Archive for October, 2008

Blending & Retailing Ethanol

Wednesday, October 29th, 2008

Today the American Coalition for Ethanol (ACE), along with the Ethanol Promotion & Information Council (EPIC) presented a webinar that dealt with several of the key challenges facing ethanol retailers as they begin to offer increasing quantities of E85 (85% ethanol). Although the presentation was targeted at gasoline retailers, the information was of interest to anyone watching the emergence of ethanol in the U.S. as a significant transportation fuel. The presenter was Ron Lamberty, VP of Market Development for ACE, and himself an owner of gasoline retail establishments.

Currently there are just over 1,500 retail refueling stations offering E85 ethanol (85% ethanol), not quite 1% of the 160,000 total stations throughout the U.S. About 70% of the retail refueling stations in the U.S. offer ethanol blends, usually E10 (10% ethanol). There are 171 ethanol plants with a capacity of 10.4 billion gallons per year, and there are 28 plants under construction with the capacity to produce another 2.8 billion gallons per year. Ethanol now supplies 7% of the fuel for used in the U.S. for light vehicles.

The first topic covered regarded the question of food vs. fuel. This is a broad topic, of course, but Lamberty made the point that in the case of corn grown in the U.S., even though the corn allocated to ethanol distillation rose from 2.3 billion bushels in 2007 to 3.1 billion bushels in 2008, an increase of 35%, the total corn crop in the U.S. rose from 10.5 billion bushels to 12.9 billion bushels, an increase of 24%. Put another way, the quantity of corn grown for fuel in the U.S. between 2007 and 2008 increased by 800 million bushels, but the quantity of corn grown for food during those same two years increased by 1.7 billion bushels, more than twice as much.

In some respects the question of food vs. fuel is going to go away pretty soon anyway, both because crop yields continue to increase worldwide faster now than human population increase, and also because cellulosic ethanol is on the verge of being produced in commercial quantities. In the table below, it can be seen that the federal renewable fuel standard calls for corn ethanol production to peak at under 15 billion barrels per year, which they are fast approaching. The rest of the targeted 35 billion barrels, nearly 20 million barrels, is mandated to come from cellulosic feedstock. As we document in our feature “Cellulosic Ethanol,” there is feedstock in the U.S. sufficient to supply many times this 20 million barrel annual target.
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RENEWABLE FUEL STANDARD
The U.S. renewable fuel standard calls for 35 billion gallons per year
by 2022, with cellulosic ethanol taking over the primary share by then.
(Source: American Coalition for Ethanol)

One of the most interesting challenges to blending and retailing ethanol relates to the so-called “blend wall,” which refers to the gap between how much E10 consumers can absorb, and the supply of ethanol. Basically if the supply of vehicles who can utilize E85 doesn’t increase fast enough, too much of the ethanol being produced has nowhere to go but into the E10 mixes, and at current annual production of 10+ billion barrels per year, ethanol is already being mixed into 70% of all gasoline sold.

The table below shows the gap projected between the rise of E85 capable vehicles who can use up 8.5 times as much ethanol with every gallon they purchase, and the projected supply of ethanol. As can be seen, in the period beginning around 2010 and lasting about six years, there is a gap between line that depicts total supply of ethanol, and the solid light (E85) and dark (E10) green area that depicts the total consumption capacity of ethanol.
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THE ETHANOL BLEND WALL
Beginning in 2010 there is a projected gap where the supply of
ethanol could exceed the capacity of the U.S. vehicle fleet to aborb it.
(Source: American Coalition for Ethanol)

The solution to the challenge faced by the projected blend wall is to put more E85 flexfuel vehicles onto the road. But the U.S. automotive fleet only turns over once every 17 years, and out of 240 million cars on the road, only 7 million are currently E85 capable. U.S. automakers are moving quickly towards offering 50% of all new models in flexfuel mode, but it will take several more years before enough of these cars are on the road.

Along with flexfuel vehicles that are explicitly designed to run on E85, however, there is another solution to the blend wall, which is to adjust upwards what percentage of ethanol can be mixed into regular gasoline. Currently E10, 10% ethanol, 90% gasoline, is considered a safe fuel blend for any vehicle. But “mid-blend” fuels, such as E15, E20 and E30, containing 15%, 20%, and 30% ethanol respectively, according to Lamberty, can also run reliably in regular vehicles. Just moving the blend wall standard from E10 to E15 would solve the blend wall problem, and allow ethanol production to continue to increase without disruption.

