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Biofuels Coming With a High Environmental Price?
DurandalTree writes "With the spectre of global warming on the horizon, biofuels have been touted as the solution to motor vehicles' greenhouse gas emissions. But with biodiesel use on the increase, it appears a distinctively environmentally unfriendly footprint is being left behind by some of its prime sources; affected food prices are surging out of reach of the poor and rainforests are being destroyed to create larger plantations."
One of the the first renewable fuels was firewood, and using it in quantity caused quite an impact on forests.
Nothing occurs in a vacuum any more. Efficiency and economic viability of any product is tied to the current supply chain, and any change in the balance of this order of magnitude will be felt everywhere. I always thought it interesting when there were stories on biodeisel being made from recycled cooking oil nobody ever mentioned that there is a fairly limited supply of said oil when compared with the demand for automotive fuel. Sure, there's lots going to waste, but making the waste product a viable commodity in a quickly growing market is bound to create scarcity. All of a sudden, stuff that's free because it is waste now has an actual market value.
Are we really so myopic that the lure of "free fuel" has completely distracted us from the fact that nothing on this planet is being produced in such quantity that changing the market for that product radically will not affect the marketplace?
I guess the answer is, "yes."
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Growing fuel in the dirt is very hard on the planet. Not only does it suck up a lot of land (on top of what we already need to grow food) it also covers that land with one single crop that needs all sorts of nasty things such as pesticides and fertilizers.
The best bet for biofuels is something that has less of an impact on the soil and the planet, such as algae based biofuels. Algae is grown in tanks, so the process requires less land, and any chemicals used in the process can be contained so it isn't spread over open land.
Yes, switching to these kind of fuels will leave less of an environmental impact, but it will hurt poor people the most who consume corn frequently and will certainly lead to an increase in price in corn-produced food. (Think Corn Syrup in soda) This is why we can't radically switch to biofuels like some people are calling for.
People don't care enough to change less.
The simple answer is to reduce energy usage, but people don't want to.
Stop travelling, have new stuff, heat/cool their houses, import food etc.
Myself I fully intend to visit a few more far off locations, I want a new couch and bigger TV, I want my house warm in the winter and cool in the summer and I want a broad selection of fresh fruits and vegetables year round.
That's gonna use a lot of energy, even if I gave up my car to walk to a market. People don't want to change, and they won't yet.
The latest trend I saw is directly blaming the "rich", which pretty much includes most of us with computers and the time to argue on slashdot. I don't see us making huge changes.
This is one of those things that should be obvious but that's very difficult to explain to some less critical radical environmentalists.
Energy demand = Growing rapidly without forseeable upper bound
If you switch from fossil fuels to biofuels, all you do is change the problem set, from pollution and peak oil to deforestation and starvation. There is one solution and one solution only: energy efficiency and conservation. I suppose you could say there is a second, getting energy from outside the system (i.e. space) but that still leaves the problem of getting the energy back out of the system (i.e. pushing it cleanly and transparently back into space once used) so that we don't simply heat/pollute the globe beyond control.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Indeed - there's another resource we need to care about here. Viable soil is a renewable resource - but like fresh water, it has its limits, and is geographically quite limited in terms of cheap availability. By forcing the land to both feed everyone, and fuel all their vehicles, we place a much lower maximum on the population that can be supported by that land. More than that, by potentially stretching the demands on the land too far, we risk that farmers and companies may deplete or despoil the soil they use for short term gain before they decide to leave the market, making it difficult for anyone else to economically recover that same area.
That said, we could make better use of the oceans - but I trust our current free market much less there - the oceans have much more of a "tragedy of the commons" dynamic than elsewhere, with fragile ecosystems and high difficulty sectioning off properties. Algae on land-based ponds in otherwise nonviable landscapes would offer the most promise for producing biomass in a way that would not negatively affect prices for the poor. Algae can produce its own food, doesn't need to use much fresh water, can produce various kinds of oils, and could even be used as a part of foods if we are interested in exploring that. The only question is, will it be able to scale and pay for itself in terms of needing to control its environment to mass produce it? Given the history of livestock, I can't imagine algae can't be made efficient or be properly bred en mass.
That's just my idea though - and I'm fairly uninformed about the whole field of energy crops. Why are we currently pursuing the whole turn-food-to-fuel path anyway, given how wide open the algae field is?
