Biofuels Coming With a High Environmental Price? 541
DurandalTree writes "With the spectre of global warming on the horizon, biofuels have been touted as the solution to motor vehicles' greenhouse gas emissions. But with biodiesel use on the increase, it appears a distinctively environmentally unfriendly footprint is being left behind by some of its prime sources; affected food prices are surging out of reach of the poor and rainforests are being destroyed to create larger plantations."
Indeed... (Score:5, Interesting)
That said, we could make better use of the oceans - but I trust our current free market much less there - the oceans have much more of a "tragedy of the commons" dynamic than elsewhere, with fragile ecosystems and high difficulty sectioning off properties. Algae on land-based ponds in otherwise nonviable landscapes would offer the most promise for producing biomass in a way that would not negatively affect prices for the poor. Algae can produce its own food, doesn't need to use much fresh water, can produce various kinds of oils, and could even be used as a part of foods if we are interested in exploring that. The only question is, will it be able to scale and pay for itself in terms of needing to control its environment to mass produce it? Given the history of livestock, I can't imagine algae can't be made efficient or be properly bred en mass.
That's just my idea though - and I'm fairly uninformed about the whole field of energy crops. Why are we currently pursuing the whole turn-food-to-fuel path anyway, given how wide open the algae field is?
Ryan Fenton
Re:Algae (Score:3, Interesting)
Corn? You COULD use it.
Algae? You could use it.
Human waste? You could use it.
The fact that it can draw from sources that are less likely to drain the biosphere is one of the best things ABOUT biodiesal.
Well, we have to try our best? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Algae (Score:4, Interesting)
I drive by a sewage treatment plant, and a landfill a few times a week, and wonder just how much methane is just escaping into the atmosphere. Methane which could be captured fairly easily, and used anywhere natural gas or propane are currently used.
Non-food biofuel. (Score:5, Interesting)
Which might not be as hard as it sounds. The University of New Hampshire did a study [unh.edu] in 2004 where they concluded that biodiesel from algae could -- at least theoritically -- supply all the nation's fuel supply without require food oil (like soy or palm) to be used at all. On the ethanol front, cellulosic ethanol [wikipedia.org] can be produced from high-cellulose plant products, like sawgrass or wood chips, without cutting into the corn crop. Some of cellulosic plants are beginning to approach commercial volumes of production.
It's not that biofuels are a bad idea, but not all implementations of those ideas are equally valid.
Diesel now has much less sulphur and particulates (Score:5, Interesting)
Diesel engines are much cleaner now, if the proper technology is used to clean the exhaust. Unfortunately all that technology got clogged up by the sulphur in US diesel through last year, so none of it was used.
US diesel switched to a low-sulphur blend at the start of the year, and all 2007 model year diesel cars require it. It exchange, they now have the particulate filters that make diesels run cleaner. This does little to clean up the millions of diesel cars and trucks built before 2007, unfortunately, but it shows that the problem hasn't been forgotton.
Please don't attack diesel based on a complete lack of information and one anecdote. For more information, see the National Clean Diesel Campaign [epa.gov].
Re:Corn is massively subsidised (Score:4, Interesting)
And I completely agree that rising corn prices are not a problem while the US government subsidizes production. Get rid of the subsidies, and then we can talk about the affect on food prices. If the poor really can't afford to eat because of rising corn prices, the subsidies on corn production could be replaced with an increase in funding for foodstamp programs, if nothing else.
Nuclear Power is the answer (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Yes but... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Well, we have to try our best? (Score:5, Interesting)
Chernobyl would probably still be running and providing power if they had not shut off all kinds of safety mechanisms at the same time like a bunch of fucking idiots.
The saying more accurately says that we can build very safe nuclear plants that consume less fuel than coal plants spew into the atmosphere as a result of burning coal. Many people (correctly) point out that it is possible to scrub all of that from the air, but most coal-burning plants do not do this. Also it is not a matter of "now". We have known for decades how to build breeder reactors that will process the "spent" fuel back into usable fuel, and which are not capable of making weapons-grade material (the usual purpose for a breeder reactor.) This would reduce our fuel needs by something like three orders of magnitude and the fuel waste would be (IIRC) two orders of magnitude less long-lived. If you do the math you will see that if this does not actually solve the nuclear waste problem, it at least comes very close to it.
We do not do this because of a flawed interpretation of a nuclear treaty. Bush (ObDisclaimer: I hate the guy, his family, and all for which they stand, which has nothing to do with America except the part about greed) has spoken in favor of the use of breeder reactors for processing nuclear fuel.
