Hydrofuel Inc believes that…

Hydrofuel Inc believes that increasing the usage of biofuels is counterproductive to the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In addition, the increasing use of biofuels reduces global food available while increasing food costs. Biofuel usage in motor fuels should be reduced or eliminated and other carbon-free fuels from renewable sources should be used instead.
The most cost-effective feedstock for biofuels is sugarcane, of which there is a large supply in Brazil. Unlike sugarcane, corn-based biofuels predominately used in North America require large government subsidies in order to be competitive with fossil fuels. There must be a level playing field for all fuels where market forces determine winners and losers and none receive subsidies. The true cost of each fuel should reflect the cradle-to-grave lifecycle costs and environment impacts their usage.
Hydrofuel Inc. and UOIT (University of Ontario Institute of Technology) submitted a report, CLEAN FUEL STANDARD DISCUSSION PAPER, to Federal government on 2017-04-11 in response to a request for comments about the new federal renewable fuels standard. The paper recommended the following:
WHICH ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS SHOULD BE CONSIDERED? A life cycle is the set of phases of a product or service system, from the extraction of natural resources to last removal. Overall environmental impact of any process is not complete if only operation is considered, all the life steps from resource extraction to disposal during the lifetime of a product or process should be considered. The selection of future vehicle options can strongly depend on the emission characteristics. As the world struggles with greenhouse gas emission reduction policies, global warming potential is the main characteristics to compare the total CO2 equivalent emission from the alternative vehicles. Abiotic depletion, human toxicity, ozone layer depletion appear to play an important role for decision of using clean transportation vehicles because there are vast amount of road vehicles in the cities which can cause severe side effects. Moreover, when considering alternative fuels, issues such as land use, fertilizer use, water for irrigation, waste products etc. are necessary points to be addressed. Therefore, indirect land-use changes (ILUC) should be also considered. Indirect land-use changes can also have important social and environmental impacts which can include biodiversity, water quality, food prices and supply, community and cultural stability. Assessing the indirect land-use changes is a knowns as challenging topic. Some methods of quantifying indirect land-use changes can be listed as follows: •Implementing empirical calculations based on previously experienced indirect land-use changes •Developing life cycle analyses methodology with lower uncertainty ranges •Developing integrated models combining the life cycle, sustainability, efficiency, social cost etc. The following environmental impact categories represent higher significance in life cycle assessment approach, hence suggested to be included in decision making processes: •Global warming potential is the main characteristics to be compare the total CO2 equivalent emission from any source. •Abiotic resources are natural resources including energy resources. Since fossil fuels resources are declining gradually, abiotic depletion potential is also a significant category. •Human toxicity may play an important role for decision of using alternative fuels. •Acidification potential is for acidifying substances which causes a wide range of impacts on soil, groundwater, surface water, organisms, ecosystems and materials. •Marine aquatic eco-toxicity refers to impacts of toxic substances on marine aquatic ecosystems which is more important for maritime transportation sector. •Land occupation/land use refers to the total arrangements, activities and inputs undertaken in a certain land cover type. The term land use is also used in the sense of the social and economic purposes for which land is managed.
The Hydrofuel/UOIT RFS submission also recommended that, in order for renewable fuel technology to compete on its own merits and for the market to decide which technology has the best merits, energy consumers must ultimately participate in selection of renewable fuels. For a technology-neutral carbon policy, there must be a completely level playing field and there is more to the life cycle environmental impact of the fuel than the amount of carbon dioxide generated from the its combustion. Focusing on carbon dioxide alone precludes any consideration of the global warming potential of other greenhouse gas emissions. Specifically, there are nine categories of life cycle environmental impacts caused by the production and utilization of energy that must be considered for a completely level playing field: •Abiotic Depletion •Acidification •Eutrophication •Global Warming •Human Toxicity •Ozone Layer Depletion •Terrestrial Ecotoxicity •Marine Aquatic Eco-Toxicity •Land Occupation/Land Use
Hydrofuel Inc. recommends the implementation of a flow-through carbon tax, which would work much like the GST and be designed to improve upon the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by including other detrimental effects on the environment. Rather than basing the tax rate solely on the carbon content of the fuel, global warming would be one of the nine environmental impact categories.
Conceivably, some fuels could have a beneficial effect on a particular type of pollution. In this case, such a process should be given a negative environmental impact factor to reduce its tax rate. An environmental impact multiplier would then be applied to the baseline rate that takes into account the nine environmental impact categories. Each environmental impact category would have an assessment scale of -10 to 10. The environmental impact multiplier would then be based on the sum of the nine assessments.