Ryan Fenton
The only reason it's so cheap is the corn lobby demanding big payouts from the government. It's not even particularly healthy, corn syrup isn't the best form of sugar for you. And it's a crap source for ethanol production too.
Deleted
And growing biofules takes that carbon right back out again. The problem with fossil fuels is that we're taking carbon that was taken from the atmosphere millions of years ago over a long period of time and releasing it now in a short period of time. I do agree however that nuclear, solar and wind are the way to go. Hopefully the nuclear fission will be replaced by nuclear fusion in my lifetime.
When will people listen???
Biofuels are simply not environmentally friendly in any way, shape or form. They are seen by some as a temporary solution to dwindling oil stocks. Not as the environmental saviour some idiots have imagined them to be.
For any problem, first solutions prove to be questionable. First, and many existing nuclear power plants are obviously very dangerous - just consider Chernobyl. Yet, now we can build very safe nuclear plants that produce less radioactive waste than comparable coal plants. No matter what it is now, early adoption of biofuel will eventually encourage better solutions. In principal at least, plants get all their combustible content by capturing greenhouse gases from the air. If dry grass or agricultural byproducts can be burned, at least for home heating purposes, without much processing, we are reducing our output of CO2.
Which might not be as hard as it sounds. The University of New Hampshire did a study in 2004 where they concluded that biodiesel from algae could -- at least theoritically -- supply all the nation's fuel supply without require food oil (like soy or palm) to be used at all. On the ethanol front, cellulosic ethanol can be produced from high-cellulose plant products, like sawgrass or wood chips, without cutting into the corn crop. Some of cellulosic plants are beginning to approach commercial volumes of production.
It's not that biofuels are a bad idea, but not all implementations of those ideas are equally valid.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
The argument against ethanol because of corn is going to be off the table in relatively short time. Cellulosic ethanol is coming commerically viable now and it will turn your green-waste trash into fuel. The US Department of Energy gets this and has formerly denounced corn as the future of ethanol. So when you use corn as a reason against ethanol, consider the other sources of it.8 30990020070328
Corn is not the future of U.S. ethanol: DOE
http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSN2
A cellulosic ethanol company who was recently awarded a $40M grant from the DOE in February:
http://bluefireethanol.com/
Nothing is foolproof because fools are so ingenious.
Diesel engines are pollutin' machines.
Diesel engines are much cleaner now, if the proper technology is used to clean the exhaust. Unfortunately all that technology got clogged up by the sulphur in US diesel through last year, so none of it was used.
US diesel switched to a low-sulphur blend at the start of the year, and all 2007 model year diesel cars require it. It exchange, they now have the particulate filters that make diesels run cleaner. This does little to clean up the millions of diesel cars and trucks built before 2007, unfortunately, but it shows that the problem hasn't been forgotton.
Please don't attack diesel based on a complete lack of information and one anecdote. For more information, see the National Clean Diesel Campaign.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
If you want to be serious about replacing oil with bio-fuel you probably need to use resources that are otherwise unused. For example in Sweden we use waste to create most of our heat, as well as some electricity. By now the waste burning plants and our other bio-industries produce more energy than all of our nuclear plants! And yet most Swedes are unaware of it. Which is probably because burning waste does not disturb anything else. Another set of resources that exists in many countries is salt water, sunlight and unused land. In theory, countries around the equator could grow algae in salt water and use it to produce enormous amounts of bio-fuel. This would go on without much interference with anything else.
Somebody will mention the word "clean" at some point - it is not a word that really makes sense in the context of burning stuff in air (nitrous oxides are produced), and the clown that always mentions nuclear whenever energy is mentioned should also remember that mining and processing is not "clean" either.
Sad but true. The environmentalists who used to hate nuclear so much will end up being the greatest proponents.
The summary is right... biofuels made from food are causing deforestation and a rise in food prices. The solution is obvious. The USA needs to get it's head out of the sand and legalize THC-Removed Hemp for biofuel production. Hemp is more efficient, has more crops per year, can fill the roll of many other crops that are less efficient, and won't increase the price of foods that shouldn't be associated with fuel anyways (corn? Come on. Painful example of how rampant lobbying can overcome a products inefficiency).
