Green Redux

Dr. Robert M. Gresham, Contributing Editor | TLT Commentary July 2009

A host of problems must be solved if we’re to achieve our goal of living off the sun with maximum efficiency.
 

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KEY CONCEPTS
• Green technology has to make financial sense, and fluctuating crude oil prices make a moving target.
• Green sources of base oils still only work in limited applications.
• The future of green technology could be in converting nonfood bio-mass to industrial products, an inherently clean process.

Based on my experiences last fall attending STLE’s international Joint tribology Conference and the annual meeting held by the American oil Chemists society, I have waxed a bit about all things green, particularly as they pertain to our industry—probably more than you ever wanted to read. In these articles I’ve tried to add perspective and make a few key points.

First, green technology has to be financially sound. The global price of crude oil controls these economics. Green technology has certain inherent costs, as do all technologies, and while we can, through science and engineering, work to reduce these costs, at the end of the day they are what they are. When the global price of crude is high, exceeding these costs by a respectable margin, these green technologies look pretty good. Conversely, green technologies don’t look so good when the global price is low, as it is at the time of writing this article. The biggest problem is price swings, which create a moving target.

Second, technically speaking, despite the efforts of the additive-producing industry, green sources of base oils don’t work very well except in limited applications. If we refine them to the point where they greatly resemble petroleum base oils chemically, then they are not so bad, although still expensive and not very biodegradable. Indeed, like global warming, where the science won’t cooperate with our political or social biases, the lexicon on the subject is changing—from global warming to climate change (that way if it gets cold we can still blame it on man-made sources) or from biodegradable to renewable sourced. Hmm.

Third, whatever we do, we need to have a goal of making our green efforts and processes sustainable in the long-term. This means the goal is to live off the sun with maximum efficiency. In doing so, ideally, we should be able to survive as long as the sun does. An easier way to look at sustainability is meeting the needs of the present without adversely affecting the future, to quote GM’s Jim D’Arcy.

OUR INDUSTRY’S APPROACH 
Those points hopefully having been made, I would like to focus a bit on some of the more elegant scientific achievements of folks in this industry. Recall the goal is to create C18 fatty acids that have relatively few double bonds, resulting in better lubricity and oxidation stability with less refining and additives. So how do we do that?

Some companies have taken the approach of bio-engineering or genetic modification of such plant sources as high-oleic soybeans. The argument in this example is that fewer soybeans are needed, as the yield of useful oils is higher and costs of refining are inherently less per pound.

In another example, a company is taking glucose and sucrose, naturally occurring sugars (in fact sucrose is the same sugar molecule we use for table sugar), and reacting these with fatty acids (three for glucose and eight for sucrose) to make potentially new lubricants. The sucrose-based product, called Sefose, has a molecular weight of about 2500, exhibits a high VI and features outstanding lubricity for specific application in pneumatic mining tools with superior performance to conventional rock drill lubricants.

But we are still using our food for fuel or industrial products. I don’t have a problem with bio-engineering as a technology but only to make food-oriented crops more efficient for making food—not to convert food into nonfood applications. That seems to me to be inherently unsustainable and, as long as we have people in the world starving, feeding them makes more sense. However, converting waste products of food crops or production into nonfood applications is fine.

The key, and I’m speaking as a chemist, is to convert nonfood bio-mass (renewable sourced materials) to industrial products such as base oils via chemical catalysis, bio-catalysis and/or fermentation. These are inherently clean processes from a green, sustainable perspective.

There is a lot of bio-mass in the world. It can be in the form of not particularly useful plants and a wide variety of bacteria and waste products of naturally occurring fermentation processes. Much of this bio-mass is currently involved in excessively slow processes like creating crude oil over the period of a millennia or two. 

Some bio-mass grows very rapidly in relatively low population areas throughout the world. One example might be bamboo. Sure, I eat bamboo shoots on salads from time to time, but it is not a food staple. What if we could harvest bamboo and catalytically convert it into relatively high yields of basic chemical-building blocks like glycerol or propylene glycol?

I’m sure PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals or, as my son says, people eating tasty animals—but we won’t go there) folks may be concerned with harvesting bio-mass that also could be some varmint’s habitat, but there is an enormous amount of available, rapidly growing biomass in places like Asia, parts of Africa, South and Central America and countries like Brazil, India, China, Indonesia, Thailand, Mexico and Australia. These areas, where the climate and flora promotes this kind of rapid growth, would make ideal locations for biomass farms. In these areas the growth, harvesting, conversion to useful products and waste management can be managed as opposed to “raping the environment.” 

Thus, one can envision perhaps not utopia but continuous biomass separators running bio or chemically catalyzed reactions that create building-block chemicals from C1 to as much as C18 for a wide variety of industrial products. Electric power can come largely from nuclear, clean coal and perhaps some percentage of wind.

Will the petroleum industry go away? Of course not, but the world mixing all these technologies is analogous to a diversified investment portfolio. This means less dependence on such forces as resource depletion, geography, weather, politics and social whim.


Bob Gresham is STLE’s director of professional development. You can reach him at rgresham@stle.org.