Nobel Prize winning biochemist says all biofuels are nonsense
climatesanity.wordpress.com
climatesanity.wordpress.com
Basically, [corn] ethanol is obtained from burning methane, coal, diesel fuel, gasoline, corn kernels, soil and environment. We destroy perhaps as many as 7 units of free energy in the environment and human economy to produce 1 unit of free energy as corn ethanol, and make a few clueless environmentalists happier and a few super rich corporations richer. The story is even worse for switchgrass ethanol.
(As quoted from http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9619 )
An ethanol plant has more outputs than ethanol. Distillers Grain is a major output stream, which is a useful lifestock feed.
The paper, which I have read, counts as energy inputs all the energy required to make ALL of the inputs and takes every step possible to make the largest energy input amount possible.
Ethanol isn't the most efficent process, but the tech is being pushed ahead and the end output is a liquid high energy density fuel which is more useful that some of the energy input into the system.
And yes, I am energy economist iaee.org
He also claimed that for most nuclear power plants, if you covered them and their exclusion zones with solar cells, you'd generate more energy than the plant itself generates.
(Both assertions seem pretty strong. Both were made during the interview at Oxford that was put online yesterday.)
The portability/infrastructure view can be seen by a market based approach. One MMBTU of natural gas delivered at Henry Hub, sells for $3.50 A Barrel of Brent oil sells for $110 a barrel 6 mmbtu’s of Natural gas has the same energy content of a barrel of Brent, or you could buy the energy content of a barrel of oil for $21 with natural gas. The FORM that a unit of energy comes in matters a lot.
Regarding Elon Musk’s claim on nuclear power plants I think there must be an assumption he’s made that I’m not aware of. On it’s face I don’t believe this is true, there likely is an important assumption missing like perhaps every single inch of the site is covered. Also even if the absolute outputs of energy are the same because solar isn’t going to always deliver a steady planed amount of power output, peaker power plants are going to be needed when days are shady etc. changing the economics. The FORM of energy matters, Nuclear power plants run for months at full capacity and when they need to be out of service that is planned ahead of time to occur during times of the year when demand is lower. My job at Enron was to know everything about every Nuclear power plant in the country because there was a lot of money to be made in predicting if one wouldn’t be able to produce.
The compressed air storage investment that PG recently made is all about the timing and form of energy, being able to shift those has a LOT of economics value. PG
However, the major side product of corn based biofules is distillers grain which is animal feed for Cows/pigs. There is enough demand there to actually consume all of the distillers grain produced.
Not at night.
But yes, Corn ethanol is not good for a series of reasons. Other plant based ethanols may not suffer from the same problems.
Ok, I read the article, typical "only oil is good" atitude.
And by the way: efficiency with respect to sunlight doesn't matter because sunlight is free. (enough) free * anything -> free (It matters in respect to other processes)
According to Elon Musk, even if you assume perfectly ideal biofuel production through photosynthesis (which no existing plant is), the amount of land that you'd need to devote to biofuel production to meet current energy needs is similar to what is currently devoted to human agriculture.
By contrast from what I'm reading on Wikipedia the reaction that drives photosynthesis has a theoretical max of 25%. But you only get that efficiency at 1/4 of normal sunlight levels during the day (the rest of the light has to be wasted). We're already well below solar. And then you've got to give some of the energy to the plant for growing. Then you lose energy in the chemical reactions that make a biofuel. And the biofuel goes into an engine. Every one of these steps has a maximum theoretical efficiency that is fairly low. (For instance a gasoline car engine's maximum efficiency is in the 25-30% range.)
If I remember correctly, Elon claimed that biofuel production had a theoretical max of about 0.5% of incident sunlight energy being converted in the end to useful work. (We're a long ways away from this maximum in practice today.)
Soil area to absorption of energy is small, from leaf area to absorption of energy it looks ok.
Efficiency is overrated! Sure, you need soil, etc, but you can have two crops at the same area (or just some kind of grass or other vegetable cover)
And funny how the land usage argument disappears when it's the oil industry that's using arable land http://www.greenpeace.org/canada/en/campaigns/Energy/tarsand...