There are studies now in progress that were noted by Lamberty, including a DOE Oak Ridge finding that E20 is fine in regular engines. Lamberty also cited recent University of North Dakota study which he said indicated non flexfuel cars can run well on E20 and E30 and even on E40. Lamberty also noted the retail stations who have been offering mid-blends have yet to receive a complaint or damage claim from a vehicle owner. Currently the question appears not whether or not a mid-blend ethanol fuel will immediately damage a regular vehicle, but what the long-term impact may be. One of the commenters during the presentation stated they had been fueling their car with E20 and E30 for 70,000 miles - on a car that already had over 200,000 miles logged - and had no problems to-date. Additional study of the long-term impact is going to be needed before, for example, major automakers are going to be comfortable providing warranty protection for regular cars that use mid-blend fuel.

Another barrier to adoption of ethanol fuel is the cost of the pumping systems at the retail outlets. To install a new tank, pipes, pumps, wiring, island, canopy, etc., in order to sell E85 can cost a retailer $100,000 or more. A terrific innovation that can greatly reduce this cost is to use what is called “blender pump” technology, where existing tanks are used. Since retailers offering E85 typically use the same underground tank they previously used to store premium gasoline, the blender pump can draw from an E85 tank as well as from an unleaded tank, and mix the fuel to whatever specification the retailer chooses.
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HOW AN ETHANOL BLENDING PUMP OPERATES
A blending pump can utilize two tanks, one with either E85 or E100,
one with unleaded gasoline, and blend any mixture the owner specifies.
(Source: American Coalition for Ethanol)

Blender pumps have a variety of benefits. Because they cost between $10,000 and $20,000, but take away the need to install a new underground tank, they greatly reduce the costs for a station to begin to offer E85. They also can blend E85 on demand, meaning the retailer can purchase 100% ethanol directly from the refinery if they wish. They also make it possible to vary the blend of E85 onsite - allowing the retailier to comply with state regulations that actually vary the percentage of ethanol in E85 from between 75% to 85% depending on the region and the time of year. Finally, blender pumps make it possible for retailers to use the same equipment to offer mid-blends whenever they choose.

The future of ethanol in the U.S. appears promising from several perspectives: If vehicles indeed can run on mid-blends, there is less pressure to precipitously introduce flexfuel vehicles. Using blender pump technology, retailers may be able to begin introducing ethanol at their stations at far less expense. It is already clear there is cellulosic feedstock in the U.S. - in the form of forest slash, municipal waste, flue gas, crop residue, as well as energy crops - to supply raw material for 100+ billion gallons of ethanol per year. The real remaining question is how fast cellulosic ethanol refining technologies can be commercialized and brought into production.

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Posted in Biofuel, Ethanol | 1 Comment »

BlueFire Ethanol

Tuesday, October 21st, 2008

Concentrated acid hydrolysis will transform virtually any cellulosic feed into fermentable sugars. BlueFire Ethanol, located in Irvine, California, has developed an advanced, proprietary version of this process which they believe could make them the first company to deploy a commercial scale cellulose to ethanol refinery that generates a return to its investors.

The process relies on reusing more than 96% of the sulphuric acid that is used to initially break down the cellulose from the lignin, as well as using the lignin to provide up to 70% of the total plant’s energy requirements. Although from the diagram (below) it doesn’t appear BlueFire’s process is simple, in reality it is one of the most straightforward and proven cellulose to ethanol processes known. BlueFire has adapted and improved a process that was used in WWII era Germany at an industrial scale to refine vast amounts of ethanol from cellulosic feedstock, and pilot plants already operated by BlueFire have successfully refined ethanol from sorted municipal solid waste, wood chips, as well as rice and wheat straw.

