I don't think it's politically or substantively wise to set ourselves up as dogmatically opposed to any given source of energy (except coal!) (just kidding!) (only not!). The key is to set up low-carbon standards and benchmarks and say, "if you can meet these without ginormous subsidies, have at it."
This is true of biofuels as well. We all agree that politically speaking, biofuels are a freaking mess -- a big subsidy-ridden boondoggle that's doing great harm and very little good. And no, biofuel proponents can't defend the current political situation by waving their hands at cellulosic ponies. After all:
... experts at a national ethanol conference Wednesday warned that commercial production of the fuel from grass, wood and waste may be a decade away. Test projects are being ramped up, and federal energy and farm bills may funnel money into more advanced tests, but experts say there are too many unanswered questions to promise the next ethanol stage soon.
But technologically, there's hope for biofuels. What's needed is to reduce the amount of feedstock needed, the efficiency of the conversion, and the scale of the facilities required. Bioengineering -- a la LS9 -- can solve some of these problems. Now researchers going another route, namely thermochemical, have turned up some interesting results:
Researchers at the University of Minnesota have developed a fast way to convert sawdust and waste biomass directly into a mixture of gases that can be burned to generate electricity or made into liquid fuels such as diesel. If the process can be scaled up, it could be a more energy-efficient method for making biofuels by allowing for small, fast reactors located close to biomass sources.
This could potentially be a big advance, since one of the worst aspects of present biofuels, including cellulosic, is that feedstocks must be transported long distances, burning lots of fuel along the way. Distributed, small-scale biofuel has always been the only model that makes any sense to me.
Gov't money ought to be going to basic research on biofuels, and leave the deployment of products on the market to private investors, who unlike gov't bureaucrats actually face some personal risk and so tend to be a bit more judicious.
Corn-based meat and ethanol: burning the planet to a crisp
Two new documentaries—‘Crude’ and ‘Fuel’—examine two sides of our petroleum problem
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GreyFlcn Posted 4:35 pm
09 Aug 2007
Even if biofuels were converted 100% into energy and magically transported directly into your gasoline tank, we still wouldn't have enough land/water resources to make a dent.
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Ron Steenblik Posted 5:11 pm
09 Aug 2007
We should resist falling too easily for what in the software industry would be called "vaporware" -- a product that is announced well in advance of release, generating unwarranted optimism, or sometimes even deception. It has been a commonplace in anything connected with cellulosic ethanol, that a news release about a new technology is made too early in its stage of development to support responsible statements about its applicability at a commercial scale, much less economic feasibility.
Drying cellulosic material, pulverizing it to a tiny particles, and controlling its gasification is not as straightforward as it sounds. As one of the people commenting on the article notes: "with smaller than 1 mm particle size. Good luck."
Also, once one has syngas, there is still the knotty problem of turning that syngas into liquid fuel. The currently available technology, Fischer-Tropsch, is well known. But it is expensive. And all the existing plants are relatively large.
Just the other day, I met an Australian travelling through Paris who was very enthusiastic about a pilot cellulosic ethanol plant that Ethanol Technologies Limited ("Ethtec") is planning to build in north-eastern New South Wales. The plant would be fed with ligno-cellulosic material derived from wood, bagasse (waste from sugar production), crop stubble and municipal green waste.
One of the key technologies that the plant would employ is "induced phase separation", a means for extracting ethanol from the fermentation broth that, the company claims, would eliminate the need for conventional distillation technology. If true, that would dramatically reduce the energy required in ethanol production (with an accompanying reduction in greenhouse gas emissions). As well, the process allows the re-use of the remaining solids for process heat and power, and can re-use the remaining (benign) effluent.
My question, is this: the induced phase separation process was developed by Australia's Apace Research Ltd in 1986!. If it is so superior to steam conventional steam distillation, why -- two decades later -- is it not now in widespread use around the world? Any answer that requires resorting to conspiracy theories or "Big Oil" is not acceptable.
Also, we need to be very careful in the vocabulary we use. When David refers to "low-carbon standards" I read something like what California has proposed for its fuels, and what some people in Congress are thinking about establishing for the country as a whole. Perhaps that's not what he meant.
The distinction is important, however. While a low-carbon standard for fuels is slightly less technology-specific than a renewable fuels standard, inasmuch as it allows for the substitution of compressed natural gas or biogas for petroleum fuels, it is not the same as a carbon tax or even a cap-and-trade system, because it provides no incentive for reducing carbon emissions simply through conservation.
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JMG Posted 5:31 pm
09 Aug 2007
http://www.scientificblogging.com/news/net_energy_is_a_da ...
The engineer, Dr. Bruce Dale of Michigan State U., is becoming to ethanol what Teller was to nuclear weapons. This is pitiful.
In a carbon constrained world with rising energy prices, energy return on energy invested is THE critical concept, and if we lose track of it, we risk disaster. Anything that doesn't have a good EROEI or that merely launders fossil fuels into "renewables" is a dangerous sidetrack -- but not to Dr. Cornlove.
I actually met Dr. Dale in Lansing, when he gave me his canned spiel about how corn ethanol is actually MORE energy efficient than gasoline. Yikes!
Save the world: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5% annually.
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Ron Steenblik Posted 9:18 pm
09 Aug 2007
[Minnesota Governor Tim] Pawlenty drew laughs from ethanol producers gathered at the RiverCentre [for a national conference of ethanol producers], when he referred to ethanol skeptics as "know-it-alls, pseudo-scientists or graduates of the National Academy of It Can't Be Done."
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justlou Posted 9:43 pm
09 Aug 2007
I think you have just described a technology that the Amish are using quite sustainably -- the draft horse. Quite amazing really. Feed it grass, hitch it to a plow, and it craps fertilizer. Very decentralized and created with the union of two cells. No engineers or politicians or armies needed. Who would have thought of it?
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Ron Steenblik Posted 10:11 pm
09 Aug 2007
[C]orn-based ethanol and horse feed would require roughly the same area of cropland for traction to farm the nation's cropland, but on a net energy basis, the former area [i.e., for corn-based ethanol] would be more than twice the latter [i.e., for horse feed]. Since animal production is a major component of Amish agriculture, the results of the study provide indirect evidence that the small-scale, traditional farming of the Amish contributes substantially to the agricultural economies of Holmes and Wayne Counties [Ohio].
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Delay And Deny Posted 10:50 pm
09 Aug 2007
http://uk.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUKN0946978520 ...
GM to begin testing Volt electric car by spring
As the race to bring a mass-market, rechargeable electric vehicle to the market heats up, GM's global product chief Bob Lutz said he expects to have next-generation lithium-ion battery packs ready for the vehicles by October this year.
Photo
"We should have the battery packs by October," he said, speaking to reporters on the sidelines of an industry conference. "We'll have some on the road for testing next spring, and we should have the Volt in production by the end of 2010."
