Editorial - 26 January 2009
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Lucien Trueb

Car Batteries, Biomass, Malcolm Turnbull and Carbon Reduction

 

 
Malcolm Turnbull

 

 

In 2005 Lucien Trueb had published his 436 page volume The World of Watches. In reviewing the book WatchTime refers to Mr Trueb as: "Scholar, explorer, pioneer and fanatic, Trueb, a native of Neuchâtel, Switzerland combines an erudite overview of timekeeping history with a watch connoisseur’s appreciation of micromechanical craftsmanship."

 

Previously (1997) Mr Trueb wrote, together with Paul Rüetschi,  Batterien und Akkumulatoren: Mobile Energiequellen für heute und morgen and he now contributes a carefully crafted correspondence to the January 15, 2009 issue of  Nature titled "Choosing between batteries or biomass to stay on the road". He doesn't discuss the ecological footprint involved in the manufacture of battery storage for automobiles but only the relative energy density of electrochemical power storage vs petroleum based or synthetic fuels. To him it's a no brainer.

 

Nothing would please me more than to see batteries break out of their traditional markets and propel our cars... [but] in my view, this will not happen, however, because of the weakness of electrochemical power storage. The best lithium-ion battery provides energy at the rate of 100 watt-hours per kilogram. For liquid fuels such as petrol and diesel the energy density is around 12,000 watt-hours per kilogram. Even after dividing the latter figure by four because of Carnot-cycle losses in the conventional car engine, you are still at least 30 times better off with petrol than with the best and most expensive battery.

 

Synthetic fuels made of non-edible biomass are the best way to free cars of carbon dioxide emissions with existing technologies. Although the enzymes needed for splitting cellulose into sugar (the source of ethanol) are still much too expensive, the Fischer–Tropsch technology for making synthetic fuels from waste wood, straw or grass has been around for 70 years. Controlled burning with the addition of water yields a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen that can be catalytically converted into any desired liquid fuel suitable for conventional internal-combustion engines.

The infrastructure for distributing such fuels is already in place. And enough biomass grows each year to supply the world's entire car fleet.

 

Curiously, the leader of the federal parliamentary Liberal Party, Malcolm Turnbull, in his paper, "A Green Carbon Initiative - Investing in our Land, Energy and Food Security and Jobs", delivered to the Young Liberal Convention in Canberra this past Saturday, made no mention of developing plants utilising a combination of biomass gasification and Fischer-Tropsch synthesis as a possible means to produce renewable transportation fuels (biofuels). Instead he refers to, "A Green Carbon Initiative - a comprehensive biocarbon strategy of investing in the health of our landscape, restoring soil carbon by reversing over-grazing and excessive tillage, embedding CO2 in biochar (charcoal fertiliser), tree planting, and revegetation". Nor does he make any reference in his 4,000 word address to support for research into methods for "splitting cellulose into sugar" to produce ethanol.

 

Currently CSIRO's David Trimm is leading research into manufacturing petroleum substitutes from a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, a process known as Fischer-Tropsch synthesis, and into methods to produce the raw materials needed for this process, but Mr Turnbull makes no suggestion that this work should receive increased public support.

 

 If you're gonna bag the government for its namby-pamby carbon reduction proposals, and it certainly deserves to be, at least do it in a manner that lets you appear to know what your talking about rather than looking like an ill-prepared-opportunistic populist.

 

 

Alex Reisner

The Funneled Web