I always thought it pretty obvious that burning carbon based chemicals produces CO2. Just because the carbon based chemicals are fom plants that died a couple of months ago rather than plants that died a couple of ages ago doesnt make that much difference.

Biofuel from would-be-food cropland is not the only possible production method ever. Is there room around this paper's complaints for something like vat algae production?

I should note that CO2 and food production criticisms leave out the terrorism (or, "terr'ism", as some over here pronounce it) prices. It may be much less militarily expensive for the US to secure and produce ethanol itself. (Although I favor trade with South America, and hope we don't end up having to one day chant "no blood for sugar-cane juice".)

It took 18 years for the US to accept Global Warming / Climate Change after Europe decided it was proved in (about 1990). It only took 5 years for them to understand why growing biofuels isn't really a good idea after Europe showed that. At this rate, the may actually get ahead of the game soon. Yay!

... then you'd probably be a lot better off. It's actually the insistance of US Biofuel makers in using Corn (which is horredously hard to convert into Ethanol) rather than, say, Sugar (which is easier, not easy, but easier).

But that's what you get when you have a massive farming lobby that insists people buy their corn.

As always you can "fix" figures by specifying what you measure ... for example how come Brazil has managed to go solve this problem and the US has not?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_Brazil

Of Particular interest is the section "Comparison with the United States" which contains the real jem;

"The fundamental issue is that the energy balance of ethanol produced from Corn is negative. It is necessary approximately 1 joule of source energy (Fossil Fuel, Electricity, etc...) to produce 0,7 joules worth of Ethanol energy, given current technology. In other words, Corn ethanol is not viable as a source of energy as it wastes more than it generates. Sugar Cane ethanol, on the other hand, after 3 decades of reasearch, have reached 1 to 8 joules of energy production balance, that is, 1 joule is spent to produce 8 joules worth of ethanol energy."

Since when is the US responsible for feeding the world? Seriously.

I noticed the article does not include the reduction of greenhouse gasses caused by not using gasoline in cars? That should be considered (although I don't know the numbers)

A recent article I read about the switchgrass use suggested that there is no need to remove existing crops in order to grow it. It is hardy and can grow just about anywhere, including next to existing crops...

All methods of energy production have their drawbacks. Real work to make processes more efficient change the equations over time. Like burning lignin to generate some of the energy needed in ethanol production.

But even if farming for ethanol releases CO2, so does farming for corn, or sugar cane, or rice. The transition to biofuel will obviously require some upfront cost, but the payoff in the long run is that you set up a renewable system of converting the Sun's energy for powering our lives.

We can keep burning coal and oil. Or we can move to a system that only releases the CO2 we can capture through farming.

There used to be a lot more CO2 in our atmosphere, before green things started living here. Burning coal and oil keeps us marching in that direction. Switching to biofuels stops that march.

A lot of work is yet to be done before biofuels are ready for primetime. We should definitely have more public education on the matter. But solar and wind are from ready to handle our energy requirements too.

"biofuel systems seem to be more effective at smaller scales"

No, that's not the case. To quote the article:

"Because existing land uses *already* provide carbon benefits in storage and sequestration ... dedicating land to biofuels can potentially reduce greenhouse gases only if doing so *increases* the carbon benefit of land."

So if you have a spot of land that has trees, shrubbery, crops, or what-have-you, the Bio-Fuel crops you plant must sequester *more* carbon than the original plant life did in order to provide any benefit. It doesn't have anything to do with the industry surrounding the conversion of the biomass into fuel.

are made from waste products or from weed grown on marginal land.

Trying to get petrol from corn (which requires a lot of energy in the cultivation to grow) is damn stupid, but the corn growers in the US like their pork.

How many idiots post here...

A few things to ponder:

1) Does the US have the technology to produce all of it's electricity carbon free? Yes! We've had it for the last 60 years. It's called nuclear power.

2) Does large scale wind power farms FUCK up the view of nature? Yes! There is one about 20 miles off one of the highways I travel. Thirty miles of wind turbines make power lines look positively insignificant. And pretty.