In summary, the process might be described as follows: Waste biomass, ground and dried, is mixed with sulphuric acid and reduced to a paste and heated in the 1st stage hydrolyser - depending on the feedstock this process may be repeated in a 2nd hydrolyser.  The hydrolyzed cellulose and hemicellulose, along with the acid, is then separated from the lignin in a plate and filter press.  The lignin is used for fuel for process steam, feedstock drying, and plant power.  The acid and sugar solution that has been separated from the lignin is itself separated, with 96% of the acid being extracted for reuse.  The sugar solution is then fermented with yeast and distilled, with the water captured for reuse and the ethanol collected for distribution.
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CONVERSION OF CELLULOSE TO SUGARS USING CONCENTRATED ACID HYDROLYSIS

A proven method, reusing the acid and water inputs, and using the waste lignin
to generate most of the energy required, makes BlueFire’s technology an
attractive contender to be first to commercially refine ethanol from cellulose.
(Photo: BlueFire Ethanol)

One convincing aspect of this process regards the synergy created by using the lignin for heat energy and the cellulose for ethanol fuel.  If all of the biomass were burned to create electricity, the energy efficiency would be about 25% - that is, an efficient biomass plant will require 13,000 BTUs of biomass feedstock to generate one kilowatt-hour, which is about 3,420 BTUs.  At 15.0 million BTUs per ton (on the high side) of biomass and at a wholesale electricity price of $.07 per kWh a biomass electricity plant operating at a 25% efficiency will earn $77 per ton.  But using BlueFire’s process, each ton of biomass can be refined into 70 gallons of ethanol, which at $2.00 per gallon earns nearly twice as much, $140 per ton - and, the manufacturing costs are lowered because the lignin from the feedstock is still used to provide most of the energy requirements of the refinery.

BlueFire Ethanol has already received DOE funding and a conditional use permit from Los Angeles County to begin construction of a commercial scale refinery to produce ethanol from biowaste.  Sited next to a landfill in Lancaster, California, this plant will be able to use municipal waste feedstock for which there is already a preexisting collection and delivery.  One of the advantages of processes such as BlueFire’s, that can use municipal solid waste as feedstock, is the yield of waste relative to the territory surrounding the plant is quite high, and already serviced anyway.  But instead of going into the landfill, the BlueFire’s Lancaster facility will divert 125 tons per day into the refinery to produce 3.2 million gallons of ethanol per year.

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Posted in Biofuel, Ethanol | 3 Comments »

Renewable Electricity Dominates California Utility Plans

Monday, October 20th, 2008

On Thursday 10-16-08 I attended the User Group meeting of Plexos Solutions LLC, a boutique firm providing software and consulting to the rapidly changing California electric market. One of the presentations covered issues surrounding integration of renewable energy resources into the California Independent System Operator (CAISO). This is important to sustainable energy investors because virtually all the growth in generating capacity is forecast to come from renewable resources. While the fundamentals of this market have been overwhelmed by broader market conditions this last month, over time the fundamentals provide the tailwind that will lift stocks. And the growth expectations for renewables are very high in the California market.

Over the period 2007 - 2012 the CAISO is planning for increases over existing capacity of:

5,053 MW of wind, a 187% increase,
1,064 MW of geothermal, a 68% increase,
946 MW of concentrating solar, a 203% increase,
508 MW of utility scale PV solar, a 2,032% increase, and
221 MW of biomass, a 28% increase
These are huge numbers representing billions of dollars of projects and electric revenues. Striking are the growth expectations for the two main solar approaches.

The ISO Control Room in Folsom directs the flow
of electricity and ensures access to 25,000 circuit
miles of high-voltage, long distance power lines.
(Photo: California ISO)

In the concentrating solar sector, the state currently has 354 MW of large projects operating with the last one completed in 1990, 18 years ago.

Most of this capacity is owned by FPL Energy, part of a large regulated utility. So the new capacity has to come from a sector that hasn’t, in California at least, been able to construct a project for many years. Equally noticeable it the paucity of publicly traded companies in the concentrating solar sector. Solar Millennium (S2M.DE) is one the few with significant concentrating solar activity.

The state currently has 8 projects with 3,689 MW of large concentrating solar projects in the permitting pipeline. But these numbers are deceptive. Of the 8, two projects are actually “solar/thermal” hybrids like the existing operating projects. These two projects represent 1,180 MW of capacity with 112 MW attributable to solar. The remaining 6 projects are a gamut of technologies ranging from troughs, reflectors, towers, and Sterling engines. These projects are all owned by private companies or municipal utilities and currently don’t present an opportunity for public market investors.

The PV solar sector provides more avenues for public investors to participate via investment in the PV supply chain. If the numbers work out the utility market represents a multi-year, very large opportunity. Let’s take a look.

