Drop In, Tune Out, Turn On: new thinking for new days in bioenergy
“Think for yourself and question authority” – Timothy Leary
It was Timothy Leary, the controversial Harvard professor, who coined the phrase “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out” in the 1960s, to provide a simple yet evocative way to think about a new set of controversial lifestyle choices that were a product of the social unrest of the 1960s.
In a world where we have a 100-page explanation from the state of California on how they propose to measure greenhouse gas reductions of a single renewable fuel (ethanol) produced from a handful of feedstocks (primarily sugar and corn), we can use some simplicity in bioenergy too.
For too long we have made the dialogue over a handful of renewable fuels more and more complex. If one thing is assuredly unsustainable in the debate over renewable fuels, it is the way we talk about them.
We need to get past talking about a simple set of alternatives in a complex way, because in the future we will have complex alternatives that we need to organize neatly in our minds.
For the days of making fuel in the manner of what the French describe as a bricolage – that is, an artwork created from the resources at hand – are ending. The time of first-gen fuels is come and gone, though material amounts of fuel made from cane sugar, ethanol and soy will be with us for some time to come and will find an enduring if limited role in the future.
The era of synthetic fuels are upon us, though as Gerald O’Hara said to daughter Scarlett in Gone With the Wind, “you may not recognize it now, but there’s no getting away from it.”
As readers of the Digest know, I’ve filed 5,000 news items on bioenergy over the past two years – hard data – and had more conversations with synthetic biologists and project developers than I can count, that get quickly down to “what do you really got?”.
Here’s what they got: They have the future of fuel in the maw of their hands.
Based on synthetic biology, we are at the first milepost of the journey to (and on) synthetic fuels, continuously harvested from cellular bioreactors that will be the descendants of today’s feedstock crops.
We need something to express that era that is more relevant than the “made at home, available now” argument that was advanced for corn ethanol, or the “f**k ethanol” argument that has been advanced by critics like Dan Sperling in response.
Here’s my alternative: Drop in, Tune out, Turn On.
Drop In: The future does not lie in ethanol and biodiesel, though they may well provide important fractions of the renewable fuel supply for some time to come. The future lies in “drop in” renewable fuels that do not require changes in infrastructure or engine design to accommodate them.
The failure of E85 ethanol to gain meaningful traction has something to do with price, but far more to do with lack of infrastructure and vehicles, and the well-known resistance of the driving public to wholesale changes in the way they buy and use fuels. Not to mention that fuel distribution is increasingly handled as a side business to the sales of snack foods and general merchandise.
To say that retailers (capped at a nickel a gallon in revenue from fuel sales) are loathe to invest $50 grand to add E85 to their station, would give the phrase “Bernard Madoff could have made better investment decisions” a run for its money as understatement of this young century.
But we have alternatives: companies like Amyris Biotechnologies, Sapphire Energy, UOP, Virent and LS9, to name a few, are focused on drop-in fuels that come from renewable biomass but act like traditional hydrocarbons. Drop in fuels bypass the arguments about conversion timelines and energy density that have plagued first-generation fuels. Synthetic biology is giving us options that do not require re-invention of the 100-year old system of making and distributing fuels, and that’s the bigger solution that the broader market requires.
Tune Out: The great debate over land use change, greenhouse gas emissions and the wisdom of the ethanol tariff and alt-fuel subsidies, is a debate about yesterday. The protagonists – such as Friends of the Earth, the Environmental Working Group and the Grocery Manufacturers Association on the one hand, and Growth Energy, the Renewable Fuels Association and the National Biodiesel Board on the other hand – are committing the cardinal sin of a commander in the field, the sin of fighting the last war.
The battle over biofuels is a proxy fight in the Cold War over corn and genetic modification of the food supply, more than a debate about fuel. The waving of the red flag of Third World poverty is a canard: far more calories are diverted to fat bellies in the North than are diverted to ethanol distilleries; it’s not even a close race. The best thing Westerners can do to provide more food at affordable prices for hungry people in the South is to, borrowing a phrase from the cows at Chick-Fil-A, “Eat more chicken”, or even better, eat less highly-processed foods altogether.
Not all debates go away if ignored, but the debate over renewable fuel emissions and land use change is an exception. In the future, which is less far away than most people think, fuels will be generated from waste or cultivated on otherwise useless land or ocean, diverting nary a drop of water from our freshwater aquifers, and will cause less indirect land use change than throwing an unwanted serving of broccoli in the garbage.
Meanwhile, our attention has been diverted from the development and support of advancing and advanced fuels by this Grand Inquisition into the purity of existing alternatives to fossil fuels. The whole process has the theatrical elements of the Salem witch hunt: it’s a continuation of corn politics by other means.
