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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 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.