As of the end of 2007 California had an estimated 279 MW of installed PV in homes and businesses and 25 MW of utility scale projects. This makes sense since the home and business markets are net metering against retail rates whereas utility scale projects have to compete against wholesale markets. So the premise is that PV solar is now becoming sufficiently competitive at the wholesale level to install over 500 MW in the next 5 years.

One of the first test cases was recently announced. On July 10, 2008 the California Public Utilities Commission approved a 7.5 MW contract between First Solar’s (FSLR) FSE Blythe project and Southern California Edison. Unfortunately much of the economic information was not disclosed but some key data can be gleaned from the record. First, the company is projecting an excellent 27% capacity factor for the project, significantly higher than typical estimates for PV projects. But equally important is the company is pursing the development receiving a price at or below the “market reference price” which is based on a highly efficient modern thermal plant. After accounting for some messy seasonal and time-of-use factors I calculate the project will receive approximately USD 0.14/kWh on average plus a 30% tax credit now that the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 passed. If First Solar can make money at this project then they are very near the holy grail of grid parity (at least until the credit expires December 31, 2016). And the utility systems can, according to the CAISO, absorb large amounts of solar power for years to come. Game on.

Mark Henwood is the founder of Camino Energy, an information provider specializing in globally traded sustainable energy stocks.

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Posted in Energy, Geothermal, Investment, Photovoltaic, Solar, Solar Thermal, Wind | 1 Comment »

Using Soybeans to Create Nanoparticles

Tuesday, October 14th, 2008

Nanoparticles are all the rage for a variety of different applications, ranging from treatments for cancer to use in automobile sensors. Trouble is, the manmade nanomorsels have been raising concern about side effects in humans and the environment.

A University of Missouri research team has devised a method for creating nanoparticles that don’t have negative side effects. And the work has garnered the scientists international recognition.

The team found that when you submerge gold salts into water and then add soybeans, gold nanoparticles are created. The procedure is simple but can be used in creating very complex nanoengineered components.

The beauty of this green process, created by the head Missouri researcher Kattesh Katti, is that it doesn’t involve the use of any synthetic chemicals, so no toxic waste is generated.

The versatile midwestern soybean - first used
for food and feed, then for fuel, and now they
are also promising nanotech building blocks.

The water pulls out a phytochemical from the soybeans that is effective in reducing the gold to nanoparticles.

Another phytochemical from the soybean also interacts with the nanoparticles and helps stabilize them so that they don’t fuse with nearby particles. The research work was supported by the National Cancer Institute.

The soybean-inspired extraction is just one of the ways by which life sciences and new engineering processes will converge over the next several years. This is likely to open a broad range of opportunities for startups and large companies looking to reduce their carbon footprint and boost energy efficiency across business units.

Another notable effort is underway some 1,500 miles to the west of Missouri. Researchers at the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University have started putting the micromachinery of living cells to work to create nanostructures inside of a living cell.

More specifically, the focus of the research is to use what is known as structural DNA nanotechnology, which gathers up molecular building blocks of DNA and allows for other different chemical components to be wrapped into the assembled structure.

What this work promises to do is overcome some of the shortcomings of having to chemically synthesize all of the material used in DNA nanotechnology from scratch. To date, it has strictly been a test tube science, where researchers have developed many toolboxes for making different DNA nanostructures to attach and organize other molecules, including nanoparticles and other biomolecules.

The researchers recognize that they’re still at the early stages of this work and need to test the tolerance limits for how much artificial DNA can be handled by the cellular machinery. No doubt there is a great deal of interest in this line of research, which could lead to some very intriguing opportunities. Lee Bruno

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Posted in CleanTech, Nature, Plants | No Comments »

GM Volt On Track for 2010

Tuesday, October 7th, 2008

With Tesla now shipping 10+ vehicles per week, and other automakers, small and large, increasingly announcing electric vehicle programs, what is the latest on the Chevy Volt? At this point, with about 110 weeks to go before the Volt is going to be in showrooms, are they on track? We got an update last week from GM spokesperson Rob Peterson, as well as access to photos of the final Volt exterior and interior design. Here’s what we know:

GM is currently testing two “mule” vehicles with prototype components in an old Malibu body. By the end of this year GM expects to have the next generation of test vehicles in service, using production intent propulsion and chassis components. There will be over 30 of these vehicles, many of which will be used for crash safety testing.



