The Oil Drum: Canada has an interesting interview with Tad Patzek, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Berkeley, about biomass energy sources. Patzek publishes research on the energy return on energy invested for biomass ethanol sources. In this latest interview many topics are covered. The most interesting to me was Patzek's view that biomass energy isn't sustainable because it drains the soil of minerals.
Ben: So, we have identified that the largest energy input is the actual industrial process. People are moving away from natural gas to coal power now because the price of natural gas is too volatile. What if we started burning biomass instead of coal because biomass, some types of biomass such as pelletized switchgrass for instance has a fairly good energy balance, does it not, when you burn it.
Tad Patzek: Right. So here we are running into another problem. The thing about agricultural production is that it requires a substrate. Plants need soil to grow on and that soil needs to be protected from the elements, wind and rain being the most important ones. So a prairie system with switchgrass let us say protects the soil very well because the soil is covered with plants all the time. Prairie in fact is a very good example of a system, which is enormously efficient and whose net productivity, that is, net mass production is zero. That is, everything that the prairie produces is recycled in it. The bison, the buffalo eat the grass. The coyotes and the lions, mountain lions, eat the buffalo, and the wolves and everybody dies on the prairie and their bodies are recycled and so it goes on, the nutrients, and in fact the prairie gets flooded every now and then from the rivers, which bring other nutrients and so it goes on, the nutrients are resupplited. Now we come, we the humans come into that system and we say, “Okay, grass, we are going to cut you every year, year after year. Remove everything that we cut and burn it elsewhere.” Unfortunately, when you do so not only do you remove carbon, but you remove nutrients with the grass and these nutrients are gradually depleted from the soil and of course the whole system stops producing. There is a fundamental problem with removing all biomass from an ecosystem because that ecosystem stops functioning and in order for you to make it function, you have to resupply it back with the nutrients and that of course takes an enormous amount of fossil fuels. So we are back to square one.
Using cellulosic technology to extract energy from plant matter such as switch grass will be even worse for the soil than corn ethanol in this view because a larger percentage of the plant matter will get removed during harvesting. The concentration of minerals in corn kernels (which are mostly starch) is lower than the concentration of minerals in corn stalks or in grasses.
Patzek sees a similar problem with use of sugarcane in Brazil to produce biomass energy. Such farming will deplete the soil faster because more of the plant will get removed from the farm for processing.
Tad Patzek: Sugarcane has another feature that differentiates it from corn. It actually coexists with a bacterium, Rhizobium bacterium, to some extent, which sequestered nitrogen. So sugarcane needs less nitrogen fertilizer than corn. Also, it grows year around not 100 days per year as corn does in the United States. There are differences in the yield. Also, sugarcane in the past centuries was grown organically with no fertilizers and basically what was taken out of the plantation in the end was the sugar juice, the carbon, in terms of sugar, but the rest of it and some fiber from the bagasse, but the rest of it would be returned back to the plantation as malt and as fertilizer and that would actually allow these plantations to go on for three centuries in some places.
Ben: Okay.
Tad Patzek: In Asia and in South America, so very good so far. Now, we are now doing it slightly differently. Now, in order for us to drive the process with sugarcane only, we need to use the entire plant, that is, the bagasse, the leaves and everything else and essentially bury them in the ethanol plants. So now we are removing all biomass from the fields. Of course, that puts us in the quandary that no we will have to be replacing the nutrients just as we do with corn. In Brazil, this is not being done to the same extent yet. So they are essentially depleting the soil and unfortunately they will have to do more and more fertilization as they go on with the system.
My expectation is that very low cost photovoltaics will eventually make an acre of desert capable of producing electrical energy from photovoltaics much more cheaply than an acre of farm land will produce biomass energy. But the electricity won't be as convenient to store and use as are liquid fuels. Better batteries will improve the usefulness of electricity in transportation. But liquid fuels will still provide advantages - especially for longer trips. So even with super cheap photovoltaics I still expect some political demand and economic demand for biomass liquid energy, enough to do a lot of environmental damage.
I think government support for biomass energy is a measure of both the corruption and relative stupidity of our elected officials. That, in turn, is evidence of two problems. First off, the average voter isn't bright. Second, the average voter has little incentive to be well informed about what elected officials believe and do.
European lawmakers seem anxious to brake the biofuel bandwagon. On Thursday, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called on G-8 countries "urgently to examine the impact on food prices of different kinds and production methods of biofuels, and ensure that their use is responsible and sustainable." France's agriculture minister has promised to unveil proposals at next week's European Union agriculture council that will ensure "absolute priority must be given to agricultural production for food" over biofuels. Germany's environment minister Sigmar Gabriel said this month that he was considering canceling laws requiring a minimum of 10% of petrol be plant-sourced by next year, and 17% by 2020.
Just because some European politicians have finally decided to ride the clue train on biomass energy and food does not mean we should expect to see a decrease in demand for crops to create liquid transportation fuels. Oh no. As food prices rise the pressure to reduce biomass energy subsidies might lead to some subsidies cuts. But rising energy prices will make crops more useful as energy sources even at higher price points for the crops.
I expect the biomass energy problem to get worse due to advances in technology that lower the costs of converting food crops to energy. Even the development of technology to exploit non-food crop biomass energy sources such as switch grass will increase the demand for crop land to grow biomass for energy and therefore will cause a shift of crop land away from food and toward energy.
The demand for biomass energy is just one of the causes of very high grain prices. Industrialization raises living standards and the more affluent people want more meat which takes more grain to grow.
First, there's the march of the meat-eating Chinese - the growing number of people in emerging economies who are, for the first time, rich enough to start eating like Westerners. Since it takes about 700 calories' worth of animal feed to produce a 100-calorie piece of beef, this change in diet increases the overall demand for grains.
Second, there's the price of oil. Modern farming is highly energy-intensive: a lot of BTUs go into producing fertilizer, running tractors and transporting farm products to consumers.
Population growth is another cause of rising food prices. Over population is the energy and food problem we most ought to do something about.
If you haven't been following agricultural commodity prices the rates of price increases have been very fast.
In fact, in just the past year a number of commodities crucial to food manufacturers have soared to record-breaking prices, with wheat up 107 percent, soybeans 65 percent and corn 61 percent.
This past year's price increases come on the heels of substantial price increases in the previous few years. Corn at $6 a bushel and wheat at $12 a bushel are shocking after corn sold for $1.76 per bushel in 2001.
The impact of rising food prices is felt most in the poorest countries because the poorest spend over half their income for food.
The effect is far more pronounced in developing countries, where 50-60 per cent of income goes on food, compared with 10-20 per cent in the developed world.
Several Asian countries have imposed controls on rice exports. Its price jumped 40 per cent in three days recently, when India and Vietnam banned exports, an FAO official said.
Asian countries which ban crop exports will improve food availability within their borders. But most of the shifts of crops into biomass energy are going to occur in countries which have large food surpluses such as the United States and Brazil. The Brazilians are going to ramp up a big biomass energy industry as long as it is profitable. That leaves less and higher priced crops available for export to countries where people are hungry. High energy prices cause reductions in exported crops.
Brazilian Agriculture Minister Reinhold Stephanes attempts to deny the obvious by claiming that biofuels do not compete with food crops.
In Brazil, ``biofuels do not compete with food crops,'' Stephanes said today in a Bloomberg Television interview. ``That isn't the case in other parts of the world.''
Assorted countries are restricting wheat exports too.
Thailand, the world's largest rice exporter, is reportedly flirting with the idea of doing the same, even as its farmers toil to plant a third crop of rice this year, one more than usual. Wheat, too, has seen the scythe of political maneuvering: Last week, Russia extended for 60 days a ban on wheat exports. China and Argentina have adopted restrictions; in Pakistan, where farmers have just begun to harvest the annual wheat crop, officials yesterday said the country most likely will fall millions of acres below the expected goal, prompting the government to dispatch soldiers to guard grain elevators.
I think this presages what is going to happen with oil exports. As oil production starts declining over the entire world many countries that now export oil will cut back on exports in order to satisfy domestic demand. Therefore oil importing countries will be hit harder than you might expect just from looking at total oil production numbers.
The poorest people (who parenthetically need to have a lot fewer babies) are also experiencing a much higher inflation rate than people who shop in grocery stores is developed industrial countries. The people who shop in stores are paying prices that include a lot of processing costs. So when the price of a bushel of corn doubles and doubles again the price of Corn Chex might go up by tens of a percent at most. But for poor Third World town dwellers who buy raw corn kernels or wheat kernels the increase in price they see is more like the bushel price increase. Ditto if they buy raw wheat kernels or rice kernels.
