Slashdot Mirror
Are Biofuels Still Economically Feasible?
thefickler writes "With falling gas prices, and the end of capitalism as we know it (otherwise known as the credit crisis), the
biofuels industry is not looking as viable as it once was. Indeed biofuel production has fallen well short of expectations, with biofuel companies closing down or reducing production capacity. It appears that the industry's only hope is government support."
The biofuels of which you speak have always produced more pollution through their manufacture than they have saved through reduced car emissions, so their future is largely political, not economical.
Oh and holy crap what an inflammatory summary. Yes the banks are temporarily not lending at the lower interest rates, no this does not have any effect on capitalism.
The future of biofuel and food production is algae. It's the most primitive plant form there is and is therefore the most efficient at converting solar energy into an energy store (oil) or edible substances. A lot of work is going to have to be done to develop methods of growing and harvesting algae, but that's just engineering. Better get used to the idea of algae steaks as an alternative to soy burgers... Yum!
Are Biofuels Still Economically Feasible?
No
Were they realistically feasible in the first place?
Absolutely not. The quantity of land that would need to be re-purposed if a significant percentage of US oil usage was to be bio-fuels would be enormous.
Perhaps support of bio fuels will at least reduce our dependence on foreign oil... hasn't this been a concern for quite awhile?
Though I am enjoying relief from $4.00/gallon gasoline as much as the next guy, I would hold off on prognostications until summer arrives. I doubt oil will remain cheap for long. The current low is likely due to more factors than just demand destruction. Matt Simmons (author of Twilight in the Desert [no, not playing at a theater near you]) suggests the current lows have more to do with settling derivatives trades between oil companies more than anything else.
Let us not become the evil that we deplore.
It depends on what nations you are talking about. In the USA, bio-fuels might be a non starter but in poorer [tropical] nations, bio fuels are a "Godsend."
These nations put in very little in bio fuel plants like the Jatropha, then get its seeds that can yield up to 40% oil by weight.
The plant is also resistant to drought and needs very little maintenance. The trouble with the USA is that folks look to corn whenever the bio-fuels subject comes up and in many cases, this is not economic at all.
Back during the 1970's there was a fuel shortage and the bio-fuels industry picked up. Then we saw $30 a barrel and lower oil that drove all the producers out of business. Some say it was a calculated move on the part of OPEC to make sure that no competition arises. I'm not sure I'd go that far as OPEC nearly destroyed itself due to cheating in that period...
It's not much of a surprise that it's happened again. (Gee what happened to that $200 a barrel mark the media was predicting by the end of the year). Bio-fuels were another way for the agriculture lobby to get more money for corn. So with cheap oil, everyone will go back to worrying about other things and in 10 -15 years when there is another disrupution and the prices sky rocket, people will once again start up bio fuel projects.
You'd think we'd learn, but to quote Mark Twain: History doesn't repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Let's hope not. Biofuels based on corn and other food crops are bad for obvious reasons, but even non-food biofuels have their risks - among them degradation of the American/Canadian Great Plains, ecological degradation in the Third World, and the risk of invasive species (most of these non-food biofuels are fast-spreading grasses).
The most ecological energy policy is to stop the government from subsidizing oil (by building suburbia with land use restricitons), subsidizing coal, and subsidizing water. There is no magic fuel out there that will allow us to consume infinite amounts of cheap energy - nature made extracting energy expensive for a reason, and the government needs to get out of the business of trying to make it easier.
The whole industry needs to be scrapped and would die an immediate brutal death except for subsidies which keep it alive.
One could say the same about many American industries which are getting bailouts.
While I don't agree with some of your reasons, I do appreciate that someone asked the question "were they ever"?
I'm not aware that biofuels had ever graduated from the direct subsidy phase. In fact, pretty much every issue that I receive of Biodiesel magazine and the ethanol & fuel reports talk about where the government money is now, where it's headed, and how to get it.
I suppose this will start a whole rant by someone(s) regarding the invisible subsidies for oil (including the intangible subsidies of environmental damage, etc.), but to imply that biofuels have been economically feasible in the US seems rather disingenuous.
(as an aside, the points I'm disagreeing on pertain mostly to food costs, as the general commodities market speculation was largely to blame for that. Quite possibly driven by biofuels speculation, but - like oil - mostly a market with no fundamentals supporting the prices)
Gasoline might look cheap, but it's not. ...
You forgot to include the enormous government subsidy in the form of (military) security.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Why does everyone assume that corn (and why is it always corn...) used for ethanol comes directly out of the human food stream allotment?