With legal, non-smokable Hemp, we could stop cutting down forests. We could cut back on the amount of cotton crops that have to be grown (and the corresponding amount of land that has to be rested because cotton crops sucked the life out of them). We could even use it for biofuel until we can get algae farms that are efficient. Hemp was made illegal because some big tycoon decided he wanted to protect his cash cow. It's time to get rid of that silliness, and start using our heads. Hemp is where it's at. Wake up, USA.
And, in conjunction with Hemp, let's work on algae... a great way to make use of inhospitable land, and possibly the best/most-efficient biological source that we can turn into biofuel to replace our dependence on dead dinosaurs.
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
The best example of where such a model falls down was the Australian wool industry. Wool was selling at a low price. Leading economists said the answer was simple - kill lots of sheep to make wool scarce. It didn't work, they forgot that cotton exists. I wish I was making this up but this piece of utter stupidity that ruined many farmers really did happen.
Not at the levels projected/required!
Corn is produced through an incredible usage of fossil fuels. From the fertilizers, through the mechanized Ag cycle. It's just awful! A petro-carbon boondoggle, for Monsanto and the usual Cheney back-room.
Then there's the "let's burn food!" aspect.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
...it depends on how you produce it.
Note that the linked articles are foreign, discussing production of biodiesel in places like Malaysia. US biodiesel production, OTOH, is a by-product of soybeans grown for human and animal consumption; the fuel does not compete with food here in the USA.
Now, if we started importing biodiesel the way we have with ethanol, then its an entirely different situation. Product from Brazil or Malaysia would almost certainly come from a process of deforestation.
The EU farms rapeseed specifically for biodiesel production, and it is pushed heavily as a rotation crop. They are introducing ways to make the byproducts edible (at least for livestock) although how beneficial this is remains to be seen. At least there seems to be no large-scale deforestation associated with EU rapeseed.
I'd also like to note that the EU some years ago blocked the import of palm oil fuels. Partly because of this, in order to have any biodiesel market at all, Malaysia and other Pacific rim nations have agreed to form a commission regulating the land use associated with the industry.
Hydrogen is a storage medium, not an energy source.
So? Neither is petroleum, coal, or biodiesel.
There is not a single energy positive creation source on the face of the planet. 99.9% of everything all our energy sources come from the sun (excluding geothermal and uranium) which oil and coal was from plants and animals from millions of years ago that got their energy from the sun, while biodiesel is from more recent plants.
The reason that hydrogen is not used is because it is currently inefficient to convert from your standard energy production methods. You could technically grow corn and burn it to make hydrogen just like biodiesel. It is just not that efficient to do so.
This might change and eventually someday be easier to just use direct solar power and remove hydrogen from water.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I'm sorry, but what?
If you want to be literal, then basically nothing we do is environmentally friendly. At least, nothing modern. In fact, the only environmentally friendly thing we could really do is to bury ourselves and become fertilizer.
But a biofuel can be mostly environmentally friendly. There are problems with issues like nitric oxides, which are produced by burning many fuels - gasoline, diesel, biodiesel, and vegetable oil alike. But then, burning wood releases many things that we would prefer not to breathe, and it is a natural occurrence.
One thing that you can say for biofuels is that they themselves are carbon-neutral. Other processes related to them may not be, of course. But if all of our energy was derived from biofuels, it would all be carbon-neutral.
Arguably the best fuel to use for these various reasons would be hydrogen. It is not an energy source, but then, neither is biofuel, which is the liquid result of processing plants made mostly with solar energy. Hydrogen burns most cleanly (the outputs are water and heat) but of course the energy has to come from somewhere, and it has a laundry list of problems, probably the most serious of which is hydrogen embrittlement which destroys everything dealing with hydrogen eventually.
An option I like a great deal for transmitting power is the use of compressed air. MDI's air car technology is quite environmentally friendly.
But put quite simply, the biofuels are our best hope for reducing our environmental impact in the short term, and one article that says that one flawed method of producing biofuels is causing problems is quite simply not evidence that the entire concept is flawed.