John Bailo
Supratext:
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Sean Casten Posted 11:52 pm
09 Aug 2007
This post and many others strike me as too long on emotion, too short on facts. Ignore the subsidies for a moment, and simply consider the overall ecological signature of various options and liquid biofuels prove to be a heck of a lot better options for transportation than anything else out there, because of their combination of easy storage (liquid, relatively compatible with the existing distribution and vehicle infrastructure) and POTENTIAL for low carbon paths. I emphasize potential, because not all paths are equal, but - as compared with hydrogen, for example - one can at least envision reasonably possible technological paths that lead to happy outcomes. We also need to recall that the goal of any alternative fuel is not to be best, but rather to be better. Ethanol is clearly better than gasoline - and the debate between corn and cellulosic is a debate about whether it is 15% better or 70% better. Thus, even in a world with plug in hybrids, we are still better off using ethanol as the backbone for the non-electric part of the hybrid.
Having said that, we should make a couple things very clear. (1) Of all the feedstocks one could make ethanol from, corn is about the worst. Very fertilizer (=natural gas) intensive, very water intensive, prone to monoculture, etc. (2) If you're going to make it from corn, a corn dry mill is the least efficient way to do so.
The current ethanol boom is in - you guessed it - corn dry mills. So yes, subsidies have compelled goofy directions, but even this point bears some closer examination, because it is concievable to build vastly more efficient corn drymills that start to shift this balance. But at the very least, one should not tar all biofuels with the assumption that the current conversion technology and feedstock choices are set in perpetuity, nor that all feedstocks have the same ecological consequences as corn.
I think this means I agree with the initial sentiment of this post, but would urge us all to more critically examine some of our "biofuels are bad" assumptions.
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Sean Casten Posted 11:57 pm
09 Aug 2007
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Ron Steenblik Posted 12:24 am
10 Aug 2007
Ethanol is clearly better than gasoline ...
Not much, in terms of life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions (especially if we're talking corn ethanol processed in coal plants), and in terms of air pollution, not much either. While it fares better for some pollutants, it fares worse for others.
... and the debate between corn and cellulosic is a debate about whether it is 15% better or 70% better.
I presume here you are talking about net energy. There are many more concerns, particularly relating to increased demands on land use -- not just for food but for other uses as well.
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trock Posted 2:25 am
10 Aug 2007
I was at a wind power convention where a speaker was talking about in North Dakota, people were spending 1 billion dollars a year on fuel oil a year to heat their homes. He advocated wind power and heat pumps instead. (The wind really blows when the cold front moves in) Fuel Oil is close to diesel fuel with just some additives.
It may be better to just leave liquids to transportation, and try to replace the liquids used for heating with solid and gas fuels and heat pumps. or even start the whole thing with keeping the building warm and cool by better design and insulation in the first place.
It's nuts trying to convert something to something else that doesn't need to get converted. Then some people make huge political claims that we're doing something great when all we are doing is changing some forms of energy to other forms of energy without getting anything valuable from it.
How about a program to replace heating systems in houses that use fuel oil now to one that uses gas, solids (wood), retro insulation, or burning corn in corn furnaces or whatever? Wouldn't that be a better system overall?
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JMG Posted 2:43 am
10 Aug 2007
This post and many others strike me as too long on emotion, too short on facts. Ignore the subsidies for a moment, and simply consider the overall ecological signature of various options and liquid biofuels prove to be a heck of a lot better options for transportation than anything else out there, because of their combination of easy storage (liquid, relatively compatible with the existing distribution and vehicle infrastructure) and POTENTIAL for low carbon paths."
IGNORE THE SUBSIDIES?!? Why? Without subsidies, we aren't having this discussion because we aren't using biofuels in any appreciable way.
It's not like biofuels are an issue of principle, like slavery or human rights or child labor ... biofuel boosters are selling them as an economic substitution for petroleum. If they fail at that, then we're done.
The need for production subsidies is a red flag (hell, a red rocket, brass band, and cannon) that they don't work on their own terms. They are not an economic substitute. Talking about biofuels while "Ignor[ing] the subsidies" is like saying "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"
Further, contra your post, the main biofuels have two primary traits: ethanol is entirely NOT compatible with existing distribution systems, and biodiesel serves only a tiny market in North America.
Nor are either one low carbon in any meaningful sense; they both merely serve to convert fossil fuel inputs into "biofuel" outputs, which are then used instead of fossil fuels.
A national campaign to put the valve caps that warn car owners of low tire pressure on every car would do far more to raise mileage and reduce carbon emissions than biofuels ever could. Reducing speed limits to 55 mph wold do even more, at far lower cost, and save a lot of lives to boot.
We also need to recall that the goal of any alternative fuel is not to be best, but rather to be better. Ethanol is clearly better than gasoline - and the debate between corn and cellulosic is a debate about whether it is 15% better or 70% better.
Ethanol is clearly NOT better than gasoline; take away the subsidies for oil and people will use every bit as much petroleum and natural gas as they are today (alas). Take away the biofuels subsidies and they all but disappear. That is absolute evidence that the biofuels fail as replacements for oil.
Oh, and about that cellulosic --- right now, it's just magic pony poop. It's like the transuranic materials that only exist inside laboratories. So any argument that depends on the virtues of cellulosic is nonsense.
Having said that, we should make a couple things very clear. (1) Of all the feedstocks one could make ethanol from, corn is about the worst. Very fertilizer (=natural gas) intensive, very water intensive, prone to monoculture, etc. (2) If you're going to make it from corn, a corn dry mill is the least efficient way to do so.
The current ethanol boom is in - you guessed it - corn dry mills.
You mean the ONLY ethanol boom there is, and the only one foreseeable for the next decade and possibly longer, since there is simply no telling when magic pony poop will actually get the bugs worked out enough to be only as inefficient as corn ethanol. But the fact that we've spent nearly as long trying to do cellulosic and nuclear fusion should give you a hint: neither one is easy or should serve as a basis for policy.
I think this means I agree with the initial sentiment of this post, but would urge us all to more critically examine some of our "biofuels are bad" assumptions.
Biofuels are not BAD -- nobody is saying that they're morally inferior to petroleum. (What they actually are is an attempt to maintain the petroleum dependency, the methadone, if you will.)
No, they're not "bad," they're simply a scam. Even worse, they are being used as the major prop for a second scam, the flex-fuel credit scam to help prop up monster trucks.
You want us to make nice and stop being such big mean old bullies picking on poor little ADM and Cargill? Easy: take away the production subsidies for biofuels all the hate and discontent goes away.
Without production subsidies, biofuels would be like anything else in science and technology: a lot of what you try doesn't work, even though there are tantalizing bits that drive you crazy.
Heck, maybe we'll corral that magic pony and figure out how to make to make those bugs that eat waste and crap gasoline, or figure out how to feed landfill wastes to bugs and get biodiesel out of it. But that's all lab work meaning, at most, R&D subsidies, not production subsidies.
Save the world: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5% annually.
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GreyFlcn Posted 2:55 am
10 Aug 2007
Even if biofuels were converted 100% into energy and magically transported directly into your gasoline tank, we still wouldn't have enough land/water resources to make a dent.
Unless make biofuels out of stuff that really would be finding it's way into a landfill or waste treatment facility, then we're going to need new farmland.
And certainly if we use our farmland here, whats going to happen to food crops that we removed?
