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."

Comments

Obama oops . .

[Anonymous Coward]

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. ...

Careful With This Logic

[TrollstonButterbeans]

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.

Re:Careful With This Logic

[RabidReindeer]

No, the core problem is that these countries do not produce enough things of value.

Or, the bastards at the top keep all the profits.

Biofuels have Always Been Political

[ideonexus]

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.

Hello, the 1980s are calling, they caught your lie

[drinkypoo]

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.

Re:Demand

[Svartalf]

They're all fatally flawed. The biggest problem with biofuels as they currently are is that we're not really doing them right. We're taking food and converting it to fuel- when we should be producing the fuel as a recycling process which isn't the same thing and isn't as "polluting" and the like. It's not a solution, per se, to fuel- but it is a solution to convert what'd go into landfills and the like into something else useful as it can be used for fuel and feedstock for plastics, medicine, etc.

Re:Pollute the air twice. Once to make bio fuel,

[drinkypoo]

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.

Exactly!

[RingDev]

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