Dedicated biomass is not a good idea
climateer.substack.com
climateer.substack.com
Turning bio-mass into electricity comes with a lot of losses.
If the desired product is fuel, the numbers for bio-mass are a lot better, and the numbers for all other sources that first produce electricity are a lot worse, because turning electricity into fuel comes with a lot of losses.
This is true, but when generating fuel, the end goal is usually to move a vehicle X miles. Now that electric cars are nominally competitive with ICE vehicles, the metric should be something more like “land required to drive a truck X miles/year” - and assume the best of either electric vehicle efficiency or ICE efficiency, not force an arbitrary electrical->chemical conversion for the metric’s sake. Biofuels probably wouldn’t look like as much of an outlier as they do here, but I would still wager that they’re among the least efficient options.
I wouldn't wager because it's not a simple yes or no type question. There's a lot of ambiguities even in the analysis behind the graph presented in the article, but when it comes to fuels vs. batteries, it gets even more insane. Fuels have a weight advantage over batteries that gets magnified as the weight and range of the vehicle increases... and there's a lot of variance within fuels too. So, while an electric bicycle is going to be a no-brainer over a motorcycle for pretty much any scenario, it can be quite the opposite for something like a commercial truck.
I keep coming back to the economist argument that if we just captured the externalities related to climate change, we avoid having these discussions and simply look at the price of things... but of course, that's the hard part in all these discussions.
A land-efficient biomass fuel system would convert all the carbon in the biomass into fuel. This would require adding extra hydrogen, particularly if you want hydrocarbon fuels, since the oxygen in the biomass has to be carried off somehow. The hydrogen could be sourced from solar or wind by electrolysis.
In any biomass technology with a CO2 waste stream, the CO2 can be converted to hydrocarbon fuel by Fischer-Tropsch, if you have additional hydrogen.
In the post fossil fuel age, there will be an entire biochemical industry that converts biomass to chemicals now obtained from fossil fuels. Some of these processes will look a lot like things developed for the petrochemical industry. All the carbon going into landfills now will instead be fed into this industry.
The number of required energy comes in at the order of 10^20 J or 90000TWh:
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=300+quadrillion+BTU+in+...
but if I multiply the energy return from biofuels with these alleged 1billion hectares of land, I get much, much more energy, billions of TWh:
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=582Mwh%2Fm%5E2+*+1billi...
So unless there's a mistake somewhere, only a marginal fraction of land would be needed to cover all needs.
So what went wrong here? I think it's the MWh per square meter number. 500MWh in PV would be a 500kW solar installation in Germany. I am quite sure you cannot fit that into a square meter.
But even if we assume 580MWh per hectare per year, the output from 1billion hectares would be 580000TWh. So there's probably more wrong in that post.
> According to Google, the world’s total arable land is about 1.38 billion hectares. Using the biomass LUIE figure of 580 m²/MWh/y, we get a total potential electricity production of 23,793 TWh / year.
This is correct:
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%281.38+billion+hectare...
The LUIE figure we found for dedicated biomass is 580 m²/MWh/y: 580 square meters to generate one megawatt-hour per year. You multiplied this by hectares, meaning you multiplied area times area. If you want to determine the amount of energy you can produce from a given area (e.g. 1 billion hectares), you need to divide by 580, not multiply by 580.
I think this graph wins the hotly contested "most misleading use of a log scale" award. Anyone glancing at it quickly would vastly underestimate the differences between energy sources.
But secondly: some log scale graphs have unevenly-spaced lines along the Y axis to make the use of a log scale more obvious. This is an example of what I mean: https://www.geol.lsu.edu/jlorenzo/geophysics/graphing/semilo...
On this graph, though, the lines along the Y-axis are evenly-spaced, increasing the confusion.
Thirdly: the use of a log scale should be mentioned in the graph's caption, not buried in the text.
