Bob Dylan Turns 70

This week old Robert Allen Zimmerman the Jewish kid from Hibbing Minnesota turned 70. Bob is quite the songwriter and his becoming a septuagenarian reminds me of my own aging as a quinquagenarian. The Green Machine should favor Bob’s song “blowin in the wind” from a renewable energy perspective but this is not my favorite Dylan song. My favorite by far is “all along the watchtower”.

The lyrics are:

There must be some way out of here
Said the joker to the thief
There's too much confusion
I can't get no relief

Businessmen, they drink my wine
Plowmen dig my earth
None of them along the line
Know what any of it is worth

No reason to get excited
The thief, he kindly spoke
There are many here among us
Who feel that life is but a joke

But you and I, we've been through that
And this is not our fate
So let us not talk falsely now
The hour is getting late

All along the watchtower
Princes kept the view
While all the women came and went
Barefoot servants, too

Outside in the distance
A wildcat did growl
Two riders were approaching
The wind began to howl


Bob must have studied the book of Isaiah in the Old Testament while preparing for his Bar mitzvah in Northern Minnesota as his lyrics echo Isaiah chapter 21, verses 5-9:

Prepare the table, watch in the watchtower, eat, drink: arise ye princes, and prepare the shield.

For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth.

And he saw a chariot with a couple of horsemen, a chariot of asses, and a chariot of camels; and he hearkened diligently with much heed.

And, behold, here cometh a chariot of men, with a couple of horsemen.

And he answered and said, Babylon is fallen, is fallen, and all the graven images of her gods he hath broken unto the ground.

Now what does a Watchtower have to do with Greenexplored? Lots!! In writing blogs about thermodynamics I have sought the path of knowledge over self interest. The VCs drink the wine and the gangrenous hucksters dig the earth. Hard to tell who is joker and who is a thief? Of course there is too much confusion with the department of entropy in charge. The average gringo thinks life is but a joke and you can fuel all the people all of the time. The hour is certainly getting late so let’s not talk falsely now. The photos of Joplin Missouri sure show that the wind has begun to howl. Babylon is fallen and we went there for the weapons of mass combustion. Now we are tripping over ourselves to get to Tripoli.

Sugar’s Eco Footprint

The past couple of weeks have had me preoccupied with sugar. Green sugar and gangrene sugar have been covered. Now I will discuss sugar facts and the enormous burden this sweet nectar places on the planet. We all know that sugar is a health hazard and high fructose corn syrup is even a greater health hazard but did we know that sugar consumes enormous quantities of water for its cultivation on an enormous amount of land?

Some sugar facts

As a fraction of total mass sugar cane has less fraction of sugar (sucrose) in its stalk than beet sugar has in its bulb – about 13.5% versus 16.5%

Sugar cane stalks contain approximately 73.5% water, beet sugar bulbs contain approximately 75% water

Sugar cane stalks when crushed are called bagasse and this is the fibrous material in the stalk. The bagasse accounts for approximately 13% of the mass of the stalk. The bagasse is 98% fiber and only 2% protein. With this low protein content bagasse is a poor animal feed.

Beet pulp is the fiber that remains when sugar beet bulbs are crushed. The pulp amounts to approximately 8.5% of the mass of the beet. The beet pulp is 90% fiber and about 10% protein. As beet pulp has a good fraction of protein it can be used as an animal feed.

Beet sugar accounts for about 30% of world table sugar production and cane sugar the remaining 70%.

In 2010 approximately 150 million metric tons of dry table sugar was produced worldwide

In 2008 the US harvested just over 1 million acres of sugar beets at an average harvest of 26 tons per acre, with a yield of 16.5% sucrose this equals 4.3 tons of sucrose per acre per year

In 2008 the US harvested just over 900,000 acres of cane sugar at an average harvest of 33 tons per acre, with a yield of 13.5% sucrose this equals 4.4 tons of sucrose per acre per year

It takes an acre of land to yield about 4.4 short tons (4 metric tons) of sucrose whether derived from beets or cane

In the California Imperial Valley and acre of sugar beet needs 6 acre feet of pumped water per year, therefore each metric ton of sugar produced in the Imperial Valley need 1.5 acre feet of water. An acre foot of water is 325,851 gallons. Each pound of sugar therefore requires 245 gallons of water just for the cultivation. The purification and of table sugar is also water intensive.