Assuming we made magic-switchgrass with a 100% CO2 reduction.
That would be dwarfed by increased deforestation.
Furthermore, what about N2O. It keeps getting ignored.
http://greyfalcon.net/n2o.png
http://greyfalcon.net/lcarough7.png
http://jeq.scijournals.org/cgi/content/full/35/1/3#ABS
http://www.ars.usda.gov/research/publications/Publication ...
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Ron Steenblik Posted 2:56 am
10 Aug 2007
Talking about biofuels while "Ignor[ing] the subsidies" is like saying "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"
Brilliant. Just brilliant.
As a footnote, to support what you say about biodiesel, on another string I have just written a comment showing the very small share it (or at least "good" biodiesel -- drived from animal fats and recycled cooking oil) can make to America's transport needs.
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GreyFlcn Posted 3:39 am
10 Aug 2007
Yeah they are.
As long as they use additional swaths of arable land, and fresh water resource they are bad.
There are a few that don't do that.
For instance WVO, Raw Sewage, industrial waste(i.e. Sawmill), municipal solid waste.
However those can't make much of an impact.
WVO for instance wouldn't even be able to breach 0.3% of our fuel needs. And thats assuming all of it has the same energy content as petroleum, with no conversion losses.
http://www.insidegreentech.com/node/376
WVO for instance, if it were turned into biodiesel needs roughly 12-20% methanol. Methanol is produced almost exclusively from natural gas.
The place where it's assumed where all the other "wastes" would come from is forest "waste" and farm "waste". And thats just a myth that those are waste products.
http://venturebeat.com/2006/11/05/why-cellulosic-ethanol- ...
http://greyfalcon.net/peaksoil
The removal of dead and dying trees from managed
forests already leads to large-scale biodiversity losses
and possibly to lower carbon sequestration in forests.
According to a recent study, less than 5% of the biomass
in managed forests in Germany is made up from dead or
dying trees or fallen branches, whereas in natural forests
they account for around 40%. It is estimated that 20-
25% of all woodland species depend on so-called `forestry
waste' being left in woodlands - including 1,500 types
of fungi and 1,350 types of beetles in Germany alone,
as well as many other species of insects, lichens, birds,
and mammals.
http://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/docs/agrofuels_reality_che ...
Either way if it isn't coming from genuine waste streams theres only 2 options.
Displace world food crops to less sustainable areas.
Grow it with weak yields on poor soil, with small quantities of water, and pray it all works economically.
Algae
_
Algae could work, but thats yet to be seen.
http://greyfalcon.net/algae
________
So so far unless it's true waste, or algae, I don't see biofuels as anything but a bad thing.
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Sean Casten Posted 4:06 am
10 Aug 2007
1) I do not suggest that a discussion of subsidies isn't important. My point is that policy has to start by ignoring subsidies, and then come around to whether or not technology X is worthy of public support. (Disclosure: in past employment at Arthur D. Little, we did exactly this exercise for both the US and Dutch governments, looking at just about every possible alternative fuel chain you could think of on economic and environmental merits independent of any subsidy). Note however, that the subsidy consideration has to be removed uniformly. Saying that any alternative to petroleum "don't work on their own terms" when those terms factor in massive subsidies to petroleum (income tax for persian gulf adventures, tax breaks on E&P, etc.) is one hand clapping. This doesn't suggest that ethanol - or any other fuel - is categorically good of course. It merely illustrates that the need for a subsidy to compete does not necessarily mean that an option is uneconomic on it's own merits, to the extent that the competing price is artificially propped up.
As I've noted elsewhere, it is politically easier to create subsidies than take them away, and thus we are full of economic distortions throughout the economy. Yes, biofuels is one of them, but unless we're getting rid of all the others, the mere presence of a subsidy isn't an argument for it's elimination.
Consider just on the agriculture side. We have a subsidy that artifically depresses the price of corn (as Michael Pollan has pointed out rather eloquently, our Ag policy makes it cheaper to buy corn than to grow corn). On the other side, we have a subsidy that artifically inflates the price of sugar to protect Florida sugar farmers from competition. This disparity is responsible for quite a bit of the overplanting of corn in this country. ("High fructose corn syrup" is very precisely defined to avoid the tax imposed on sucrose rich sugar cane. Thus, we have created strong economic signals to grow corn for sugar, and replace sucrose-fueled softdrinks with HFCS-fueled softdrinks.) Thus, a world with no agricultural subsidies is almost certain a world where we grow more latin american sugar and proportionally less US corn. Good or bad? I'm not sure, but it's complicated.
Ethanol is clearly better than gasoline. I will grant you that this is like being taller than a midget, but it is still better. The studies that have shown a breakeven/net loss for ethanol have all largely been founded on work done by Pimentel at Cornell, which have been widely discredited by those in the trenches (although not in the media - like Global Warming skeptics, scientifically contrarian views can often get pulpits larger than their science deserves). The flaw in Pimentel's analysis was essentially assuming outdated technologies, and zero advancement in same. Modern ethanol production, even in dry mills represents about a 10 - 20% net reduction in fossil fuels relative to gasoline. We could certainly do better, and indeed many dry mills are doing better. We are currently working on a project to put a perfectly thermally balanced cogen plant at an ethanol mill which will take so much carbon off the grid (by displacing dirtier power) to net out all the carbon release on the farm and the field. Technology marches ever onward, but that one flawed study has not.
You oversimplify that corn dry mills are the only ethanol boom there is. Prior to the recent flurry of plant construction, most of the nation's ethanol was made in wet mills, which are substantially more efficient - but also substantially more expensive - than dry mills. (Indeed, this is the type of plant typically operated by the ADM's of the world.) The massive equity rush into ethanol has created an incentive for people who can quickly build plants, which creates a pressure for smaller, quicker-to-build plants, even if they are less efficient. There is an old saying in finance that you should "eat when they're serving lunch". Lunch is presently being served to those who can get ethanol plants in the ground and operating, and such conditions have driven investors towards quick-to-build plants rather than those that are designed to be the low-cost producer decades hence. ADM and Cargill - who are predominantly wet-millers - have actually been surprisingly quiet during the boom, which is telling, given that they are far more sophisticated than most of the folks putting money into ethanol nowadays. Much of the early action has been by farmers coops, and we are only just now beginning to see an increase in the financial sophistication (read: longer investment time horizons) in the industry. This will shake out and gradually tip us towards more efficient milling technologies, for the simple reason that when the equity dries up, you've got to pay off the debt... and the plants that don't have low operating costs are going to take a bath when margins inevitably fall. I have worked to design energy islands of several ethanol plants over the last 5 years and can attest to a significant shift between those putting up plants 5 years ago who were concerned only with minimizing their first cost and those building them now who are consistently talking about being competitive when the margins drop.
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justlou Posted 4:13 am
10 Aug 2007
So, until we have a significantly more efficient means of improving this efficiency it is just criminal to put this much energy and capital development into a liquid fuel that gets used this inefficiently (worse than gas).
There is a place for a limited use of ethanol in vehicles that have the capacity of getting over 100 miles per gallon. It is just crazy to waste such a resource in vehicles that are getting 10 to 15 miles per gallon.
