"The farmers and the cowmen should be friends..."

It almost seems to drip with irony that the Rogers and Hamerstein musical comedy containing the song about the farmers versus the ranchers is set in oil rich Oklahoma. There may be many branches on the new "green energy" tree, but that doesn't mean they have to be pruned and re-grafted to their own separate roots. Clearly the roots are common, as are the goals.

I feel like I am back in the 1970's when we university students were trying to point out the irrational basis of racial and religious prejudices. We figuratively, and sometimes even literally, shouted ourselves hoarse saying, "One planet. One people." The world keeps growing smaller, more interdependent and more tolerant of our differences on the one hand, while on the other side, the forces of ignorance keep fueling the fires of hatred and conflict.

I watched part of the excellent documentary on Barry M. Goldwater this morning. Not surprisingly, it was produced by his own granddaughter, CC Goldwater. More surprising was all the nice things good Democrats like James Carville and Hilary Clinton were saying about him (Hilary was a "Goldwater Girl" in her youth). I am sure that some of the Republican "base" will be shocked and dismayed to have his own family re-painting him as a moderate, even a liberal (as he said himself would be his fate, referring to history's perspective on him in a 1963 speech). I have a little trouble settling that label on him myself, though he does seem a moderate in comparison to many of the current crop of conservatives who are cheerfully attempting to exploit the religious right that Goldwater said had no place in politics. In Tempting Faith An Inside Account of the Rise of Christian Conservatives, and Their Betrayal by the Bush White Houseby David Kuo, he shows how cynically he believes Mr. Bush and his associates are in courting the support of those religious and social conservatives. But they are no doubt appreciative of the support they see when they start a "small" war against those who would kill "us".

I find it difficult to "forgive" Goldwater's "drop the bomb" and "nuke 'em all" attitude to have earned the status of moderate, but having gained the perspective of many years since then, I also understand that he was speaking from the perspective that felt that using the first nuclear bombs was the kinder, more effective way of ending the war with Japan. The opinion being, at that time, that a prolonged conquest of the Japanese homeland would result in far more deaths on both sides than the lives lost in a couple of devastating attacks that showed the American military superiority was beyond question. Indeed the massive firebombing of Tokyo killed many more people than the explosions and even long-term radiation effects on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I do believe, as most parents still do, that a stinging slap on the wrist and a warning, "Don't do that! Ever Again!" is a lot more effective than, "Georgie, please don't scare Daddy like that. You might get hurt if you go sticking your fingers in a dangerous place like … Baghdad."

I do have to give the Bush administration credit for recognizing the U-turn sign in the Baghdad road when the British erected it, though. When British military leader, General Sir Richard Dannatt, said, in effect, "We can't let this go on much longer," it seemed like mere hours until George was saying, "perhaps we need to look for new ideas." The British are far more used to dealing with the middle east than Americans. The British have ruled most of it since the era of the British Empire. If you think differently, you should try dealing with a Saudi Arabian Prince some time.

I only had one direct deal with a Saudi Prince myself. A young lad, he was at the time, and frankly among the hundreds of Saudi princes, I don't even recall his name. He was a pleasant fellow, and pleased that I was able to help him. But when it came to the business side of the deal, when an unfortunate disagreement arose, was it a Arab I was speaking to? No, indeed it was not. It was a British Air Force officer, assigned to the Prince's staff. Not that there aren't thousands upon thousands of majors and colonels scattered across the world, but this was no petty officer either. Yes, the British are the real experts in the Middle East, (although the Israeli's are perhaps more efficient) and they continue to rule with an iron hand inside the velvet glove in many instances. But also with what I can only describe as a colonialists' attitude. However benign their intentions, they tend to feel superior to their allies in the region, and recognize too that without a long history of laws and institutions, and social values aimed at equal protection for citizens as for aristocracy, that benevolent guidance is the only practical course. Nor, coming from a society that is long on the tradition of an aristocracy themselves, are they completely averse to slightly slanting things in favor of those who are already in power. As any student of history can tell you, a strong but benign aristocracy is likely to mean a long period of stable government and economic growth.

The same can be said, to some extent in America. The members of the American aristocracy are the individual and corporate heirs of the robber barons, with the occasional newcomer tossed in to keep the bloodlines fresh. The current evolution in fuel technologies is one of those times when new bloodlines are being formed and we have a chance to strengthen the economy in the process.

We also have the opportunity to toss the entire thing to the existing top dogs and hope that they won't do any worse than they have in the past. After all, IBM did replace Remington as the top typewriter brand. Xerox did displace Gestetner for copy machines (as well as "ditto" and "Mimeograph").