I could see this as a critique of a log-scale graph appearing in a newspaper article or something where the reader is likely to be skimming, but in an persuasive essay readers would probably be more engaged and able to spend time synthesizing the arguments vs just storing information.
To have any chance on the market, the price per protein content of the insect larvae must be at least twice lower than that of chicken meat. Therefore it must be about the same as for legumes like beans or lentils.
To be able to judge whether investing in such a thing is worthwhile, you need a very accurate prediction of the production costs, to determine whether it is possible to match the legumes in price per protein content.
I would be very wary about the risk that the estimation of the future production costs might be exceedingly optimistic.
Currently some cereals are the cheapest source of proteins suitable for human consumption, but they cannot provide much more than a half of the daily protein intake of a human, because they lack lysine, so they must be combined with a more expensive source of proteins, like meat, legumes, or perhaps insect larvae.
Nearly nobody has an objection to eating legumes (I am ignoring, among other things, people on ultra-low-carb diets, specific allergies, and Ashkenazi Jews during Pesach), so an improved yield of legumes, or a reduction in water usage, or a tolerance for greater temperature extremes, or... would be extremely valuable.
If they could come to be just the same price as "ethical" chicken that would be amazing. I think it's been shown that there's not much market for meat replacements at a premium (like impossible and beyond). But I can't imagine there's not an insane market at the parity. I know I would buy insect burgers for my family at least once or twice a week if they had comparable quality to chicken and similarly priced.
But biomass being converted into electricity is horribly inefficient.
Even in CHP?
And that optimistic 2% efficiency for plants is just the energy conversion to grow the actual plants. Then to convert it into electricity requires it to go through a power plant which often have lower efficiencies of say 30%. If it is in a co-generation facility, it may have upwards of say 80%. Which sounds nice, but when you multiply those efficiencies and end up with in the best case, something like 1.6% efficiency which is terrible.
And that is to ignore the other major factor which is that burning biomass causes major pollution.
Fossil fuels are just convenient biomass that have been given the luxury of hundreds of millions of years to compress into dense hydrocarbons which make a convenient fuel source. We don't have this luxury when it comes to creating new biomass.
The best aspect of biomass is that it is freely available to everyone. Anyone can gather sticks to burn.
However, the parts of the world that still heavily rely on these methods for heating their homes and are used for cooking unfortunately suffer the consequences of breathing all of the smoke in over the years.
The article is aboit dedicated biomass for electricity production, which given the cheapness of solar and wind is a little like dunking on steam-powered cars. I'm not aware of anyone arguing for that as an approach. We did these sums a couple of decades ago.
On the other hand, wwste food, sewage, manure, and various other things that would become methane are useful to capture as it can be GHG negative comparrd woth letting it rot. That is also "biomass".
Nerdy people on message boards will adopt extreme positions. The argument against meat is that animal fodder is inefficient and everything would be better if we just ate soy, peas and beans. The same argument would be made against your idea.
I think it’s dumb to grow crops to stretch the viability of ICE engines in cars. But growing crops to produce upstream value, whether that’s steak or food for my steak isn’t an issue for me, and probably isn’t a problem for 98% of people once they get over the “yuck, bugs”.
On top of that, food margins aren’t huge and you’re aiming for the low budget market, not a lot of money to be made there. And the optics aren’t great, lots of people will find your product repulsive and at a low price it will look like you’re trying to feed bugs to the poor.
If insects as food ever becomes significant, it probably won’t be the first to market that will succeed but a later breakout learning how to be successful after somebody else tries and fails several times.
I work with creating efficient closed loop food production systems.
In 18th century Japan for example, landlords often had rights to their tenants manure. "Night soil" became especially valuable as fertilizer prices grew. There have been fights over who is entitled to these biosolids. Even up into the 1980s much of Japan used special vacuum trucks to deliver night soil collections to treatment facilities
Contrast that with the West where we spend billions of dollars on sewage systems that often cause ecological harm
https://daily.jstor.org/a-history-of-human-waste-as-fertiliz...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092544391...
