Biofuel

Post Reply New Topic

Technically: No. Most petroleum is carbon based.



The use of food as fuel is not the only problem; you also have to use A LOT of land areas to make biofuel. You need a field which is 1km^2 for one whole season to make 200 liters of diesel. Even with all the food waste in Western Europe and North America you won't be able to provide nearly enough petrol for the increasing amount of cars. Did I mention that most of the biofuel in North America and Western Europe come from Latin America?



Well, when we're only responsible for 3% of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, should we use other people's food as a fuel for our cars?

Uh - not so much the tree huggers as the farmers.

The idea of ethanol from corn as fuel started in the energy crisis of the 1970s. At that time, we had large stockpiles of corn that were sitting around and going to waste. Since then, we have converted much of that corn surplus to high-fructose corn syrup, which is stored in the adipose tissue of our nation.

The idea that it burns cleaner is partly true - ethanol is more oxygenated than gasoline. Depending on local conditions, it might lead to less smog, or merely a different type of smog.

You are right that it is not a good deal thermodynamically. In the case of corn -> ethanol, it is a net loss of energy that ends up consuming more conventional energy (ie, petroleum) than it replaces.

Yes, that is what I was referring to. Fossil fuels are accumulations of bio-fuels.



Starch from corn is more digestible to most bacteria - we went down the corn route because the technology was on the shelf, and there was lots of corn at the time. There are companies that claim that they can profitably produce cellulosic ethanol (at today's gas prices) - but it is new and too soon to say if it will pan out.




True, but most engineering calculations show that Brazil's sugar-ethanol program is significantly in the black when it comes to producing net energy, while the US corn-ethanol is slightly to significantly in the red.





Never believed that noise - fuel security and fuel prices were the impetus for the program, and farm state economics kept it going. Ethanol can reduce smog (sometimes) which can reduce toxins in the air (improving regional air quality), but burning a pound of ethanol carbon is no different from burning a pound of gasoline carbon in terms of the amount of CO2 produced (doesn't decrease potential climate change).

OK, then, your original comment was a load of bull. "Biofuels" refers to fuel that is not derived from oil/petroleum but from some agricultural product such as corn or sugarcane.


So they should introduce them to the market. If they can actually profitably produce ethanol from that source, compared to current fuel costs, they should be a huge success and earn obscene quantities of money. After all, current alternative energies need to be heavily subsidized by tax money so that they can be only a little bit more expensive for the end consumer.


Brazil has been going slash-and-burn on their rainforests to be able to increase sugarcane production for use here. Now drilling in ANWR doesn't sound so bad does it?


Maybe, but the higher use of biofuel in the past 6 years that has caused the increase in world food prices is specifically geared toward reducing carbon emissions. Combating climate change is the reason given when biofuels are used- not energy independence, not price to consumers. If the issue was one of prices, the market would already have chosen the cheapest option. And farmers will always get their subsidies, even if it means completely wasting potential agricultural production,

Both petroleum and ethanol from corn are carbon fuels. And both are derrived from biological sources. In one case, the plants grew a few months ago, in the other, they grew a few million years ago, but in both cases, plants were the carbon accumulators. The distinction between fresh carbon and fossil carbon is artificial and has little meaning with respect to possible climate change.



According to Purdue University, a typical scenario is a yield of 50 bushels of soy per acre, which is converted to 78.1 gallons of diesel (295.64 liters). That would be just over 73,000 liters per 1km^2, which is somewhat more than 200. Plus, we are only using the oil from the soy - the protein, fiber and carbohydrates remain behind and can be used as human or animal food.



First, there is no agreement that we are only responsible for 3% of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Second, we are not using other people's food. If they didn't buy the food, it isn't theirs.

If I cut down a tree in my back yard for a bonfire or to make a cabinet, am I responsible for people in Siberia that can't keep warm in the winter? I don't think so. When the rich compete for a resource in the market place, the poor lose. Morally, that is unfortunate. It is also an inherent feature of capitalism.

If food prices weren't currently high and rising, we would see farmers cutting back on their attempts to grow food, and there would be a new demand/supply equillibrium that would still make it difficult for millions or billions around the world to afford enough to eat.

I agree that the whole 'renewable' fuels process doesn't deal with the real issues, but getting people to drive less (and consume less) and eliminating poverty so that people around the world can afford food are not easy nuts to crack.

Last edited by monty on 29 Jul 2008, 7:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.

hemp oil can readily be turned into deisel

You are oversimplifying the problem. In a global market where these goods are regularly imported and exported all over the world, it does make a difference, and American and European use of biofuel has diverted resources in such a manner as to cause the starvation of poor people in other parts of the world. And this isn't capitalism causing the problem. Biofuels wouldn't be in use if various governments weren't mandating and funding their use. That doesn't exactly sound like a free market situation to me.


