Any worthy idea can withstand and even be improved by naysayers; scolds and skeptics play the useful role of pointing out obvious flaws. The biofuels industry has no more persistent, articulate, and scathing critic than David Pimentel, professor emeritus of entomology at Cornell University.
David Pimentel.
Photo: Chris Hallman / Cornell University Photography.
In 1979, with the price of oil surging and a politically connected company called Archer Daniels Midland investing heavily in ethanol production, the U.S. Department of Energy invited Pimentel to chair an advisory committee to look at ethanol as a gasoline alternative. The committee's conclusion: ethanol requires more energy to produce than it delivers.
That assessment didn't stop the government from enacting a variety of subsidies for ethanol, which has since developed into a multibillion-dollar industry. Nor has Pimentel refrained from issuing a series of scholarly articles claiming to show that, after decades of steady government support, ethanol remains an energy bust.
Over the years, Pimentel has become an increasingly controversial figure. The U.S. Department of Agriculture now claims that corn ethanol delivers a modestly positive net energy balance [PDF], a conclusion recently endorsed by a study from University of Minnesota researchers. Yet Pimentel's provocations continue. Not only is corn-based ethanol a net energy consumer, he says, but cellulosic ethanol -- simultaneously biofuel's holy grail and sacred cow -- is "worse."
Grist recently spoke to Pimentel about why he thinks biofuels are an environmental dead end. Enthusiasts for crop-based energy would do well to at least examine his analysis.
You claim corn ethanol's energy balance is negative, and there's a growing consensus that it's positive. Why the difference?
Pro-ethanol people make it out to be positive by omitting many of the inputs that go into corn production. For example, they omit the farm labor -- I'm not talking about the farm family, I'm talking about the farm labor. They omit the farm machinery. They omit the energy to produce the hybrid corn. They omit the irrigation. I could go on and on. Anyway, if I did all of those manipulations, I could achieve also a positive return.
However, that's not the way these assessments are made. You can go check the noted agricultural economists who have looked at corn as well as other crops, and they do include the labor, they include the farm machinery, they include repair of the farm machinery, and so forth and so on. And so, those are all inputs that the ag economists include. Why are the pro-ethanol people leaving them out?
When you say that the ethanol crowd fails to include the farm machinery, are you talking about the energy that's needed to manufacture a tractor, for example?
That's right. Or an automobile used by the farmer.
From your experience, how do these researchers justify that omission?
They don't. They just omit it.
I also see that in your studies, your calculation of how much energy goes into producing synthetic fertilizer is higher than the USDA's assessment. Why that difference?
Our data come from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. We're actually using a lower number than [the FAO's]. We're using 16,000 kilocalories per kilogram [of fertilizer], and I say the FAO is using 18,000. So again, we're using the most accurate data that are available, and not trying to manipulate these numbers.
Another place where you clash with other researchers is over the byproducts of ethanol: stuff like distillers grains that go into animal feed, etc. For those researchers, byproducts are what push ethanol's energy balance solidly onto positive ground.
We do account for it. Distillers grains, incidentally, are being used as a substitute for soybean meal. So we went back to the soybean meal, and examined how it's produced, and the energy that is required to produce it. Instead of giving [distillers grains] a 40 to 60 percent credit as the pro-ethanol people do, we found that the credit should be more like 9 percent. They [pro-ethanol researchers] are manipulating the data again.
All of that is very controversial, but let's get to the really provocative part of your work. You claim cellulosic ethanol's energy balance is "worse" than that of conventional ethanol. How can that be?
It's quite easy. Number one, if you have a handful of sawdust, and a handful of corn, which one has the most starches and sugars? That's easy. It takes almost twice as much sawdust to make the same gross energy as [corn] from cellulose, or wood.
Number two, it takes two additional treatments to release the starches and sugars [from cellulose]. That is, you're going to treat the cellulose. It's held by the lignin, and the lignin is the stuff that holds the trees up straight. And the cellulose is trapped inside that lignin. And you've got to release it, and that requires an acid or an enzyme. And so that's one treatment, and then you've got to use an alkali to stop the acidity at some stage. And now you can introduce the bugs for the fermentation. But No. 1, it takes more cellulose, and No. 2, you've got two additional treatments.
But wouldn't the response to that be that it's a lot less energy intensive to grow material for cellulosic ethanol because you don't need to focus on plants that have high sugar concentrations?
That's right. And we did that [in a recent study (PDF)]. But we found negative energy balances for both wood and switchgrass.
Don't you figure that after 35 years the industry will figure out how to make cellulosic ethanol work? We're always hearing about a big breakthrough that's about to happen.
