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Biofuels Make Greenhouse Gases Worse
Posted by
kdawson
on Sat Feb 09, 2008 09:31 PM
from the no-free-lunch dept.
from the no-free-lunch dept.
vortex2.71 sends us to the Seattle Times for an account of two studies published in the prestigious journal Science pointing to the conclusion that almost all biofuels used today cause more greenhouse-gas emissions than conventional fuels if the full emissions costs of producing these "green" fuels are taken into account. "The benefits of biofuels have come under increasing attack in recent months, as scientists took a closer look at the global environmental cost of their production. These plant-based fuels were originally billed as better than fossil fuels because the carbon released when they were burned was balanced by the carbon absorbed when the plants grew. But that equation proved overly simplistic because the process of turning plants into fuels causes its own emissions — for refining and transport, for example. These studies... for the first time take a detailed, comprehensive look at the emissions effects of the huge amount of natural land that is being converted to cropland globally to support biofuels development."
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Hm... (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hm... (Score:4, Insightful)
You know....I'm willing to do this anyway...if it will still get us OFF the 'teet' of middle east oil.
If we could just remove our dependency from oil and quit throwing money and worrying about the situation over there because of it....let that place dry up, and let them all do as they please over there. At the very least, it would be worth it in order to quit making peoples and countries wealthy that hate us in the western world.
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Re:Hm... (Score:5, Insightful)
If America is willing to let countries own their oil fields and do what they please, oil prices would be sky high (loons like Hugo would make sure that happens) and people would've invested money in alternative fuels - money that is going to 'protecting oil interests' now.
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Re:Hm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Gasoline is $8 in England (and much of Europe) which is why they:
1. Have great trains, buses, trams & subways, walkways, pedestrian bridges and tunnels and bicyclists.
2. Less issue with obesity.
3. Neighborhood grocery stores.
4. Neighbors they meet regularly at Neighborhood stores.
5. About half the energy consumption per person.
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Re:Hm... (Score:4, Insightful)
6. Half of their passenger cars are diesel
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Re:Hm... (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Hm... (Score:4, Insightful)
England has 10 times the population density of my home state of Missouri. You have subways because you can easily divide the cost among your population. Gas prices are artificially high in Europe, and artificially low in the US -- in both cases for political reasons. The US middle and lower class depend on gas, and must have it cheap, so it isn't taxed much. The European economy just uses it for shipping goods, which makes it a good way to tax transportation.
While I agree that the urban lifestyle is much better for both the environment and human health, it costs at least 3 times as much to live in that environment here. If you find a solution to suburban sprawl (good luck), then maybe we can have all the benefits you mention in the US, and save the planet in the process.
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Re:Hm... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Hm... (Score:5, Informative)
It's also important to note that the VAST majority of our petroleum imports don't actually come from the Middle East! The DOE says so [doe.gov] itself. Our top two petroleum importing countries are... Canada and Mexico!
Biofuels were never about being a real solution. It was always about political capital for politicians and special interests. Now we at least have more science to show how messed up biofuels really are.
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Re:What about solar? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the fundamental question is that if we were to find the hypothetical perfect clean, cheap, local, and renewable source of energy, would we be able to stop worrying about our energy consumption? I frankly have no idea and I think there is a lot of room for debate there. However, I'm becoming increasing convinced that even if our energy source was perfect, our species would still run into numerous other choke points, such as raw material shortages, food shortages, and so forth, not to mention the fact that many energy-consumption-facilitated activities can be seriously harmful to our health: driving (accidents), tv (sedentary lifestyle), etc. Plus, diminishing returns says it's going to be harder and more expensive to use technological means to reduce our energy consumption in the future.
When I look at it that way it makes a whole lot more sense from a practical point of view to modify my behavior to simply use less energy. I could spend a few hundred bucks on a super-efficient water heater, or I could take shorter showers. I could invest in a fuel efficient car, or I could just drive less. I'm constantly amazed at how much energy I can save just by completely turning off my devices. Doing this is cheaper and easier than upgrading to newer technology, and fights the root of the problem of overconsumption. It's even better if I can do both.
