Over the last year I’ve educated myself on crude oil and natural gas economics, wind energy up to the farm placement and operations issues, the ammonia fertilizer market, ethanol plant operations, and I’m making rapid strides in grasping biomass efforts as well. Solar escapes me as that is an issue for places with a lot of sun and I’ve not been in such an environment since I became peak oil aware.
One of the things that strikes me is the amazing accommodations made for the oil and coal industries on the financial and regulatory front ... and the utter lack of funds for R&D, pilot plant implementation, and the barriers smaller players face in ramping up renewable operations.
Project financing is very challenging in the current environment and I'm going to rant a bit, in symbolic fashion, about our lack of progress in this area ...
Renewable energy projects have three phases of existence, much like matter’s solid, liquid, and gaseous states. I’ll reverse the order of their appearance for the sake of storytelling.
gaseous
New, exciting, untested ideas abound. Most of them are, well, they’re junk. I bet you’ve seen one of those "run your car on water" advertisements, as an example; this sort of hucksterism benefits no one, but it does fascinate the corporate media. Cold fusion? Another famous nonevent. I’ve had several things deposited in my mailbox over the seven months since the Stranded Wind Initiative launched that fit this category. I can debunk some on my own, generally by whacking them with the second law of thermodynamics and the rest generally respond like a soup cracker facing a sandblaster once I pass them on to the real engineers I know.
Mixed in with all of the Moray valve projects and other claptrap there are gems, and these gems don’t always come from university research labs, especially in the realm of thermodynamics. There is a need for the garage tinkerer in the scheme of things, but separating the lone gun genius from the lone gun crazy guy is a task to try a saint’s patience; they’re often one in the same.
I think this is always going to be ad hoc financing – engineers who work by day and tinker by night, machine shop owners with a creative bent, and the like. Our problem, as a society, is how to bring their inventions into public awareness. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office ... well ... it’s as messed as anything in our government, but we’ll take up that issue another day.
liquid
There are many, many, many incremental improvements to existing processes sloshing around out there. Why are our shingles heat absorbing black and not heat reflecting white? Why aren’t all roofs passive solar collectors? Why is ammonia still made with natural gas rather than electricity? Why isn’t all corn being used for ethanol fractionated first to extract its oil? Why isn’t the methanol used to turn that oil to biodiesel made with wind driven electricity and captured CO2 from the ethanol fermentation process? I could go on all day like this ...
I have two genuine, already tested on the bench in the lab, ready to go to pilot sized project things that desperately need funding, each created by a lone gun inventor type with a solid track record. There are many, many potential funding sources ... but none it would seem who can do an evaluation of a fairly simply piece of technology and make estimates on its viability based on projected oil prices.
Iowa has taken a stab at making things like this come to fruition, but their program is new and still learning about what it will and won’t fund. I worry what’ll happen with the budget after the flooding this year. There are other funding sources but they’re fragmented, finicky, and quite often downright predatory. One needs a corporation as a vehicle to manage capital in excess of that an individual can make available but we must, as a society, do something about the sociopathic nature of these organizations as they’re rendered today.
solid
There are things that are very well understood and they’re not being done. The one that comes immediately to mind is anhydrous ammonia production using the old school Haber-Bosch process. If you’ve got cheap hydroelectric power, say in the Pacific Northwest or near Niagra Falls, you can churn out a farm production commodity, fire a greenhouse or wood pellet production facility with the waste heat, and make a pile of money doing it.
Here those seeking funding face a problem with lack of strategic vision on the part of the funding entity. They say "But what if natural gas prices go down?" Those who are up on the various aspects of resource depletion know what is coming – we heard that when prices were $700/ton ... now six months have got by us and the price is ... $1,200/ton. Will it get to $2,100 before someone moves? I sure hope not.
I think by now most everyone has noticed the banking collapse coming at us; it will not be another 1929, or a 1987, or a 1998, but instead more like the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. I think our somewhat sullied democratic institutions and historical respect for the rule of the law make it likely that we’ll not follow the Soviet Union’s descent into gangsterism ... but then I look at the Bush administration and I see a labor awaiting President Obama. Somewhere in all of this we have to deal with the fact that oil production peaked in May of 2005 and will never rise to that level again, no matter how or where we drill.