β Scribed by Chris Adams
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
The recent book "Sustainable Energy -without the hot air"* by the Cambridge physicist David Mackay is a sobering read for any chemist. MacKay's world of heat pumps, electric motors, batteries, silent motorbikes, and smart grids has little place for liquid fuels and hydrogen. This is not just interdisciplinary rivalry. MacKay's primary analytical tool is efficiency, and his assessment is that in simple terms of kWh per annum per square metre, temperate zone crops are just not efficient enough to compete with other forms of converting sunlight to liquid or gaseous fuels, especially when the energetics of processing are taken into account. Hydrogen also fails the same test, except when generated by solar or nuclear thermolysis, though photocatalytic algae might get close after a little genetic tweaking: but hydrogen storage remains elusive and leaky. Systems utilising energy storage as liquid fuels (such as cars running on biodiesel or hydrogen) do not compare with electric vehicles, except in the special cases of air and ocean transport.
MacKay's bright and welcome analysis throws into relief the current scramble to develop new ways to convert specially grown biomass to fuels. This increasingly looks like a drive to increase revenues from land, and simultaneously reduce farm subsidies: most of the discussion is about short term economics and the minutiae of life cycle analysis.
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