A two liter bottle of regular cola has 0.53 pounds of sugar, therefore it takes 130 gallons of irrigation water simply to produce the sugar for a single 2 liter bottle of regularly sweetened soda. The sugar beets needed for this one soda bottle require about 4 square feet of land.

If you buy a similar sized soda that is zero calorie that is sweetened with Sweet.zeroTM you are saving your body harm and certainly helping the planet.

Gangrene Sugar

This week I blog about gangrene sugar. In particular I will discuss two super virulent gangrenous companies. These companies are Solazyme and Amyris. John Doerr is on the board of Amyris located in Emeryville California. It is an off shoot of the work performed in the labs of Professor Jay Kiesling at the University of California in Bezerkley. Old John Doerr is the Kleiner Perkins chief who has both Al Gore and Colin Powell involved in his green-tech junk science companies such as the Bloom Box. John Doerr is one powerful dude, remember he was the host to the President a few months ago.

Young Professor Kiesling founded Amyris and then proceeded to give away on a royalty free basis his first invention for a wonder anti-malarial drug. Actually the free give away was not a free give away as the Gates Foundation gave Kiesling’s lab at Bezerkeley and his company Amyris millions of bucks to continue their research into genetically engineered yeasts and bacteria that yield unsaturated hydrocarbons ( isoprenoids) from table sugar via fermentation. Some of the unsaturated hydrocarbons that are yielded in Amyris processes are isoprene and farnesene. Isoprene can be used to produce thermoplastic elastomers or synthetic rubber. Farnesene can be used to produce intermediaries for cosmetics, or it can be incorporated into PET (the plastic in soda bottles) or it can react with hydrogen to form farnesane that is a synthetic diesel fuel.

This all sounds great and Amyris’ stock is trading with a market capitalization of over a billion dollars. It has a who’s who on its board including Art Levinson the one time CEO of Genentech. Art is perhaps the brightest biotech guy I have ever met. Let us go back to making farnesene out of sucrose. Sucrose is C12H22O11, and farnesene is C15H24. In fermenting the sucrose the oxygen in the sucrose is liberated as CO2, therefore approximately half of the carbon in the sugar winds up in the farnesene, while the rest of the carbon is in the CO2 that is yielded by the fermentation. The carbon content of sugar is approximately 42%, hence approximately 21% of the mass of the sugar becomes the mass of the carbon in the farnesene. The fraction of carbon in the farnesene is approximately 88%. By performing tedious math one can calculate that one pound of sugar will approximately yield 0.238 pounds of farnesene. The economic value of sucrose solution even in Brazil has to be worth 20 cents per pound of dissolved sugar. Therefore the cost of the sugar in farnesene production equates to 84 cents per pound of farnsene produced. Farnesene has to be reacted with hydrogen to convert it to farnesane that can be used as a diesel fuel substitute. This hydrogenation adds costs to the process and for argument sake let’s say the cost of raw materials to make farnesane is one dollar per pound. Add labor and other operating costs as well as capital recovery on the shiny stainless steel fermenters and other equipment and we are in the range of $1.50 to $2.00 per pound of farnesane they produce.
If farnesane has a similar specific gravity compared with diesel, we are now talking about a full cost of between $10 and $14 a gallon. Three years ago prior to Amyris’ IPO their CEO one Mr. John Melo promised the US government 200 million gallons of his diesel at a cost of $2 a gallon to be delivered in 2010. 2010 has come and gone, and they have not yielded much diesel. Diesel is selling for just less than $5 a gallon here in the Bay Area. To be a green machine, I will pay $10 a gallon to Amyris instead of paying $5 to BP for diesel. The extra $5 will remove 20 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions. Wow this is a tax of $500 per ton of CO2. Wait a moment Total the French Exxon is an investor in Amyris so why would I be dumb and pay more for Amyris’ diesel?