You make clever use of propaganda in your comment, but I notice that there is no actual content, no facts, no science. Please come back when you have some meat to place in your comment.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Sugar cane not only has a greater concentration of sucrose (about 30% more than corn) but it is also a lot easier to extract. Yet the USA places a 53 cent tarif on all imported ethanol. Powerful interests are at play, the greater good not being one of them. Brazil is lucky to be largely energy independant, which is in their politcal interest economically and security wise. The USA has double the oil of brazil with a roughly only a 30% larger population, but instead of being anywhere near energy independent, the USA imports 20% of its oil from Venezuela of which whose leader calls the USA president "the devil." Expect the USA to screw their corn industry, play brinkmanship with oil producing countries and thereby rising the price of oil, and continuing tarifs on importing ethanol. Confused? Follow the money and you may not be.
Soylent Green enough said.
Excepting the fact that you conveniently didn't RTFA. Biofuels are encroaching on native habitats, which often includes slash and burn farming. These techniques mean that, depending on the oil used for fuel, the carbon output of biofuels can be about 10 times that of petroleum. Who cares if the end carbon burned in a car was pulled from the atmosphere, when many times the stored carbon are released in production? Not to mention the absolutely huge numbers of native habitat that will simply be destroyed to accommodate biofuel production. The risk to the ANWR from petroleum is nothing compared to the risk to the rainforests and other sensitive habitats that biofuels present.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
Every time this subject comes up, people pipe up that we need to stop consuming, stop using power.
Well, I don't intend to go back to living in a world of horse flop in the streets, coal in my stove, pumping water every day from a well a half mile away. Nor should I. Nor should anyone else.
What is flabbergasting is that the same crowd that joneses for Star Trek all the time is so fast to posit that we need to live simply so that others may simply live. If there's anything Trek should have taught you is that life is not a zero sum game, mankind can design and reason its way out of situations it creates, and there are more than enough resources to go around and you just need to figure out what they are and how to use them.
We are truly stupid if we turn backwards right when we figure out how to do high efficiency fusion, store energy as extra mass, and other off the wall things we've cooked up in sci-fi but haven't gotten around to figuring out in the basic physics departments. We will be condeming all future generations to poverty of not only economy, but morality and ethics, because with poverty of nations go all those things we so hate in our pasts: war, slavery, conquest, exploitation, disease, starvation. We have more than enough of those things left now. We have been fighting damn hard to change ourselves for a long time. To rise from that horrid muck.
There's a difference between being more efficient and doing an about face in our march forward. And getting things done from building pyramids to cities needs energy of one kind or another. We can't simply stop using energy. We can make things use less and still use. We cannot stop using.
Damn us all now if we reflexively retreat from advancement now like idiot children. Damn us to hell.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
US electric consumption is roughly 1/1000 of your figures. Net 2005 generation was 4038 billion kWh (not MWh).
The insolation in mid-Kansas is about 1550 kWh/m^2/yr. At 15% efficiency, this would produce about 230 kWh/m^2/yr of electricity. Divide 4.038e12 kWh/yr by 230 kWh/m^2/yr and you get 1.76e10 m^2, or 17,600 km^2. Total impervious area in the USA (roofs, pavement, etc.) is 112610 km^2, so we'd need to put PV on about 16% of what's already covered. This can be done when we re-roof.
True, covering the rest of our energy needs would take more, but that's no reason to curl up in a fetal position and suck your thumb.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Biofuels are useful because of the economic benefits of fuels mostly compatible with current engines. It's the first step: renewable energy rather than non-renewable. But we're not meant to stay with biofuels. Compared with other pieces of the alternative fuel puzzle, it's one of the most expensive. It's only meant to subsidize oil consumption for now. The next step is cheaper, enviro-freindly, economical, renewable energy *sources*.
In regards to fuel, there is a practical difference between an energy *source* and an energy *carrier*. (In general physics, it's all just energy transfer. But this is in practical terms, not theoretical.) There are only a handful of what we might consider energy *sources*: solar, nuclear, geothermal, wind, etc. Energy *carriers* would be: hydrogen, electricity, compressed air, etc. Biofuels are somewhere in between depending on how it's made. The difference is that with sources, we don't really expend very much energy to get a net gain of energy. Especially with solar (which is now cheaper and 40% efficient compared to past solar tech) we simply soak up the sun and use the energy. Biofuels are basically carriers of solar energy, just like oil. If we can make it with little effort, it's more of a source. If we consume a lot of oil, coal, etc. to make it, then it's more of a carrier. Hydrogen is made with electrolysis, which spends electrical energy (e.g. from the sun or another source), and you get the energy back using the fuel cell in your car that reverses the process to output eletricity, so hydrogen is also carrier (electricity could be seen as a carrier as well, since we are ultimately concerned with kinetic energy for motion).
