<![CDATA[Grist Feed: Cellulosic Ethanol]]> http://www.grist.org/ Articles about Cellulosic Ethanol from your friends at Grist en-us webmaster@grist.org (Grist) Sat, 28 Nov 2009 3:48:27 PDT Sat, 28 Nov 2009 3:48:27 PDT 2009, Grist Magazine, Inc. All rights reserved http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss <![CDATA[Two takes on school lunches, plus other tasty morsels from around the web]]> http://www.grist.org/article/2009-09-30-school-lunches-choice-nuggets/ Wed, 30 Sep 2009 12:20:51 -0700 Tom Philpott http://www.grist.org/article/2009-09-30-school-lunches-choice-nuggets/ Reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news, humor, and inspiration, visit www.grist.org.

When my info-larder gets too packed, it’s time to serve up some choice nuggets from around the Web.

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Get 'em while they're hot.  • In today's New York Times, Kim Severson's got a wonderful report on one New York City school cafeteria's quest to cook as much as possible from scratch.

The piece has all sorts of good tidbits. E.g., to serve meat, New York City school cafeterias have to use stuff like "frozen pre-roasted commodity chicken parts." Why? Because "there isn't a speck of raw meat allowed in New York City school cafeterias. It poses too much of a food-handling challenge."

Granted, the meat industry is churning out highly dubious product these days. And school cafeterias are a great place to teach kids to eat less meat; and thawed-out "frozen pre-roasted commodity chicken parts" surely do their bit on that front!

But the no-fresh-meat rule is surely about lack of trained personnel--i.e., professional cooks. At most schools, Severson reports, the kitchen staff "isn't trained to do much more than steam frozen vegetables, dig ravioli out of a six-pound can or heat frozen chicken patties in a convection oven."

Safely breaking down a bunch of whole chickens for a fricassee requires training and experience--and school-cafeteria budgets are simply too cut-to-the-bone (to keep with the butchery imagery) to pay for such training.

Then there's the whole equipment problem: schools are in charge of raising funds to supply their own kitchens with ovens, cooktops, pots, etc. As a result, they raise funds in dubious ways (like installing soda and junk-food machines), or they simply eschew real cooking equipment and stick to reheating machines. From Severson:

Barely half of New York's 1,385 school kitchens have enough cooking and fire-suppression equipment so cooks can actually sauté, brown or boil over open flame.

Even in those that do, aging ovens sometimes don't heat properly, equipment is hidden away in storage rooms or broken....More than 80 percent of the nation's districts cook fewer than half their entrees from scratch, according to a 2009 survey by the School Nutrition Association.

The article describes the heroic effort of one cafeteria staff in Queens to skirt those obstacles and more to put a decent lunch on the table for the kids. Toward the bottom of the article, though, we come to a heart-breaking line:

"No machines until you get your lunch!" an aide yells, trying to keep students from the bank of vending machines at the back of the cafeteria ringing with the siren call of Pop-Tarts and Cool Ranch Doritos.

Why would such a conscientiously run cafeteria peddle such garbage? Severson doesn't go there, but I'll venture a guess: to raise funds for cooking equipment. The decision to make school cafeterias responsible for their funding own equipment is a brutal legacy of the Reagan era. I hope it changes soon.

• At the Washington Post, Jane Black has an interesting article on the school-lunch problem and a possible solution: de facto privatization. Black opens with a depressing and accurate summary of the miserly sums now devoted to school lunches and the dismal fiscal situation that confronts school lunch reformers. She concludes:

But with a projected $1.6 trillion federal deficit in 2009, even the strongest supporters of school lunch reform privately concede a substantial increase is unlikely to pass.

Black highlights an Oakland-based company called Revolution Foods that reportedly offers well-sourced, healthy, and good-tasting lunches to school districts for a price only about 12 percent higher than the government's $2.68 per-meal allotted budget. The company cooks the meals at regional commissaries and then distributes them to client schools.
From my perspective, any method for getting decent food into schools deserves praise. But I can't support a full-on privatization model--if we want a decent society, I think we need to figure out how to make and serve good food in our public schools.

• For those of us who like to eat and find ourselves rather hooked on it, curtailing cliamte change is really, really important.

• Ezra Klein thinks  maybe the meat industry should be forced to stop using so many antibiotics. D'accord!