Well, we know how to make it work. The question is, can you do it energetically, with small amounts of energy? That I seriously doubt.
You recently wrote that "green plants in the United States collect about 53 exajoules of energy per year from sunlight. Americans consume slightly more than twice that amount, however." How did you arrive at these figures?
All you do is sit down with a pencil and paper, total up all the crops being produced, along with any of the additional biomass that goes with it. Like with corn, you not only total up the corn, but the corn stalks. You total up all the crops, and then with the wood material, you total up all the annual production in forests, and we use a rather optimistic number, three tons per hectare per year, under a range of conditions. So you can make this calculation yourself.
So if we converted 100 percent of a year's worth of solar energy stored in plant matter to fuel, we'd only supply half of our current energy consumption. What's that telling us?
It's telling us we're using too goddamn much fossil energy! And another thing it tells us is that you're not going to be self-sufficient, or even produce half of our energy from biomass in the U.S., if we want to eat. And that's using an optimistic figure for ethanol production. I don't know why [biofuel proponents] don't sit down with pencil and paper and make these calculations instead of spouting off on all the wonderful things we can achieve.
One of your critics, David Morris, has written [PDF] that the basic thrust of your work is that "the world's population has vastly exceeded its biological carrying capacity." Is that an accurate characterization?
Yes. The World Health Organization is reporting now that we've got 3.7 billion people who are malnourished on Earth. That's about 60 percent of the world population, and that problem has been getting worse each year.
Now look at the production of cereal grains per capita. That's an important number, because it is per capita that we eat and utilize resources. And you will note that since 1983, per capita grain production has been declining continuously. Declining for more than 20 years. Now why?
Population growth, right? Because overall production has actually risen over that same time.
That's right. But it's not increasing as fast as the population.
What do you think about the prospects for sustainable or organic agriculture to meet these increasing population demands?
I don't want to say that organic can supply all the food in the world, but it can be much more sustainable than conventional ag and just as productive. I recently coauthored a 22-year study [PDF] of organic agriculture utilizing corn and soybeans, which are certainly two dominant crops in the United States. Yes, we can produce these crops organically, with less energy, while improving the sustainability of the soil. [The study involved] rotating corn with soybeans in conjunction with cover crops. We had one field that was dependent on legume cover crops [for fertility], and one dependent on manure.
Which came out better?
Well, the manure was slightly better in terms of increasing soil organic matter. Slightly ... I think the yields were about the same. In both cases, the yields equaled those in conventional corn.
Now let me ask you a trick question. What if we took some of that organic corn and soy and turned it into ethanol and biodiesel? Would that achieve a positive energy balance?
No! It's not going to do it. It certainly would improve [the energy balance], because we were able to reduce the energy inputs for corn by about 30 percent.
Is it theoretically possible to turn biomass into a fuel with a positive net balance?
The difficulty is that plants do not collect very much solar energy. On average, plants collect one-tenth of one percent of the solar energy available. Photovoltaic solar cells collect at least 10 percent, which means 100 times the energy collected by plants. But you can get a positive energy balance by simply burning biomass.
But not by converting it into a liquid fuel?
No. I don't care what kind of imagination you have, it won't work.
A lot of earnest people support biofuels as a way to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and displace fossil fuels. What do you tell them?
Conserve! One word. And no one talks about it, including the environmentalists. When these people talk about biofuels providing us with our energy, they need to look at the facts right now. Eighteen percent of all corn is going into ethanol production. We're getting 4.5 million gallons of ethanol. That's 1 percent of U.S. petroleum use. It's 1 percent.
If we use 100 percent of U.S. corn, and we won't do that, but if we used 100 percent, what would that do for us? Six percent. And ethanol is being subsidized at 45 times the rate of gasoline.
Michael Pollan on agriculture and health care
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Soda lobby gets its game on
Comments
View as Flat
ethanoloverload Posted 8:02 am
08 Dec 2006
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Maywa Montenegro Posted 2:15 pm
08 Dec 2006
On the other hand, he sides with P&P on their criticism of the high credits many research teams assign to the co-products. Instead, he adopts the more modest "displacement method," which only gives co-products an energy savings equivalent to the most efficient conventional method of feed production.
All told, McElroy's analysis still finds corn ethanol to be energy positive by "about 20 to 30 percent."
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Biodiversivist Posted 2:18 pm
08 Dec 2006
Where would this world be without curmudgeons?
