Biofuels Cause More Global Warming Than Fossil Fuels!

[Alric]

That would reduce our dependence on foreign oil and fossil fuels a lot. It would cost $420 billion in subsidies from 2011 to 2050, but that's a lot less than the cost of the Iraq war and spread out over many more years.

And a lot less than oil company and corn farmer subsidies and tax breaks.

 

[Tumbleweed]

Isn't the problem with solar that you can only get so many watts per square meter of sunshine. Do we want to cover vast ares of desert to get it? Seems like they need to figure out how to get more bang for their buck meter wise by concentrating the sunlight via something other than a giant magnifying glass. Gravitons maybe?
Or they can cover vast areas way out in space and then beam the converted sunlight energy down via lasers or microwaves. To stations out in the ocean, tethered to shore with ordinary electric cables, of course, to keep people and property from being fried if the emergency shut off switch doesn't work
THEN your Prius and/or Hummer will be carbon free!

 

[robinson]

Just putting rooftop solar cells on every building already here, would solve the problem. Add parking lots and you have more than enough power, on a sunny day.

Except for heavy industry.

 

[BenBurch]

I believe that algal biofuels will prove to be a big part the answer. And it IS a form of solar power, and can be "farmed" on any sort of land. Even the tops of factory buildings (assuming we have any left) could host scum ponds, and this would have the added benefit of reducing summer cooling costs. And it isn't a hit on the fresh water supply as you can use nutrient-rich graywater in the troughs.

 

[Terry]

I thought the point of biofuels was that they were renewable, not that they had lower greenhouse impact.

 

[Alric]

I thought the point of biofuels was that they were renewable, not that they had lower greenhouse impact.

Both.

 

[Crundy]

Reminds me of something I read years ago about fossil fuel power stations releasing more radioactive material into the environment than a nuclear power plant. Is that true?

 

[David Wong]

In every one of these discussions we keep mixing up the issues.

I have NEVER heard ethanol put forth as an environmental solution. I have ONLY heard it promoted as a way to wean ourselves off petroleum, because of the instability of that market and the political situation in the middle east. As in, if one suitcase nuke detonates in Tel Aviv, suddenly we're paying $9.00 a gallon because the market will panic.

Again we see the debate problem where we try to make it black and white, when we should be looking at a spectrum of solutions. You can't dismiss a solution that's an improvement over where we are, just because it falls short of some ideal (particularly when the ideal isn't attainable without 30 years of infrastructure rebuilding and new power plants).

So, sure, a fleet of electric cars powered from solar and wind is ideal, and maybe that's what we'll have in 2050. But that ideal is light years away from where we are now (figuring out how to charge the vehicles in a few seconds, safely, being just one of the engineering challenges).

So less desirable, but closer to reality, is a fleet of hydrogen powered cars, with the power coming from nuclear power plants. But between now and then is a whole lot of plants that need built, and solutions for the waste.

So the next option down, and more realistic still, is hydrogen powered cars with the power coming from traditional power plants, mostly coal-fired. So now you're producing CO2 but at a much lesser rate than with the current fleet.

Next down on the spectrum is hybrid cars burning biodiesel, more demanding on the environment than the above, but renewable and disconnected from the volatile oil market;

Next down from that is a fleet of hybrid cars burning petroleum;

Next down is regular cars burning biodiesel/petroleum;

Next down is where we are now, a petroleum-powered fleet with a few hybrids and some talk of upping mileage, and praying that unrest in the volatile middle east won't send oil prices skyrocketing.

But every time somebody touts the advantages of any of the half-dozen steps above where we are now on that spectrum, someone else shoots it down because it falls short of the perfect solution (absolutely renewable energy with minimal environmental impact).

I don't feel like those people are being realistic or helpful. Any thread discussing the Prius brings this up, with people talking about how it's a feel-good solution that still burns fossile fuels. Well, right, but it's a step up from what most of us are doing right now.

 

[Alric]

I have NEVER heard ethanol put forth as an environmental solution. I have ONLY heard it promoted as a way to wean ourselves off petroleum, because of the instability of that market and the political situation in the middle east.

I think the problem is that ethanol from corn is not a way to reduce oil use. As discussed before it results in as much or more use than just refining oil to gasoline.

 

[David Wong]

I think the problem is that ethanol from corn is not a way to reduce oil use. As discussed before it results in as much or more use than just refining oil to gasoline.

No, that's not what they're saying. They're saying the land use issue is what creates all the excess greenhouse emissions, not the burning of oil in the farm and transport machinery.

Sure there is a certain amount used there, just as there is fuel burned in the refining and transport of gasoline. But nothing even close to the amount of fuel that is created. I've never heard that asserted.

 

[David Wong]

By the way, if you want an example of what I'm talking about with the spectrum thing, turn on talk radio today. If this story comes up, it'll be played as yet more proof that those wacko environmentalists are way off base. Biofuels are ridiculous and impractical, so we need to instead drill for oil in Alaska and off the coast of Florida and stop listening to these extremists.

If you're asking me to choose between biofuels and a hypothetical fleet of cars that run on sunlight and emit rose petals, of course I'm going to choose the latter. But if you're asking me to choose between the status quo and biofuels, I'm going to choose biofuels. Whether or not it looks like a good solution depends entirely on what you compare it to.

 

[BenBurch]

I thought the point of biofuels was that they were renewable, not that they had lower greenhouse impact.

