Shuck the ethanol and let solar shine

As importers foresee an impasse -- and observe the painful ineffectiveness of simply grabbing resources, as the United States is accused of doing in Iraq -- new sources are needed or our way of life must plainly end. The solution? That's where it gets interesting.

Sun block

The U.S. agriculture lobby is incredibly powerful, and it has somehow managed to convince Congress that our next 100 years of energy should also come from the sun. Not in its most efficient route, directly transformed by the magic of electronics from solar rays into electricity via large and small grids of photovoltaic cells. But in the most inefficient way possible: From the growing of corn and then its refinement into fuel.

How inefficient is the ethanol solution? When you break the "agrofuels" system down scientifically, you can see that 99.9% of the energy in sunlight is lost in the process, with the greatest waste coming in the creation of ammonia-based fertilizer from natural gas, and in the refinery. That is, for every unit of energy that is put into creating agriculture-based fuel, almost three-quarters of it is dissipated before it actually does any work. The greatest amount of energy lost is not in the creation of ammonia-based fertilizer, as many believe, but in the refinery.

• Talk back: Should we pursue solar energy and natural gas, not ethanol?

Of course, an even bigger problem is that the 6.6 billion people on Earth need all the food they can get, so every acre taken out of wheat, rice and soybean production to feed our 1 billion cars is an acre that won't feed starving kids. As Patzek notes pungently in his paper, after a lot of math to prove the point, "Our planet has zero excess biomass at her disposal."

One better solution is solar energy created at the municipal level by massive photovoltaic cell facilities, at the street level by home-based grids and at the transportation level at lots where electric vehicles' batteries can be charged. Photovoltaic cells lose only about 80% of the sun's energy to dissipation, making them at least 100 times more efficient than ethanol after the fuel cost of growing and refining the biomass feedstack is accounted for.

The sun doesn't have its own lobby or a voting bloc in the presidential primaries, so research and funding has lagged. U.S. and European industrial giants General Electric (GE, news, msgs) and Siemens (SMAWF, news, msgs) are working hard at this solution, as are many intriguing U.S. and Chinese small and midsize companies such as Suntech Power (STP, news, msgs), First Solar (FSLR, news, msgs), Trina Solar (TSL, news, msgs) and MEMC Electronic Materials (WFR, news, msgs).

For transportation, most energy experts agree that compressed natural gas, or CNG, is an ideal long-term choice. It is not only much more plentiful in North America than oil -- negating the need to depend on unstable regimes in Nigeria, Venezuela and Russia -- but also many times more efficient. CNG only loses 5% of its power in the transportation and refinement process, and has two other benefits: Its emissions are much less toxic than gasoline or diesel, and when a CNG tank is hit in a crash it is much less likely to explode than a gasoline tank.

As I wrote back in August, many countries are depending on CNG trucks for their large truck, taxi and bus fleets, so this is not some pie-in-the-sky idea. What's lacking in the United States is a distribution network and convenient filling stations -- though you can actually install equipment at home to fill a CNG car or truck from your current heating gas line.

A pilot project in California, moreover, may pave the way for thousands of heavy-duty trucks to be retrofitted with fuel injectors made by a Canadian company called Westport Innovations (CA:WPT, news, msgs) in conjunction with engine maker Cummins (CMI, news, msgs). The conversion kit allows Peterbilts and Kenworths to run clean-burning CNG instead of filthy diesel.

In short, there is nothing we can do about the depletion of the sun's bounty from the bowels of the Earth. But we can stop the politically cynical ethanol scam in its tracks, and try to move the debate and our own consumption toward solar and CNG. Of course, the best solution of all is to cut down on wasteful uses of energy such as long-distance commuting, and shipping off-season fruits and vegetables up from the southern hemisphere, and to encourage cities to step up mass-transit development efforts.

It's easy to just ignore the problem with our usual American bluster, but 30 years from now our grandkids are really going to wonder what the heck we were thinking.

Fine Print

To learn more about Patzek, visit his Cal Berkeley Web site. Here is the paper he presented at OECD, titled "How Can We Outlive Our Way Of Life?" (.pdf). It's quite readable every for lay people and explains a lot -- so take some time to go through it. To learn more about Clean Energy Fuels, click here. To learn about Westport Innovations, read here. . . . Learn more about GE solar projects here. . . . To read more about Suntech, click here. . . . Learn about MEMC Electronic Materials here. . . . To learn about First Solar, check its Web site here. . . .

When it's available next year, I'm thinking about trading in my trusty Ducati Monster , which I use for my two-mile commute, for the Enertia electric motorcycle. There's also a hydrogen-powered motorcycle in the works called the ENV. . . . There's a sweet Mercedes-Benz, the 200 NGT, available only in Europe, that runs on CNG. Check it out here. To gas it up at home, check out the Phill by FuelMaker. . . . For more background on the ethanol craze, check out my April 5 column on the corn boom.

At the time of publication, Jon Markman owned shares of General Electric, First Solar and MEMC Electronic Materials.

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