The first step of making any compost-based fertilizer is always to mix the "greens" (high nitrogen material, in this case the poop) with browns (high carbon material such as hay, leaves, straw, etc). Cow manure and other manures based on pretty much any other animal will have had this done. Any composting toilet, any night soil transportation truck, etc will also do this. Compost toilets usually simply mix it with sawdust, peat moss, or coconut noir.
This very simple process was used in pretty much every culture the world over. It's simple and extremely effective at neutralizing odors and changing the microbiology to aerobic conditions which can make it safe to handle in as little as a few weeks
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_soil
"Night soil is a historically used euphemism for human excreta collected from cesspools, privies, pail closets, pit latrines, privy middens, septic tanks, etc. This material was removed from the immediate area, usually at night, by workers employed in this trade. Sometimes it could be transported out of towns and sold on as a fertilizer.
Another definition is "untreated excreta transported without water (e.g. via containers or buckets)".[1] The term "night soil" is largely an outdated term, used in historical contexts. The modern term is "fecal sludge"; fecal sludge management is an ongoing challenge, particularly in developing countries.[2]
Night soil was produced as a result of a sanitation system in areas without sewer systems or septic tanks. In this system of waste management, the human feces are collected without dilution with water."
Note: UNTREATED.
One might also ask, when was human waste first subject to treatment?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sewage_treatment#History
"It was not until the late 19th century that it became possible to treat the sewage by biologically decomposing the organic components through the use of microorganisms and removing the pollutants."
The problem from there is twofold 1. Generally we grow things for food and beauty, both of which are kind of ruined by human manure. 2. Most needs for manure come from animal farms and they usually have an excess of the animal manure and don’t really need anymore.
https://www.nps.gov/articles/composting-toilets.htm
In fact, I'd argue solutions like this would be an overall reduction in the risk of spreading communicable diseases. Sewers can still transfer diseases like this until the waste reaches treatment facilities. Treating it more locally reduces the overall amount of time available for diseases to grow and spread
> 1. Generally we grow things for food and beauty, both of which are kind of ruined by human manure
Cow manure is an excellent compost used all the time that you can even buy at a local gardening store. It's mostly a silly cultural "yucky" aversion that keeps us from utilizing safe, neutralized human manure in the same way
> 2. Most needs for manure come from animal farms and they usually have an excess of the animal manure and don’t really need anymore.
...cities and towns have an excess of human manure that they don't really need anymore too lol
Ethanol in the current US gasoline supply, as I understand it, is not really an energy source. Rather, the purpose is to increase the octane rating. Other octane additives were added in smaller amounts (tetraethyl lead, methyl tert-butyl ether) but they tended to be persistent pollutants, while 10% ethanol is foolproof and non-polluting. But it's bad for food prices: 40% of the US corn crop is used for ethanol.
I could be way off, but that's what I heard.
Corn ethanol utilizes the starch from corn, and leaves behind proteins, fats, minerals, and yeast cells which are used as animal feed, where its superior to plain corn.
Likewise woody biomass isn't coming from clear cutting forests, its from necessary thinning to keep forests healthy (thats otherwise burned in slash piles) and mill waste thats a byproduct of lumber production.
From what I've seen, claims to this effect often turn out to be false. For instance, from https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/a-little-xmas-cheer-for-...:
> ...the world’s largest supplier of wood pellets for power generation ... has long insisted that it doesn’t use big, whole trees, but only uses wood waste, “tops, limbs, thinnings, and/or low-value smaller trees.” It insists it only sources wood from areas where trees will be regrown, and that it doesn’t contribute to deforestation.
> As it turns out, Mongabay reporter Justin Catanoso found a management whistleblower who pointed him in the direction of clearcuts that the company was making: Catanoso watched as a feller-buncher machine grappled down a fifty-acre forest and fed the old oaks straight into a chipper, producing tons of wood to be turned into pellets. The whistleblower said that was par for the course: “We take giant, whole trees. We don’t care where they come from. The notion of sustainably managed forests is nonsense. We can’t get wood into the mills fast enough.”