Food prices have started increasing quite dramatically.
At $1.32, the average price of a loaf of bread has increased 32 percent since January 2005. In the last year alone, the average price of carton of eggs has increased almost 50 percent.
Even though corn has soared to around $6 per bushel versus $2 per bushel just a few years ago.
The market is expecting a bullish crop report. Farmers are expected to plant 7 million or 8 million acres less corn because of high fertilizer costs. Soybean makes its own nitrogen and doesn't require fertilizer. If the report confirms this number, well use more corn than we produce next crop year. And as a result, new all-time high prices will be justified.
High fertilizer prices could potentially reduce fertilizer use and therefore reduce yield per acre. More land will get put into production though. So expect a reduction in wildlife habitats.
Solazyme is pursuing an unusual process for using algae to produce liquid fuels including biodiesel. In the Solazyme approach they keep the algae in the dark and feed it sugar.
The new process combines genetically modified strains of algae with an uncommon approach to growing algae to reduce the cost of making fuel. Rather than growing algae in ponds or enclosed in plastic tubes that are exposed to the sun, as other companies are trying to do, Solazyme grows the organisms in the dark, inside huge stainless-steel containers. The company's researchers feed algae sugar, which the organisms then convert into various types of oil. The oil can be extracted and further processed to make a range of fuels, including diesel and jet fuel, as well as other products.
The company uses different strains of algae to produce different types of oil. Some algae produce triglycerides such as those produced by soybeans and other oil-rich crops. Others produce a mix of hydrocarbons similar to light crude petroleum.
I am very interested in algae biodiesel because I think it might turn out as the best approach for doing biomass energy. But most other research groups pursuing algae biodiesel are using photosynthesis where the algae get their energy from being exposed to sunlight. Can the Solazyme approach work better?
Solazyme's approach is supposed to let them use cellulose. So trees, switchgrass and other non-grain crops which can produce more biomass per acre can serve as food sources for the algae. Solazyme avoids the need to build ponds with glass or plastic coverings on a massive scale.
Estimates for how much biodiesel can be produced using the pond approach run into the thousands of gallons per acre per year (one figure: 4000 gallons). One big problem with these approaches is the cost of physical plant structure over many acres. If instead an acre is used to grow switchgrass or trees how many gallons of biodiesel can the Solazyme approach produce?
If anyone can point to some good sources of information on the viability of algae biodiesel please post in the comments.
The corn ethanol industry would be only a third smaller without government subsidies.
One of the most dramatic aspects of the ethanol "revolution" is a ballooning percentage of corn crops being made into ethanol, which prior to 2004 had always been lower than 10 percent. This year, for the first time, ethanol replaced exports to become the second largest use of the grain behind that of domestic animal feed. With a fixed subsidy in effect, the amount of corn used for ethanol increases from 12 percent for $40 oil to 52 percent for $120 oil, the model predicts. With the renewable fuel standard, the ethanol share is quite stable, ranging from 44 percent for $40 oil to 47 percent for $120 oil, Tyner said. With the fixed subsidy in effect, ethanol production ranges from 3.3 billion gallons a year at $40 oil to 17.6 billion gallons with $120 oil, according to Tyner. The variable and no-subsidy policies yield 6.5 billion gallons at $80 oil and 12.7 billion for $120 oil.
As the price of oil goes up the price of corn will follow. The rise in the price of corn will pull up prices of other grains as farmers shift their fields to corn and they produce less of other grains. Peak Oil means high food prices.
Together the two studies offer sweeping conclusions: It does not matter if it is rain forest or scrubland that is cleared, the greenhouse gas contribution is significant. More important, they discovered that, taken globally, the production of almost all biofuels resulted, directly or indirectly, intentionally or not, in new lands being cleared, either for food or fuel.
“When you take this into account, most of the biofuel that people are using or planning to use would probably increase greenhouse gasses substantially,” said Timothy Searchinger, lead author of one of the studies and a researcher in environment and economics at Princeton University. “Previously there’s been an accounting error: land use change has been left out of prior analysis.”
The Wall Street Journal quotes a figure of 93 years to get a payback for US grassland converted to corn ethanol.
But corn ethanol is far from the worst offender. Conversion of Indonesian peatlands to palm oil biodiesel takes 423 years to pay off.
The conversion of peatlands for palm oil plantations in Indonesia ran up the greatest carbon debt which would require 423 years to pay off. The production of soybeans in the Amazon, which would not "pay for itself" in renewable soy biodiesel for 319 years.
The shifting of US croplands into biomass energy causes lands in other parts of the world to shift into crop production. (this is called stating the obvious but with a scientific study to make the obvious harder to deny)
Searchinger's study focused on the global ripple effect of changing the use of farmland. U.S. farmers have been replacing soybean fields with cornfields to meet the rising demand for ethanol, lowering the world supply of soybeans and driving up their price.
As a result, farmers in Brazil are clearing rain forest to plant soybeans, he said.
His model estimated that devoting 12.8 million hectares of cornfields in the U.S. for ethanol production would bring 10.8 million hectares of additional land into cultivation throughout the world, including 2.8 million hectares in Brazil and 2.3 million hectares in China and India -- much of it forests and grasslands.
This demonstrates the foolishness of European Union rules to prevent import of biodiesel from high ecological value converted lands. Such bans just shift the biomass energy production onto other lands while shifting food production from those other lands onto the lands that otherwise would have produced biomass energy crops. The only way to prevent habitat destruction from biomass energy is to use little land for biomass energy crops.
People who want less ecological damage have a few alternatives staring at them: First, promote wider birth control use. Babies never conceived will never use land for biomass energy or for food to eat. Second, support energy sources that use small land footprints per amount of energy produced. Nuclear energy best fits the bill.
A new analysis shows that the energy balance of biodiesel is a positive ratio of 3.5-to-1. For every unit of fossil energy needed to produce the fuel over its life cycle, the return is 3.5 units of energy, according to new research conducted at the University of Idaho in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). The announcement of the increase—up from 3.2—was made today (6th February) at the National Biodiesel Conference & Expo in Orlando.
The yield of soybeans per acre keeps rising while energy inputs are not rising. So the ratio of energy out to energy in keeps rising.
The researchers found national soybean yield data from 1975 to 2006 shows that the yield has increased at the rate of 0.6 bushels per acre per year. Yet, the fertilizer application rate has essentially remained the same and the herbicide application rate has declined to one-fifth of its rate in 2000. Reduced herbicide applications have the added benefit of requiring less diesel for field spraying.
At the processing level, technology improvements at soybean crushing facilities led to 55 percent less energy needed than what was reported in the NREL study.
The best option I can see coming up for biomass energy is biodiesel algae. The algae approach might allow thousands of gallons of diesel to be produced per acre per year. But it is not clear when algae biodiesel will become cost effective. Maybe sooner than we think once oil production declines send oil prices into the stratosphere.
Higher oil prices are driving up food prices.
We are witnessing the beginning of one of the great tragedies of history. The United States, in a misguided effort to reduce its oil insecurity by converting grain into fuel for cars, is generating global food insecurity on a scale never seen before.
The world is facing the most severe food price inflation in history as grain and soybean prices climb to all-time highs. Wheat trading on the Chicago Board of Trade on December 17th breached the $10 per bushel level for the first time ever. In mid-January, corn was trading over $5 per bushel, close to its historic high. And on January 11th, soybeans traded at $13.42 per bushel, the highest price ever recorded. All these prices are double those of a year or two ago.
As a result, prices of food products made directly from these commodities such as bread, pasta, and tortillas, and those made indirectly, such as pork, poultry, beef, milk, and eggs, are everywhere on the rise. In Mexico, corn meal prices are up 60 percent. In Pakistan, flour prices have doubled. China is facing rampant food price inflation, some of the worst in decades.
In industrial countries, the higher processing and marketing share of food costs has softened the blow, but even so, prices of food staples are climbing. By late 2007, the U.S. price of a loaf of whole wheat bread was 12 percent higher than a year earlier, milk was up 29 percent, and eggs were up 36 percent. In Italy, pasta prices were up 20 percent.
Here's the most interesting part: Oil at $100 per barrel will up ethanol demand to the point that corn goes to $7 per bushel.
A University of Illinois economics team calculates that with oil at $50 a barrel, it is profitable—with the ethanol subsidy of 51¢ a gallon (equal to $1.43 per bushel of corn)—to convert corn into ethanol as long as the price is below $4 a bushel. But with oil at $100 a barrel, distillers can pay more than $7 a bushel for corn and still break even. If oil climbs to $140, distillers can pay $10 a bushel for corn—double the early 2008 price of $5 per bushel.