Solazyme is even more ridiculous claiming to make bunches of diesel directly from sugar in the dark using algae. They are located in South San Francisco and have attracted Ian Clark the present CEO of Genentech to their board. I wish that Ian and Art would have asked the green machine for advice in joining the boards of companies that are destined to fail in making real quantities of bio fuels. The two companies may make specialty chemicals and pharmaceuticals with their bio fermenters as all that shiny stainless steel should be used for this purpose.

I apologize for the gross photo of a diabetic patient suffering with gangrene of the toes.

The Royal Wedding

Over a billion people watched their TVs to see Prince William and Princess Kate marry. The wedding was wonderful and gave us all a brief respite from the wars going on in the Arab lands. It is hard to place the carbon foot print on the wedding but it was pretty high given the jets and limousines needed to bring in the rich and famous guests. The 300 million or so TVs that were on for a couple of hours consumed about one hundred million kilowatt hours of electricity. Generating electricity emits approximately 1.25 pounds of carbon dioxide per kilowatt hour. Therefore the carbon dioxide emitted around the world to watch the fanfare on TV equaled approximately 125 million pounds or about 60,000 tons. This equals the emissions of 10,000 cars driven for a year. No doubt that the carbon emissions were worth the joy of witnessing a fairy tale wedding. For me the most enjoyable part of the wedding was to watch Kate being driven in a 1950s vintage Rolls Royce from her hotel to the Abbey. Wow what a beautiful car! The second most enjoyable part of the wedding was to see the newly-weds driving in the 1970s vintage Aston Martin convertible after the wedding ceremony. These vintage cars are brilliant even though they are such fuel hogs.

Gasoline prices for mid-grade for my 1999 C280 spiked to $4.45 per gallon at my local service station and it looks like we may hit $5 a gallon in mid-summer. I know the folks who read my blog in the UK, South Africa, and New Zealand think this price of gasoline is a bargain. So do I. I am all for the US government adding another $1 a gallon as a tax. This only equals a tax of $100 per ton of carbon dioxide emissions. Giving Bright Source, Bloom, Solyndra, Tesla, and all the other pig companies at the Federal trough the equivalent of $1,000 per ton of CO2 saved makes this level of gasoline tax a bargain for the tax payers. Now that the President has released his long form birth certificate and has proved he was born in Hawaii and not hatched in Kenya, he should start to attack the Federal deficit. I believe a gasoline tax of $1 per gallon will bring in about $100 billion a year.

The Donald keeps on saying he is going to run for president. I don’t think he was an invited guest to the wedding so for at least a day or two he was upstaged on the airwaves. His two pet enemies are China and OPEC. His wife designs and sells jewelry on QVC. Of course if one goes to the QVC website and investigates where the jewelry is manufactured, it states “Made in China”. I am sure if one investigates where the oil for the jet fuel for his plane was extracted it will state “Extracted in an OPEC country”. He is just the living embodiment of the hypocritical junk we live with each day. The real Royals at least provide real entertainment with fairy tale weddings. Had they used some horse drawn carriages they may have been able to cut down by a minuscule fraction the carbon footprint of the joyous event. Given that we emitted so much carbon simply watching the telly, I am actually glad that Kate got to the church in time in that marvelous Rolls Royce.

World Car Of The Year

The world car of the year award has been announced and the winner is the Nissan Leaf. This award was announced this week at the international car show in New York. The jurors announced that the “leaf is the gateway to a brave new electric world”. Perhaps these jurors were also the jurors for the OJ murder trial. While the leaf is kind of cool and is pretty, it is expensive for how it performs and it is no gateway to a brave new electric world. It is has limited range and will have limited appeal and will likely make Nissan no money. The latest casualty in the stock market is a company called Advanced Batteries (ABAT on the NASDAQ). ABAT is a Chinese based company that had its stock listed in the USA about a year ago. There is quite a bit of concern that ABAT hyped their reported earnings in China prior to the US listing and that they actually lost money just like A 123, Valence, and Ener1 who all play in the same lithium ion battery space for plug in vehicles. All of these four listed lithium battery companies are hemorrhaging cash and eventually the US government and the State of California will end subsidies on purchases of plug in vehicles and lithium ion batteries will be used for power tools, electric bikes, and traditional hybrid cars.