Seriously, read the paper I linked to on the previous page. The use of biofuels is driving food prices through the roof, pushing millions upon millions into poverty, and will probably result in more death and suffering than the US invasion of Iraq could ever cause.

Biofuels are a terrible idea. You have claimed in this thread that there is no difference between biofuels and conventional petroleum in terms of carbon emission, and biofuels sure as hell haven't brought down energy costs. What justification is left for starving the world's poor?

[/quote]

So do you think farmers should be making their decisions out of altruism and not plant whatever crop is most profitable? And the grain merchants should also ration based on need, not on willingness to pay?

It is true that the corn => ethanol program in the US is based on government policy, but the so-called 'biodiesel' from vegetable oil has been mostly a fringe of the free market. Brazil did launch a big sugar to ethanol movement to be less dependent on foreign oil, but that also involved the development of new lands specifically for that purpose, not the conversion of food land to fuels.



I'm not saying they are a good idea - with the exception of capturing waste fryer oil, which clearly makes use of something that would otherwise be landfilled or burned elsewhere. I'm not denying that it is a big factor pushing prices of food up. But so is the wealthy world's appetite for meat - most of our grain goes to feed animals, and every pound of meat protein represents a waste of 3 to 8 pounds of plant protein. That is a lot of beans and grain that could be sent to the poor, except that eating less meat would not get that plant protein to them, and the farm economy would adjust to lower demand with lower prices and lower production. That's just the way it is. If the demand stays high, production will increase, and prices should adjust to a lower level.

Really, it's like the conflict I feel when I'm at the store and the bagger asks "Paper or Plastic?" ... do I deplete a finite resource and call forth more non-biodegradable plastic, or do I kill a tree?

No. I never said that, so stop making BS strawmen. The fact that governments in the US and EU have mandated biofuel use has diverted food resources and pushed prices up. Increasing prices means less people able to eat. The decision isn't being made by farmers (except to the degree that agricultural lobbies push for more subsidies for ethanol, but they would push for subsidies anyways) but rather by governments on behalf of environmentalists who mistakenly think they are saving the planet. I will say again: READ THE STUDY I LINKED TO!! !


I think I already mentioned the slash-and-burn of the rainforest.


But there is a difference in utility between meat and grain, so there will be demand for meat. People don't really give a damn what they put in their car as long as it's cheap. And even if it's expensive, they still won't care too much.


Eating less meat would decrease demand for grain, which would lower prices, which would enable more people, globally, to be able to buy it.


You're serious? Um... food prices are up 140% in the past six years. The issue with food is that production is not perfectly controlled by human will, and can only increase at a certain pace. The lower demand to use grain for biodiesel would lower prices to be within the reach of more poor people. If demand stays high because of biodiesel use (which is a market distortion because it is being forced by governments and other forces outside the economy) then prices will just continue to rise because it is very difficult to simply produce more food.


Kill a tree. Most of our paper comes from trees specifically planted for the purpose of being made into paper, so demand for paper actually spurs the planting of more trees, which by all accounts is good for the environment.

Except that most of Brazil's sugar is grown a thousand miles from the rainforest. It is not so different from planting trees to cut down to make newspapers, which end up degrading in a landfill and giving off carbon dioxide and methane. Both require replacing natural ecosystems with narrowly defined human managed systems; both are non-food uses of potential cropland.



In the short run, maybe. But in the absence of government policies to keep farmers farming even when it isn't profitable, lower grain prices would bankrupt more US farmers, which would reduce production.



Really, I think it is a good wake-up call for the world. Population will probably go from 6 billion to 10 billion in the next few decades. We will probably hit biological carrying capacity, if we aren't already over it. Meanwhile, we are losing productive capacity to erosion, salinization of soils, and depletion of fossil water. Better to send market signals now and adjust for future demand - it is painful now in both economic and human terms, but would be even more painful if population continues to grow exponentially and nothing is done. I am not opposed to eliminating government mandates on biofuels (never really liked them since hearing a lecture on them from Wes Jackson of the Land Institute in 1985), but this is really a mild manner harbinger of what's to come if there aren't big changes. Merely eliminating so-called biofuels will not optimize the many policies that are out of whack ... more likely to lead to a business as usual denial that there are limits that could hit us hard in the not so distant future.