• Commmercial-scale cellulosic ethanol from swithcgrass is coming ... in "ten years or sooner"!!!!  Bold claim, guys--I'll be checking up on that!

• Terrain Magazine has an interesting article on a housing development in suburban Phoenix build around a farm.  It's called .... Agritopia. On La Vida Locavore, Jill Richardson says she's planning a piece on "what's right and what's wrong" with the project. I look forward to Jill's take.

• At Bitten blog, Corinne Ramey weighs in on the best way to avoid pesticides in your produce. 

• Is The New York Times' new restaurant critic Pete Wells a hanging judge, or has New York City run out of great restaurants? In his first three reviews combined (here's the latest), he's awarded all of one star (of a possible combined twelve. 





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]]> <![CDATA[Electric cars get better mileage]]> http://www.grist.org/article/electric-cars-get-better-mpa/ Fri, 08 May 2009 16:41:18 -0700 Biodiversivist http://www.grist.org/article/electric-cars-get-better-mpa/ Reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news, humor, and inspiration, visit www.grist.org.

From a study published in this week's Science Express ($ub Req'd):

Bioelectricity produces an average 81% more transportation kilometers and 108% more emissions offsets per unit area cropland than cellulosic ethanol…

Given the limited area of land that is available to grow biofuels crops without causing direct or indirect land use impacts, bioenergy applications should maximize the efficiency with which a given land area is used to meet transportation and climate change goals.

Bioelectricity is the act of making electric power by burning biomass for boilers or turbines instead of fossil fuels like coal.

In a nutshell the study says that an electric car using electricity generated by burning biomass will get 81% more miles per acre than a car using cellulosic ethanol. That is equivalent to improving the purported American average of 24 mpg to 44 mpg, which coincidentally is also the improvement achieved by the Prius and Insight.

I touched on this subject in an article titled Misplaced Priorities over in Grist last year. Imagine replacing the coal in the above photo with corn or wood or hay. Something has to give.

Corn ethanol was also part of the study and as you might have guessed, faired much worse than cellulosic. Not studied by this paper are environmental impacts and costs:

Specifically, the competitiveness of biomass ethanol depends on the cost of petroleum, whereas the competitiveness of biomass electricity depends on the cost of coal, wind, hydro, solar, and nuclear.

Which of the above energy sources will be increasing in cost and which will be decreasing?

The study looked at pure internal combustion cars and pure battery powered electric cars. It did not look at plug-in hybrids, which would eliminate range constraints imposed by today's battery technology.

The paper also said:

Two leading technology developments, cellulosic ethanol and electric vehicle batteries, provide alternative pathways for bioenergy-based transportation. Biomass can be converted into ethanol to power internal combustion vehicles (ICVs) or converted into electricity to power battery electric vehicles (BEVs). It is uncertain which pathway could reach technical and economic maturity first. The cellulosic ethanol pathway benefits from commercially available flex-fuel vehicles but requires significant investments in infrastructure as well as technology advancements to reduce costs for energy conversion. The bioelectricity pathway shows promise in existing distribution infrastructure and emerging commercial offerings of battery electric vehicles that meet technology challenges of range, cost, and charging time. Electricity produced from biomass is a near-term renewable energy source that can be implemented with biomass boilers, Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) power plants, or co-combustion with coal.

What we have here is a battle forming up between increasingly electrified transport (hybrid--plug-in-hybrid--fully electric) and corn ethanol powered internal combustion engines (cellulosic is and will probably always be just five years from economic viability). One side is championed by consumer demand being met by market forces and the other side is championed by our politicians who force us to pay to turn our own food into fuel and then pour it down our throats. These are the same politicians who subsidize oil with one hand and its competitor, biofuels with the other. If it hasn't dawned on you yet that our politicians are not capable of solving complex problems like this, maybe it's time it did. Take matters into your own hands. Make your next car purchase a hybrid, plug-in hybrid, or full electric when they arrive (on dealer lots next year).

The Renewable Fuels Association and the National Biodiesel Board are going to have their hands full debunking all of this peer-reviewed rubbish being published in rags like Science (see here and here).


You can listen to a Science podcast here.



















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]]> <![CDATA[The DOE’s annual biofuels conference doesn’t inspire confidence]]> http://www.grist.org/article/2009-03-19-the-does-annual-biofuels/ Thu, 19 Mar 2009 13:29:16 -0700 Tom Laskawy http://www.grist.org/article/2009-03-19-the-does-annual-biofuels/ Reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news, humor, and inspiration, visit www.grist.org.