Yesterday while driving, I listened to a science hour titled Science Friday on national public radio that touted the brilliance of the Bright Source Energy project for concentrated solar in the Mojave Dessert. The project makes no sense now that PV cells cost less than concentrated solar but the NPR announcer interviewed a group of experts who made wonderful claims that this project will bring green energy to Los Vegas and Los Angeles. They forgot to mention that it will bring losses to the Los Tax Payers. I wondered why NPR was so high on this project. I then heard the tribute to the foundation that supports Science Friday on NPR. The foundation is the S D Bechtel Junior foundation. Well who is the general contractor for the multi-billion concentrated solar project that Bright Source will bring to the Mojave? It is the Bechtel Corporation. Who helped Bright Source secure $1.6 billion of US government loan guarantees? I doubt it was the couple of really smart Israeli guys who run the company.

Talking about US government money, President Obama was in the Bay Area to speak to folks at Facebook and of course raise some money for the 2012 campaign. He did a town hall style meeting at Facebook and his spokesperson had this to say. "The president is looking forward to visiting Facebook and speaking directly to the American people about his plan for responsibly bringing down the deficit and continuing on the path to economic recovery," White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said in a statement before the event. "This is a part of our effort to hear from the American people." Well Mr. President if you really want to bring down the deficit, let’s impose a gasoline tax of $1.00 per gallon and let’s not give Bright Source a bunch of money for an idea that makes no sense.

On the other side of isle, the king of bridge Mr. No Trump is the candidate of the day with his nonsense of how rich he is and how he can negotiate with the Chinese. Well he is rich and he can sure negotiate with the Chinese, but can he understand thermodynamics? Maybe he has some knowledge of thermo as he always shouts you are fired. Perhaps Mr. No Trump should exclaim you are about to undergo an exothermic reaction when he boots his secretary of energy.

Hair Brain Schemes

Another week has passed and the price of gasoline has risen to a record high for this time of the year. We are only slightly lower than the record high reached in the summer of 2008. I am fortunate to commute to work in a van pool so I only drove 53 miles last week and my 1999 Mercedes C280 only needed 2.5 gallons of midgrade gasoline at $4.35 a gallon. In 2010 my fellow Californians still drove their cars as much as they as they did in 2009. The State Board of Equalization that levies taxes on fuels sold in the Golden State reported that taxable gasoline sales increased from 14.81 billion gallons in 2009 to 14.87 billion gallons in 2010. Gasoline consumption peaked in 2005 at 15.94 billion gallons. I believe that the slight increase in gasoline consumption in 2010 over 2009 is an anomaly and by 2015 we will be using one billion less gallons of gasoline than we did last year. Small cars are replacing large SUVs and there is no longer a mad rush to move 50 miles away from our places of work. With the record high prices of gasoline we will also see more people carpooling or taking public transportation.

The economy of the not so golden state is still depressed. Diesel consumption is an excellent indicator of economic activity. We consumed 2.59 billion gallons of diesel in 2010. This is a quantity that is almost identical to the 2.58 billion gallons we consumed in 2009. Diesel consumption peaked in 2007 at 3.08 billion gallons. I am sure that in a decade with population growth and eventual economic recovery diesel usage will increase. Also there will be more diesel cars on the road and the Green Machine will be very happy as we substitute diesel cars for gasoline cars going forward.

Motorists in the USA drove almost 3 trillion miles last year and used approximately 9 times the amount of fuel that Californians did. The 3 trillion mile figure is some 20.5 billion more miles than was traveled in 2009 by the car crazy Americans. In 2006 we Yanks with gas in our tanks actually exceeded 3 trillion miles of vehicular travel. Every time gasoline prices increases CNN and other major news organizations bring guys out of the woodwork with new invention to improve gasoline consumption. Ravi who is a regular reader sent me a link last week from CNN of some wannabe thermodynamics king with an electrolyser that converts distilled water to hydrogen using the car’s alternator and somehow the usage of gasoline is reduced by 20%. In 2008 I wrote a whole blog on hydrogen assisted combustion and determined that these on board electrolysers may give a 1 or 2% boost to fuel efficiency as there is indeed some merit to hydrogen assisted combustion . The primary boost comes from the wide range of concentrations that hydrogen combusts in air and therefore with the proper controls on the air fuel mixture in the engine it is possible to operate the engine with less throttling of the air and improve fuel efficiency. The 20% claim of improved efficiency is spurious and the Green Machine is not endorsing this idea in any way shape or form.

