The Electrifying End To Life on Earth

By Peter Brown
Special to The Digest

I have come to the conclusion that due less to climate change than suffocation we are coming to the last chapter of our presence on this planet. AND we will have done it with the best intentions. In pursuit of our salvation from climate change we are now engaged in a deliberate effort that will dramatically increase the very polluting toxins that are causing that change. Even more ironically, we will use our ultimate weapon against pollution, the rush to electrification for all things from transportation to providing comfort in our homes. 

That rush is putting an immense strain on the grids that will be needed to recharge the billions of new cars, trucks, buses that are slated to go electric over the next ten years. We are faced with a pollution solution that relies almost totally on the main reason why we are at this impasse. Doubling down on this disaster we are phasing out the bright shiny solutions that some of the largest chemical and fuel companies are bringing in by, in some cases, banning the venerable internal combustion engines that have adopted some very strange forms: Wankel, Sterling, Diesel, turbine, hydrogen, steam and others still in development.

But we seem to be betting our existence on the feeblest horse in the race, a horse that has been repeatedly returned to its stables for the same reasons it should stay there. Electric cars are not new, they even have one automotive first as the first car to top 100Km/hour in Belgium in 1899, and,at that time most cabs in New York were electric.

The cars that are already being built to meet the anticipated and forced demand for these ”clean” solutions are amazingly simple, the standard starter motors that get real cars going can serve as a blueprint for the car of the future. What is different lies in the batteries that these $60,000 family sedans require and the feeding of those batteries from the various solutions are, to say the least, “interesting”.

The Batteries

For example The 2021 Tesla Model Y OEM battery (the cheapest Tesla battery) is currently for sale on the Internet for $4,999 not including shipping or installation. The battery weighs 1,000 pounds . It takes 7 years for an electric car to reach net-zero CO2. The life expectancy of the battery is 10 years (average). Only in the last 3 years do you start to reduce your carbon footprint, but then the batteries must be replaced, and you lose all gains made.

What goes into those batteries is not exactly pretty compared to the dirtiest alternatives now in use from fossil fuels. 

You must move 250 tons of soil to obtain:

— 26.5 pounds of Lithium

— 30 pounds of nickel 

— 48.5 pounds of manganese

— 15 pounds of cobalt

To manufacture the battery also requires:

— 441 pounds of aluminum, steel and/or plastic 

— 112 pounds of graphite

The bulk of those minerals for manufacturing the batteries come from China or Africa.  

You must do all that in order to replace the fossil fuels being pulled from the earth. Reminds me of the early days of the coal plants of yore, slated to recharge the EVs of tomorrow.

Batteries are just one aspect affecting the actual cars. As more and more EVs come onto our roads , some troubling facts are emerging. The main one is our ability to recharge them, and some of the latest information is not flattering. Issues with batteries not holding charges in cold weather, and as climate change becomes an issue, this will become serious. You see, an electric car does not produce heat like a real car where the energy of the combustion can be used to actually heat it via the radiator. On an electric the heat is generated by small electric heaters that  munch watts. The same applies to the car battery itself, it cannot recharge itself because it is making it go. 

The sheer added weight created by the new cars and trucks (Remember the EV revolution will affect all rolling stock on our roads, from electric bicycles to eighteen wheeler could lead to a massive rebuilding of the infrastructure, bridges, roads, parking and safety issues have yet been addressed, from tires to asphalt surfaces, there a number of unknowns.

If you follow the news, you may have heard from some more reactionary types, waffling about banning the Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) altogether, this peculiar activity serves only one purpose and that is to create a clean financial playing field for the EV by eliminating all competition. It ignores the immense progress made in the creation of alternate fuels that can slot right into existing engines, these include a plethora of biofuels like biodiesel made from a variety of vegetables, animal fats,  algae, used cooking oils and more are appearing every day. (Read the daily Biofuels Digest, Advanced Biofuels, Bio Based Diesel) to name just three of the massive information sources available online.

