New Study Says Governments Should Ditch Reliance On Biofuels 224
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."
Demand (Score:3)
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?
Re:Demand (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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but it is a solution to convert what'd go into landfills and the like
By which what is really meant is "into the air". What part ain't burned and released real quick-like (producing soot in the process, yay cancer!) is set somewhere to rot anaerobically where it produces the maximum possible methane and CO2 and releases it into the air to cause us all problems.
Exactly! (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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E85 lacks basic energy, not to mention the hideous cost of manufacturing. Methane recovery is a great idea and there's an abundance of methane (just look at Congress-- they need a dome over the dome).
Ultimately, producing heat for use with transducers just isn't going to work, and doesn't scale. Passive solar scales. Active solar (wind/volcanic) lunar (yeah, waves) are all vastly underdeveloped resources where at least the energy coefficient comes free-- the transducers and business models cost.
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E85 lacks basic energy, not to mention the hideous cost of manufacturing.
E85 is less energy dense per unit volume of fuel than gasoline, but for a given amount of air you can liberate more energy with E85 than with gasoline. Also E85 has a much higher octane rating than gasoline so you can run higher boost or higher compression. Higher boost allows you to liberate more energy per combustion cycle while higher compression just increased your Carnot Cycle efficiency making better use of the energy you liberated. Either way producing power with alcohol fuels isn't a problem, only t
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Recycling waste vegetable oil is ok. The problem is the waste vegetable oil is not nearly enough to cover the demand for diesel.
Automotive (Score:2)
I think it really depends on what you are using the fuel for. Baring massive change to culture and how we do things, it will never really be an alternative for mainstream automotive fuel. It is a niche market. So I like your farm example. That makes sense. There is also pretty much a net zero cost for fuel distribution (as it is produced where it is generated). So the same could be true for a number of industries. But these would all be limited use.
Using it as fuel for transportation (unless we drastically
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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.
There's not enough waste oil for the demand for bio-diesel NOW. It used to be that restaurants had to pay to get their old grease hauled away, so they were more than happy to give it to the 'wierdos' who wanted to turn it into bio-diesel. Today it's a valuable commodity that the bio-diesel types have to pay money to get.
Personally, I'm for algae farms located in desert areas using seawater as a feedstock. Some solar panels to provide the energy needed to run the pumps.
Most can drive electric cars, but fo
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That makes bicycles, which get 48 miles per gallon of orange juice [sierraclub.org], sound bad.
And if it's wrong to use a natural resource for transportation when that same resource can also be used to produce food, then why are we using fossil fuels for transportation?
And is it wrong to use land to produce biofuels if the biofuel is used to produce or transport food?
For these reasons, the "no food for fuels" argument doesn't make perfect sense to me.
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Realistically, the price of clothes would increase until people learned to sew or shop in second hand stores again like they used to -- at which point the demand would stabilize at a much lower level. People would stop throwing out half of what's on their plate and locally grown food would start to out-compete food that has to be trucked further. Etc. Increasing prices always reduces demand. Gasoline costs twice as much in Europe as the USA, but life goes on with people adapting to use less of it.
Americans
Obama oops . . (Score:5, Informative)
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. ...
Let's have a War on Corn! (Re:Obama oops...) (Score:3, Interesting)
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 f
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This has nothing to do with anarchy, and everything to do with political overreach. The government wasn't created to be your nanny. Grow a pair of balls, and be a man.
Careful With This Logic (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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how it is distributed is what keeps poor nations miserable
No, the poverty keeps them miserable. If they had the money, they could fix the distribution problem very quickly.
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Poverty is just what we call people who get the narrow end of the distribution stick. Money is merely a token by which distribution is made.
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No, the core problem is that these countries do not produce enough things of value.
Re:Careful With This Logic (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Usually, there aren't many profits in the first place. But corruption is indeed one of the causes for low production.