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There are still problems with any plant-based biofuels, but they're problems with scaling, crop rotation, pesticides, and the current state of the art of ag in countries where sugarcane is grown.
But the energy return of sugarcane ethanol is high enough to make it non-silly.
I can never understand why people trot out this sentiment. Humans are a biological species subject to normal ecological principles. One of those principles is that, in the absence of a limiting factor in our environment, we will grow. If energy availability is removed as a limiting factor, we will grow ("gettin' larger in waist and taste") until it is again. Anyone who pretends otherwise has not stepped outside to notice all the millions/billions of people clamouring for food, clean water, jobs, holidays, new computers, clothes, homes, education, etc etc. Imagining that, unlike every time in the past where human societies have chafed against resource limits and hoped that just a little more would fix everything, this time human needs will finally be satisfied, is the oldest fallacy in the book. It's just not how life works.
You live in a valley full of aurochs, horses, and boars, more than any man could eat. Taking just a fraction of these bountiful riches would give us all the food we could ever need.
Every time I buy a new laptop, I can't imagine how I'll fill up the drive, but I know I will.
No, that's the whole point!
Humans surely cater to farming using oil, and we would be a lot worse without it.
But in the end food came from two sources: energy from the sunlight and CO2 (matter) from the atmosphere. (Well, then we could say we're eating car emissions).
Unless you're converting oil directly into food (let's say carbohydrates), no, all energy from plants comes from solar energy. You could of course have a giant oil powered lamp that produces light and shine that over the crop.
On the other hand: what is stopping us now from combining salt evaporation ponds with sweet water production in e.g. the coastal regions of the Sahara?
Sure, solar is great, except current technology is really bad at using it.
This sounds like the Chinese soda analogy [1] in a different form. The fact that we only need 0.01% doesn't indicate the ease of capturing 0.01% in the form of usable energy.
[1] http://lake.blogs.com/my_weblog/2006/05/the_chinese_sod.html
And yet they still make a profit, and it is still highly rational to do so. Because it turns out 1 Joule of liquid hydrocarbons is more valuable than 7 Joules of methane or coal or sunshine.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LNG_carrier
When used as a portable fuel it is usually just compressed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_process
Generally, it hasn't been very economical to do so, although I wonder what the numbers are now that we've got so much natural gas production in the US.
“… these values even do not take into account that more than 50% of the energy stored in the biofuel had to be invested in order to obtain the biomass (for producing fertilizers and pesticides, for ploughing the fields, for transport) and the chemical conversion into the respective biofuel.” [...] “The production and use of biofuels therefore is not CO2-neutral. In particular, the energy input is very large for the production of bioethanol from wheat or maize, and some scientists doubt that there is a net gain of energy. Certainly the reduction of CO2 release is marginal.”
In real world economics, biofuels are not energy; they are high-density liquid transport fuels. The economics make it clear: e.g., gasoline costs ten times as much as coal, per unit energy. You're paying for the chemistry, not the joules.
It matters very litte in real life, that much of the energy (cheap) is wasted; that much of the energy comes from (cheap, external) sources. If biofuels are viable, they can be seen as a conversion of energy to hydrocarbons: of (comparatively) cheap electricity and methane/hydrogen to expensive liquid fuel. Not as a primary energy source. It's the carbon that's valuable.
Farming machinery can be electric powered. Nitrogen fertilizer can be created from nuclear- or solar- powered hydrogen. And voilà, it is carbon-neutral. Nuclear electricity, solar electricity, hydrogen -- these are only marginally viable fuels (c.f. the world market for EV's; opinions may differ). Converting them to liquid hydrocarbons is a very useful thing.
Somehow, this is hard to get through people's skulls. Liquid hydrocarbons are a really potent energy storage medium with fantastic economics. (Compare a metal tank to Li-ion battery.) So long as we have need of bulldozers and heavy equipment at sites outside of fully established infrastructure, like construction sites, we will have a good use for such fuels. It's not overall efficiency that's important here. It's efficiency in a mobile context.
> Farming machinery can be electric powered. Nitrogen fertilizer can be created from nuclear- or solar- powered hydrogen. And voilà, it is carbon-neutral.