We also need to remember other lessons from the technology revolutions of the past, however. We let a winner-take-all strategy kill off the "beta" format for home taping of television, even though it was actually superior in quality to the VHS format we all have been using for the last 20 years. Yes, the new format wars in DVD and HD DVD versus Sony's Blu-ray suggests, in light of the generous bites of the economic pie shared by Atari, Nintendo, and Sony that perhaps we have room for more than one format. Maybe we really can, just all get along for a change.

So why are methanol and biodiesel perceived as separate and distinct alternative fueling paths? Haven't the forces of commerce been paying attention? Cellulosic methanol production,could be combined with thermal depolymerization with both married to a basic fermentation process for simple saccharides. I expect this would result in tremendous efficiencies. The unusable waste from conventional fermentation can easily be incorporated into cellulosic methanol production feedstock. Thermal depolymerization can provide a fast and effective method of reducing long chain carbon molecules into shorter chains of carbon. Does it take a lot of energy to raise temperatures to 500 degrees Celsius? Unquestionably. Is it possible to recover much of that energy for other uses? Absolutely. Fairly typically, in fact, there are laws governing it, in Canada, the output of a steam turbine used to generate electric power is recovered to provide heating for other buildings in the winter. The output of gas turbines is also commonly recovered in a secondary process used to fuel a steam turbine to produce additional electicity. In Mexico, Seimens has a plant that has the same kind of situation using the cooling towers to desalinate sea water into drinking water. Desalination plants in other situations (not using distillation to purify the water) use pressure recovery systems to save energy by transducing the pressure in the outflow from the reverse osmosis process to pre-pressurize the incoming flow, thus requiring only a relatively small booster pump to achieve the required pressure for production flow. This essentially passive device saves huge amounts of energy, and is one of the key factors in making desalination via reverse osmosis an economically practical method.

Heat recovery from thermal depolymerization is easily sufficient to power the distillation process for methanol. Indeed the steam released from some thermal depolymerization processes could easily become bottled distilled water, of sufficiently purity to be suitable for drinking. The California City of Long Beach has recently been granted a patent for an improved reverse osmosis system that reportedly requires significantly less energy for a dual stage process, but they don't expect a "commercial" release until 2009, apparently.

The main point here is that we are seeing conferences intended to advance the development of methanol and biodiesel production are being held under common titles, even though they may have separate agendas. Take for example the "BIOFUELS FINANCE & INVESTMENT SEMINAR" (October 24th - 25th, 2006, 3 West Club, NYC) in which the web site from the sponsor Financial Research Assoc. LLC states there will be, "one full day dedicated to the ethanol market and the second dedicated to the biodiesel market." They (FRA LLC) have additional sessions scheduled as BIOMASS FINANCE AND INVESTMENT SUMMIT (January 18th - 19th, 2007, The US Grant, San Diego, CA) and as the 2ND ANNUAL RENEWABLE ENERGY FINANCE & INVESTMENT SUMMIT(April 23rd - 25th, 2007,

Pointe South Mountain Resort, Phoenix, AZ). Costs for participants is about $900 per day or a little under $2000 for the two days. My sincere hope is that as these two steams of "green energy" mingle, they will begin to realize that there are opportunities to integrate the processes.

You will recall, if you've been reading my columns, that I mentioned both Virgin Group's Sir Richard Branson (my colum, Sept. 24, 2006) and the British Sugar Corporation (in partnership with BP and DuPont) planning to convert a methanol plant into a biobutanol production facility (my column Sept. 30, 2006). I can't honestly say, "I told you so," but on this week's edition of Bill Maher's Real Time show on HBO, Sir Richard announced that he had great hopes for powering his aircraft on biobutanol. He also, you will notice, managed to sidestep Bill Maher's question about why he was "giving away" $3 billion. As I noted before, he is not "giving" it away, he has promised to "invest" that much in development of greener fueling sources for all his transportation businesses, and he noted that his railways were much more environmentally friendly already than his aircraft in that respect.

According to the US Military's Defense Logistics Agency, up until recently (2002) only South African synthetic crude produced by SASOL was able to meet standards required for kerosene-type jet fuels, and then only by using a blend of synthetic and convention sources of kerosene. Part of the problem lies in the energy density of kerosene (diesel) versus the lighter, "lightweights" of methanol and butanol. Although they are lighter to carry aboard an aircraft, the net efficiency is reduced because they simply contain less energy available through combustion. Blends are indeed the near term future for most attempts to breach the aircraft jet fuel market, but that does not mean that a purely biomass source for biodiesel cannot achieve the required performance characteristics very soon, especially with appropriate additives, as is currently already necessary for any source to meet the high standards for military grade JP-8. The US military calls JP-8 the "universal fuel" of the future. Let's hope that they mean the universal diesel standard of the future. We don't need another "beta" versus "VHS" war, or any other for that matter.

Love

Stafford "Doc" Williamson