Human consumption and ethanol production combined pale in comparison to the amount of corn used for animal feed. Also, more corn is grown each year. So the percentages may shift around giving a slightly larger slice to ethanol production but the human use slice, while slightly less percentage wise is out of a bigger pie. And frankly, the less corn shoved into animals the better. Most animals can't handle a high corn diet without needing a lot of antibiotics. Send corn off to the ethanol plant and find something better to send to the feed lots. One thing which is better than corn is the mash left over from making ethanol. It's basically predigested corn. Still not win-win but it'd be better than what we're doing now.
Look at the usage of corn and just try to keep a straight face next time when you blame ethanol for rising food prices.
Ethanol in the US has nothing to do with alternative fuels, or replacing gasoline. It is primarily a subsidy to American corn farmers. Corn can never be a worthwhile source of ethanol.
Fact is, gasoline is cheap. Arguing about nebulous unknown "costs" in the future doesn't change it's price today. In fact, gasoline isn't just cheap, it's rock bottom dirt fucking cheap. The economics are simple, as long as gasoline is cheaper than any sort of biofuel, people will continue to use it.
This isn't the fault of the oil companies, who have been for years reshaping themselves into "energy" companies. The minute biofuel becomes competitive with gasoline, the oil companies will begin sinking their billions into controlling it. They already have the infrastructure, so it's logical for them to take it over.
Until some new process is created which can demonstrate large volume production of biofuel at prices better than gasoline, we're stuck with gasoline. The moment such a process is created, auto makers, consumers, and the oil companies will all switch on their own.
Research into biofuels is still going full speed. I'm involved in a project using switchgrass to produce diesel (and other products) directly through pyrolysis and the Fisher Tropsch process. Other projects are looking at using switchgrass as a feedstock for conversion to ethanol, or as a "lignocellulosic material" that can be co-fired with coal, reducing costs and pollutants.
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
UPS is already investing in electrics. Lots of their transports are short-range (from the local depot to your door, though city traffic) with relatively small loads, which fits perfectly with small electrics.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/automotive/new_cars/4234572.html?page=2
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
The difference is that most of those industries have actually been profitable at some point in the past and have some potential for making a profit in the future. I don't foresee a future in which biofuels could possibly be economically viable unless you are talking about at a very small, local level where you can use waste material from restaurants to run a half dozen cars or where farmers grow corn for human or animal consumption and use some of the leftover biomass to make fuel for their tractors. As soon as you cross the line from recycled biomass to newly grown biomass specifically for fuel, you find an entire industry based on a fundamentally flawed economic model. Basically, it's the dot-com boom all over again---a company loses money on every sale but tries to make it up in volume.
The amount of energy put into biofuel in the form of fuel to run tractors, transport it to market, etc. exceeds the amount of energy you get out of it. Therefore, by definition, short of a significant change in the fundamental technology of farming or in the types of crops grown, biofuel will never---can never---be commercially viable. (Source: Cornell/UC Berkeley study circa 2005. And then, there's the fact that the U.S. seems myopically focused on using corn as a source, which is quite possibly the worst thing you could possibly plant for fuel purposes by almost any useful metric---output relative to soil damage, output per acre, etc. It's a joke.
About the only thing slightly promising in that area is the whole algae thing. but I'm not holding my breath. Even if it eventually proves financially viable, you're still dumping CO2 into the atmosphere. And I suspect that when you factor in all the hidden maintenance costs, etc, it will end up being unprofitable just like the rest of them.
The GP poster may have said it in a flamebait-like way, but that doesn't mean the post was wrong. On the contrary. it was dead on accurate, at least if you limit biofuel to current farming technology and current sources of biomass. Realistically speaking, dumping more and more money into biofuel research is not the answer. We already have much better sources of energy---solar, wind, geothermal, tidal---that don't pollute our atmosphere significantly, don't contribute to global warming significantly, and at least in the case of solar and wind, don't require nearly the overhead in terms of maintenance, repairs, infrastructure, etc. because they can be set up at the local level (or, in the case of solar, even the household level). Power storage. That's where we should be spending research dollars. That's a problem that will still be needed even if biofuels did become commercially viable, but with better power storage, biofuels would have no real purpose for existing.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
A lot of people posting so far seem to confuse corn subsidy biofuel with biofuels in general. But there are other biofuels already which are not energy-negative such as alcohol made from sugar cane waste in Brazil, where the nonconvertible cellulose is burned to provide the heat input to the process. Here in the UK we have limited production of alcohol and charcoal from coppiced shrubs and timber processing waste; there are several other initiatives. Given that the price of oil is controlled more by speculation than demand, and given financial instability, we can expect it to change wildly over the next few years. Industries needing long term investment should be protected to some degree from the fluctuations. A working biofuel industry would help to stabilise the oil price, because it would introduce an element of competition into the fuels market. Speculators do not like competitive industries because it is harder to manipulate them.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
They don't run out, and they aren't located underneath countries that don't like us much.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
There are fundamental fallacies to our existing economy. They assume a workable environment in which to do business, and that the environment is infinite and free. If you look at the economic cost of global warming over the next hundred years, the global price rises to hundreds of trillions of dollars. A few of the costs include;
A) Land lost by sea level rise
B) Damage caused by increase flood and drought
C) Loss of critical biostocks (crash in fish populations, ocean acidification, key land ocean and air species)
D) Storm damage
E) Increased spread of tropical diseases
F) Wars caused by loss of water, food, and habitable land
G) Loss of land for agriculture
H) Failure of environmental systems supporting a minimum quality of life
Algae based oil is an excellent fuel alternative. Another is bioengineering new fungii discovered to produce diesel fuel directly from cellulose. Both of these technologies are utterly plug and play in our current petroleum base infrastructure. Both sequester carbon from the atmosphere, so their burning adds no new carbon and using them for other purposes like petrochemical feed-stocks actually removes carbon from the atmosphere. Both create tremendous new economic opportunities, and if supported by the government and the current petroleum business point us to a workable gap stop solution until helium cooled pebble bed fission and fusion are perfected.