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Re:What about solar? (Score:4, Insightful)
Instead of talking about how we over consume, I try to explain that life can be as good (or even better) if we use less. There's a sweet spot somewhere on the consumption curve where our life enjoyment is maximized. This is kind of a strange concept for a lot of people. If some is good, more is obviously better. But it's like eating candy. Eating a little bit of candy can really improve your day. Eating a lot of candy just makes you feel sick.
I have made a lot of changes to my life that were a win-win situation. I started taking the bus instead of driving. Now instead of madly trying to rush around and get a million things done (stressing me out), I read a book. I intentionally say to myself, "I'm going to relax today. I'm not going to go shopping on the way home to pick up that one last thing. I'm not going to pick up the dry cleaning. Because I can't. I'm taking the bus today and reading my book." It turned out that virtually all of the things I did with the car were unimportant to me. In the very rare case where I absolutely need a car, I get a taxi. Doing this has improved my life, improved my finances and improved the environment (or at least not degraded it as much).
Not every change is good for every person (some people really can't deal with mass transit for instance). But I think it's good to encourage people to find areas in their life where less is more. As more and more people do this, our society will change. It will become easier and easier to reduce and win. For instance, in many cities bicycle paths are becoming a useful part of the infrastructure. In the town I'm living in now I can do all my shopping on my bike, without having to compete with cars. And on a nice day one of my most hated jobs (shopping) has become an extremely pleasant activity. 20 years ago, this town had *no* bicycle paths and it would be extremely difficult/dangerous to go shopping on your bike.
I think the very best thing to do to get people thinking is simply to try stuff yourself. Experiment. Have fun. Find out what you *really* need and what you don't (TV is always a good option to do without
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Re:What about solar? (Score:4, Insightful)
And if I compare my life at $15000 a year to my life at $100000+ a year, I'll take less any day. As long as you aren't in debt, or hungry, or freezing to death, having not very much money is totally fine. And it forces you to try things that you might not otherwise try. Sure, you *could* do it with extra money, but the fact that you can pay someone else to cook your food or clean your house or whatever means that you probably will. And I've found that life is infinitely more interesting if you live it rather than pay someone else to live it.
I'm not explaining this very well. But it was quite a surprise to me to learn that I was happier with less. Now I'm trying to reduce even more. $15K per year still seems pretty fat to me. What else can I learn by cutting back more?
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Re:What about solar? (Score:5, Informative)
"Overconsumption" is akin to "overspending". If you have an income of $2000 and $100K in the bank, and you're spending $10000 a month, you're overspending. You can get away with it until your "banked" resources run out, at which case you will be spending only $2000 a month. The only question at that point is whether you've prepared your finances for that sudden change, or whether things will crash and burn (i.e., your home and car get reposessed, you have to pay exhorbitant cancellation costs for cell phone contracts, &c).
If your income is from your capital (i.e., if your income is dividends from stocks, &c), you have an even worse problem: that the more of your savings you spend, the less income you have. If you keep spending at your "overspending" rate, you'll eventually have no capital at all. Moderation early on may mean a sustainable income of $2000, but the longer you wait to adjust to your sustainable income, the lower your sustinable income will be when you finally get your head on straight.
Oil, coal, copper, steel, and other non-renewable resources are like money in the bank. Right now our energy consumption, as a society, is several times what our "income" is from renewable energy sources. We're running on our "bank" of oil, coal, &c. What happens when the oil & coal run out, if we don't find a renewable energy source that can provide us energy at the rates we're used to? "The market will adjust", certainly, but it's likely that it will "adjust" by massive wars, anarchy, starvation, and societal collapse. (See "Collapse", by Jared Diamond for a history of many such past societies that have had exactly that happen.)
Renewable resources like ocean fish, trees, and soil are like the stock market. If fishing and logging happen at replacement rate, then you have a sustainable renewable resource indefinitely. But if you fish or log at more than replacement rates, then your stock of reproducing fish or trees goes down, meaning a lower rate of the sustainable resource, until the resource is finally exhausted and cannot be renewed.
With these kind of fixed resources, "overconsumption" definitely has a well-defined meaning that has nothing to do with "externalities".