CO2 impact tracks renewability closely. Any crop depleting the land of carbon is also not long-term renewable; It is just tapping a different stored carbon source.

 

[Alric]

No, that's not what they're saying.

Yes. Unfortunately it is their recent calculations regarding greenhouse gases in addition to the energy innefficiency:

Newspaper article

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/08/science/earth/08wbiofuels.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

Original peer reviewed journal article:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/314/5805/1598

Interesting interview:

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/podcasts/2008/02/07/08worldview.mp3

The first clue should be the ethanol results in 25% less mileage than gasoline when used in cars.

 

[Fredrik]

I have NEVER heard ethanol put forth as an environmental solution. I have ONLY heard it promoted as a way to wean ourselves off petroleum, because of the instability of that market and the political situation in the middle east.

You obviously haven't been to Sweden. Most people here would probably say the opposite. Ethanol is considered an "environmental fuel" (miljöbränsle) and cars that can run on ethanol are considered "environmental cars" (miljöbilar). If you drive one of those, you get special benefits (like free parking in some places).

Very good post by the way.

 

[Earthborn]

Old news? As in everybody already knew this?

Yes, everybody who knew anything already knew this. The EU is already restricting biofuels that are not environmentally friendly (see here and here, National Geographic magazine recently had a special on biofuels detailing every aspect, with neat graphs showing the energy efficiency and CO₂ neutrality of different biofuels and different origins of biofuels. and it showed very clearly that many of the most used biofuels are quite lousy in those respects.

Even the advocates of biofuels have been saying it for years, but they said that it would be a good idea to first build the infrastructure for the delivery of biofuels, and that technological innovations were likely to take care of the problems. They were especially hoping for methods that could generate biofuels from the non-edible parts of plants instead of using what is basically food. I recently saw some science programme about Dutch scientists having made considerable progress in this: they found a bacterium that can break down non-edible plant material to something that can be changed into biodiesel. They found it in elephant poo.

There is also great hope of using algae to produce biodiesel. So the fact that today's biofuels are not very environmentally friendly does not necessarily mean the whole concept of biofuels is a bad idea.

 

[quarky]

Oil is a bio-fuel, in a way. It represents accumulation of bio-mass, processed by time and pressure. To acheive a steady state of production and consumption with the bio-mass we could sustainably grow on the planet, would demand a complete re-do of how we approach all our energy needs.

Nevertheless, I feel it to be the eventual solution.
In a groovy world with less than a billion people.

 

[genesplicer]

I was of the opinion that if all we burned were biofuels, we would not change the greenhouse issue, but that we would be pulling out as much CO2 in the form of growing plants as we were burning. We would be tapping into the carbon cycle in a very real way. So, the level of CO2 remains static, and we would no longer add more CO2 to the atmosphere...

Where am I wrong?


Edited kuz I spel gud

 

[Alric]

Where am I wrong?

It takes about as much oil to produce the same mileage of ethanol than gasoline in an automobile due to fertilizer manufacturing (from oil) and diesel for farm machinery (from oil). Then at the end ethanol has less mileage than gasoline.

Just recently publications in Science discuss how using land for growth of biofuel crops can further increase the amount of greenhouse gases produced.

 

[mhaze]

Wow....

Now biofuels are a big flop, and look at the comments! It's all a conspiracy by Big Oil and the Corn producers. Let's take a look back and see just a few of the people that were talking biofuels up, shall we?

Among the organizations and people that promoted biofuels -

1. IPCC, in its current report to policymakers on mitigation strategies, approves biofuels

2. First Biofuels Congress of the Americas, ft. Al Gore, to Take Place in Buenos Aires [Update date change] TreeHugger
we informed about the First Biofuels Congress of the Americas, which will take place at the Alvear Palace Hotel in Buenos Aires, Argentina and will feature former U.S. Vice President Al Gore as the keynote speaker

3. Sierra Club
the nation’s preeminent climate scientist to unveil a new report authored by ASES that lays out a plan for dramatically reducing the nation’s global warming emissions. The roadmap--now the official Sierra Club global warming strategy--details how an aggressive, yet achievable increase in the use of energy efficiency and renewables alone can achieve a 60-80% reduction in U.S. global warming emissions by 2050.
"This report moves the discussion from whether we can achieve the necessary reductions in global warming pollution with energy efficiency and renewable energy in this country to exactly how we should do it," said Carl Pope, Sierra Club Executive Director. "Fully three-quarters of the reductions in global warming pollution called for by Dr. Hansen and other scientists can be realized using energy efficiency, wind, and solar--all technologies we have today. The rest can be made with geothermal, biofuels, biomass, and other renewables.

4. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/5/8/153810/3358

Last week, ENR passed out its omnibus bill, S. 1321, which covers biofuels, energy efficiency.....Boxer has introduced a more aggressive biofuels bill than S. 1321....

 

[Tumbleweed]

I have one gallon of gasoline. How much heat do I grt out of it in the form of calories and how muchy CO2 is produced
How much ethanol do I have to burn to get the same anount of heat, and how much CO2 is generated in the process. My guess is the same amount of CO2 will be produced by both
All fires and the heat they give off are hydrogen fires. You break down a hydrocarbon or carbohydrate into CO2, oxygen, and hydrogen. The hydrogen oxidizes into water and the CO2 just floats away
Our metabolism and rot do the same thing, but in a more controlled, evenly spaced out over time way
I'm betting there is a direct correlation between heat released and CO2 produced