Looking Beyond Corn and Sugarcane For Cost-Effective Biofuels

carmendrahl writes "The abundance of shale gas in the U.S. is expected to lower the cost of petrochemicals for fuel and other applications, making it harder for plant-based, renewable feedstocks to compete in terms of price. In the search for cost-competitive crops, companies are testing plants other than traditional biofuel sources such as corn and sugarcane. In this video, you can see how a company is test-growing a relative of sugarcane, which is expected to yield 5 times the ethanol per acre compared to corn."

Comments

Nature's solar panel

[schneidafunk]

So when do solar panels become effective enough to replace growing a plant to harness the sun's energy?

Re:Nature's solar panel

[MightyYar]

It's not just energy conversion that needs to compete, it's storage and transport.

For a solar panel to compete, you would need some efficient way to turn electricity into liquid hydrocarbons - or you would need tremendously improved battery/capacitor technology. You would also need to replace the existing infrastructure for moving around liquid fuels.

Re:Nature's solar panel

[ShanghaiBill]

how does your solar panel work on cloudy days, rainy days, snow days and at night?

In sunny places, electricity demand is strongly correlated with hot, sunny days when the AC is running. Solar is not good for base load, but that really isn't an issue as it currently generates less than 0.2% of the electric power. This is something to worry about when it gets to about 10%. If that ever happens, we can deal with it by energy storage, long distance transmission, and/or load shifting.

Re:Nature's solar panel

[iotaborg]

Actually it isn't that terrible on cloudy/rainy days. We have a solar panel installed on our house in the pacific northwest of the US, which is 100% cloud/rain in the winter months. Energy generated is 100-300 kWh per month in the winter, 500-700 kWh per month in the sunny summers. Obviously nothing in the nights. Excess production in the summer pays for the shortfall in the winter (paid by utility company), so it works out.

Re:Nature's solar panel

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

So when do solar panels become effective enough to replace growing a plant to harness the sun's energy?

I suspect that the break-even point varies depending on what you want to do. If you want electricity, photovoltaics get a substantial boost (plants may still turn out to be cheaper, for sufficiently large installations, if you can grow a zillion acres of generic combustables with minimal human intervention and then shovel them into a slightly converted coal plant or something; but the poor efficiency of the conversion from thermal energy to electrical energy will hobble you, and it will cripple you in small-scale installs). If you want a hydrocarbon-fuel substitute, the ability of organisms to synthesize all kinds of neat organic compounds is going to be quite a trick to replicate, even if you have unlimited electricity.

Also depends on location: given suitably robust solar cell packages(ideally with some fancy catalytic autocleaning coating), you could convert surface area on large structures into PV sites with just an occasional visit by the installers-with-climbing-gear. You wouldn't want to try crops under those conditions. A desert area, with plenty of sun but next to no water, would also be decent PV territory but bad planting ground. A large patch of arable land would have the opposite conditions(though it might also have competing food producers; but luckily, while it's illegal to use poor people for biofuel, it's legal to use food for biofuel and let poor people starve.)

Re:Nature's solar panel

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole issue of sugar to ethanol suffers from several false economies including the usefulness in this case of water from the Colorado river which is not exactly surplus, and from the energy to distill and etc. Damage to the soil is a problem as is the whole issue of fertilizers etc. The USA is barking up the wrong tree with ethanol. It is a bad bad idea.
In the issue of a parent post regards competing with solar vs plants. Plants are at best thermally 1.5 to 2 percent efficient of sunlight. Solar cells are currently about 21%. The whole issue revolves around trading energy for which we currently have no effective use for energy that we can use. Biomass doesn't work well in cars so we only see it as a plus in the equation assuming we in our segmented economy fail to look at the total lifecycle costs.
Solar is already competitive and on price with standard generation means by fossil fuels.

Re:Nature's solar panel

[jellomizer]

Fossil Fuels have some key advantages.
1. Portability. You can take it, put it in container and ship it anywhere, or store it when you need it.
2. High Energy. You can get a good bang for 1 kilo of Fuel. Vs. batteries, or other forms of portable energy
3. Low tech maintenance. Fixing a problem in a fossil fuel engine is much easier then fixing a power turbine or a solar sell, we can use alternate parts if needed to.
4. Out of Sight or of Mind. Large Windmills covering the landscape, acres of solar panels, large dams... A lot of big infrastructure projects

It isn't that we couldn't go, however you need to know the tradeoffs and find ways of dealing with them.