To make a long story short, biofuel technology is meant for backwards compatibility until cars are designed to run on something else. The future will be energy sources that are practically free or will be very cheap in the long run once the tech becomes more widely used (e.g. solar, wind, nuclear, etc.).
A plant that has been proposed for making cellulose ethanol is a Brazilian water hyacinth, it has the advantage of being one of the fastest growing plants in the world. This one is definitely a pest, if left to grow it will quickly choke any water surface. If it could be harvested to make ethanol, many swamps in tropical and sub-tropical areas that are not considered "arable" today could be used for making fuel.
I think the solution for our energy problem will not come from a single source. There are many alternatives, we will have a mix of different sources, just as we have hydro power together with nuclear and fossil fuels today.
Anyhow, I agree that it's a fact that the current population of the world is too large to live at USA standards of consumption with our current technology. Malthus has been proven wrong before, but even with technological innovations, there are physical limits to growth, one of them being the absolute availability of energy you mentioned.
Anyone who said "hydrogen" must leave the room immediately.
Nah, anybody who said burning hydrogen has to leave the room. Anyone who said fusing hydrogen just gets to be called foolishly optimistic.
Excepting the fact that you conveniently didn't RTFA. Biofuels are encroaching on native habitats, which often includes slash and burn farming.
But is that actually true?
Slash and burn farming has been encroaching on native habitats long before we decided to make biofuels. The fact is that population pressures in these areas will cause farmers to slash and burn in order to grow any crop which is at that time economically viable. Now that we are concentrating on biofuels the demand for sugar cane grows and that is the particular crop that is chosen.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
The argument for conservation is not that we turn the clock back--- people in the past weren't terribly friendly to the environment either--- that's a strawman. The argument is that we make an honest attempt to balance our books. We are profligate spenders and mindless consumers. We argue about biofuels and watch *NASCAR* for cripes sake. We ship oranges from Florida for processing in California and back for sale in Florida (yes, really). We ship Wisconsin cheese to New York and New York cheese to Wisconsin. We ship potatoes *to* Idaho! We commute hours a day to/from work to live in huge cookie cutter developments that waste heat/cooling/electricity while letting the urban centers decay. We grow corn on marginal land to feed animals in feedlots that are designed by evolution to graze for themselves--- then we use antibiotics to treat all the diseases they pick up in the feedlots and chemicals to treat the fact that they can't digest corn. We waste non-renewable petroleum on disposable plastic packaging and risk running out of it for pharmaceuticals. We don't need to haul water 1/2 mile from the well (though I've done it), we just need to stop being *idiots*.
If we actually stopped and thought about what we were doing a small fraction of the time and budgeted what we had, we might have a chance of getting to that future you talk about. Otherwise, all that will happen is that new technology will beget *more waste*. How far has the space program gotten in the last half century? People flush the economy and ecology down the toilet and complain about research being a waste of money, so landfills fill up and space exploration languishes.
In the 90s there was a great deal of urban renewal, and a lot of people who had moved out of the city starting moving back.
Much of the urban renewal going on is due to gentrification which creates more problems. One, two, or more people may buy property in a rundown neighberhood which they'll fix up. Seeing this others will as well which drives up prices pricing lower income residents out, many of whom rent.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Very few people are as wasteful as the US. This extends through energy use/waste and food use/waste. The whole system is propped up by agricultural subsidies which keep the system inefficient and unsustainable.
The typical US diet uses a hell of a lot more arable land than the average diet. The resulting land use is a major land destructor and uses a lot more water, oil land input than it should. One of the biggest problems is high meat consumption.
If people ate the grain fed to beef, instead of the beef, they'd only need to consume one tenth of the grain (ie grain to beef is only approx 10% efficient).
Each pound of beef requires about 3-4 pounds of oil.
Thus, switching to significantly reduced meat intake would use vastly less oil and free up a lot of land that could be put to other uses (eg. biofuels).
Of course, the farming and oil industries don't really want you to change the current high consumption and are happy for you to keep funding this insane system through subsidy handouts.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
If there were studies showing GMO food as anything other than a way to grow more, better food on the same land, I'd be the first in line, but there isn't.
