if cost is no object. Lots of algae companies have done a great job, but the system doesn't look like a massively scalable system
Alge grows in water and a company would need to product enough water to meet the needs of these many farms and they would have to be located in sunny, hot places to speed up the drying since algae is 98 percent water.
So where is the water going to come from? Certainly hot, dry places never have a allot of water to spare and water table in states like Nevada, Arizona Utah and New Mexico is extremely low. Drying would be easy. “Water” now that is another problem.
In one 1996 report that an area around the size of the U.S. state of Maryland -- approximately 15,000 square miles would be enough to cultivate enough algae to serve the entire transportation needs of the U.S. And again how much food crops would be displace?
And in a 1996, the DoE estimated that it would cost twice as much to produce algae-sourced biodiesel than it would gasoline.
The University of New Hampshire's (UNH) Biodiesel Group estimates it could cost as much as $308 billion to build enough farms across the U.S. to meet these production levels and another $47 billion to run them. and along with that UNH says the technology isn't yet available to produce the yields algae are capable of producing.
But with all this we cannot estimate the time it would take develop such technology that and since ethanol handling and shipping is expensive and may not feasible to make that switch. And also the time to produce such a product would be longer than to produce a well in Alaska or for that matter anywhere else in the U.S. And many other problems exist but the return of a investment to the company that produces the product.
Yes, there are many questions out there and yes there many well-meaning people like liberal friend and my Grandfather. But since it took nearly a two thousand years to go from Olive or whale oil to a hundred years to petroleum base economy it would questionable that we could go to a alternative in ten short years.
The answers are not nationalizing or for that matter to demonized the oil companies. Good or bad we need to the oil companies and at this point we need to look to all solutions. We cannot look to the government for the solution, we can and should look to private enterprise to do so.
As I said above biofuels may not be the way to go and ethanol may never be a real solution except in the minds of a few zealots. Of course we would always have people who would protest even the most workable alternative. Reminds one recently of a town in Cape Cod who wants to place Wind turbines offshore to generate power , only to have one powerful family to protest them being place there because it might ruin their view of the ocean. Meanwhile that same family was pumping oil into that very same ocean from their yacht.
We need a workable alternative, not a fallacy of over expectations or dreams!
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