biofuels

Can “Unrealized Technology” Jump-Start Biofuel Revolution?

By Tomi Owens, 9-29-06

The October issue of Wired magazine has a run an article written by Vinod Khosla titled “My Big Bet on Biofuels” It reads like an infomercial script. Khosla is a founder of Sun Microsystems. As of late, he has become passionate about clean energy and the techie mag have given him some rhetorical room. Khosla energy pledge begins like this “The road to energy independence starts in a cornfield in Nebraska.”

He continues by describing E3 Biofuels new “$75 million state-of-the-art biorefinery and feedlot capable of producing 25 million gallons of ethanol a year.” What makes this refinery so much better than other biorefineries is that the refining process is fuel by cow manure rather than fossil fuels. According to Khosla the “super-efficient operation capitalizes on a closed loop of resources available here on the prairie” and the output will be “a potential gusher of renewable, energy-efficient transportation fuel.”

The manure fueled refinery, located in Mead, Neb., achieves what Khosla calls a positive energy balance. “For every BTU of energy used to run the ethanol plant,” he writes, “five BTUs are produced.”

But Khosla admits that the E3 Biofuel refinery is only “nearly a closed energy loop (some corn has to be bought from other farms.)” How much corn has to be bought from other farms and how that corn figures into the equation of BTUs in proportion to the ethanol output is unclear.

More promising, perhaps, is the concept of a feedlot becoming a “closed system.” That is if you are comfortable with an “880-acre commercial feedlot” in the first place.

Apparently, Khosla isn’t worried that the Wired audience will even bat an eyelash at his description of four open-air cattle sheds each half a mile in length and 28,000 cattle standing in a single pen floored with slotted concrete to catch the manure. Maybe the concept appeals to the high-tech crowd as a sort of bovine version of the Matrix. Plugging live animals directly into the production of transportation fuel is simply by-passing the whole ‘fossil’ stage of fossil fuels. Animal rights issues aside, methane powered fertilizer factories supplying fertilizer to adjacent fields in which grows the corn to feed the cows that produce the manure to power the factories has a certain, circle-of-life finesse.

(Mega-dairies also can help create air pollution — like one in Eastern Oregon that’s suspected to dirty air in the Columbia Gorge.)

But does it really payoff in BTUs? Here is where the Big Bet theme of the title figures. The usefulness of E3 Biofuels technology is dependent on “unrealized technology.” In other words, E3 Biofuels are estimating output based on future innovation. It’s a gamble, but necessity is the mother of invention and Khosla is hedging his bets with venture capitalist enthusiam. He has included a graph projecting a rosy, if-you-build-it-they-will-come scenario of the US transportation fuel economy. Unfortunately, in almost the same breath, Khosla dismisses wind-energy and hydrogen fuel cell technology as “trendy.”

Hmmm. Think outside the box, but only so far.

What is hopeful about Khosla’s soap boxing is the feeling that America is entering a new fuel paradigm. He writes “With better fuels and more-efficient engines improving mileage by about 50 percent, we can safely predict a seven-to-tenfold gain in miles driven per acre of land over the next 25 years.” Could thinking in terms of miles-per-acre rather in miles-per-gallon add an immediate sense of gravity to filling the gas tank?

Khosla’s tirade against the oil industry is as timely as it is vehement. He elucidates with examples of oil lobbying the evils of letting big business play both sides of the chess board. And, to his credit, Khosla is candid in his political and financial support of California’s Proposition 87, the Clean Energy Initiative. He also promises donate all profits from any of his companies that benefits from the passing of the Clean Energy Initiative. However, it’s impossible to ignore the implication that Nebraska’s closed resource loop includes California consumers. Are they building a corn pipeline or will the super efficient ethanol be shiped overland in diesel trucks?

When it comes to the oil industry, its most decidedly not better to stick with the devil we know. A change in transportation fuels is inevitable, the oil won’t last. Khosla claims “the convenient truth is that corn ethanol is a crucial first step toward kicking our oil addiction.” The drug metaphor is apt. Collectively, we are blowing through our oil reserves like a junkie with an eight ball of cocaine and 48 hours until mandatory rehab. The first step is kicking our combustion addiction. Time to look for a cure, not just another dealer.

Like this story? Get more! Sign up for our free newsletters.