This really bothers me, and it happens all the time. Of course everything in our current infrastructure has a carbon footprint!
Similarly with biofuels, even if we are to genetically engineer more efficient plants to grow fuel, it still must be grown in a remote location, processed, and transported to places with existing established infrastructure.
In comparison, most places where people need energy already have the electric infrastructure to support it. We should be using liquid fuels in cases where it is truly necessary, not just for the short distances and minor wants of most.
you are just arguing that the production of bio fuels is cheap and that hence they are economically viable. obviously you'll make a profit with selling bio fuels, but that's because the market incentives are botched and a lot of the external costs have not been internalized in agriculture. ultimately the production of bio fuels is not ecologically viable - it competes against the food production and requires significant energy for the conversion (as you say) into hydrocarbons.
If biofuels are viable, they can be seen as a conversion of energy to hydrocarbons: of (comparatively) cheap electricity and methane/hydrogen to expensive liquid fuel. Not as a primary energy source. It's the carbon that's valuable.
that doesn't make any sense, because hydrocarbons have a very small intrinsic value - the (most common) usage you derive from hydrocarbons is motion energy. and the most efficient source for motion energy is again the electric motor (which could be powered more efficiently by electricity from solar panels).
* He says the energy input is very large. I say it's reasonable for it to be so, because it's converting a cheap form of energy into a valuable one
* He says it is CO2-intensive because of the large energy inputs. I say this is just a reflection of the whole energy economy being CO2-intensive; that in principle the inputs can be CO2-free, and so biofuels can be CO2-neutral. (And they unique in this aspect; there is no other way to make CO2-neutral hydrocarbons, short of chemically scrubbing CO2 from the atmosphere.)
...we should not grow plants for biofuel production.
Reading between the lines, if we want to run cars on solar power, we should do it with electrics and solar cells, not photosynthesis.
However, we humans already managed to genetically modify them (using simple selection of seeds over the millenia) to optimize plants for nutritional content instead.
It would be interesting to know to what extent human selection and other forms of genetic manipulation could improve the efficiency of photosynthesis in plants to make them viable for biofuels.
After all, large scale agriculture is still much simpler to pull off than the kind of industrial process needed to build solar cells on a large scale.
I would love to see large-scale sustainable agriculture that doesn't require such a staggering amount of resources. There are many smart people working on this problem. Unfortunately I don't see those advances outpacing the advances being made in electricity storage and transport.
I guess the really important point is your second paragraph: As long as there are advances in both the plants and the technology, the plants may simply be unable to catch up.
Solar cells cost something to build - ignored in the article. Using all sorts of minerals and industrial processes, very hard to trace thru our entire economy to get an 'energy budget' and thus a payback. So its easy to call them more efficient, if you don't actually calculate their cost.
Plants 'build' themselves - essentially nanotechnology for free. They can be built over and over again, or the land can be repurposed for food or grazing or parks or whatever. Solar cell farms are heavy infrastructure investments that have to be manufactured, hauled into place, installed, maintained, replaced.
And doesn't require expensive equipment for that.
My money is on that.
It's also really cheap to store energy as heat and we've got two centuries of knowledge around turning heat into mechanical energy.
It's also really easy to apply heat and pressure to most organic material and directly convert long chain hydrocarbons to short chain hydrocarbons.
Also if you can generate steam you can just inject it into the ground and recover the oil in bitumen, your friendly neighbours to the north have like a trillion barrels of it.
If acquiring solar energy through biofuels is less efficient than through photoelectric cells or other means then the market will definitely sort this out (though would not directly account for externalities such as carbon pollution).
The have neither the insentive nor the knowlage to do so.
Electric cars, solar cells are the things that will change the world, not goverment regulation.
what's that got to do with the market? without pricing gas correctly, electric will always be inferior. technology can only help so much - it's a question of fundamental physics of chemical bonds.
The market will figure out if electirc cars are a workable, maybe it want work. Maybe we should have hydrogen cars or maybe something else. Maybe we just have to live with it, use all the oil and only then we will stop. Sure you can add a carbon tax or something but that will at most drag things out (or maybe make the adoption of diffrent cars faster).