3) Why does the US insist on (trying to) use corn for ethanol? Because the land here is VERY suited to growing corn, but not very suited at all for growing sugar. Why do you think places like Brazil are known for sugar exports, but not the US?

4) Is using the primary food crop for the WORLD to make fuel a good idea??? Uhm, NO! The primary impact won't be felt in the US. It will be felt in all those countries that import US food stuffs (look it up. There are a LOT of them). It's not nice, but it is true: The US will still have all the food they need. The rest of the world will suffer though. Dependency on oil sucks. Dependency on basic food stuffs is REALLY bad.

5) Should the US invest in more non carbon based energy production? Of course! The real bitch is developing alternative systems that are actually cost effective. As the price of oil goes up, there will be more and more cost effective solutions out there. Not to mention, as the alternative systems mature, they will become more and more cost effective in there own right. The transition WILL happen. It's just a question of time. Some of us think a free market will time it better than a government mandate. Of course, some of use have actually looked at the majority of government programs that were an abject failure and recognized them for what they are.

All this US harping on ethanol from maize etc has always puzzled me. As well as oil, what else does Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states have lots of? Answer: sunshine. If they expanded their reverse-osmosis extraction of fresh water from the Gulf and the Red Sea, they could grow an awful lot of sugar cane. Brazil knows how to efficiently distill ethanol from sucrose.

So when the oil runs out, countries with seasides and hot deserts could still be the major energy suppliers. Surely it would take a long time before it made the sea shores too salty? OK, I don't have the data to say if this would be viable, but it's surely worth some research?

"Since when is the US responsible for feeding the world? Seriously."

Seriously? The US isn't responsible (as in 'obliged') but they are *responsible* (as in, 'foreigners have imported a lot of US-grown food in the past').

If the US has less food to trade to foreigners (because it's being brewed up into SUV-juice) then it follows that foreigners will have to grow their own to make up the difference (or starve, but that's generally not a good policy option to adopt). Furthermore, if the food that foreigners now grow (to replace the US imports they can no longer get) comes from newly cleared land then it is reasonable to count the resultant CO2 emissions as part of the 'whole system' cost for the decision to devote Iowan corn to SUV-juice rather than exporting it for tortilla flour or whatever.

It's not America's *fault* that foreigners clear forests or drain peat bogs to grow food, but it's an unintended consequence of the biofuels policy the US has adopted.

Regards

Luke

There are more intelligent carbon capture methods available than simply pumping gas into the ground. One that will have a pilot plant running the near future is Skyonic's SkyMine, which uses the heat energy available in a smoke stack to convert the CO2 into CaCO3 (calcium carbonate aka baking soda). The baking soda can then be injected back into a well, where it (unlike a gas) will stay.

http://skyonic.com/Press%20Release.php

Seems much of the complaint is over converting food crop land or converting non-farming land. The solution is to convert to switchgrass all those 1-acre ChemGreen lawns in the McMansion subdivisions that keep popping up everywhere in the US. Nobody lets their kids out to play in those neighborhoods anyway, and they could get them 'mowed' for free by whatever business collects the switchgrass for fuel...possibly receiving fuel credits in return. All you have to do is convince them it's an *upscale* landscaping option...perhaps charge them 10k to have it installed when the house is built..

People in developing nations are largely involved in subsistence agriculture, they grow food for themselves and then sell the excess... High food prices would benefit such people wouldn't they? To the detriment of non-food producing fatso's who need to lose weight anyhow..

Regarding energy balance, hydrogen takes more energy to produce than is contained within it, so the hydrogen economy is out, when the oil runs short we'll have to work with an energy deficit.

Looks like bio-fuels won't save the planet.. :(

...but they will get the muzzo's off our backs. :)

"2) Does large scale wind power farms FUCK up the view of nature? Yes! There is one about 20 miles off one of the highways I travel. Thirty miles of wind turbines make power lines look positively insignificant. And pretty."

