Archive for the ‘methanol’ Category
How to achieve energy independence
Monday, November 1st, 2010New MIT report calls for Open Fuel Standard
Monday, June 28th, 2010A new MIT report on natural gas determines that natural gas to methanol is the best use of natural gas in transportation. The report calls for the introduction of an open fuel standard enabling cars to run on any mixture of gasoline, ethanol and methanol.
“A range of liquid fuels can be produced by thermochemical conversion of natural gas to a synthesis gas followed by catalytic conversion to the liquid fuel. These fuels include diesel produced by the Fischer-Tropsch process, methanol, mixed alcohols (methanol, ethanol and others), ethanol, gasoline and dimethyl ether (which, like propane, requires modest pressurization to remain liquid).10 Among these conversion processes, the only one that has been established at large industrial scale over a long period, with well established costs, is the natural gas to methanol conversion (for purposes other than transportation).
It is the liquid fuel that is most efficiently and inexpensively produced from natural gas.”
“[...] Methanol could be used in flexible-fuel, light-duty vehicles in a manner similar to present ethanol utilization with minimal incremental vehicle cost.11 The incremental cost relative to gasoline-only operation would likely be less than $300. These flexible fuel vehicles could be operated on various mixtures of methanol, ethanol and gasoline.
Presently flexible-fuel vehicles are not equipped to operate on methanol. Removing this barrier through the adoption of some type of open fuel standard would be needed for methanol use to be pursued on a level playing field.”
Anne Korin & Jim Woolsey talk energy independence at the Milken Global Conference
Saturday, May 1st, 2010Geopolitics, Global Demand and the Quest for Energy Security
Wesley Clark, Army General (ret.) and former Supreme Allied Commander, NATO; Chairman, Rodman & Renshaw
Jim Woolsey talks Salt on FOX
Saturday, May 1st, 2010How to End America’s Addiction to Oil
Wednesday, April 14th, 2010Set America Free Coalition member Jim Woolsey writes in the Wall Street Journal:
“Oil dominates transportation: About 95% of transportation fuel in the U.S. is derived from petroleum. And over three-quarters of the world’s reserves of conventional oil are in OPEC nations. But OPEC is pumping less than it did in the 1970s, despite a doubling in global demand, because it’s a cartel maximizing its income. OPEC sets oil’s price at a level that exploits our addiction but is generally not high enough for long enough that we go cold turkey.
“Oil profits enhance the ability of dictators and autocrats to dominate their people. This is one reason that eight of the top nine oil exporters (Norway is the exception) are dictatorships or autocratic kingdoms, as are virtually all of the 22 states that depend on oil and gas for at least two-thirds of their exports.
“Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth enables it to control around 90% of the world’s Islamic institutions even though it has less than 2% of the world’s Muslims. [...]
“so far every national policy we’ve tried to end our oil addiction has failed, including picking winners. Neither the Synfuels Corporation (the early 1980s drive for coal-to-liquid fuel) nor the hydrogen highway (the push early in this decade to get Americans to drive hydrogen-powered cars long before the technology was ready) had a chance of succeeding. It was too easy for OPEC to drive prices down and crush such costly competition.
“Supporters of cap-and-trade legislation have argued that putting a price on carbon would help us get off oil. But the effect of this would be negligible. Twenty dollars a ton of CO2 equates to about 20 cents a gallon at the gasoline pump.
“Drill, baby, drill? Some suggest that if we replace foreign with domestic oil our problems will be solved. Domestic drilling does help reduce oil’s share—a billion dollars a day—of our huge balance of payments deficit, and it adds some domestic employment.
“But that’s it. OPEC has very large reserves and cheap extraction costs, while domestic drilling costs for new oil will be many times that of the Saudis. We can’t drill our way out of the cartel’s control of the global oil market.
“Shifting the way we produce electricity also has essentially nothing to do with oil dependence; less than 2% of U.S. electricity comes from burning oil. We may decide to shift from coal-fired electricity to wind or nuclear for environmental reasons, or not do so for cost reasons, but these issues are not at all central to the oil debate.
“We urgently need to reduce oil dependence in the short term. This means lowering demand and utilizing substitutes as cheaply and quickly as possible. Here are four strategies we can implement beginning today:
“First, we should take advantage of electronic modifications that are being developed for internal combustion engines in existing vehicles. Innovations in computer chips and valves hold an early promise of substantial improvements in mileage by regulating combustion much better than current engines can.
“Second, we should pay attention to T. Boone Pickens’s recommendations to switch to natural gas for fleet vehicles such as buses, and for interstate trucking. Buses and trucks are easily modified to run on natural gas and would only require new pumps at a few central locations and interstate truck stops.
“Third, we should force petroleum products to compete with other fuels as soon as possible. There are many ways to do this, and we should use them all. For example, we should deploy “drop-in” fuels produced from waste and algae. These fuels can mix freely with gasoline and diesel in existing vehicles.
“We should also require all new gasoline-using vehicles to be “flexible fuel, open standard.” What this means is that these vehicles would use a type of plastic in their fuel lines that tolerates nongasoline fuels such as ethanol and methanol. This is a cheap and simple change: Brazil accomplished it easily several years ago. Methanol made from natural gas can be produced for around $1.20 a gallon (of gasoline equivalent) today.
“Fourth, we should move to electrify automotive transportation. Plug-in hybrids are on the road now (I drive one), and production models such as the Chevy Volt, due out this autumn, can drive electrically for roughly 40 miles before needing to plug in or to use on-board liquid fuel. Three out of four days an average car in the U.S. travels fewer than 40 miles.”
Cop turned into a flop – what’s next?
Sunday, December 27th, 2009With the Copenhagen climate summit’s failure to achieve a binding agreement to resuce greenhouse gas emissions Gal Luft proposes a new approach – oil first.