This is a case of really needing to put the cart before the horse. Get a much higher efficiency in infrastructure and transportation in place while we are researching promising means of ethanol production. In the meantime, this will stretch oil supplies out and give us more energy to put into developing a truly sustainable infrastructure.
We could not be doing this more ass backwards than we are.
The financial picture the past few days should be a big wake up call -- we do not have unlimited energy and capital to be wasting on massive projects that do not get us closer to the goal. We need to be doing this right. Our opportunity to take mulligans is fading.
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Jon Rynn Posted 4:20 am
10 Aug 2007
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JMG Posted 4:29 am
10 Aug 2007
http://i-r-squared.blogspot.com/2007/08/bob-dinneen-respo ...
Save the world: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5% annually.
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GreyFlcn Posted 4:30 am
10 Aug 2007
Well we have unlimited energy.
Not unlimited fossil energy.
But perhaps the biggest threat of continuing in our inefficient ways are the diametrically opposed issues of population growth, and global warming.
If our transportation motive energy demand is expected to double by 2025, then we can't complacently accept a mere 4% reduction in CO2.
(Thats assuming that that 4% reduction is even real, or just imaginary.)
Our most precious scarce resource is time.
And we're wasting it like crazy with these faux solutions.
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GreyFlcn Posted 4:37 am
10 Aug 2007
Since atleast with coal, the damage is pretty localized on a global scale.
However with biofuels, combining the fact that agriculture is more greenhouse intensive than transportation, and that deforestation is more greenhouse intensive than transportation.
I'd take something thats only Twice as bad as the status quo, over something which is Ten Times worse than the status quo any day.
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justlou Posted 4:44 am
10 Aug 2007
I was thinking specifically about fossil fuels. They are the energy sources that we have harnessed that do work. They will remain our horses for a while. My point was that while we have them we need to put them to their greatest value -- getting us off the horse. It will be more difficult to make the transition with more depleted and more expensive supplies of these limited fossil fuels. And we sure as hell don't want to burn all of them either. So, yes, time is a great factor here. There just seems to be no sense of urgency.
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alphaniner Posted 4:47 am
10 Aug 2007
http://biopact.com/2007/08/expert-net-energy-useless-misl ...
They challenge net energy on a multitude of platforms.
"For evidence, he points to the markets, where a unit of energy from gas, petrol and electricity are worth 3.5, 5 and 12 times as much as a unit of energy from coal, respectively."
Also net energy does not factor in greenhouse gas emissions (obviously).
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GreyFlcn Posted 4:48 am
10 Aug 2007
Or just in general a lot of people trying to solve the problems by 2050, not 2017.
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trock Posted 5:05 am
10 Aug 2007
I'd think though that putting biomass in a boiler and making electricity and having vehicles with batteries would be better (more efficient) than;
putting biomass in a cellulosic converter to make a liquid to burn in an internal combustion engine.
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alphaniner Posted 5:22 am
10 Aug 2007
http://www.evworld.com/article.cfm?storyid=1182
http://www.evworld.com/article.cfm?storyid=1180
Better batteries are probably on the way, but for this we will need to wait and see.
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GreyFlcn Posted 7:38 am
10 Aug 2007
For instance, lets say the plausible scenario:
What if we make a biofuel process which is an overnight economic success, that satifies all of our performance needs, and scales rapidly.
However the process creates much more direct or indirect emmisions of greenhouse gases than petroleum.
Then what do we do?
Outlaw growing crops?
You can't uninvent that process.
It'd be just as detrimental or worse than if they found a cheap and inexpensive way to turn coal into high grade gasoline.
And frankly there would be no way to stop it on a global scale. Especially if it were done locally as opposed to centralized.
It'd be a nightmare.
And the scary thing is that, thats an all too likely scenario. Infact it's more likely than not assuming biofuels were ever successful without subsidies.
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GreyFlcn Posted 7:42 am
10 Aug 2007
What makes you think lithium is the only way to make a decent battery?
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JMG Posted 2:22 pm
10 Aug 2007
http://www.scientificblogging.com/news/biofuel_for_milita ...
Save the world: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5% annually.
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Ron Steenblik Posted 3:41 pm
10 Aug 2007
that the need for a subsidy to compete does not necessarily mean that an option is uneconomic on it's own merits, to the extent that the competing price is artificially propped up.
I presume what Sean means is "artificially depressed". If the gasoline price were "artificially propped up" -- as it was in the days when gasoline had to pay the federal excise tax but gasohol didn't -- that would favor ethanol.
There is a lot of misunderstanding about subsidies to oil and their relationship with biofuels.
First, though, the important thing to bear in mind is that the price of oil in the USA is determined in world markets. If all the tax breaks for petroleum (which are mainly on the exploration and production side for crude) were eliminated, it would not make a big difference in the retail price of gasoline. Eventually it would mean that less oil would be extracted in the United States, and that might have a small effect on world supplies and therefore markets. But the main argument for eliminating tax breaks for the oil industry now is that they are simply a pure transfer of wealth to the industry.
Some people point to U.S. military expenditure in the Middle East as a subsidy to oil. Some element of that may be, to the extent that it obviates the need for private industry to pay for its own protection.
But to treat the hundreds of billions of dollars being spent now in Iraq as a subsidy to oil is just nonsense. That money is being spent because we broke Iraq, and now we are trying to fix it. No conceivable amount of domestic production of biofuels in the United States in the near and medium term is going to make one jot of difference to what the U.S. Government spends in Iraq over the next decade.
Meanwhile, the subsidies to biofuels, rather than being the kind that the government can walk away from if it decides it has made a mistake -- e.g., subsidies for R&D, or for the construction of new plants -- is predominantly concentrated on production. That leads to investments that are dependent on the continuation of those production subsidies. If those subsidies were to be withdrawn, huge economic dislocations would result.
Worse, those potential dislocations are working their way upstream -- as economic theory would tell us -- through capitalization of the subsidy (i.e., the discounted future value of a stream of subsidies) into into the price of farmland. If the plug is ever pulled on the ethanol machine, we will once again hear loud screems of pain from the Midwest, accompanied by the obligatory first-person news reports of bank foreclosures of family farms.
Sean acknowledges that
it is politically easier to create subsidies than take them away, and thus we are full of economic distortions throughout the economy.
Good. But then he adds
Yes, biofuels is one of them, but unless we're getting rid of all the others, the mere presence of a subsidy isn't an argument for it's elimination.
I would put it in another way: Unless we are very, very careful about any new subsidies we create, the task of getting rid of the bad ones will be made nigh impossible.
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amazingdrx Posted 3:41 pm
10 Aug 2007
With some of the lighter oils used in solid oxide fuel cells and the waste heat from the cells evaporating the oils, efficiency would be 3 times burning the oils. Heavier biodiesel oils could still be captured as fuel.
Collectors that fit over tanks or ponds growing algae could solve the cost problem with algae growing for biomass feddstock for this process.
Manure and sweage and other organic waste is better off used in biodigestors. The biogas is a perfect fuel for the fuel cells that would yield waste heat for processing the oil bearing wood, grass, and algae.
