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Start with raw material when assessing alternative fuels

  • “It’s kind of a no-brainer that we should be considering alternative fuels.”

    Carl Lund
    SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor
By CHARLOTTE HSU
Published: July 22, 2009

Catch phrases such as “green energy” are on the lips of the nation’s most powerful politicians. Even the president is touting development of “clean energy” as a key goal for his administration.

But which alternative fuels are best?

Carl Lund, SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, posed that question during his UBThisSummer lecture yesterday. But instead of giving an answer, he provided an audience of about 90 people with knowledge to help them decide.

According to Lund, crude oil comprises the vast majority of the fuel the U.S. consumes each year for transportation purposes. With experts predicting that stocks will run out within decades, “It's kind of a no-brainer that we should be considering alternative fuels," Lund said.

A major problem with debates on alternative fuels is that stakeholders frequently lack enough information to develop educated opinions on the topic, Lund said. Proponents of specific types of energy sources often focus solely on their products’ benefits, ignoring negative information.

Backers of hydrogen as a gasoline replacement say, for instance, that hydrogen is an ideal fuel because it emits only water when it burns. As Lund pointed out, however, common methods of creating hydrogen, including electrolysis, gasification of coal and steam reformation of natural gas, yield or rely on chemical reactions that yield carbon dioxide, which scientists have fingered as a culprit behind global warming.

To assess various alternative fuels in an equitable manner, “Don't start with the fuel,” Lund said. “You need to start with a raw material. …You can’t drill a hydrogen well. You can drill a gas well, a crude oil well. You can’t drill a hydrogen well. So you have to start with a natural resource and follow that all the way through.”

Variables that should be taken into account when analyzing an energy source include its technical and economic viability, and its impact on the environment, Lund said.

Many crude oil substitutes are expensive to produce, making it difficult to commercialize them. For fuels such as hydrogen, which cannot be distributed to consumers using existing infrastructure, the necessity of building new filling stations would present an added, costly challenge.

Other alternative energy sources pose different problems. Satisfying the United States’ transportation energy needs using soybean-based biofuels or ethanol made from corn or cellulose would require the country to cover all existing farms with these energy crops, leaving no room for growing food. Even then, in many cases, more land would be needed, Lund said.

Synthetic fuel from coal or oil shale could be marketed successfully as long as crude oil prices stayed around or above $35 a barrel, Lund said. But production of these products could be disastrous for the environment, releasing toxins into the air and destroying swathes of previously untouched land.

Sun, wind and waves can be harnessed to produce electricity, but today’s electric grid lacks the capacity to support a nation of electric cars, Lund said. Algae have shown promise as a source of “green” biodiesel, but the technology to create this type of fuel is in its infancy.

Though no known energy source is perfect, the environmental and political consequences of relying on crude oil, much of which comes from foreign countries, makes serious discussion about alternative fuels crucial—even if the payoff for developing new technologies is years away, Lund said.

In the interim, he said, “The thing that we should be pursuing today is conservation and improved efficiency. In the next five years…any other solution is not going to have anywhere near the impact that this potentially could have.”