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Re:What about solar? (Score:5, Insightful)
No offense, but most people don't understand economics. So I don't see how having a lot of people agree with you is relevant.
Bad analogy. "Overconsumption" is a conveniently vague term. It could be a chicken, could be an egg. How much consumption is too much consumption? Who gets to decide? The point is that the current markets already allocate scarce resources in a sensible manner. In a market without externalities, we don't need to care if someone consumes more because they automatically have paid for the cost of the additional consumption. It doesn't even make sense to speak of "overconsumption". There's no rational criteria for deciding a certain level of consumption is too much.
What do you mean "enough to go around"? That's the key problem here with your claims. Humanity has plenty of room for feeding itself. So "starving to death" isn't an issue. As I see it, if things did get that close, then there will be mass starvation due to the inefficient societies of the world that are already starving many of their citizens.
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Re:Hm... (Score:5, Insightful)
But, if we hit the problem with multiple alternative fuel methods....we can do it. We can at least get down to levels of oil we in the US produce ourselves. We have a great deal of natural gas, we have lots of coal, and if we went more nuke, especially with breeder reactors, raise oil producing algae, etc....we'd start on the path towards energy self-sufficiency, and rid ourselves of that middle east monkey on our backs.
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Re:Hm... (Score:5, Informative)
2: Even this slim ratio applies ONLY when you use corn kernels to produce ethanol. Not the stalk. Not the cob. Just the fracking kernel.
Brazil gets a 300% energy efficiency for growing sugar cane to make ethanol. That's "spending 1 gallon of gas to get the equivalent of 3 gallons."
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Re:Hm... (Score:5, Insightful)
furthermore, the cane is burned to produce the ethanol, as well as electricity, the electricity created helps cover the cost of fuel to transport the cane, and ethanol around.
but there is still tragically a huge negative, the burning of cane has caused a huge increase of smog in brazil, you see when you burn the cane a lot of small particulate gets into the air. that's why in the us, they burn natural gas to make bio-ethanol, instead of the stalk and husk.
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Stupid inflammatory headline (Score:5, Insightful)
First off, the concerns raised by the original article only apply to some biofuels, not all. The corcerns only apply to some biofuel crops and to some farming practices.
Secondly, the original article had a 'might' in it and was of the form "Biofuels might make greenhouse gases worse". Deleting 'might' combletely changes the meaning and esculates the threat.
Slashdot editors are getting to be like regular journalists ((hint: this is not a compliment) and looking for a new inflammatory headline where they can. Junk journalism!
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Re:Hm... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Hm... (Score:5, Informative)
Nobody's really sure how much oil is in ANWR, but the estimates run from 5.7-16 billion barrels, with a mean of 10.4 billion barrels. To put things in perspective, Saudi Arabia has about 250 billion barrels of reserves, and Iran and Iraq put together have about that much. Kuwait and the UAE each have about 100 billion barrels. Personally, I'm in favor of developing ANWR if we can ensure that a close watch is kept on the oil companies to make sure they don't screw up the environment, but there's no way it will end our dependence on the Middle East.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Scientists have been saying all along that food-product based bio-fuels--corn-ethanol in particular--are a bad idea. It's the politicians and auto manufacturers that are too stupid to listen.
Re:Hm... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Hm... (Score:4, Insightful)
Here. Take your pick. [google.com]
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Not really. (Score:4, Insightful)
Your only valid point is that too much of the vegetables we buy comes from too far away, and that is why it is not only important to eat less meat (note I didn't say NO meat), but it is also important to purchase as much seasonal, local produce as possible. One criticism you missed, however, is the popularity of heavily processed meat substitutes (eg: "Tofurkey"). They probably consume far more energy per pound than most meats.