These decentralized power stations could use manure and biomass to yield backup electric power for the renewable grid and biofuel, as well as organic fertilizer and carbon soil amendment that would sequester CO2.
It's a whole organic electric power and fuel system. That compliments wind and solar. On the great plains, grasslands could feed the biomass backup power for huge wind farms. Biodiesel fuel and organic fertilizer as valuable byproducts. Nice bison habitat too. for clean grass fed organic meat products.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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GreyFlcn Posted 6:24 pm
10 Aug 2007
And how exactly do you plan on harvesting that grass?
No-Till perhaps?
http://jeq.scijournals.org/cgi/content/full/35/1/3
http://www.ars.usda.gov/research/publications/Publication ...
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Ron Steenblik Posted 6:48 pm
10 Aug 2007
Your link is to an article on no-till techniques for planting crops (soybeans, corn and wheat) planted in the Argentine Pampas, no less. What does that have to do with harvesting prairie grasses in the United States?
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Ron Steenblik Posted 9:59 pm
10 Aug 2007
Farmers in the corn belt have watched the coming of the ethanol boom with an ill-concealed excitement. They've invested in small-town processing plants, and they've happily seen the price of corn fluctuate steadily upward. But land prices have also moved steadily upward. Land set aside for conservation is being put back into production. And a bidding war has broken out over acreage, a war that farmers are sure to lose to speculative investors.
In short, the ethanol boom is accelerating the inequity in the rural landscape. The high price of corn -- and the prospect of continued huge demand -- doesn't benefit everyone equally. It gives bigger, richer farmers and outside investors the ability to outcompete their smaller neighbors. It cuts young farmers hoping to get a start out of the equation entirely. It reduces diversity in crops and in farm size.
For the past 75 years, America's system of farm subsidies has unfortunately driven farming toward such concentration, and there's no sign that the next farm bill will change that. The difference this time is that American farming is poised on the brink of true industrialization, creating a landscape driven by energy production and what is now called "biorefining." What we may be witnessing is the beginning of the tragic moment in which the ownership of America's farmland passes from the farmer to the industrial giants of energy and agricultural production.
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amazingdrx Posted 1:56 am
12 Aug 2007
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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Jonas Posted 3:15 am
12 Aug 2007
Biofuels may push up food prices, but higher oil prices push up prices for all products.
In the developing world (where people live on more than sugarcane), this would be problematic.
Biofuels have their drawbacks, but reliance on oil has far bigger drawbacks.
I've read that some African governments are now spending twice as much on importing expensive oil, than on health care. Can you imagine?
We need a study showing the effects of high oil prices on poor economies that could switch to biofuels (made from e.g. sugarcane).
I'm sure biofuels would then be looked at from an entirely different perspective.
So far, no alternatives exist (solar or wind + battery cars is ultra-expensive, hydrogen is unfeasible or will have to be based on biomass, etc...).
Of all "horrible" options, biofuels is the least horrible. That's how I look at it.
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JMG Posted 6:02 am
12 Aug 2007
That's the issue -- biofuels are a way of LAUNDERING fossil fuels, making them appear to be "renewable" when they're not. If they were, biofuels makers would be using biofuels to power their refineries, and biofuels to power the farm machinery etc.
But they don't (because they can't -- they wouldn't have anything to sell if they did, and they would STILL have to buy fossil fuels). So ramping up biofuels IS ramping up fossil fuel usage.
Sugarcane ethanol is the exception, but that's not at issue here in the US, as we cannot grow much cane.
Save the world: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5% annually.
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Jonas Posted 7:41 am
12 Aug 2007
So, one more time, with biofuels you displace oil, which is a very good thing.
Especially in the developing world (where oil dependence is disastrous for the economy), but even in the U.S. The U.S. is investing in first-generation fuels now, to prepare the groundwork for second-generation fuels - which have a balance of 8 to 1. Very sensible.
What is more, this fantasy about the need for oil and gas to make biofuels is stupid. In Brazil the vast bulk of biofuels is made without a single drop of oil: tractors run on biodiesel, cane is grown organically, and processing is powered by bagasse. The energy balance remains rock solid. Rapeseed growers in Europe use pure plant oil in their tractors.
So: one more time, biofuels displace oil, that's stating the obvious. The question is: how big is the potential benefit, especially for energy-intensive developing countries.
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Ron Steenblik Posted 9:41 am
12 Aug 2007
As for developing countries, oil dependency may be disastrous for some, but more at a macro-economic level. In many countries, food constitutes a larger share of people's budgets (poor people's budgets) than energy. And in large parts of Africa, the main source of energy (for cooking mainly) is already a "biofuel": solid biomass. The way they use that fuel could stand to be improved -- e.g., through more-efficient solid fuel stoves -- but liquid biofuels are not likely to make a big difference to their lives.
Finally, proponents of big biofuel programmes in developing countries forget that while increasing biofuel production may reduce imports of petroleum, they will probably increase imports of capital for a number of years, and reduce exports of the crop diverted to biofuel production.
If a country is landlocked, and a low-cost producer of (rain-fed) cane, producing ethanol may well be cheaper than importing oil. But in many other countries, selling the sugar on the world market (and taking advantage of the higher prices created by reduced production elsewhere) may actually serve them better.
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Biodiversivist Posted 12:14 pm
12 Aug 2007
No, that's not the question. The question is how big is the potential for biofuels to devastate what is left of our biodiversity and raise the price of food all around the world?
http://www.agrisurfer.com/mirror.aspx?dt=/attachment%2Fsize%5Foriginal%2F84016145%2DC762%2D41FC%2DB715%2DC5CB0ECF266C%2Ejpg
http://www.agrisurfer.com/mirror.aspx?dt=/attachment%2Fsi ...
Educate yourself, Jonas.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2043462,00.htm ...
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/8/1/131539/4661
http://www.biodieselrealitycheck.com
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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GreyFlcn Posted 1:10 pm
12 Aug 2007
Do biofuels as a whole create more net direct, and indirect(!) greenhouse emissions than if we had stuck with oil, and worked of nearly exclusively on efficiency programs.
Could turning the US national fleet be turned into hybrids or diesels be achieved cheaper than subsidizing biofuel research, production, purchase, and infrastructure.