What is fascinating about the reaction against all these alternatives is that they all state that the Bio and other fuels are unsafe, and they bring up old stories about busloads of children freezing to death in winter storms due to bio-based fuels. But when placed in context it is not the fuels that are lacking, or why would they be so widely acceptable in such crucial and dangerous environments as two miles up on airliners that carry more than 300 passengers over thousands of miles every day, and it is happening without the fuss and muss so prevalent in cars and trucks. Again, the only difference is the cash cow to be milked from replacing every car and truck on the road with an EV equivalent, that cow is not open to airline engines and certainly getting off the ground powered by a couple of tons of batteries

What I am hinting at is the fact that this rush to the watt is no more than a money-making scam and that correcting climate change is the furthest thing from their minds.

Why?

Well, if you have read just the introduction to the Economics of Climate change by Sir Nicholas Stern that came out in 2005 you would know that the only solution to the crisis must be endorsed and supported by every nation on the planet each and every one of them mitigating and altering the toxic mix to the best of their abilities. It calls for a collective approach where each component dovetails into the others and funds stimulate not just clean air but the economies that they touch. The idea of having charging stations available every 50 or 60 miles or so in places like  Africa where the “grid” is intermittent at best is a ludicrous insight into an entitled world.

So how do we intend to keep those billions of EVs up and running, not twenty years from now, but the day after the ICE has been phased out? I believe that the preferred solution will be to plug into the grid, not the ephemeral solar power and windmills, but the cold hard natural gas, coal, fossil fuels and nuclear. There is of course a plan to provide charging stations here in North America, the plan is somewhat fuzzy since no one has yet determined how to even connect the chargers to the vehicle. In the US there are four serious contenders, and that is just for the plug. Gas tanks seem to work regardless of the fuel and all have standard holes.

EVs are definitely designed for the leisure class since full charges from flatline can top out above 20 hours for a complete charge from a home charger. The scenario of lines of parked EVs waiting patiently to get to the plug, in perfect harmony, was not carried out during the gas shortage years of the seventies as drivers became quite testy trying to fill’er up. 

You see, there are at the moment 280 million cars on the road in the US, 99% of them run on fossil fuels,  for the most part arriving here from unfriendly places to be refined into the gas we all know and pump. Over the years that fluid has been modified in a number of ways to make it friendlier to the environment, cheaper and safer, but it will always be a fossil fuel. But we can work with that, remember the great get the lead out of fuels days. The problem does not seem to be the car but the fuel we put into it and, substituting a local electrical grid for some sort of petrol station seems to be needless overkill unless you happen to want a monopoly on the transportation industry.

The Grid

The American grid is fairly typical to most national power grids. 

U.S. utility-scale electricity generation by source, amount, and share of total in 2022¹
Data as of October 2023

 Utility-scale electricity generation is electricity generation from power plants with at least one megawatt (or 1,000 kilowatts) of total electricity generating capacity. Although not mentioned biofuels are estimated to have produced 23 Billion Gallons a year of various biodiesel, renewable diesel and ethanol. The irony of course is that Bio-fuels may end up as a cleaner alternative than ULSD that recharge those “clean burning” electrical cars and trucks, if we are lucky. The same applies to natural gas (The fracked Kind). And here the irony is almost comical because there are numerous sources of cleaner natural gas that would help clean the planet, and yet, in anticipation of the high demand for electricity to feed the EVs, gigantic pipelines are being built all over North America. Tar sands, offshore fracking and other deadly projects are being sponsored and funded with cash that would be better spent converting existing cars and trucks to biofuels. (Easy convert, do nothing,) run ‘em as they are, (it’s better for the engines), or better yet, Hydrogen. 

To get back to reality, I suddenly remembered that the US is not the world, but we will have an enormous influence on the evolution of climate change legislation. So, world wide you are asking that 1,475,000,000 cars be converted to electric power, that would be billions all over the world just because we will opt for the least acceptable solution. 

Next,  Going Global locally

If a single, brilliant and feasible plan will not make a dent in the depredation and ultimate destruction of the planet, at least at this point in the evolution of the change and the access to solutions, where else should we be looking?