We are going to find out much corn production can go up.
6 years ago corn was only $2.18 per bushel.
By 2012, the U.S. goal is to produce 7.5 billion gallons of ethanol a year, meaning U.S. annual corn production must rise 22 percent from about 10.9 billion bushels to 13.5 billion bushels to meet the demand.
Corn prices are at their highest level since the drought of 1995, jumping from around $2.18 per bushel in 2002 to $4.78 per bushel this week.
Peak Oil is going to push up the price of food. Though I'm beginning to seriously wonder whether algae biodiesel could provide a way to avoid that. How fast can the technology for algae biodiesel be developed? Can algae biodiesel some day really scale up to thousands of gallons of biodiesel per acre? Any of my regular readers know much about it?
Over at The Oil Drum (one of my favorite blogs btw) Stuart Staniford takes a hard look at biomass energy and argues most of the world's agricultural production might end up going to produce biofuels as billions starve.
Many people are aware that food-based biofuel production has had an influence on food prices. Many people also know that US ethanol production is growing rapidly and now using a noticeable fraction of the total corn supply. However, I'm going to argue that the situation in the near term is potentially more serious than is generally realized.
I will use a mixture of existing data, analysis of biofuel profitability, and simple modeling of biofuel production as an infection or diffusion process affecting the food supply, to demonstrate that there are reasonably plausible scenarios for biofuel production growth to cause mass starvation of the global poor, and that this could happen fairly quickly - quite possibly within five years, and certainly well within the life of the existing policy regimes. It doesn't have to be this way, but unless we start doing things differently soon, the risks are significant.
What, governments around the world are capable of pursuing policies that could lead to this outcome? Yes, pretty much. Though they'll probably back off some once news clips of starvation in assorted locations become frequent enough that people in developed countries start feeling queasy about what is going on. On the other hand, once world oil production starts declining people in the more developed countries might become so focused on their own problems that they just won't care. Ditto for China too.
The article is quite lengthy and I'm only going to excerpt a few smaller pieces of it. If you have an interest in how biomass energy puts food and energy in direct competition with each other then click through and read the whole thing.
Staniford's essay isn't perfect. For example, I don't think that modeling the spread of ethanol production facilities as analogous to disease spread makes sense. But he brings up a lot of useful information about costs and trends in biomass energy production in the United States and the rest of the world. One of his useful observations is that the trend in world biomass facilities construction lags US trends by a few years. This suggests total world demand for grains for biomass energy production will grow substantially in the next few years. Though US demand for grain has pushed up world grain costs and therefore reduced the profitability of biomass energy facilities in the rest of the world. So I question the continuation of this trend.
Let's just pause a moment and figure out how much food we are talking about when we discuss bushels of corn, or gallons of ethanol. A bushel of corn is 56 lb (or 25.4kg) of corn. At about 8000 btu/lb we get 113120 kCal/bushel. Given the average human diet globally contains 2800 kCal/day (see figure below), 1 bushel represents 40 days worth of calories for a person (if that person eat only corn!). Thus at current conversion efficiencies of about 2.8 gal/bushel, the corn in a gallon of ethanol represents a shade over two weeks worth of food (again, all corn). A 15 gallon fuel tank of ethanol is thus 7 months worth of corn calories for one person. Of course, the American corn crop is mainly fed to animals, and after conversion to meat, eggs, or dairy at efficiencies in the range of 1/10 - 1/3, the 15 gallon tank of ethanol is more like 1-2 months worth of food calories for a person.
Note how an increase in demand for meat (as is happening in China and other rapidly developing countries) reduces the amount of grain available for direct human consumption. The grain gets fed to cattle, pigs, chickens and the like. Therefore the poorest humans can't buy it.
Staniford's rough cut calculation has another quadrupling of food prices causing most of the human populace to go hungry.
Here the value for the lower-income 2/3 of the world's population is about +0.7. What this means is that a 10% reduction in income has about the same effect on food consumption as a 10% increase in food prices. This suggests that we can use the global income distribution (shown above) to roughly estimate the impact of a doubling or quadrupling of food prices. We noted earlier that according to the UN about 800 million people are unable to meet minimal dietary energy requirements. That is 12% of the world population. On the income distribution (one graph back), the 12% mark corresponds to $1020/year in income (shown as the lowermost green dot). By looking at the $2040 level (36% of the global population - second green dot up), and the $4080 level (61% of the global population - third green dot up), we can estimate that a doubling in food prices over 2000 levels might bring 30% or so of the global population below the level of minimal dietary energy requirements, and a quadrupling of food prices over 2000 levels might bring 60% or so of the global population into that situation.
These estimates should be regarded as quite uncertain. Still, it seems hard to make a case that food price increases will cause a cessation of biofuel profitability before a significant fraction of the global population is in serious trouble. The poor will not be able to bid up food prices by factors of two and four and keep eating. In contrast, the quadrupling of global oil prices, and tripling of US gasoline prices, over the last five years has had very minimal impact on driving behavior by the middle classes.
The core problem is that gasoline price elasticity in the US is about -0.05, versus the -0.7 price elasticity for food consumption by poor consumers. This makes clear who is going to win the bidding war for food versus biofuels in a free market.
The longer term price elasticity of gasoline demand is a lot higher than the number he references. People don't buy new cars very often and so when their preferences for more efficient vehicles change that change in preferences takes a while to translate into changes in fuel efficiency. Similarly, car companies need years to adjust their product mixes. Also, people do not move very often and so when they decide they ought to live closer to work in order to cut commuting costs again the effects of their decisions do not show up immediately.
Down in the comments Staniford says the price elasticity of meat in developed countries is lower than the price elasticity of grain in poorer countries. This sounds right and has some interesting consequences: As the buying power of Chinese consumers rises a larger fraction of the world's populace demands meat and develops greater price inelastic demand for meat. So the price of grain can go much higher due to demand for livestock feed just as it is going higher due to demand for biomass energy.
Industrialization of part of the world causes starvation in other parts. We can see from the current oil prices and grain prices what to expect from the coming decline in world oil production. Higher oil prices will increase demand for biomass ethanol. That increased demand will raise the price of ethanol in lock step with the price of oil. The higher price of ethanol will cause further bidding up of corn prices to shift grain away from human and animal consumption toward vehicle consumption. Higher prices of oil mean higher prices for corn, wheat, soy, and other grains. It is as simple as that.
Some of the improvements in biomass processing efficiency actually make this problem worse. By reducing the use of non-corn inputs to corn ethanol production these improvements make ethanol production profitable at even higher corn prices. So more corn gets shifted to ethanol production. Yes folks, advances in technologies sometimes make problems worse, not better.
So what should we do about this? I have some suggestions:
Hey, isn't the future supposed to be Panglossian? Am I letting down my readers by not being sufficiently optimistic?
MIT's Tecnnology Review has placed David Berry of biotech energy start-up LS9 on a list of top 35 innovators for 2007 for an on-going attempt to genetically engineer organisms to feed on plant cellulose and produce gasoline or diesel fuel.
Berry took the lead in designing a system that allowed LS9 researchers to alter the metabolic machinery of microörganisms, turning them into living hydrocarbon refineries. He began with biochemical pathways that microbes use to convert glucose into energy-storing molecules called fatty acids. Working with LS9 scientists, he then plucked genes from various other organisms to create a system of metabolic modules that can be inserted into microbes; in different combinations, these modules induce the microbes to produce what are, for all practical purposes, the equivalents of crude oil, diesel, gasoline, or hydrocarbon-based industrial chemicals.
...
Nonetheless, LS9 has no products so far and many hurdles to surmount. Berry's system, for example, is designed to exploit glucose-based feedstocks such as cellulose. Berry says he is "agnostic" about what source of cellulose might drive the LS9 system on an industrial scale; he lists switchgrass, wood chips, poplar trees, and Miscanthus, a tall grass similar to sugarcane, as potential sources of biomass. But a cost-effective and efficient source of cellulose is one of the more significant bottlenecks in the production of any biofuel.
Producing gasoline or diesel has a lot of advantages over producing ethanol. Unlike ethanol both gasoline and diesel can be transported via pipelines. They also let you go much further between fill-ups than ethanol. So a reader asked whether this approach can work. I can't say for sure but the question should be considered in parts:
1) Can they genetically engineer the sorts of organisms that they want to genetically engineer to perform the way they want those organisms to perform?
2) Will the resulting process be cost competitive?
3) If they manage to create a cost competitive process will the result be a good thing?