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That's often not the case. Most raw materials come from parts of the world where there is much poverty. Huge amount of value. But it's not distributed to those people. There's a small percentage of usually corrupt people in the country that do very well, but most of the value of those materials is generally taken by foreign multinationals aided by international organisations such as the World Bank and the IMF.
Biofuels have Always Been Political (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Biofuels have Always Been Political (Score:4)
Really, it's more the powerful lobbying of Archer Daniels Midland, which does most of the corn processing in this country. The fact the the first caucus (not the first primary--that's in New Hampshire. Iowa's caucus is before New Hampshire's primary, though) is in Iowa doesn't hurt though, I'd imagine.
Re:Biofuels have Always Been Political (Score:4, Interesting)
ok then... but (Score:2)
I understand biofuel may not be very efficient, and that's fair enough - altrhough I'd love for there to be an unlimited, carbon-free supply of cheap energy... there isn't, so we need to be a bit intelligent about it all.
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.
The problem with wind is that it can be quite intermittent, not working on non-windy or too-windy days
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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.
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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.
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Batteries wear out and you need a very considerable number of them to store enough energy for everyone's evening use watching TV, lighting, heating, cooking and whatnot.
I think you'd be surprised just how much gets used overnight just on street lights, let alone all the use for heating water when the cost is cheap.
A better way to store the energy is to pump water uphill, then let it drop to power turbines in the evening, but that requires a lot of infrastructure. Simply put, we don't have an easy solution t
population (Score:2, Insightful)
vast tracts of fertile land that could be devoted to helping feed the world's growing population
The growing population only increases future demand for fuel, adding to the problem.
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At this point, we don't have a good alternative for transportation fuels.
Hello, the 1980s are calling, they caught your lie (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [nrel.gov]. 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.
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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
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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.
In order to come to that conclusion, they only included technologies known to support it, and completely ignored well-known and proven technologies which disprove their point. Therefore, there is no validity whatsoever to the study, and you should summarily ignore it in turn.
Converting biomass to biodiesel, right now, costs more energy than turning solar into charged batteries through PV, wind, or solar furnaces.
[citation needed]
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[citation needed]
You first. You made the first claim; you show me your resource showing the energy efficiency of algal microbiofuel from sun to tank. Cite the page, please.
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You made the first claim; you show me your resource showing the energy efficiency of algal microbiofuel from sun to tank.
I didn't make a specific claim about algal microbiofuel from sun to tank.
Cite the page, please.
First, you cite the comment which justifies your claim. And, your laziness. I provided a citation. It's a summary, and it contains its own summaries, and you can search it.
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So you're saying you have no basis for your belief that algal microbiofuel is energy efficient. Pretty much what I figured. Lots of semi-literate technobabble about the components, but you don't know shit about the efficiency, which is the entire focus of this article.
I haven't looked at any of the research since 2009, when I looked into setting up an algae system with a friend who ran his family's vehicles on biodiesel and was buying from a company 20 miles away. We figured we could take all the hipster bu
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That sounds like a huge waste of water lost through evaporation. The environmentalists have really been cracking down on cooling ponds for power plants lately, for exactly this reason. It is going to have to be in closed systems in order to be better than turning corn into ethanol.
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That sounds like a huge waste of water lost through evaporation.
It's okay, because algae doesn't care if you use salt water. So you use wind, solar, and solar thermal pumps to move seawater inland. There's no shortage of that.
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Sea water. It come (these days) fully loaded with everything needed for algae.
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ok, we can grow enough algae to power all our diesel road fuel consumption. what about the energy to mine all the iron and to electro-magnetically extract it. what about to power all the computers, every iphone requires an infrastructure that is the equivalent of one refrigerator worth of power per user. what about computers that do jobs for humans, what about buildings necessary to shelter humans. what about roads, what about air transit?
sustainability is great, proving the technology works is great. but a
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they're very initial studies that never scaled up.
Yes, I've read them, I know they only did one decent-sized test.