We have gone through a number of international Climate Change conferences where the problems facing humanity were baldly set out by specialists from all points of the globe and from all levels of society, industries and technologies, financial institutions and money changers, universities and political parties and their leaders. Bold statements were issued at the end of each of these meetings, targets set, promising technologies reviewed and then ignored. Deadlines for abandoning fossil fuels, the rapid deployment of electrical solutions, the end of methane, tidal and solar streams tapped for their kinetic energies, implementing EVs, and banning diesel.

The upshot of all that Sturm und Drang is a pile of empty promises, inflexibly advancing climate changes where environmental threats have now become climate disasters in the shape of roaring firestorms from Australia to California, dwindling ice packs, receding glaciers, drought and other natural disasters that threaten the very existence of humanity on the only planet we know capable of sustaining life. At the base of all this pandemonium lies a very simple fact: Mankind is not mature enough to handle the crisis, and this for several interlocking components that we seem unable to comprehend.

Although daunting, none of these situations are insurmountable if we allow ourselves to take a step back and redefine the problem in a global context where boundaries serve only to limit the scope of the solutions, we can all bring to the table.

“WE”? 

Is the only way to look at climate change? “We’ is the plural pronoun that encompasses the concept of a collective, a meeting of individuals coming together to solve a single problem that threatens a collective, be they individuals, corporations, countries or ideologies. This coming together under the aegis of “We” denotes a serious attempt to rectify what is deemed a threat to all. In that context the threat of the changes to our climate is a clear objective for a collective intervention and maybe a clear invitation to become involved in a collective solution to the threat rather than gesticulating at our own pet projects. 

Breaking down the WE covers a range of opportunities, from worldwide collective action as evidenced from the Kyoto, Oslo, Paris and other joint actions to small cooperatives, joining together to form energy groups across county or even state lines. A good example of a national cooperative that has now closed the loop is the renewable Energy Group (REG) just bought out by Chevron and putting their worldwide biodiesel facilities to bring an element of stability through size to a market pummeled by on and off federal taxing structures, acceptance by more major engine builders and a market for one off biodiesel feedstock and the fuel itself.

The primary problem that is being addressed by the climate change action is relatively simple, we must lower the carbon level that has slowly crept into our atmosphere from all the oft discussed sources. While carbon has been singled out as the benchmark, we are also very aware of a host of other substances that have been earmarked and typecast as villains in more regional or specific cases. From methane to sulfur-based contaminants, all must be addressed and every solution must pass through a battery of keen scrutiny exempt from monetary or national considerations. Existing contaminants must be either eliminated or mitigated by significantly less toxic alternatives, preserving, for the time being, the infrastructures erected to provide economical solutions to key necessities such as transportation, energy generation and production and conservation of food and water, health and reproductive avenues to sustain life, not just of the human race, but all life on the planet, from plants to animals and even microscopic entities that maintain life even unto the internal organs of the larger species.

None of this should come as a surprise so there is no reason to reinvent the wheel every time a company, a country or a politician needs to score points for their business, voter base or bottom line. It has been set out often enough. Personally, the work of the Stern Review in the early years of the century covered all the relevant facts and although dated, bears keeping on the bedside tables of any climate activist anywhere in the world.

The point is that most of the tools necessary to block the climate change disaster are already known and available. The enemy has been identified and meeting the requirements of stopping the carbon buildup induced Armageddon is not a great mystery to those who have been fighting this disaster since the sixties. It is a question of scaling up the solutions and not trying to interfere with other solutions already on the table.

The most recent bout of activity is all based on restricting access to the obvious solutions rather than opening the field for a combined assault on a clear and present danger. The time has come to reimagine how we solve climate change issues.

The Collective

A climate change collective is a community-based infrastructure that allows unrestricted access to new technologies, assuming the principle that the proposed solutions will meet the requirements of the group for the betterment of the group and society at large all the while enhancing the collective’s ability to affect climate change for the benefit of society and the material benefit of the group.

In English and in the dairy industry, as an example among many such as biomass, algae, waste, the collective takes a simple assemblage of cows, milk and land enhancing and adding to those three basic components to produce biomethane, electricity, clean water, bedding and renewable biofuels, jobs, technologies and others not yet discovered. It can expand over time to include any number of new businesses, economic models for funding, contracts for income on some of the by-products, participants and collaborators. The collective will allow the participants to seek out and adopt components that may not be available yet geographically, financially and technologically to the individual participants. 

