Efforts to find alternatives to oil are slowly gaining momentum, pushed on by fears about dwindling reserves and global warming. Indeed, sometimes it seems that every newspaper you pick up has a story about one new answer or another, such as biogas, biodiesel or hydrogen among others.
Yet no single fuel has emerged as the shining new star to replace gasoline and diesel.
Nor is there likely to be one, predicts Sheldon Hill, manager of the Alternative Energy Development Business Unit at the Saskatchewan Research Council (SRC).
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“There will be no silver-bullet solution,” Hill says. “There will be no single fuel that allows us to replace fossil fuels.” And he’s not alone in that belief. Other industry experts agree too.
But to be clear, they don’t say it has to be fossil fuels or nothing. In fact, what they’re saying is the exact opposite.
The scientific consensus is that there are going to be several alternatives, creating a future energy landscape made up of a patchwork of different fuels and technologies.
Then the popularity of each fuel will vary across the country. Hill thinks regions will take advantage of the most cost-effective resources available to them.
So where will that leave farmers? No one knows for sure. At least not yet. But initial indications are that our individual farms could be as diverse on a small scale as the country as whole is on a much larger scale.
A few farms are already making progress down this path, and many of the technologies gaining favour on farms are on the leading edge of what’s happening elsewhere.
So lets look at some of the trends, starting with energy sources for farm buildings. Already, small-scale solar and wind energy systems are beginning to appear, providing electricity and heat. But biogas (methane) is one important technology growing in importance for livestock operations.
While a small number of Canadian dairy farms have invested in biogas, it’s mainly the larger U.S. dairies that are using biodigesters to create methane from manure in order to operate a variety of systems, including methane-fuelled generators that produce electricity. Now, Jay Martin, an associate professor at Ohio State University, is working on developing a smaller, simpler and cheaper biodigester that smaller farms could use without a million-dollar investment.
Martin hopes to produce complete kits that individual farmers could install for less than $20,000 so they could begin converting manure into fuel. “Our goal is to make it something a farmer can install himself and keep costs down,” Martin says. While he estimates a commercially-available kit for the average North American farmer is still a couple of years away, farms of various sizes in Europe have already taken to biogas production in a big way. That is due in part to government incentive programs.
An estimated 3,500 farms in Germany alone currently produce biogas, with some of them selling biogasderived electricity to the national grid. Early in 2009, Austrian tractor manufacturer Steyr, a subsidiary of Case IH, released a model that is designed to make use of farm-produced biogas. The tractor runs on a 50-50 blend of biogas and diesel. It will also run on a mix of diesel and natural gas or diesel alone.
Even though the on-farm system required to produce compressed, cleaned biogas of high enough quality to burn in engines is a pretty significant investment itself, Steyr believes enough farmers will be willing to spring for the higher-priced tractors to make it worth while building them. “Taking everything into account, we reckon that the cost of the system (which adds about C$30,000 to the tractor’s price) could be repaid through fuel savings on a crop-growing farm within seven years,” Steyr’s business director Rudi Hinterberger recently told Farmers Weekly, a British magazine.
For small cars and light transportation vehicles, electricity is shaping up as the new energy of choice. Chevrolet has just announced that its Volt, the car that runs entirely on electricity, will hit the market in 2011, as will the electric Nissan Leaf. By 2012, you’ll also be able to buy Toyota’s electric version of the RAV4 and Ford’s Transit Connect commercial van. And then the list will keep growing.
When it comes to small off-road vehicles like the ATV or UTV, things are beginning to follow the small-car lead. Early in 2010, John Deere took its Gator utility vehicle in that direction, introducing an electric version, and Polaris has released its 2010 Ranger E electric side-by-side.
To keep these vehicles powered up, General Electric has just introduced its WattStation recharging outlet for commercial and residential installations. The station can reduce recharge times by as much as two-thirds, and it will be available this year.
Transport Canada recently conducted a study on how electric vehicle performance can be improved in cold winter weather.
