Biofuels Policy, a Mainstay of American Agriculture, a Failure for the Climate | Hacker News Reader

Biofuels Policy, a Mainstay of American Agriculture, a Failure for the Climate

insideclimatenews.org

84 pointsrntn75 comments

The easiest fix might be pushing for faster adoption of BEVs. Nobody can easily take subsidies away from farmers.

BEV - Battery Electric Vehicle

(just in case it's not obvious)

Are you aware that by having agriculture directly integrated inro the fuel/electricity market, you have ai compete directly against people for basic survival neccssities?

Wouldn’t it technically be “the use of AI complete directly…” a well-functioning market would easily solve this by prioritizing the basic survival needs over what AI use provides.

> “ a well-functioning market would easily solve this by prioritizing the basic survival needs over what AI use provides.”

In fiction. What you’re saying is in a fictional scenario designed to benefit humans, this would happen. What in the history of this earth would make you believe that fiction though?

You might be replying to the wrong message; I was just providing the acronym's definition.

I would be content to settle for carbon-neutral synthetic gasoline. It is politically viable. But the price needs to be lower. The startup Prometheus is working on this.

Carbon-neutral synthetic gasoline is and will be too expensive to work, apart from small niche cases. This makes it politically unviable.

We're going to have almost universal BEV adoption before the carbon avoidance cost of synthetic gasoline becomes attractive.

The tail of gasoline cars will be long. "Beater" gas cars will be around for decades. I will opine just on the USA: it has to be solved from the top-down with 0 inconvenience to average people. If you synthesize gasoline with abundant nuclear or solar power, I think it could be cost-competitive with old-fashioned crude oil.

BEV are not a serious climate solution unless you are talking about ebikes. BEV also contribute a load of pollution to waterways via tire wear. ebikes are cheaper to purchase and make a significant change.

They're not a panacea, but they're better than gas/petrol/diesel (or biofuel) cars across the board. Emissions have dropped and air quality has measurably improved in places with high BEV adoption, like Norway and China.

Even the weight thing is a bit of a red herring: if we really cared about that, we should restrict car weights across the board. (Few BEVs clock in at over 2T, while virtually every F-150 style truck does.)

Last time I checked, a Tesla 3 (a small car by NA standards) weighted 1800kg. That's twice the weight of my 1987 VW Jetta and very close to that 2T you mention. The weight issue is real; it affects the driving dynamics and makes the energy problem worse in many ways.

1987 is not a valid comparison for many reasons. Pick modern premium sedans (eg bmw) as a comparison and you’ll see it isn’t that different.

Modern cars are generally overweight. A 1987 BMW 325 weighted 1200kg. Considering the advances of materials science and digital technology, weight should have gone down, not up. What's the daily purpose of that extra 600kg, other than protecting against an eventual collision with a monstruous pickup?

Safety arms race of vehicle size. We would all be better off collectively with smaller vehicles, imo.

Colliding with 1t of car is similarly deadly as with 2t of car. Traffic fatalities have gone way down in the past forty years.

BEVs are not that much heavier than comparable ICEs. All modern cars are too big and too heavy. From an energy standpoint weight is less of a problem for electric cars because they can recuperate.

90M light vehicles are sold globally every year. As long as consumers demand cars, BEVs are the most climate friendly cars to sell them. Anyone saying “don’t buy cars!” is living a pipe dream.

China is going to build as many EVs as the world can consume.

(don’t disagree that we should build and sell as manly electric bikes as possible, but they are not a replacement for vehicles in many cases)

Why not both? Ebikes are obviously highly useful in cities, but not so much for longer distances in the countryside, also problematic in winter up north. There will always be need for private car ownership for areas that can't be effectively served by public transport (and obviously public transport itself should also be electric powered).

Just electrify everything and let people choose what mode of transport fits their needs and wallet. I barely use my car in city, but absolutely need it to visit my relatives who do not live within reach of public transport.

Because resources are finite. Subsisdies and household income invested in Electric cars would have a much greater benefit if put towards ebikes. Most car trips are short and could be replaced with ebike trips (and that's without any infrastructure change). Leave long trips to gas cars that already exist.

For public transit, rail should be electrified because it has lower maintenance requirements and better acceleration. Trolley busses are great for similar reasons (and noise). Battery busses are a horrible idea, expensive and not yet reliable. Transit agencies are replacing diesel busses with battery because of lower emissions, and at the same time reducing frequency of service, making public transit less usable and less used -- encouraging personal vehicle use.