To continue the dairy venue, there are two key components to creating collective structure around a dairy business and a lot hinges on the land, the quality and the amount available for extensive ventures, dairies have all the keys to changing the energy flow around a major business cycle, as well as the financial markets already set up to generate revenue, cooperative business, support systems to enhance the ecological benefits that can be derived from a rural sustainable and ecologically sound multi practice feeding and enhancing every aspect of the multi-tiered units.

Farmers are used to co-ops because they rely on so many exterior services and outlets just to survive that joining a French-styled GIE A groupement d’intérêt économique (abbreviated GIE; in English Economic Interest Grouping or Economic Interest Group, abbreviated EIG) is a Francophone consortium of related businesses, companies, foundations, organizations or institutes which are formally pooling their efforts for competitive advantage. 

Farmers are also quite adept at developing income producing ideas. So if a collective of neighboring farms decides to start installing methanizers it should be no surprise that small pipelines can be built connecting the methanizers and further building larger concentrations of gas production.

Most partners come from the private sector, but inclusion of public sector partners is not unusual.is a natural way for the farmer to survive. Taken a step further, gathering manure to feed a digester is the first step. Extracting bio-methane from that digester is round two. Biomethane is a cleaner form of the natural gas pulled from fossil fuel ventures. It can be used to power an electricity producing machine, turbine, diesel whatever. Those units are available on the open market and they are installed in many dairies already because they meet two requirements of the collective: Replacing a noxious gas (Natural Gas from fossil fuel extraction), and producing a clean form of energy (electricity). 

The Digester is the first step and it comes in all shapes and sizes, except not in the USA. We seem to be immune to the charms in a way that European farms cannot resist. There are more digesters in Germany, the size of Montana, than in all of the US. From that we can learn a lesson, the most important being that running out of space, even on the large spreads that are central to the US agricultural community is a waste of arable land, the touchstone of all that follows. With land you can grow feedstock for the biofuel processor, you can create silage and threshing operations call for silos and grain storage.

A digester is not necessarily aimed at dairy farms, it is useful wherever organic mass is produced that can be rendered into gases and solids. Its only function is to generate those gases in a useful manner and allow its capture for other uses. But among the barely tapped resources are waste water treatment plants, algae, rendering plants, dumps. But clearly every medium to large sized city has almost a duty to produce its own biofuel if only for their school buses, the latest targets of electrification and the natural feedstock that is already being tapped all over the world are the restaurants that produce tons of used vegetable oils (UCO) to produce a sizable revenue stream and a cheaper and cleaner diesel than the fossil fuel plants.

Anecdotal aside, the city of Vancouver Washington is voting on replacing all their school buses with new electric units costing several times the fuel based units, the irony is that one of the US’s largest biodiesel facilities is located some 70 miles from Vancouver and the fuel would have been available 24/7.

Not to beat a dead horse, but a collective implies collaboration

So, if you are thinking of creating a collective, a mix of different end products relying on home grown feedstocks the time has come to invite a few people to the farm. But it need not be a farm, a shipping concern works just as well, even an airport. Many years ago, I gave a conference in Lorient, France to an audience of fishermen and their business. It seems that they were already looking into fish residue and algae combinations to create biodiesel. Again, concern for the environment and mitigating the danger from fossil fuels by slowly replacing them with alternatives. Here it was less the air pollution as it was the actual sea. 

Polluting rivers and ports harm the very existence of their business and replacing existing sources of poison is a major motivator. They have pretty much banned two strokes on the internal waterways. Next up the larger sectors of diesel powered commercial and pleasure craft. The collective can step into the breach with biodiesel, not just for the large and small craft but also to clean up the infrastructure equipment. Forcing trucks sitting at idle to switch to higher biofuels blend when in the port area where so much sitting and belching takes place. The port of Oakland took the particulate content down from 261 tons to 77 tons from 2005 to 2012 by enacting clean air mandates around the Port. The big win was in dropping the sulfur content in the fuel. Asthma dropped significantly too. And yet, oft attempted and never implemented there were several serious projects created around the San Francisco Bay ports. I worked on one in Oakland, which died due to management embezzlement , Martinez where the project owner started with a budget of $38 million at the end, when every single component going into the collective had quintupled to $83 million and the project owner just left the country in disgust. 