The battery remains the biggest wild card in GM’s development program. While GM is confident they have a viable battery at this point, there are many performance variables associated with the battery that they still need to fully understand and manage. As Peterson put it, “right now is a very important development period for the battery, we are learning the capabilities of the battery relating to safety, protection, and optimization.”  Peterson said GM hopes to have a production contract in place with at least one of their battery suppliers by the end of the year.  Currently they are sourcing batteries for testing from LG Chem and A123 Systems.



When asked how much GM intends to charge for the car, Peterson was not specific, noting the price will depend on a variety of factors that can’t be assessed two years ahead of time.  Market conditions in 2010 will be a variable, as will the costs.  While GM has a pretty good idea of what the Volt will cost at this point, until they have a contract with their battery supplier, one major variable remains unclear.  But Peterson emphasized the choice of Chevy to deliver their first extended range electric vehicle was a clear statement of intent - “build an affordable car that fits people’s lifestyles; four seats and a long range capability.”



The Volt remains a unique design, insofar as it has an all-electric drivetrain, but also has an onboard gasoline engine that turns a generator.  This makes the Volt distinct from 100% battery powered vehicles such as the Tesla Roadster, but also distinct from all hybrid cars currently on the road, which use complex transmissions to allow the onboard gasoline engine to share traction responsibilities with the electric motors.  By completely disconnecting the gasoline engine from the drivetrain, the Volt’s onboard gasoline engine can operate at a constant RPM, allowing extremely efficient use of fuel.  This innovation also relieves Volt designers of the need for a complex and very expensive transmission, since electric motors have an extraordinary range of functional RPM.  This innovation also allows GM to downsize the battery, which is not an option on a 100% battery powered vehicle, and this also greatly lowers costs.  The Volt is designed to deliver 50 MPG on gasoline only, a 440 mile combined range, and for around town, a 40 mile range operating exclusively on electricity.  The Volt is not just another plug-in hybrid.



As Peterson put it, “there are a lot of engineers at GM who could retrofit a car and build a plug-in hybrid in a few days, but that is not a repeatable process for mass vehicles.”  The fact that not one other major automaker has a credible plan to deliver an extended range electric vehicle (EREV, also referred to as a series hybrid), is indicative of just how much is required to make this leap.  But it is also likely the EREV design will become the standard for light vehicles in the coming years.

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Posted in Green Cars, Vehicles | 4 Comments »

Biofuel Feedstock

Friday, October 3rd, 2008

When analysing the potential of biofuel, one of the prevailing questions is whether or not there is sufficient land on earth to deliver adequate food if substantial percentages of land are allocated to biofuel crops. In our report earlier this year “Cellulosic Ethanol” it is clear, in the U.S. at least, that while substantial quantities of ethanol per year may eventually be refined from municipal waste streams, crop residue, winter cover crops, and forest thinning, in order to completely replace petroleum-based transportation fuels, dedicated energy crops will also be necessary. So is there enough land?

One of the key variables often overlooked when asking this question regards yield per acre - not only for energy crops, but for food crops. For example, new strains of dedicated energy crops such as miscanthus, switchgrass and sorghum are already yielding 12+ tons per acre, which at 100 gallons per ton translates into 1,200 gallons per acre.  By contrast, first generation distillation of corn ethanol is only yielding about 400 gallons per acre.  Several experts, including Dr. Richard Hamilton, CEO of Ceres, Inc., a Southern California based company who is genetically engineering energy crops, and also Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures, the noted venture capitalist who has invested in several biofuel companies, maintain the yields of dedicated energy crops can go as high as 25 tons per acre.  This would equate to 2,500 gallons per acre, or 38,000 barrels per square mile per year.

This is a dramatic contrast - the difference between what dedicated energy crops yield today vs. where they might go within a generation. To replace roughly 30 billion gallons of petroleum per year, which is current global consumption, using distilled corn at a rate of 400 gallons per acre would require nearly 5.0 million square miles of land; using refined cellulose from dedicated high yield energy crops at a rate of 2,500 gallons per acre would require about 750,000 square miles of land.  This is still a staggering amount of land, but given there are about 10 million square miles of arable farmland on earth, it is not an unthinkable amount of land to allocate to energy crops - particularly since ethanol and other transportation fuels will also be sourced from waste streams and other sources.  So is there enough land?

