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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."
All of these I've read stories treat "demand" as a fixed quantity that's independent of the commodity's price. There's also no discussion about whether or not the planet explodes if "demand" isn't met.
Am I being pedantic, or are these stories really fatally flawed in this way?
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/08/16/president-obama-announces-major-initiative-spur-biofuels-industry-and-en
The White House
Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release
August 16, 2011
President Obama Announces Major Initiative to Spur Biofuels Industry and Enhance America's Energy Security
USDA, Department of Energy and Navy Partner to Advance Biofuels to Fuel Military and Commercial Transportation, Displace Need for Foreign Oil, and Strengthen Rural America
WASHINGTON, Aug. 16, 2011 Ã" President Obama today announced that the U.S. Departments of Agriculture, Energy and Navy will invest up to $510 million during the next three years in partnership with the private sector to produce advanced drop-in aviation and marine biofuels to power military and commercial transportation. The initiative responds to a directive from President Obama issued in March as part of his Blueprint for A Secure Energy Future, the AdministrationÃ(TM)s framework for reducing dependence on foreign oil. The biofuels initiative is being steered by the White House Biofuels Interagency Work Group and Rural Council, both of which are enabling greater cross-agency collaboration to strengthen rural America. ...
The same logic saying biofuel is inefficient (requires a lot of land for low energy yield) is the same logic saying meat is inefficient (which is true, meat is energy inefficient) because it requires a large amount of crops for the livestock.
Global price pressures on food is probably a good thing, you have places like Mumbai, India with 35,000 people per square mile. Increasing the quality of life is more than just the price of food. World population isn't a problem, but how it is distributed is what keeps poor nations miserable and cheaper food is solving the symptom of the problem, not the problem.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
The reason politicians on both sides of the political aisle push biofuels from corn is because they are pandering to voters in Iowa. A favorite political joke in recent elections is that if Wisconsin held the first primary, we would have major initiatives to make fuel from cheese.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
Darn... saw the article and raced here to post something pithy and brief with 'Duh' in the subject. Too late.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
That is why space-based solar power is very likely the only way to go.
My inner nerd wholly agrees with you.
My outer nerd thinks orbital base load energy would be a single point of failure, and the entity that provides it would become the de-facto world government. Better to build autonomous terrestrial plants in sovereign countries fueled by an element present on every continent.
And yes, I have even more layers of nerd underneath. It's nerd all the way down.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
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.'"
Food production is not a valid argument, IMHO.
We already produce 2700 calories per person per day. That's plenty to feed everyone a healthy diet. The reason so many people don't have enough food has nothing to do with the amount of food available and everything to do with logistics, politics, and inequity: The food simply isn't getting to where it's needed. Growing even more food is not going to solve that problem.
Similarly, biofuel production need not make use of land that is suitable for growing common food crops. Even though I advocate biofuels, even I'm against using food crops to do so.
=Smidge=
My outer nerd thinks orbital base load energy would be a single point of failure, and the entity that provides it would become the de-facto world government.
The solution is obvious. One entity doesn't design, launch, and/or operate them all. Since we developed the basic technology needed to build cost-effective solar power satellites, nothing else has actually made sense. We could be putting up big satellites made of little more than a big plastic sheet with solar cells printed on one side and ion engines printed on the other, with a rectenna array distributed throughout. We've got the technology to at least make a go of it, do a real trial. But our vision seems to be limited to things which are far away.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
the problem with solar is that you do get energy supply from it, but only during the day, so we need to come up with much more efficient ways of storing that energy. We don't have this yet.
Yeah, reliable and safe LiFePo batteries which can cycle 10,000 times just won't cut it! A vehicle made with such packs could only save you thousands over its lifetime! How awful.
So what else do we have that can be used. Biofuel, and biomass generation, as part of an overall strategy is something that will help to plug the gaps in the areas when the other renewables stop working. We just need to focus it at an appropriate level rather than thinking its another silver bullet.
It's only a silver bullet for our transportation fuel emissions woes. Shucks.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Even *with* the existing amount of land used for biofuel, enough food is already produced to adequately feed the entire human race. The problem lies not with production, but with *distribution*.
I've been suspicious of biofuels for quite a few reasons, but mostly due to efficiency. According to the numbers I saw photosynthetic efficiency is 3-6% but .photovoltaic are 30+%. So covering a field with solar cells would be 10x more efficient than harvesting biofuel from the same field. Don't flame me if I'm comparing apples and oranges, I have done a bit of googling on the subject and not really found much.
Both ethanol and biodiesel are biofuels but they are not the same and the economics are not the same. biodiesel is already proven to work and can be made fairly easily from non-food crops or even waste from processing food crops. Even within ethanol, ethanol from sugarcane is far more efficient than from corn. The stupidity of corn subsidies means we keep out imports of cheap sugarcane while impoverishing countries like Haiti that cant sell its sugarcane crop. It also means coca cola tastes better everywhere else except the US.
That's Big Government for you. Instead of various people acting as they see fit — some making mistakes and some not — we have a government, that's big enough to make a mistake for all of us at once...