References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_animal_feeding_operation [wikipedia.org]
http://www.beeffrompasturetoplate.org/mythmeatproductioniswasteful.aspx#Sixteen%20pounds%20of%20grain [beeffrompa...oplate.org]
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1740-0929.2007.00457.x?cookieSet=1&journalCode=asj [blackwell-synergy.com]
http://www.virtualcentre.org/en/library/key_pub/longshad/A0701E00.htm [virtualcentre.org]
http://www.springerlink.com/content/h307k69711m5nh00/ [springerlink.com]
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Stupid Article (Score:4, Insightful)
Names are easy... connecting the dots... (Score:5, Informative)
Timothy Searchinger 1*, Ralph Heimlich 2, R. A. Houghton 3, Fengxia Dong 4, Amani Elobeid 4, Jacinto Fabiosa 4, Simla Tokgoz 4, Dermot Hayes 4, Tun-Hsiang Yu 4
1 Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA. German Marshall Fund of the U.S., Georgetown Environmental Law and Policy Institute.
2 Agricultural Conservation Economics, Laurel, MD, USA.
3 Woods Hole Research Center, Falmouth, MA, USA.
4 Center for Agricultural and Rural Development, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA.
How Green Are Biofuels? [sciencemag.org]
Jörn P. W. Scharlemann and William F. Laurance
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Re:Names are easy... connecting the dots... (Score:5, Interesting)
"Biofuels from switchgrass, if grown on U.S. corn lands, increase emissions by 50%."
Huh? Why would you grow switchgrass on corn lands? The whole point of switchgrass it that you can grow it on marginal lands, freeing croplands for food production. On crop lands, cellulosic ethanol is to be made from corn stover and the like.
Here's [autobloggreen.com] an interesting analysis of the studies from a member of the UC Davis faculty. He strongly disagrees with the methodology used.
Well, either way, I think we can all agree that corn ethanol from the corn itself is lousy, cellulosic ethanol from waste streams is good, and everything else is up in the air.
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Re:Stupid Article (Score:5, Informative)
Here is one reference [nih.gov]. Original references are usually much less alarmist than the stupid news stories created by journalists who don't understand what they are reporting. This is corn ethanol, which is known to be an inefficient source of energy, so the Science article comes as no great surprise--though it does contradict an earlier report [nih.gov] in PNAS. The journalism mistakenly groups all biofuels with corn here (unless the article irresponsibly leaves out other references). Independent studies would need to be done for every biofuel source to warrant the sweeping generalizations of the Seattle Times article.
There should be a law.
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Better way to produce biodiesel is algae (Score:4, Interesting)
Biodiesel production from high oil content algaes doesn't need to use crop land. From a University of New Hampshire study...
"...NREL's research focused on the development of algae farms in desert regions, using shallow saltwater pools for growing the algae. Using saltwater eliminates the need for desalination, but could lead to problems as far as salt build-up in bonds. Building the ponds in deserts also leads to problems of high evaporation rates. There are solutions to these problems, but for the purpose of this paper, we will focus instead on the potential such ponds can promise, ignoring for the moment the methods of addressing the solvable challenges remaining when the Aquatic Species Program at NREL ended.
NREL's research showed that one quad (7.5 billion gallons) of biodiesel could be produced from 200,000 hectares of desert land (200,000 hectares is equivalent to 780 square miles, roughly 500,000 acres), if the remaining challenges are solved (as they will be, with several research groups and companies working towards it, including ours at UNH). In the previous section, we found that to replace all transportation fuels in the US, we would need 140.8 billion gallons of biodiesel, or roughly 19 quads (one quad is roughly 7.5 billion gallons of biodiesel). To produce that amount would require a land mass of almost 15,000 square miles. To put that in perspective, consider that the Sonora desert in the southwestern US comprises 120,000 square miles. Enough biodiesel to replace all petroleum transportation fuels could be grown in 15,000 square miles, or roughly 12.5 percent of the area of the Sonora desert (note for clarification - I am not advocating putting 15,000 square miles of algae ponds in the Sonora desert. This hypothetical example is used strictly for the purpose of showing the scale of land required). That 15,000 square miles works out to roughly 9.5 million acres - far less than the 450 million acres currently used for crop farming in the US, and the over 500 million acres used as grazing land for farm animals.