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GreyFlcn Posted 1:38 pm
12 Aug 2007
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Sean Casten Posted 12:54 am
13 Aug 2007
Jonas is right. Many biofuels use less fossil energy per useful MMBtu than oil. Ergo, a shift to them is favorable. While we clearly shouldn't subsidize fuels that are leading to a net increase in fossil fuel consumption, the fact that a decrease in fossil fuel consumption still requires some net fossil fuel consumption is both irrelevant and in the long-term, deeply flawed. Irrelevant because a hostility to directionally-correct shifts while we keep using fossil fuels is, at core, an anti-environmental position. Flawed because much of the underlying fossil fuel use in most fuel chains is an artifact of the transition. For example, the electricity used in biofuels plants is commonly assumed to come from the grid average, which includes a lot of fossil energy. So if we eliminated all other fossil energy in the chain, we would still have a fossil content - but this fossil energy is not innate to biofuels. It is innate to the grid. Build a less fossil-intensive grid and the fossil-intensity of electric use will fall accordingly. Biofuels per se shouldn't get credit for this reduction, but comparably they should not be penalized for factors beyond their control. Similar logic applies to the fossil impacts associated with distribution of corn/soy to plants (commonly modeled as a diesel-fired train) and of product to market (typically through some combination of diesel-fueled trucks and electric-pumped pipelines). And to the thermal energy used in the plants (typically modeled as natural gas-fired boilers). We then get to the fertilizer inputs (a much bigger deal for corn than for other crops) which are significant - and come from natural gas, given current technology - but can be substantially offset if we assume quite reasonable technological and fuels advances in the other pieces of the equation. For example, if we put thermally matched cogen plants at ethanol facilities, the amount of carbon we displace from the grid exceeds the carbon associated with fertilizer production. Throughout these posts, I see implied, consistent mathematical errors of assuming not only that technology does not advance, but that the going forward assumption should be the most carbon-intensive of the current technologies. I can point to biofuel plants in operation today that have eliminated the fossil emissions from their boilers by burning wood waste as fuel or by recovering waste heat from adjacent power plants. And as biodiesel becomes a significant transportation fuel, the fossil content of distribution falls. And if you build plants in California (which has a much lower fossil-carbon signature than, say, Iowa because of a more gas-intensive grid) I come to very different conclusions about the carbon release associated with electricity consumption.
Much of the anti-biomass tilt here is really an anti-population argument. I will accept that as population grows, land use becomes ever more constrained. Ultimately, Malthus is right even if he didn't quite factor in technology growth. But arguing that therefore we shouldn't embrace biofuels is tautologically flawed. This isn't an argument against biofuels, but rather one against unchecked population growth. And yes, this is a problem, but unless you're volunteering to take yourself or your family out of the population pile, it is a rather self-serving argument.
All arguments are only as valid as the alternatives they provide. An all electric vehicle world where all electricity comes from solar is nice, but impractical except in the very long term. In the near term, I would rather reduce the carbon emissions of 10 million cars by by 5% than 10,000 cars by 50%. Especially if those 10 million cars lead to a recursive ratcheting down by steadily lowering the carbon impact of all the upstream fuel inputs.
My consistent concern as noted before is that the anti-biofuels argument is much longer on emotion than fact. And while there are certainly vast differences in the environmental consequences of different biofuels (and therefore we ought to support some more than others), we are tarring all with much too broad a brush.
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Jon Rynn Posted 1:10 am
13 Aug 2007
What concerns me about biofuels is even the use of alleged "waste", which is critical to soil regeneration. I've seen estimates that in 50 years, the midwest could be a desert because of erosion, from what may have been the world's greatest pile of soil. Cogeneration I can see, some sugarcane -- as long as it is not directly or indirectly leading to rainforest loss -- I can see, but the entire use of land in the U.S. is another disaster creeping up on us. So the problem is wider than "simply" carbon emissions, or even peak oil, it extends to the third leg of our ecological problems, ecosystem destruction.
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Sean Casten Posted 1:15 am
13 Aug 2007
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Jon Rynn Posted 1:49 am
13 Aug 2007
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JMG Posted 3:37 am
13 Aug 2007
Let's run down some of your post:
Many biofuels use less fossil energy per useful MMBtu than oil.
Uh, duh -- oil is 100% fossil energy, and when you charge the oil used in refining and transporting oil against oil's energy balance, you are using 100% fossil energy.
Ergo, a shift to them is favorable. While we clearly shouldn't subsidize fuels that are leading to a net increase in fossil fuel consumption, the fact that a decrease in fossil fuel consumption still requires some net fossil fuel consumption is both irrelevant and in the long-term, deeply flawed.
Not so fast, Red Rider. Not all fossil fuels are the same--and since the boom in ethanol plants is in COAL-fired, what you're talking about is using coal (shipped via diesel powered trains) to further convert natural-gas-reliant corn into alcohol.
For example, if we put thermally matched cogen plants at ethanol facilities, the amount of carbon we displace from the grid exceeds the carbon associated with fertilizer production.
Except that natural gas is finite and all but irreplaceable, and it's the highest value fossil fuel because of its versatility and (relatively) low carbon profile. The question isn't whether we can waste less energy while doing something stupid; it's whether we can stop doing something stupid entirely (stop making ethanol).
Throughout these posts, I see implied, consistent mathematical errors of assuming not only that technology does not advance, but that the going forward assumption should be the most carbon-intensive of the current technologies.
Because, as you seem to have avoided noticing, the rising price and diminishing supply of oil and natural gas means that we're going to see MORE coal used wherever that's an option (such as in ethanol plants). So you can point to
biofuel plants in operation today that have eliminated the fossil emissions from their boilers by burning wood waste as fuel or by recovering waste heat from adjacent power plants.
all you like, but the bottom line is that they are exceptions; moreover, if you are seriously suggesting that we start using wood to power biofuel refineries then you've just added ANOTHER use for the same land that we're already supposedly using to grow food and feedstock for your biofuels.
2. Much of the anti-biomass tilt here is really an anti-population argument. I will accept that as population grows, land use becomes ever more constrained. Ultimately, Malthus is right even if he didn't quite factor in technology growth. But arguing that therefore we shouldn't embrace biofuels is tautologically flawed. This isn't an argument against biofuels, but rather one against unchecked population growth. And yes, this is a problem, but unless you're volunteering to take yourself or your family out of the population pile, it is a rather self-serving argument.
Well, I'm sterilized and I didn't have offspring, so is it OK if I point out what a BS argument you just made? The world has so much arable land; that number gets smaller daily, thanks (ultimately) to population pressures and unwise resource use causing environmental catastrophes. The yield curve for food crops peaked. If we're in overshoot for population (and, yes, we are) then the last thing we should be doing is wasting any of our precious arable land on growing food for cars.
3. All arguments are only as valid as the alternatives they provide.
So it's important to point out that your implicit alternative is business-as-usual, only more of it. More driving, more sprawl, more coal use, more of everything. Too bad the world doesn't know it should keep getting larger to provide all the resources you imagine will be available.
Save the world: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5% annually.
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Jonas Posted 5:10 am
13 Aug 2007
people in the developing world live on more than sugar alone
70% of all Africans live off agriculture (they stand to benefit massively from stable markets and from crop diversification)
ACP countries (Africa, Carib, Pacific) could sell a quota of sugar at artificially high prices to the EU, under a preferential agreement.
This sugar protocol is set to expire, which would have destroyed millions of sugar farmers in these poor countries.
Thank God there is ethanol; terrified, these farmers now have some new hope.
The only thing we need is to get rid of US/EU subsidies on biofuels.
The Sweden and the Netherlands governments - smart countries thinking ahead - have filed for a formal, study by the OECD to assess the damage of these trade barriers. They want to get rid of them, and they're seriously in favor of free biofuels trade, knowing very well that this represents an unprecedented opportunity for development in the poor countries.
In India, sugar prices have collapsed, and the farmers and processors are begging the government to make work of an ethanol policy, because this would allow them to play on two markets, to their great benefit.
