The World in 2050_ Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future - Laurence C. Smith [34]
An attractive alternative would be making ethanol from cellulose, extracted from low-value waste and woody material. Indeed, to make sense any large-scale conversion to biofuels must include cellulosic technology. 134 Cellulose is found in waste products like sawdust and cornstalks, or in grasses and woody shrubs that grow on marginal land not suitable for food crops. It is also the only way to achieve large greenhouse gas reduction through biofuels: Because cellulose requires little or no mechanical cultivation, fertilizers, or pesticides, the amount of fossil fuel needed to produce it is greatly diminished.
At the moment, we do not yet have the technology to produce cellulosic ethanol at sufficiently low price and large scale to penetrate the liquid-fuels market. Woody material contains lignin, a tough polymer that surrounds the cellulose to strengthen and protect the plant. Lignin prevents enzymes from reaching the cellulose to break it down to sugars that can then be converted to ethanol. Current methods for doing this require strong acids or high temperatures, making them uneconomic. But cows and termites, through a symbiotic relationship with gut bacteria, have no problem breaking down cellulose, and promising research is under way to discover how we can too.135 Another potential source of liquid biofuels is algae (e.g., algenol), which can be grown in non-agricultural, non-forest places like deserts, potentially even from wastewater and seawater.
Whether from increased competition with food crops, or the harvesting of brush and wood for cellulose, a downside of all biofuels is a pressure to expand cultivation, putting even more pressure on natural habitats. Because they consume so much land area, biofuels have the largest “ecological footprint” of any energy source including fossil fuels.136 Another challenge is purely logistical. Most plant biomass is dispersed over the landscape. How will we secure enough of it, and deliver it to plants at a reasonable cost, without also burning large amounts of fuel in the process? In an echo of hydrogen, this lack of broad-scale processing infrastructure thus remains an open challenge to major production of liquid biofuels.
Of the nonfossil fuel sources of energy, biomass is the world’s most important source today, accounting for around 9%-10% of total primary energy consumption. Most of this comes from burning wood and dung for heating and cooking in developing countries. While less than 1% of the world’s electricity production comes from biomass, its role is expected to grow across all energy sectors in the next forty years, with total biomass consumption rising 50%-300% by the year 2050. 137 Sugarcane ethanol is already a success, and most experts feel that an economically viable cellulosic technology will be found. If the described challenges to agriculture, land management, and infrastructure can be met, biofuels could possibly supply up to a quarter of all liquid transport fuels by 2050.138 But this is no small task: With world population growing another 50% over the same period, it means tripling our current agricultural productivity. Total bioenergy use in 2050 would have to approach the level of world oil consumption today.
Was Jack Lemmon’s Oscar a Setback for the United States?
On March 16, 1979, the movie thriller The China Syndrome opened, starring Jack Lemmon, Michael Douglas, and Jane Fonda. It was about a nuclear accident, compounded by a series of human blunders and criminal acts, at a fictional nuclear power plant in California. By sheer coincidence, just twelve days later a nuclear reactor core was seriously damaged at the Three Mile Island power plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The level of radioactivity leaked into the environment was too