Very true, but it is a horrible mistake to base anything you don't have to on topsoil. We are destroying soil at an alarming rate. Modern farming processes create monocultures in soil; all these people in the midwest who talk about how great their dirt is havefor the most part never seen real soil. Modern tilling techniques and the use of heavy equipment create hardpan under the soil, damaging drainage. The use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides kills off some of the biota in the soil (soil is sixty to eighty percent organic material, and up to 40% living material) but not others, creating monocultures which do little to protect plants and may even harm them. The result is a soil that does not drain properly, that requires the use of more and more chemicals, and which is additionally blown and washed away during winds and rains.
But wait, there's more! Any kind of hard soil will run off water too quickly, contributing to floods. Any kind of soft, uncovered soil will be blown away - some of the soil lands back on your ground, some of it on your neighbor's ground, and some of it goes into the water once again. Both this source of soil in the water and simply washing it away with irrigation clogs streams and rivers, creating anaerobic conditions which kill both flora and fauna. This process continues all the way to the ocean, where ocean life near the land is often killed off by changes in salinity, lack of light due to suspended soil fines, and other issues.
This last effect kills not only small, submerged plants and animals, but also plant life on the coast lines. The coast line in the Southern part of the US is especially damaged - a fact which has been blamed for much of the fury of the storm which tore New Orleans into small, floating pieces.
Topsoil-based fuels are simply completely wrongheaded, a fact which Brazil will discover sooner or later...
Re:Happened in the past with renewables (Score:3, Interesting)
It's pretty amazing how much energy, resources and space we expend on cars. I only started noticing when I stopped owning one.(don't worry, no lecture, right now, about how everyone must, MUST I say! ride a bike)
There's more than one solution (Score:3, Interesting)
A plant that has been proposed for making cellulose ethanol is a Brazilian water hyacinth [wikipedia.org], it has the advantage of being one of the fastest growing plants in the world. This one is definitely a pest, if left to grow it will quickly choke any water surface. If it could be harvested to make ethanol, many swamps in tropical and sub-tropical areas that are not considered "arable" today could be used for making fuel.
I think the solution for our energy problem will not come from a single source. There are many alternatives, we will have a mix of different sources, just as we have hydro power together with nuclear and fossil fuels today.
Anyhow, I agree that it's a fact that the current population of the world is too large to live at USA standards of consumption with our current technology. Malthus has been proven wrong before, but even with technological innovations, there are physical limits to growth, one of them being the absolute availability of energy you mentioned.
Re:Happened in the past with renewables (Score:3, Interesting)
--
Get Solar! http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
Re:Happened in the past with renewables (Score:3, Interesting)
If cities were truly models of efficiency, then maybe more folks would be attracted, but more exurbanites (like myself) would rather have small, incompetent government rather than large, overweight government. I pay a third of the taxes and my trash ALWAYS gets picked up. Something that happened with varying results in Philadelphia.
But Philadelphians are smart - they got rid of the A's and the Republicans in the 50's and only won one World Series and have lot all of their manufacturing base since then. They've taxed the smart folks out of town.
Re:People don't really care (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't equate riches with waste. There are a lot of things worth having which don't require staring at gas guzzling vehicles zooming around in circles, for instance, like, say, the enormous supply of literature we've built up, or, God forbid, sitting around with a group of folks making things with your own hands and telling stories.
A person who cannot balance their checkbook and stop spending when it runs out (allowing for situations totally beyond their control) is an idiot, nothing more, nothing less. As a people, our checks started bouncing a while back. Fiscal deficits, ecological impact, we just keep borrowing. Technology won't help for one very simple reason: if you give people 20% cleaner energy, they will use 25% more. If we mastered vacuum energy right now and could provide everyone with a perfectly clean, unlimited source of power, all that would happen is the earth would get an awful lot hotter from the waste heat. One crisis would be replaced with another with nothing gained. We've become glutted on spending for its own sake, consuming to no purpose. *That* is what is wrong and science won't fix it.
Somewhere along the line, particularly if we are to learn how to live in space, in closed environments, we need to learn how to balance our accounts. If we cannot learn something that simple, even the (supposedly) most intelligent among us, what is the point? It's not 'poverty', it's common sense.
Re:Yes but... (Score:4, Interesting)
Excepting the fact that you conveniently didn't RTFA. Biofuels are encroaching on native habitats, which often includes slash and burn farming.
But is that actually true?