“Now that delegates to the U.N. climate summit are back from Copenhagen with no more than a non binding, hollow declaration of intent to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, it is clear that the main reason “Cop” turned into a flop is the deep divide between the world’s rich and poor — between those who watch the world on plasma screens and those who are forced to sell their plasma to survive another day.
The platitudes and inspirational speeches on how we must all come together to “save ourselves from ourselves” could not mask an inescapable reality: For poor people, while often being the main casualties of an unstable climate, planetary-scale environmental concerns are a distant second to basic human needs — access to electricity, food, and shelter. They are therefore unwilling to put their economic growth on hold until the world comes up with economically competitive alternatives to coal-fired electricity. In India alone, 150 million people have no access to basic lighting. In the face of such grinding poverty, it’s no wonder that the rich countries’ attempts to thwart the expansion of fossil fuels were perceived by many in the developing world as a new form of imperialism.
This pushback by the developing world begs for a unified, yet politically feasible, agenda that can be embraced by rich and poor countries alike. One area where such an agenda can emerge is oil. Whereas reaching consensus about significant cuts in the use of fossil fuels in power generation seems to be unlikely, focusing on reducing the use of oil, which powers 95 percent of the global transportation sector, is a goal that offers a real chance of global acceptance.”
Here is the full article
Rep. Engel calls on President Obama to support Open Fuel Standards
Wednesday, January 28th, 2009“As a senior member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, I believe achieving energy independence for our nation is of the utmost importance. Dependence on foreign oil is one of the greatest challenges that our nation has ever faced — our national security, economy and environment are all tied to it.
“I encourage President Obama to build upon these measures by supporting the Open Fuel Standards Act, which I introduced last year with my colleagues Reps. Kingston, Israel, and Inglis. The United States transportation sector is 97% reliant on oil, and it accounts for two-thirds of our nation’s overall oil consumption. Every year, 17 million new cars are sold in the U.S. and, almost exclusively, they run only on petroleum.
“To remedy that, The Open Fuel Standards Act would require 50% of new cars sold in the United States by 2012, and 80% by 2015, to be flex fuel vehicles. Flex fuel vehicles are automobiles that can use as fuel any combination of gasoline and alcohol – such as ethanol and methanol. It is important to note that alcohol does not mean just ethanol, and ethanol does not mean just corn.
“Flex fuel vehicles already exist. They only cost about $100 more than the same car in a gasoline-only version. An influx of flex fuel vehicles on America’s roads would increase competition and consumer choice, strip oil of its strategic status, and protect consumers from price hikes at the pump.”
Set America Free’s Jim Woolsey on turning oil into salt
Wednesday, January 28th, 2009Jim Woolsey and Anne Korin have an article in the fall 2008 issue of MIT Innovations titled How to Break Both Oil’s Monopoly and OPEC’s Cartel. An excerpt:
The reality is that neither efforts to expand petroleum supply nor those to crimp petroleum demand will be enough to materially address America’s strategic vulnerability, although they can help on an interim basis with such issues as the effects of our huge balance of trade deficit. But such solutions do not address the roots of our energy vulnerability: oil’s monopoly in the transportation sector as the reason oil is a strategic commodity. This monopoly gives intolerable power to OPEC and the nations that dominate oil ownership and production over the consuming nations’ economies. Policies that only perpetuate the petroleum standard, doing nothing to address the lack of transportation fuel choice, would therefore guarantee a worse future dependence on the oil cartel as the non-OPEC nations’
share of the world’s oil reserves and production further shrinks.
Not long ago, technology broke the power of another strategic commodity. Until around the end of the nineteenth century salt had such a position because it was the only means of preserving meat. Odd as it seems today, salt mines conferred national power and wars were even fought over control of them. Today, no nation sways history because it has salt mines. Salt is still a useful commodity for a range of purposes.We import some salt, so if one defines independence as autarky we are not “salt independentâ€. But to most of us there is no “salt dependence†problem at all — because canning, electricity and refrigeration decisively ended salt’s monopoly of meat preservation, and thus its strategic importance.
We can and must do the same thing to oil. When the British Navy made the shift from coal to oil, then First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill famously remarked, “safety and certainty in oil lies in variety and variety alone.â€To diminish the strategic importance of oil to the international system it is critical to expand the Churchillian doctrine beyond geographical variety to a variety of fuels and feedstocks.Ensuring that new cars sold in the U.S. and, by extension, the rest of the world, are platforms on which fuels can compete will spark a competitive market in fuels made from a wide array of energy sources, thus breaking oil’s transportation fuel monopoly and eventually stripping oil of its strategic status.
Bioenergy and Biofuels: The Biomass Resource in Washington
Thursday, December 11th, 2008Craig Frear starts with an overview of agricultural biomass resources for biofuel production in Washington state. Larry Mason continues to talk about forests as a source of raw material for biofuels production. Kristiina Vogt discusses linking biomass to biofuels as a logical energy solution. Jake Eaton concludes with an assessment of producing biofuels from sustainable tree farms.
Dealing With Disaster Debris–making fuel from debris
Thursday, December 11th, 2008Biomass Magazine reports: “A professor of eco-management at the University of Washington is working on a way to overcome all the issues involved in transporting disaster debris. Rather than bringing the biomass to a centralized plant hundreds or thousands of miles away, Kristiina Vogt supports the concept of mobile disaster units to convert woody debris to fuel—methanol specifically—on-site. She has been working to promote this idea in Indonesia and a few Latin American countries. “When Katrina hit, I got a lot of phone calls from people interested in getting a mobile system out there because a lot of the wood was down, but nobody could access it,†Vogt says. “