Fundamentally the way we will live and how we will produce energy will be guided by markets.
His point was that putting energy into biofuels is an inefficient way to use the suns energy, and then getting it out is also inefficient. He compared the efficiency to solar.
If his numbers are correct - and I see no reason to doubt it - biofuels have to be a dead end.
This does not work with solar. You can produce it but storing and disributing is much, much harder.
> When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
Anyways. His criticisms are all good ones, and yet I can't help but feel like he's missing the big picture- that or he thinks we are just doomed.
In the short to medium term future (5-25years) biofuels are probably not the answer they've been hyped to be. Yet there are still some places where they will still work well, such as any thing that isn't in contact with the grid. These biofuels will be competing with oil that must be drilled through kilometers of ocean and earth, or from injecting massive amounts of steam into the ground... talk about inefficient.
Further, biofuels do not necessarily need to use arable land or potable water.
In particular I'd like to know specifics about reports of "higher efficiency" than should be possible. I wonder if these reports aren't based on efficiency as calculated from creating biomass. One thing that immediately comes to mind, is that perhaps simple circulation and dispersal of light in water can account for increased "surface area" that makes up for the "max efficiency at 20% sunlight" statement.
Compare "natural materials" and "natural ingredients". In the end, it's all made from naturally occurring atoms, right?
If you think about supplying the worlds energy needs using bio-fuel it is a non-starter, and that is basically what the editorial says. Converting incident sunlight into useful energy through existing photo synthesis processes is inefficient and does a great harm in terms of food production.
If you think of it as a way of converting sunlight into something that pre-existing infrastructure can use (fuels) that can be justified on the expense of swapping out the existing infrastructure.
Big picture -> move everything to electricity and gas, since those two forms of energy are pretty readily convertible into the other forms we need.
Intermediate points -> you need a petroleum fuel cycle while you're converting everything else.
http://biomassmagazine.com/articles/7341/cutting-edge-bioene...
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201200218/pd...
What people are still interested in is 2nd gen - converting inedible biomass (mainly cellulose) into liquid fuel - and 3rd gen - growing algae, which have all sorts of cool properties. In theory, you can engineer the algae to produce a usable fuel directly. In practice, it's still proving tricky.
The real problem is that you compete with food crops and water for fertile land, or destroy native forests.
Corn grown in Iowa could feed 2 United States. So we make all sorts of other things out of it, or the govt pays folks (me for instance) to NOT grow corn and keep the price up.
At this point in history, with our current distribution system, biofuels can make money. In the future they will become more efficient, perhaps orders of magnitude more in ways we haven't thought of yet (oil-drop lenses on the leaves; kelp that fills its pods directly with waxy carbohydrate films; seeds that can be eaten OR converted to fuel etc).
The dumb thing would be to stop innovating now, because of FUD about imaginary issues.
Maybe in the US the situation is not clear because you have vast plains so it doesn't matter if you cover the entire surface with corn, but here in Brazil, my state vanished with an entire forest just for sugar cane and soy crops. Google "Atlantic Forest".
And it's long been practice to make alcoholic substances toxic if they're not intended for human consumption so that they avoid regulations and taxes that apply to alcoholic beverages.
Edit: Should have read @hcarvalhoalves's comment. ^^;;
"Modern agriculture is the process of converting hydrocarbons to carbohydrates."
In other words, the way we feed the large human population, is by leveraging a diminishing supply of fossil fuels to grow food. Replacing fossil fuels with food in that equation doesn't really work; we need to think of something else.
Not because making biofuel is impossible, but because one of the main uses for fuel would be to make food -- and making food and making biofuel is in direct competition for resources.
Supporting evidence: aggressive marketing of "probiotic" supplements
Alternatives have only just begun being explored. Innovation in this area are very likely to surprise that chemist. E.g. steam from room-temperature water posted on HN today: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4824205
Bioengineered plants may work any way we can imagine, not just the way an oil-industry chemist imagines.
PS. Adding Nobel Prize to someone's argument doesn't have the gravitas as perhaps it once had. I think Linus Pauling and vitamin C diminished that.