The example for sugarcane can be replicated for many other feedstocks.
Personally, I don't see what's so difficult about understanding that when an African farming community suddenly can make money from planting energy crops for biomass exports to a market willing to pay a good price for it, that this is a good thing.
Why are the poor, living in countries with natural comparative advantages, not allowed to make money?
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GreyFlcn Posted 5:35 am
13 Aug 2007
What makes you think small farmers get any of that money?
http://www.alternet.org/story/49138
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GreyFlcn Posted 5:48 am
13 Aug 2007
And if it's displacing local pasture or food crops, then where do those go?
The answer? Into the forest.
http://greyfalcon.net/tropics3
As a result, while we may be "solving" peak oil, for a short time, we would be forfeiting any chance at dealing with global warming.
_
So it really comes to a question, which problem are we primarily trying to solve?
Peak Oil
Or Global Warming
BioFuels make a lot of sense is if it's merely Peak Oil.
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GreyFlcn Posted 5:50 am
13 Aug 2007
Diesel for instance achieves all the benefits or corn ethanol (the optimistic ones).
And it's just a bit more available than ethanol pumps.
http://greyfalcon.net/e85stations.png
Why should hybrids and diesels get practically ignored, over biofuels?
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Jonas Posted 12:25 am
14 Aug 2007
Greening the desert with biofuels: Inner Mongolia peasants show it's possible
Similar examples in Senegal, Haiti, Namibia...
But hey, let's not waste too much time on this: some people will never read anything that does not confirm their fixation on "destruction". Frankly, it's their problem.
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Ron Steenblik Posted 3:39 am
14 Aug 2007
But these are small-scale and marginal at the moment. Meanwhile, the big incentives, and the dominant production, is of biofuels made from traditional crops (corn, wheat, canola, soy). Until government policy stops promoting these, any "better biofuel" can be considered just part of the side show.
Few regular contributors here trust the "bait and switchgrass" tactics of the industry anymore ("current subsidies for first-generation biofuels are paving the way for second-generation biofuels!"), so any repetition of that argument is likely to provoke a strong reaction on these pages.
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GreyFlcn Posted 5:48 am
14 Aug 2007
All while doing us the dubious pleasure of emitting copious ammounts of nitrogen oxides.
A greenhouse gas which is hundreds of times more potent than CO2.
http://greyfalcon.net/n2o.png
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GreyFlcn Posted 5:48 am
14 Aug 2007
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Ron Steenblik Posted 6:21 am
14 Aug 2007
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Ron Steenblik Posted 6:22 am
14 Aug 2007
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wiscidea Posted 7:29 am
14 Aug 2007
"Why are the poor, living in countries with natural comparative advantages, not allowed to make money?"
Hmmm... based on what I've read on this website... if the folks visiting this website are an indication of what it means to be an "environmentalist"... I believe the reason is that once people actually have a bit of extra money, they like to buy things that "environmentalists" don't want them to buy -- cars, TVs, refrigerators, houses, medical care for their children.
I find it interesting that "environmentalists" also tend to be enthusiastic about preserving indigenous culture, protecting people from all the terrible products of the modern world. Perhaps it is a way to put a moral facade on what is otherwise hypocrisy and selfishness -- there seems to be little interest in embracing their own ancient heritage.
By the way, I disagree with this philosphy, which is one more reason I've stopped calling myself an "environmentalist". There has to be a way to improve the quality of life in developing countries without destroying what little remains of various ecosystems and biodiversity.
Forward!
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GreyFlcn Posted 10:55 am
14 Aug 2007
Thats actually the problem.
For instance, US DOE Model does not include N2O emissions from atmospheric nitrogen fixed by soybeans, while UC Davis Model does, contributing to an almost order of magnitude greater estimate of Global Warming Impact for soybean biodiesel.
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Jonas Posted 10:57 pm
14 Aug 2007
FAO chief calls for a 'Biopact' between the North and the South
All major global institutions back this vision, from the IEA to the EU and now the FAO.
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Jonas Posted 11:05 pm
14 Aug 2007
On that I fully agree: we are going way too fast with bad biofuels made from food crops. Brazil gets my vote for the moment, but most other initiatives must be halted.
Instead, we must develop a strategy that ensures small farmers can really grow sustainable energy crops. And that is possible, with sorghum, sugarcane, jatropha, tree crops (acacia or like in Mongolia), and other systems.
I just wish people knew more about these options. There are 2.5 billion hectares of land available for this. But the economic logic results in this more difficult land to be tapped only last; first, the good land is taken. We need international agreements that make good planning for bioenergy.
So I wish that journalists more explicitly state that bioenergy as such is not bad (on the contrary it can boost poverty alleviation efforts), but that current mega monocultural initiatives are not the way forward.
Now all I read is: "all biofuels suck". I couldn't disagree more.
Smart biofuels can restore the environment (e.g. push back desertification) and help many poor farmers in the developing world. And many biofuels do have a strong energy balance and they do reduce carbon emissions.
In short, I wish journalists would take a basic course on the available options, instead of dismissing all biofuels at once.
We need a Green Stalin who says: this is good, this is bad, if you don't agree, you're off to the gulag.
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wiscidea Posted 12:07 am
15 Aug 2007
Please clarify the N2O problem. I wasn't aware of it. Your remark suggests that chemical fertilizer and nitrogen-fixing crops both contribute to global warming. A couple questions...
(1) Is there any indication whether applying fertilizer or growing nitrogen-fixing crops results in the release of more N2O?
(2) Do cultivated fields produce more N2O than the native vegetation they replace? If not, this issue seems irrrelevant. Or are you suggesting we might want to reduce global climate change by reducing N2O to a level below "natural" levels?
(3) Is the problem really a matter of applying too much fertilizer to crops or growing crops under conditions that don't permit them to use all of the nitrogen fixed? Perhaps improving total soil health would reduce N2O emissions.
(3) This does not favor use of soybeans for biofuel OR a large-scale shift toward organic agriculture, which demands growing more nitrogen-fixing crops to build soil! How much N2O is release if just enough chemical fertilzer is used for a crop? How much N2O is released if nitrogen-fixing crops are used to build soil?
Almost seems like it would be better for the environment if a farmer carefully calculated how much chemical fertilizer to add to a field -- slow-release fertilizer produced using wind power near point it is to be used -- rather than allow nitrogen-fixing crops to grow wild and possibly fix more nitrogen than the soil can retain.
Forward!
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Ron Steenblik Posted 12:56 am
15 Aug 2007
I agree that educating journalists on technical topics is always a good idea, but what we have seen is a wide range of reactions. Back in 2006, most of the media reports on biofuels were of the "feel good" nature. Biofuels were the silver (or green) bullet that was going to reduce dependency on foreign oil, reduce gasoline prices, obviate any need to change our lifestyles in order to meet greenhouse-gas reduction targets, boost farmer incomes, etc., etc., etc. Almost no journalists at the time reported on what it was all going to cost, or that there might be more cost-effective alternatives.
