More Slimy Stuff and Politics Too: Can BioMass Still Save Us All?
Stafford 'Doc' Williamson
Stafford 'Doc' Williamson
November 6, 2006
"You can't handle the truth!" shouts Jack Nicholson from the screen. One of my favorite writers, Aaron Sorkin, sure knows a great line when he writes one. Aaron was talking about a moral issue of some complexity in that script about murder on the American military outpost on land borrowed from Cuba. That same few acres of land that have been the subject of many more controversies in recent years.
It gets harder every day to recognize the truth when you see, read or hear it. The saying about sausages and politics being two things that you never want to see the process if you want to be able to appreciate the outcome seems more and more obvious every day of this election campaign. The ugly attack ads are everywhere, lies and half-truths in collision with more of the same coming in the opposite direction seem to be shouted from every electoral district where a seat is up for grabs.
Don't you find that it gets to be very strange what constitutes an attack, however. Cover ups are worse than the crimes, according to the media. Merely being a prominent member of the American Civil Liberties Union is considered worse than the criminals of any stripe, in some quarters at any rate. By this logic you are morally unacceptable yourself for being willing to stand up for the constitutionally guaranteed rights of those who may or may not be guilty of any other offense. Being a "liberal" is worse than most hanging offenses to hear the tone in which it is used as an accusation. More often than not, the one accused of liberalism is really just a more moderate conservative than the rampantly, heels-dug-in, anchor-chain-padlocked-to-the-wellhead conservative who is slinging the mud.
Now don't get me wrong. I know lots of nice folks who got to be that way, in part, not just because of a good upbringing, but also because the back forty contained an oil well or two. I grew up, a good portion of my youth in oil country. It is nice to have money. It is very nice to have your local and regional governments not scratching to put together a budget that doesn't neglect roads or education.
And as I have pointed out before, we don't have an "oil crisis" we have an investment failure crisis, because we have plenty of domestic sources for fossil fuels if we just build the plants to extract the darn stuff. Sure it's tougher than just poking a hole in the ground and using the geologic pressure to push it all the way to the fuel tanks of our automobiles. But the resource is there. It is mostly owned by the federal government or held under leases by the already major player or their minor subsidiaries in the oil game.
We have to adjust our thinking, however, because we have, or we may have in the very near future, a "tipping point" (as the jargon now has it) on the brink of an environmental crisis from which we may not be able to recover sufficiently quickly to get our feet out of the fire without our toes getting toasted to a crisp. That makes this election cycle especially crucial, because if we don't elect representative who are sensitive this crisis, our hopes for a bright future are going to be dimming fast.
Sure, I get that the election is about "the war" (in Iraq and Afghanistan). Do you get that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are about pipeline rights? Do you get that the pipeline through Georgia (the former Soviet satellite, not the Peach State) has almost already obsoleted the economic reasons for both those wars. Let's not even try to drag out the numbers to show that the $300 billion or $400 billion it will cost before it is all over can never be recovered. Halliburton made their bones in Iraq. They proved they are as tough as Ross Perot's Private Rangers, and have bigger pockets closer to Washington. Let's get on with a 21st Century strategy for energy.
I hope that you have seen in my columns thus far, a willingness to take a flexible view. Call it "flip flopping" if you like, but as the science changes, as technologies evolve, I am always ready to turn on a dime to point my compass in the most effective direction to reach a goal of a sustainable planet of one people living in peace sufficient to bring about solutions to whatever collective challenges we may face in the coming millennia. I would like to see us produce the kind of nearly universal prosperity that brings about a Star Trek freedom from want and need, and I suspect we have a very long way to go. But let's start from today, where we are now, and do the right thing in every choice we make.
I pointed, recently, to GreenFuel Technologies, who are developing algae as a sump for carbon dioxide. What I don't think I pointed out was that although other options might be possible, their recommendation is that you have 200 acres available for a full production environment of their system. A third of a square mile, in other words. That makes the applicability of this type of system limited to very large carbon dioxide producers. Only electric power plants and VERY large factories, or whole industrial parks of heavy industries would likely produce sufficient quantities to feed a 200 acre facility.
