Some people just don't, "get it." My wife thinks Democratic Presidential Hopeful Dennis Kucinich is one of those people. I am not sure it isn't my wife who doesn't, "get it," at least to the extent of why Senator Kucinich is taking the positions and saying the things he is at this point in the Democratic Party Presidential Primaries campaign. But let's leave them aside for the moment, because the ones who, "don't get it," that I am thinking about are an entirely different (if somewhat overlapping) segment of the population.

You see, I got a nice note from a reader who argued that the kind of diesel fuel produced by the hydrocracking technique that ConocoPhilips will be employing to make animal fats into diesel fuel that is "non-ester renewable diesel" rather than true "biodiesel" was, in effect, defeating the purpose of the tax code incentives. He was especially concerned that it was not biodegradable, and a "toxic" substance. Now I am not (at this time and place anyway) a broadcaster subject to the FCC's "fairness doctrine" of equal time for opposing viewpoints (which, by the way was repealed anyway, but that's a whole other argument I'm not trying to address today). However, I do feel that it is important to understand that some people do want everything to be "biodegradable". Real "biodiesel", the fatty acid methyl ester kind, is biodegradable by natural processes of decomposition. From the point of view of a "benign" product not "poisoning" anything (some claim it is actually even non-harmful if swallowed, but I am not endorsing that view, nor am I willing to test it myself). I was something of a "flower child" of the late 1960's and early 1970's myself, so I can understand that desire. I can remember my friends and I sitting around talking about the idea that a law should be implemented that no new "thing" (actually we were talking about substances, as in the polymer plastics that we were being told would last thousands of years without any significant breakdown in our landfills) should be allowed to be brought on the market without also inventing a method of re-cycling that substance again. So, yes, I also sympathize with the point of view that we don't want "toxic" substances added to our environment. Obviously I completely agree that we did the right thing in banning DDT. The "non-ester renewable diesel" is chemically indistinguishable from the "old diesel" (except for the near total lack of sulfur content), and is deadly to drink. It is not good to be poured on your plants, plus it is potentially harmful with long-term exposure to the skin, and probably several other aspects that would require a "keep out of the reach of children" label.

The primary needs for renewable diesel, however, are not directly related to the avoiding of toxicity in the liquid fuel itself. The emphasis on ethanol as a blending ingredient to gasoline is also not based on its biodegradability either, though it happens to be so. (Pure ethanol is essentially "industrial vodka" with half the taste and twice the bite. Eminently drinkable if you don't mind being falling down drunk after one drink.) Indeed, even the highly touted E85 (85% ethanol) for "flex fuel" vehicles still contains 15% gasoline so it is not exactly the latest thing in flavored coffee creamers either.

By the way, I was in Brazil in the mid 1990's when they had a substantial percentage of vehicles running on ethanol or high percentage ethanol blends. "Gas" was expensive and ethanol was no cheaper then, and at the time "air pollution" was the main concern of most people with respect to automobiles (though not, as today, specifically carbon dioxide content). I can tell you from that experience that a LOT depends on the motor fuel standards and exhaust emission standards because although a large proportion of Brazil's vehicles were already using ethanol blends, the pollution and smog in Sao Paulo were terrible. Visibility was actually poor on some days, and the smell was probably the worst air pollution smell I had encountered to that point. (Beijing topped it for strong smells in my later travels, but I remember being singularly unimpressed with the benefits of switching cars to ethanol at the time of my Brazil trip.)

There are two main factors in making the time ripe for biofuels in my perspective on the subject. First is the renewable aspect of the biological sources from which these fuels are being made. In effect, we are using and re-cycling carbon content that is already in the biological environment, not reintroducing carbon from millions of years ago as the fossil fuels of conventional petroleum do. By substituting biofuels for petroleum, everything man makes becomes a "temporary carbon sink", effectively holding carbon just long enough to be useful to us, then once again being re-cycled into a new product. The whole myth of "tens of thousands of years" before these products break down was useful in prompting us to consider the problem serious, but as a practical matter, these were man-made substances that man now knows how to re-cycle via depolymerization. Second is the local availability of the raw materials, which is not to say that we can only use local sources, but rather that they are not exclusively controlled by a small cartel of producers as is the current petroleum industry (and OPEC). Most of these biological materials can be cultivated in almost any country, most under widely varying conditions. This makes them more or less "universally available" and eliminates much if not most of the transportation costs.