Competing ideas? To each his own? Personal responsibility? No way, no how — citizen, the Science is Settled[TM] and you are blocking our progress towards the Common Good[TM].
Fat is bad for you — all of you! Until it is not. Except it still is...
Biofuels is about to become the latest example of this. As our benevolent and omniscient overlords in Washington jump from one trend to another, the whole country is supposed to rejig, retool, and reorient itself each time: from "low-fat" to "low-sugar", from growing biofuels to drilling oil. Because they "know" better — and they are 100% confident in that settled "knowledge" of theirs. Until it changes to the exact opposite like some kind of quantum particle — and only the confidence remains.
How about we — the subjects — make our own choices, huh? Leaving only the courts, police and military to you, our beloved government class? Yes, we — some of us — will be making the same mistakes. But, at least, they will be neither coercing nor outright forcing the others to repeat them.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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.'"
the problem with solar is that you do get energy supply from it, but only during the day, so we need to come up with much more efficient ways of storing that energy. We don't have this yet.
We don't use as much power at night. And batteries are pretty good these days.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Are you now a science denier the second they said something you disagree with?
No, I'm citing science, while the report is ignoring it.
It appears scientists are in agreement on this
Only if you are ignorant. Also, not all scientists are created equal. I don't ask people about things out of their field because it's irrelevant what they think about things they haven't researched. I have done.
I don't believe you are a bio-fuel expert and qualified to question them.
If you have an issue with my citation, then make it. But I note that you're too cowardly to actually do that.
Funny how quickly that happened.
Funny how quickly some coward without sufficient courage of his convictions to even log in and be counted has raised so many nebulous objections so quickly after my comment rose to the top of the barrel.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The worst offender is the flex-fuel E85 crap. If you want to run ethanol, run ethanol, build up an engine that is designed to take advantage of it's anti-det properties and runs dramatically higher compression for waaaaay better efficiency. And we definitely shouldn't be doing it with corn (Corn requires nitrogen fertilizer, largely negating the total energy boon of ethanol). We should be looking at switch grass and other fast-growing high yield options that can generate vastly more ethanol per acre with dramatically less costs.
Bio Diesel I actually like, sulfur is all but forgotten, and the increased lubricity actually makes it easier on your engine. But the idea of trying to convert a soy crop to BD100 is going to be dumb. Recycling waste vegitable oil from the food processing industry on the other hand, reduces waste and taps into an existing supply.
Even looking at different sectors than just automotive. I have a couple of dairy farming buddies that use methane recovery from their manure processing system to power generators for electricity around the farm. Less raw methane escaping to the atmosphere, and again it's a by-product of the existing manure processing system.
The linked article sure reads like a shill for the oil industry, but it doesn't discount the point that we need to look at using the appropriate tool for the job. Sometimes that will be biofuels.
-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
They are not saying it is impossible to convert biomass to diesel, or even that we shouldn't grow biomass. They are saying that with current technology it is better to use biomass for carbon sequestration and food, and use more technological approaches to capturing solar as energy.
The core issue is the energy cost of conversion to a useful form. Converting biomass to biodiesel, right now, costs more energy than turning solar into charged batteries through PV, wind, or solar furnaces. That may change and we should still be doing research, and batteries still have ground to cover relative to diesel for energy density and refuel speed, but right now it looks like biomass fuel is going to be the losing horse.
We should be putting a larger share of our research budget on non-biomass solar capture than on biomass. We have that flipped right now because biomass looked like it was the better path ten years ago. It hasn't panned out, which doesn't mean we should give up, but we should continuously adjust our bets in favor of the stronger contender.
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What "starving billions"?
Lack of food hasn't been a major issue anywhere for more than 20 years now (last significant famine was in '92).
And most of the famines of the last century were engineered by local governments or local wars (note that the three largest famines of the 20th century were engineered by the governments in question to remove "politically unreliable" citizens).
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
But I gotta call bullshit on this report. If biofuels fail, it will be because of political interference in the process, not some inherent shortcoming. Many ways to generate fuel, but The politics involved seem to have us concentrate on corn based fuel, are chosen to send money towards farming interests more than make for efficiency.
There are ways to pretty efficiently generate biofuel that don't use food crops. Problem is, they don't use a biosource that fits in with the political baksheesh process. So we use corn.
There are some elephants in the room anyhow.
We do really need an energy dense fuel source that we can transport efficently with many vehicles. Airplanes, jet fighters, long distance heavy freight trains aren't likely to ever run on batteries. And unless there is really a never ending, hence abiotic supply of oil, we're going to have to find something else. Problem is, petrofuels set a pretty high bar.
Though widely reviled by some, ethanol is here to stay as a fuel additive. Of all the choices in boosting octane, it is about the best. Tetraethyl lead is nasty-ass deadly toxic stuff, and MTBE is capable of tainting groundwater with ease. Ethanol one way or the other is needed. It's interesting that some 6 percent of the nation's fuel supply is now ethanol additives.
So if a certain amount is needed just to keep running our petrofuels in the first place, we should look at generating it efficiently. Drinkypoo notes algae generation. I've seen the reactors (who ever thought I'd be giving a citation to a "drinkypoo" Oh well, when you're right, you're right.