I simply can't understand this position. I've actually stopped my car to get out and watch the majestic sight of a wind turbine in motion - it's certainly not something I've ever done for a transmission line. I've seen windfarms in deserts, I've seen them on moorland, I've seen them in farmland, I've seen them on hills, I've seen them in forests. I've never seen one that I considered uglier than the transmission pylons that connect it to the grid. (And there are a hell of a lot more transmission pylons about).

...you may just get it.

The law of unintended consequences. Applies to many things.

Stated another way: "Ooops".

1st, most cellulostic ethanol crop will NOT be grown on usable farm land. That's the fucking point! Making ethanol from things that grow well wehre food does not. We have millions of acres of land that we can't grow food on, but certain weeds and grasses thrive on. We can also make it from wood byproducts that most considder waste products. It can also be made from felling trees that would otherwise naturally fall and degrade releasing their CO2 back into the atmosphere anyway.

2nd, there's no "releaseing" stored CO2 when we clear land. Yes, CO2 will be made once we convert the plants to ethanol and then burn it, but new plants growing in their place reclaim that influx. Pretty Obvious stated "Just because the carbon based chemicals are fom plants that died a couple of months ago rather than plants that died a couple of ages ago doesnt make that much difference." Well, actually it's ALL the difference. We burn ethanol from plants, which makles more plants, which gets burned again. Hence RENEWABLE fuel. Burning the oil in the ground makes CO2, and yes, plants reclaim some of that, but those plants die and release their CO2 back again anyway as part of normal biodegrading cycles. It takes millkions of years to put that CO2 back underground, and it was CO2 that wasn't part of the system recently and therefore 100% adds to the system. Some CO2 is added to the system when we clear a lot of bio matter, but somewhere else we're growing more to compensate. We can't cut it all down at once because it would take a few years to regrow it... it will be a CYCLE.

3, celulostic ethanol is not a myth. It exists TODAY. See this article: http://arstechnica.com/journals/science.ars/2008/02/12/cellulosic-ethanol-makes-its-racing-debut. It's being produced. It does exist. A plant in Georgia will open soon (see http://www.renewableenergyaccess.com/rea/news/story?id=47371) and when running at full capacity will be making ethanol for about $1 per gallon.

4, ethanol from starch (corn) is bad. The energy required to make it is nearly equal to what is acquired from it. Unless we can come up with a way of making it using free renewable energy, it's pointless to try. If we DO make it using 100% renewable energy, whell then why the fuck wouldn't we just send that energy as electricity to the car's batteries, which gets near 60% return vs using an ICE at 35-40% efficiency...

5, ethanol from sugars, (sugarbeets, cane, etc) is much better than corn, higher yilds per acre, higher yield per bushel, and lower cost per acre, but it requires high grade soils, rotation, and is suceptibale to climate conditions and growing days. It also still produces less ethanol per acre per year than cellulosic processing.

6, celulosic plants and fungus grow in water too. Ocean water. This also helps clean toxins from the ocean water, a double good effect. We have a whole lot of ocean we can grow fungus and plants on without impacting food supplies at all, and it can help the ocean to boot? Sign us up! Foriegn nations are experimenting with methods for growing and harvesting massive crops just like this.

7, we won't be powering cars on ethanol in place of gas. We'll be using ethnol in the future only as a SUPLEMENT to plug-in electric driven vehicles. You only need to burn fuel when the battery is low or on long trips. Power can be generated centrally and run over super conducting lines from clean generating facilities run by wind in the north, solar in the west, water most places, coastal tide power, and goe thermal as well. With investment, it is possible to run almost everything off of 100% renewable carbonless power. We only need fuel for when we are not near a power source.

8, "clean coal" is NOT an answer. It's a horroble polluting product. Sure, it's less polluting, but it still releases just as much CO2. We can scrub the CO2 out of the system to a limited extent instead of releasing it to the air, but not at an economical cost compared to other 100% renewable sources... and doing so completely destroys a local body of water to do it. Yes, it;s better than regular coal, yes we can reduce it's carbon output by 50-70%, but it costs more than solar or wind, still pollutes, and is still not renewable. Do the math, it;s bad.