> He continued: “The company says that we use mostly waste like branches, treetops and debris to make pellets. What a joke. We use 100% whole trees in our pellets. We hardly use any waste. Pellet density is critical. You get that from whole trees, not junk.”
CO2 fixed per hectare per year should be much higher in lignocellulose than in seed oils. And if the forest is already there, you don't even have to wait for it to grow. The temptation to strip mine forests will be strong.
Algae tend to grow in large clumps, and you can very efficiently filter for them from water. I don't think it's a great strategy, but it's more practical than extracting from forests.
> CO2 fixed per hectare per year should be much higher in lignocellulose than in seed oils.
Forests are definitely way better for CO2 capture, but we're talking about producing fuel here. I'm speaking in terms of the net energy produced per hectare, so factoring in the energy consumed to extract fuel, industrial rapeseed oil beats the forest every day of the week.
Yield of rapeseed in the US in 2020 was 2.16 tonnes/hectare/year. Yields of lignocellosic biomass (dry mass) in the US (miscanthus, eucalypt) is almost an order of magnitude higher.
Above ground forest biomass in Guyana: 499 tonnes/hectare.
Again, we're talking about land use for the energy you get, not the carbon it stores. Algae have a distinct advantage when it comes to metrics with land use in the denominator, since they don't use any land.
...and pulling algae from water is significantly easier than pulling biomass out of forests. I'm not sure what you're getting at there.
> Yield of rapeseed in the US in 2020 was 2.16 tonnes/hectare/year. Yields of lignocellosic biomass (dry mass) in the US (miscanthus, eucalypt) is almost an order of magnitude higher.
Yup, the other stuff is much heavier per hectare for sure. That doesn't make it a better source of fuel. Having more mass just means it takes more energy to move it. Step 2 is you extract fuel from it.
Algae might work if one can get species that grown in extremely alkaline conditions, with water that can be sprayed into the air and recovered to scrub CO2 into the solution from the air. There are algae that grow in suck alkaline lakes. To get around the wild contamination problem would likely require engineering the algae to survive some kinds of poisons, then filling the water with those poisons as well to kill everything you don't want there. This wouldn't be very environmentally friendly. You still have the water separation problem, now made harder by the water being alkaline and toxic.
> Yup, the other stuff is much heavier per hectare for sure. That doesn't make it a better source of fuel. Having more mass just means it takes more energy to move it. Step 2 is you extract fuel from it.
The huge problem with biomass is the land requirement. That yield for rapeseed would be crippling for that crop as a fuel source for an economy.
I clearly missed a step then. So when you say:
"I think the biggest argument against biofuels is that if they achieved large scale use, it would encourage people to mine biomass from existing forests instead of growing it."
So, I drew from that a conclusion that if biofuels were prevalent, you believe there's an incentive to mine forests to create biofuels, rather than the grow new biofuels.
In my mind, that means going into wild forests, ripping trees and other biomass out of the ground, slicing it up and transporting it to some kind of a processing plant, where you'd separate out the useful bits and turn it in to biofuel. The incentive comes from the profits yielded from selling the biofuel after paying the costs of creating it.
I don't disagree that there are challenges growing and harvesting of algae, but it is something that is done, at an industrial scale, already (largely for the harvesting of pigments). They don't produce CO2, but they do pump in a lot of fresh CO2 (and pump out O2) to ensure good yields. It's just not done for purposes of creating biofuel, because there's no demand to justify the costs involved. In a world you're envisioning where there is much more of an incentive to produce biofuels, it seems eminently reasonable those incentives would apply to algae as much as anything else.
> Second, it rapidly reproduces, with a generation time much shorter than a growing season
While there are challenges related to this, this does largely mitigate the turn around time advantage that existing wild forests might have.
> The huge problem with biomass is the land requirement. That yield for rapeseed would be crippling for that crop as a fuel source for an economy.