The algae farms would not all need to be built in the same location, of course (and should not for a variety of reasons). The case mentioned above of building it all in the Sonora desert is purely a hypothetical example to illustrate the amount of land required. It would be preferable to spread the algae production around the country, to lessen the cost and energy used in transporting the feedstocks. Algae farms could also be constructed to use waste streams (either human waste or animal waste from animal farms) as a food source, which would provide a beautiful way of spreading algae production around the country. Nutrients can also be extracted from the algae for the production of a fertilizer high in nitrogen and phosphorous. By using waste streams (agricultural, farm animal waste, and human sewage) as the nutrient source, these farms essentially also provide a means of recycling nutrients from fertilizer to food to waste and back to fertilizer. Extracting the nutrients from algae provides a far safer and cleaner method of doing this than spreading manure or wastewater treatment plant "bio-solids" on farmland.
These projected yields of course depend on a variety of factors, sunlight levels in particular. The yield in North Dakota, for example, wouldn't be as good as the yield in California. Spreading the algae production around the country would result in more land being required than the projected 9.5 million acres, but the benefits from distributed production would outweigh the larger land requirement. Further, these yield estimates are based on what is theoretically achievable - roughly 15,000 gallons per acre-year. It's important to point out that the DOE's ASP that projected that such yields are possible, was never able to come close to achieving such yields. Thei
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Still works on a small scale though (Score:5, Insightful)
For example, the biodiesel I run in my Jetta is made locally at a rendering plant out of waste fats. So, not only am I being a little more carbon neutral compared to buying fossil fuels that have been transported long distances, I'm also keeping what would otherwise be wastes from going into the landfill.
Re:Still works on a small scale though (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Still works on a small scale though (Score:4, Insightful)
So your fuel source is not viable for the future, and in fact you should keep quiet about it if you want it to continue to be a viable source for yourself personally.
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Re:Still works on a small scale though (Score:4, Insightful)
Ok...I can see ineffective...but, unethical?? What does biofuel have to do with being ethical??? You got me on that one....
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Re:Still works on a small scale though (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't get that then..at least in the US, we actually PAY farmers subsidies $$$ to not farm parts of their land..etc. We give freakin' subsidies to corn farmers....so, it isn't like we don't have a ton of potential farmland out there we could use in addition to the excess of crops we already produce. In the US at least, there isn't anything remotely looking like a food shortage, I think we could easily work on raising bio-crops without depriving anyone. If we went more towards ethanol from wastes products....algae farms....hell, even things like sugar beets, we could be more efficient than with corn, and take the pressure off that crop for raising food prices.
If we removed the subsidies right now, that would relieve the pressure we're starting to feel a little bit of already in the US. Do that and lower tariffs on imported cane sugar, and we could easily start making cheaper, more efficient fuels (not to mention maybe we could get cane sugar in real coke again and other foods rather than fattening ourselves with HFCS.
But really, c'mon...we already have more than enough food raised as surplus, even with subsidies....so, it isn't like we'd be depriving someone of a meal.
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lose-lose game ? (Score:5, Insightful)
you know what ? fuckit!!!
if we're so stupid we can't find a stable balance to ensure the survival of the specie, so be it. let mass extinction come. and in 60 million years from now, some form of land dweling squid will be unearthing our bones, just like we do with the dinosaurs.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:lose-lose game ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Out here in Idaho, there are remnants of curiosities such as a regenerative reactor that worked once upon a time. (There's also a nuclear jet engine that didn't.) These reactors produce more energy for for the same amount of fuel and have less waste. But we can't use them, because (horrors!) they produce weapons-grade waste. I have a very simple solution to this dilemma: put it in a weapon.
Now the environmentalists want to blow up the dams that supply almost all of the state! I mean, you can't get much greener than a dam. But I guess fish are more important than people. And it's not like there's shortage of uranium. There's a deposit under my house for goodness sake!
If we could build more reactors at the real cost of building them, drill the oil in Alaska and give the tree-huggers desk jobs like everyone else, we'd be so much better off.
-Super-cheap electricity would mean less dependence on foreign oil.
-We have more oil here than in Saudi Arabia, so we could quit importing oil altogether.
-We could have electric cars.
-Less coal and oil burning would make the environmentalists happy and stop global warming (or global cooling, whatever it is this year).
-Breeder reactors would produce little waste, and what little they do produce could make more nukes (best defense is a good offense; see "Cold War" on p. 187)
Yes, I know I've posted this before, but it's worth repeating.