Excepts it's been decades and no one has been able to do it.
Who has the land? Who has been trying 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.
Clearly you and all the people you have allegedly been following [citation?] failed to read and understand the report, which specifically says that this will happen if you try to seed the ponds with specific strains, but also that it's a fat waste of time because the strains which are most efficient in the laboratory are not going to be the strains which are most efficient in your pond, year over y
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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 ob
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2nd generation biofuels aren't yet economically feasible
That is wrong, and you are either ignorant or lying.
You put the feedstocks in a big bag, basically like the ones they use as water tanks. You run the escaping gases into a system where they're pressurized to appropriate levels, the methane is separated with a membrane, and then compressed. This is already being done at a profitable level on a number of farms across the country. The lowest-hanging fruit is pigshit (what a great sentence) because it is very hot so it cooks quickly, and it is a major environme
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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.
Yeah you sound like you know what you're talking about, except you don't. BP is patent trolling to prevent Butanol from happening, when they could be selling it. Why wouldn't biodiesel be subject to the same sort of machinations?
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I worked in a lab that researched biofuels and turns out that the biggest issue with this setup is that the bacterial populations keep evolving away from the good biofuel-producing genes, [...] That, more than anything else, is the biggest issue with algae and biofuel production.
That might be true for butanol production, and if so, you should say so. But as for Algae grown in open ponds, it's a complete falsehood, and the linked report makes this clear. In a reactor, where it doesn't have to compete with other strains, it might work. But if you put it in a pond, another algae is going to come along and outcompete it, since it's not putting its effort into producing what excessive lipids (for its purposes, anyhow.)
The linked report is especially relevant to the particular point you
Food is not the problem (Score:4, Interesting)
Food production is not a valid argument, IMHO.
We already produce 2700 calories per person per day [fao.org]. 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=
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Similarly, biofuel production need not make use of land that is suitable for growing common food crops.
Yes, this article is based on the argument from ignorance, and it's really only been posted here to whip us up into a froth. Yay Slashdot!
Does not compute (Score:2)
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You nailed it pretty well. Teach a man to fish...
Also, it's not the efficiency of the land use, it's the economic efficiency. Is it really cheaper to cover an acre with PVs than to grow crops on 50? An acre of PVs is still pretty expensive.
Photosynthetic efficiency vs Photovoltaic efficien (Score:2)
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So covering a field with solar cells would be 10x more efficient than harvesting biofuel from the same field.
You can't plant a solar panel. Well, you can, but they're called plants. Anyway, covering the field with solar panels would be dumb, unless you had some shade crops that you wanted to grow beneath them. Solar panels can go all kinds of places. Food can only go on arable land, unless you want to build a bunch of equipment to sustain it. And that's the obvious and logical end result of using our topsoil to produce fuels...
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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 maki
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That's only relevant if you use the fossil fuels to make electricity. If you use the fossil fuels to power your car biofuels get far more interesting.
In the end we will have a mix. A combination of solar panels/solar towers, wind farms and biofuels has my vote but it will always be a mix of different sources.
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- Plants don't need to be built, they can build themselves with local resources
- Biofuel is easy to store, solar panels are only efficient when connected to a power grid. Batteries are still too expensive and lacking in energy density in many cases.
OK, can we have our food growing capacity back? (Score:2)
Please? We're fucking starving here just so GM can sell more "Super green" automobiles.
Thanks,
The ordinary people of England who are actually just a little bit allergic to the field after field of inedible castor.
What about algae? (Score:2)
Biofuel from algae can be produced much more efficiently, should its development be ditched as well? I think there's a future for biofuel from algae.
Strange Stuff here (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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.
Indeed. Ethanol as fuel additive is by far the lesser evil.
Further, most of ethanol in the US is via corn fermentation. On surface, that seems like a waste. In reality, it is a good thing.
1. corn is fermented, sugars digested by yeasts into ethanol.
