Bring Out Your Carbon!
OFFICIAL: Bring out your carbon! Bring out your carbon!
(A FORESTER steps out from behind a bush, holding two pinecones.)
FORESTER: Got some here!
(The Official stops the cart, takes one of the pinecones, examines it through a magnifying glass, and pokes it with a stick.)
OFFICIAL: That’s not carbon.
FORESTER: Of course it’s carbon. It’s wood.
OFFICIAL: Don’t be ridiculous. Carbon is a thick black liquid that lives three miles under Texas and causes international disputes. This is a stick.
FORESTER: It absorbed CO₂ from the sky.
OFFICIAL: Well, it shouldn’t have. It hasn’t got a permit.
(Consults a vast scroll.)
Have you got anything involving an offshore rig?
FORESTER: No.
OFFICIAL: Pipeline through a swamp?
FORESTER: No.
OFFICIAL: Strait that might be closed during a regional war?
FORESTER: No.
OFFICIAL: Carrier battle group?
FORESTER: No!
OFFICIAL: Then I’m not entirely sure you understand energy security.
FORESTER: LOOK AT THE FOREST.
(The Official turns around.)
OFFICIAL: What about it?
FORESTER: THAT’S THE CARBON.
OFFICIAL: Sounds speculative.
FORESTER: One of the trees is touching you.
The joke would be funnier if Southwest Arkansas had not chosen this exact moment to make it factual. This week comes a new AA-rated BDO Zone centered on Prescott, Arkansas: 1,026,000 bone-dry tons a year of low-risk woody biomass inside a 75-mile drive radius.
A million tons. Not a million tons that might be there, a promising geological formation, or something suggested by seismic echoes from the Jurassic.
A million affordable, sustainable tons of wood. Right. There.
The underlying numbers are almost rude about it. There are 1.368 million tons per year of forest residues in the supply zone with essentially no present industrial draw, plus another 1.026 million tons of surplus pulpwood before conservative availability factors are applied. And this is southwest Arkansas. Down the road is Hope.
A town called Hope.
Only America could have a million tons of renewable carbon lying around a town called Hope and still organize a national search party for diesel.
(Back in the forest.)
OFFICIAL: Have you established that the biomass exists?
FORESTER: Yes.
OFFICIAL: Sustainable?
FORESTER: Yes.
OFFICIAL: Affordable?
FORESTER: Yes.
OFFICIAL: Reliable?
FORESTER: Yes.
OFFICIAL: Available?
FORESTER: Yes.
OFFICIAL: Can it be converted to fuel?
FORESTER: Yes.
(The Official looks deeply troubled.)
OFFICIAL: Hmmm.
FORESTER: What?
OFFICIAL: It all seems rather sudden.
FORESTER: THEY’RE TREES.
Meanwhile, somewhere in Avalon, there is movement. The old legends tell us that Arthur sleeps until the kingdom has need of him.
Rise and shine, great king. The trumpet has sounded. Energy markets are tight. Diesel matters. Geopolitics is doing that thing geopolitics does when everybody suddenly remembers that an enormous share of modern civilization depends upon combustible liquids moving freely through places with names such as Hormuz.
Somewhere, Arthur opens one eye. He reaches for Excalibur. He summons the Knights of the Round Table.
ARTHUR: Gentlemen! The kingdom calls!
KNIGHTS: Huzzah!
ARTHUR: Saddle the horses!
(Awkward silence.)
SIR BEDEVERE: Slight problem, sire. Armies don’t really travel by horse anymore.
ARTHUR: What do they travel by?
BEDEVERE: Trucks, mostly.
ARTHUR: Excellent. Saddle the trucks.
BEDEVERE: Trucks need diesel.
(Pause.)
ARTHUR: Isn’t that why they woke me?
BEDEVERE: Essentially.
ARTHUR: So how am I supposed to get there?
BEDEVERE: We’re working on financing.
The Knights of the Round Table have therefore abandoned the search for the Holy Grail.
The Grail was easier.
They are now questing for underwriters.
