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New Study Says Governments Should Ditch Reliance On Biofuels
HughPickens.com writes The NYT reports on a new study from a prominent environmental think tank that concludes turning plant matter into liquid fuel or electricity is so inefficient that the approach is unlikely ever to supply a substantial fraction of global energy demand. They add that continuing to pursue this strategy is likely to use up vast tracts of fertile land that could be devoted to helping feed the world's growing population. "I would say that many of the claims for biofuels have been dramatically exaggerated," says Andrew Steer, president of the World Resources Institute, a global research organization based in Washington that is publishing the report. "There are other, more effective routes to get to a low-carbon world." The report follows several years of rising concern among scientists about biofuel policies in the United States and Europe, and is the strongest call yet by the World Resources Institute, known for nonpartisan analysis of environmental issues, to urge governments to reconsider those policies.
Timothy D. Searchinger says recent science has challenged some of the assumptions underpinning many of the pro-biofuel policies that have often failed to consider the opportunity cost of using land to produce plants for biofuel. According to Searchinger, if forests or grasses were grown instead of biofuels, that would pull carbon dioxide out of the air, storing it in tree trunks and soils and offsetting emissions more effectively than biofuels would do. What is more, as costs for wind and solar power have plummeted over the past decade, and the new report points out that for a given amount of land, solar panels are at least 50 times more efficient than biofuels at capturing the energy of sunlight in a useful form. "It's true that our first-generation biofuels have not lived up to their promise," says Jason Hill said. "We've found they do not offer the environmental benefits they were purported to have, and they have a substantial negative impact on the food system."
Timothy D. Searchinger says recent science has challenged some of the assumptions underpinning many of the pro-biofuel policies that have often failed to consider the opportunity cost of using land to produce plants for biofuel. According to Searchinger, if forests or grasses were grown instead of biofuels, that would pull carbon dioxide out of the air, storing it in tree trunks and soils and offsetting emissions more effectively than biofuels would do. What is more, as costs for wind and solar power have plummeted over the past decade, and the new report points out that for a given amount of land, solar panels are at least 50 times more efficient than biofuels at capturing the energy of sunlight in a useful form. "It's true that our first-generation biofuels have not lived up to their promise," says Jason Hill said. "We've found they do not offer the environmental benefits they were purported to have, and they have a substantial negative impact on the food system."
The NYT reports on a new study from a prominent environmental think tank that concludes turning plant matter into liquid fuel or electricity is so inefficient that the approach is unlikely ever to supply a substantial fraction of global energy demand. They add that continuing to pursue this strategy is likely to use up vast tracts of fertile land that could be devoted to helping feed the world's growing population.
Hello, the 1980s are calling with some information for you. There is more than enough appropriate land for biofuel-from-algae production in the USA to replace one hundred percent of our transportation fuel consumption, assuming it could all be done with diesels. And since the average age of a vehicle in the fleet is under 20 years even now when it is at literally its all-time highest level, you could feasibly phase in the diesels on a useful time scale without inconveniencing a single driver.
The short form is that you grow algae in inexpensive raceway ponds and use centrifugal separation to get oil out as a diesel feedstock. This can then be fed to a basically traditional fractionation column distiller and made into green diesel, eliminating the gel-point disadvantages normally experienced with biodiesel.
The longer form is that Gevo, a corporation held by GE Energy Ventures and others, would also like to sell us Butanol — a 1:1 replacement for gasoline made by bacteria which reduces emissions and which is made from any organic material — including the left-over algae from the biodiesel process. But Butamax, a company owned by BP and DuPont, holds the rather obvious patent on taking the gene which has been doing this for us for decades and putting it into basically anything else which might hold it, which is the piece needed to make it commercially viable. Yet, they seem to have no interest in actually selling the fuel.
We have the ability to shift to biofuels using technology which is decades old. This report is a dirty and stupid lie, because it completely ignores decades-old technology.
Oh yeah, as an aside, if you put your algae production facilities near coal or oil plants, you can capture up to 80% of their CO2 output in the algae, increasing growth rates and letting you basically use that carbon all over again when you burn the fuel. It's not a solution to the problem of carbon release, but it does mitigate it significantly. Then we can save our oil for making plastics. It's too valuable to burn.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It takes a much oil to make bio-fuel as you get back out of it. The entire process produces far more air pollution than simply burning the fossil fuels in your car.
Ethanol is now typically at least 15% energy-positive. That's not very good, of course, but it's still energy-positive. Your numbers are far out of date.
However, there are lots of very good reasons why ethanol is rotten from stem to stern. In the interest of brevity I'll spare all the reasons why ethanol is a bad motor fuel and just move straight to environmental impact. Virtually all fuel ethanol is made from corn and virtually all of that corn is grown continuously, which is to say without crop rotation or even letting fields lie fallow. This depletes the soil of everything that makes it soil and not just dirt. Thus, virtually all fuel ethanol production is actually selling out the future of food production for short-term profit.
One thing that would be a really great motor fuel is methane. What we do is we stop cooking our shit in open ponds and then feeding it into waterways. Instead, we cook it in a closed (or at least effectively closed) reactor, it turns into soil, and then we can use it to grow food. While it cooks in an anaerobic environment it releases a lot of its carbon in the form of methane, which we can separate with a membrane and capture for later use anywhere we currently use natural gas or propane. It's really quite trivial on a mechanical level to convert literally any gasoline vehicle to run on methane. They get less mileage per unit of mass, but the output is of course vastly cleaner, the crankcase lubricant lasts longer, and so on. The fuel can be stored in relatively inexpensive tanks compared to hydrogen, or of course compared to the energy density of batteries. Propane conversions are common in off-roading. Range becomes an issue, but I see a lot of Jeeps with conversions up here in the sticks. Gas will work at any right-side-up angle even when the tank is mostly empty, unlike gasoline.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"