The discovery of the climate change fraud has emboldened the oil industry. Hydrocarbon Processing, a technical magazine I am suscribed to, publishes a ferocious attack by Pierre L. Latour on the idea that anthropogenic CO2 has anything to do with climate change. As a chemical process engineer, used to control closed systems, Latour reviews the concept that manipulating the atmosphere's CO2 concentration will affect its temperature. He says no way. Solar radiation drives CO2 conentration, not the reverse. Sun warms up the atmosphere reducing CO2 solubility in the oceans so there is more atmosphere. Man generates 30 billion tons of CO2 per year, plants consume 7 trillion. At higher temperature, plants are more active and consume more CO2.
Is the hothouse effect, positing that Earth's radiation to outer space decreases as the atmosphere's temperature increases, true? Impossible, he says, that goes against Stefan-Bolzmann Law.
Another article describes the collapse of the ethanol fuel industry in the US and in Europe. The subsidies are being discontinued and the industry cannot compete. Maybe new sources of ethanol like algae or cellulose will reduce its price, but not before.
I sold my BAZAN refinery shares at a 30% loss because I thought that the oil refining business has no future. Since then it is slowly rising. Am I - once more - wrong?
3 comments:
Ethanol was always just a boondoggle for the US corn industry and ADM. If you add up all the fuel it takes to produce a gallon of ethanol (grain alcohol) - fuel for the tractors, fertilizer, fuel for the still, etc. it is almost a gallon of fuel so there is no net contribution. Oil has the wonderful property that it is lying in the ground already made so almost nothing that is made by an industrial/agricultural process could compete. The process for making ethanol is especially inefficient - it is the same way that you make vodka. So you grow a big corn plant, but you don't use the whole plant, just the seeds (the corn). Then you grind up and cook the corn and you ferment it with yeast, but yeast can only consume sugars, so all the protein and fiber in the seeds is left behind (the waste is used as animal feed). Then you must heat the mash to distill it, and then redistill to higher purity. And then the result is incompatible with pipelines and must be transported by truck. It makes zero sense economically to go thru such an elaborate and expensive process and then just burn the result when there are other things that could be turned into energy in a much more straightforward and efficient way. Our ancestors would never have been so stupid as to use vodka as a fuel for anything other than their stomachs.
K
Yet 50% of Brasil's fuel demand is ethanol. Brasil does not depend from those Arab sheikhs.
Brasil uses sugar cane which is cheaper than corn to grow and has higher energy payback (but needs a tropical climate). Cane processing is very self contained - you burn the squeezed out remnants of the cane to create the energy to run the sugar mill and distillery, so very little petroleum is needed. Still not clear that even in Brasil it would make sense except that the govt. mandates it.
What would make more sense is a process where biomass is converted directly to a fuel by a chemical reaction rather than this convoluted process of fermentation, distillation, etc. And preferably the biomass is some item that grows on waste land or in the sea and not on fertile crop land displacing human food supply.
K
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