That the mainstream (and not so mainstream) media have started to see some of the negative sides of U.S.-style biofuel production (actual, not some future ideal) -- and find it makes good press -- should not come as a surprise.
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Ron Steenblik Posted 1:01 am
15 Aug 2007
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GreyFlcn Posted 2:46 am
15 Aug 2007
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnOSnJJSP5c
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0h0kUCuNi54
Even if it's having a pretty rough start.
http://greyfalcon.net/algae
http://greyfalcon.net/algae2
http://greyfalcon.net/algae3
http://www.bizjournals.com/masshightech/stories/2007/07/0 ...
But thats only because the water used does not need to be purified and can be easily recycled back into the system, and the nutrient feed is usually waste from fossil fuel power plants.
_
Now if you wanted to say "All biofuels are an inherently inefficient way to capture sunlight as energy".
Then you would be correct.
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Biodiversivist Posted 3:48 am
15 Aug 2007
No energy scheme is without its positives and negatives. Take nuclear power for example. As with an agrofuel enthusiast, a nuclear enthusiast will present the good side of nuclear power over and over, refusing to acknowledge a single negative. An anti-nuclear activist will do the opposite. But, until someone builds a spreadsheet to compare the good and the bad, you can't really say if it is overall bad or overall good. So, when you find a biofuel that uses less fossil fuel to make a gallon than it takes to make a gallon of gasoline you have one positive. But lets say that biofuel also requires a consumer to usurp 15 acres of the surface of the planet to run their car on it for a year and it also destroyed part of the Cerrado ecosystem/carbon sink. So, do you ignore the negatives and promote the fuel on its one positive attribute or do you weigh the positive attributes against the negative ones?
Irrelevant because a hostility to directionally-correct shifts while we keep using fossil fuels is, at core, an anti-environmental position.
Simply stating that biofuels are a directionally correct shift does not make it true. I put 130 miles on my electric hybrid bike last week without busting one bead of sweat and getting to my destinations faster than a car could have carried me. I emitted no CO2, consumed no fossil fuels, usurped no food crops, destroyed no biodiversity, ecosystems or carbon sinks. You don't have to have much of an imagination to extrapolate my bike into a future with plug-in hybrids and eventually fully electric cars. The future can't be predicted, so maybe I'm wrong, but your vision of a world where vast amounts of our remaining biodiversity has been converted into neat rows of agrofuel monocrops may be, hopefully, wrong also.
The entire biofuel concept is deeply flawed. It relies on the usurpation of the living tapestry of a planet that is already beginning to fail under the load of 6.7 billion upright walking aggressive omnivorous primates. We are already fomenting a mass extinction of the other lifeforms we shared this planet with and along comes a profit making fad that pours gas on a raging fire. I would argue than anyone who ignores the obvious environmental destruction being wrought by agrofuels is at core, taking an anti-environmental position. Palm oil is poised to help drive the wild orangutan to extinction in the next ten to fifteen years along with countless other species. The destruction of carbon sinks in those areas is presently contributing more to global warming than the United States.
Several forest preserves in Africa are presently being converted into sugarcane and palm oil plantations as I write.
Soy, palm, and cane are beginning to consume more and more South American ecosystems and carbons sinks.
Every time you fill up your flex fuel car with corn ethanol or your Jetta with soy biodiesel you have usurped enough food to sustain several poor people for a year, driven the price of food up (expected to climb 7% this year) helped propagate the Gulf of Mexico dead zone, and supported the conversion of conservation wildlife habitat back into biologically impoverished wastelands of monocrops. Now that is my definition of hostility toward the environment.
For example, the electricity used in biofuels plants is commonly assumed to come from the grid average, which includes a lot of fossil energy. So if we eliminated all other fossil energy in the chain, we would still have a fossil content - but this fossil energy is not innate to biofuels. It is innate to the grid. Build a less fossil-intensive grid and the fossil-intensity of electric use will fall accordingly... Similar logic applies to the fossil impacts associated with distribution of corn/soy to plants (commonly modeled as a diesel-fired train) and of product to market (typically through some combination of diesel-fueled trucks and electric-pumped pipelines)... And as biodiesel becomes a significant transportation fuel, the fossil content of distribution falls.
I am going to turn your own argument against you. A corn ethanol or biodiesel refinery should be able to burn a portion of its own product to heat water and generate electricity. In theory, it should not have to use coal, or natural gas, or even the electric grid for power. They don't burn part of their own product because they would go bankrupt (or most likely would lobby for even more subsidization). Ditto for the trucks and trains moving the grain. There would be practically nothing left over to sell and certainly no profit to be made. This is overwhelming common sense evidence of a biofuel shell game.
Throughout these posts, I see implied, consistent mathematical errors of assuming not only that technology does not advance, but that the going forward assumption should be the most carbon-intensive of the current technologies. I can point to biofuel plants in operation today that have eliminated the fossil emissions from their boilers by burning wood waste as fuel or by recovering waste heat from adjacent power plants
Interesting, I just scanned these same posts and didn't see any such thing, suggesting that you just laid a strawman on us. Inversely, I see implied, consistent mathematical errors of assuming that environmental destruction is not taking place at a far greater pace than biofuel production efficiency. Those plants using waste wood are already starting to compete with others who also want to use that waste wood. Because they can't use it, they are forced to use fossil fuels instead. Very few of the biodiesel or ethanol processing plants in existence can or will burn biomass to offset their fossil fuel use. Those problems of competition for biomass, along with environmental usurpation and destruction, grow faster than productivity improvements and certainly grow with increasing biofuel production.
Much of the anti-biomass tilt here is really an anti-population argument.
Here you create out of thin air an association between the individuals who are pointing out (with methodically defended and sourced arguments) the flaws in biofuels, with Malthusian anti-populationists. The attempt is as ridiculous as it is transparent.
I will accept that as population grows, land use becomes ever more constrained. Ultimately, Malthus is right even if he didn't quite factor in technology growth.
You acknowledge that Malthus is right (that there will be a massive population reset as a result of food shortages) while simultaneously promoting an idea that usurps arable land and is clearly already competing with food.
But arguing that therefore we shouldn't embrace biofuels is tautologically flawed. This isn't an argument against biofuels, but rather one against unchecked population growth.
One commenter briefly mentions population in a sentence and you expand it into another (deeply flawed) strawman argument.
And yes, this is a problem, but unless you're volunteering to take yourself or your family out of the population pile, it is a rather self-serving argument.
Hmm, seems to me, and I could be wrong here, but another option to killing oneself or one's family, would be to support women's reproductive rights with votes and with donations to organizations like the Northwest Women's law Center, NARAL, and Planned Parenthood (which we do). If it is true that you garner profit from biofuel production as suggested by another commenter, then this quote by Al Gore in "An Inconvenient Truth" of Upton Sinclair may be applicable to you:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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Biodiversivist Posted 4:03 am
15 Aug 2007
You don't see anyone critiquing biodiesel made from waste or electricity being generated by waste biomass. In short, nobody has said "all biofuels suck." However, because 99% of them being produced today suck, it is important that people understand that.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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GreyFlcn Posted 6:53 am
15 Aug 2007
Reusing waste is good.
Soil mining is bad.
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