I'm much more optimistic on the first point than on the second point. Worse, I'm more optimistic on the second point than on the third.
On the first point: Sure, with enough genetic engineering talent and time you can modify organisms to eat cellulose and produce diesel. Will this particular crew succeed? Hard to know.
But if they succeed in the genetic engineering task will the resulting fuel be cheap enough? They have going for them the rising cost of corn driven by both corn ethanol subsidies and rising world demand for food. But their approach starts with an inefficiency: They first grow plants to produce cellulose. Therefore some of the initial plant energy gets lost as they feed the cellulose to genetically engineered organisms. The conversion from cellulose to diesel fuel will have some inefficiency associated with it. Will the conversion process cost more than half the cellulose energy?
A larger fraction of the sun's energy would get converted to diesel fuel if they geneticallly engineered organisms to convert the sun's energy directly into diesel fuel rather than first into cellulose. But that approach would raise costs since then plants would need to be grown in elaborate diesel fuel collection systems. Far easier to harvest existing trees, bushes, and grasses to get cellulose.
That depends on the cost of the cellulosic material, the efficiency of the conversion of it into less oxidized hydrocarbons (out with the oxygens and in with the hydrogens), and the cost of vats and other equipment.
How much of the existing biomass out there in nature get diverted to this purpose? The human footprint is already much too big and growing. The other species are already too squeezed.
I'm skeptical of this approach because it seems inefficient. Plants are inefficient converters of sunlight into chemical energy. Then there's an additional step of harvesting the plants, transporting them to vats, and then using the cellulose to feed microorganisms where part of the energy gets lost running the metabolism of these plants.
Most estimates I've come across on the efficiency of conversion of light energy into chemical energy by plants end up with a conversion efficiency of 1% or less. Keep in mind that most photons are at frequencies that plant chloroplasts can't use. Plus, seasonal plants aren't even alive part of the year to absorb photons and convert them into chemical energy. According to this report sugarcane is the most efficient converter of light energy into chemical energy.
Tropical grasses that are C4 plants include sugarcane, maize, and crabgrass. In terms of photosynthetic efficiency, cultivated fields of sugarcane represent the pinnacle of light-harvesting efficiency. Approximately 8% of the incident light energy on a sugarcane field appears as chemical energy in the form of CO2 fixed into carbohydrate. This efficiency compares dramatically with the estimated photosynthetic efficiency of 0.2% for uncultivated plant areas. Research on photorespiration is actively pursued in hopes of enhancing the efficiency of agriculture by controlling this wasteful process. Only 1% of the 230,000 different plant species known are C4 plants; most are in hot climates.
Since the conversion efficiency into chemical cellulose energy is so low in the first place the harvesting, transportation and conversion of cellulose to diesel or gasoline makes a low initial efficiency even lower by the time the final usable chemical product comes out of the conversion process. That means if we shift to biomass energy to push our vehicles around more land must get shifted to provide energy for humans.
Want another argument against biomass energy? It will make vegetables more expensive. Lower calorie foods such as vegetables are generally healthier and yet their prices are rising most rapidly.
As food prices rise, the costs of lower-calorie foods are rising the fastest, according to a University of Washington study appearing in the December issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association. As the prices of fresh fruit and vegetables and other low-calorie foods have jumped nearly 20 percent in the past two years, the UW researchers say, a nutritious diet may be moving out of the reach of some American consumers.
UW researchers Dr. Adam Drewnowski, director of the Center for Public Health Nutrition, and Dr. Pablo Monsivais, a research fellow in the center, studied food prices at grocery stores around the Seattle area in 2004. They found that the foods which are less energy-dense -- generally fresh fruits and vegetables -- are much more expensive per calorie than energy-dense foods -- such as those high in refined grains, added sugars, and added fats.
When the researchers surveyed prices again in 2006, the found that the disparity in food prices only worsened with time. Lower-calorie foods jumped in price by about 19.5 percent in that two-year period, while the prices of very calorie-rich foods stayed stable or even dropped slightly, the researchers found. The general rate of food price inflation in the United States was about 5 percent during that period, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.
"That the cost of healthful foods is outpacing inflation is a major problem," said Drewnowski. "The gap between what we say people should eat and what they can afford is becoming unacceptably wide. If grains, sugars and fats are the only affordable foods left, how are we to handle the obesity epidemic""
The demand for land to grow grains will squeeze out the growth of vegetables. Industrializing Asians and affluent people driving big SUVs are both pushing up the costs of fruits and vegetables. This is happening both due to rising affluence and the big push for corn ethanol and other biomass sources of energy.
World cereal and energy prices are becoming increasingly linked. Since 2000, the prices of wheat and petroleum have tripled, while the prices of corn and rice have almost doubled (Figure 6). The impact of cereal price increases on food-insecure and poor households is already quite dramatic. For every 1-percent increase in the price of food, food consumption expenditure in developing countries decreases by 0.75 percent (Regmi et al. 2001). Faced with higher prices, the poor switch to foods that have lower nutritional value and lack important micronutrients.
Birds and lions and tigers and bears (oh my) are all getting squeezed out of habitats by population growth, industrialization, oil reserves depletion, and the push for biomass energy. We have too many people, worsening resource limitations, and politicians who are compounding the problem with dumb energy policies aimed at raising incomes of farmers first and foremost. We need fewer babies, more nuclear power, and some breakthroughs in the cost of photovoltaics.
A new Greenpeace report Cooking The Climate highlights the huge amount of carbon dioxide getting released into the atmosphere as a result of rainforest destruction. Destruction of rain forests for palm oil plantation production is a major cause of carbon dioxide emissions.
Greenpeace investigations centred on the tiny Indonesian province of Riau on the island of Sumatra which contains 25 per cent of Indonesia's palm oil plantations. Its peat swamps and forests are among the world's most concentrated carbon stores.
They contain an estimated 14.6bn tonnes of carbon and their destruction would release the equivalent of total global greenhouse gas emissions for a year.
Greenpeace claims the burning of Indonesia's peatlands and forests releases 1.8bn tonnes of greenhouse gases annually - equal to four per cent of the global total - even though it occupies 0.1 per cent of the land on Earth.
Note that the push for biomass energy from Brazil and other equatorial countries is leading to huge CO2 emissions as forests get ripped down and burned. A lot of this is happening to feed a growing population of humans. Also, Asian industrialization is increasing the amount of spending money people have for food and so Chinese, Indians, and others are spending more on types of foods (e.g. meats) that require more land usage to produce. This increases food imports by these countries and forest destruction by food exporters.
Making a bad trend even worse, some Westerners who pose as environmentalists are promoting biomass energy usage. Well, because of the CO2 released by rainforest clearing equatorial region biomass production expansion causes a net boost in CO2 emissions. So people who worry about global warming and therefore advocate biodiesel are not just wiping out species (and I'm not trying to belittle the importance of this problem). They are increasing atmospheric concentrations of a gas whose rise they view as a big problem.
Fossil fuels burning attracts a lot of attention for its effect on global temperatures. But Greenpeace says that forest destruction is also very important for global climate warming.
About three million hectares (7.5 million acres) of these peatland forests are earmarked for conversion to palm oil plantations over the next decade, Greenpeace said. This "climate bomb" is ticking loudly in the run-up to December's United Nations' climate change meeting in Bali, which is expected to debate forests' role in accelerating -- and slowing -- climate change, said Sue Connor, Greenpeace International Forests Campaigner.
"(If the Riau peatlands are cleared) it would wipe out any chance we have of keeping the temperature increase below two degrees Celsius," she said, referring to a threshold given by the UN's climate panel. Palm oil is used in anything from body lotions and toothpaste to chocolate bars, crisps and as a component of biofuels, such as biodiesel.
I am more concerned about the destruction of habitats and species. My guess is that CO2 emissions will peak some time in the next 20 years and then decline as fossil fuels reserves depletion causes fossil fuels extraction to decline. This will happen first for oil, then natural gas, and eventually even coal.
Don't go getting happy at the taste of a KitKat bar.
Indonesia — If, as you read this, you're tucking into a KitKat or dipping into a tube of Pringles, you might be interested to know that these products contain palm oil that is linked to the destruction of forests and peatlands in Indonesia. As our new report "How the palm oil industry is cooking the climate" shows, it's a recipe for disaster.
The manufacturers of these products - Nestlé, Procter & Gamble, and Unilever - are sourcing their palm oil from suppliers who aren't picky about where they site their plantations. As the volunteers at the Forest Defenders Camp in Sumatra have seen, this includes tearing up areas of pristine forest then draining and burning the peatlands.