Slash and burn farming has been encroaching on native habitats long before we decided to make biofuels. The fact is that population pressures in these areas will cause farmers to slash and burn in order to grow any crop which is at that time economically viable. Now that we are concentrating on biofuels the demand for sugar cane grows and that is the particular crop that is chosen.
Re:Algae (Score:4, Interesting)
If it's a well-managed facility, the methane is probably already being reclaimed. They do that at the Vancouver landfill. Surprisingly though, sewage treatment doesn't release that much methane, unless you have an anaerobic tank for biological phosphorus removal. Most of the carbon-based gas released is CO2 from the aerobic reactor.
And before you point out the smell, methane is actually odorless. The smell most people associate with methane is hydrogen sulfide, which is often produced at the same time by anaerobic biological processes.
Good god, I want to smack Monbiot (Score:4, Interesting)
If biodiesel production causes food prices to spike, capitalists will find something different that does not cause this to occur. It may take longer than we wish, but it will happen.
As for land-stripping, it is well known tht most stripping has occurred to plant inefficient farms. This was happening well before the recent enthusiasm for biofuels, and it will continue. I'd love to see it stop. But I'm not going to give up biodiesel to try and stop it or even help it. My fuel comes from America, not Saudi Arabia, Brazil, or even Canada, as does a great deal of our oil.
The last thing I have to say about Monbiot, the most insulting, doubtlessly the one thing that will make people say "you lose this argument because you got personal, hell, you might as well just get it over with and violate Godwin's Law," is about his style of presentation. George Monbiot [monbiot.com] makes himself out being omniscient, and if only the world would listen to him, all would be well and people would live in peace. I had enough of that sort of person when I lived in Madison, Wisconsin. They're everywhere there. It is, IMNSHO, this sort of person that enrages the reactionaries among us like no other, the ones who think that they know better than everyone else how to live, function, even breathe.
Okay, let's put ALL biofuels on hold for five years. With that sweeping generalization, all work on it comes to an crashing end for five years. In April 2012, we will resume. And know what? We'll be right where we left off, only to find that we're five years behind, as we finally had the wisdom to listen to the one guy who knows better than us how to run the world. At least, we thought he was. You'd think we'd have learned by now to listen to people who claim to know better than everyone else, but our race is notorious for its memory deficiency.
Economics in One Lesson (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:GE food (Score:3, Interesting)
That's not an issue with genetically modified foods as such, it's an issue with an hyperimmune response to certain foods, and the foods whose genetic materials are used.
And who's to say more gm foods won't create more allergins? Also who can say definitively other bioreactive chemicals, proteins or not, won't be created as well?
Using your arguement, we shouldn't import brazil nuts, because they cause an hyperimmune response.
Not at all. Most people don't have an allergy to brazil nuts, myself, I love them. The specific problem here is when someone does not know what genetic material has been inserted into an item. While I don't like gmos, as long as they were labeled as such I wouldn't mind if they are on the market. However most businesses who are in the industry are against any labeling. Also I'm against using genetic engineering to make crops produce their own pesticides or for making them herbicide resistant.
FalconMy comment is too far down to be noticed (Score:2, Interesting)
I read in Nature recently that hydrogenerated power had a suprisingly large impact on greenhouse emissions as usually when dams are made, there's a lot of trees that are flooded, which ferment and produce a lot of methane.
Re:GE food (Score:4, Interesting)
People who waste their time on trendy non-issues like this make me sick.
Nonissue? People dying from an allergic reaction is a nonissue?
There are people dying RIGHT NOW from actual problems in the food industry with handling, inspection
These are handling and sanitation issues and don't have anything to do with genetic engineering. GE does nothing for preventing food from being contaminated. And for people without enough to eat, that's a problem with politics and logistics. Take Zimbabwe, it used to be the breadbasket of southern Africa. But when pres Mugabe forced the white farmers off of their farms then gave the farms to his cronies the country turned into a basket case. Then there's what's happening in Mexico. Because of massive subsidies the US gives to US agribusinesses these companies can export food to Mexico and sale it there cheaper than Mexican farmers can grow food. You can blame this on many of those "illegal immigrants" in the US. Because Mexican farmers can't make a living on their farms they migrate into the Mexican cities or north to come to the US. And those who go to the cities drive those already there north. Massive farm subsidies was the reason the WTO talks in Geneva fell apart. India and other coutries demanded the EU, Japan, and the US to stop subidizing their agribusinesses so these companies couldn't flood export markets with food that cost less than what local farmers could grow food for. In India thousands of farmers [blogcritics.org] have been committing suicide in part because they can't compeat with subsidized imported food [business-standard.com].
