What Are Our Alternatives--If Fossil Fuels Are Such a Problem?

3. Won't ethanol cover our fossil fuel shortfall? I know we are growing a lot of corn for ethanol and it is supposed to be a clean fuel. A few years ago, corn ethanol looked like a very good idea. It would provide an additional market for farmers' corn, thereby helping to hold the price up. Also, as a fuel additive, it would act as a substitute for MTBE (methyl tertiary-butyl ether), which makes gasoline burn cleaner, but does not easily biodegrade, so tends to pollute the groundwater. While corn ethanol works as a replacement for MTBE, it does very little to increase the liquid fuel supply. It takes a huge amount of corn to produce a small amount of ethanol (20% of the 2006 corn crop added the equivalent of 2.4% to the US gasoline supply energy level.) When the fossil fuels used in growing corn and making ethanol are considered, the net energy gain to the fuel supply in 2006 was virtually nothing (0.4% or even negative, depending on the study). Ethanol from corn has increased greatly in recent years, because of the significant subsidies it receives. The wisdom of increasing corn ethanol production further is now being questioned because of its poor net energy gain, its indirect impact on food costs, and its adverse environmental impacts (including soil erosion and aquifer depletion, due to its high water usage).

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The End of Everything

Five years ago, when I first started writing about Peak Oil, and published my findings in a book called Silver in the Mine, the idea that the earth was running out of oil was preposterous. Now, the Peak Oil meme is running on steroids. Everyone seems to know about Hubbert and his curve. A couple of years later, I did some research on nuclear fuel and found that we only have about 45-50 years or so of nuclear fuel left, and that is with the important caveat that there would be no increase in their numbers. Many of us in the energy planning business know that the United States and North America in general has peaked in natural gas, so we plan on using the natural gas of Russia or Iran in our power plants. And we plan on liquifying and putting it on huge tankers. Even then, that natural gas is limited in supply and it will likely peak in the next 20 years or so. But thank goodness we have plenty of coal. Well, not so fast there wildman.

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  thanks to Politics in the Zeros

Peak Coal - Coming Soon?

The general consensus view on coal supplies has long been that we have hundreds of years of the stuff left, and that oil and gas depletion are the pressing concerns. However, dissenting voices are emerging. Canadian geologist David Hughes recently claimed that "peak coal looks like it's occurred in the Lower 48 (US states)", and the consensus position on coal is also called into serious question by the Coal: Resources and Future Production report soon to be released by the Energy Watch Group in Germany. I present a summary of its findings here.

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