We had a wake-up call with the oil price shocks of the 1970s, but that didn't stop many people from profligate consumption once prices dipped back down. We kept on designing and building infrastructure as if fuel would remain cheap, locking us into the familiar but destructive patterns. Maybe that's just our lot as humans - live for the day, maybe live for tommorow or next year, unable to take a broad, long term view.



No, it isn't good for the environment by all accounts. Those tree plantations used to be real forests with biodiversity and wildlife. Today, it is one species of pine, one or two species of weeds, and a few deer. Not much better than a corn field, just a 20 year cycle instead of a one year cycle. Brazil isn't the only country to convert their wild spaces to monoculture economic production - why is it wrong if they do it, but ok if the US and Europe do it. If we used less paper, that land could be put to other uses ... of course, the people who own it will want to use it for whatever is most profitable - maybe growing more suburbs.

The farmers were farming before grain prices went up 140%. Your argument really isn't very cogent here.


No, it's a death knell to people who aren't in a position to do anything about it.


:YAWN: Sorry, but you're just being the boy who cried wolf here. Malthusian theories aren't taken all that seriously anymore.


I think I already explained that this is not driven by market forces.


Of course not. We still have the looming energy crisis, and there would still be people starving to death. But it would be an improvement over the current policy.

[quote="Orwell]
The farmers were farming before grain prices went up 140%. Your argument really isn't very cogent here.[/quote]

Of course my argument is cogent. Goverment programs kept most of them afloat. The taxpayers were paying to keep them going, so there would be abundant, innexpensive grain. If there had been a free market, we would be eating more imported foods. Now, as China and India expand in both numbers and affluence, they are consuming more (including more meat, in the case of China), and that is also increasing demand and

Malthus did have some good ideas. He discounted the value of innovation, but there are ultimately limits. You yourself said that there are limits to how fast food production can be expanded - and there are physical limits based on space, soils, precipitation, and temperature. We cannot grow forever. Why hasn't the market taken care of this problem on its own? More farmers in Kazakstan producing food for the hungry? Credit markets seeing an opportunity and investing in the poor? Why doesn't the market worldwide correct for the market distortions in the US and Europe?

Seriously. Read the paper I linked to. It was authored by an economist working for the World Bank. Increasing demand from China and India has very little impact on food prices. here's the link for you and here is the Guardian article where it was first reported (though it mistakenly understates the extent of the impact of biofuels on food prices) and here is an excellent editorial on the subject in the Guardian.


Malthus's ideas, IIRC, mainly consisted of telling people to have fewer babies. Wealthy, prosperous nations already tend to have lower birth rates. If we help keep food costs lower, won't standards of living in third-world countries rise, allowing them to start to lift themselves out of poverty? Once their economies develop, it seems likely that their birth rates would also decline. Malthus said that calamities like starvation and famine are caused by overpopulation, not a good solution to it.


True, but population is expected to plateau fairly soon anyways.


:headdesk: Because when government comes in and uses force to divert resources away from their highest-valued use, the free market is not given a chance to operate. And yes, even with a free market tons of people will starve to death. But fewer than are starving under the current policy which has a full third of US corn being used for ethanol production. And no, agriculture is not a charitable endeavor, so there will probably be excess production capabilities that are not utilized even as people starve. But moving some of our capacity to produce food to producing fuel instead puts a strain on the food market that unnecessarily causes many people to starve to death. It's an issue of opportunity cost, and current policies are artificially inflating the opportunity cost of grain production for food, because generous subsidies are available for ethanol production.

Really, if we're going to insist on agricultural subsidies (which farmers will) why not simply have it in the form of the government buying up the excess food and giving it to the poor, or to the UN world food program? Certainly makes more sense than paying farmers not to farm, or cooking up bizarre ethanol schemes to force prices up.

Ok - read it. He does make a strong case that food to fuel is a big part of the food increases, but I am not convinced that his numbers or conclusions are correct.

Can you explain this sentence from the first section to me:
"Other food prices (sugar, citrus, bananas, shrimp and meats) increased in 2005 due primarily to to a poor sugar crop in Brazil, but declined in the following year [...] however, they have begun to rise again due to increased sugar prices despite large stocks" ??

Are we to believe that shrimp and meats are fed large amounts of sugar, and an increase in sugar prices in Brazil thereby had some effect on those commodities on a worldwide scale? Or that faced with a few cent increase in the price of sugar, people around the world started to substitute these fruits for sugar, using them to sweeten pastry and candy, thereby driving up the price of citrus and bananas? Maybe there is some other explanation, but these seemed very strange and completely unsupported by reason or facts.