The answer depends on what assumptions one makes regarding yields per acre for food crops.  And in this area the data indicates surprising potential for yields worldwide to register sharp increases in the coming years.  Despite the often heard suggestion that we have already had our global revolution in yields (the first “green revolution”), there is still a vast disparity between yields using modern agricultural techniques and modern strains of crop seed, and the yields using traditional subsistence agriculture.  Crossing this gulf by bringing significant portions of the world’s agricultural land into the 21st century would completely eliminate food scarcity.

For example, corn yields in the USA in 2005 averaged 149 bushels per acre.  The global average, however, was only 75 bushels per acre.  Agricultural powerhouses such as Brazil and Argentina, respectively, only averaged 54 bushels per acre and 109 bushels per acre.  Technologically advanced nations with the capacity to increase yields if they prioritized this effort, such as China and India, only delivered 80 bushels per acre, and 31 bushes per acre, respectively. 

Another way of analysing this is to compare the global average yield for major food crops as a percentage of the commercial yields being delivered by the top 10% of acreage for that crop.  The figures, again, are dramatic:  For corn, the global average yield is only 29% of the average yield by the top 10% of corn producing acreage; for wheat, 38%; for rice, 43%.  Major grain crops worldwide have the potential to increase their yields sufficiently to easily feed 9.0 billion people simply by adopting 21st century techniques.  As Richard Hamilton at Ceres puts it, “we don’t have a shortage of crop land, we have a shortage of agricultural technology.”

Clearly there are issues with food production that go beyond land - ensuring adequate irrigation and addressing concerns about genetically modified crops, for example.  But these modern crops are designed to replace nutrients in the soil and deliver these high yields with relatively minimal water inputs.  Nations that embrace modern agricultural methods are likely to experience food abundance as well as have land left over to allocate to energy crops - a prospect so positive in its humanitarian implications perhaps it may stimulate another, more balanced look at the risks and benefits of genetically modified crops.

 

AVERAGE U.S. CORN YIELDS
Commercial yields of corn per acre now routinely
exceed 160 bushels per acre, but advanced test crops are
actually delivering yields as high as 300 bushels per acre.
(Source: Ceres, Inc.) 

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Posted in Biofuel | 3 Comments »

Rational Urban Planning

Friday, October 3rd, 2008

It is our official position that long-range government planning cannot work no way no how. But it is a mark of how bankrupt the planning profession has become that many of its members never seem to bother to follow its standard planning system, which is known as the Rational Planning Model.

As defined by Wikipedia, the Rational Planning Model “is the process of realizing a problem, establishing and evaluating planning criteria, create alternatives, implementing alternatives, and monitoring progress of the alternatives.” This model, Wikipedia adds, “is central in the development of modern urban planning.”

If it is so central, then why do so few urban planners follow it? In particular, most plans that I have reviewed leave out step 3, “create alternatives.” They also leave out what should be step 4 (but which goes unmentioned by Wikipedia), evaluate alternatives. Which isn’t surprising if they don’t have any alternatives to evaluate.

Today, most planners follow what I would call the “Irrational Planning Model.” That model (to paraphrase Wikipedia) “is the process of thinking a utopian scheme, establishing planning criteria that are foreordained to support the scheme, creating a constituency of special interest groups that will benefit from the scheme, implementing the scheme, and proclaiming victory.” Notice that they leave out monitoring as well as alternatives, because there is no need to monitor when you know you are going to succeed.

My first exposure to the idea of a Rational Planning Model was when the Forest Service began writing plans for each of the national forests under the National Forest Management Act of 1976. The agency issued planning rules in 1979 that specifically followed the Rational Planning Model. Over the next decade, I read nearly all of the 100-plus forest plans issued by the agency. Nearly all of them had at least five alternatives. Some had as many as ten. Even though I didn’t agree with most of the agency’s decisions, the alternatives were very useful in identifying cost-efficient solutions to national forest issues.

A thing of beauty, or an abomination?
Should freeways have a future, as cars go green?

Nowadays, I review urban land-use and transportation plans. Most plans don’t contain any alternatives at all.

Some plans have token alternatives, usually because they are required by some federal rule, that everyone understands have no chance of being selected.

Take, for example, long-range transportation plans, which all metropolitan areas have to write to be eligible for federal funding. I recently happened to download such plans for the nation’s 65 largest urban areas. Only two — Jacksonville and Salt Lake City — included two or more real alternatives and compared the effects of those alternatives on such things as congestion and air pollution.