Continued rapid Asian industrialization, population growth in the less developed countries, and growing use of palm oil for biofuels all are feeding the continued destruction of the rainforests. The rainforest trees are getting cut down for wood. Crops are being planted in cleared out areas for human food, animal feed, fiber for textiles, and biomass energy.
Industrialization, population growth, and a misguided attempt to reduce carbon dioxide emissions are not the only forces driving this trend. Rising energy demand is colliding with the world oil production plateau (and a decline that could start any year now). The oil production plateau and decline are going to increase the destruction of rainforests for a few reasons:
Borneo is also getting cleared for crop production.
I am staying at the Borneo Rainforest Lodge in the middle of the largest surviving area of primary forest in Sabah. Today, palm-oil plantations cover most of north Borneo, and lorries laden with hardwood trundle in convoys from other remnants of jungle. But the Sabah state government has decreed a 30-year ban on logging from 2008, and in the Danum Valley, 175 square miles of lowland rainforest have been designated a protected reserve.
Brazil's rainforests are also getting cleared for crop production.
While the mention of Amazon destruction usually conjures up images of vast stretches of felled and burned rainforest trees, cattle ranches, and vast soybean farms, some of the biggest threats to the Amazon rainforest are barely perceptible from above. Selective logging -- which opens up the forest canopy and allows winds and sunlight to dry leaf litter on the forest floor -- and 6-inch high "surface" fires are turning parts of the Amazon into a tinderbox, putting the world's largest rainforest at risk of ever-more severe forest fires. At the same time, market-driven hunting is impoverishing some areas of seed dispersers and predators, making it more difficult for forests to recover. Climate change -- and its forecast impacts on the Amazon basin -- further looms large over the horizon.
In order to at least slow habitat destruction we need to accelerate the development of non-fossil fuels and non-biomass energy sources. Nuclear power and not biomass energy is a friend of the environment.
We also need to try ways to slow population growth in the less developed countries. The projected rise of the human population to 9 billion people is going to be a multi-decade environmental disaster in slow motion.
Growing and burning many biofuels may actually raise rather than lower greenhouse gas emissions, a new study led by Nobel prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen has shown.1 The findings come in the wake of a recent OECD report, which warned nations not to rush headlong into growing energy crops because they cause food shortages and damage biodiversity.
Crutzen and colleagues have calculated that growing some of the most commonly used biofuel crops releases around twice the amount of the potent greenhouse gas nitrous oxide (N2O) than previously thought - wiping out any benefits from not using fossil fuels and, worse, probably contributing to global warming. The work appears in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics and is currently subject to open review.
'The significance of it is that the supposed benefits of biofuel are even more disputable than had been thought hitherto,' Keith Smith, a co-author on the paper from the University of Edinburgh, told Chemistry World. 'What we are saying is that [growing many biofuels] is probably of no benefit and in fact is actually making the climate issue worse.'
Biodiesel and corn ethanol both suffer from the same problem. Good, two stupid government programs to kill off.
Crutzen, famous for his work on nitrogen oxides and the ozone layer, declined to comment before the paper is officially published. But the paper suggests that microbes convert much more of the nitrogen in fertiliser to N2O than previously thought - 3 to 5 per cent or twice the widely accepted figure of 2 per cent used by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
For rapeseed biodiesel, which accounts for about 80 per cent of the biofuel production in Europe, the relative warming due to N2O emissions is estimated at 1 to 1.7 times larger than the quasi-cooling effect due to saved fossil CO2 emissions. For corn bioethanol, dominant in the US, the figure is 0.9 to 1.5. Only cane sugar bioethanol - with a relative warming of 0.5 to 0.9 - looks like a viable alternative to conventional fuels.
Some previous estimates had suggested that biofuels could cut greenhouse gas emissions by up to 40 per cent.2
So unfortunately bioethanol advocates in Europe can still rationalize incentives that encourage Brazilians to tear down rain forests to plant more sugar cane for ethanol.
When the extra N2O emission from biofuel production is calculated in "CO2-equivalent" global warming terms, and compared with the quasi-cooling effect of "saving" emissions of fossil fuel derived CO2, the outcome is that the production of commonly used biofuels, such as biodiesel from rapeseed and bioethanol from corn (maize), can contribute as much or more to global warming by N2O emissions than cooling by fossil fuel savings. Crops with less N demand, such as grasses and woody coppice species have more favourable climate impacts. This analysis only considers the conversion of biomass to biofuel. It does not take into account the use of fossil fuel on the farms and for fertilizer and pesticide production, but it also neglects the production of useful co-products. Both factors partially compensate each other. This needs to be analyzed in a full life cycle assessment.
Biomass energy is not the answer. Biomass energy is probably not even part of the answer. We need to move to a more electrified economy. The billions of dollars of US taxpayer subsidies for corn ethanol would be better spent on moving to nuclear, wind, and solar power.
The federal government heavily subsidizes corn growers and ethanol producers. Rolling Stone reporter Jeff Goodell observed in the July 24 issue that ethanol receives more than 200 tax breaks and at least $5.5 billion in subsidies per year.
According to Goodell, ethanol production represents only 3.5 percent of the nation's gasoline consumption, but it consumes 20 percent of the entire U.S. corn crop. The Energy Information Administration reported that "Ethanol relies heavily on Federal and State subsidies to remain economically viable as a gasoline blending component."
Congress is about to decide whether to give fast-growing biofuels a new supercharger by requiring that the nation use 36 billion gallons yearly by 2022 — 15 billion gallons from corn.
That is six times what is used today. Next in the schedule: The Senate and the House appoint members to decide whether the Senate-passed, 36 billion-gallon mandate survives.
Bio energy subsidies are huge and growing.
If extended through 2022, as the Senate bill provides, the ethanol subsidies will cost taxpayers an estimated $131 billion, according to the Tax Foundation. Subsidies under the Lugar-Harkin measure would cost as much as $205 billion over the next 15 years.
$205 billion is a lot of money to waste.
The madness for biomass energy is international and shows how foolish elite crowds can be together.
The European Union has announced that it wants to replace 10 percent of its transport fuel with biofuels by 2020. China is aiming for a 15 percent share. The United States is already on track to exceed Congress' 2005 goal of doubling the amount of ethanol used in motor fuels to 7.5 billion gallons by 2012. In his State of the Union speech in January, President George W. Bush set a new goal of 35 billion gallons of biofuels by 2017. In June, the Senate raised it to 36 billion gallons by 2022. Of that, Congress said that 15 billion gallons should come from corn and 21 billion from advanced biofuels that are nowhere near commercial production.
Just because lots of governments decide some path is a good idea doesn't mean they all aren't being stupid.
Switching to biofuels will accelerate the rise in CO2 emissions.
Increasing production of biofuels to combat climate change will release between two and nine times more carbon gases over the next 30 years than fossil fuels, according to the first comprehensive analysis of emissions from biofuels.
Does that sound counter-intuitive? Stop and think about where the land would come from to grow biomass crops: Places that are now forests. Those forest contain large quantities of carbon dioxide. The clearing of forests to turn them into biomass energy croplands releases so much CO2 that it takes several decades for the resulting reduction in fossil fuels use to cancel out the effects of CO2 release by destroyed forests.
What is more, environmentalists have expressed concerns that the growing political backing that biofuel is enjoying will mean forests will be chopped down to make room for biofuel crops such as maize and sugarcane. "When you do this, you immediately release between 100 and 200 tonnes of carbon [per hectare]," says Renton Righelato of the World Land Trust, UK, a conservation agency that seeks to preserve rainforests.
Greenie supporters of biofuels are helping to destroy massive amounts of rain forests.
"Brazil, Paraguay, Indonesia among others have huge deforestation programmes to supply the world biofuel market", says the study's co-author Dominick Spracklen from Leeds University.
According to an article in the French monthly Le Monde Diplomatique, Brazil aims to supply 30% of the world's ethanol market by 2025. Last year it reclassified 200 million hectares as "degraded land" to release it for biofuel crop. Presently, it is growing crops such as sugar cane on land the size of Britain and the Benelux countries combined.
By 2025 the Brazilian government intends to expand that area fivefold to meet 10% of the world's petrol requirement. And last year it reclassified 200 million hectares as "degraded land" to release for crop cultivation.
I can see one way around this problem: Bury the biomass material in a sealed underground cavern. That way the CO2 from the destroyed forest won't make it into the atmosphere. Though that approach would still drastically shrink habitats available to all the species currently living in rain forests. Another alternative: Only grow biomass energy crops in areas which are currently barren with little plant life. Those areas tend to lack water. So how to irrigate? How about nuclear energy to drive massive desalination plants and to pump the water inland to deserts? Then deserts could bloom with plant life.
