Re: Biocoal Economics

This thread has mixed all kinds of issues, so I've decided to try to address them with what I do know. Some is recent reading, but some dates back to my daze as a graduate student in economics:

(1) conventional sources of energy became "conventional" because they were the cheapest. Unconventional sources will cost most. The question is whether people are willing to pay that extra for other reasons. Currently I live in Massachusetts, and I was amazed when people reacted so hotly negative when they discovered the cost of electricity from the "cape wind" turbine project.

(2) The next big thing here in Massachusetts seems to be a government effort to keep "organic" material out of the landfills. Apparently they plan a new form of recycling (applied at first only to the food industry) that would create industrial-sized composting facilities to turn food waste into dirt and methane (to burn).

(3) Wood makes sense under some circumstances. Burning coal liberates carbon that was locked away before there were people; burning wood liberates carbon that was locked away during my lifetime (typically), so it is "greener" assuming that we are constantly planting new trees for the next generations to burn.

(4) A recent survey showed that methane and wood were the cheapest (per BTU) sources of heating in New England. Oil was basically dead last.

(5) Many times scale makes a big difference. Ethanol looked better at a lower scale of production, that is, before it affected food prices. Some things, such as making methane in your home composter, just aren't practical in small levels of production.

(6) The American Way (you may all sit down now) is for experimentation to weed out bad ideas, so I think trying to guess winners in advance works poorly at best; it is best to let competition, survival of the fittest, to do it for us. I could offer many example from my own field of computing, but here is just one of them. Around 30 years ago the Japanese launched a great national effort that was going to pass the USA in software development. The magazine of the Association for Computing Machinery had a famous cover showing two pillars, one with a Japanese flag and one with a USA flag. The Japanese pillar was shorter, but the people on it were standing at attention on each other's shoulders, while the Americans were a bunch of cowboys, sending their ropes out in disorganized confusion, so the top Japanese was much closer to the cloud above. The problem with that cover, of course, was that it assumed people knew where the answer was. Incidentally, Americans still produce the best software. In another 30 years, those of you who are still around will see how these various types of energy work out. Any talk before then is recreational.