The Problem with "Technical Fixes"

Geoffrey Styles has written a very interesting posting on his Energy Outlook blog:

An article in today's Financial Times (registration required) raises a worrying possibility concerning the plans of the US and other oil-consuming countries to rely on biofuels for an increasing fraction of future fuel needs. What if oil-producing countries took those plans seriously and reduced their investment in new oil capacity, on the assumption that it wouldn't be needed? In some respects, that's exactly what we have in mind. However, if biofuels then failed to materialize in sufficient quantities to fill the gap between oil supply and total fuel demand, or proved to be economically or environmentally unsustainable, then we might inadvertently create precisely the sort of crisis these efforts were intended to avert. It would be easy to dismiss this argument as OPEC-inspired propaganda, if global oil production didn't require enormous ongoing investments to counteract the natural decline rates of producing fields, and if producing-country governments weren't already under internal pressure to spend their oil profits on programs other than reinvesting in future production.

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So far, this is only a problem for oil producers. It becomes a problem for the rest of us when the biofuel plans and targets of consuming countries are based on unproven technology that may not be able to deliver in time, or possibly at all. Unfortunately, that's the position in which we find ourselves. Consider the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) enacted by the Congress in 2007 and refined in new regulations issued by the Environmental Protection Agency. Out of the 36 billion gallon per year target for 2022, only around 16 billion gallons is accounted for by corn-based ethanol and first-generation biodiesel--both of which have been amply proven, however much they depend on generous subsidies to remain competitive. 20 billion gallons per year must come from cellulosic ethanol and other advanced biofuels, none of which are in truly commercial production today, in spite of the hype that has been generated by a handful of "demonstration facilities."

One indication of just how unrealistic these targets might be is that EPA was forced to reduce the cellulosic biofuel target it will enforce for 2010 from 100 million gallons to 6.5 million gal.--the equivalent of just over 400 barrels per day of oil--due to lack of supply. And while the agency attributes that shortfall to delays in starting up new facilities using a variety of new technologies, a careful reading of their analysis suggests the problem might be more serious than that. Two firms account for nearly a third of the 694 million gallons of cellulosic biofuel capacity they expect will be in operation by 2014, Cello Energy and Range Fuels. Unfortunately, last year Cello was ordered by a federal court to pay $10 million for defrauding investors concerning its technology claims. Meanwhile blogger Robert Rapier has documented the problems that Range Fuels has experienced in scaling up its process for producing ethanol from gasified biomass. Until both of these firms have demonstrated they can actually do what they claim, at full scale, it's not prudent to bet the ranch on their production forecasts.

In the real world there is an "ecology" of technology, a depth of solutions to provide backup when one fails. Unfortunately humans have limited brain capacity, so when we come up with "fixes" they tend to be shallow, simple, and subject to catastrophic failure. Blend this fanaticism demanding "instand fixes" to non-existent (or minimal) problems and you have the mix for a complete breakdown of civilization. As Styles points out, this is a kind of cosmic joke. Fanatics are convinced we face a doomsday, so they agitate for quick fixes that in fact set us up for the very doomsday they claim to want to avoid!