Towards an Apollo Program for Energy: Part 2

So heres a rough blueprint on technologies that could change things and some
numbers I threw together on what kind of funding might make sense.

The budget for the National Institute of Health is about $29 billion.  I think something
along those lines would be quite reasonable for ensuring our climates future and
energy stability.

This is going to be a pretty link heavy post, and these aren't the lightest of links.  I'm
going to try to boil some of this down, but quite frankly this is a pretty heavy subject and theres only so much boiling I can do so please do try to take a look at some of the links if you can.

22.5 Billion US dollars

• Pretty-These are the technologies that will really make a difference in the
  •   Fusion $3 B (another ITER + seed innovative ideas)
  • Solar $4B    nano-solar, or other methods seed innovation here, to be honest I don't see solar being practical for a while now, but its probably a key component of the long term solution.
  • Wind (reliability, materials) $2B
  • Algae $2B (more on this later, personally I find this a very exciting approach and it might be able to leverage a lot of the stuff coming out of the wider biotech industry).  Heres a nice link , worth taking a look at (more on this below)
  • Geothermal $1B       Some info on this here here and some stuff on a trial run in France here       An interesting technology and worth investigating. Probably not a full solution in and of itself, but could be a useful component, imho.

• Ugly - What follows are technologies that just aren't that pretty.  They have serious drawbacks, and in a perfect world we wouldn't even have to bother with them.  Unfortunately thats not the world we live in and time is running short.  While the long term solution will probably come from the stuff discussed above, averting catastrophe will probably require using some of the stuff below as a stopgap.
  •     Carbon Sequestration -In a nutshell this is storing carbon from fossil fuel emitters underground (where it won't lead to warming), read the links for the full story.  Its actually much more practical than it might appear at first reading and is probably an absolutely critical step in stabilizing near term emissions.
    •       Geological Safety $500 mil
    •      Site exploration and testing $500
    •       Initial Testing Ramp up from $100 mil to 1 bil 
      
    • Coal gasification $500 mil
  • Shale Oil, Research $500 mil           This is an alternative source for oil from shale rock.  A good quick explainer here and more detailed info can be found in this pdf.  This does nothing to solve global warming at all, but is important from a long term energy security perspective since there is a huge amount of it and since the US has huge deposits it helps deal with some of the dependency problems that occur as a result of relying on oil from places tlike the Middle East.  It is also important to be aware of the existence of shale oil because anyone hoping that warming will be averted when normal oil deposits run out is mistaken.  Reserves of both shale oil and coal are huge and will almost certainly be utilized.
    
  •  Nuclear (fission)  (really a messy technology and only really suitable as a last resort...       backup plans may be important here however, and this technology appears to be       quite proven)
    •     Breeder Reactors
      •     Design $500 mil
      •       De-weap $500 mil
    •    pebble bed reactors $500mil
  • Distribution    (Many of the better energy alternative will require a radical rethinking of energy    distribution...  its not enough to have a very high efficiency solar cell, you also need    ways to manage the inherent variability of solar energy)
    •  Battery Tech $2B, one example
    • High temp. superconductors $2B (lots of potential benefits in a wide variety of fields)
    • Digging Robots $1B
    • Feasibility Studies $.5
    •        heres an interesting link on a theoretical European supergrid (fairly low tech)
    •  And heres a more radical proposal for a superconducting supergrid
      

• Increasing Efficiency (nice MIT tech. review article on some of this here)
  •   Automotive research: $500 mil  microhybrids, plug in hybrids, connecting to the grid
  •   Consumer Appliances: $500 mil       -Just automatic deactivation when not in use could really do a lot.
    

But what about corn/soybiodiesel?
Personally I think whats currently being called biodiesel is  just political pork/farm subsidies dressed up as responsibility.  It is simply not practical on the kinds of scales required to actually do something about emissions.
This post on The Energy Blog makes this very clear:
Let me pull a quote out:
"To replace all transportation fuels in the US, we would need roughly 140 billion gallons of biodiesel.  To produce that amount of biodiesel by growing soybeans would require almost 3 billion acres or over 1 billion acres growing canola (rapeseed), at nominal yields of 48 and 127 gallons oil per acre, respectively.(7)  To produce that amount, by growing algae producing 15,000 gallons per acre, would require a land mass of roughly 9.5 million acres (almost 15,000 square miles ). To put these numbers in perspective, consider that the Sonora desert in the southwestern US comprises 120,000 square miles...450 million acres are currently used for crop farming in the US, and over 500 million acres are used as grazing land for farm animals (1).  As has been shown here it is not possible to grow enough of the more conventional crops to meet our fuel needs, but using algae it is possible. "

In summary: algae is practical, corn/soy isn't.  Sadly there is no entrenched group of pro-algae lobbyists, to push things along hover.