Re:Nature's solar panel

[mlts]

One advantage of solar power is that it is distributed, which helps with redundancy on the grid.

Plus, there are multiple ways of using solar power. Grid tie is one way. However, with the fact sometimes it is more expensive to pay a utility company to string a wire to a remote property than it is to set up an off-grid solar panel array, charge controllers, battery bank, and inverters, it isn't too far-fetched for people to just go with a bunch of panels and not bother with the electric grid whatsoever.

Solar is getting cheaper, mainly because China now has the critical mass of technology and willpower to stand behind it. It is only a matter of time before we start seeing each cell having a small MPPT controller so partial shading's impact is minimized, and perhaps even having the charge controllers or inverters built into each panel, so adding more usable watts might just consist of dropping another row of panels, plugging two power cables and a CANBUS cable, and letting the electronics do the rest. China wants this technology because it means that they don't have to deploy as many coal plants, thus less pollution.

Solar is coming to a point where it is less of a matter of "why", but a matter of "why not"?

To boot, solar panels have a long life. In 20-30 years, where most energy plants need to have a complete overhaul, solar panels might need to be washed every so often. An investment now may seem foolish, but given a steady return over the years, it may be wise over the long run. This is something that Germany understands, and is allowing them to wean completely off of both nuclear energy and Russian gas.

Re:Nature's solar panel

[jekewa]

Sadly the AC is right. Sad because of the AC, not the right.

The issue with the US (and any other nation with cars and therefore a fuel problem) is that the solution being sought is to keep the vehicles we have running, or make vehicles of the future run the same way. There's some benefit to this, to be sure, considering the infrastructure, expertise, and experience around vehicles as we know them today. It seems like a shoo-in to find an alternative fuel that would let everyone use the cars just like they have today.

A better solution is to find a better vehicle. As the AC suggests, solar could provide that answer. The vehicles themselves (surfaced with panels) and roadways (surfaced, covered, or lined) and rooftops (nearby or...well, all of them) could be leveraged to provide the electricity to power electric vehicles (and homes and stores and lights and whatnot). Other "clean" and "safe" sources like hydro or wind or (far away) nuclear could be used to supplement as needed. A properly re-invisioned vehicle would be light enough to use electric motors and batteries for long-enough travel to essentially replace the fuel-powered vehicles we use now.

The trouble with that transition is that not enough people want to drive an electric Smart car in a world of Chevy Suburbans and Hummers. We've got a mindset of what "car" means that needs to change first. if SUV was the rare exception, the smaller, compact-to-mid-size electric vehicle could get a foothold. This mindset needs to be transitioned in large groups to be successful; places like Belize and Bermuda and really any tropical island could do this more easily than the US; well, if it weren't for the money to get the vehicles and infrastructure started...

If we're looking to replace petroleum, and no one can come up with Mr Fusion (which I'll concede didn't power the car, just the flux capacitor), other solutions need to be found that are lateral impacts. Line freeways with saw grass, which is a better bio-fuel than corn, and harvest the grass when the freeway borders are trimmed. Otherwise, maybe stop making chips and soda out of corn, and turn all of that into fuel...that might help reduce the weight the vehicle needs to move, too...

Re:Nature's solar panel

[evilviper]

For a solar panel to compete [...] you would need tremendously improved battery/capacitor technology. You would also need to replace the existing infrastructure for moving around liquid fuels.

Current batteries are more than good enough. A car full of Li-Ion batteries can get better range than a conventional ICE car, and charging is getting very fast now, so charging might be faster than your current stops to eat.

We have a replacement for the oil infrastructure, it's called the electrical grid, and it goes directly to almost everyone's homes, so we'll need far fewer electrical charging stations than we currently have of gas station, and they can just be electrical boxes in existing parking spaces at malls, airports, and other freeway-adjacent rest stops.

Re:Nature's solar panel

[evilviper]

I had high hopes that fuel cells would become viable, not for cars, but for homes. If photovoltaic got good enough, and fuel cells got cheap, we wouldn't need the electric company.

Why do you want fuel cells, when batteries are more efficient at the purpose you described? For stationary use, the weight of cheap batteries shouldn't be an issue, and neither is the slow charging time with 24-hour cycle times.

Non-hydrogen fuel cells are interesting as a replacement for traditional conversion of fossil fuels to electricity, with better efficiency than Carnot. But natural gas / gasoline / etc. fuel cells haven't been forthcoming. Methanol fuel cells are becoming popular with forklifts, but ones that can directly use fossil fuels without conversion will offer a huge leap in efficiency, and significantly lower consumption of those fuels.