(A clearing in the Arkansas forest.)
SIR LANCELOT: Got one!
(Two Knights drag an UNDERWRITER into view.)
UNDERWRITER: Unhand me!
LANCELOT: We have one million tons of AA-rated low-risk woody biomass.
UNDERWRITER: Interesting.
LANCELOT: Existing roads and rail.
UNDERWRITER: Encouraging.
LANCELOT: Experienced forestry supply chain.
UNDERWRITER: Useful.
LANCELOT: Industrial infrastructure.
UNDERWRITER: Helpful.
LANCELOT: Conversion technology.
UNDERWRITER: Promising.
LANCELOT: So will you finance the refinery?
UNDERWRITER: Has somebody already built the first one?
(Silence.)
LANCELOT: This would be the first one.
UNDERWRITER: Then how do we know the first one works?
LANCELOT: By building it.
UNDERWRITER: Far too risky.
LANCELOT: How would you suggest we prove it?
UNDERWRITER: Build one first.
(The Knights confer.)
LANCELOT: Bring the rope.
Their search for policymakers has been equally productive.
(Another clearing. A POLICYMAKER is tied to a pine stump.)
POLICYMAKER: This is outrageous!
SIR GALAHAD: Will you support commercial refining capacity?
POLICYMAKER: We strongly support innovation.
GALAHAD: Refining capacity.
POLICYMAKER: We have announced new research.
GALAHAD: Refining capacity.
POLICYMAKER: Stakeholder engagement.
GALAHAD: Refining capacity.
POLICYMAKER: A listening session.
GALAHAD: Refining capacity.
POLICYMAKER: A task force.
(Galahad turns.)
GALAHAD: Another rope.
POLICYMAKER: You cannot make energy policy this way!
GALAHAD: We’ve tried yours.
This would all be difficult enough if we had to construct an entire forest-processing civilization from scratch. We don’t. Pulp and paper spent more than a century doing much of the heavy lifting. There are wood yards and boilers and steam systems and rail sidings and wastewater treatment works and truck scales and power connections and maintenance shops and people who already understand the decidedly unromantic business of getting large quantities of wood through an industrial gate every morning.
Walk around one of these sites and you encounter more heavy industrial infrastructure than you could collect in a thousand years of American Pickers.
(An enormous old pulp-and-paper complex.)
MIKE: Boiler.
ROBBIE: Yep.
MIKE: Rail siding.
ROBBIE: Yep.
MIKE: Wood yard.
ROBBIE: Yep.
MIKE: Wastewater.
ROBBIE: Yep.
MIKE: Steam.
ROBBIE: Yep.
MIKE: Power.
ROBBIE: Yep.
MIKE: Truck scales.
ROBBIE: Yep.
MIKE: Lot of yep out of you today. You think I ought to build it?
ROBBIE: Yep.
(Pause.)
MIKE: But you think I’m just going to make excuses.
ROBBIE: Yep.
MIKE: I’ll just string everybody along.
ROBBIE: Yep.
MIKE: Because I want petroleum so badly I’d unleash hell to get it.
ROBBIE: Yep.
MIKE: And it’s getting hot as hell out there.
ROBBIE: Yep.
(Long pause. Mike surveys the boilers, rail, wood yard, steam plant and miles of industrial equipment.)
MIKE: You’re really getting on my nerves.
ROBBIE: Yep.
Southwest Arkansas is not remarkable because somebody discovered trees there. It is remarkable because somebody did the work of saying, with institutional rigor: Here they are.
This is what the BDO Zone initiative has been doing around North America. How much feedstock? Where? At what price? Who already uses it? How much redundancy is required? What does the infrastructure look like? How much can a new project prudently count upon? In other words, all the things that once allowed the Official with the clipboard to say, Yes, but nobody really knows, are steadily disappearing.
(Back to the Official.)
OFFICIAL: Nobody really knows.
FORESTER: Actually, they rated it AA.
OFFICIAL: Who did?
FORESTER: The BDO Zone people.
OFFICIAL: How much?