Rapeseed is currently produced on an industrial basis in places where the HEAR derived from it already yields more profits than say, growing soybeans. It's not a popular crop, because the demand for edible canola products is much higher than the demand for biofuels, but if that demand were to shift...
Where we agree is that I don't see biofuels being a viable strategy, at least for the foreseeable future. I just don't see a future where they become viable, but the incentive to mine existing forests for biofuels becomes significantly more significant than extant incentives to mine forests.
As the article points out, growing crops to make biofuel is very space intensive.
It’s either that or the depletion of aquifers.
(This is what I infer his argument to be. There are a million other ways to solve this problem besides changing the senate.)
If we used wood as a fuel source, heated it enough to release methane and other violitile gases to power a generator, but not enough to release the majority of carbon, that would leave us with charcoal.
Instead of trying to extract the remaining energy from the charcoal, we could bury it. Which would sequester the carbon, and be fertilizer. Growing clovers or legumes would add nitrogen.
I am sure I have something wrong, and maybe a better answer is to just not do it with dedicated crops as the article suggests. Maybe we could grow corn for food, but cram the stalks into the generator and sequester the remaining carbon?
A couple of questions I have:
How much carbon could be captured this way, vs other carbon capture methods?
How are cornstalks etc dealt with today by farms? Maybe they're already doing something efficient with it
This is a thing; it's called "BECCS". You can also sequester the carbon without trying to burn it first; see, for instance, https://charmindustrial.com/.
What about how much land would be required to replace the _gasoline_ usage with ethanol?
"Each year, one acre of corn produces 551 gallons of ethanol, which is the equivalent of 386 gallons of gas."
"According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), Americans consumed 140.43 billion gallons of gasoline in 2015"
363.8 million acres to make enough corn to replace gasoline - not factoring in all the other negative externalities. A little more than 4x land area what the US uses now.
In France, the research institute Negawatt has computed numbers when using biomass to fill the gaps when solar panel and wind turbines are not producing electricity. They show we could replace nuclear power only by using current farming wastes (no need to allocate more area to bio fuel). (But they also assume a serious reduction of our current electricity usage)
I am not a fan of biofuels, but the article would be much more persuasive if biofuels were 25x more expensive than the alternatives, rather than just 25x worse in land usage
But not if you offer exemptions. If you offer exemptions the winning strategy is to build tons of spread out, cramped, single- or two-story residences with most of their land value exempted.
But how will people pay their land value tax? Well for the most part, low income people will pay it the same way they currently do: rent. It's the landlord that pays the tax. (And preemptively: no, studies have shown that higher taxes aren't just passed back to the renter. So they'll pay the same rent even if the land value increases.)
For other small homeowners, (1) there is expected to be a lot of disparity in land value in an 85% LVT regime. People in desirable places pay high LVT. People on the outskirts pay close to $0 because their land is valued close to $0 (compared to today, at least). And (2) there could be other social welfare programs (e.g. basic income, or unemployment LVT forbearance) which help those in need.
So the promise is a scenario like 1970s Bronx.
The real answer, which the GOP was able to test the waters on with the SALT cap, is for the federal government to slowly back away from supporting mortgages. 0% down mortgages with rates linked to T-Bills depend on the policy to back mortgages. As the country gets poorer, that is less relevant.
If I accumulate some land, its becoming a forest. For at least as long as my direct descendants live.
You try do something good for the world (put a forest somewhere, do a bit of rewilding), then that area becomes desirable, then some LVT prick comes along and tries take what's yours so some property developer can flatten it to build magnolia shitboxes.
Edit: the LVT people on here remind me of the arseholes who want to replace most of the good public parks in Berlin with housing, lol.
National parks and land trusts are a good thing, but such exemptions ought to be publicly managed since there are societal costs involved.
Look at how much space a mine like Inkai or Husab 2 takes up for what would be typical of expanding the indistry.