Their pilot project managed to find ways to keep an electric minivan running despite low temperatures that would reduce the efficiency of storage batteries. Our climate isn’t the stumbling block it might seem to be for this energy source after all.
But electric battery power isn’t practical for larger vehicles, like heavy-duty pickup trucks or large trucks. And without a large-scale biogas facility on the farm, methane fuelling may not be the answer here either.
So how about hydrogen?
Farms have plenty of wide open spaces ideal for erecting solar panels or power-generating wind turbines that could take advantage of natural resources to create electricity, which can be converted to hydrogen. Producing it that way would create a no-cost fuel, aside from the infrastructure costs.
Hydrogen fuel cells would allow for electric drivelines on a pickup truck or tractor and would eliminate the need for large battery banks, thereby increasing a vehicle’s effective range. There is currently a fleet of hydrogen-powered transit buses operating regular runs in Whistler, B.C. using exactly that technology.
This explains New Holland’s experimental venture into hydrogen power with its NH fuel cell tractor. It was introduced to the public early in 2009, and after making the rounds at farm shows as a conversation piece, it is going back to Europe for a redesign and field trials to test new components. “We know in an over-the-road situation fuel cells do work,” says Paul Trella, New Holland’s product marketing manager for agricultural tractors. “But when you bounce them around and subject them to the natural environment that farm machinery goes through, how durable will this medium be?”
New Holland will soon be able to answer that question. But other questions remain. Although fuel cell technology like that in the NH is very efficient, hydrogen can also be ignited in a regular internal combustion engine, just like gasoline. That would allow farmers to use hydrogen in existing equipment with only some minor modification.
That’s why many others are already using hydrogen. ITM Power PLC of Great Britain has developed a portable hydrogen generating station that fits in a small cargo-shipping container. It can be installed at a company’s own site to produce fuel. The company has entered into a number of high-profile trials evaluating the system. Among those participating and operating hydrogen-powered vehicles is the Scottish Police Services Authority.
But there is a major hurdle yet to be overcome with hydrogen systems.
The technology does not yet exist to store it in large enough quantities
to give vehicles a range comparable to current gasoline engines.
While hydrogen research continues, another group of scientists believes they know a better alternative. It happens to be one already familiar to farmers, anhydrous ammonia. The same gas that benefits crops
as a nitrogen fertilizer may be one of the best alternatives as a fuel,
according to Norman Olson, director of the Beacon Facility at the Iowa
Energy Center at the University of Iowa. Relatively cheap and easy storage is one
of its biggest advantages. “I priced out a five-gallon, 5,000-PSI (hydrogen) storage tank and the cost was $5,000,” Olson explains. “For comparison purposes, a five-gallon propane tank, which is basically what you can use to store ammonia if you change the fittings to steel instead of brass, would store more than twice as much and cost about $60.”
Adding to the storage tank advantage, anhydrous contains 50 per cent more energy per gallon than hydrogen.
Icom, a U. S-based company already specializing in propane conversions for gasoline engines, will offer a dual-fuel ammonia conversion kit to consumers by mid 2011, allowing an engine to run on an ammonia-gasoline, LPG or CNG mix. It will be designed for fuel-injected gasoline engines. Later, the company expects to offer a mono-fuel ammonia conversion eliminating the need for regular gasoline entirely.
Aside from all these options, there are still ethanol and biodiesel to consider. Ethanol blends are already commonly available, and many new engines are biodiesel compatible right off the assembly line. Biodiesel can easily be refined right on the farm from oilseed crops like canola.
Organizations like the Canadian International Grains Institute offer two-day seminars to anyone interested in learning the home-refining process.
But it’s also possible to skip refining entirely and burn straight, raw vegetable oil. One tractor brand, Fendt, already offers a machine designed to exploit that resource. The 820 Greentec, currently available only in Europe, is a dual-fuel model designed specifically to burn either regular diesel or straight raw oil.
All of this means farmers may have more options than anyone when it comes to their future fuel.
In all likelihood you’ll also be the producer of your own energy… in one form or another.CG
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2011 will mark the year when the new generation of off-oil fuels will finally be farm ready
