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The New York Timesreports on a new study from a prominent environmental think tank that concludes that 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 and 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 that 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,” 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.”
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Friday January 30 2015, @11:18AM
Yup. Poo, too. Sewage can be turned into fuel. And coffee grounds, and all kinds of biological matter. Some of these waste products would otherwise find a use in agriculture or gardening but plenty of it ends up on landfill. Turn it into fuel, I say.
Corn as biofuel was only ever a big subsidy game, maybe even a false-flag by the oil companies to convince the world that biofuels don't work by pushing the least efficient and useful form of biofuel possible to the forefront.
That said, I don't think biofuels will ever be a major part of the future energy economy. I predict all engines eventually going electric, with ICE engines (powered by biofuels) left only in a few niche applications and vintage machines. Hydrogen is going nowhere.
Bioplastics, however, will almost certainly be something we eventually come to rely on.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bradley13 on Friday January 30 2015, @11:43AM
False flag operation? No, you miss the simpler explanation: Agricultural subsidies are a huge money siphon, with lots of payback to the politicians. Best of all, the voters never object, because they think of the "family farm", even though it's the big corporations that get the money. That's what drives most of the ethanol programs, including corn.
Processing agricultural waste? Sure, you can turn it into ethanol at some ratio. I don't buy the 10:1 - if current processes were that efficient, then ethanol would be commercially competitive, which it isn't.
In any case, turning agricultural waste into ethanol is a sub-optimal solution. If you want to get energy out of agricultural waste, then burn it and drive a steam turbine. You will get a much higher percentage of the energy out, in the form of electricity, without using all sorts of nasty chemicals to break down cellulose.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by Covalent on Friday January 30 2015, @02:59PM
Energy ratios are easily 10:1. MONETARY ratios tend to be much lower, which is why petroleum is still king.
As for burning the solids, that's not a bad solution for replacing coal, but most of the transportation infrastructure is predicated on liquid fuels - so biodiesel and ethanol are likely to be very important players.
You can't rationally argue somebody out of a position they didn't rationally get into.
(Score: 2) by jcross on Friday January 30 2015, @04:00PM
It's been a few years, but all the EROEI studies I read for biofuels conveniently ignored all capital expenses of processing it. I expect that's one reason why the money ratio doesn't match up.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday January 30 2015, @06:54PM
There's a good reason capital costs are ignored in such analyses - they're irrelevant to steady-state operation. No serious long-term market analysis, in almost any field, considers capital costs. For the simple reason that you pay them once, and then amortize them over the entire lifetime of production. In almost every market the per-unit amortized capital costs approach zero - it's only the incremental costs which determine market viability.
(Score: 2) by Covalent on Friday January 30 2015, @07:08PM
Good point. In addition, we are completely ignoring the costs of climate change which, while difficult to calculate, are clearly not 0. If you factor in the cost of evacuating Miami, gasoline may well be more expensive than nuclear powered cars.
You can't rationally argue somebody out of a position they didn't rationally get into.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday January 30 2015, @07:45PM
Excellent point...and yet somehow I don't think nuclear powered cars would substantially reduce the chances of having to evacuate Miami. :-D
(Score: 2) by jcross on Friday January 30 2015, @08:08PM
That's true, but they certainly don't amortize to zero. The amortized cost of capital is highly volume dependent. For instance, several people I know used to drive their cars on used fryer grease, then they started a biodiesel company and claimed that the EROEI looked awesome for waste oil of all kinds. And it does as long as waste oil has a very low cost. The problem is, there's not that much of it available, and when the demand for it took off, so did the price. If you built a factory large enough to process oil at scale, you'd have to start buying rail cars of canola/rapeseed oil to make enough fuel to pay off the factory, which is exactly what they ended up doing.
Now when you start talking about virgin agricultural oil, and you ignore the energy costs of things like tractors and combines, which are very expensive and used for only part of the year, it starts to look a little naive to ignore capex as a major part of the cost equation. Any modern farmer that ignored it financially would be out of business quick, and from an energy perspective, I'm guessing it costs a lot more to build a combine than all the diesel it will burn in its lifetime. This is even true for consumer vehicles that I'm guessing get more lifetime mileage. Hell, people have the same marginal-cost-only mental accounting about gas prices, thinking it's a huge factor when it's been something like 12% of the cost of driving for some time.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday January 30 2015, @09:57PM
That is a fair point - but anyone making capital investments for production levels beyond what the market can support (both on the supply and sales sides) is what is commonly known as "an idiot". If there's not enough used oil available to supply your factory, then you built too large a factory. If that combine isn't working continuously throughout the season (at least during the work day, and preferably for 2-3 shifts) then you bought too much machine and should have invested in more land and labor instead.