Most car trips could be replaced with ebike trips, but the majority of distance travelled (and thus, roughly, carbon emitted) can't. 80% of the distance driven is with trips >10 km, 70% of the distance driven already at >20 km. There are people doing these trips on E-Bikes daily, but even with great infrastructure they'll remain a small proportion of the modal split (Data from Germany, MiD, 2017). The long(er) trips are the majority of the problem, as the rest are, well, short.

Most rail should be powered by overhead electricity, but for short- to medium-term gains BEMUs are also great, with most European train manufacturers not building DMUs anymore. They'll hopefully also come down in price, as this first generation is really expensive.

I know that the US (and Canada) has issues with battery busses, but in (western) Europe, they work great (but currently still a tad too expensive). Trolley busses are even more expensive (similar if not higher purchasing cost, much higher infrastructure cost, slightly less energy usage) and require a whole lengthy political process to deploy, while battery busses can be deployed in a few months.

BEVs are the only feasible solution for replacing a large part, if not most, of the emissions from cars. Even in countries with a great countrywide transit network and reasonable bike infrastructure (Germany), 73% of passenger-kilometers are traveled by car (MiD 2023, 19% by transit, 4% by bike, 4% by walking), down from 80% in 2002. There is no way to much more than double transit usage in the next 15-20 years. And the situation is much worse in e.g. the USA where little good transit exists, where good infrastructure exists operations suck, building transit is astoundingly expensive, land developmental patterns run contra feasible attractive transit and transit agencies seem unable to learn anything from outside the US (in operations, construction, planning, ...).

This is not to say that anti-car policies (and pro-walking/biking/transit) policies shouldn't be implemented and are in many cases preferable compared to subsidizing BEVs, but their potential in the short- to medium-term for carbon reduction is quite limited.

Ebikes might have more positive impact, but that doesn't matter unless you can convince a critical mass of people to use them instead of their cars. I say this as someone who thinks ebikes are cool, but that's absolutely not going to happen in any significant way at least in the US. Replacing a gas car with an ebike requires a significant shift in your lifestyle, which most people either can't or don't want to do. The benefit of a BEV is that you can mostly use it exactly like you use the gas car you already have, with some added benefit of being able to "refuel" it at home while you sleep. Changes that people actually adopt are at the end of the day the most impactful ones.

This has been obvious for anyone doing the basic math since the beginning.

It was great for farmers though.

It was great for large investor backed farmers who bought out their neighbors via debt, leased expensive John Deere equipment via debt, and are now trapped.

iirc it is scientifically possible to take corn stover and convert it to bioethanol with net negative carbon emissions.

There was a bunch of activity in the 2000s and 2010s trying and failing to do this commercially.

Never say never but for ground transport BEVs seem like they will eat the market well before anyone gets the technology working.

BEVs powered by PV use two orders of magnitude less land than ICEVs burning biofuels.

Biofuels are just incredibly land (and water) hungry. In the post fossil fuel age, biofuels will be reserved for special applications, if that (and for providing carbonaceous feedstocks for the organic chemical industry.)

> use two orders of magnitude less land

not if you use stover and cob. in those cases, you use net zero new land (you were growing kernels anyways)

Using a process that no one is using. Ethanol from cellulose failed.

Clearly. Worth asking why though, if it wasn't scientific (assuming my recollection is correct). Is it because of patents? Lost knowledge? Better alternative? Subtle engineering issue?

It was a technical failure, I believe. It was too difficult to hydrolyze cellulose and hemicellulose efficiently into a mixture that would allow enzymatic conversion to ethanol. Enzymes are easily poisoned and the mixture is more complex than what one gets from starch (which is just polymerized glucose.)

There is one success story, in Brazil.

https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/75/7/22/2848574/Wh...

Conversion of cellulosic biomass into chemicals other than ethanol might be the better route to take, particularly if green hydrogen can be used to boost the yield. Virent (which was bought out by an oil company) has a process for doing this. It would yield even more fuel per unit of biomass than conversion to ethanol, as potentially all the carbon can end up in the fuel. The fuel could also be drop-in replacement for existing hydrocarbon fuels. But there's not much interest in this as long as oil is still being used.

again i recall it wasnt technical, but i dont recall where i heard that (i could be wrong). they might also not have been doing enzymes, it might have been orgsnismal. do you have specific knowledge that this effort failed for technical reasons?

yes I'm aware. in that era, which was last i tracked this field, BP had a pilot plant that reached commercial and greenhouse breakeven, but then they lost the deepwater horizon case and scuttled their biofuels research, I'd be surprised if no one caught up. did no one catch up?

this is as much evidence as i can find on the internet that this was a thing, i cant remember where i heard that it was breakeven:

> BP sought to experiment with ways to turn corncobs, sugarcane and other agricultural waste into biofuel

https://www.nola.com/news/business/bp-shutters-biofuel-plant...