Other people want to wet their beaks now?

[Kohath]

But corn ethanol is already the perfect way to enrich campaign donors in Iowa and the other farm states. Why should the guys getting rich off corn ethanol agree to share the government loot with other biofuel producers?

Re:Other people want to wet their beaks now?

[Kohath]

More importantly, WTF is this corn subsidy doing for anybody?

Green jobs man. If politicians can't transfer money from the people who earned it to their cronies and financial backers, the terrorists win.

Re:Other people want to wet their beaks now?

[ShanghaiBill]

But corn ethanol is already the perfect way to enrich campaign donors in Iowa and the other farm states.

Before we can reform farming, we need to move the first presidential caucuses out of Iowa.

Re:Sugar Beet

[Hatta]

Beet beet, sugar beet
Beet, sugar beet
Sugar beet beeeet!

Video link in summary

[noh8rz10]

I hate video. Too real-time. Like TV news, I can read the majority of nyt.com in the space of the evening news. I assume the video is about switchgrass, can anybody confirm?

Re:Video link in summary

[noh8rz10]

It's not that my attention span is short, it's that I can absorb info like a fire hose, while real time video is a trickle. I can type faster than conversation speed as well. Given the mods on my original comment, I think many people agree with me!

Re:Video link in summary

[Zalbik]

I can type faster than conversation speed as well.

Really?!? People can easily understand conversation up to 150 - 160 words per minute.

For comparison, the world champion of typing speeds obtained an average rate of 150 wpm in 2005.

So if you are outputting information, speech tends to win hands down.

However if you are receiving information, people can read at 250-300 wpm....

Which is why I also hate video posts. That and:
1) Basically impossible to skim
2) Harder to "re-read" items that may require a second viewing
3) Harder to reference / quote specific points in the video
4) Accents and/or poor audio setups can make video difficult to understand
5) Bandwidth limitations (e.g. mobile devices)
6) Ugly people

Re:Video link in summary

[pepty]

I try to avoid "informative" videos as well. In general it takes less time to read the relevant info than it takes to watch the ad at the beginning of the video. It also usually takes less time to find a more in depth and useful version someplace else on the web than it would take to watch the logos, credits, and all the introductory fluff at the beginning of said video.

Small economics

[EmperorOfCanada]

People blah blah about the economics of this vs that and then write off the more expensive techology. But what interests me are the actual costs. Often the economics can be very interesting on a local scale. For instance, if you were a small organic farmer could you plant some of this stuff in the scrubby back 20 and then with a little bio-fuel setup in the barn make your own fuel? Often people like farmers have cash flow problems and taking fuel out of the equation could be a big help. This might be a case where the farmer would work at this in the winter producing a summer's worth of fuel and it is grown on worthless land. For the farmer it takes his winter time and makes it valuable and takes worthless land and makes it valuable. It is doubtful that the farmer cares that crude oil is cheaper in that he doesn't have that under the back 40.

Then you go third world where access to cash is an even bigger problem so again removing fuel from the expenses would be a huge help.

A good variation of this would be that many Texas farmers have abandoned oil wells on their land. The farmer stakes a claim to the wells and then using wind or solar pumps a few barrels a day. These wells are dead as far as the big companies are concerned but for the farmers can add up to a pretty good living. So according to macro economics as viewed by the oil company accountants these wells are worthless; when the farmers show that they clearly aren't.

So I often read about technology X not being better than oil when you add up all the costs but often those costs don't apply.

Re:Small economics

[Anonymous Coward]

With an oil pump (*if* the farmer can cheaply get the mineral rights for it, which is a big if), this whole scenario makes sense. That's because, generally speaking, oil is always worth it. Oil is such a dense and easily-accessible energy source (accounting for untold thousands or millions of years of solar input) that if you can get it flowing odds are you're net positive. An old well that's not flowing *much* may not be worth it to a large oil company, but could be substantial for a small farmer. I get that.

However, the biofuel stuff hasn't worked out at *any scale, ever*. It's not just that you can do something else more economically-viable with the land (if subsidies weren't present to prop it up...), it's that it quite literally costs more in real energy terms to grow and process the biofuel plant than the fuel you get out of the process. When you add up the real energy costs of the fertilizer, the manufacture and transport of the fertilizer, the fuels to run the machines to till the earth, plant the crops, harvest the crops, running the machines and chemical processes by which the biofuel is extracted, etc... you come out net-negative.