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Simplistic FUD piece... (Score:5, Insightful)
How about a discussion on SVO (Straight Vegetable Oil) from crops like Chinese Tallow, and the newer algae production processed instead.
Re:Simplistic FUD piece... (Score:5, Informative)
No, the reason HFCS is in everything in the US is because our high sugar tariffs make the domestic sugar price double the global price. If it weren't for the tariff, we'd import cheap sugar from our friendly neighbors down south, and US Coke wouldn't taste so lousy.
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For small values of "most" (Score:3, Interesting)
There is some additional point pollution but I run a catalytic stove from Woodstock Soapstone which reburns the smoke so you can barely smell the woodsmoke outside (and I own enough forestland to eat my share of pollution). Besides that most of that 'pollution' was sequestered from the environment within the past thirty years.
If they want to argue against most fermentation-based biofuels, fine, but most cultures burn wood and have before 1830 when the planet started heating up.
Re:For small values of "most" (Score:5, Insightful)
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Other possibilities (Score:4, Interesting)
Just today I was listening to CBC's "Quirks and Quarks" talking to Sandia labs about using solar energy to convert CO2 and H2O into H2 and CO, which can be effectively combined to make hydrocarbons. Unlike bacteria or algae, this process uses a special solid substance that, when exposed to the intense light, has its oxygen molecules stripped off, releasing O2 into the atmosphere. Then this substance is taken out of the sunlight, exposed to CO2 and Water, and it rips the oxygen molecules out of those substances, leaving H2 and CO behind, both of which can be fairly economically combined into hydrocarbons like methanol and gasoline. What's intriguing is that the substance they are using to rip the oxygen out of the water and CO2 can do this over and over again. Right now they are using CO2 from sources other than the atmosphere, making this not carbon neutral. However they plan to work towards harvesting CO2 from the atmosphere. In the meantime, though, this is a great way of increasing the efficiency of energy extraction from, say coal. If, someday, we could capture all CO2 from coal plants and convert it to gasoline for use in autos, that would have an overall decrease in our CO2 emissions because the coal could now be used to generate electricity *and* drive cars, reducing the CO2 emissions from refined gasoline. Assuming we can control particulates, nitrous oxides, and sulfur dioxides from burning gasoline, in the future perhaps gasoline-burning cars will be the cleanest things on the planet! Certainly as the scientist pointed out, gasoline (hydrocarbons anyway) is the best way of storying energy. Generating electricity is nice, but we have to use it as we generate it. Batteries and H2 production aren't really that good at storing energy as densely. The radio program is http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/archives/07-08/feb09.html [www.cbc.ca] and the Sandia press release is http://www.sandia.gov/news/resources/releases/2007/sunshine.html [sandia.gov]
If we are wise, then I think the push to biodiesel or solar gasoline will ultimately be our ticket.
Abstracts (Score:5, Insightful)
Land Clearing and the Biofuel Carbon Debt
Joseph Fargione Jason Hill David Tilman Stephen Polasky, Peter Hawthorne
Increasing energy use, climate change, and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels make switching to lowcarbon fuels a high priority. Biofuels are a potential lowcarbon energy source, but whether biofuels offer carbon savings depends on how they are produced. Converting rainforests, peatlands, savannas, or grasslands to produce food-based biofuels in Brazil, Southeast Asia, and the United States creates a 'biofuel carbon debt' by releasing 17 to 420 times more CO2 than the annual greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions these biofuels provide by displacing fossil fuels. In contrast, biofuels made from waste biomass or from biomass grown on abandoned agricultural lands planted with perennials incur little or no carbon debt and offer immediate and sustained GHG advantages.
Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases Through Emissions from Land Use Change
Timothy Searchinger, Ralph Heimlich R. A. Houghton, Fengxia Dong, Amani Elobeid, Jacinto Fabiosa, Simla Tokgoz, Dermot Hayes, Tun-Hsiang Yu
Most prior studies have found that substituting biofuels for gasoline will reduce greenhouse gases because biofuels sequester carbon through the growth of the feedstock. These analyses have failed to count the carbon emissions that occur as farmers worldwide respond to higher prices and convert forest and grassland to new cropland to replace the grain (or cropland) diverted to biofuels. Using a worldwide agricultural model to estimate emissions from land use change, we found that corn-based ethanol, instead of producing a 20% savings, nearly doubles greenhouse emissions over 30 years and increases greenhouse gases for 167 years. Biofuels from switchgrass, if grown on U.S. corn lands, increase emissions by 50%. This result raises concerns about large biofuel mandates and highlights the value of using waste products.