But lately a very new event has been slowly creeping up, showing that we are unable to learn from the past. As you are all aware climate change is devastating the planet brought on by a cumulative strangling of the atmosphere by an overabundance of toxic gases, chemicals, and a few other components. In our stampede to go all in for electricity we are courting disasters of which we are not yet aware.

To start with, we have no idea what removing 3.5 million cars and trucks from the transportation pool will look like, and to do it between 2030 and 2050 is insanity. Amazingly there is absolutely no backup plan to ensure transportation, heating, and other niceties on which we all depend, the grand plan is to eliminate ALL fossil fuels, terminate ALL internal combustion engines, provide ALL forms of heating and cooking from the grid. That very same grid that is so fragile that 200 people died in Texas from the cold during just one climate induced winter storm. It is no surprise that when Putin decided to invade his neighbor the first targets of his attacks were powerplants and electricity infrastructures. That very effectively pushed the country into survival mode. 

Now just imagine that very same scenario with every form of transportation locked into the power grid and because the production of fossil fuels was interrupted by order in 2030 and there were no more diesel engines to run goods and services, transport them by truck, train, plane or boat because since all those would be powered by electrical devices. 

We are working very hard to create enclaves where life can continue as before. The shining light right now is renewable energy from local feedstocks, dairy farms by themselves can stay alive with biodigesters, biodiesel feedstock from camelina, soy and other silage fodder to convert to clean biodiesel. As a matter of fact, instead of going hell for leather on nothing but solar and wind, we should adopt some of the cleaner diesel blends as a transition between the urban plug and play and the rest of the country with its multiple needs, like tractors, milking machines and such. Now imagine if instead of covering the arable land with solar panels we tilled and planted the creage to produce three harvests of Camelina Sativa, an oil bearing seed that works wonders in biodiesel production? (This plant is also a very healthy fodder for cattle and silage  can be converted to bedding.bedding. )

But it is in the collectives such as farming communities where this type of solution can be developed. It is in the fields that grow the feedstocks, rural, local and essential to the survival of the farm that the essential farmlands can capture and return the diesel to what has always been the diesel fuel’s rightful place.

If the objective of electrification is to eliminate climate change, and as Stern pointed out, the easiest way to do that is to cut carbon emissions enough to allow the planet to breathe once again. The EPA has run evaluations of the carbon reduction by just using blends of as little as 20% biodiesel in ULSD. Unburned hydrocarbons drop 20%, Carbon monoxide drops 12%, particulate matters drop 12%. Of course, if we really ramped up the production of biodiesel so we could offer 100% pure bio in every tank, unburned hydrocarbons would drop 67%, CO 48%, NOX 10%. And we have only scratched the surface of what is possible. Algae, that scum on the ponds have only now started to become an option because of a remarkable study done in France by ADEME and a couple of truly groundbreaking corporations who penned the Livre Turquoise, a study of all projects and research done in France on algal conversion, surely a solid companion to Stern’s economics of climate change: 

None of the technology is new, none of it requires massive restructuring of infrastructure and most of them are renewable, local and relatively easy to produce the engines and the modules required to transition into a cleaner and safer world.

World?

Stern is very clear insofar as climate change is a global phenomenon. Nobody escapes the consequences of supertankers plying the oceans with their precious cargoes of crude, and, emitting more toxics than a large city filled with cars, generators, buses and all the other obvious suspects. 