And then there is the early statement that back to back droughts in Australia could not have had a big effect because that only reduced the world global grain supply by 4% and the system would adjust to that, and world grain consumption by people/animals has only gone up by 1.3% and that has no effect (~5.3% total) ... yet, biofuels, which are later said to account for 15% of world grain production are the cause of 3/4 of the price increase? Mind you, it is 75% of the increase in consumption (according to his numbers), but that is before all other factors are considered: a doubling of fuel prices, a tripling of fertilizer prices, devaluation of the dollar, and speculative activity and panic buying. Maybe I can't read or add at 1:00 in the morning, but when I try to lay all his facts side by side, something is not right.

Here's another choice quote:
"High energy prices have provided market incentives and made ethanol production from maize profitable in the U.S."

This suggests to me that government policies should not be the sole whipping boy - if it is profitable to do something, companies are simply behaving like companies do, and making money. By all means, lets remove the subsidies and mandates that compound the problem. But even if we do, market incentives will remain in place as long as high energy prices are in place, and the 'rational' company will continue to use resources for their 'best and highest purpose' which is defined in terms of profit. I stand by one of my original points from a few posts previous: in a market economy, the rich will consistently out-compete the poor for resources. If it is profitable to convert grain to ethanol, the rich will do it - whether to drink, or to power their cars. The only way to avoid this is to raise the purchasing power of the poor, or to impose limits on the market that prevent converting grain to gas.

The study also discounts the effects of meat consumption in China, and on the surface, he has some numbers to back that up. Those numbers, however, are not cosistent with other reports on the topic, including a report from the People's Daily that meat consumption has risen dramatically in China to 53 kg/person/year, with expectations that it will increase by another 20 kg/year in the next decade or so, putting China on par with the lower end of developed nations. When the economy in less developed countries improves, meat consumption is usually one of the first things to rise. Real income in China has grown at an sustained pace , all anthropological data I have seen describes a rapid increase in meat consumption (even if you don't trust People's Daily). I think it is premature to brush away meat production/consumption in the land of 1 billion people; it is certainly a factor in rising world food prices, just as rising demand for oil in China and India has driven up prices at the pump here.






No, it doesn't always. The knee-jerk reaction when people see pictures of starving people is to send ships full of grain. Which depresses the prices that local farmers get for their produce (and why would anyone pay farmers in their country for wheat or corn, when the nice Americans are giving away 80 pound sacks of it?) ... this often damages the productive capacity there. Short term, starving people might need some food. But the best medium to long term response to a famine is usually economic - send cash. In a world economy, people starve for economic reasons ... if they could afford to pay for food, it would be grown and delivered to them. If there is a local drought, it will be shipped in through existing markets, which get hammered when cargo planes are parachuting food into thousands of villages.

You might also be interested to know that we pretty much stopped paying farmers not to grow food over 30 years ago - look up the term 'Earl Butz" somewhere. In fact, a big reason that we have had low food prices for the past 3 decades is that most of the programs to limit grain production and give subsidies to pay US farmers not to grow crops were replaced with incentive programs that linked the subsidies to typical productivity levels for a farm.... grow more, get a bigger check. It wasn't really a great deal for the US farmer, but it did keep many of them going and production did increase.

With today's grain prices, many farmers are actually doing well instead of scraping by - and investment in tractors, combines, field tiling and fencing are all up dramatically. That is true not only in the US, but also around the world. If prices fall, farmers will go back to scraping by. If there were a completely free market with no subsidies, we would see a dramatic drop in food production in the US should prices ever drop back to what they were just a few years ago. It would be cheaper to import grains (unless the drop in US production were so dramatic that it drove world prices through the roof).



Malthus's main idea was that population grows exponentially, while food production grows linearly, and that given finite land areas, finite oceans, finite nutrients and finite sunlight, the exponential growth in mouths to feed can cause famines. That is true as far as it goes, but that model needs to be expanded to account for improvements in technology (ie, Haber process for producing nitrogen fertilizer), which can change the slope of the line that represents increasing food production.

While there are other things that can be used to modify the Malthusian model (ie, birth control, modernization and demographic transition, etc), it is not at all clear that these will happen fast enough to prevent serious problems. The best mathematical model to describe population growth is the so called doomsday equation published in 1960, and we remain ahead of schedule for a crash in the next 20 years.

Last edited by monty on 30 Jul 2008, 12:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.

D - Compressed air vehicles. Get off the petrol teat; leaching the life out of the soil for no reason for biofuels is not a viable long-term option.


M.

I read about a company in Spain or France that was developing a car propelled by compressed air - but last I heard, it could only drive a few kilometers at slow speed. Any word on the progress of this technology??