It makes very little difference in the world if the fuel you put in your automobile gas tank is biodegradable before it goes into your engine. What comes out of the exhaust pipe is what matters, and that is going to be roughly the same for any carbon based fuel. It matters a whole lot more that it isn't adding carbon to the atmosphere at a rate faster than the earth's environment can cope with it. In spite of the publicity being received by tropical rain forests, and concerns about their destruction, the Northern Hemisphere's coniferous forests contain more oxygen producing biomass than all the tropical rain forests combined according to the FORESTS episode of Discovery Channel's series "Planet Earth". Not only that, but for all the concern we have about arboreal environments the OCEANS have a great deal more to do with how much oxygen is available to the atmosphere than do all the trees in the world.

To some extent I can empathize with those who are offended by major petroleum companies jumping on the bandwagon, so to speak, of "renewable diesel", because I tend to feel the same way about operations that merely burn sawdust or municipal solid wastes to produce electricity, then call it "biomass" generated. ("Oh, look Cecil, we've invented the wood stove! Three cheers for us!") There are good reasons why cities aren't filled with houses heated by wood stoves any more (in addition to the plain old fire hazards). It is not efficient. Pipelines are expensive to install, but a natural gas pipeline to every individual home in a neighborhood quickly pays for itself in terms of overall energy savings compared to individually, physically delivering the fuel in some other form via truck.

I can remember when I was quite young that the local dairies all delivered milk to your homes in horse-drawn wagons. The horses quickly learned the routes and it was actually fairly easy for a substitute milkman to take over the route because the horse already knew where to go and at which houses to make a stop. The dairy owners were reluctant to change because they thought that trucks were going to be more expensive to maintain and less efficient. In the long run, horses proved to be more expensive to keep running. So too, with wood heat versus electricity. Natural gas tends to be cheaper still.

Turning to "biomass" as a solution to our energy problems is not just a matter of burning wood and grasses. That is one of the ways we got into this mess in the first place. As it happens my family's ancestral home is a tiny island off the North coast of Scotland. Today it has one tree on the whole island. All the rest were cut down for firewood a hundred years ago or more. We is needed is a matter of the requirement to make portable fuels for transportation and electricity generation that don't add to the carbon in the environment. Whether you burn "biodiesel" or "non-ester renewable diesel" the main exhaust components are not significantly different. Hydrogen is a much cleaner fuel. There is no question about that, but it is so much less energy DENSE that it becomes impractical for many situations. Pure hydrogen in airplane fuel tanks would burn beautifully, but the tanks would have to be so heavy to safely contain the extremely high pressures to concentrate the energy of hydrogen into the energy density of jet fuel that a 747 would never get off the ground.

One of the key elements here is the "portability" of the liquid fuel. It has to be carried in the vehicles that transport us and our materials. It might be nice to be able to look in the gas tank for human nutrition as we drove from Chicago to New York City, but that is not what we are trying to accomplish. That is not to say it might not be a worthwhile goal if the trip were a 9 year mission to one of the moons of Saturn, but it is not relevant to the fuel situation today. If you can take it with you, and it has the necessary energy density, plus it answers the other two fundamental questions of carbon load on the atmosphere, and local/universal availability, it is a good candidate, in my hardly ever humble opinion.

Biobutanol is, "a contender, coming up fast on the inside," as they say at the race track. This week's news included more from Sir Richard Branson of the Virgin Group of companies. According to the article in the San Francisco Chronicle (which has more details, and apparently more correct information than most of the other reports I read) Virgin Fuels, a Virgin company will run a test in cooperation with GE Aviation, the jet engine maker, to, "burn a yet-undetermined formulation of biofuel in a jumbo Boeing 747-400 sometime in 2008." Others report that this will be a flight in which one engine burns the biofuel(s) and the other 3 burn conventional jet fuel. Such test flights are likely to be without passengers, since the FAA frowns on testing with passengers aboard. This is in addition to ordering up to 8 billion dollars (US) of the new Boeing model 787 "Dreamliners" that burn 27% less fuel than similar aircraft. Since Branson is also [reportedly] an investor in the development of biobutanol, which is completely compatible with conventional automobile engines and the whole infrastructure that delivers it, there seems a reasonable chance that biobutanol will be one of the fuels they try at some point.

However, that brings me back to, "non-ester renewable diesel," because that is exactly what DaoChi Energy of Arizona is aiming to produce: a jet fuel grade kerosene type of "diesel" from biomass. We like sewage and manure for sources but we have recently also broadened our "horizons" to include some other ingredients. Plastics are both a worrisome set of problems, and a tantalizing potential for higher yields. Cellulose, which makes up approximately 70% of all landfill wastes, can be rendered into a rather bland, comliant feedstock that offers certain advantages if blended with sewage or manures.

