Biofuels are a con

[watervole]

In a nutshell, biofuels push up the price of maize and wheat so that poor people are competing for their food with the prices that car ownwers can afford for fuel. 

Secondly plantiations for palm oil, etc. are destroying forests that were soaking up perfectly good carbon and release that carbon when felled or burnt for biofuel plantations. 

Thirdly, by the time they've been processed into fuel, they aren't nearly as carbon neutral as people would like you to believe.

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/03/27/a-lethal-solution/

Comments

[melodyclark.livejournal.com]

It figures it would be a con.

I wonder if recycled biofuels might be a good alternative, though.

[kremmen.livejournal.com]

The article might as well say "We need a five-year freeze on books, before they wreck the planet!" I wonder why they are aiming at the whole concept rather than the implementation? The fact that some companies/govenments are allowing rainforests to be cut down for biofuels is an implementation issue. The governments which are encouraging the consumption of biofuels need to ensure the sources are renewable.

You can power a car on biofuel from used cooking oil. You can use renewable crops. (Yes, prices are rising, but in many cases we could simply use less sugar -- In the USA's case, they could remove much of the corn syrup from food [eg bread, which doesn't need any] and reduce the obesity level as well.) Or you can destroy native rainforests.

The issue's little different from whether you obtain your wood/paper products from recycling or plantations or rainforests and "OMG! Stop using paper!" is a pretty shallow response.

[dumain.com (from livejournal.com)]

I think you've misunderstood his point. He isn't calling for a freeze on biofuels but a freeze on attempts to increase their use since at present we don't have a sustainable method of producing them in volume.
Individual sustainable plantations don't help since they just displace food production. Recycled cooking oil is good but insignificant. Reducing demand for agricultural products would help but until global agriculture as a whole is sustainable every additional demand on agricultural land (such as biofuels) will cause problems.

With wood/paper product it is just a case of using the same resources more sustainably. With current biofuel production it requires deploying more/different resources and these resources cannot be obtained sustainably.

[watervole.livejournal.com]

Paper can at least be recycled and thus the carbon is kept out of the system for longer. We don't tend to burn books...

I've just started composting newspapers, which means that the carbon ends up in the soil, not in the atmosphere. Biofuels are burnt and they only get used once.

Used cooking oil is one of the rare examples of good use of bio fuels, as would be biofuels from crop waste (though I can see potential problems there from loss of soil fertility if you remove plant material that would once have been composted or ploughed in).

Sugar is one of the more efficient bio fuels - still not very efficience, but better than corn. Corn-based ethanol is very energy inefficent - around 3/4ths of a gallon of fuel is required to produce one gallon of ethanol

[kremmen.livejournal.com]

Burning paper products isn't really the issue. We don't generally burn them. Fuels are going to be burned. I was merely comparing choice of supply sources.

The corn question is an interesting one. The efficiency issues are complex, as the energy to produce the ethanol doesn't have to come by using fuel. And then there's the issue of the rest of the corn. If corn is mostly used for animal feed (as is claimed for US corn -- I've not investigated for UK or other places) and the nutritious parts are mostly still present in what's left after the alcohol is produced, that left-over material can still be fed to animals. The assertion by some is that existing corn production can still become (slightly less) stock food as well as becoming a huge biofuel source.

[watervole.livejournal.com]

The efficiency issues are complex, as the energy to produce the ethanol doesn't have to come by using fuel.

While this is true, I don't think there is an easy green way to produce the necessary energy. I'm moderately sceptical of many 'green' energy supplies as a lot of the calculations often ignore the carbon cost of production. (what is the cabon cost of manufacturing a solar panel?) I'm more fond of nuclear than many people. I don't love it, and I don't think it's carbon neutral, but it does have some plus points.

Corn for animal feed is an interesting cabon cost in itself. High meat diets haven a carbon footprint that may be upto twice that of a vegetarian diet (I've not seen any really good studies here, so I'm hesitant to claim an exact figure)

I would have thought - though I admit that I don't know - that the high-energy part of the corn (sugars of various kinds) would be the part most useful to both the animals and the biofuels. Have you got more information on that? I'd be happy to be proved wrong on that particular point.

[kremmen.livejournal.com]

I guess it depends on how cheap other sugary/starchy foods are to add to the nutrients.

Mike Brown (http://www.mikebrownsolutions.com/ethanol.htm) claims: "After you distill the alcohol from the corn, you wind up with distillers dried grains (DDG). Essentially, it is the starch portion (about 70%) of the corn kernel that is converted into ethanol. All the remaining nutrients in corn, such as the protein, fat, minerals, and vitamins are concentrated and come in the form of distillers grains, which can be fed to livestock wet or dry."

As with so many things, whose statements do we believe and who has what agenda?

[watervole.livejournal.com]

I think he's missing a couple of important points, though he sounds plausible in other areas.

He's looking at ethanol as an oil replacement, whereas I'm considering the CO2 angle.

This means that he doesn't have to worry about the carbon cost of the nitrogen fertiliser required to grow the maize (the Haber process is very energy intensive).

He's also not questioning why the land used for farming is gradually decreasing (4% a year was his figure). I can think of a number of possible reasons - some of which would easily allow that land to be brought back into production and some which would not.

My main worry about what he's saying is the bit at the bottom where he's saying how incredibly easy it is. If it was that simple, I'd expect all those hard-up US farmers to be driving cars powered by home-made ethanol.

The best thing he could do to back up his argument would be to give more information about people who are actually producing ethanol. He is right about the subsidies to farmers distorting the balance though.

[alex-holden.livejournal.com]

It makes sense to recycle waste oil wherever possible, but there's only a very limited amount available. Nowhere near enough to fuel all the diesel vehicles in the world.

[ia-robertson.livejournal.com]

However there is another issue - we are dependent currently on oil for complex hydrocarbons for such as plastics - some of which would be very difficult now for us to survive without. (I am aware that there are many green issues about plastics too!)

At present we are basically burning a large proportion of the oil produced (which is effectively non-renewable!) and we need to ease this usage if oil supplies are to last another century or two.

Biofuels may be one way to do this.

Alastair

[watervole.livejournal.com]

I agree that we're wasting an incredibly complex resource. Oil has so many uses that burning it is a horrible waste.

Cutting back on wasteful use is a more effective way of conserving supplies than developing bio fuels overall. (Most people could reduce their energy consumption by 20% with minimal effort. If I can, then other people can)