To put that in a simpler form: suppose you're even given all the necessary machinery (for farming and fuel refining) for free (which is bullshit, because we should include an energy cost for some fraction of the manufacturing effort, but anyways). And you start with a giant 10,000 gallon silo full of fuel with which to run your equipment and create feritilizer and all that jazz, and whatever fuel you create from the crops goes back into the tank after processing is done. If you run this operation in isolation for years (which assumes no equipment breakdown/replacement, again overly-idealistic), your silo of fuel just keeps getting smaller and smaller until you run out of energy and give up.

Biofuels are simply not worth it. Not with the crops and methods we have today, anyways. Until then, confine the experiments to the lab instead of fucking around with our economy and our fuel blends at the pumps!

Do these take up areas that food crops grow?

[mlts]

My question: Is ground for growing food crops affected by this? If farmers all grow switchgrass/hemp/$whatever and make more money selling that for fuel, then it will spike food prices, which can cause major problems down the line (people can put up with a lot of injustice, but if they are starving, all bets are off.)

Ethically, I can't support a fuel that takes food out of people's mouths, even though ethanol has a number of decent advantages.

Re:Do these take up areas that food crops grow?

[H0p313ss]

My question: Is ground for growing food crops affected by this? If farmers all grow switchgrass/hemp/$whatever and make more money selling that for fuel, then it will spike food prices, which can cause major problems down the line (people can put up with a lot of injustice, but if they are starving, all bets are off.)

Ethically, I can't support a fuel that takes food out of people's mouths, even though ethanol has a number of decent advantages.

Excellent question, this is already subject to debate.

There are three major areas of concern here, food vs. fuel, CO2 emissions/footprint and the ecological cost of production.

In my opinion CO2 emissions is the elephant in the room for biofuels. Extensive production and consumption of biofuels may ween us off fossil fuels but it does nothing to address just how stupid it is for us to be modifying the chemical composition of the atmosphere.

Note that the process of biofuel production does not exist in a vacuum, like any other agricultural activity it has a direct ecological impact furthermore the vast majority of current agricultural practice involves burning fuels (tractors and other farm equipment) and the use of inorganic commercial fertilizer which also has a wide variety of impacts such as the seepage of phosphates in runoff leading to downstream agae blooms.

IMHO, the development of biofuels is just robbing Peter to pay Paul. While other alternative power sources are less efficient, more costly or less power dense the vast majority of systems that are currently in production, (wind, water, solar) are both profitable and significantly better for the environment.

Re:Do these take up areas that food crops grow?

[H0p313ss]

The great thing about CO2 emissions for plant-derived biofuels is that they won't modify the chemical composition of the atmosphere. Think about it for a moment: what you're doing is extracting carbon from the atmosphere, turning it into complex hydrocarbons using energy from the sun, and then burning it to release that energy. Any CO2 released was *already in the atmosphere* to begin with, so biofuels net zero greenhouse emissions (to first order at least, maybe there's some weird combustion products or whatever). Hard to get much lower than that.

Well, yes and no. Biofuel will only be carbon neutral if all the production, transportation and fertilization was done with biofuels as well. A great goal, but I don't think it's been realized anywhere yet.

And of course, that still leaves the whole fuel vs. food issue open. Now if we could manage to come up a biofuel production process that includes the net fixation of atmospheric CO2 (net reduced or zero carbon footprint), with close to zero ecological impact that is not using precious agricultural land then I'd be all over it. But at the moment it's a bit of a pipe dream.

Re:Do these take up areas that food crops grow?

[Belial6]

You don't have to worry about the CO2 emissions. One of the benefits of bio-fuel is that the carbon in the plants was taken out of the air. With bio-fuels you only add as much CO2 to the air as you take out.

Re:Sugar Beet

[mcgrew]

Beets are perfect for fuel. Nasty vegetable! Yech! When I see beets I say "beat it, beet."

Now, buttered corn, yum. Corn fed beef? Even better! Corn is for eating, beets are best used as fuel.

immediately if cost was not a factor

[peter303]

The best plants are convert 1.5% of incoming sunlight when factoring length of growing cycle and planting density. Cheap solar panels are five times more efficient. More expensive solar technologies and/or concentrators gets into double digits.

However when you include the costs of the entire system- the startup capital, intermediate fuel type and distribution- the current cost-efficiency of both become more comparable.