Ethanolloverload,
"I doubt the petroleum industry would stand up to the same magnifying glass of energy usage"
Not to defend fossil fuel, but no biofuel can possibly hope to match the energy efficiency of pumping a highly energy dense liquid out of holes in the ground, cracking it into various forms and transporting it. The argument over energy used to make ethanol is moot in any case. It has enough environmental and economic negatives to bury it without that argument.
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Jason D Scorse Posted 4:55 am
10 Dec 2006
J.S.
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Delay And Deny Posted 8:23 am
11 Dec 2006
This guy makes sense!
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GreenEngineer Posted 9:30 am
11 Dec 2006
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millercs Posted 2:10 pm
11 Dec 2006
I lived in Ithaca, too, for 6 years and I understand the Luddite mentality of the place but that is no excuse for an Ag School scientist to put the skids to every attempt at progress to an industry that, up to now, has been a godsend to so many farmers.
According to renown business and national security advocate James Woolsey switching to biofuels like cellulosic ethanol and biodiesel represent the fastest way out of the fossil fuel paradigm. Because our national security and environmental health is depending on successful deployment, how can we make it work?
Cellulosic ethanol can be made from (negative cost) waste using syngas fermentation. Using gasification to break the lignin bonds is much more efficient than enzymatic hydrolysis Pimental talks about and uses very little water. BRI has a good description of the syngas process. It has been proven in the lab and plans for commercial-scale development should be finalized soon. It would be interesting to hear how the esteemed insect doctor from Cornell would argue the results of the work of the biotechnology chemical engineer from the U. of Arkansas.
I lament the absence of a national conservation campaign as much as Pimental. But the campaign would have to be global to have much meaning - and Asia has too much invested in industrialization to make conservation here worth anything.
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jhoechst Posted 5:21 am
21 Dec 2006
Each and every year the sun shines on the earth and transfers its energy to all growing things. We humans plant and grow vegetation to feed both ourselves and the animals we husband and subsequently consume. The result is an enormous quantity of waste, both animal and vegetable which becomes increasingly difficult to dispose of, but which is potentially a never ending source for the production of oil.
The stated purpose of the government's search for alternative energy sources is to reduce or eliminate the need for importing oil. Time and time again the President has stated that "technological innovation" will hopefully produce a solution to the energy "crisis". Were it not for the obstinate refusal of the administration to recognize the existence of a currently readily available, technological innovative system, the nation could be three years down the road to real oil independence.
"Oil", as we all know has become a three letter dirty word in America's lexicon. However we view it, good, bad or indifferent, oil will be with us for many years to come, for it is not untrue that America's economy is literally lubricated by oil. Insofar as the future is concerned consider that the current population of the United States is roughly 300 million. Demographers estimate that by 2040, the U. S. population will exceed 400 million souls. That is a 33% increase in but 34 years. Where in the name of all that's holy, will the necessary energy come from? Other energy sources, hydrogen, solar, wind, nuclear and others have unique properties and will obviously fill certain energy requirements but they do not compare to the manifold uses we have found for oil Oil will have a future for as long as we can see down the road for there is nothing else which can manifest itself in so many forms in our daily lives. Given that oil is a necessary "evil", and given the generally accepted postulation that oil is finite, where will it come from?
About a decade ago a patent was issued by the United States Patent Office for a process then called thermal depolymerization process (since changed for obvious reasons to thermal conversion process or (TCP) which can take any non-nuclear material containing carbon, which is anything which has ever grown, including you and me, and produce a diesel fuel quality oil in two short hours! Additionally, the system produces a number of useful and viable byproducts and ultimately discharges potable water. Everything emanating from this system is completely benign to the environment, and in fact, rather than creating environmental problems, resolves them. In this scenario "waste" becomes an oxymoron. As one small example, the city of Philadelphia is producing oil from its sewage. The oil thus produced may be additionally refined into gasoline or other useful byproducts used to manufacture plastics, and as a feedstock is useful for many other products. There currently exists in Carthage, MO, a pilot facility producing 500 barrels of oil per day from about 200 tons of turkey effluvia from a nearby Butterball turkey processing plant and the oil thus produced is sold as a heat producing fuel, demonstrating the viability of the concept. The efficiency of the TCP system runs in the range of 85%, meaning that 15% of the energy introduced is utilized to extract 85%. These are extraordinary numbers.
You might well ask why, if this system is so good, you have not heard of it and why it is producing a mere 500 barrels per day in this vast country with so much waste being produced. There are good and sufficient reasons.
First of all, as a fledgling industry, TCP encountered start up problems usually associated with any new development, and being relatively new, may still endure problems with different feedstocks. Given time these will be overcome. Feedstocks may vary from slaughterhouse effluvia to tires to discarded plastics, and each different feedstock requires a different processing modality, and the development of those methods takes time.
