Turning Soybeans into Diesel Fuel Is Costing Billions
npr.org
npr.org
This kinda reads like a corn industry hit-piece on a rival technology.
Besides, having third-world countries be dependent on US exports of (heavily subsidized) surplus food is one of the things that causes famines (shortages in the US come out of exports first), and continues the cycle of economic dependency (domestic producers cannot compete with heavily subsidized US exports). The actual fix here would be to develop foreign food production and then have the US reduce emissions to offset.
At best its only a problem in specific locations and due to political problems. I don't believe its reasonable to demand that progress in renewable energy adoption should be aborted just because some nation on some random corner of the world is experiencing political problems.
https://ourworldindata.org/hunger-and-undernourishment
Even in sub-Saharan Africa under nourishment has gone from ~35% of the population in 1991 to ~18% today.
It's a problem that is being solved.
In particular, think about the case where US farmers have a good year and many other places have a bad year.
It seems like efficiency and environmental considerations would have us reduce the amount of land devoted to crops as much as possible, but guaranteeing safety of the food supply would mean increasing capacity. So there's a tradeoff here.
The way that this is framed really betrays either a bias or a significant gap in understanding on the part of the author. The big one is their neglect of the costs to society borne from extracting and refining diesel from fossil fuel. Instead they focused solely on the costs of the subsidy.
Look at how they mentioned the Argentine subsidy: "Argentina was doing the U.S. a favor, helping it satisfy its biodiesel demands more cheaply"
They're framing this as a net positive for America, but it betrays their perspective: they don't see disincentivization of biodiesel production by American farmers as a negative thing.
"X is less bad than Y" doesn't mean that X is not bad. Both can be. In this case, both are.
> then have the US reduce emissions to offset
Yes. One way to do that would be to stop planting huge cultures for "bio"-diesel and then fertilizing them to death.
However, the fundamental problem with biofuels overall is that fuel requirements are so huge. Indeed, total annual fossil fuel usage -- coal, oil and natural gas -- is an appreciable fraction of total annual biomass production through photosynthesis. Everything, all plants, everywhere. The reasons being that energy requirements are so much greater than food and feed requirements, and that photosynthesis is so inefficient compared to PV.
Human land use is a major factor in the current great extinction. Adding large-scale biofuel production would increase extinction rates. But of course, global climate change is also a major extinction driver.
PV and batteries are clearly the way to go.
It's a bit frustrating to have to leave mid-read to define an acronym.
Hybridization would be more efficient by far.
EVs in general (energy production + transport to plug + battery efficiency losses) are more efficient than the biofuel option (growing/fertilizing/harvesting crops -> turning into fuel-> transport/storage->burning in a vehicle)
But what's being discussed? Which crop or where it's grown? Shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic.
I very much doubt it would have survived as long as it has as a technology if it were a net energy loss.
Most of the assessments I have seen generally always show that bio-ethanol is a net loss. Only subsidies keep it afloat.
None of the bio-* will make any sense until we have a lot more renewable electricity on the grid. At that point, producing bio-* will basically become an energy storage solution and a way to soak up excess energy production that you couldn't store any other way.
I sort of assume both, but I'd like to hope for one of them.
" 1 acre produces 122 bushels of corn per year, which makes 122 x 2.6 US gallons of ethanol, which at 84000 BTU per gallon would mean a power per unit area of {0.2 W/m^2}; however, the energy inputs required to process the corn into ethanol amount to 83,000 BTU per gallon; so 99% of the energy produced is used up by the processing, and the net power per unit area is about {0.002 W/m^2}. The only way to get significant net power from the corn-to-ethanol process is to ensure that all co-products are exploited; including the energy in the co-products, the net power per unit area is about 0.05 W/m^2."
Frankly, I love my combustion engines for fun and sport, and while I fully support the switch to EV, I have long been wondering how the switch will effect my ability to use them for fun Sunday drives. Eventually they will be banned from the roads and the production and distribution of petroleum will slow right down.
With many motorsport vehicles using Ethanol based fuels for its lower temperature burn and higher power output, I suspect that is the fuel that will stick around as a special use product. Appropriately priced, no doubt.
But I have no clue how the numbers actually work out.
If there were, then human-powered farming would have been pointless as a food production method.
I don't think that stuff would be good for aviation. Maybe palm or algae derived?
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ulf_Neuling/publication...
The most land-efficient way to produce fats from crops is by far the palm oil fruit ( http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_yield.html ), but because most cropland is already used for growing food, most palm oil plantations are on recently cleared forest, which gives palm oil an undeservedly bad reputation (farmers in Southeast Asia would simply grow something else on cleared forest if not for oil palms).
In fact, China wants so much soy meal that it's boosted global supplies of soy oil, because soybeans, when they're crushed, yield both meal and oil. By satisfying China's demand for meal, soy processors inevitably end up with plenty of oil to sell, too.
So if soy meal is what's driving the Soy market, doesn't that limit the environmental cost for soy used for oil, since the oil is effectively a waste product from the soy meal production?