As for gas - perhaps it is only 12% of the total cost of driving, but add in insurance and maintenance - both also recurring expenses, and you're looking at much closer to the whole. I also suspect that to get that 12% number you need to assume that the car is replaced every few years, which is completely stupid from a business perspective. Unless of course you can sell it for an amount comparable to it's total remaining functional value (= purchase price * remaining lifetime / total lifetime, not bluebook which suffers from the notorious "loses half it's value once you drive it off the lot" effect) - in which case you still need to subtract the sale price from the total capital costs before doing the analysis.
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Friday January 30 2015, @09:05PM
Oil comes out of the ground. All the hard work took 100 million years to form all those long-chain hydrocarbons by heat/pressure/microbes?.
Cellulosic ethanol (or any other fuel) is a process of degradation. Recalcitrance requires a consider pre-processing to let the enzymes do their thing.
But the enzymes (cellulase) are not very effective, because the organism that make them don't need to them to be. Seen any trees go floppy? That's the combination of cellulose and lignin. That's what's in almost all the green you see out there.
Waterproof and generally enzyme proof (for the time the organism is alive).
The only way biofuels are ever going to be economically viable is if the entire process of energy extraction can be made optimal and deliver a significant fraction of the "potential" energy.
Ethanol is a lousy target when the fundamental efficiency of gasoline ICE is ~30%. Making longer hydrocarbons for diesel would seem to be a better idea....
Countries that have simpler fermentation based fuels (e.g. Brazil) can do so because sugar cane is easily grown and the microbe that converts sugar to ethanol (yeast) has had 500 million years to get good at it,
It is simple information like this that is largely missing from the debate on energy. We need a bit of everything, and the plurality will hopefully take us towards a greater use of "renewables".
With gas at $1.80/gallon though....
Of course the politicians will fix that by upping the tax and making biofuels competitive again, so maybe they have a bright future!
(Score: 2) by Nobuddy on Friday January 30 2015, @08:21PM
One of the better researches done on this was someone that looked to where farm subsidy checks are mailed to. They took a map of the US and put a pin on the address the checks are mailed to. the map shows a dozen little red dots scattered across the midwest. Manhattan is a solid red blob.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday January 30 2015, @07:28PM
Well, for now at least hydrocarbons have a much higher energy density than any robust electrical storage device has managed, which is incredibly important for mobile application. Good lithium-ion batteries only manage about 0.9MJ/kg and 2.6 MJ/L, while gasoline is getting 44.4Mj/kg and 32.4 MJ/L. That's ~50x the specific energy, and ~12x the energy density.
For driving around town electricity may well take over if we can bring the costs down far enough, which is a good start, but for long distance transportation (trains, semis, airplanes, and cargo ships) batteries can't begin to compete. And as fuel cells become more robust that will only increase the appeal by utilizing the 1/2 to 2/3 of the fuel energy wasted by an ICE. Of course with light vehicles that are prime candidates for batteries being responsible for ~59% of transportation-based fuel consumption that could dramatically cut consumption up front, and slashing the remaining 41% of consumption in half by switching to fuel-cell+electric drive would do a number as well
Then there's power generation - an awful lot of remote/off-grid/transportable generators could be replaced with fuel cells as well - what other alternative is there? You're not going to be trucking in massive batteries, though bio-solids might be sufficiently cheaper to make up for the ICE inefficiencies. Modular nuclear is probably the only other viable option.
Personally I suspect that we'll move towards fuel-cell backed batteries, at least until we invent massively denser electricity storage devices that don't rely on rare Earths (there's not nearly enough accessible lithium on the planet to replace all the world's gas tanks with LiIon batteries, and half the world's population doesn't even own vehicles yet). Enough capacity for a 20-mile or so range will be an 80% solution and allow for regenerative braking and other efficiency-boosting technologies, while cheap fuel cells will offer massively extended range that can be quickly refueled at any ethanol station.