9, bio diesel, OK, so pumping certain gasses into a lake filled with a fungus allows the fungus to convert it into a form of diesel fuel. How many lakes will it take to do this for just the population of California? more than we have in the total landmass of the USA. It also means we loose that lake as a source of fresh water, which is another resource in short supply. Bad idea...

The real scoop: We need solar, wind, water, and geo-thermal power expansion. We need investment in battery tech, CVT transmissions, superconducting grid infrastructure, etc. We need to shift more people to remote work sites (from home where possible, segmented small office space where not). We need a better commuting system, lots more tele-commuting, tighter environmental codes, tighter building codes. It's going to cots money. Lots of money. It's going to be cheaper than sealing Florida in a wall to keep it from sinking into the ocean, and it's going to be cheaper than the $10 per gallon we'll be paying by 2020.

If you're buring a biofuel, you're not burning a fossil fuel which would have previously been burnt. Therefore carbon is staying locked up in the ground rather than in the atmosphere causing global warming.

America came in thought, "if we're not burning fossil fuels we don't have to start as many wars in the middle east", so they are making it, but the same amount of fossil fuels are still being released. When fossil fuel "production" slows in the next few years, replacing it with something which has to be re-newed each year makes it a finite resource, which should spur efficiency in either vehicles or production methods.

This report seems to think that to get enough corn they're going to bulldoze trees. Non-edible crops which can grow in areas which are not currently habitable can be used. Farm cactus in the desert, etc. The yields probably won't be great but you're not destroying anything

I've had this same discussion before in the XP v Linux crowd. (linux is the cumbersome, 'better' product, like green energy)

It'll happen when running XP, I mean Vista (I mean oil/coal energy) is more of a hassle than the alternative. In the meantime feel free to dual boot.

So there are - apart from G.Brown's obsession with tax and currently doing it in the name of saving the planet - no easy answers?

That must be a real blow to certain sections of the 'green' movement.

If we don't use corn, sawgrass, daffodils or petunias as a substitute for oil - oh my God! Whatever are we going to do?

Well, we're going to have to be more inventive - something the United States used to be good at.

"1) Does the US have the technology to produce all of it's electricity carbon free? Yes! We've had it for the last 60 years. It's called nuclear power."

So instead of wrecking the atmosphere with carbon, we have to dispose of lots of lovely radioactive spent fuel with a half life measured in millenia. Sweet!

Where do you propose to put it, exactly? In the oceans? Underground? Shoot it into space? Use it to turn countries we don't like into radioactive wastelands? Throw 55-gallon drums of the shit off the back of a truck in parts of the country where people are too disadvantaged and beaten down to fight back? Load it up on a ship and hope someone, somewhere, will allow it to dock and take it off our hands?

Swapping one harmful by-product for another is NOT a solution, unless of course you subscribe to the myopic "carbon bad, reduce CO2 at all costs" mindset so many "environmentalists" have.

"2) Does large scale wind power farms FUCK up the view of nature? Yes!"

No more so than anything else we build does.

Besides, given a choice between fucking up the *view* of nature, or actually fucking up nature itself by spewing CO2 or spent uranium all over it, I'll take the compromised view, thanks. I can always position myself so that the wind farm isn't spoiling my view, but I can't position myself on another planet with breathable air and non-radioactive ground.

During the global warming debate, several of the "scientists" arguing against Global Warming were later found to be funded by the large oil companies.

Reminds me of the smoking debate of years past when big tobacco funded several studies showing smoking good for your health.

This also reminds me of the University of Lousianna study that tobasco is good for your health funded by the Avery Island Foundation ....

Before I would believe this report, I would question exactly who funded this report and why.

Given the current Bush Administration, they are about as pro big oil as possible.

Any study with their funding is suspect at best. I can't remember the last time that I heard qualified and Bush in the same sentence.