Another thing is as long as we are burning stuff, the concept of what makes for less carbon in the atmosphere ends up just silly arguments. A certain amount of energy is going to be had by burning, so we have on concentrate on burning what we must, and moving away from it for everything else.
A final note - it is irony of the highest order to read in the report about how cheap solar and wind power are making it difficult for biofuels to compete. But there is some wisdom to be gained in that. While we are garroted by having to use food as fuel in our politically based ethanol production system, wind and solar have been much more innovative, and the industries have worked hard at lowering their cost. And they have largely succeeded. The present biofuel system is based on sending money to producers, not efficiency or ecological sense.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Biofuels are great, as long as they are made with waste products. That is, certain agricultural products create a lot of waste - we eat ears of corn, not the stalks. The countries that have made biofuels work do it by using the waste products of edible plants. There is no plant around that is anywhere close to profitable to grow just for fuel. That kind of agri-energy only 'works' if you give huge government subsidies. But if you happen to be growing an edible plant with a high amount of agricultural waste, you can easily and profitably turn that waste into energy. Note, normally we do other things with that waste - turn it into fertilizer, etc. To be a truly viable bio-fuel, the biofuel creation process must be more profitable than the alternative disposal method.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Please note that 5.5% of our arable land covered in solar panels (with the necessary auxiliary systems to buffer the energy till we need it) could supply ALL energy (not just electrical) needs of the USA.
It should further be noted that only 17% of the USA is "arable". Which means less than 1% of our total land area needs to be covered in solar panels to get the desired result*.
*Assuming that the "desired result" is energy independence and elimination of fossil fuels (which are much more valuable for making plastics than burning).
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
The problem lies not with production, but with *distribution*.
... and even that is far less of a problem than it used to be. The number of people living in extreme poverty (less than $1.25/day) has been cut in half in the last 15 years. Within another decade, just projecting current trends, we should be able to mostly eliminate hunger outside of war zones, and there are also a lot fewer war zones than there used to be. There are a lot of "virtuous cycles" happening in poor countries: as health and education improve, people become more productive, feed their families, and electrify their villages. The better childhood nutrition leads to higher IQ, and electrification means lights so people can read and study, and fewer smokey indoor candles and kerosene lanterns that cause respiratory diseases. Better education means people learn how malaria, AIDS, and hookworms are transmitted. Cellphone banking is helping the poorest accumulate savings. Cheaper solar panels are allowing villages to electrify locally, bypassing corrupt national providers.
Because high school was all about running cost benefit analyses on space based solar power.
Yeah you've repeated the rah rah promising sounding stuff from the decades old NREL reports. It sounds really great, I've read those too. But read them carefully--they're very initial studies that never scaled up. They are full of statements to the tune of "when scaled up to commercial volumes". Excepts it's been decades and no one has been able to do it. I've followed a number of the experiments of people trying and it doesn't seem to be as easy as the NREL papers made it sound. The open raceway ponds get contaminated with lower oil strains and don't produce the oil at the rate the papers hypothesized and the closed systems are expensive and difficult to operate. I'm not saying it's not possible, but the magical oil from algae to produce 100% of our transportation fuel isn't going to be nearly as easy as it seemed. Possible? Maybe yes, but probably not economical anytime soon. Think of it this way, if it worked, oil companies would be pouring billions into making it work rather than spending those billions drilling underwater or paying despotic dictators. They don't care where their oil comes from and if biodiesel from algae worked they'd be all over it to sell that to you cheaper than the other oil companies. They are researching it and possibly when crude oil is 4, 10, 20 or more times more expensive than it is now then algal biodiesel will be cost competitive. It wasn't when oil was over $100 a barrel, but it's possible something will be figured out that hasn't been in the last few decades to make it feasible by the time it gets back there. Or maybe it won't.
In case you did not hear they have been slashing forests in Malaysia and Indonesia to plant palm trees for biodiesel.
There is a famine going on right now in North Korea.
I read a claim that there has not been a famine in 400 years that was not politically created. This sound crazy when you first hear it, but when you start diving into the specifics it is scary.
I read the internet for the articles.
Yeah you sound like you know what you're talking about, except you don't. I know the studies you read make it sound easy, except it didn't turn out to be so easy. If it were that easy people would be investing billions into it to earn the profits that the oil companies are currently earning on petroleum. The studies you read, I read too, and they are smaller scale, talking about hoping to scale up. Optimistic pilot studies are practically legend and this seems to be a case. When trying to scale up, difficulties seem to have arisen. When you look into the companies that are trying to scale it up, it isn't working out as well. The contaminants are happening, the yields are lower, the costs are higher, etc.
So, a field of solar panels is more efficient. Hurray!
Lemme just stop by and get a gallon of solar!
Oh wait!
Maybe, if we had a grid and road system that supported wholesale, on-the-go electrification of cars, this would be more important.
But, with our current infrastructure, while biofuels offer less energy density, they result in a product that's appropriate for the uses required.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
That's not a food production issue, it's a geopolitical problem. So, are you agreeing with "And most of the famines of the last century were engineered by local governments or local wars..."?
Just another day in Paradise