HOW BEST TO ATTAIN 100% RENEWABLE ENERGY SELF SUFFICIENCY

Let me start with a rather monumental report published by the International Energy Agency:

Net Zero by 2050

A Roadmap for the Global Energy Sector

• There are 400 milestones to get there from here.  
• For success, the world will need to fully commit.  Hasn't happened yet.
• Most state or national efforts of this sort usually only address electricity.  This will be the easy part, for wind and solar options are well developed, with storage being the primary, and serious, concern.
• 
  What about aviation?  
• Nothing much is ongoing today to address this matter.  
• There is some mumbling about jet fuel from biomass, but every major attempt has failed to be economically competitive.  
• Part of the difficulty has been the collapse of oil prices, which were above $100/barrel for a while from 2010 to 2015, but has since then largely been below that level, more recently at around $80/barrel.

So for nostalgic Tuesday, let me go back to my posting of 20June2011 on JETFUEL FROM MACROALGAL PLANTATIONS.

• The United States has the largest Exclusive Economic Zone (the 200 nautical mile region surrounding land--about 30,000,000 square miles, of which 85% is in the Pacific--in comparison, the land area of the USA is close to 25,000,000 square miles).   Thus, the U.S. has more seawater than land ownership.  France is #2, followed by Australia, Russia, UK, New Zealand, Indonesia, Canada, Japan and Chile.  Thus, all these countries (UK through Commonwealth countries) touch the Pacific. 

I also quoted from the International Programme on the State of the Ocean:

The photosynthetic efficiency of aquatic biomass with an average 6 to 8% is much higher than the average photosynthetic efficiency of 1.8 to 2.2% for terrestrial biomass (Aresta et al., 2005a).

Thus, a rough average is that aquatic biomass is three times more efficient in converting sunlight into mass than land crops, where there is no additional cost for irrigation, plus the fertilizer is free if the effluent from an OTEC facility is used. 

All the effort so far has been to convert land biomass into biofuels.  However, given so much space, algae is far more efficient in converting sunlight into biomass.

Further, marine microalgae is more efficient than marine macroalgae, which was the focus of my 20July2011 blog.

So to produce biofuels for jetliners, the ultimate ideal would be to utilize microalgae.  I had a Huffington Post article in 2011:  Biofuels from Microalgae (Part 1).  A couple of months later I wrote on:  The Future of Sustainable Aviation.

More and more you are seeing headlines such as this from the New York Times:

AI:  World likely to hit key warming threshold in 10-12 years

AI stands for artificial intelligence, which also more and more seems to be encroaching into our lives.  Anyway, this article by Seth Borenstein reports on a recent Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study indicating that we will reach the limit of increasing the temperature of 2.7 F between 2033 and 2035.

So what is the transition from today to total renewable energy self-sufficiency?

• Shift from fossil fuel-based gasoline/jetfuel-powered vehicles to electricity, methanol, other biofuels and hydrogen.  

• 
  It could well be that the best biofuel is bio-methanol, because this is the only liquid which can be used by a fuel cell, which is a lot more efficient than batteries when you look at the total energy cycle.  Biomethanol is renewable methanol.

• 
  Develop green hydrogen.
• Develop the hydrogen jetliner.  In 2011 I also posted on NEXT GENERATION AIRSHIPS.  Since then, essentially nothing new has been accomplished.
• Continue to perfect fusion.

As well-meaning as efforts might be, the actual effectiveness of the ultimate societal response will be the seriousness of global warming itself.  

• Most fossil fuel companies will in their own ways be resistant, for giving up will doom their future.   Their strategy will be to delay, delay, delay.  

• 
  Countries dependent on fossil fuels will mostly be non-cooperative.  The United Arab Emirates is surprisingly taking a leadership role by hosting the next COP28, and their attitude seems sincere.
• Some countries like India and China will seem to be collaborative, while pleading for fairness that the U.S. has had the advantage of using fossil fuels to attain our current status, so they need some time  to transition away.

• 
  Numerous nations will need foreign aid to overcome.  A good example are the islands of the Maldives.  They will almost certainly be overwhelmed by sea level rise over the next half a century, and are already taking significant steps by planning for future cities that will be linked, but float as necessary.  Such a solution will be very expensive, something they cannot afford.

I've long felt that any international agreement will just not be sufficient until a particularly hot summer kills tens of millions, or something else as cataclysmic occurs.  A dozen Category 5 hurricanes causing a trillion dollar total damage would be effective in engendering real cooperation.  Maybe even a Category 6.  You can easily come up with similar scenarios.  Geoengineering of Planet Earth will take time, so things will only get a lot worse if nothing is done now to plan for the worst.

So what is the ultimate solution?

• I don't think the world will sufficiently arrive at a political solution in time.
• In the meantime, I can only offer one view of a pathway for leaders to consider.
• Initiate a grand plan to evaluate all the geoengineering options.  I wrote this Huffington Post article 15 years ago:  Geoengineering of Climate Change.  Actual full-scale implementation under any condition will be decades away.
• 
  Embark on an optimal transition to wean Humanity away from fossil fuels.
• Electric cars will remain key.  However, the lithium battery has limitations.
• Fuel cell vehicles are a lot more efficient.  But hydrogen is today too expensive to produce, and will remain so for several decades, unless a severe carbon tax changes the economics.  This was a HuffPo of 12 years ago:  Is there an Option More Promising than the Plug-In Electric Vehicle?  The direct biomethanol fuel cell would be a nice transition until hydrogen becomes competitive.
• 
  Full court press to develop non-battery options for electricity storage.  Read this article.  Adding storage to the production cost of renewable electricity will be expensive, especially so for batteries.
• 
  Thus, accelerate the development of fusion electricity.  ITER in France features magnetic confinement, which I've always thought was not optimal.  The inertial confinement method of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has more promise.  In any case, commercialization of either option will not be until 2050, with 2075 being more realistic.  We can hope that one of these fusion reaction processes can be tamed, for this is the process used by the Sun and all the stars.
• 
  But then, there remains aviation, which cannot use electricity.  The lightest and cleanest fuel is hydrogen.  While biofuel jetliners will someday begin to replace fossil jet fuel, this should only be a transition.  Some combination of Rinaldo Brutoco's fast dirigible and the National Aerospace Plane will someday dominate the skies.  Reportedly, Brutoco recently gained Series A funding to continue development.  Not much being said by the Department of Defense about their involvement of any black program linked to their plane that would go 25 time faster than the speed of sound.

-