2. the "waste" from ethanol plants is ideal animal feed.
Apparently farmers love the ethanol plant waste feed. It is high in protein. It is very low in sugar. If you feed cows corn, it fuels bad e. coli growth. That is, the pathogenic e. coli then tends to coloniz
People don't change (Score:2)
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
Of course that is assuming that those vast tracts of fertile land would be used to help feed the worlds growing population. Prior to be used to produce biofuel, much of that fertile land was not used for this purpose, so the question for the think-tank would be "Why do they suppose it would be now?"
Waste biofuels (Score:3)
It depends on the biofuel feedstock (Score:2)
Using corn to produce ethanol is about the worst possible way to do it, it actually takes more energy to produce x amount of E85 corn ethanol than you get out of it when you use it.
Using sugar cane to produce ethanol is a little bit better but still inefficient.
Using something like switchgrass on the other hand is much better, you can grow it in places where other stuff wont grow, you dont need anywhere near as much energy inputs or chemicals to produce it and with a little R&D and the right kind of pro
The Answer Man Rants (Score:2)
What else would we have ditched... (Score:2)
...because we were doing it wrong? Obviously we should have given up on space exploration because chemical rockets are so inefficient.
Corn and ethanol are used because the people who stand to profit from them have significant political sway, not because they make any sense whatsoever to do. It's too soon to give up on biofuels. Energy crops should be part of an integrated agricultural solution. The idea that not growing crops for fuel means energy production won't increase food prices is ridiculous. Energy
In other news, someone discovered arithmetic (Score:2)
Biofuels are nifty, but they will never scale to run an industrial civilization at current levels without creating an ecological disaster.
You didn't actually need a "think-tank" to figure this out. A hand calculator and the ability to use Google would have done just as well.
It's a ruse ... (Score:2)
... because "fracking."
Fossil fuel price has tanked to the point that people are gearing up with muscle machines again [cnn.com].
Even the Hummer H2 saw a jump in sales on the used car market, according to Kelley Blue Book. General Motors (GM) discontinued the line as part of its 2009 bankruptcy.
Biofuels is a panic solution for an energy crises that has (for now) disappeared.
Sigh.. (Score:2)
" 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 bio fuels at capturing the energy of sunlight in a useful form."
1. Wind and Solar do not complete with bio fuels. You can not run a truck, ship, or airliner on electricity effectively because of battery technology.. Even cars are limited today by cost. Now if you are talking about bio fuels to run generato
They're Ignorant of the Alga6 Photobioreactor (Score:2)
Algasol's photobioreactor technology [algasol.info] requires less than 1/10th the land of other biofuel technologies and, in fact, it requires no land at all, preferring to be located on saline water. The largest photobioreactor, the 250m^2 Alga6, sells for $3,375 retail [algasol.info]. When the numbers are all run, Alga6 biocrude is competitive with $40/bbl oil -- and that includes all costs including the cost of insuring the photobioreactors against hail, the power cost of centrifugal separation, the power to drive the wave mixing w
"Biofuels in the US and Europe" (Score:2)
Let's see, this is where we spend big bucks raising *crops*, on *cropland*, to turn into fuel, as opposed to the original proposals to use biomass - that's waste, that's *weeds* (that need *zero* bucks on fertilizers and watering and pesticides to raise....
mark
Corn subsidies (Score:2)
The focus on ethanol was never about the bio-fuel aspects, but about corn subsidies and pork-barrelling.
Lemme pour some solar in my tank... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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Darn... saw the article and raced here to post something pithy and brief with 'Duh' in the subject. Too late.
Re:Um, duh? (Score:4, Funny)
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 [slashdot.org].
And yes, I have even more layers of nerd underneath. It's nerd all the way down.
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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 seem
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You and Mr Murphy both need to take a course in logical thinking.
Space based power has it's problems but heating up the world more than existing energy use is not one of them.