Secondly, and more importantly, as a new industry, subsidies in the form of tax credits have not been forthcoming from the federal government to enable this industry to become established. As an example of what is missing, ethanol, currently the darling of the energy and environmental policy wonks, has been granted subsidies (tax credits) running through 2012 resulting in a rush to construct new facilities which effectively guarantee profits. Ethanol is however a guaranteed loser in the long run, since its prohibitive cost together with less energy output than gasoline is actually counterproductive to its stated goals. (See http://www.taxpayer.net/energy/raceforsubsidies.html) If similar support were extended to TCP, entrepreneurs would correspondingly react, and TCP plants would spring up all over the country where source material was most accessible.
As examples of such conditions, a small town, Hereford, TX, has one of the largest stockyards in the country. They are faced with the monumental task of disposing of some 6200 tons of manure each day. If it can happen in Philadelphia, it can happen in Hereford.
A recent television program was devoted to the garbage disposal problem of Los Angeles. One of their dumps receives 2000 tons of garbage per hour to be deposited on a dump that is already deeper than the Statue of Liberty is high!
These are but two isolated illustrations of what is happening across the entire nation in cities, towns and hamlets facing problems of disposal of their agricultural waste, industrial waste, their garbage and their sewage. In many instances, dumps leak effluent such as PCP's and dioxin, into the groundwater contaminating it and endangering public health. When one becomes aware of the possibilities of TCP to resolve not only the oil crisis but concomitantly also resolve environmental problems one wonders why the federal government continues to support an expensive ethanol boondoggle (scam is a better word) while ignoring a system which more quickly than any other can substantially reduce or eliminate our dependence on imported oil, which is, after all, the purported goal. The deeper one looks onto the advantageous attending to this invention the more one uncovers.
Following is an incomplete list of benefits to be derived from the introduction of the TCP system into our economy. When reviewing his list, picture in your mind's eye these benefits working on behalf of the government and its citizens.
.
1. All manner of cultivated agricultural waste can be processed into oil and other valuable byproducts.
2. Recapturable animal wastes can be processed into oil and byproducts.
3. Slaughterhouse waste from all animal types can be similarly processed into oil, as is currently being demonstrated by the Butterball turkey plant in Carthage, MO.
4. Bio-hazardous hospital waste can be safely processed for oil with the TCP system, with no hazardous output.
5. Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis (BSE) (mad cow disease) material may be safely processed as with all other types of animal byproducts, with no harmful output. All prions are destroyed.
6. Unsightly landgrabbing garbage dumps are eliminated as all garbage is choice feedstock.
7. Tire dumps are eliminated because they already contain both oil and carbon.
8. Any community producing waste, including sewage, can produce its own oil and gas for use or sale as they see fit, therefore their waste becomes a source of income to the community.
9. Because the efficiency of the system is so high, (85%) the cost of production will
drop to competitive rates when large scale production is reached.
10. With reduced oil costs, all industries dependent upon oil for their source material could produce and sell for less. This could have enormous impact across the entire spectrum of the economy.
11. A whole new industry would be born with consequent creation of jobs and a whole
new tax base and revenue source for government.
12. Within ten years the U. S. could be independent of foreign (read Saudi) oil.
13. With all oil production entirely confined within the U. S., container ships could be virtually obsolete, and thus remove future oil spills. This has tremendous environmental impact.
14. Totally reliable, steady oil prices. This could become the bedrock for a more stable economy.
15. The beneficial impact of this development on the environment, including possible (probable?) reduction on carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and consequent global warning.
16. The creation of means to assist poorer nations to develop and sustain their own never-ending source of energy. For each nation, large or small, which utilizes this system to create its own source of oil, the pressure on the international oil market would be diminished to the point where oil could become one of the least expensive commodities on the international market.
17. The elimination of international charges that the United States' efforts in the Middle East and other regions is dictated by their need for oil.
18. Should the President announce that the Administration is supporting this new development, OPEC could respond by immediately dropping the price of its oil to protect market share.
19. Given a reliable never ending source of oil, the U. S. might well find the Strategic Petroleum Reserve an unnecessary luxury.
20. Since a facility may be rapidly constructed with off the shelf equipment currently employed in the
oil refinery field, new facilities may be rapidly constructed and the ten year dream of freedom from
imported oil becomes a reality not a pipe dream.
21.An entire new industry will supply the Treasury with a huge new source of revenue, as will the
thousands of new workers employed in the field.
