Exaggerated Claims and Outright Lies About Green Energy and Fuels

Is it the season, or the weather, or just the political climate that seems to bring out the lies? One can hardly help but be conscious of all the accusations about lying at the present time. Exchanges of attack ads from politicians have deteriorated from merely saying what is wrong with the other candidates' political positions and platforms to details about what lies and distortions their attack ads told about their opponents. In reply, could there be any doubt, we get more accusations about the lies and distortions hurled at them by their opponents. All of which makes the season ripe for the picking.

I was going to say that I will take the "high road" and avoid the political arena altogether, but the fact of the matter is that one of the "lies" I want to talk about is one that I caught on video a few weeks back, so I will point you to a brief clip I posted to YouTube.com. At the time, I thought it was just one incredibly inept incumbent grasping at straws because he had nothing of substance to point to in his record that had anything to do with the moderator's question about the state's lack of "green" energy either in policy or in practice. (By the way, and I am bragging here, it was my question the moderator had just read to the candidates.) It turns out that I have been deaf to growing publicity positioning the nuclear energy industry (that's fission, not fusion) as being the "clean" alternative.

I recognize, having on occasion received some praise from time to time, that one can get carried away with the accolades. I won a competition in high school involving mathematics. I and my best friend, Bruce Batchelor, had the two highest scores in our grade, and I considered myself a math genius. Of course, that was not exactly accurate, and following that pinnacle of achievement, I promptly lost interest in math because the school wouldn't let me skip the next dreary grade worth of geometry to advance to further mathematical pursuits at a higher level. These days I have trouble remembering the rules for "mixed sign" additions, subtractions and fractions. (Though I do find that when called upon to convey the "order of precedence" rule, using the memory mnemonic of "Please Excuse My Drunken Aunt Sally", with a corresponding cartoon, of a matronly woman with a martini glass does a pretty good job of locking in that concept.) Still, no math genius I, despite my temporarily inflated ego on the subject.

It seems, however that the nuclear power industry has taken to expanding on the fact that they do not directly contribute large quantities of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere as being "earth friendly" and anti-global warming. I don't have any figures I would trust, in any absolute sense, to pass along about the amount of pollution by greenhouse gases along the way to mining, refining and enriching the uranium fuel, as compared to, say natural gas, or even hydro-electric production of electricity. I would venture to guess that it might be some net savings in overall carbon-dioxide emissions compared to those, and more particularly compared to coal fired generating plants. But calling it "clean" energy, or an anti-global warming and therefore "environmentally friendly" enterprise is a bit off the scale of "truth" in my book. So-called "spent" nuclear fuel rods are lethal sources of toxic radiation for thousands of years.

Oh, yes, while we are speaking of, off the scale of truth, I heard a response by President George W. Bush this morning that hit "tilt" on the truth meter. President Bush, in response to a question from George Stephanopoulos about his strategy for the US involvement in Iraq, said, flatly, "We have never been about 'stay-the-course' in Iraq." Well, Mr. President, the Whitehouse.gov web site has in the transcript of a 2004 interview with you that you said, "And my message today to those in Iraq is: We'll stay the course; we'll complete the job." I will leave it to you, then, Mr. President to decide if today's statement fits into the "exaggerated claims" or the "outright lies" categories. Columnist George Will, the resident spokesperson on Stephanopoulos' panel for the libertarian conservative view, delighted later in the program in pointing out that President Bush's response to George's question on "strategy" in Iraq immediately turned, instead, to "tactics, as if the two were synonymous."

Come to think of it, before you find me guilty of the sins of which I am complaining, let me cast a more positive note on the political situation. I am not only against mudslinging and hypocrisy and distortions and lies, I am for someone with a plainspoken and forthright attitude. Candidate for State Representative (4th Arizona District) Debra Boehlke (her name is pronounced like "bell-key") also responded to my question about "green energy" policy and environmentally friendly energy development for the state. Here is her response. Apparently she appreciated my posting that video, too. I just discovered that Ms. Boehlke put the link to it, front and center on her own campaign's web page. I was so impressed with Ms. Boehlke that I took her recommendation for her cohort, Sue Dolphin, who had been a write-in candidate in the primary, that I voted for her, Ms. Dolphin, as well, in my mail-in ballot. So, as they say in Chicago, "Vote early, vote often." Well, that is, I mean, VOTE. "Early," also seems like good advice given the disgusting delays suffered by some voters in the last federal elections.

