The Debacle That Is Renewable Energy

by Fate’sRightHand

Growing up in a farming community taught me a lot of things. Things like the importance of family, friends, and neighbors as well as the reliance on faith and religion. Quite possibly the most prevalent lesson that I learned was that everything in the community relies on the land and what comes out of it. The west Texas farming culture is the epitome of living off of the land. Simply put, a good crop facilitates a strong year all-around, while a bad crop makes the entire community hurt. That reliance and passion for the land and industry is the reason that it pains me so much to consider and try to accept the following content.

The current shift in views in the United States from a fossil-fuels mindset to the green energy movement is preposterous. There is no other way to put it. There is no comparison in the financial feasibility of creating renewable energy versus utilizing fossil fuels. Renewable energy, at this point, is not a sustainable industry from a financial perspective, prompting billions of dollars in government subsidies (your tax dollars) to make the wheels turn. In a country whose core principles are deeply rooted in the theories of capitalism, isn’t that counterintuitive? I didn’t have strong feelings for or against the green movement until the effects of it began to hit home.

As the search for more efficient forms of renewable energy trudges on, biomass conversion continues to be presented as a viable source. Biomass is the biological material from living, or recently living, organisms. Biomass is, more commonly, plant matter (corn and sorghum stover, switch-grass, etc.) that is collected and converted to electricity, heat, or liquid fuels. With recent development of efficient processes for gasifying biomass to create electricity and ligno-cellulosic conversion of biomass to create ethanol, environmentalist movements are calling for increased large-scale production (with government support) of biomass as a clean energy source. So how does this hit home for myself and other members of the agricultural industry in the U.S.? To foster the large-scale production of biomass as a renewable energy source would require the direct displacement, and/or conversion, of a large majority of the agricultural producers and their operations in rural America. Moreover, this movement would create an overwhelming reliance on commodity imports from other agricultural countries like China and India.

Ok, enough of the smoke-blowing. Let’s put some numbers to this. There is a finite amount of farmable land in the U.S.; 922,000 acres as of 2007, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. Biomass production is measured in the number of dry tons per acre that can be produced. The average biomass yield per acre of production, as reported by multiple government agencies and other sources, is about 9 dry tons per acre. Obviously, adverse weather conditions would prevent us from producing full yield across the country, so we will multiply that yield by a factor of 0.75 to garner a more reasonable yield of 6.75 dry tons per acre. According to the Department of Energy and regardless of the method of converting biomass that is utilized, the average energy content of biomass (measured in British Thermal Units) is 8,600 BTU per pound, or 17.2 x 10⁶ BTU per dry ton. Therefore, we could expect to produce 11.6 x 10⁷ BTU per acre, on average. Now I don’t know about you, but I hate looking at numbers in scientific notation. Let’s simplify this a little bit.

Energy consumption in the U.S. is measured in quadrillion BTU’s or “quads”. Written out, one quad is equal to 1,000,000,000,000,000 BTU (a huge number, I know). According to the DOE, the yearly consumption of energy in the U.S. as of 2009 was approximately 102 quads (a number that is growing). Using the figures that we calculated above, and converting them from BTUs to quads, we can see that if every farmable acre of land in the U.S. was devoted to biomass production for energy conversion, the maximum energy that we could expect to produce would be 107 quads.

I know that it is not reasonable to expect that all energy required in the U.S. be derived from biomass conversion. I simply like to put things like this into perspective. The fact of the matter is, a devotion of even 25% of the farmable land in the U.S. would cause a complete shift in production processes, farming knowledge needed, the commodity market, and imports/exports, but wouldn’t put a big dent into the country’s energy requirement. We are already seeing an unwanted increased reliance on foreign commodities such as corn, soybeans, wheat and cotton, and this type of movement would increase import levels beyond a level of comfort due to the displacement of domestic production. Too heavy of a reliance on imports will drastically increase the uncertainty of availability of the supplies that we need to feed and clothe the American people. We simply cannot stomach the increased lead times, delivery and production uncertainty, communication barriers, etc. that go along with that heavy reliance on imports.

So what does all of this mean to me? We cannot logically, financially or logistically shift our reliance on energy derived from fossil fuels to the uncertain renewable energy processes that are available today. Do I believe that there may be niche markets available for biomass conversion processes that have some viability? Yes I do. I simply think that the ostentatious desire and belief, by some, that this country can rely fully on renewable energy is naïve and selfish.