Tune out the debate, and move on.
Turn On: Beyond the advances in fuel technology, there are even more advances in feedstock development that need attention. Turn on to the idea that, like moving from print to digital, we are moving from an era of batch production of feedstock to continuous harvest. We wouldn’t have much of a dairy business if we had to kill a cow every time we wanted a glass of milk, yet that is the Stone Age we currently find ourselves in with our most important feedstocks. Better days, like the iceman, cometh.
From corn to soy and over to advanced, high-yield feedstocks like algae, we kill the biomass to harvest the energy. The exceptions are the harvestable large oilseed crops like jatropha and palm, but new continuous harvest options for algae are under development at Iowa State, Ames Lab as well as companies like Naturally Scientific and Catilin. Assuredly that it the route to yields north of 10.000 gallons per acre, or even 100,000 gallons per acre given some advances in the underlying science, that will permit us to milk cellular bioreactors producing oils and carbs using a feed of synthetic sugars.
Ultimately, our energy limits from the sun are around 8.5 million BTUs per square meter per year in the mid latitudes, the energy equivalent of 250,000 gallons of gasoline, per acre, per year. That’s what rains in from the sun, without tapping the stored energy in carbon and oxygen here on earth.
The limits are in the batch process, which is like print compared to digital – too much energy is expended making cells, especially cells that were designed to survive in the wild and have corresponding allocations of energy to cell walls and other defenses. Continuous production of feedstocks is the wave of the future.
Drop In, Tune Out, Turn On: abandon ye comfortable ways of thinking about the future of liquid fuel. Come together in a discussion of a newer, better fuel supply.
As the Red Hot Chili Peppers advise:
“To readjust you’ve got to trust
That all the fuss is just a minor thing”
–
Jim Lane is editor & publisher of Biofuels Digest.
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hick | May 5, 2009 | Reply
Hi Jim. Your “Drop In, Tune Out, Turn On” editorial is a must-read for Steven Chu, U.S. Dept. of Energy, and decision makers in the EPA, White House and other federal agencies concerned about climate change and how liquid biofuels can curb the change. Right now, please send it to everyone who might be willing to get behind Drop In, Tune Out and Turn On. Well done, my friend!
Narendra Mohanty | May 12, 2009 | Reply
Dear Jim,
Your “Drop In, Tune Out, Turn On” editorial is thought provoking. Instead of keeping things simple all parties concerned with “bioenergy” are bent upon scoring points.
The Science paper on Bio-electricity Vs ethanol is a pointer. Bound to generate more dust than settle.
I must say that I enjoyed reading your posts, on Indian scenario, too. Plz. keep it up. Thanks.
Narendra Mohanty
simplicator | May 25, 2009 | Reply
Maybe the future follows Mr. Leary more closely: take a pill and think you’ve driven someplace, when in fact you never left your couch!
Part of the problem we have with fuel comes from Detroit saying they can’t make a car that gets better than 25mpg. I’m all for drop in fuels, but vehicles, infrastructure and fuels all need to evolve into something better. What we have is far from perfect, so there is no reason to perpetuate it forever.
Green Diesel is a better fuel than biodiesel, but it takes too much energy to collect and process its feedstocks. We need something like algae that is concentrated in a small area near where it is processed and used and does not require a huge amount of processing. As much as I like the idea of using biomass, the reality is that it has a very poor energy ratio. It may only work well for lumber and paper operations where the waste is more centralized.
It may sound sacrilegious here, but I really think that cars should be electric, while trucks, buses, trains, planes, ships, construction/farm equipment (basically every vehicle that is not a car) run on biodiesel, green diesel or something similar. This means forget about ethanol and focus on cleaner power generation and a better replacement for diesel.
anacortesrealtor | Jun 15, 2009 | Reply
I just sent the following to my Representative in Congress and the two U.S. Senators from my state of Washington regarding the additional $95 billion they will vote on for our military in the Mid East countries:
“Perhaps even a stronger reason for voting against the $95 billion because it is needed for healthcare is the need for the money elsewhere as follows:
Many of us know it but hardly any of us wants to express it. That is, the primary reason we are in Iraq or in any other Mid East country is because of oil. If we continue to stay in the Mid East Countries we will only continue our expensive use of foreign oil instead of converting to 85% Ethanol and Biodiesel for the next forty or so years while concurrently Hydrogen is fully developed to the point of completely replacing combustion engines. Since globally we have already reached and passed peak oil we cannot afford to keep on using oil until it is all gone and find ourselves without alternative fuels transportation. OUR ENTIRE NATION NEEDS TO TRANSITION TO ETHANOL AND BIODIESEL NOW. WE ARE ALREADY LATE IN DOING SO.”