Mandating use of biodiesel seems like a better way of achieving the same goal: it ensures extra food-production capacity is maintained.
Plus, it reduces the amount of soybean oil being used in food. That stuff's unhealthy (very high omega-6 content), and apparently there's a huge amount of it being produced essentially as a byproduct of soy meal.
You also can't give away your overproduction to less well off countries, as you cripple their ag market, preventing them from bootstrapping their own economy.
It's a moot point with transportation electrifying as quickly as it is. I don't have enough knowledge to say what crops we should be planting above and beyond what meets human consumption needs, but I can say without a doubt we should not be subsidizing crop based biofuels (only algae based fuels, only to be used for air and marine transport).
You are correct that in the current equilibrium state it is sub-optimal. Prices are settled right now where a small number of hungry poor people are out-competed by the transportation market because they can't pay more than it can.
That is bad, I completely agree. But fixing that isn't what the policy is for, the policy is for preventing starvation during World War 3.
So you have to compare the suffering of people here and now against the potential suffering expected without the policy in place multiplied by the probability that WW3 occurs.
edit (too deep to reply): I really don't think it's moving the goal posts, you asked about redirecting that food production in general, not soy. As is mentioned elsewhere, the soy oil isn't really used much for food anyway.
That said - you can't just swap corn grown for ethanol for "corn for people to eat" - the equipment involved to harvest it is completely different, as are the facilities to process it. The same concerns apply to other crops.
Farmers currently produce as much food as the market demands, plus some excess capacity is converted biofuels. If the market required less, they would (eventually) produce less unsubsidized food. Then, the logic goes, WW3 takes out a lot of our food and we suffer massive shortages because there is no extra capacity to produce more.
If there were total war again between major military powers I could see a brutal spasm of months of using conventional weapons followed by nuclear murder-suicide from whichever side is losing worst. Perhaps a negotiated peace if the winning side doesn't make the losing believe it has nothing left to lose. I don't see it going on for years either way. Preparing to fight the next World War as if it were going to be as protracted as the last one is strange.
Some amount of ethanol added to gasoline serves as a fuel oxygenator, reducing emissions of soot and carbon monoxide. A discussion of whether there is a better oxygenate than corn ethanol could be interesting, but 5% or 10% ethanol is really there for emissions, not biofuel.
It reduces the land being used to produce food.
http://hungerreport.org/2017/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/hung...
"In 2014, Italian and U.S. researchers, examining a global dataset of large-scale land acquisitions, published a study showing that between 300 million and 550 million people could be fed by crops grown on these acquired lands. The land in these deals was in countries with some of the world’s highest rates of hunger and malnutrition. Govern-ments in fragile states, desperate to attract foreign investment, have proved all too willing to trade land to investors at bargain rates. Agri-businesses typically claim that they will reduce hunger by applying modern technologies to increase productivity on the acquired land. In fact, many of these deals are intended to produce crops for export or to produce biofuels. Reducing hunger and poverty in the host country is not a priority when crops can instead go to paying customers."
One year they planted crop A, the next they planted crop B, and the next they left it fallow.
This was before industrial fertilizes mind you, but leaving part of the land fallow is not a bad thing.
Industrial fertilizers have definitely changed the rules and allow farmers to shift the traditional cycles, but the same principles of caring for the land still apply. Crop rotation is still common, but some land is so much more productive for some uses than others that it makes sense to "weight" the rotation with fertilizers.
Lifestock, crops, all that happens over years, not weeks or months like in most industries.
(tho, I bet if you read news from Brazil, it would go the other way)
Or maybe I just have cynical friends.
He's got a comprehensive book "Alcohol Can Be a Gas!" http://alcoholcanbeagas.com/
Sure the initial carbon dumped into the atmosphere to plow the fields is a short term increase, but then you're also deforesting lands to grow them, which permanently adds more carbon into the atmosphere.
https://www.extension.umn.edu/agriculture/nutrient-managemen...
The intent is that this is grown on lands that would otherwise lay fallow, so there shouldn't be a large deforestation concern.
Well, if you're going to be that pedantic about it, then nothing we know of is technically carbon neutral. We might be off by an atom or two!
"Either it is or it isn't," implies that it's a binary. That's incorrect and muddies the waters. It's quantitative in a practical sense, as in geography or geology, not in an absolute sense as in mathematics. So "more carbon neutral" can be sensibly interpreted in this quantitative sense. Your use of language implying that it's a binary, "confuses the discussion to use it as such."
You probably think it's "unfunny" because you missed the logical distinction. Now that it has been explained to you how you were the one who derailed the discussion in the first place with bad logic, you probably still think it's "unfunny."
The poster said "They're more carbon neutral than dino diesel."
I was simply stating that not only was I not arguing otherwise (if we're assuming "more carbon neutral" means better for the environment), but also clarifying what the term means (the binary state of being carbon neutral).
I think your statement was unfunny because I did not personally find it funny, nor do I expect others to. Not for any other nefarious reason.