FORESTER: 1,026,000 tons annually.
OFFICIAL: Hmm.
(He looks at his scroll.)
OFFICIAL: Nobody really knows.
FORESTER: I’m going to hit you with this pinecone.
Now pull the camera higher. Arkansas gets smaller. The Southeast comes into view. Then the whole country.
Because woody biomass is only part of an American biomass resource that is almost preposterously large. DOE’s Billion-Ton Report concludes that the United States has the capacity to produce more than one billion tons of biomass every year while still meeting projected requirements for food, feed, fiber, conventional forest products and exports. Enough, DOE estimates, for something on the order of 60 billion gallons of liquid biofuels.
Sixty. Billion. Gallons. Annually.
(Avalon.)
ARTHUR: How much?
BEDEVERE: Sixty billion gallons, sire.
ARTHUR: And we’re short of fuel?
BEDEVERE: Periodically.
ARTHUR: What are the Knights doing?
BEDEVERE: Searching for additional evidence that trees exist.
(Arthur closes his eyes.)
ARTHUR: Fetch Excalibur.
BEDEVERE: You’re holding it.
ARTHUR: Fetch me another one.
Let us make the thought experiment smaller. Forget 60 billion gallons. Take 100 million tons of wood. Ensyn has reported results of at least 70 gallons of fully fungible hydrocarbon transportation fuel per ton of wood biomass.
That’s 7 billion erfing gallons. It’s like a strategic petroleum reserve that grows back. Except you don’t need the salt cavern. Any reasonably cooperative patch of dirt will do.
(Arthur and Bedevere inspect a pine forest.)
ARTHUR: Where do they keep the strategic reserve?
BEDEVERE: Here, sire.
ARTHUR: Underground?
BEDEVERE: No.
ARTHUR: Caverns?
BEDEVERE: No.
ARTHUR: Then where is it?
BEDEVERE: Those.
ARTHUR: Those are trees.
BEDEVERE: Yes, sire.
ARTHUR: You store the carbon standing vertically in dirt?
BEDEVERE: Essentially.
(Arthur examines a pine tree.)
ARTHUR: Extraordinary.
None of this makes refining wood easy. Good. Refining petroleum isn’t easy. Modern industrial civilization is an enormous collection of things that are not easy. There was a time when woody biofuels had legitimate unanswered questions everywhere you looked. Some of those questions remain project-specific. Some technologies will fail. Some deserve to.
But the argument has moved. We all know we can do this. The trees are there. The technologies are there. The old infrastructure is there. The need is there.
What is increasingly scarce is the willingness to build the industrial bridge between them.
And that requires something Napoleon understood rather better than most project committees: two-o’clock-in-the-morning courage. Anybody can have eleven-o’clock-in-the-morning courage. Eleven in the morning is wonderful. There are renderings, podiums, governors, banners, bunting, clean hard hats, ceremonial checks.
Then comes two in the morning.
(A refinery control room. Alarms.)
ENGINEER: Yield is off eight percent!
PROJECT MANAGER: Fix it!
ENGINEER: Feedstock handling is jammed!
PROJECT MANAGER: Fix it!
CFO: EPC needs another twenty million!
PROJECT MANAGER: Find it!
BOARD MEMBER: Perhaps this demonstrates that industrial technology is impossible.
(Everyone turns.)
PROJECT MANAGER: Who invited him?
Arthur, meanwhile, is still at the gate. The kingdom needs him. The forests of Avalon are standing behind him. A million newly rated tons are sitting around Southwest Arkansas, practically within waving distance of a town called Hope. The pulp-and-paper industry has left us wood yards, boilers, steam, rail, wastewater treatment and skilled industrial people.
The conversion technologies are waiting. The Knights have stopped looking for the Holy Grail and are presently combing the countryside for underwriters and policymakers, whom they intend to lash to convenient tree stumps until somebody agrees to build something. The trees are right there. Look at them. Look at them.
Arthur is awake. The trucks need fuel. The king needs a ride.
For heaven’s sake— bring out your carbon.
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