Can We Harness Hydrocarbon Energy without Burning Hydrocarbon Fuels?

Building the Green Economy, Quipu Economic Forum, Renewable Resources, Zero-combustion paradigm ::

8 July 2008 :: by J.E. Robertson

As we search for a new way to fuel the global economy, in the midst of a rapidly spreading climate crisis, skyrocketing petroleum-based fuel prices and the likely imminent moment of peak oil production, it is instructive to look at the possibility that energy we already know how to access might be derived in (not cleaner, but) entirely clean ways. If we can find new sources of hydrocarbon fuels, can we access their energy content without burning them or emitting carbon?

We have also to deal with the problem of plastics. Industrial synthetic polymers have come to permeate our civilization, and indeed we rely on petroleum-based plastics for a wide range of life-saving medical devices and procedures. Without the petroleum necessary to produce those plastics, we face a serious economic readjustment, entirely apart from what petroleum-based fuels or their absence mean for the global economy. 

Perhaps the first question to be asked is whether or not petroleum is running out. Most evidence suggests that the world’s major deposits of petroleum are in fact being diminished at an unsustainable rate, even as global demand increases at (economically and ecologically) alarming rates. The scientific world is not, however, completely unanimous as to the finite nature of petroleum deposits.

In his book, The Deep Hot Biosphere, Thomas Gold, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a professor of physics at Cornell University, puts forth the theory that petroleum is actually a residue of microbial life in a deep Earth biosphere, beneath the Earth’s crust, meaning it is replenished at a rate not directly relative to cycles of surface life and surface-sourced sedimentation. Gold suggests that petroleum is not actually a “fossil fuel”, but is the byproduct of a natural deep Earth life-cycle, which gives us the opportunity to continue to harvest petroleum, if we can find it and tap into it without disrupting the “deep hot biosphere”, or the chemical resources it depends on. 

If we could in fact tap into new sources of replenished petroleum, we could stave off an economic collapse of unprecedented proportions, but could we do so without damaging the environment beyond repair? Current evidence, and scientific consensus, shows that we cannot if we burn the petroleum to obtain energy locked within its molecules. But could we use chemical or even biological (i.e. microbial) processes to unlock the energy tied to the hydrocarbons we have until now burned for their energy?

Metabolic de-oxidization and/or energy extraction, petroleum “reduction” or treatment with biocatalytic enzymes, could allow us to employ petroleum and other hydrocarbons in new ways, to expand the resource-potential and fundamentally alter the modes of extraction and refinement currently in use. We could phase out high-polluting modes of extraction altogether, if we find a way to put in practice on a large scale, the use of bioreactors that are part of more complex energy-cycling ecosystems.

It is important to note that we are talking about a very high bar for innovation, in finding a way to access, harvest, refine and convert petroleum to energy, without a detrimental impact on the natural environment, and without repeating economically destructive conditions that we have seen emerge from the excessive reliance on petroleum as a commodity and on the industry that provides it. It is fair to say this is a noble dream, but an impracticable vision of a clean-carbon future. But the idea cannot be discounted, because should petroleum continue to be available in economically viable amounts, we need to find a way to eliminate the damage it currently brings with it.

We must come to think of this sort of innovative geologically-based energy-extraction process as a viable and even necessary part of the zero-combustion paradigm for powering the future of our global economy. To learn what sort of metabolic processes would be most efficient for extracting useful energy from hydrocarbon molecules, without combustion, emissions or nuclear fission, will mean to lay the groundwork for an entirely seamless transition from the 18th-century industrial economy we are still expanding outward to the 21st-century renewable clean-energy economy we are in such need of achieving.