Re:Sugar Beet

[MightyYar]

I don't think sugar cane can be grown in sugar beet country and vice versa, so the two are complimentary. In addition, harvest times are totally different between sugar beets and sugar cane.

Re:Sugar Beet

[ShanghaiBill]

Corn and sugarcane got nothing on the sugar beet.

Acre for acre, sugar beets get more subsidies than corn, if you include the protective tariffs on sugar imports. There is no way that beets can compete with cane in a free market.

Wouldn't it be easier to adapt palm oil trees?

[gestalt_n_pepper]

Unless something has changed, palm oil still has the best net energy return compared to any other organic fuel source. If we're not going to eat the stuff, GM palm oil trees may be the way to go here.

Regardless, plants are still just inefficient solar panels whose only advantage is that their energy output is chemical, not electrical, thereby minimizing transmission and storage energy loss.

From a net energy/price standpoint, biofuels still can't compete with petroleum, though that will change as petroleum gets more expensive and yields less net energy over time, however, the ecological effects of trying to replace the 160 exajoules of energy provided by oil each year would be an unmitigated disaster.

Nice idea, but we're still going to have to reduce our energy consumption worldwide, long before the end of this century.

Sorghum

[MrWin2kMan]

Here in Maricopa, AZ we host the only ethanol plant in the state of Arizona, and one of the local crops used (grown by Ak-Chin Farms, one of the Indian Reservations that surrounds Maricopa) is sorghum, the same plant you can get molasses from. Much more bang for the buck than corn or sawgrass.

Re:Sugar Beet

[ShanghaiBill]

There is no way that beets can compete with cane in a free market.

That's OK, because there isn't a free market on the planet, and never has been.

A free market has a large number of sellers, a large number of buyers, low barriers to entry, and full information. There are plenty of real markets that meet those criteria, including farm commodity markets in most countries. Of course, if you are pedantic ass, you will insist that the number of buyers and sellers must be infinite to qualify as "free" and therefore nothing is free and any sort of subsidy or corruption is fully justified. Whatever.

Re:Sugar Beet

[biobogonics]

Corn and sugarcane got nothing on the sugar beet.

As a Michigan native, I have always thought that sugar came from beets. This part of the state is the heart of sugar beet country. Growing more beets would solve several problems at once. It's time to plow under most of Detroit and plant beets. This would reclaim more of the city for productive use, create a tax base and possibly produce bio-fuels. At the same time, we can lower unemployment and empty the jails by teaching young people to farm. Imagine the historical irony of undoing the "great migration".

Screw Ethenol, use Butanol

[Anonymous Coward]

way better than ethonal. If has an air:fuel ratio close enough to petrol that you can mix it in any ratio and not need to mod the engine.
 
  Butanol fuel

Re:Sugar Beet

[Hatta]

I think beets get a bad name due to everyone using canned beets. I haven't prepared fresh beets myself, but I've had beet coleslaw made from fresh beets that was fantastic. Julienned beets, red cabbage, shallots, oil & vinegar, IIRC. Really pretty too.

Obligatory Michael Jackson

[dkleinsc]

When I see beets I say "beat it, beet."

They told us don't you ever try to make new fuel
Don't want a lower price, you better like your gruel
The law is on their side, and their policies are cruel
So beet it, just beet it!

Re:Sugar Beet

[rycamor]

Yes, there's a world of difference between fresh beets and the canned garbage you buy. And there is another world of difference between 5-day-old beets you get in the produce section and beets you just picked from your own garden. Fresh beet juice isn't half bad, also.

Beets are easy to grow, and since they are in the brassica family (along with broccoli, collards, kale, etc..) the leaves are quite healthy for you (yes, broccoli leaves are good eating), and good in a salad, or cooked form. I didn't find out any of this until I started growing my own garden.

Re:Ethanol is not what it's claimed to be

[Bob the Super Hamste]

It will go down but it shouldn't decrease that much. It sounds like someone has a poorly running vehicle that has problems maintaining proper fuel trim and the excess oxygen in the E10 fuel is really confusing they system. Time to clean or replace the MAP/MAF sensor, change the O2 sensor(s), and do a tune up with new plugs and wires, maybe check for vacuum leaks as well. There may be other things wrong but those things usually affect how a vehicle reacts to E10 vs Non-Oxy fuel the most. That is where I would start unless his truck is so old it has a carburetor in it which case the simple solution would be to adjust the carb for one fuel type and then only put in that fuel type.