My thought is if the plant was on track to success but was killed by corporate politics somebody else would have tried again. The demand for carbon-neutral liquid fuels isn’t going away; long-range shipping and aviation aren’t going to run on batteries.

> somebody else would have tried again.

Yes. I would think that too. But the market isn't efficient, VCS are definitely not efficient, and it takes a lot of capital to spin up a factory, and the number of qualified people to run this factory is probably in the hundreds worldwide. Also ppl who worked on it in the past might be burned out, or not have access to key IP... Hundreds of things could get in the way

‘Demand’ in this sense is driven by economics + politics.

Nothing is going to beat fossil fuels on pure economics, so then we’re left with what political pressure will be applied and how much to make other options economic enough.

Biofuels are so marginal, it’s unlikely they’re going to ‘win’ as they would require exceptional political pressure and excluding a lot of other options.

There are people who use pyrolysis to turn left over biomass to biochar which can then be added to the soil and, depending on your energy use for other things, can turn the process carbon net negative. It is a roundabout way to sequester carbon though as you need to consider the opportunity cost of doing other things with the land (like leaving it for nature to take over and sequester carbon that way).

It's always worth being sceptical about some of these claims about processes magically being carbon net negative since cleaning up the atmosphere might not actually be what's paying the bills leading to inherent conflicts between selling a product (ethanol) and doing an environmental service. Switching to EVs will allow you to use much less land to fuel the cars with wind or solar energy and then the leftover land can be used for carbon sequestration and rewilding/biodiversity projects where that's the sole focus of the operation.

Yes

Deeper topsoil is a good way to sequester carbon.

Buffer maybe. Like forests, actual sequestration (beyond an initial ‘loading’ amount) isn’t a thing long term.

No word about cutting down whole rain forests (ie on Borneo or mainland Malaysia) just to have more biofuels? I've seen those endless fields of that palm monoculture where almost nothing else lives from above and in person, and also how proper rain forest next to it looks like, it was a very depressing view.

The palm plantations in Malaysia and Indonesia are targeted at human consumption - palm oil is the primary cheap cooking oil across Asia, and demand is high.

Paraguay and Brazil are where a significant portion of plantation farming is targeted at biofuels.

"Deforestation" is also known as economic development, when someone is not trying to disparage a third world country. Malaysia and Indonedia, with their relatively stable politics and governance, gained a lot of FDI in the 1970's and started developing rapidly. Rainforests were cleared, true, and initially the land was planted with rubber, because that's was the most profitable crop that grows well in this climate. Then rubber price crashed, so the farmers switched to oil palm, the next most profitable crop.

There is no intrinsic link between biofuel and deforestation. If coffee is the most profitable crop, then you'd see an endless sea of coffee plantations in Malaysia. Would you want to ban coffee then? Okay you banned coffee, so cocoa now is the most profitable crop, so you banned cocoa. Now pineapple is the most profitable crop, so forth and so on.

The logical conclusion is that when you try to "save the forest", you are saying that a country has no sovereignty in developing its economy and exploiting its resource to enrich its citizen. "You should stay poor, because I say so".

Isn't a large part of ethanol it's use as a fuel additive that it boosts octane and is relatively cheap? Compared to leaded gasoline it seems very "green".

Most crops beyond sugarcane in tropical areas lack biomass output high enough to compensate the need for fossil fuel inputs and land use emissions.

Leaded gasoline hasn't been a thing for decades now.

Except in general aviation, where lead free alternatives are just coming out of the approval pipeline.

You literally proved Forge36's point. Ethanol is the replacement for lead in gasoline.

Unleaded gasoline was unleaded long before ethanol was added. So, no, I didn't prove his point.

The history of ethanol in gas is quiet old.

Per https://www.eia.gov/kids/history-of-energy/timelines/ethanol...

It looks like it usage of ethanol as an additive started increasing around the same time lead was being phased out.

Turning solar power into something we use to destroy the environment doesn't strike me as very "green" at all. Quite the opposite. I can't imagine it's a very efficient use of money, either.

Granted, we will likely always need to do this, but where was the need at this absurd scale? Most of our heavy industry runs on diesel anyway.

It goes full circle: where does the carbon in the biofuel come from? The plant. Where does the carbon in the plant come from? The air. This is why biofuels are carbon neutral in theory at least. There is of course loss in process like in most things.