A flow-through carbon tax would allow any processing of fuels from their initial creation (eg, wellhead) to their end use to be rewarded or penalized for its net effect on the environmental impact categories. For example, biomass pyrolysis process to manufacture bio-oil would be given a credit for any sequestered biochar.
Ultimately, only electricity or fuels with a zero or negative environmental impact assessment would have a zero carbon tax rate. The cost of the inputs of varying environmental impacts used to generate the final fuel product would be included in the retail cost of the fuel. This would ensure that that the lowest-cost fuel is produced with the lowest environmental impact.
Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change appears to believe that ethanol and biodiesel are green fuels that can help Ontario meet GHG emission reduction targets. However, it is impossible to grow enough biofuel feedstock (typically from corn in North America) for this fuel to displace petroleum to any great extent. As crops are grown for fuel rather than food, this diversion of resources places upward pressure on the price of food. Please refer to the OECD article about rising food prices as well as the OECD report entitled "BIOFUELS: IS THE CURE WORSE THAN THE DISEASE?" found the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations web site:
The OECD has said biofuels may "offer a cure that is worse than the disease they are seeking to heal". "The current push to expand the use of biofuels is creating unsustainable tension that will disrupt world markets without generating significant environmental benefits." "When such impacts as soil acidification, fertilizer use, biodiversity loss and toxicity of agricultural pesticides are taken into account, the overall environmental impacts of ethanol and biodiesel can very easily exceed those of petrol and mineral diesel."
In the Science Magazine article, USE OF U.S. CROPLANDS FOR BIOFUELS INCREASES GREENHOUSE GASES THROUGH EMISSIONS FROM LAND-USE CHANGE, the authors came to the following conclusion:
Most prior studies have found that substituting biofuels for gasoline will reduce greenhouse gases because biofuels sequester carbon through the growth of the feedstock. These analyses have failed to count the carbon emissions that occur as farmers worldwide respond to higher prices and convert forest and grassland to new cropland to replace the grain (or cropland) diverted to biofuels. By using a worldwide agricultural model to estimate emissions from land-use change, we found that corn-based ethanol, instead of producing a 20% savings, nearly doubles greenhouse emissions over 30 years and increases greenhouse gases for 167 years. Biofuels from switchgrass, if grown on U.S. corn lands, increase emissions by 50%. This result raises concerns about large biofuel mandates and highlights the value of using waste products.
Another issue with increasing the substitution of fossil fuels with biofuels is the increase in nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions. Authors of the Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics discussion paper, N2O RELEASE FROM AGRO-BIOFUEL PRODUCTION NEGATES GLOBAL WARMING REDUCTION BY REPLACING FOSSIL FUELS, have found that:
When the extra N2O emission from biofuel production is calculated in “CO2-equivalent” global warming terms, and compared with the quasi-cooling effect of “saving” emissions of fossil fuel derived CO2, the outcome is that the production of commonly used biofuels, such as biodiesel from rapeseed and bioethanol from corn (maize), depending on N fertilizer uptake efficiency by the plants, can contribute as much or more to global warming by N2O emissions than cooling by fossil fuel savings.
The holy grail of "green" fuels is hydrogen, an element that is also very scarce in its pure form on earth. Green in the sense that it is produced from renewable sources, the most common being the electrolytic cracking of water. Hydrogen may also be produced from "brown" sources such as the refining of petroleum. Brown in the sense that by-products of this production are greenhouse gases and other forms of pollution. Almost all of the world's H2 is produced by steam reforming of natural gas, or as by-products of petroleum refining. Relatively little hydrogen is currently produced by electrolysis although there is no technical reason that it can't be produced in large-scale wind farms in areas rich in wind resources such as the US Midwest, Canadian Prairie Provinces, and Labrador.
An alternative to hydrogen is anhydrous ammonia (NH3), which on a volume basis is a much better hydrogen carrier than even liquefied hydrogen. Many countries (like Australia and Japan) recognize anhydrous ammonia as a fuel and it's the same chemical that farmers inject into the ground as fertilizer. Because it does not occur naturally in its pure form on our planet and must be manufactured, we can consider it an energy carrier that can easily be used a motor fuel.
The energy density of liquefied hydrogen is 8,491 kJ/litre compared to ammonia's 11,308 kJ/litre. Although ammonia contains 17.65% of hydrogen by weight, the fact that there are 3 hydrogen atoms attached to a single nitrogen atom allows ammonia to contain about 48% more hydrogen by volume than even liquefied hydrogen. That is to say, a cubic meter of liquid hydrogen contains 71 kg of hydrogen compared with 105 kg for liquid anhydrous ammonia.
