Biofuels Aren't Evil

Annie

Annie

Not So Junior Member
Those based on corn/soy/etc are not people friendly, but there are alternatives for the short term:

http://www.popsci.com/environment/article/2008-04/scientists-weigh-biofuels-vs-food-debate

Scientists Weigh in on Biofuels vs. Food Debate
With debate raging on whether biofuels are robbing the world's hungry of food, scientists and engineers at the first annual BioMass conference in Minneapolis say it ain't so
By Michael Belfiore Posted 04.16.2008 at 4:00 pm 5 Comments
Ecologist David Tilman at BioMass 2008 in Minneapolis: Photo by Michae Belfiore

The first annual BioMass conference, attended by biofuels researchers, manufacturers, equipment suppliers, and farmers, is underway here at the Minneapolis Convention Center.

Prime on the agenda in the opening session this morning was a question lately blaring from headlines, for instance in a story in today's New York Times: can we grow crops for converting into fuel without catastrophically upsetting the world's food supply?

The answer is an unqualified "Yes," says David Tilman, ecology professor at the University of Minnesota and one of this morning's speakers. He deplored the polarization of the biofuels debate, pointing out that that biofuels were first touted as a savior a couple of years ago, with public opinion shading into doubt not long afterwards, and now in full-swing backlash mode, with people like the United Nations special rapporteur for the right to food, Jean Ziegler, calling biofuels "a crime against humanity" because it takes food out of the mouths of the hungry according to today's Times.

What's needed instead, says Tillman, is a rational look at the big picture, backed by good science. Yes, he acknowledges, the demand for biofuels derived from traditional food crops like corn has contributed to a rise in global food prices, but so has increasing demand for food from burgeoning populations in China and India.

More to the point, though, is the mistaken notion that we have to use food crops for fuel production. In test fields in Minnesota, Tilman and his colleagues have found that the best energy yields actually come from native prairie grasses, not corn or soy. And, said Tilman, "there's a surprising benefit from the mixture of species. Farmers know this from growing pastures. Nobody plants a pasture of a single species. They put out a variety of grasses, legumes...and so on. They do that because that gives them a higher yield."

What's that mean for energy? "We see here we get 238 percent more energy per acre of land that we can harvest mowing this hay in the autumn by growing a high diversity mixture of species than we can get on average by growing any one of those species by itself."

Tilman's test plots were "on land that is incredibly unproductive, with very infertile soils... We did not fertilize it, we didn't water. We put out high diversity native prairie, let them grow...." And energy production from the harvest went through the roof. "Another thing which happened which really surprised us is that we have a lot of carbon being stored in those soils."

So, growing inedible biofuel crops on otherwise unproductive farmland not only will ease the current pressure on food crops exerted by biofuels, but will also help remove harmful CO2 from the atmosphere. Seems like a win-win.
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My position is that they are a transiton type of fuel, to help in weaning ourselves off of massive volumes of oil.
Hopefully they will be replaced by other alternatives later.

but sending money to us workers and farmers sure as heck beats sending it to the ME.
 
Biofuels evil.....? No...they aren't evil, they're a joke.....a joke played on the stupid by the elitists.....successfully I might add.....something akin to 'carbon credits'
 
Ethanol has resulted in close to a 4% reduction in imported oil. Not a bad thing.
Nothing is perfect though, not even me.
 
Renewable energy resources, which include bio-fuels, could either be a disaster or a triumph for the United States. At this juncture we can go either direction.

It seems we're starting out in the wrong direction, but it is so early in the game it can easily be corrected. The wrong direction is using food grains to produce alternate fuels. We need to grow food for food. Doesn't do much good having ethanol to drive to the grocery store if it's empty from agriculture being turned into go juice for your car.

Another part in the wrong direction we are taking is focusing too narrowly on the transportation industry for the consumer of alternate fuels. While transportation does use the majority of fossil derived fuels, there are too many problems to be solved (Lower energy content of ethanol yielding lower engine power and efficiency. Higher burning temperatures yielding engine damage. Etc.) before ethanol can really make a significant difference in our use of fossil fuels.

Additionally, if we continue to rely on traditional sources for ethanol production (ie: food grains) the low yield per acre will make the effort fall flat on its face because it can't meet demand, and we'll only end up that much more dependent on fossil fuels.

So bio-fuels, in the direction we are headed, have a high probability of failure, but not due to bio fuels being a bad idea, rather because we didn't make the necessary changes in thinking to make bio-fuels a success.


OTOH, we could look to alternate crops for the biomass needed to produce the fuels we need. The advantage of alternate crops is we do not need to make the decision between food or fuel. The types of alternate crops, like switch grass, than can be made into fuels have the advantage they can be grown economically in areas where food grains cannot be grown economically. Switch grass, and it's cousins also have a much (2.5-3) times the yield per acre of ethanol.

