36 Characters in Search of an Author: The Quest for a National Energy Solution, Part 1

The problem of renewable molecules is not hard to understand. Molecules that are sustainable and affordable are not available.  Those that are sustainable and available are not affordable. If they are available and affordable, they are not sustainable. So: sustainable, affordable, available, pick two out of three, or head to Congress and ask for a scheme for carbon credits.

Unsustainable paths to sustainability

Our challenge, then, is to get to three out of three. That’s it, that’s all it is. Impossible, for now, yet not for ever. However, at energy-scale, changing our outcomes will not come from incentives that mask unaffordability, mandates that mask unavailability, or greenwashing that masks unsustainability. These practices are, themselves, unsustainable at the scale and in the timelines that we need.

To begin to see the way of the future, we have to first look to renewable electrons to understand why more progress has been made there — progress so substantial that some people have the mistaken idea that all problems can be solved with more and more renewable electrons. Once, the goal with electrons was power and heat, now many say “electrify mobility”. In the form of power-to-x technology, they say ‘electrify chemicals and materials”.

The Three Es of the new Orthodoxy

Electrify everything everywhere, the three E’s of the new orthodoxy,  is as wrong-headed as any “one solution fits all”. ever is, same as it was when petroleum went from power and heat into mobility and then chemicals & materials. Now, our world has become choked with greenhouse gas emissions, and yet we cannot get off the dope, because monopolies create economies of scale and bottlenecks of infrastructure that prevent the deployment of alternatives. The three Es are the new version of the old three Ps — Propagate Petroleum Perpetually. 

What’s different and good about renewable electrons, then? They come in sufficient volume from a free and abundant feedstock, the sun. Renewable power tech directly converts the energy we have into the energy we need, and that’s good. Because the inputs are free, the challenge for solar and wind is simpler: making the conversion cheap and distributable. 

Melting the BMW to make the Mercedes

Agriculture is based on the same principle. Plants use the carbon (CO2), water and sunlight we have, and do the complex conversion for free. Plants cost money only because we have sped up the process with catalysts such as fertilizer, placed a cost on land ownership, charged for the delivery of extra water, charged for crop protection, and patented the Lord’s creation, the seed. Plants grow on unclaimed land for free, if more haphazardly.

In the bioeconomy to date, we have used plants more than we have used the ideas that lead to plants, and that will change, must change. Constructing a plant, then deconstructing its elegant chassis to make a fuel or fiber is like making a Mercedes-Benz by first melting down a BMW. 

The Melody of Unsustainable Expansion

So, what we have are sophisticated plant feedstocks and residues, wonders of living nature, when we need are inert, dumb, raw inputs. Plants and residues never stay cheap because they can never be abundant at energy-scale.  The price will always rise to a level of pain, as it did for corn, as it did for soy, as it did for cane, as it did for fats, oils and greases. The demand for fuel molecules will overwhelm the price structure of any plant feedstock, in the  end, until we hear the Melody of Unsustainable expansion in the treble of high prices and the bass of  protesting traditional users priced out of their own markets by carbon credits they cannot earn. Today, it’s food vs fuel, tomorrow it is timber vs fuel, later it is rope vs fuel, candles vs fuel, pharma vs fuel, clothes vs fuel.

The Process We Need is The One Unsought

Transitional technologies that offer lower carbon intensities today, compared to petroleum? Using plants? Wondrous things! We need every second of the extended timeline that low-carbon alternatives give us. But the bioeconomy will not realize its potential until it relies on the plant for inspiration in addition to the sugars and oils.

The process we need is the one we do not have, that makes an affordable fuel molecule from CO2, water and sunlight. We have some microbes that make fuel molecules in low titers from these inputs, but we need high titers, and we need to be able to get the fuel out of the water or the water out of the fuel at a price we can afford. Good news, that is all we have to do. Bad news, we have to do all of that.

The Neglected Knowledge Workers of Neptune

You’d think the search for the magic microbe would be vigorously underway, but it isn’t. Research into the production of combustion energy from water, sunlight and the products of fossil combustion, that is CO2 — is not only in its infancy, it is like an infancy spent on Neptune, a cold dark place where nurture never finds you. There are centers, institutes and consortia of so many kinds that you could not count them in a lifetime devoted to counting, yet the thing we gravely need is the thing we lightly study.

The world needs transportable, stored energy, lots of it. Grids are not good enough, as any resident of a developing nation or the rural residents of developed nations could tell you. Batteries are not good enough, as anyone who has looked at the supply of rare earth materials and a chart of the future energy needs of Planet Earth can tell you. 

10X, the energy quest

Because we don’t need this year’s energy, or double that. Today we have 8 billion people and most of them live in energy poverty. Give energy person on Earth a Western lifestyle — and who, with justice, could deny to the many the privileges of the few — and we need ten times our current energy production. With advances in the needs of future society, we might need twenty times. 

Yes, we could distribute the energy we produce, or perhaps half of it, justly and evenly across the population of the earth and call it the end of energy poverty, but when you’ve experienced a sub-Saharan African lifestyle for a couple of weeks, you’ll know why sub-Saharan Africans yearn from more access to affordable energy.  Distributing the world into equal measures of poverty does not alleviate poverty, and the same goes for energy. 

Molecules offer agency to the future

Ultimately we must solve our problems by a better harvesting and use of the sun’s energy, but it not entirely about electricity, which is neither easily stored nor distributed. Molecules go anywhere and live forever. Molecules offer agency to the future.

The problem is not a complex one to describe, it is a little like climbing Everest, the route to which you can summarize in a paragraph, because the challenge lies not in understanding but in execution. The recipe is simple: twelve parts carbon dioxide, 14 parts water, and stir. 

But, right now, our microbes do not tap sunlight to make any molecule in abundance excepting sugars, lignin and a smattering of oils, all of which are useful, yet not useful enough in storing and tapping energy for the mechanical mobility we know how to engineer, at the scale we need it. Plants don’t make enough sugar, too much lignin, and they do it too dang slow.

The Microbe and the Tenement

The other problem in science is one. to use a human term, of real estate. Algae, for example, live in extravagant palaces of water compared to their weight, so that we are in the water-moving business instead of the algae business. Algae, it turns out, fare terribly in tenement conditions — instead of producing affordable energy, they suffer and die.

What we must discover is not a living thing, but a process understood from living things that can be recreated in a non-living process.  Ingesting air and separating nitrogen and oxygen is the party-trick of a living lung —  but intake and separation are not living processes. 

It is the prize of prizes, yet there is no prize. It is the grand challenge of grand challenges, yet there is no Grand Challenge. It is the boldest goal, yet there is no Bold Goal.  There are, I think it is fair to say, fewer people working on this than coaching college football, and the coaches make a lot more money.

36 Characters in Search of an Author

We need some ambition. Until we scale some mountains, yea, we walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Carbon Prices, and fear not transformation, for none shall find us. We will not meet our energy demand, and the road we are traveling leads not to Damascus but to the endless, heart-breaking debates of environment vs economy, Global North vs Global South, the needs of the few trumping the needs of the many.

The anvil upon which our civilization is being hammered — in the pursuit of Sustainable Energy For All — is not the Sustainable, nor the Energy, it is the All. Abundance is the way, molecules are the means, science is the hope.

12CO2 + 14H2O + ∆ —> 2(C6H14) +26O2. That’s one way to look at it. 36 characters in search of an author. We may not ever solve the puzzle but we are hardly supporting those in the quest, and those who fail to try are trying to fail.