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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."
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 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
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.'"
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.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
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