Destruction of rain forests to create land for biomass energy crops such as sugar cane ought to strike environmentalists as a bad idea before even considering effects on CO2 emissions. Yet so far the chorus against biomass energy is pretty quiet as compared to the chorus against CO2 emissions as a cause of climate change.
Near as I can tell the real oil reserves and natural gas reserves remaining are so low that world CO2 emissions are headed for a fall within a couple of decades. So the destruction of the rain forests to grow energy crops to displace fossil fuels isn't necessary in the first place. The fight against global warming is the wrong battle. Instead we should think a lot more on how to shift to wind, solar, and nuclear power as replacements for fossil fuels that aren't even going to exist to burn. The biggest challenge is how to make electric power more usable in transportation.
Update: Current carbon trading schemes will even accelerate deforestation.
New research indicates that slowing tropical deforestation may play a much larger role in mitigating climate change than previously believed [1,2]. Carbon emissions from tropical deforestation are expected to increase atmospheric CO2 concentration by between 29 and 129 ppm within 100 years, much more than previously estimated [3]. The parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change are considering policy approaches and incentives for reducing emissions from deforestation (RED) in developing countries [4–6] that are timely, in light of these recent research findings. The leading proposals would enable trading of carbon saved by reducing tropical deforestation, just as carbon is currently traded from reducing industrial emissions. The state of these discussions suggests that a key group of countries are at risk of being omitted from a new framework—those with high forest cover and low rates of deforestation (HFLD).
Developing countries can be classified into four categories defined by two axes: remaining forest cover and deforestation rate (Figure 1). The HFLD countries in Quadrant IV harbor 18% of tropical forest carbon. Since current proposals would award carbon credits to countries based on their reductions of emissions from a recent historical reference rate [4], HFLD countries could be left with little potential for RED credits. Nor would they have the potential for reforestation credits under the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism that the countries in Quadrant II have. Without the opportunity to sell carbon credits, HFLD countries would be deprived of a major incentive to maintain low deforestation rates. Since drivers of deforestation are mobile, deforestation reduced elsewhere could shift to HFLD countries, constituting a significant setback to stabilizing global concentrations of greenhouse gases at the lowest possible levels.
The development of cellulosic technologies to generate ethanol from cellulose will also accelerate deforestation by increasing the demand for wood cellulose.
Over at The Oil Drum Professor Cutler Cleveland has an essay "Energy Transitions Past and Future that is well worth the time to read. One of the points he makes is about biomass energy and the amount of land needed for biomass to displace oil:
The low energy and power density of most renewable alternatives collides with a second global environmental imperative: human use of the Earth's plant life for food, fiber, wood and fuelwood. Satellite measurements have been used to calculate the annual net primary production (NPP)—the net amount of solar energy converted to plant organic matter through photosynthesis—on land, and then combined with models to estimate the annual percentage of NPP humans consume (Figure 12). Humans in sparsely populated areas, like the Amazon, consume a very small percentage of locally generated NPP. Large urban areas consume 300 times more than the local area produced. North Americans use almost 24 percent of the region's NPP. On a global scale, humans annually require 20 percent of global NPP.
Human appropriation of NPP, apart from leaving less for other species to use, alters the composition of the atmosphere, levels of biodiversity, energy flows within food webs, and the provision of important ecosystem services. There is strong evidence from the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and other research that our use of NPP has seriously compromised many of the planet's basic ecosystem services. Replacing energy-dense liquid fuels from crude oil with less energy dense biomass fuels will require 1,000- to 10,000-fold increase in land area relative to the existing energy infrastructure, and thus place additional significant pressure on the planet's life support systems.
Note that the current human use of global NPP is only going to go up as populations expand and more affluent populations use more land for plant crops, livestock, and also for biomass energy and wood for structures.
The already extensive harnessing of biomass to produce useful products for humans strikes me as a strong argument against biomass energy. The only compelling argument for biomass is the ability to produce liquid fuels from biomass suitable for use in vehicles. But we can develop ways to use more electricity in transportation including better batteries and methods to make synthetic liquid fuels.
Two researchers working at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Iowa State University set out to compare the capital and operating costs of generating fuel from starch and cellulose-containing materials.
They showed that the capital costs for 150 million gallon gasoline equivalent capacity range from around $111 million for a conventional grain ethanol plant to $854 million for an advanced (Fischer Tropsch) plant. The difference in the final cost of the fuel, however, was less severe, being $1.74 for grain ethanol when corn costs $3.00 per bushel and $1.80 for cellulosic biofuel when biomass costs $50 per ton.
The authors compared biochemical and thermochemical approaches to biofuels. They showed that both have much higher capital costs than conventional grain ethanol plants, but that neither had a significant cost advantage over the other.
The assumption of $3 for a bushel of corn seems low given that a bushel of corn for December 2007 delivery is above $3.50 at the time of this writing. However, $50 as the price of a ton of biomass material seems realistic:
Biomass Program analysts estimate that 512 million dry tons of biomass equivalent to 8.09 quads of primary energy could initially be available at less than $50/dry ton delivered (Walsh et al. 2000, 2003, Ugarte et al. 2003). Of this, 36.8 million dry tons (0.63 Quads) of urban wood wastes were available in 1999. In the wood, paper, and forestry industrial sectors, they estimate that 90.5 million dry tons (1.5 Quads) of primary mill residues were available in 1999 and 45 million dry tons (0.76 Quads) of forest residues were available at a delivered price of less than $50/dry ton. An estimated 150.7 million dry tons (2.3 Quads) of agricultural residues (corn stover and wheat straw) would be available annually. A joint U.S. Department of Agriculture and Department of Energy evaluation of the potential to produce biomass energy crops (Ugarte et al. 2003) estimated 188 million dry tons (2.9 Quads) of biomass could be available annually at delivered prices of less than $50/dry ton by the year 2008. A county-level database of potential energy crop resources is available at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and a county-level database of multiple resources will be available soon. State-level information can also be obtained at the EERE website.
Once cellulosic technologies mature to the point that costs drop then the demand for biomass ethanol will rise. What I wonder: Will this increase or decrease the demand for land to make ethanol? On the one hand ethanol yield per acre will rise. On the other hand, lower prices will cause demand for ethanol to displace more gasoline. That might boost the demand for ethanol so much that land usage for biomass ethanol will rise. The ability to use more types of land to grow various biomass ethanol feedstock plants could allow biomass ethanol agriculture to grow far beyond the lands currently used to grow corn.
I do not want to see more habitats shifted into biomass energy production. I'd rather we develop better battery technologies so we can switch from gasoline to electric power rather than to ethanol.
The idea that biomass energy can become a substantial source of new energy production is based on the assumption that plenty of land is available to shift into agricultural uses. Well, land prices seem like a good test of this idea. If the United States had a large amount of surplus land suitable for expansion of corn ethanol or soy biodiesel production then the prices of farm land wouldn't be going up so much.
In central Illinois, prime farmland is selling for about $5,000 an acre on average, up from just over $3,000 an acre five years ago, a study showed. In Nebraska, meanwhile, land values rose 17 percent in the first quarter of this year over the same time last year, the swiftest such gain in more than a quarter century, said Jason R. Henderson, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank in Kansas City.
A federal-government analysis of farm real estate values released Friday showed record average-per-acre values across the country. The analysis said property prices averaged $2,160 an acre at the start of 2007, up 14 percent from a year earlier.
We aren't getting much useful energy out of biomass energy and the cost of farm lands is already going up a lot. That suggests we don't have enough farm lands to really scale up biomass energy production - at least not with corn ethanol. Now, maybe other types of land which can't grow corn could get used for biomass energy production using other types of plants. For example, cellulosic technologies applied to miscanthus or switchgrass plants might so expand the range of usable lands and yield per acre enough to make contribution from biomass energy substantial. Of course, if that comes to pass then less land will be available for wild plants and animals.
Big food price increases are coming in the next 10 years.
The study predicts prices will rise by between 20% and 50% by 2016.
"Growing use of cereals, sugar, oilseeds and vegetable oils to satisfy the needs of a rapidly increasing biofuel industry is one of the main drivers in the outlook," said the report, which was co-written by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).
The OECD-FAO Agricultural Outlook 2007-2016 says temporary factors such as droughts in wheat-growing regions and low stocks explain in large measure the recent hikes in farm commodity prices. But when the focus turns to the longer term, structural changes are underway which could well maintain relatively high nominal prices for many agricultural products over the coming decade.