“Securing broad-based and sustained co-operation requires an equitable distribution of effort across both developed and developing countries. There is no single formula that captures all dimensions of equity, but calculations based on income, historic responsibility and per capita emissions all point to rich countries taking responsibility for emissions reductions of 60-80% from 1990 levels by 2050.” P.XXII Stern Review

As a matter of fact, it is becoming clear that the responsibility for getting a grasp on the collective will be placed squarely in the hands of those who can best afford it and that mitigating the damage will burden those who can least afford it. The talk about converting to an all-electric energy solution is gibberish at the end of a long single lane road uniting two large cities in Africa. The dream of a charging station every 50 miles is ridiculous when the people in those areas barely have enough watts to keep lights on ten hours a day. The extension cords from the Upper Volta Dams barely make it to the capital Accra, and even then, sporadically let alone for the leisurely eight hours to charge a brand-new Tesla for a 300-mile run, let alone a fully loaded Bedford truck eighteen-wheeler to shift market critical foods from outlying farms to the center of town markets. 

A small company in Finland, Ductor, will take the ammonia out of a dairy farm waste thereby creating usable fertilizer, and in removing the ammonia will enhance the production of clean biomethane for immediate consumption to generate electricity, or conversion of LNG or CNG under the RNG (Renewable Natural Gas). A cooperative venture might do well to call Finland to understand how far the technology has progressed, pilot plants are now fully operational commercial ventures and the fertilizer produced is added to the Collective for us and for sale.

The solution of course is the massive production of biofuels made on the spot, within walking distance of the source of feedstock, from waste products, to food waste and digesters and algae and whatever works to replace the tons of fossil fuels that keep those less fortunate alive and prospering in an increasingly uncaring world. But beyond that, we see with interest that the little being done here in the tier one economies, can be done massively in the third world so that basics such as heat, transportation and technologies can be used, although at a reduced rate, to better not just the animals at the top but all mankind.  

If we look at funding for megaprojects like 3.000 cow dairies, not so uncommon as we think in various places around the world, then access to world markets for energy from these places would go a long way to alleviating the social ills of second and third world farms, and with them the countries where they can be built. 

There are also many parts of the world that offer serious financial incentives to companies willing to purchase their goods to ensure jobs and income and the propagation of their technology because they can provide not just the technology to build a specialized digester, but will also give loans at rates that many first world financial institutes cannot approach. The now renamed GIEK comes to mind, a Norwegian state-run export bank that sponsors some very large shipping projects around the world. Another group that specializes on farming is the Dutch Bank, Paribas, or the smaller Triodos. People who understand that it takes cheap financing to build large solutions such as wind farms in the North sea, blueprints for such farms in Europe and now the US that should be made available to Africa and Asia’s poorer nations with generous, international financial support to allow those countries to beat the energy crunch coupled to the climate changes that are worldwide regardless of where the carbon is produced. 

A suggestion whose time has come is for the newer technologies be tested on pilot plants and that those smaller but functional units be transferred directly to third world countries where a smaller size is more in keeping with the solution of a local problem. For example large dairies are not that common in some of the more agrarian areas of Africa, the perfect setting for a community fed digester feeding real energy into areas where the lights cannot come on 

Bio-Technology, the new Alchemists.

There was a time when technology was the realm of Hitech. The wonderful chip begat from the bowels of the transistor. There was a time, in my lifetime, that semiconductors were touted for their transistor content, or as they were then called, Flip Flops. When computer was a giant with very little to offer. We are at that stage as far as energy is concerned. But now the magic words are Greenhouse gases (GHG), environmental impacts are the guiding lights, less because of their inherent threat but because of their ubiquitous presence. When we blithely announce that we must eliminate fossil fuels we assume a sage nodding of heads not aware that the problem goes way beyond eliminating life on earth.

If we start with the idea that we will eliminate those obvious poisons, we will fail. We must learn to work with what we have and what we can create. The problems are known the answers lie in the simple fact that Europe uses biomethane for hundreds of applications, to clean up the natural gases they must use and so they built a massive infrastructure based on the collective will to make farms, landfill, waste water treatment plants and other bio-rich environment to mitigate the easily obtained fossil fuel solutions by diluting with cleaner blends and bring down the carbon content to a more sustainable for the planet level. Sure, one percent of the rolling stock in the USA is electric powered and we observe with interest the massive PR campaign to install solar panels on every rooftop and in all the fields. But what you are actually seeing is a pollution transfer exercise rather than a true shift away from fossils. Even though the dream is clean energy from a non-existent tailpipe most of the energy going into those batteries are from the grid and what goes into the grid would make a sailor blush.