Most of the plans had no alternatives at all. A few had what they called the “no-build” alternative, which presumed that no new facilities would be built for 20 years. Some had something you might call (and one of the plans did call) the “wish-list” alternative, which included every transportation project that every transportation agency in the region could think of to build in the next 20 years.

Plans compared no-build and wish-list alternatives against the “financially constrained” alternative, which became the plan. This which only included projects for which funding was available. But neither no-build nor wish-list could be considered serious alternatives, since no one expected nothing to happen any more than anyone expected that every possible improvement would be funded.

So the question is: how do planners go from the wish list to the plan? Ideally, you would develop alternatives that included different combinations of projects on the wish list and then do an analysis to see which alternative works best.

I happen to have a 1958 book called Better Transportation for Your City (11 MB pdf) that was put together by a group called the National Committee on Urban Transportation, which consisted of a variety of planners, engineers, transit managers, and other transportation experts. The book describes the Rational Planning Model and recommends (on page 57) that cities and urban areas consider at least three alternatives: predominantly transit, predominantly automotive, and balanced transit-automotive. Planners from Jacksonville must have read this book for those are similar to the alternatives they used.

Many national forests followed a similar system: because timber cutting and wilderness were considered polar opposites during the forest planning process, they typically had a timber-emphasis alternative, a wilderness-emphasis alternative, and a supposedly balanced alternative. They usually also had a no-action alternative (meaning no change from previous plans), and at least one more, perhaps a wildlife-emphasis alternative.

I didn’t like this process. For one thing, it was polarizing: it made everyone defend “their” alternatives (which were, in fact, Forest Service caricatures of their alternatives). For another, it ignored many win-win solutions that could have protected more wilderness and wildlife while still cutting lots of timber.

I would suggest that, instead of focusing on inputs (how much land to manage for timber, how much for wilderness, how much money to spend on highways, how much for transit), plans should focus on outputs. Here is my four-step process for developing alternatives.

First, identify the goals of the plan. They might include safety, congestion relief, reduced air pollution and other environmental effects, energy efficiency, and so forth. Goals must be outputs, not inputs. Things like “multimodalism” and “walkability” are inputs, not outputs. Goals should not be biased towards any particular mode but should focus on the things that people consider important.

Second, measure the effects of every possible transportation project in the region on each of the goals. How many lives will each project save or destroy? How many hours of congestion relief will the projects provide? How much pollution will they prevent or generate? How much energy will they consume or save? In addition, how much will each project cost?

Third, rank all of the projects using each goal. Planners should divide the benefits of each project by its dollar cost to get a cost-efficiency estimate. Then sort the projects from high to low cost efficiencies.

Fourth, create an alternative from each goal’s ranking. Planners know roughly how much money the region will have to spend on transportation improvements. So pick the top projects ranked according to each goal until all the money is spent.

The result would be alternatives emphasizing Safety, Congestion Relief, Clean Air, Energy Efficiency, and any other goals planners considered important (and quantifiable). None of these alternatives are biased toward transit, autos, bikes, or whatever. Instead, they each focus on an important community goal. Moreover, it is likely that there will be a lot of overlap between alternatives, because some projects that improve safety will also reduce congestion and air pollution. By finding such overlaps, and weighing trade offs when goals conflict, planners can put together a preferred alternative.

All this supposes that planners really want to develop the best possible plans for their communities or regions. But it seems that few do, which is why so many use the Irrational Planning Model instead. If they don’t develop alternatives, then no one will know how much money they waste and how poorly their plans perform.

At the risk of repeating myself, I don’t think that the Rational Planning Model can save government planning from all the insurmountable problems with planning that the Antiplanner has identified. But it would go a long way toward keeping planners honest and keeping the public better informed about the benefits and costs of the often inane plans that planners propose.

If anyone knows of urban land-use or transportation plans that really do follow the rational model, I would love to learn about them.

About the author:  Randal O’Toole is the author of Reforming the Forest Service, The Vanishing Automobile and Other Urban Myths, and The Best-Laid Plans, and edits the website The Antiplanner.  This article originally was published on The Antiplanner on March 17th, 2008, and is republished here with permission.

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Posted in Land Use, Politics | No Comments »