While this work is very useful, the immediate concern would seem to be that grain carryover stocks [earth-policy.org] are becoming quite low as a result of ethanol production. They are now at about 54 days worth of world consumption [earth-policy.org] compared to over 100 days in 2000. Much lower stocks would mean making a choice between starvation of people or reducing feedlot operations and meat availability.
Well, duh (Score:3, Insightful)
This is one of those studies... (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that the net emissions from biofuel production cannot ever be determined accurately---it is totally impossible ot absolutely quanitfy it because it is always a moving target.
The article goes on about rainforest being clear-cut to make way for the production of fuel plants. That kind of land makes really poor land for growing and there is no evidence at all that shows biofuel production has been cited as a reason for clearing a significant amount of new land. The "biofuel lobbyists" are right about one thing; the study is too simplistic to be an accruate assesment of the real net impact of biofuel production. What if the farm equipment itself was powered by biofuels? What if the waste biomass from preparing farmland and growing the crops was recovered and used for power generation? What if we used biomass from the ocean (this is already done on an experimental scale)? Have there been studies on the efficiency of biofuel-powered engines and on the overall emissions (sulphur, particulates and things that not only afect the climate but actually harm our health)? What about the impact of making fuel out of tarsands vs middle-east light sweet crude vs. crude drilled in the Gulf of Mexico? How can they put a number like "92 years of emissions"? It all smells pretty fishy to me.
It's like the argument that biofuels threaten foodstocks. Well, we used Soybeans extensively for food products...and it makes a good biofuel...and plastic...and industrial lubricants...and a host of other things. What is wrong with doing that using corn too? Corn production in the US actually exceeds what the world NEEDS for food by quite a margin, as do the production of many other crops (wheat, etc). These crops have been very cheap since the depression (in fact for decades they went down significantly when adjusted for inflation) and only in the last few years have grain prices been coming up to where they really should be. Sometimes I wonder if there are lobbyists out there for the processed food undustry putting resistance out to any competing demand in order to ensure they can name their own bargain prices for high-fructose corn syrup, bleached and enriched white wheat flour and hydrogenated vegetable oil and keep the margins on twinkie sales up.
Anyways, what is the big surprise here? Burning fuel creates emissions...surprise surprise! When you drive an electric car you are indirectly burning natural gas, or coal, or splitting uranium atoms. When you are using biodiesel you are burning soybeans or canola, along with whatever the equipment used to grow it uses. Same with ethanol except it's corn or switchgrass or sugarcane. Hello...if you want to reduce emmissions DON'T DRIVE SO DAMN MUCH! Get rid of your suburbans and buy a hatchback (a VW Golf diesel is better than a Prius if you don't live in a big city). Better yet, get off your ass and WALK once in a while.
Actually having worked in power plants and refineries and such...I have a hard time believing ANY sort of fuel doesn't have a significant environmental impact. These guys obviously haven't seen how tarsands ar mined, or how much fuel an oil tanker uses, or how much power an offshore drilling platform uses.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Nuke power is the most sane, environmentally safe method for us to meet our energy demands and we should be busy building plants now, not debating about it.
Trouble is, you gotta convince all of the treehuggers and pseudo enviros, best start at a Starbucks since that's where they all are -- with their disposable cu
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:SciAM / NatGeo (Score:5, Insightful)
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Cellulosic ethanol (Score:5, Informative)
still in development; no current production
Sources of Cellulosic Ethanol:
Energy Balance
Fossil-fuel energy used to make the fuel (input) compared with the energy in the fuel (output)
1 to 2-36
Greenhouse gas emissions (production and use)
Gasoline=20.4, Cellulosic ethanol 1.9 (lbs/gallon)
Sources: U.S. DOE; U.S. EPA; Worldwatch Institute
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