Ah but there is. Some people are allergic to brazil nuts, some have gone into shock and have died. Soy was gentically engineered with a gene from the brazil nut. In a study it was shown those with an allergy to brazil nuts were also allergic to the soy. The gene inserted encoded for a protein that's an allergin.
Case study: Brazil nut allergen in GE soybeans.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I agree but it's not just suburbia that is wasteful. We in North America, (and other parts of the world) have based our prosperity off the exploitation of cheap natural resources, while utterly failing to take into account the true cost that the exploitation. We developed all aspects of our society on the assumption that we will always be able to continue with an endlessly escalating usage of all our resources. Simply substituting one fuel for another, may buy us some time but it will ultimately fail to address the root of the problem, which is unsustainable consumption. In order to finally tackle the greenhouse gas problem (frankly ALL environmental problems!) we are going to have to use less (of everything). How we accomplish this is going to be interesting, we may finally have to account (and pay) a full replacement value for that which nature provides us, or (more likely) some people are simply going to have less access to resources that we once took for granted, as those who can pay will increasingly have preferential access.
I am starting a biodiesel co-op here in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I've read Monbiot's arguments. Every few months, someone brings them up. While I greatly respect The Guardian, they insist on printing his stuff. A lot of what I so vehemently dislike about Monbiot is not necessarily what he's saying. It is possible to easily produce sound counterarguments. Soy-based biodiesel and corn-based ethanol are temporary bases for fuel. Another reader pointed out that there is great potential for making biodiesel from algae. One plant apparently made it from turkey carcases. You can make biodiesel from a huge variety of sources, including fry grease.
:::end of rant:::
If biodiesel production causes food prices to spike, capitalists will find something different that does not cause this to occur. It may take longer than we wish, but it will happen.
As for land-stripping, it is well known tht most stripping has occurred to plant inefficient farms. This was happening well before the recent enthusiasm for biofuels, and it will continue. I'd love to see it stop. But I'm not going to give up biodiesel to try and stop it or even help it. My fuel comes from America, not Saudi Arabia, Brazil, or even Canada, as does a great deal of our oil.
The last thing I have to say about Monbiot, the most insulting, doubtlessly the one thing that will make people say "you lose this argument because you got personal, hell, you might as well just get it over with and violate Godwin's Law," is about his style of presentation. George Monbiot makes himself out being omniscient, and if only the world would listen to him, all would be well and people would live in peace. I had enough of that sort of person when I lived in Madison, Wisconsin. They're everywhere there. It is, IMNSHO, this sort of person that enrages the reactionaries among us like no other, the ones who think that they know better than everyone else how to live, function, even breathe.
Okay, let's put ALL biofuels on hold for five years. With that sweeping generalization, all work on it comes to an crashing end for five years. In April 2012, we will resume. And know what? We'll be right where we left off, only to find that we're five years behind, as we finally had the wisdom to listen to the one guy who knows better than us how to run the world. At least, we thought he was. You'd think we'd have learned by now to listen to people who claim to know better than everyone else, but our race is notorious for its memory deficiency.
-- haaz.
I read in Nature recently that hydrogenerated power had a suprisingly large impact on greenhouse emissions as usually when dams are made, there's a lot of trees that are flooded, which ferment and produce a lot of methane.
Biodiesel: Beyond however much CO2 it takes in or puts out, it only works well in moderate or tropical climates. Not only is a diesel engine difficult to start in the winter because batteries don't operate efficiently in the cold, diesel fuel has a tendency to 'gell', or solidify. I haven't had enough experience with biodiesel to know how it reacts to the cold, but here in Minnesota, there was talk about it 5 years ago and nobody's heard about it since. My guess is that it gells at a much warmer temperature than fossil diesel due to the lack of sulphur, or the abundance of wax, or both.
Ethanol - Corn: Beyond it cutting into corn as a food source, corn is grown from the ground, out in the open, and requires that ever-dependable stoic force, NATURE. Yeah, right. Droughts, floods, tornadoes, hail... all of these things destroy corn crops, all of them are not preventable by man. Also, I'd be interested in knowing about the studies that measure the amount of corn that can be grown on the land in a year... they need to cut it in half or a third, because you can't grow corn on the same ground year after year after year, regardless of how much fertilizer you add, unless you're in the blessed state of Iowa. Not rotating your crops is a great way to turn your land useless in a hurry. One year of corn, one year of hay, plow under the hay in the fall of the year, and you can plant corn again. That's a two-year process. Corn is a commodity, it's futures traded just like oil. Increase the use of corn and the price goes up, and it's measured by the bushel, not by the barrel, otherwise identical to other commodities. I hate to see the day that the price of corn overruns the price of oil just because we can grow it and the Middle East can't. People will be getting the popcorn out of the cupboards and bringing it in, just like the copper prices cause people to steal copper from empty houses and construction sites.