Team Ethanol got together recently at the Department of Energy for Biomass 2009: Fueling Our Future -- a conference on all things biofuel. Needless to say, they're still singing the same old song. More subsidies, a higher blend wall (a cheer that USDA Chief Tom Vilsack knows well) and much crowing over the promise of cellulosic ethanol, which uses "non-food crops" such as switchgrass and wood waste rather than corn.

They all clearly got the memo about carbon neutrality, which explains why Richard Hamilton, CEO of Ceres, one of the ethanol bigwigs, was saying things like this:

[L]arge increases expected in crop productivity, as well as better utilization of fallow or marginal land, will absorb the demands being placed on U.S. farmers by bioenergy. "And if we look at improved ways to roll-out advances in plant science globally, and rely primarily on non-food, low-carbon crops like switchgrass, sorghum and Miscanthus, then the math behind biofuels looks even more promising," he said.

Hamilton noted that direct land-use policies hold the greatest promise for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by providing a predictable, transparent carbon playing field.

"By having landowners and governments be directly responsible, we can drive efficiencies in farm practices, such as conservation tillage, expand the use of high-yielding, low-input crops and varieties, and encourage other sequestration practices, such as the use of winter cover crops. From a policy and practicality standpoint, it makes greater sense to be tackling the problem head-on," he said.

It sounds positively sustainable, doesn't it! Ignored in his analysis, of course, are the indirect effects of using land to grow fuel -- whether the crop is a food or not. If that land is no longer being used for food, then food will be grown somewhere else -- likely in former rainforests, as a team from Woods Hole Research Center discovered. And Lester Brown points out that profitable crops grown on marginal land will provide too much temptation; farmers would invariably try to grow them on prime land, thus further displacing food crops.

And if there was any doubt about the current carbon footprint of ethanol production, Phil Brasher of the Desmoine Register erased it when he noted concern among participants that "new biofuels plants will face greenhouse gas emission targets they can't meet when EPA releases a long-awaited formula." But wait, I thought ethanol was a low-carbon "solution." Guess not.

All that said, we will likely need low-carbon liquid fuels well into this century -- it's not, however, the concept of biofuels that are the problem. Algal biofuel (which may turn out to play a crucial role in carbon sequestration) or ethanol fueled by wood waste (or waste products) may yet be in our future fuel mix. But forcing agriculture to provide crops exclusively for use as fuel makes no sense for a planet wracked by climate change and struggling to feed our growing population.

Sadly, with the politics of ethanol all about "reducing dependence on foreign oil" and providing a means to use all that corn our screwed up system of agriculture subsidies produces, we lack a means for our political institutions to connect the dots. Making matters worse, there's no powerful, well-funded interest groups pressuring for the decoupling of crops and fuel nor an institutional pressure point on which to act. What a biomess.








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]]> <![CDATA[On the challenge of cellulosic ethanol]]> http://www.grist.org/article/notable-quotable179/ Thu, 08 Jan 2009 07:53:50 -0800 Tom Philpott http://www.grist.org/article/notable-quotable179/ Reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news, humor, and inspiration, visit www.grist.org.




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]]> <![CDATA[Robert Rapier on ever-delayed cellulosic ethanol]]> http://www.grist.org/article/Waiting-for-Godot-in-the-switchgrass/ Wed, 31 Dec 2008 10:18:56 -0800 Tom Philpott http://www.grist.org/article/Waiting-for-Godot-in-the-switchgrass/ Reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news, humor, and inspiration, visit www.grist.org.




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]]> <![CDATA[Cellulosic ethanol’s bumpy ride]]> http://www.grist.org/article/Where-is-this-bridge-leading-exactly-/ Fri, 19 Dec 2008 13:12:50 -0800 Tom Philpott http://www.grist.org/article/Where-is-this-bridge-leading-exactly-/ Reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news, humor, and inspiration, visit www.grist.org.




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]]> <![CDATA[New energy chief’s enthusiasm for cellulosic ethanol makes me uncomfortable]]> http://www.grist.org/article/Chu-ing-the-fat-of-the-land-/ Wed, 17 Dec 2008 17:24:57 -0800 Tom Philpott http://www.grist.org/article/Chu-ing-the-fat-of-the-land-/ Reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news, humor, and inspiration, visit www.grist.org.