Reduced crop surpluses and a decline in export subsidies are also contributing to these long-term changes in markets. But more important is the growing use of cereals, sugar, oilseed and vegetable oils to produce the fossil fuel substitutes, ethanol and bio-diesel. This is underpinning crop prices and, indirectly through higher animal feed costs, also the prices for livestock products.
My guess is this report probably understates the scale of the problem because they are probably still assuming that oil production can keep up with growing demand.
Peter Brabeck, chairman of Nestle, which is the world's largest food company, told the Financial Times that he sees an extended period of high food prices due to the industrialization of India and China, world population growth, and the use of agriculture to make biomass energy.
Peter Brabeck, chairman of the world’s largest food company, said rises in food prices reflected not only temporary factors but also long-term and structural changes in supply and demand.
“They will have a long-lasting impact on food prices,” he told the Financial Times during a visit to China.
The US. Bureau of Labor Statistics also sees rising food prices.
"We are going to see grocery store prices show one of the most rapid increases in the last 15 years or so," said Patrick Jackman, an economist at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
....
The Economic Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture expects food prices to go up another 4 percent this year. The average increase over the past decade has been 2.5 percent.
The Consumer Price Index for all food has increased 3.9 percent — about 50 percent more than the 2.6 percent rate of inflation — since a year ago, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Egg prices have taken the greatest jump, and have increased 2.9 percent in May and 29.6 percent since May 2006. Milk prices are 7.5 percent above levels a year ago and have jumped 2.2 percent in May. Overall, dairy prices have increased 3.5 percent in the past year and increased 0.8 percent between April and May. Poultry prices are up 0.8 percent in May and 5.7 percent for the year. Pork prices jumped 3.2 percent in May, and 3.9 percent in a year. Beef prices are up 5.8 percent over last year
If you think you've seen big increases in food prices in the last 3 months you are correct.
Retail food prices jumped 5% over the past three months. Tom Thieding with the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation says the 20 items in their monthly Market Basket Survey cost $50.33 at the end of June compared to $47.85 at the end of March.
The more developed countries could do themselves and the Third World a big favor if they made a much bigger effort to get birth control tools into the hands of the poor people all over the world. A more rapid rate of decrease of Third World fertility would reduce the demand for food and fuel and also reduce the strain on habitats and other species.
We could reduce ecological footprints of developed country populations by a number of methods and in the process lower food and fuel prices. First off, make bigger efforts to systematically implement measures that increase fuel efficiency. See the McKinsey & Company study from May 2007: Curbing Global Energy Demand Growth: The Energy Productivity Opportunity.
Second, we could accelerate the development of battery technologies that will enable a shift away from liquid fuels for transportation. Reduce the demand and justification for bioethanol and biodiesel by powering cars with electricity from nuclear, wind, and solar power.
Third, adopt policies that will accelerate the technological development of nuclear and solar power to lower their costs and enable them to displace fossil fuels and biomass fuels.
Regular readers know that I think biomass energy is a bad idea that shows just how ignorant or morally corrupt our elites can be. Please excuse me if I'm boring you with repetition. But repetition doesn't just breed acceptance of lies. Repetition also breeds the acceptance of the truth. US government subsidies of biomass energy are decreasing the amount of corn available to feed livestock.
The surging biofuel industry will use 27% of this year's American corn crop, challenging farmers' ability to meet food demands, the US government says.
How to think about this? We are feeding over a quarter of our corn to our cars. Our cars are becoming corn hogs. Imagine we all rode horses and fed them corn. What we are doing is like that. But we ride mechanical horses (hence the term "horsepower") and with car computers that provide driving assists (e.g. anti-lock braking, traction control, and electronic stabilization control) those mechanical horses are well on their way toward becoming robotic horses. Cars are robotic horses that consume a lot more energy and hence more land.
Even with the projected, record 12.46 billion-bushel crop this year, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) says national corn stockpiles will run low going into the next crop year, when voracious ethanol demand will rise again.
In its first projections of this year's crops, the USDA says ethanol is already boosting crop prices, and will reduce the amount the amount of corn used to feed livestock in the coming year by 3%.
Note that the US population is growing, not shrinking. So the demand for meat will rise even as the amount of corn available to feed livestock shrinks.
The Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) sees many harms from the rapid increase in use of corn as an energy source.
"Consumers have already seen an increase in the cost of food, as corn traditionally used for livestock feed and processed food is increasingly used for fuel.
In fact, the price of corn has nearly doubled in the last nine months.
"In addition to its inflationary impact, there are many unintended, but nonetheless important, consequences of an ambitious corn ethanol strategy.
"For example, a 35 billion gallon ethanol mandate will require a substantial increase in the use of fossil fuels for corn and ethanol processing and transportation, as well as an additional fifteen million acres devoted to corn crops, which will encroach on agriculturally-marginal and environmentally- sensitive land.
Some people are under the mistaken impression that the United States has such huge amounts of unused space that a massive ramping up of agriculture to produce biomass energy won't impose substantial environmental costs. But the amount of land available for farming shrinks as the population grows and suburbs around cities expand outward.
How about world hunger?
"An aggressive ethanol mandate will also require the U.S. to significantly reduce its corn exports to ensure an adequate supply of corn for food and fuel.
"Such a reduction will result in a decrease in the amount of food available overseas, which in turn will have a negative affect on world hunger.
But biomass ethanol is green. Hunger? Encroachment on wildlife areas? Okay, but corn plants have a green color. End of argument. Shut down your neocortex. Suppress any thoughts that begin with "But". Corn stalks are plants that sop up the goodness of solar energy They aren't humans. How can the grocery companies oppose something that politicians running in primaries in Iowa find to be the best thing since Mazola corn oil spread on sliced bread?
The GMA wants an end to the US government subsidy for ethanol. I agree (my neocortex refuses to shut down).
"In addition, GMA supports a broad-based approach to alternative fuels that includes the increased use of cellulosic ethanol, the elimination of the fifty-four cents per gallon tariff on ethanol imports and the expiration of the taxpayer-funded fifty-one cents per gallon ethanol subsidy.
But elimination of the ethanol tariff will just speed the deforestation of the Amazon. I wonder what greenies are thinking when I see some of them interviewed on TV extolling Brazil's production of ethanol as an example of morally virtuous behavior. What about the rain forests?
Government officials acknowledge that loggers, ranchers and farmers gobbled up 10,088 square miles of Amazon rain forest in the 12-month period ending last August, an area about the size of Massachusetts.
Strains of soy developed for Brazil are enhancing the attractiveness of soy as a crop for Brazilian farmers. So is the increased use of soy to make biodiesel. What's the result? Destruction of Amazon rainforests.
But, to the horror of environmental activists, soybeans are claiming increasingly bigger swaths of rainforest to make way for plantations, adding to the inroads by ranching. The Amazon lost some 10,000 square miles of forest cover last year alone -- 40 percent more than the year before.
In Querencia, cowboy-hatted ranchers recently transplanted from Brazil's prosperous south rub shoulders with Amazon Indians as streams of tractor-trailers kick up dust hauling fertilizer in and huge tree trunks out. Nowhere is the doubled-edge thrust of soybeans more apparent than in this dusty boom town on the rainforest's southern edge.
"The farmers are cutting down everything to make way for soy and that's good business for me," said Ivo de Lima, a lumber man who moved here recently.
The shift of US acreage way from soy toward corn for ethanol increases demand for soy from Brazil which increases the destruction of the Amazon rain forests. So the US corn ethanol subsidy increases the rate of destruction of the world's rainforests.
The study, "Net greenhouse gas flux of bioenergy cropping systems using Daycent", was completed by Paul Adler (United State Department of Agriculture - USDA), Stephen Del Grosso (USDA and Colorado State University), and William Parton (Colorado State University). Results appear in the April issue of Ecological Applications.
"Biofuels have a great potential to reduce our dependence on gasoline and diesel fuel," says Parton. "We have performed a unique analysis of the net biofuel greenhouse emissions from major biofuel cropping systems by combining ecosystem computer model data with estimates of the amount of fossil fuels used to grow and produce crop biofuels."
Adler, Del Grosso and Parton used the Daycent biogeochemistry model, developed by Parton and Del Grosso to asses greenhouse gas fluxes and biomass yields for corn, soybean, alfalfa, hybrid poplar, reed canary grass and switchgrass.
I am guessing they are assuming the development of cheap and scalable methods to do biomass processing using cellulosic technologies. That seems a safe bet.