In terms of a use of money it is a good way to subsidize the american corn farmer. Whether you believe that is worthwhile depends on your views of WWIII.

The devil is in the details. Where did the land used to plant it came from? What was there before? Deforestation emits a lot of CO2. Fertilizer needs fossil fuels to be manufactured, tractors and harvesters burn diesel, et cetera.

We could also just feed the food to people who want to kill us and maybe they'll want to kill us less.

The perfidious outcomes of viewing climate change as a "business opportunity" rather than an urgent crises is making things worse

There are the obvious effects outlined here

There is also an opportunity cost. Bad policy displaced good policy

We see something similar with planting trees in New Zealand. Huge land area planted out with pine trees, allowing polluters to tick a box, take good productive land out of use, impoverish the people living around it, and in the end they burn

What a waste

The part that is useful is there's strategic benefit to surplus food production, and it's an outlet for surplus food.

The sensible way to do biofuel is biogas from cattle. It doesn't slot so neatly into the car network (car needs to be modified to have a gas tank (why the heck do you call petrol gas, you nation of fools??)), but actually lowers the climate footprint of cattle farming even before considering the petrol that would be burnt instead of it: Methane is a potent greenhouse gas and eventually burns into CO2 in the atmosphere, so it's better to burn it in an ICE.

Dairy farmers would never do this. The cost of LNG and methane are far, far too low to justify the costs of digestors, collection and infrastructure. Gasses are waste products that are usually vented to the atmosphere, even in the oil industry. They're dirt cheap.

I worked on a project to make a useful biomass from chicken shit. In the end, after years of research and viable product, it was axed because the upfront costs would always be too high for chicken farmers to adopt it.

The only way to get dairy ops on board would be to mandate it with regulation and then subsidize it. Cattle and dairy ops are massive welfare queens who resist change in every way they can, unless that change is more welfare.

We can't even get landfills to stop leaking/venting methane. No chance we get dairy ops to build methane capture systems.

What I meant was we should collect methane to use as fuel in cars. It happens a bunch here in Finland, and driving a biogas car is totally feasible. At some point the government stopped incentivising biogas refueling stations in favour of foreign dependency-riddled and rare earth metal-laden electric cars, which sucks a lot. I think it's pretty significant that you can make an old car basically carbon neutral, instead of buying a Chinese child labour spyware battery on wheels.

Again, American dairy farmers would never adopt this without massive subsidies. Even then they would fight it like they do every environmental regulation(of which there aren't many). If they can't increase profits they will not do it.

Finland is not the US. Americans will try everything else before doing what other countries do because we believe we are different/exceptional.

I agree it's a good idea. It just isn't feasible in the United States for a variety of reasons.

Dairy-based biogas "RNG" is done at scale in the United States already, there are hundreds of large anaerobic digesters across the country turning cow waste into biogas

I've had to build fire & gas detection systems for ~15 diary farm biogas operations in the last two years. It isn't even in our usual list of clients to work with, we just happened to have an oilfield client pass our name around and got calls for these systems a year or two later.

If our tiny company is getting requested to bid on life safety systems for biogas operations it must be a lot bigger of an industry than you believe it to be.

Because just about every country is greenwashing "Energy Security" as "Alternative Energy".

Countries that are supporting BEVs are those countries that have slip capacity to other fuels (renewable AND coal) and rare earth processing, just like those pushing for Hydrogen are those with alternative sourcing supply chains for biofuels and coal, those pushing for continued ONG usage have plenty of access to refining capacity, and those continuing to push for biofuels have the ethanol processing capacity.

The brutal reality is large countries can eat the financial and humanitarian cost of climate change easily, but those worst affected live in countries that cannot. There is a moral case to be made for multilateral climate engagement, but NatSec will always trump morality.

Duh. It was never meant to actually be good for the climate. We USians just wanted to point more subsidy money domestically (particular at farmers, the target for virtually every non-kinetic subsidy for decades) instead of using MBTE, which was IIRC mostly of Canadian manufacture.

Ask ChatGPT what would happen if all ethanol corn farmland were replace by solar panels. Then ask about agrosolar

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43817787

Instead, why don't you tell us what your point actually is?

Over 1.6% of the contiguous USA is dedicated to corn ethanol. If that land were replaced by solar, at 20% capacity, it could produce 10.8 PWh of electricity. That’s two and a half times the total amount of electricity that the US currently produces per year. Biofuels produce the equivalent of ~ 0.4 PWh.

1.5% of land area dedicated to solar can produce enough to meet all global energy needs (not just electricity), according to this article. https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01754-4

His point is probably we'd save 99.5% of the land that is going to make bioethanol.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com