Ethanol - Switchgrass: There is no infrastructure in place for this, and establishing that infrastructure takes lots of time and lots of money. How are you going to measure it, by weight or by volume? Again, switchgrass is dependent on Dependable Nature, and the same shortfalls that apply to corn, apply to switchgrass.
Personally, I think we should be building a shitload of windmills and solar panels. Convert everything possible to electricity and run our lives from that. The infrastructure is there and we know how to harness it. It's almost free for the taking. The wind's always blowing somewhere, and the sun's always shining somewhere. Add geothermal to that mix and you could have a nuclear winter and still be making electricity.
As a side note, internal-combustion engines are only 40% efficient at best, regardless of what you run them on. There's a ton of heat that comes out the exhaust, out the radiator, out the crankcase (convection)... As humans go, we sure as hell know how to make heat, we just don't know how to harness it. Been that way since the caveman built a fire and warmed himself by it. 90+% of a campfire's fuel heats the air around the campfire, and does very little to heat you or anything else. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
We should stop using corn to make biofuel and instead use Miscanthus.
9 128950913
Miscanthus is a genus of about 15 species of perennial grasses. Miscanthus giganteus has been trialed as a biofuel in Europe since the early 1980s. It can grow to heights of more than 3.5m in one growth season. Its dry weight annual yield can reach 25t/ha (10t/acre). The rapid growth, low mineral content and high biomass yield of Miscanthus make it a favorite choice as a biofuel. After harvest, it can be burned to produce heat and power turbines. The resulting CO2 emissions are equal to the amount of CO2 that the plant used up from the atmosphere during its growing phase, and thus the process is greenhouse gas-neutral.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscanthus_giganteus
Educate yourself http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-57028888
So if US=4038 billion kWh/yr then world @ US standards would be roundly 80,000 billion kWh/yr, or 80 million MWw/yr, or 80,000 GWh/yr, at 8760 hr/yr that means power of 9,000 GWe continuous, or about 6000 nuclear reactors at 1.5 GWe each (a large modern design).
There currently is about 386 GWe of nuclear capacity in the world from 435 nuclear reactors operating in 30 countries supply 16% of world electicity with fairly rock-solid base load. We need to have about 14 times as many as we do now to meet world energy needs living as Americans do.
I'd say to try again with the numbers, perhaps with a vehicle more suitable for EV conversion. Starting from a compact car, EV's are MUCH more practical than what you're talking about.
Regards,
Ross
Ethanol fuel production is not the ONLY reason that slash and burn exists and is on the rise, but it greatly increases the rate at which it occurs.
I seriously doubt that ... and how could you demonstrate it?
If the demand for coffee were rising instead of the demand for biofuels would we be saying that drinking coffee greatly increases the rate at which slash and burn occurs? Ie. there is nothing inherent in biofuels that leads to this kind of deforestation. Nor would non-use of biofuels allievate deforestation. Instead this kind of deforestation is a function of population, poverty, inadequate government controls and outright corruption.
Biofuels can also be, and are, grown in countries with stringently enforced environmental protection laws, (relatively) wealthy farmers etc. etc.
In the article under discussion Malaysia was mentioned. Deforestation there occurs even in the absence of any demand for land on which to grow any kind of crops. It is fueled by rampant corruption, organised crime and the insatiable demand of Japan, Australia and other developed countries for paper.
A ban on using slash and burn farming for ethanol production would therefore just shift food crop growth to freshly slashed and burned areas.
You said it!
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
It seems nobody (getting modded-up) here understands. Of course it's going to be difficult to start biofuel production, and any change of this level is going to cause short-term shortages, and higher prices.