22. Manufacturing oil within the U. S. will deny Iran, Saudi Arabia and other middle eastern oil rich
countries the petro dollars they use to support anti-American terrorist groups
23. Last, but far from least, the reduction of oil imports will have an enormous effect on reducing the
trade deficit.
Further information concerning the process may be found at: http://www.discover.com/issues/may-03/features/featoil/
And
http://www.discover.com/issues/apr-06/features/anything-oil
And at
CWT's web site at Changing World Technologies, Inc.and from Renewable Environmental Solutions (RES).
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/July05/ethanol.toocos...
Public ignorance of this remarkable development is an overriding reason why Congress and the administration give it such short shrift. Most assuredly if the general public knew of this system and the potential it contains to alleviate the reliance on imported oil and the resultant ultimate reduction in the price of all things dependent on oil, there would develop a huge hue and cry for the government to get off its duff and support this concept. Without the dissemination of that knowledge, the country will continue to rely on unreliable, insecure sources resulting in ever escalating oil prices.
If, after reviewing the above sources you are convinced that this system is worthy of implementation into our economy, pass the word to friends, family, colleagues, whomever, to join with us in not only spreading the word, but inundating Congress with the requirement that if they wish you to vote for them, they must support this invention. As Jack Kennedy once so famously said, "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country."
ADDENDUM
With the current cessation of hostilities in Lebanon, Hezbollah has reclaimed the streets of Behrut and proclaimed victory. They have informed the public not to accept aid for rebuilding from any organization but Hezbollah. Given the hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars required for such an effort, where does the money come from if not from Iran? And where does Iran get its riches? From oil!
It requires no great leap of imagination to recognize that if petro dollars were denied Iran, their enormous expenditures for terrorist support and nuclear experimentation would require some rethinking of their priorities. The rapid development of this system into our economy is one type of "sanction", if one wishes to call it that, which can be benign, peaceful, far reaching and very effective.
The announcement by the United States government that one of their highest priorities would be the rapid implementation of the TCP system into our economy, would have not only national, but global significance as well..
J. W. Hoechst
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Feiner Posted 4:45 am
06 Feb 2007
Though the crux of Morris' well-intentioned piece is to celebrate the viability of an autonomous biofuel industry free from the serfdom of corporate globalization, as he points out, you may in fact be able to get there from here, but where exactly do you think you are going, and is there anyway to come back home?
An initiative based on government subsidies will get us nowhere fast. Off the top of my head, keep it much more local at the start if that is where you want to end up. State initiatives that fund locally owned production and distribution facilities from coffers filled by conservation and reduction efforts across the state cutting financial inputs into the energy grid as it operates currently. Citizens that want to see the potential benefit of a local, directly democratic biofuel 'industry,' will have to rise to the occasion, cutting need and overall use thus generating excess state and local funds to then 'subsidize' state and local alternative energy projects.
The last thing we need is the feds pulling more money out of health care and such for research and development into biotechfuels and deforestation, padding the same dirty lobbyist and industry accounts already getting rich in the agribusiness, biotech and energy sectors.
Please read my recent article, "Shattering the 'Royal Decption,' online at http://www.gefreemaine.org/article.php?story=200609261613 ... or in print in the January 2007 issue of Acres USA magazine, for more well-intentioned grease lightning.
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kgpc Posted 7:20 pm
30 May 2007
http://www.ethanol-news.de
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peter lauce Posted 1:17 pm
30 Jul 2007
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bailsout Posted 3:58 am
20 Aug 2007
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05 Jun 2008
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26 Jun 2008
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roywatson Posted 3:46 pm
06 Sep 2008
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roywatson Posted 4:01 pm
06 Sep 2008
Well conceived alcohol plants generate exponentially more energy than the non-renewable inputs required to operate them. What doesn't make sense is running alcohol plants with natural gas or coal...operating these plants on a massive, centralized scale...and turning the ethanol over the the oil companies to mix with gasoline. It's interesting that this is how they are being run now. It's almost as if they are being set up to fail spectacularly - and very publicly.
Alcohol for fuel can be produced locally and in a de-centralized way, very close to the fields where the crop inputs are grown, and distributed gasoline-style at local pumps. A system like this is massively efficient and sustainable, cuts the oil companies out the picture completely, and will substantially strengthen the farming economy in the US and in any other nation that converts to alcohol as fuel. You can see why oil companies and their allies who prefer centralized control (and with it the ability to turn energy on and off and raise prices at will) don't want you to know these basic facts.
Read David Blume-Author Alcohol Can Be A Gas: http://www.permaculture.com/
Featured on a series of videos at:
http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/422.html
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