Hydrogen's physical properties make it very difficult to handle. Because it is such a low density gas, very high pressures must be used to transport compressed hydrogen gas and this results in very low energy densities. The low energy density of compressed hydrogen gas makes storage and transport very expensive. Transporting compressed hydrogen gas any significant distance by truck can consume more energy in diesel fuel than what is contained in hydrogen. Liquefied hydrogen is obviously more energy dense than compressed hydrogen gas but a significant amount of energy must be expended to liquefy hydrogen and keep it refrigerated because its boiling point is –423 ºF (–253 ºC). Liquefaction requires about 30% of the energy content of liquid hydrogen while compression to 800 bar requires about 10-15% of energy carried by the hydrogen.
Hydrogen's molecules are very small and difficult to contain. Hydrogen will slowly leak out from hoses and its rate of leakage is much higher than larger molecule gases like ammonia and propane. Hydrogen also causes embrittlement in metals which requires periodic replacement of metallic tubing, valves, and tanks.
Hydrogen is typically transported as a compressed gas and a 40 ton truck that can carry 26 tons of gasoline can only carry about 400 kg (0.4 tonnes) of compressed hydrogen due to the weight of the high pressure hydrogen tanks.
Ammonia, in comparison, stores and handles very much like LPG. Its boiling point is -33.35 °C (-28.03 °F). Propane, the main constituent of LPG, has a boiling point of -42.07 °C (-43.73 °F). On a hot day, a tank of NH3 at 50°C (122°F) will have a pressure of 2032 kPa (295 psi) compared with propane at 1729 kPa (251 psi), which allows the use of readily available steel storage tanks without any special handling requirements.
Hydrofuel Inc already has technology to easily substitute diesel fuel with carbon-free NH3 through our diesel-NH3 dual fuel systems. This type of diesel fuel system is well established and is already commercially available for heavy duty vehicles using the Cummins Westport diesel-LNG dual fuel system. Hydrofuel Inc’s diesel-NH3 dual fuel systems are designed to be used for both retrofits and OEM systems. Unlike Hydrofuel’s system, the performance of the Cummins Westport fuel system is severely downgraded when operating without LNG. Hydrofuel with its partner UOIT have collaborated on several MITACS projects about viability of NH3 as carbon-free renewable fuel and are developing several technologies to manufacture and use NH3 as and energy currency and motor fuel.
While it is possible to retrofit gasoline-fueled vehicles with NH3 fuel systems, Hydrofuel Inc recognizes that both passenger vehicles and light-duty trucks are moving towards hybrid-electric and battery-electric operation. Although batteries are becoming more cost-effective, the increasing demand for lithium will ultimately cause the price of this commodity to rise. Hydrofuel and UOIT are developing NH3 fuel cell technology that can eliminate gasoline usage in hybrid-electric vehicles and reduce the need for battery-electric vehicles. Using NH3 fuel cells, a simple way to refuel an NH3-Hybrid vehicle would be to either swap out the NH3 fuel tank (as is already done with lift-trucks) or to fill the permanent NH3 fuel tank (as is already done with commercially-available propane bi-fuel systems).
The increasing cost of electricity in Ontario have adversely affected many of its industries. Many companies are now avoiding purchasing power from public utilities due to high costs (including the Global Adjustment charge) by generating their own power. Globally, the diesel generator market is growing and global annual diesel genset capacity additions have had a 5.8% compound annual growth rate. The capacity additions are set to nearly double to 103.7 GW from 2015 to 2024 according to the TechSci Research Report, GLOBAL DIESEL GENSET MARKET FORECAST AND OPPORTUNITIES 2019. This growth in diesel generator capacity will obviously increase their net emissions, which can be mitigated by carbon-free fuel technology developed by Hydrofuel Inc and UOIT here in Ontario.
REFERENCES https://hub.globalccsinstitute.com/publications/biofuels-markets-target… http://nh3fuel.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=48&Itemid=… http://nh3fuel.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=29&Itemid=… http://www.oecd.org/trade/agricultural-trade/40847088.pdf http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/9/3/39411732.pdf http://renewables.morris.umn.edu/wind/conferences/2007/Reese-WindToAmmo… https://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/8/389/2008/acp-8-389-2008.pdf http://www.energyjustice.net/files/ethanol/ghg/2008-Searchinger-Science… https://www.evernote.com/shard/s182/sh/34217ada-ebc8-4871-bd63-3e67dec9…

[Original Comment ID: 212241]