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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 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.
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.
Corn is not the only way to make ethanol. There are far better ways. Just look at how many different sources you can make drinking alcohol from. Ethanol is the same thing, just distilled to 200 proof.
you got whiskey (corn), rum (sugar, and you can grow sugar beets just fine in most of the US), wine (grapes or practically any fruit or berry. France actually is doing this with a lot of their surplus wine.), sake (rice), vodka (grains, potatoes), etc. All of those are potential fuel ethanol sources.
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You missed something in your list. That stuff in the back of my fridge. I'm not sure what it started out as, but I'm pretty sure it's got a decent ethanol content now.
Typical AC, you are absolutely wrong.
There are many companies existing right now that can turn landfill waste into bio-deisel. The process is completely self generating meaning they use energy from the process to run the system. Many designs are completely sealed systems meaning they do not vent anything into the environment.
Google: "biodiesel from landfill" and see for yourself. Another: http://www.cleanenergyprojects.com/
"Suppose you were an idiot...and suppose you were a member of Congress...but I repeat myself." Mark Twain
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!
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.
Good point. I also like diesels in general as they have better characteristics (inherently better efficiency, more torque, and the engines last practically forever due to the heavier construction) for most people. Sure, they can be problematic to start in the cold, but that's why Andrew Freeman invented the block heater.
I'm not a fan of methanol though, as it's fantastically toxic (blindness, death, etc.), and can be absorbed via the skin, whereas ethanol is much less so. Also, methanol burns almost invisible.
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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.
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.
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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 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
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 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