In a criticism of another article on the GreenFuel process one observer noted that this would merely be "sequestering" the carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning power plants. Which is a valid criticism; except that one needs to note too that eventually, the quantities of biomass fuels available to power the plants could replace, in whole or in part, the fossil sources. Thus at least slowing, and perhaps bringing into balance the total biocarbon load in the environment. Remember that one of the main advantages of biomass fuel sources is that they are re-cycling the carbon that is actively circulating in the environment at the present time. Which is to say; that unlike fossil fuels they to not add previously “sequestered” carbons that have been locked away in geological formations back into atmospheric circulation.
But let's also take a step back and look at the larger picture. It has not gone un-noticed that we are fast channeling all available potable water into human consumption in one form or another. Whether for drinking water, and urban irrigation, flowing eventually into our waste water systems, or for agricultural or industrial use, which tends to either add to the salinity of our flowing sources of "fresh" water, or to the vast wastelands like the Salton Sea (of California) or the now source-starved Aral Sea (on the border between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan). Fisherman, who fished for centuries, can now stare glumly at very substantial fishing trawlers stranded on dry land, miles from the water on their way to jobs as cotton farmers. May I remind readers that we have lots of cotton fields, right here in the Arizona desert. Surprisingly (?) the cause is the same. Vast irrigation diversions of mighty rivers have dried their estuaries to mere trickles. The difference of course, is that in Arizona we one more boats per capital population than any other state. Pleasure boats that sail (in truth I mean "zoom") up and down the various dammed segments of the Colorado River or various other man-made lakes. Is this a dream come true of merely the start of a very long nightmare?
I believe that it is an indication of the kind of triumphant application of technology to what could have been seen as insurmountable problems. What about a scenario that goes something like this, hypothetically, of course?
Say we start to harvest algae from the sea. Say we use that alga to produce biomass ethanol, and bio-diesel, which we do NOT burn to fuel our conversion process. We use it to generate electricity. We use some of the electricity to autothermal reformating convertion of the methanol to hydrogen, so our output is pure water, and the excess heat is used to steam convert salt water to pure distilled water. We use more of the electricity to pump the pure water ashore and into areas like the desert wastelands of Nevada, Arizona, the grazing lands of Texas and Montana, the rice crops of Louisiana, the corn crops of Nebraska and so on. We recapture the carbon dioxide output to feed the growth of more of the most productive strains of algae. We don't need to wait for THE VERY BEST, MOST DISEASE RESISTANT, CLIMATE ADAPTIVE and yet containable variety of alga to be developed. We need to start now. (Remember, not "starting now" was how we got into this "investment crisis" of not having refining capacity for our domestic sources of oil shale and oil sands in the first place.) The giant kelp off the California coast seem like a species whose growth is limited mainly by access to sunlight, since any tiny patch removed grows back in days as soon as the sunlight penetrates to stimulate the surrounding plants. That may be a good genetic pool to experiment from for the future, but hey, at this point in the election process, any scum that doesn't smell too bad is starting to look good to me.
Vote early. Vote often.
love
Stafford "Doc" Williamson
Stafford “Doc” Williamson was born and formally educated in Canada. He considers his life to have been “rich and full” in experiences and opportunities. Having held about 40 different “jobs”, so far, his wealth of experience includes travel to South America, Asia and Europe, both professionally and for pleasure. He credits his parents for creating in him a thirst for knowledge, and stimulating his imagination with lots of “read aloud” bedtime books, stories and poetry. His wisest investment was the purchase of a set of “WorldBook Encyclopedia” (most of his allowance for several years) allowing him to have read almost all of it by the time he was 14 years old. Doc moved to California in 1981 where he found and quickly married his lovely bride, Maggie. They now live, and bake (in more ways than one) in Phoenix, Arizona. Doc has worked in the fields of agriculture, real estate, computers, finance, theatre, dance, film and television, and education. He spends much of his time now as a substitute teacher in various school districts in the Phoenix area. “I like the feeling that I am ‘giving back’ something of the wonderful life this world has provided me,” Doc humbly reports. “It is also a great feeling when you see that light bulb turn on behind a student’s eyes when they finally grasp real understanding of the concept they have been struggling to comprehend.” Above all Doc enjoys writing, especially now that the computer checks his spelling for him.
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