'How to greenwash': propane industry tries to rebrand fuel as renewable | Hacker News Reader

'How to greenwash': propane industry tries to rebrand fuel as renewable

theguardian.com

20 pointsBrajeshwar8 comments

Don’t we have a name for that already - biofuel?

Wikipedia says yes [1], research says no [2].

In any case it seems both better than regular fuels and worse than regular renewable energy sources.

[1]: “Biofuels (and bioenergy in general) are regarded as a renewable energy source”, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biofuel

[2]: “Energy accounting method showed quantitatively that biofuels are not renewable energy sources.”, http://www.globalbioenergy.org/uploads/media/0710_Ortega_et_...

That's just a fraction of the total for the industry. The vast majority still comes from refineries. That's the greenwashing part, industry trying to muddle the water, as the direct quotes show. On biofuel, changes in land use associated with agriculture make for quite a bad impact as well.

But, as the article says, it's a byproduct of refining, not the reason for the refining, right?

That means the propane will be released and burnt whether people buy it or not. It's better for the environment to use it for a productive purpose rather than flare it off uselessly at the refinery or NG well.

And if we ever do reduce production of oil and natural gas, then a bigger share of propane would be biofuel.

> Energy accounting method showed quantitatively that biofuels are not renewable energy sources

That's essentially the same as the argument that electric cars aren't green because they're charged from a grid powered by non-renewable sources.

It's true, as long as the energy input to either system comes from non-renewable sources, neither is really green. But it's not inevitable.

That paper also says the energy yield ratio for biofuels is around 1.5, so it should be possible to make closed loop, renewable production of biofuels using biofuels as energy input.

So the news here isn't very interesting. They had a dumb marketing idea and didn't implement it (because it was dumb). But read the article anyway just for the transcript of the meeting that leaked. It reads like a comedy skit.

I agree. This is really just a really bad marketing idea. Here was the key quote from the article for me:

  “Twenty-five percent [of people consider] natural gas to be renewable, in this millennial and gen Z bucket,”
  “We can attach to that for propane.”

I had always wondered what had happened to Hank Hill from Strickland Propane.

That's even better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Planet_Energy

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