Refining Gasoline
From the ground to your car has a number of steps. Drilling, shipping (or flowing through pipelines), and refining. The drilling and shipping is normally done by the big oil companies who are making a pretty good profit right about now. Prices go up profit margins go up and all that. Of course as oil gets harder to get out of the ground, the price of drilling goes up, but over all the oil companies are doing ok. I am always trying to figure out why gas is so cheap though. If $20/barrel oil = $1/gal gas, you would think that $100/barrel would be $5 gas (modulo additives and sunk costs, like the refineries themselves).
Turns out the refineries are sort of taking some of that cost. I assume this is a what the market will bear situation, but it is interesting to note that independent refineries in the US are tanking in the stock market. Turns out their profit margin is way down. They rely on a heavy difference between the cost of oil and the cost of gasoline (the “crack” price) in order to maintain good cash flow to do maintenance and general operations on existing refineries. Not only that, but they also rely on that extra cash to make efficiency improvements. Unfortunately that crack price has dropped to record lows. One of the reasons that gas prices aren’t $5 yet is that the independent refineries are taking it on the chin. Unfortunately this also means that newer more modern and efficient refineries are not being built. As we learn to wean ourselves from oil we also need to be learning how to use what remains with the utmost efficiency. Right now it looks like the refining process may be one of the bottlenecks there.
On the plus side, they finally finished sequencing Trichoderma reesei and most Americans think that the world is running out of oil. Wow. I really didn’t expect that result at all.
Yay, it’s my fungus!
The first grad school project I ever worked on was redesigning the cellulose-binding-domain of T. reesei to try to have structure in the absence of the rest of the protein.
Not to bind cellulose or anything, but just because it was cool and no one could do that kind of thing and we really didn’t understand how the structure was stabilized.
(for anyone who is interested - the way it binds cellulose is by having a lot of amino acid side chains that line up to make a flat hydrophobic surface that sticks to the cellulose; most sugars have a lot more “bumps” that prevent them from binding)
I haven’t followed developments in T. reesei as a biofuel possibility, but my sister the termite microbiologist says the real problem is breaking down lignin, which has nothing to do with cellulose and is a much harder problem in woody plant structures. Apparently most the plants where lignin isn’t a problem aren’t energetically efficient. (all secondhand, of course; I know little on the topic).
Heh, I actually thought of you when I read that article.
The current solution to the lignin problem is to burn it and use that energy to run the cellulose fermentation process, utilizing every part of the plant. That poses the problem though of where do you get the nitrogen from that will need to go back into the soil. The Haber–Bosch process requires too much energy in the form of 3-5% of the worlds natural gas production. An MIT team is looking at replicating the natural process, which reduces the energy input, but still uses gas as the feed-stock.
I see legumes in our future. Lot and lots of legumes.
Hey, did I show you this?
I still think this is a very neat idea, and I’m hoping something using it hits the broader market. (They aren’t the only people working on the idea.) Imagine combining this with a hybrid, or putting one on a GEO metro or Smart car.
Steam power! Awesome! Another good one I saw recently was bio-aviation fuel.
I’m not so sold on bio-aviation fuel-I think we’re going to have to go back to zeppelins and the like. Solar-powered zeppelins!
I envision a future in which food is locally grown in farm skyscrapers, people travel between cities in solar powered zeppelins, cars are smaller but much more fuel-efficient (and use steam power to get a bit more bang for the buck), ships use wind, solar and conventional power, and there is a lot more telecommuting.
It may be a little far-fetched, but so is the idea that we’ll totally revert.
(See other comment for solar zeppelin response.)
I actually think that the future will look an awful lot like what we have now, just without burning stuff we dig up out of the ground. Possibly more earthbound, but possibly not. There are plenty of idea out there of how to keep us in the air without jets. The real question is how long it will take us to get from here to there, and how hard things will get before we get there. I’ve seen some ideas where we recapture the carbon that we burn and turn it directly back into gas using different kinds of bioreactors. If that pans out, we would have a world almost exactly like ours, except we reconstitute our own gas, using energy derived from some other source. The trick is to ramp up enough of that technology before we really need it so that we don’t have a gap of time where the new technology is not available yet but the old is prohibitively expensive.
My take on the end game you describe above: large cities to utilize as much locality of business and distribution as possible. However using a nationwide electric rail system to get the food from the old food production locations to the distribution points. This might also aid in massive electric transmission from the sun belt and wind belt energy production sites to the central locations. And the more telecommuting is already happening, with companies saving on electric bills by having people telecommute certain days per week.