Heat is heat. It doesn't matter where it comes from or how it is created. Burning a gallon of gas on the ground. or beaming 144000 BTU from orbit, is going to put the same amount of energy into the biosphere. The differences come from how efficiently the energy is utilized not their source. Seeing as space based energy would be very e
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If you define space based solar as solar that uses a light source in space then you are right.
But putting the collectors in space will be stupid and uneconomic for the foreseeable future.
Until the cost of launch and the lower service life on orbit match the efficiency loss on earth (call them 1/2 from atmospheric losses and 4/24 (1/6) for night time based on 'equivalent hours maps') land based solar is cheaper. At a really rough chop, assuming $1 peak watt installed on earth, you'd have to get orbital
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The only argument for space-based is "it's a way around NIMBY". PG&E did some serious research into it, as there's just no where in Northern California they're allowed to build a new power plant, and demand keeps rising. The main reason the plan failed is still NIMBY: They'd need a 1-block receiving station for the incoming power, and could never get that approved. Fuck California.
It's also useful in Northern latitudes. In Texas, ground-based makes perfect sense: lots of land, far enough south. In
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The ten or so new power plants in CA during the last 10 years prove you wrong. Granting utilities have learned to site them with or replacing existing plants.
PG&E doesn't own any generation. They are a load serving entity and have been for over a decade. They still own some very valuable transmission lines.
Even is an overcast shithole like Seattle, ground based solar is more cost effective then orbital.
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Oh, sure, for now, but Solar for now can't be baseload anyhow. Orbital can. It will be a while before panels get cheap enough and enough not reliant on scarce materials to scale. It seems inevitable now, but it's still a ways off. Meanwhile, private space efforts keep making progress. In 50 years, when solar has wide adoption and we're struggling with baseload at night, and in bad climates, I think orbital will be a viable choice vs nuclear or gas.
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Solar can't do base load due to transmission issues. Transmitting power to the other side of the planet is non-trivial.
But a small part of making orbital solar work is transmitting power down from orbit.
More fundamentally; the only reason to insist solar do baseload is quasi religious.
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Dairy cattle survive just fine eating grass.
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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*.
Re:Vast... Tracts of Land (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Vast... Tracts of Land (Score:4, Informative)
In case you did not hear they have been slashing forests in Malaysia and Indonesia to plant palm trees for biodiesel.
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like perhaps feeding the starving billions.
I'll just repeat the usual refrain: starvation is just a distribution problem, at least for now. In the US, we throw away 30-50% of our food, and 60% of us admit we overeat. In comparison, 15% of us struggle to put food on the table occasionally, including 5% who struggle often. So right now, we have enough to feed ourselves and hundreds of millions of other people. Maybe you mean taxpayers should pay farmers to grow food specifically for those food insecure people, both here and abroad? We'd also have
Re:Vast... Tracts of Land (Score:4, Interesting)
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).
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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.
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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..."?
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I think that jandrese was addressing the specific point of 'last significant famine was in '92' with 'there's one right now in NK'.
If anything, he's saying the link is stronger - the 400 year remark means that it's not just the 20th century, but dating back to the 16th that 'all' famines are politically based. Of course 'politically created' means that it could be engineered by an outside polity, rather than being of the government of the area itself.
For example, I remember reading somewhere that the potat
Ethanol vs biodiesel,etc (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Pollute the air twice. Once to make bio fuel, (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [sdsu.edu], 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.
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Or, of course, you can use the fischer-tropsch process to turn the methane into actual gasoline and not have to bother converting the vehicles.
But that just costs more energy. If you've got unlimited energy, why not just make fuel from seawater? I mean, we should be treating our crap better anyway because we need the resulting soil anyway, but even so.
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Every corn growing farmer in the US rotates with soybeans.
Untrue. There are fields near my house that have been in corn continuously for at least 5 years. When the price of corn is high, it's worth buying tons of fertilizer. It probably has all of the bad effects that you write about, but it happens.