You don't even have to invoke the spectre of global warming for this (of which /. has many doubters anyway); to avoid being raped by ludicrous oil prices ever again, it's in our best interest to get personal transport with great MPG numbers (so even if it rises, you'll still be laughing - and what's now spent on hauling 1 pair of buttocks from A to B is simply gross inefficiency) and independence of oil since there's so many ways to generate electricity - but none to generate oil.
You might want to watch the story of Brazil's petroleum independence and almost total conversion to ethanol:
http://current.com/items/89112645/the_world_s_sugar_daddy.htm
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
If we had kept even moderately higher oil price levels after the scare of 73' then we would have a way less dependence on all the middle eastern oil. When the price went down after that it just killed the efficiency and alternate fuels industry that had sprung up, all the ideas(patents) to be bought out by oil companies. Now it could happen again, and in 20 years well wonder why we didn't ever do anything about our dependence on foreign oil.
We blame this crisis fully on the mograge market but some blame is surely to put on the oil prices, and now as they go back down we'll forget. Just like you would be crazy to have a nation import all its food, its stupid to import most of your energy, an equally important resource. There is a reason Japan has such high tariffs on food, and there is a reason we need to subsidize ways to make our economy less reliant and more self-sufficient.
These waves of volatility in energy are very bad for ventur capitilism into energy fixes but that does not meen they are bad ideas. Toyota makde great strides by continuing to invest in efficiency well afer the 70's scare and it worked. Governments need to realize this and help new companies that are not Toyota.
Sugar-cane is a fast-growing weed where most of the mass of the plant can be used for creation of fuel. America's problem is that ethanol production out of corn is tied up in the farm bill, which not only pays farmers not to grow sufficient amounts of anything to keep the price high, but causes a diversion of product away from food, forcing the price high.
The increase in production of corn-based ethanol in the US caused the price of tortillas to jump in Mexico a couple of years ago, leading to increased numbers of illegals being captured at the border (and of course, the number that get through are far, far greater than the number that get caught).
I **WISH** we could use sugar instead of corn here... the corn industry has us on lockdown and is fucking everything up. They're in collusion with our domestic sugar growers to keep sugar tariffs as well. We're practically the only developed country that has a sugar tariff, and that's why we have "high fructose corn syrup" in everything, and why American Coca-Cola tastes like filthy, disgusting shit, compared even to the Coke in Canada.
Its a bloody agricultural mafia.
The big increases in corn prices (mostly, this gets complex, but I am a farmer-not a corn grower though but I know about this subject - so I'll make it simple for you) were due to the wall street thieves getting bumped out of speculating on repackaged mortgage debt instruments and taking their cash and getting into commodities skimming/speculating.
All those people do is rape industry after industry and then pass along the misery and use the controlled press to try and put the blame anyplace but their greed. Biofuels and natural gas are now our two most credible alternative sources for domestically produced energy for the existing vehicles and equipment we have out there, and knocking this industry off right now goes right along with what they did in the 80s when we had a renaissance of alternative energy. they flooded the planet with cheap oil then and squashed the alternatives. They are doing it again, right on schedule just when it started to look decent.
There are NO "electric tractors" or road trucks out there now for replacements, and even if there were, it would still be way more expensive to switch to them. Personal light vehicles are another matter, but again, there just aren't any electric cars out there beyond a pitiful small handful of big golf carts masquerading as cars and a few dozen Teslas and so on, again, it would take dozens of trillions to change over our infrastructure to all electric. You need something to feed those ICE powered vehicles.