Ajay another regular reader, sent me a link about another Vinod Khosla company that takes wood chips and through rapid pyrolysis converts the wood chips into diesel. I had to tell Ajay that Vinod was once again making wood out of furniture from an economics perspective. The Vinodian company will build a plant in Mississippi and will use yellow pine for feed stock. I told Ajay the folks in Miss could simply make pine planks for furniture and have far higher value than chipping the lumber into pellets for the very expensive plant to perform the pyrolysis and purification. Where I come from one gets ahead by making furniture out of wood and not wood out of furniture. The US department of entropy and the State of Mississippi have supported the plan to make wood out furniture to the extent of hundreds of millions of dollars. I guess it is a case of who you know not what you know that helps fund hair brain schemes.

Actually I bet there is some guy out there asking for US and State funding for a way to rapidly perform pyrolysis on the hair and brains of sheep to yield bio diesel. But sheep hair is worth much more as wool and sheep brains can be sold as a delicacy. The morons in the Obama administration will rather support a hair brain scheme to produce bio fuels for bio fools. Sheep brain masala is called Maghaz in Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka. Perhaps old Vinod can get a serving of this soul food.

Extended Producer Responsibility Laws Reduce E-Waste

Why are Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) policies an effective method for reducing hazardous electronic (e-) waste? Challenging the Chip: Labor Rights and Environmental Justice in the Global Electronics Industry¹ describes EPR as policy instruments “that hold manufacturers accountable for the full costs of their products at every stage in their life cycle” (p.247). Equipment is taken back at the end of its useful life by the producer, or hired contractor, for recycling. This way, products containing environmental or health-damaging components will not contribute to pollution in landfills, incinerators, or in the informal recycling system (exposure for scrap pickers). Producers are forced to internalize the costs of disposal and, therefore, are more likely to implement product design changes to minimize non-recyclable and hazardous materials.

The European Union (EU) passed two directives in 2003 dealing with electronic wastes. The Directive on Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) made manufacturers responsible for managing e-waste disposal. The Restrictions on the Use of Certain Hazardous Substances in Electrical and Electronic Equipment (RoHS) phased-out the use of hazardous materials in such equipment (p.265). Why does EPR work? First, these restrictions created a market opportunity for companies to sell their products in the EU and beyond. It would have been prohibitively expensive for manufacturers to have separate non-hazardous and hazardous product lines. Plus firms did not want to face bad publicity or liability for hazardous versions of their products (p.248). So they anticipated legislative changes and redesigned their entire product lines. Second, individual manufacturer responsibility rules forced companies to fully internalize the cost of e-waste disposal. This drove the innovations in design that reduced disposal costs and fostered ease of recycling (p.275).

While the EU was successful in instituting the EPR directives above, similar policies face implementation obstacles in the United States. Powerful industry associations, like the Electronics Industry Alliance (EIA), have argued for voluntary recycling programs and defended the use of certain materials in electronic products (p.266). The American Electronics Association (AEA) resisted sharing up-front costs of recycling. They also claimed material bans would undermine the functionality, reliability, and safety of their products (p.248). Furthermore, they sought help from the federal government’s U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) who put counter pressure on the EU, saying the regulations violated the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and were “unnecessary barriers to trade” (p.248-9). In a later affront to EPR, the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) prohibited the federal government from adopting preferences for environmentally sustainable products (p.257).

EPR’s success in the U.S. depends on organizations’ ability to attract more industry support, like that won from Hewlett-Packard and Dell in the 2001 Computer TakeBack Campaign (p.250). In addition, strong state (and eventually national) laws that reflect the true spirit of EPR must be enacted to force manufacturers to internalize the costs of toxic materials in their bottom lines.

~Mark Bremer, Green Explored Contributor

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[1] Smith, T., Sonnenfeld, D., Pellow, D. Hightower, J (2006). Challenging the Chip: Labor Rights and Environmental Justice in the Global Electronics Industry. Temple University Press. Philadelphia, Pa.