TOD - It is hard to believe that just a few short years ago, Congress mandated a massive increase in usage of cellulosic ethanol. This was remarkable, because no commercial cellulosic ethanol facilities even existed at the time. But people like Vinod Khosla were busy testifying before Congress that the only thing holding the industry back was more funding, and if they would provide the funding we could replace all of our gasoline consumption with cellulosic ethanol. So Congress mandated in the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act that we would use 100 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol in 2010, 250 million gallons in 2011, and then rapidly expand to 16 billion gallons per year by 2022. At the time, I saw a very appropriate analogy that summed up the situation: "It's like trying to solve a traffic problem by mandating hovercraft. Except we don't have hovercraft."
I tried to bring a dose of reality to the debate in this blog. I have worked on cellulosic ethanol myself. I know first hand the challenges. Biomass has low energy density relative to fossil fuels, and thus a conversion facility must have easy logistical access. In most cases, this means that biomass must be sourced close to the facility. This puts some limits on the size of biomass facilities, so they suffer from the lack of economies of scale. I have harped on this logistical issue for years, and a newly released study from Purdue reiterates the points I have made: "Without solving the logistical issues, commercial production of second-generation biofuels will not take place."
...Conclusion – Technological Breakthroughs Can Not Be Mandated
Personally, I don't believe large-scale commercialization of cellulosic ethanol will ever be viable due to the aforementioned fundamental issues with biomass conversion and efficiency, and will ultimately be relegated to the role of a niche fuel provider (as discussed in Biofuel Niches). The heart of the problem here was the idea that technology can be mandated. Imagine that in 2005 Congress put forward a mandate that lung cancer would be cured by 2010, breast cancer by 2012, and by 2020 all cancers would be cured. People would think they were absolutely daft, because more people understand the difficulties involved in coping with cancer. On the other hand the general public doesn't have a clue of the difficulties in economically turning cellulose into fuel, but they did hear a lot of hypesters in the news saying that it would be easy — as long as you get that Silicon Valley "know how" working on the problem. But the Silicon Valley players learned that Moore's Law doesn't apply to the energy business.
It is great to have lofty goals, but when you start to base your energy policy on fairy dust, you are setting yourself up for massive problems down the road. Technology breakthroughs can't simply be mandated. Sometimes critical breakthroughs happen, and sometimes they don't. In the case of cellulosic ethanol, commercial viability remains out of sight. - Read full by Robert Rapie at TOD