How could ethanol or electricity made from switchgrass and poplar reduce greenhouse gas emissions by more than 100%? By keeping some of the carbon anchored in roots after the surface biomass gets harvested?
The results of the study showed that when compared with gasoline and diesel, ethanol and biodiesel from corn and soybean rotations reduced greenhouse gas emissions by almost 40 percent, reed canarygrass by 85 percent. Greenhouse gas emissions were reduced by about 115 percent for switchgrass and hybrid poplar. Both switchgrass and hybrid poplar offset the largest amounts of fossil fuels reduced emissions compared to other biofuel crops and offset two times as much fossil fuels if they are used for electricity generation via biomass gasification.
On second thought: If the poplar gets burned in order to generate heat to generate electricity this creates the possibility of carbon sequestration. If the carbon dioxide from burned poplar trees gets captured and sequestered then the net effect would be to pull carbon out of the atmosphere! Such a process would go beyond carbon neutral to carbon negative. Using such an approach on a large scale to generate electricity the amount of carbon in the atmosphere would gradually go down.
Biomass energy production produces oxides of nitrogen.
Study results showed that nitrogen (N2O) emission resulting from production of the biofuel crops is the largest greenhouse gas source, while displaced fossil is the largest greenhouse gas sink followed by soil carbon sequestration.
Leave aside for the moment that the global climate computer models are huge simplifications of reality with huge errors in their predictions. Never mind that assorted confidently stated projections of future world temperatures are therefore not real science if by science we mean the ability to predict. Leave all that skepticism aside for the moment for the skepticism cuts both ways. While it is true that we do not know for a certainty that we are warming the planet we also do not know for a certainty that we aren't. All we know is that we are pumping up the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and that gas does - all else equal - cause warming. Therefore the possibility exists that we really are warming the planet. Those who can handle the state of uncertainty have to admit that, well, we don't know if we face a big problem or not.
Having said all that, here's my most important point: We might eventually find that we really are going to heat up the planet by several degrees Fahreneit or Celsius and that doing so will cause what most of us will decide is morally unacceptable damage to some peoples (e.g. Pacific islanders and Bangladeshis who'd get flooded by rising sea levels due to melting ice). In spite of the obvious benefits to humans living in northern Russia and other cold places we might decide we want to stop global warming. In that case it is good to know we could always shift to using poplar tree biomass to generate electricity with carbon sequestration and then use electricity for most transportation needs. Then we could pull down the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide and (since by the assumptions in this scenario CO2 really does heat the planet) cause as much cooling as we want to cause.
Mind you, we'd still probably need to generate most electricity using nuclear, wind, and solar power. Otherwise too much land surface would get used for poplar forests and switchgrass fields. But we could use some land areas for forests in order to do large scale atmospheric carbon extraction and help pay for these CO2 extraction operations by using the poplar to generate electricity.
While hype over the threat of global warming has recently taken the pattern of a crescendo leading up to the release of the latest IPCC report my own thinking is heading in the direction of worrying less about it. Why? In a nutshell: We are going to have the technological tools to stop and reverse it if necessary. Gregory Benford sees a cheap way to cool the planet. Should the need arise we could use his proposal as a temporary measure to cheaply buy time while we ramp up poplar forests to extract CO2. We'd still use nuclear, wind, and solar photovoltaics to provide most of our energy.
Technologies for biomass gasification, photovoltaics, batteries, nuclear power, and other needed elements will all get much cheaper. In a few decades time the potential problem of global warming will become solvable for an affordable price and pieces of the solution will become popular anyway because they'll become cheaper ways to get energy.
"Breaking open the very stable bonds in CO2 is one of the biggest challenges in synthetic chemistry," says Frederic Goettmann, a chemist at the Max Planck Institute for Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam, Germany. "But plants have been doing it for millions of years."
Synthetic emulation of plant photosynthesis could some day produce gasoline or other liquid hydrocarbons for transportation and also for use in the chemical industry to make plastics and synthetic fibers for textiles.
In an attempt to emulate this natural process, Goettmann and colleagues Arne Thomas and Markus Antonietti developed their own nitrogen-based catalyst that can produce carbamates. The graphite-like compound is made from flat layers of carbon and nitrogen atoms arranged in hexagons.
I'd love to see a catalyst like this integrated with photovoltaics. Imagine a dynamically configurable system that could send the electricity out to meet immediate demand when electric demand is high but which switches to making, say, gasoline when demand for electricity is low.
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - A group of scientists have created a portable refinery that efficiently converts food, paper and plastic trash into electricity. The machine, designed for the U.S. military, would allow soldiers in the field to convert waste into power and could have widespread civilian applications in the future.
"This is a very promising technology," said Michael Ladisch, the professor of agricultural and biological engineering at Purdue University who leads the project. "In a very short time it should be ready for use in the military, and I think it could be used outside the military shortly thereafter."
The "tactical biorefinery" processes several kinds of waste at once, which it converts into fuel via two parallel processes. The system then burns the different fuels in a diesel engine to power a generator. Ladisch said the machine's ability to burn multiple fuels at once, along with its mobility, make it unique.
Roughly the size a small moving van, the biorefinery could alleviate the expense and potential danger associated with transporting waste and fuel. Also, by eliminating garbage remnants - known in the military as a unit's "signature" - it could protect the unit's security by destroying clues that such refuse could provide to enemies.
It has a favorable ratio of energy inputs to energy outputs. But that does not tell us what fraction of the energy in the waste material gets converted into electric energy.
Researchers tested the first tactical biorefinery prototype in November and found that it produced approximately 90 percent more energy than it consumed, said Jerry Warner, founder of Defense Life Sciences LLC, a private company working with Purdue researchers on the project. He said the results were better than expected.
The U.S. Army subsequently commissioned the biorefinery upon completion of a functional prototype, and the machine is being considered for future Army development.
It reduces waste volume by a ratio of 30 to 1. But the article provides no indication of production costs. It starts up running on diesel fuel until its processing apparatus starts producing burnable fuel. At that point the fuel it produces powers continued processing to make more fuel. But most of the fuel produced is usable for other purposes.
If the refinery can be made cheaply enough it could provide supplementary power for a number of uses.
The refinery also could provide supplementary power for factories, restaurants or stores, Ladisch said.
"At any place with a fair amount of food and scrap waste the biorefinery could help reduce electricity costs, and you might even be able to produce some surplus energy to put back on the electrical grid," he said.
Much of the fuel the system combusts is carbon-neutral, said Nathan Mosier, a Purdue professor of agricultural and biological engineering involved in the project.
So what would this unit cost to mass produce and operate? If the waste was free from trash collection then what would the cost be per kilowatt-hour? A much larger unit would probably have lower labor costs per kwh. Also, the portability could be sacrificed for lower operating costs.
The New York Times reports that Dutch and other European environmental organizations are shocked to find their support for biomass energy is wrecking rainforests and producing lots of carbon dioxide pollution.
AMSTERDAM, Jan. 25 — Just a few years ago, politicians and environmental groups in the Netherlands were thrilled by the early and rapid adoption of “sustainable energy,” achieved in part by coaxing electrical plants to use biofuel — in particular, palm oil from Southeast Asia.
Next time you hear confident policy recommendations from environmental groups just remember that some of them are still stupid enough to see biomass energy as a boon to the environment. The mind boggles. Politicians who see biomass as a way to simultaneously appeal to greenies and farmers are only to happy to provide tax subsidies for habitat destruction.
To be fair, not all environmentalists are lame on biomass. Lester Brown keeps warning that biomass has big downsides and he argues that biomass will raise the price of food for poor people. Making energy demand, food demand, and wildlife all compete for the same land means 2 out of 3 lose. The article reports on other environmental organizations that are skeptical about biomass energy.
Bye bye rain forests.
Rising demand for palm oil in Europe brought about the clearing of huge tracts of Southeast Asian rainforest and the overuse of chemical fertilizer there.
Worse still, the scientists said, space for the expanding palm plantations was often created by draining and burning peatland, which sent huge amounts of carbon emissions into the atmosphere.
Indonesia is pumping massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in the name of sustainable energy.
Considering these emissions, Indonesia had quickly become the world’s third-leading producer of carbon emissions that scientists believe are responsible for global warming, ranked after the United States and China, according to a study released in December by researchers from Wetlands International and Delft Hydraulics, both in the Netherlands.
“It was shocking and totally smashed all the good reasons we initially went into palm oil,” said Alex Kaat, a spokesman for Wetlands, a conservation group.
They saw good reasons for tearing down rainforests. Good reasons. If only it didn't result in lots of CO2 release it was otherwise a good idea from the get go? Hello?
The amount of