Our friends in the jatropha oil world are getting along swimmingly. Plans are afoot for several ventures with more on the way soon. Jatropha's hardy nature, drought and disease resistance are exactly the kind of qualities I was talking about earlier. It is not very tolerant of frosts, and as a shrub or tree that doesn't make it ideal for the Peace River Country of Northern Alberta even though nearly 24 hour sunlight turns a short Summer growing season into a wildly productive time for some crops, but most warmer temperate zones and almost all of the tropics are potentially viable growth environments for jatropha. Very modest irrigation could make this a terrific crop for "taking back the desert" in Northern Africa. Indeed this could be exactly what the vast new irrigation plans in Egypt need to get a jumpstart on economic viability.

And speaking of Africa, I saw yet another episode of the Planet Earth series this week on FRESH WATER. It had two rather interesting sequences that set me thinking (it has lots more interesting sequences, but two of them caused me to "think different" as the ungrammatical slogan from Apple Computers goes). The first I'll mention was the scene taken from an aircraft of some sort, showing 2 million wildebeests on the hoof, migrating in search of fresh water to drink, and pasture land sufficient to sustain them. It reminded me of a politically incorrect and insensitive comment from the screaming comedian Sam Kinison. In reference to starving populations living in intolerable heat and without water, he shouted, "Pay attention! Move to where the food is!!" It was my observation that part of the reason for the difficult migration of millions of wildebeests every season is that they are concentrated to the extent that wherever they go they strip the environment of all the available food. If these mild animals could just spread out it seems to me that there would likely be more food for everyone, pastures could recoup before the small herds came again, and mass migrations would not be necessary. Now oddly enough, that got me thinking about Tom Friedman's "The World is Flat" concept. The flattening of the world means, to a large extent, that people no longer have to concentrate themselves in particular locations to accomplish most of the jobs that need to be done. Commodity traders certainly don't have to live within walking distance of the Chicago Board of Trade to live an environmentally responsible lifestyle. Fashion designers and their seamstresses do not have to be in Milan, Paris or New York any more. They do, however, need reasonably priced portable energy sources, so locally available biomass, solar and geothermal energy make the overall strain on the planet much less than when all the people are clumped into massive mega-cities clogged with smog and pollution.

Oh, yes, I almost forgot to get back to my wife and Congressman Kucinich. No they are not "together" in any sense, they are in some ways opposites. They actually have hopes and dreams that are similar, but Congressman Kucinich wants us to believe that he stands by his principles in all events and really wants to 'study war no more'. He has said many times that war should not be an instrument of US foreign policy. He wants us out of Iraq now, and he says he would never resort to unilateral military action even in response to terrorist attacks. He points out, rightly in my opinon, that "terrorists" are not a country, nor a government, but a tactical operational method of various factions who want attention and action from those in power. He has a pretty strong following among liberal democrats, though hardly anyone gives him any serious hope of obtaining the party's nomination. My wife, on the other hand, says "there are bad men out there" and that sometimes you just have to deal with them in a fire with fire, violence with violence way. Kucinich (among many others) points out that terrorism is a "police matter" not a military one. I tend to agree with him on that point, but on the other hand, I don't know that diplomatic resolution and peaceful settlements are always possible. When the "terrorists" are choosing terror because they really believe that WE (the Westerners in general and the Americans in particular) are "godless heathens" who need to be killed or converted to their religious beliefs, then I think we may need to show more than diplomatic strengths. We do need to ally ourselves with the "rest of the world" in a show of solidarity that we do not believe that anyone has the right to dictate what beliefs we should hold. (Though Americans have long been guilty of the "godless heathens" argument against Communists because they believe that we should live in freedom FROM religion instead of the American Way credo of freedom OF religion, that seems to exclude atheism or agnosticism as legitmate systems of belief.)

Which brings me to the second example I saw on that same Planet Earth episode. A colony of river otters (in India, I believe) were faced with some rather scary looking crocodiles inhabiting their territory. Occasionally a careless otter becomes a meal for these scary monsters, but when the colony stays vigilant, something remarkable happens. The crew of 15 or 17 otters takes on the crocodile and, nipping and biting in a long succession of lightning fast strikes, the group of 12 pound otters frightens these 12 foot crocodiles away. Now if that sounds like a Hollywood ending with everyone riding off into the sunset to live happily ever after, it is not. The crocodiles still live in the same river as the otters. They still have to be wary of them, and be prepared to stand firm and united against any of them, but they have the scary monsters at bay and they are keeping them that way.

At the time it struck me that this little otter story was a kind of metaphor for the human condition. There are a lot of "big scary" things out there, but together we can manage to live with them, provided we remain wary and ever vigilant.

I am going to try to keep that image in mind every time I face another hurdle in persuading the world that the time to take action on biofuel factories has already arrived. We need to develop renewable energy resources now, not next year, or in 10 years, but now. We also need to share that capability with the world, in order to share our prosperity with the world, now, before it becomes too late.

love

Stafford "Doc" Williamson