Another industry clawing and scraping for a share of the pie in the "clean" energy arena these days is our old friend, coal. While it may be true that "Old King Cole was a merry old soul," the same cannot be said for the coal industry as a whole. Coal's safety record in mining accounts for the majority of catastrophic deaths in mining accidents in a history that goes back hundreds of years. But an attempt by coal to re-position itself as a new clean fuel alternative goes a little too far too. They are painting themselves as so environmentally friendly because of improved flue technologies and gasification processes that they are now getting questions as if they belong to the "renewable" resources category. No matter how "clean" coal buring technology gets, it still has the one great disadvantage that it belongs in the category of a "fossil" fuel. And I don't just mean that from the point of view of a "dead" and dying industry either.

Even assuming that the world has a thousand year supply of coal, it takes natural geologic processes about 100,000 years to make coal. Using a resource at 100 or 1000 times as fast as it can be reproduced seems like a spendthrift way of managing resources to me. Doesn't it to you?

I do not deny that flue scrubbers are a significant improvement, and as to the "green" side of the equation, there is something really fairly exciting happening. Greenfuel Technology Corporation of Cambridge, MA, has recently won the "Frost and Sullivan Bio-based Fuels - Technology Innovation of the Year" award for 2006. Their process is one that takes carbon dioxide gases from flue gases in any of a wide variety of combustion situations and feeds that carbon dioxide to green algae as a highly stimulating nutrient to their growth and good health. The result is both huge reductions in carbon dioxide emissions from smokestacks, but also a very viable source of green (literally) material from which one can extract various biofuels. Of course, some of the resulting "crop" of green algae are also cycled back into the process to seed the next generation of algae. The water in which the algae is grown is also recycled so water consumption is not huge either. Greenfuel Technology Corp. specifically attempts to appeal to both power generation industry and the wastewater treatment industry as well as seeking markets for their algae in the biofuels segment. Their illustrations point out that the algae can be a source for methanol and ethanol and "other valuable products", and make a distinction between these and other "bio-fuel" products. They also are keen to point out that the resulting fuels can become a product sold to the the transportation industry, or can be used as a secondary source of fuel for the originator (i.e. as alternative combustion fuel for the manufacturer, power company or waste water processor itself).

There are also processes that turn coal into either liquid or gas versions of hydrocarbon fuels. Both produce far more clean burning combustion processes than does coal in any of its more traditional solid forms. Ultimately, with flue scrubbing, and perhaps the addition of the Greenfuel Technologies' algae process this could be as clean as, or even cleaner than natural gas combustion. That's a HUGE improvement, and we need (yes, I said, "need") not to ignore this as a potentially significant source of energy for the short term transition from petroleum dependency. Let us also not forget the little fossils who gave their lives for ... okay, that's silly. But we do not want to lose sight of the fact that it is a fossil fuel, not a renewable one.

What I would like you to take away from today's column is that the use of carbon dioxide removal by a technique that grows algae is just one more way that we can integrate a lot of disparate technologies to bring about a better world. Shouldn't every sawdust burning "green" electric generation operation also be using it? Why not ethanol producing plants too? Even if they are being powered by ethanol, they are offgassing carbon dioxide. Shouldn't their flues be scrubbing? Shouldn't we be trying to mitigate whatever byproducts our energy transformation manufacturing may be throwing off?

For that matter, shouldn't hydrogen powered cars be exhausting their combustion not into the atmosphere but rather into condensers so that we are gathering the freshly created water to take home as "distilled" water to use in our steam irons? Is it really worth the trouble? Maybe not today, but we keep making more people all the time and that means we have to be thinking about the future more and more each day.

love

Stafford "Doc" Williamson