Thanks for confirming one of my theories.
Other than anecdotal evidence, do you have any source for this?
The cost to remove trees and put that land into production is quite high. Even then, most forested land is poor for growing crops. I would be very surprised to learn that in the US, farmers are removing trees and preparing the land to till on a large scale.
Also, Brazil enacted a soy moratorium over ten years ago to combat deforestation.
You're limiting your "surprise" to the US, but that's not what I, or the article we're discussing, are talking about.
It is still probable that grasslands are a better carbon sink than the same land would be if used to grow soybeans.
Here's a source that describes methods which would be broadly beneficial:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1287318.Holistic_Managem...
However, that's the net reduction for B100, or 100% biodiesel. The more common and engine-friendly B20 blend at 20% biodiesel / 80% petroleum diesel would be a 15.6% net reduction in CO2.
> A 1998 biodiesel lifecycle study, jointly sponsored by the US Department of Energy and the US Department of Agriculture, concluded biodiesel reduces net CO² emissions by 78 percent compared to petroleum diesel.
Soybeans may be similar to Sugar. You have to ask if it’s really clean also the growing part not just the fuel.
A greener way is to put up electricity lines over highways. Then trucks can be driven electrically without hauling lots of resource instensive batteries. The mining of lithium in truck production scale probably is not clean. Mining is one of the largest emitters of co2 in the world.
Cop report on largest co2 emitters doing 70% of the emissions. https://b8f65cb373b1b7b15feb-c70d8ead6ced550b4d987d7c03fcdd1...
Biodiesel has some advantages, and many disadvantages. To me, I could see this being a part of a energy mix, but it doesn't seem like it is worth the money we are spending on it today, given that we could get better renewable energy/dollar in several other ways. If anything must be spent here, it seems we need some research to figure out how to do this better.
'Biodiesel is very expensive, relative to petroleum diesel'
'Defenders of biodiesel insist that it's a much cleaner fuel than regular diesel, because it doesn't come from the ground, but from soybean plants that capture carbon dioxide from the air as they grow. In fact, by the EPA's calculations, replacing petroleum-based fuel with biodiesel will cut greenhouse emissions at least in half.
A growing number of environmentalists, however, say that this calculation is dead wrong. They say that if more soybeans are needed to make fuel in addition to food, it inevitably means that people somewhere on Earth will have to plow up grasslands or cut down forests in order to grow that additional supply — and clearing such land releases huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.'
Up to 2006 was a direct impact causing deforestation. But a law passed making it hard to sell soybean cultivated in deforestated areas (specially to the USA).
But still there is an indirect impact, since then. Cattle raising is the main force behind direct forestation of the Amazon on brazilian area. But once the cattle extinguish the resources of the land and move to a new land to deforestate, the soybean farms occupy the empty land they left behind.
So soybean farmers have an interest in supporting cattle raisers deforestation of the Amazon.
source: http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1414...
For large swaths of the Earth, we need to say "You can't touch this area for any reason. Don't even step foot here. Go away."
There's a short, medium and long term outlook here. In the short term, there's a wastage of $5.4B. In the long term, burning things for fuel is bad. In the medium term, being able to moderate swings or ensure minimum supply of fuel mitigates risk that endanger the economy as a whole.
I was with you until this. a brief thought experiement makes it seem impossible that it would be 1 to 1, but rather that some smaller amount of fossil fuel used would yield a much larger amount of biofuel
The value of biofuels is simply cushion in case of poor harvests.
There's a lot of debate about this, with numbers varying due largely to differing assessments of inputs and credits for byproducts, but I have never seen a convincing EROEI for corn ethanol over about 2.
EDIT: I forgot to include the link! Here it is: http://netenergy.theoildrum.com/node/6760
According to the source below, the partial conversion rate is about 57 gallons per acre (at 39 bushels/acre). It takes WAY less than 57 gallons of biodiesel to farm one acre of soy. Modern practices are really only going to have 3-4 passes (no till plant, early spray, maybe a later spray and harvest). After that is is mostly bulk trucking which shouldn't be much per acre.
Remember that unlike corn, soy requires very little/no fertilizer due to it being able to fix its own nitrogen. It is mostly the fertilizer the kills corn.
Cane ethanol seems to do better than soy fuel. I'm also aware that new biofuel "generations" have the potentional for much higher returns, but these things are either still emerging technologies (e.g., cellulosic and algae) or horrifically damaging to the environment (e.g., palm oil biofuel).
"IARC: DIESEL ENGINE EXHAUST CARCINOGENIC" [PDF] https://www.iarc.fr/en/media-centre/pr/2012/pdfs/pr213_E.pdf
... Soybeans are also useful for bioplastics.
Of course, the rest of the world introduces different combustion products, including sulfur as part of the fuel oil fractions not completely distilled away.
I can tell you inhaling anything from our pre-DPF '81 tractor isn't something you want to do but I'd be curious to know how much modern DPF(Diesel particulate filters) make a difference.