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]]> <![CDATA[Cellulosic ethanol ranks dead last]]> http://www.grist.org/article/Thoughts-from-a-cellulosic-skeptic/ Sun, 14 Dec 2008 10:49:50 -0800 Biodiversivist http://www.grist.org/article/Thoughts-from-a-cellulosic-skeptic/ Reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news, humor, and inspiration, visit www.grist.org.




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]]> <![CDATA[Fungus in rainforest foliage has promise as biofuel]]> http://www.grist.org/article/treediesel/ Wed, 05 Nov 2008 12:42:00 -0800 Grist http://www.grist.org/article/treediesel/ Reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news, humor, and inspiration, visit www.grist.org.

A fungus hiding out in the trees of a Patagonian rainforest could be "a better source of biofuel than anything we use at the moment," according to the scientist who accidentally discovered it.




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]]> <![CDATA[Khosla’s letter to <em>Science</em> backfires]]> http://www.grist.org/article/the-misadventure-capitalist/ Thu, 23 Oct 2008 11:36:21 -0700 Biodiversivist http://www.grist.org/article/the-misadventure-capitalist/ Reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news, humor, and inspiration, visit www.grist.org.




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]]> <![CDATA[AP: cellulosic ‘not even close’ to being ready to satisfy government mandates]]> http://www.grist.org/article/whatever-happened-to-cellulosic-ethanol/ Fri, 17 Oct 2008 14:52:05 -0700 Tom Philpott http://www.grist.org/article/whatever-happened-to-cellulosic-ethanol/ Reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news, humor, and inspiration, visit www.grist.org.




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]]> <![CDATA[Not all biofuels are the same; we can do biofuel well or poorly]]> http://www.grist.org/article/how-biofuels-are-like-drugs/ Tue, 17 Jun 2008 09:52:22 -0700 Vinod Khosla http://www.grist.org/article/how-biofuels-are-like-drugs/ Reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news, humor, and inspiration, visit www.grist.org.




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]]> <![CDATA[<em>Wall Street Journal</em> editorial mischaracterizes both my position and biofuels]]> http://www.grist.org/article/biofictions/ Thu, 22 May 2008 12:12:15 -0700 Vinod Khosla http://www.grist.org/article/biofictions/ Reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news, humor, and inspiration, visit www.grist.org.




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]]> <![CDATA[Biofuel-bound grasses are often invasive species]]> http://www.grist.org/article/weeds/ Wed, 21 May 2008 08:30:00 -0700 Grist http://www.grist.org/article/weeds/ Reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news, humor, and inspiration, visit www.grist.org.

As biofuel sources go, weeds and grasses are looked on with more favor than land-ravaging, food-price-raising corn and palm. But there's no such thing as a free lunch-in-your-tank, says a paper presented by green groups at a United Nations meeting Tuesday: "Some of the most commonly recommended species for biofuels production are also major invasive alien species." The quick growth and need for little maintenance that make some grasses attractive as biofuels also make them liable to spread where they're unwanted. The paper warns of the potential for both environmental and economic damage; the Global Invasive Species Program estimates that invasive species cost the world more than $1.4 trillion each year. The biofuels industry says it will be cautious, but that the risks are overstated.




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]]> <![CDATA[Colbert on ethanol and the energy war]]> http://www.grist.org/article/colbert-on-ethanol-and-the-energy-war/ Tue, 29 Apr 2008 18:04:02 -0700 David Roberts http://www.grist.org/article/colbert-on-ethanol-and-the-energy-war/ Reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news, humor, and inspiration, visit www.grist.org.




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]]> <![CDATA[Three million more acres of industrial corn?]]> http://www.grist.org/article/what-the-world-needs-now1/ Fri, 18 Apr 2008 14:51:15 -0700 Tom Philpott http://www.grist.org/article/what-the-world-needs-now1/ Reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news, humor, and inspiration, visit www.grist.org.




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]]> <![CDATA[Why plowing up Conservation Reserve Program land won’t solve the food crisis]]> http://www.grist.org/article/anwr-of-the-heartland/ Fri, 11 Apr 2008 09:20:39 -0700 Tom Philpott http://www.grist.org/article/anwr-of-the-heartland/ Reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news, humor, and inspiration, visit www.grist.org.




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