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Comment by paulmd | Hacker News Reader

Biodiesel is still way more environmentally friendly than ethanol, which is also heavily subsidized. And the idea of biofuels displacing food production also generically applies to any biofuel, again including Ethanol.

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.

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Ethanol has never made much sense to me. Drill and pump petroleum, process into gasoline (for tractors), and fertilizers, grow corn, turn into ethanol., It's the equivalent of getting a crisp new $100 bill from the bank, recycling it immediately and printing a $1 bill from the "recycled" paper and calling it an environmental success.

Ethanol makes perfect electoral sense: Democrats get to pass "green" legislation which their base likes while Republicans get to give subsides to farmers, one of their main constituents.

It depends on whether the ethanol is generating net positive energy. If I burn one joule of petroleum to get two joules of ethanol, it's a net success. If I burn two joules of petroleum to get one joule of ethanol, it's a net failure.

I very much doubt it would have survived as long as it has as a technology if it were a net energy loss.

> 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.

economically a net loss or ecologically?

I sort of assume both, but I'd like to hope for one of them.

Both. Here's some data from the late Prof. MacKay: http://www.withouthotair.com/Errata.html#284 :

" 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."

As an aside, I suspect once transport and commuting are handled by EV vehicles, ethanol will stick around as a small scale fuel for motorsport enthusiasts.

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.

Don't underestimate the power of farming subsidies and lobbying.

Very much so. We should not have any of these laws; if bio-whatever makes economic sense, you won't need laws mandating its use.

It you wanted to kickstart a technology I think it could make sense for shorter periods of time. For example Electric Vehicle tax credits make it much easier for car companies to develop their electric car lines, but the credits expire after so many cars.

Ethanol production has never been a net positive for energy production. It has always survived to maximize the use of the subsidies the american corn farmer.

If it takes one thousand gallons of gasoline to produce 10 thousand gallons of ethanol, then it could be a net win by requiring less gasoline production later or something.

But I have no clue how the numbers actually work out.

The laws of thermodynamics alone lead me to suspect that that's probably not the case.

The energy input to crops that later become ethanol is the sun, not the gasoline burnt in the production process, so there is no necessary relationship inferrable by thermodynamics between fuel burnt and the energy content of crops or the resulting ethanol.

If there were, then human-powered farming would have been pointless as a food production method.

I stand corrected.

I assume you're speaking in theoretical terms, but it bears mentioning that in practice, fossil fuels are a critical input to the production of crops, to the extent that EROEI for corn ethanol remains stuck at around 1.

According to Wikipedia, the energy balance of ethanol in my country is 8 or more, so it would be more like getting a crisp new $100 bill and turning it into eight $100 bills.

I'm guessing this is someplace that sugar cane can grow? The EROI from corn ethanol is much, much worse. Ethanol does make a lot of sense for, say, Brazil, but not much sense for the US.

modern tractors run on diesel (although I have two that run on gas) for the low end torque curve and slight increase in fuel-to-energy conversion efficiency. Although my person preference is gas tractors, commercial farmers all use diesel for these reasons. For me, gas tractors so much easier to rebuild a carburetor then a diesel injection pump. My diesel tractor has been down for almost a half year due to an injection pump rebuild (Case 530CK Roosamaster pump)

I don’t understand this argument. It assumes thay petroleum will always be needed to run tractors and other infrastructure around it, which seems unreasonable considering the vast number of alternative fuels out there?

I agree re the comparison.

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.

In the future, would you mind typing the word "photovoltaics"?

It's a bit frustrating to have to leave mid-read to define an acronym.

OK, sorry.

lol

Because I hate it when I come across acronyms that I gotta google.

> Biodiesel is still way more environmentally friendly than ethanol

"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.

The whole concept of fuel-based transport should be at question here.

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.

In Brazil Ethanol is made from sugar cane. It is much more efficient and environment friendly than corn ethanol.

Crop failures can happen anywhere, so isn't supplier diversity a good thing? All other things being equal, it seems like excluding US exports from the global market would increase exposure to bad weather and make prices more volatile.

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 only real fix is reducing energy usage.

Or finding an alternative energy source. I'm pretty convinced that the not-distant future will be wind/solar cached in batteries.

In a world where hunger is still an unsolved problem, burning food for fuel is not just unethical, it's downright stupid.

The counter argument there is that hunger still existing is not so much a product of there not being enough food as much as the food not properly being allocated. There is easily enough food produced in the world to feed everyone as is.

The US still has hunger despite producing about 4000kcal/person/day of food.

One of the places it is being allocated is biofuels.

Hunger is solved, in any country that is not a shit hole.

wow. chronic hunger is still a problem in the first world. i hope you are trolling. either way i hope you are banned.

Would you please not post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? We eventually ban accounts that do this repeatedly.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> In a world where hunger is still an unsolved problem

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.

Hunger is a distribution problem not a food shortage problem. There’s more than enough food being produced for everyone.

Look at the trends:

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.

>This kinda reads like a corn industry hit-piece on a rival technology.

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.

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