Regardless of global warming, we need serious alternatives to oil.

Right now our economy and our standard of living is heavily dependent on oil from unstable governments that strongly don't like us.

Sending large sums of money to people that would like to destroy you is stupid.

Unless you are an oil company and make large profits.

Our oil money is directly funding terrorism against us. Where do you think the money to buy road side bombs in Iraq comes from ? The bomb fairy ...

It is really sad to have lost trust in our large U.S. oil corporations.

No doubt the best interest of our big oil companies is no longer the best interest of the people of the United States.

This is old stuff. Tell me something I don't know...

But remember that bio-diesel can be made from liposuctioned fat. And the remains of the obese. It's not just cooking fat that can be used that way.

During the global warming debate, several of the "scientists" arguing against Global Warming were later found to be funded by the large oil companies.

Reminds me of the smoking debate of years past when big tobacco funded several studies showing smoking good for your health.

This also reminds me of the University of Lousianna study that tobasco is good for your health funded by the Avery Island Foundation ....

Before I would believe this report, I would question exactly who funded this report and why.

Given the current Bush Administration, they are about as pro big oil as possible.

Any study with their funding is suspect at best. I can't remember the last time that I heard qualified and Bush in the same sentence.

Regardless of global warming, we need serious alternatives to oil.

Right now our economy and our standard of living is heavily dependent on oil from unstable governments that strongly don't like us.

Sending large sums of money to people that would like to destroy you is stupid.

Unless you are an oil company and make large profits.

Our oil money is directly funding terrorism against us. Where do you think the money to buy road side bombs in Iraq comes from ? The bomb fairy ...

It is really sad to have lost trust in our large U.S. oil corporations.

No doubt the best interest of our big oil companies is no longer the best interest of the people of the United States.

When farmers are being paid not to produce crops on their already present crop fields, the issue is not whether plowing up new land would release carbon.

Nobody's saying we have to immediately switch to use of biofuel instead of gas, but to create more fuel instead of wasting the sun's energy is a good idea. If all else fails we could just store it for a "rainy day", you never know when a thing like fuel might come in handy even if used to power a greener new power generation system instead of pumped into an ICE automobile.

Old news, I agree. As for obesity as an energy source, we could probably setup acres of exercise bikes with generators. Now THAT would be a pretty sight! It's pretty obvious though, that ANY discussion about energy sources and usage is, in the end, just about people.

Here is some real biofuel news:

"Some 150,000 families in Argentina and 90,000 families in Paraguay have already been displaced by soya. The accelerating rate of soya expansion due to the agrofuel boom is associated with increasing frequency of evictions."

RRRoamer: The uran estimated to exist on this planet will only last for about 70 years, if used for electrical energy production. As only about 10 % of all our primary energy consumption are presently electricity, using nuclear power for the provision of every kind of energy required (heating and transportation etc) would reduce this time frame to about 7 years. Not really future proof, imho.

AI Jones: I have made a guesstimate for the requirements of wind turbines for producing all of the primary energy consumed in Germany, and ended up at about 3 million turbines. That will be close to ten such facilities per square kilometre.

Overall: Aside from the effect on carbon dioxide emissions, I do not think that humanity should use an even larger proportion of the available land masses, and should instead reserse as large areas as possible for "wilderness". At 6.5 billion people, we are devastating the whole planet, even without additional energy production from plants.

Maybe Sahara could be used for producing solar based energy, which in turn could be used to produce e.g. methanol directly from air carbon dioxide; but I am not sure.

As a nation the Americans consume too much - well a lot more than anyone else anyway.

If they ate less, drove smaller vehicles and flew less then there would be more land for bio fuel and they would not need so much fuel anyway. And if they ate less beef it would reduce the emission of the greenhouse gas methane because there would be fewer cattle.

The problem is the “American dream”: as long as it is legal, that everyone should be empowered to do anything. Other nationalities including the UK have picked up the same idea. This attitude is responsible for the state of the world today. Sad but true.