We can look at those areas of the economy that use fossil fuels other than transportation for the first round of converting to alternate fuels, and save transportation for when we have more time to develop the alternate technologies (like ceramic engines) to use alternate fuels efficiently. For instance, converting an oil-fired electrical plant would only require the plant replace its burners. The boilers would not know the difference, nor would the turbines. Might have to put in slightly larger fuel lines because it would take more ethanol to keep the boilers up to temp, but the end result is for very little investment in new infrastructure we could change over a significant oil user to alternate fuels.

Coal fired plants could be almost as easily converted, with the only additional item needed would be a switch in the fuel delivery system to handle liquid instead of a powder. The we could use coal liquifaction to produce diesel fuel, thus still taking advantage of America's huge coal reserves, while simultaneously reducing our use of oil.

By switching over easily changed infrastructure to alternate fuels, the current criticism that it costs more oil to produce ethanol than we save from using ethanol would change to a net savings in oil useage high enough to justify continuing switching our energy infrastructure over to renewable fuels.

And by switching over to non-food sources for the biomass to produce ethanol, we can use currently unproductive agricultural lands and become an energy exporter instead of an energy importer. That would go a long way in balancing out our trade deficits, and by once again being a net-producing nation instead of a net-consuming nation, we'd find a much more robust and stable economy.
 
Good Luck said:
Renewable energy resources, which include bio-fuels, could either be a disaster or a triumph for the United States. At this juncture we can go either direction.

It seems we're starting out in the wrong direction, but it is so early in the game it can easily be corrected. The wrong direction is using food grains to produce alternate fuels. We need to grow food for food. Doesn't do much good having ethanol to drive to the grocery store if it's empty from agriculture being turned into go juice for your car.

Another part in the wrong direction we are taking is focusing too narrowly on the transportation industry for the consumer of alternate fuels. While transportation does use the majority of fossil derived fuels, there are too many problems to be solved (Lower energy content of ethanol yielding lower engine power and efficiency. Higher burning temperatures yielding engine damage. Etc.) before ethanol can really make a significant difference in our use of fossil fuels.

Additionally, if we continue to rely on traditional sources for ethanol production (ie: food grains) the low yield per acre will make the effort fall flat on its face because it can't meet demand, and we'll only end up that much more dependent on fossil fuels.

So bio-fuels, in the direction we are headed, have a high probability of failure, but not due to bio fuels being a bad idea, rather because we didn't make the necessary changes in thinking to make bio-fuels a success.


OTOH, we could look to alternate crops for the biomass needed to produce the fuels we need. The advantage of alternate crops is we do not need to make the decision between food or fuel. The types of alternate crops, like switch grass, than can be made into fuels have the advantage they can be grown economically in areas where food grains cannot be grown economically. Switch grass, and it's cousins also have a much (2.5-3) times the yield per acre of ethanol.

We can look at those areas of the economy that use fossil fuels other than transportation for the first round of converting to alternate fuels, and save transportation for when we have more time to develop the alternate technologies (like ceramic engines) to use alternate fuels efficiently. For instance, converting an oil-fired electrical plant would only require the plant replace its burners. The boilers would not know the difference, nor would the turbines. Might have to put in slightly larger fuel lines because it would take more ethanol to keep the boilers up to temp, but the end result is for very little investment in new infrastructure we could change over a significant oil user to alternate fuels.

Coal fired plants could be almost as easily converted, with the only additional item needed would be a switch in the fuel delivery system to handle liquid instead of a powder. The we could use coal liquifaction to produce diesel fuel, thus still taking advantage of America's huge coal reserves, while simultaneously reducing our use of oil.

By switching over easily changed infrastructure to alternate fuels, the current criticism that it costs more oil to produce ethanol than we save from using ethanol would change to a net savings in oil useage high enough to justify continuing switching our energy infrastructure over to renewable fuels.

And by switching over to non-food sources for the biomass to produce ethanol, we can use currently unproductive agricultural lands and become an energy exporter instead of an energy importer. That would go a long way in balancing out our trade deficits, and by once again being a net-producing nation instead of a net-consuming nation, we'd find a much more robust and stable economy.
Click to expand...
Wow this is a really great post. Do work in this area?
 
Very interesting article , thanks kathy.


If this really could be accomplished in soils previously unused for food farming this could be great to suppliment our fuel needs. I fear that someone will try hybreds in better soil and recreate the other biofuel problem again though. Any land that was farmed for food that is then used for another reason adds to this problem.
 
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