The media and politicians tend to talk more about developments in technology to generate electricity than about other energy-related issues.
With wind turbines, coal, gas-fired or nuclear power stations being very much in the public eye, both literally and politically, it is inevitable perhaps that other energy topics which are equally, if not more important, get far less attention than they should.
Personally, I take the view that the issue of how we will generate electricity in the future is not actually an issue at all.
We all know our electricity will come from a mix of wind, hydro, tidal and wave (maybe), clean or cleaner coal, gas from various sources, solar and so on.
There will certainly be new technologies developed around those basic themes, but I’m quite confident that we’ll get there without too much pain.
There are actually only two questions we need to address on power generation. The first is the future of nuclear power and the second, and more important, is how we ensure that, as a nation, we gain commercially from both the old and new technologies by establishing manufacturing and export capabilities.
The latter question is of course considerably more difficult to answer than the first, especially given our lousy record at commercialising new ideas and our tendency to invite overseas players in to fill the gap.
An energy topic that seems to be getting special treatment is heat; with consultants and politicians now talking about renewable heat as being something we need to pay particular attention to.
This is interesting, valuable too, but doesn’t get me excited, mainly because it’s also an issue that’s effectively solved apart from the costs, which are still just plain silly.
To me, the biggest challenge we face is what to do about liquid fuels. It’s fairly clear now that if and when global economic growth resumes, then the oil price will surge and fuel prices will ultimately hit levels we’ve never experienced before.
UK Energy Secretary Chris Huhne says: “We will have a world where there may be lots of shocks. We may well have oil price rises which are similar to the ones that we had in the 1970s, a doubling.”
Energy agrees, but then we’ve been saying this for a long time.
The need then is to be able to produce new liquid fuels in sufficient quantities to be able to replace conventional petrol, diesel and kerosene. The latter of course is used both as a jet fuel and as heating oil.
It’s reasonable to expect that some of the demand for liquid transport fuels will be eventually offset by the introduction of electric vehicles.
However, I believe that, despite the offer of government bribes of £5,000 or so to help you buy an electric car, it is highly unlikely that a rightly sceptical public will ever adopt electric cars in any great number because they are range-restricted, take a long time to charge and the cost of replacing failed batteries is stupid.
That said, they will be great for short urban commuting hops and similar uses such as city delivery vans, although the boss of Allied Vehicles in Glasgow said recently that orders for his firm’s electric vans are currently too low to bring down the cost of production.
There is, of course, also the issue of where the electricity that charges the batteries actually comes from. If we have too many electric vehicles we may need to build more generating capacity and of course the purists will insist that electricity from a coal-fired power station just isn’t green enough.
Then there’s the problem of charging points that, at the moment, are being funded by public money. That has to stop, and probably will. Anyway, most of them are also manufactured overseas which I consider just plain stupid.
Hybrids are a con. They’re really only a mobile generator using a piston engine to drive an alternator to charge a battery that powers an electric motor that drives the wheels. So the energy used to do all that carbon free motoring in town came from burning hydrocarbons. Big deal.
Can you tell I’m a “petrol head” yet? Well of course I am and for good reason. Fact is that the internal combustion engine is a beautifully designed device that is well understood by your local friendly mechanic, and it has an established support infrastructure (garages and petrol pumps).
The only issue with the internal combustion engine is that, of course, we need to find a new, preferably carbon neutral and cheapish fuel source to be able to keep on running them.
We’re actually making some progress here. We know about bio-ethanol and bio-diesel, which tend to come from plant-type sources, but there’s some much better stuff on the near horizon.
Professor Martin Tangney, director of the Biofuel Research Centre at Napier University in Edinburgh, has developed a process to produce Bio Butanol.
Tangney uses a modified process that was originally developed to produce butanol and acetone by fermenting sugar. He has adapted this to use whisky by-products as a starting point.
Butanol is an alcohol but it has 30% more energy than ethanol and you can use it without having to mechanically modify the engine.
In Scotland we also have BioMara . . . a collaborative EU-funded exercise between Scottish and Irish researchers that aims to produce methane gas from algae grown in offshore farms and use that to power adapted vehicles.
BioMara includes six scientific institutes and universities from Scotland, Northern Ireland and Ireland. Researchers are working on a pilot project to trial grow the algae in a 2.5-acre patch of sea off Lewis.
If successful, the trial would evolve into an enormous seaweed farm.
In the same vein, Statoil has agreed to fund US-based Bio Architecture Lab’s (BAL) research, development and demonstration of algae biofuel.
The two companies aim to produce renewable ethanol derived from macro-algae grown off the coast of Norway.
You’re now thinking “how come BP isn’t doing that with someone here?” Good question. I’ll ask them.
Airbus, British Airways, Rolls-Royce, Finnair, Gatwick Airport, IATA and Cranfield University have created a consortium to “take a structured approach to addressing five major considerations for the successful use of fuels from a renewable source like micro-algae”.
Again, they’re talking about offshore sustainable production of commercial quantities of biomass for bio-fuels and presumably bio-kerosene in particular.
Of course, algae eats COand Scottish BioEnergy Ltd is already using algae-based reactors to capture COfrom flue gas at the Glenturret distillery.
So have you spotted the trend yet? It’s easy really. The players in this new world of algae and bacteria-based fuel production are all effectively from the bio-tech or micro-biology world, and this is really exciting because this is one of the areas in which Scotland in particular just happens to excel.
But there’s a long way to go yet. We need to put a lot more effort and money into this.
Intuition tells me that if we do, then we’ll finally find a renewables sector in which Scotland and the UK could really do well and around which we could create a very valuable industry.
Of course it’s not just all going to be algae-based. We’re also good at developing new crops and could use those to produce other fuels as well. There’s also hydrogen, methanol and even ammonia to consider. So plenty to do.
But we need leadership to make this happen and a strategy that will work, and this begs another question. Where the heck is the UK Energy ITI? Is it dead? Because it seems so from where I’m sitting.