There is no one size fits all energy solution, but knocking off the only credible thing we have to insure against wildass price swings in petroleum fuels along with supply issues (hello, the mideast is daily always one bad "executive decision" away from a huge war, not the tiny wars they have no,w I mean a BIG one, imperilling the supply) is remarkably short sighted and naieve. The farm I am on now could be powered with biofuels, the trucks and trains that get that food to you in your mom's basement could be powered with biofuels, but having to replace way over a million dollars in equipment with unobtanium brand electric equipment is crazy. Multiple that crazy by..EVERY farm out there and you fail it.
Biofuels create hundreds of thousands of new points of production for SOME fuel alternative, and increased R&D HAS been helping. Everyone in the industry knows corn is just a stepping stone, now you know as well, consider yourself informed now. We've been doing corn because that is what the farms are set up to produce in bulk, that's all. Farming is a specialist industry, you don't throw yout mp3 player at a server problem when a rack of blades is the correct tool. And we don't grow as much sugarcane in the US because *it can't be done most places*. We do grow sugar beets, and they have been used, but again, speciality production. And they just took a huge area out of sugarcane production down in the Florida to help with the long term water supply around the 'glades, so that the cities can have some water mostly so they can keep wasting it on fountains and golf courses.
There has to be thousands of really smart biogeeks working on better biofuels right now, telling them to stop what they are doing and slashing funding is GUARANTEED to cause massive energy shortfals off the practical kind in the future.
Jeebus, how soon do people forget? The same wall street pirates were responsible for a lot of the near 5 buck a gallon prices of fuel this summer. Wake up.
My guess is, you are both too young to remember previous fast oilshocks, and also not even remotely related to anything agricultural, because your statements and conclusions are 100% wrong. No offense but, get the data first. One of the points about insuring DOMESTIC supply is that it is a national security issue, you can't trust everything to the capitalist pig globalist market, haven't you seen how that works lately? Want to help Mexican campesinos? End NAFTA, everyone wo thought about it predicted
The amount of energy put into biofuel in the form of fuel to run tractors, transport it to market, etc. exceeds the amount of energy you get out of it. Therefore, by definition, short of a significant change in the fundamental technology of farming or in the types of crops grown, biofuel will never---can never---be commercially viable
As it applies to Corn based ethanol, true. But there are a lot of different options for biofuels. Ethanol is an unrealistic option for many reason, the limitations of corn is only one of the thorns in its side.
Soy-Diesel is a net gain, but at ~50 gallons per acre there is no way to get the volume needed to make a dent. There are other slightly more exotic that can push bio-diesel up to 200 gallons per acre, but they require a growing climate that is only available in a small section of the US.
Algae farms on the other hand, can pump out thousands of gallons of bio-Diesel per acre, can be designed to run in low pop/non-farmland south west US, and can be used to clean exhaust from existing coal fired power plants. Of all the bio fuel options, these are really looking like the hot ticket right now.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
While I'm not a fan of corn based ethanol, I am a fan of having a heavily subsidized and regulated agricultural industry in the US combined with import tarrifs and controls in imported food stuffs.
The combination of those factors ensures that farming in the US remains profitable to most farmers and guarantees that even in a global economic melt down, getting food to the plates of Americans will not be an impossible problem.
It does screw with the global economy something fierce though and pisses on all of the non-developed countries that would typically be able to compete on the global market through agricultural exports. But personally, I'm a bit more worried about health and stability in my own country.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Energy storage is indeed the biggest issue. However, note that gasoline is one of the most efficient forms of energy storage around. So, how about synthesizing the gasoline (and diesel) via thermal depolymerization (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization) of agricultural waste, garbage, sewer sludge, etc., using a nuclear power plant for the process heat (i.e. cogeneration)? Eventually we can use a fourth generation nuclear reactor that can burn the U235 and actinides in "spent" fuel from current reactors, and solve several problems at once (http://www.americanenergyindependence.com/nucleargen4.aspx).
I'm interested in the concept of "seasteading," the idea of colonizing the ocean surface. It's been proposed that a sea-farm can produce a profitable crop by using the huge "land" area available to grow algae and/or seaweed/kelp. Seaweed has many industrial uses as well as being edible, while simpler algae might be used for biofuels. Does this concept seem plausible to you -- doing it at sea? On one hand there's free "land" with solar energy, and less regulation and taxation, but on the other there're probably high maintenance costs and no subsidies. It seems as though the key to doing this profitably would be volume, which means developing dead-simple algae buoys of some kind plus a way to get the stuff to market.
Even the authors of a book on seasteading, who emphasize the need for practicality, seem to assume that you need a multi-million-dollar giant techno-platform to get started. What do you think of a homestead-style biofuel farm consisting mainly of a boat and a raft?
Revive the Constitution.
Do they take into account the sunlight that went into the plants that went into fossil fuels?
In either case, they shouldn't - the sun would have shined whether or not there was a plant there.
In any case, I don't believe Brazil are secretly consuming oil to hide the fact that biofuels are a net energy loss.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."