Nobody is going to starve. It's just that we've all become so used-to subsidized corn, that we never expected having to deal with market forces. Now that we do, everything is changing. Farmers are looking for new cattle feed, companies like Coca-Cola are looking for other sugar alternatives than corn syrup, et al. The market is starting to take action on this change, and there's no reason to believe it won't work just fine.
That rain forest is being burned is a huge shame. However, biofuels certainly don't require the burning of rain forest, so they aren't really the cause. What's more, even in the current state of affairs, that kind of pollution is only a one-time issue, while that land will continue to produce biofuels for many, many years.
Claims of limited arable lands are nonsense as well. Water can and is being transported to arid regions for crops. Every farmer in the developed world fertilizes their own fields, and there is no shortage of compost available. Once again, it will require some changes, and initially higher prices, but it really is the kind of thing the free market is perfectly good at handling, if you just give it a few years to work itself out.
People are touting cellulose ethanol, which is a good option, but it's going to have precisely the same drawbacks, just less pronounced... Food prices rising because cellulose is currently used in hog and cattle feed. Expansion of farming to meet the demands. Rising prices of crops, as existing farmland is stretched to produce enough fuel. Increase in use of petroleum fertilizers, as cheap cellulose is no longer available for compost. etc.
Things like algae for production of biofuels have plenty of potential, but it isn't just going to spring-up overnight. You really need to create a guaranteed demand for the product, before anyone is going to be willing to invest in such technologies. Indeed, the more expensive corn ethanol gets, the higher the potential profit in developing algae solutions.
Just saying "to hell with it, developing biofuels is too challenging" is just going to prolong our problems. Giving up on a good option, because it produces complications like higher corn prices in the (very) near-term is horribly myopic. We'll be reaping the benefits of widespread production of biofuels for at least the next century, and probably longer. Those in the poorer parts of the world, affected by the food prices, will also.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
. . . will always win out over the needs of the poor.
And nothing is more vain than living a life of privilege and consumption while pretending to care about the poor.
Are you listening Al Gore?
What?
As another poster pointed out [can't find the post right now, so no link, sorry], the difference in the source of the C02 that is released by burning petro- or bio-diesel matters. Fossil fuels contain carbons that would not ordinarily be dumped into the atmosphere in the billions of tons a year without we extract them and burn them.
Plants, on the other hand, bind atmospheric C02 into themselves, and that carbon is re-released when the plant (or its derivatives) is burned. It's a "zero sum" problem.
I think this argument is fallacious, esp in the longer term. If you have bio-diesel, why are you burning petro-diesel to farm corn? I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I would bet that an Iowa farm co-op can produce more bio-diesel from a soybean crop than fuel is required to farm that crop. That's a net gain in fuel, and the more efficient the farming techniques are, the greater the gain.
Furthermore, what causes you to think that pesticides can't be manufactured from bio- sources? So far, every thing I've looked at leads me to believe that there is not a single petro-based product (including e.g. plastics, packaging, etc) that cannot be produced better and more cheaply from bio-based sources.
And all this before we even start talking about refining bio-diesel into lighter fuels (bio-gasoline, anyone?) and perhaps blending it with something like ethanol.
Finally, I would point out that the main reason for moving to bio fuels generally, and bio-diesel in this particular instance, has a lot less to do with Global Warming than it has to do with National Security - both economic and materiel - in the US.
Bio-fuels represent a sustainable solution to the problem of fueling our transportation [and some other things] without totally distrupting the entire system as it exists at this moment (in the petro-based world). Bio-fuels can be implemented progessively much more quickly than we can e.g. develop the tech for vehicles powered using Hydrogen - or even electricity. Bio-fuel tech not only exists, it is well understood and is a low tech solution that trumps the high-tech, petro-based solution across the board. Any R&D we do is pure profit and long term gain.
In short, all the crap arguments like those presented in TFA have been addressed and solutions proposed. The continuing FUD is almost certainly funded entirely by short-term profit motive. What kind of an idiot goes to all the trouble to cut down a rain forest to create arable land, after all? The profit from rain forests is in things like pharmaceuticals, not bulk crops that are trivially grown far more cheaply in the millions of hectares of existing farmland we already have? The trivial case [for US bio-fuels]: If we produce the soybeans in S. America, we have to pay to ship either the beans or the oil or the finished product from there to here, and with the reasoning you present above [i.e. running tractors on petro-diesel to produce bio-diesel], the ships would be burning bunker C...
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