FalconAnd then there's reality. (Score:2, Interesting)
Biodiesel: Beyond however much CO2 it takes in or puts out, it only works well in moderate or tropical climates. Not only is a diesel engine difficult to start in the winter because batteries don't operate efficiently in the cold, diesel fuel has a tendency to 'gell', or solidify. I haven't had enough experience with biodiesel to know how it reacts to the cold, but here in Minnesota, there was talk about it 5 years ago and nobody's heard about it since. My guess is that it gells at a much warmer temperature than fossil diesel due to the lack of sulphur, or the abundance of wax, or both.
Ethanol - Corn: Beyond it cutting into corn as a food source, corn is grown from the ground, out in the open, and requires that ever-dependable stoic force, NATURE. Yeah, right. Droughts, floods, tornadoes, hail... all of these things destroy corn crops, all of them are not preventable by man. Also, I'd be interested in knowing about the studies that measure the amount of corn that can be grown on the land in a year... they need to cut it in half or a third, because you can't grow corn on the same ground year after year after year, regardless of how much fertilizer you add, unless you're in the blessed state of Iowa. Not rotating your crops is a great way to turn your land useless in a hurry. One year of corn, one year of hay, plow under the hay in the fall of the year, and you can plant corn again. That's a two-year process. Corn is a commodity, it's futures traded just like oil. Increase the use of corn and the price goes up, and it's measured by the bushel, not by the barrel, otherwise identical to other commodities. I hate to see the day that the price of corn overruns the price of oil just because we can grow it and the Middle East can't. People will be getting the popcorn out of the cupboards and bringing it in, just like the copper prices cause people to steal copper from empty houses and construction sites.
Ethanol - Switchgrass: There is no infrastructure in place for this, and establishing that infrastructure takes lots of time and lots of money. How are you going to measure it, by weight or by volume? Again, switchgrass is dependent on Dependable Nature, and the same shortfalls that apply to corn, apply to switchgrass.
Personally, I think we should be building a shitload of windmills and solar panels. Convert everything possible to electricity and run our lives from that. The infrastructure is there and we know how to harness it. It's almost free for the taking. The wind's always blowing somewhere, and the sun's always shining somewhere. Add geothermal to that mix and you could have a nuclear winter and still be making electricity.
As a side note, internal-combustion engines are only 40% efficient at best, regardless of what you run them on. There's a ton of heat that comes out the exhaust, out the radiator, out the crankcase (convection)... As humans go, we sure as hell know how to make heat, we just don't know how to harness it. Been that way since the caveman built a fire and warmed himself by it. 90+% of a campfire's fuel heats the air around the campfire, and does very little to heat you or anything else. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Miscanthus (Score:3, Interesting)
Miscanthus is a genus of about 15 species of perennial grasses. Miscanthus giganteus has been trialed as a biofuel in Europe since the early 1980s. It can grow to heights of more than 3.5m in one growth season. Its dry weight annual yield can reach 25t/ha (10t/acre). The rapid growth, low mineral content and high biomass yield of Miscanthus make it a favorite choice as a biofuel. After harvest, it can be burned to produce heat and power turbines. The resulting CO2 emissions are equal to the amount of CO2 that the plant used up from the atmosphere during its growing phase, and thus the process is greenhouse gas-neutral.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscanthus_giganteus [wikipedia.org]
Educate yourself http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-57028888
Re:You're pessimistic by about 3 orders of magnitu (Score:3, Interesting)
There currently is about 386 GWe of nuclear capacity in the world from 435 nuclear reactors operating in 30 countries supply 16% of world electicity with fairly rock-solid base load. We need to have about 14 times as many as we do now to meet world energy needs living as Americans do.
Re:Happened in the past with renewables (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't have numbers in front of me, but my understanding is that LEDs are no more efficient than fluorescent lamps. They may or may not be more efficient than compact fluorescent bulbs (CF), because CF is less efficient than the traditional 4' or 8' long tubes, but it's not much of a difference. The main benefits to LED lighting are: 1) it's small and simple: just apply DC current and it works; fluorescent requires a ballast with complicated circuitry. 2) it's rugged, so it works well in a flashlight or car subjected to shock. 3) It turns on instantly, which is good in car brake lights for safety, or any other non-continuous use.
I really wish more automakers would make hybrid powertrains available in more vehicles. The technology seems mature enough, but there's not enough selection. Besides, I'd like a used one to transplant into my older car.
I'd love to have some solar cells on my house. The problem with them is that they're still very expensive, and unless you plan on living in the same house for the next 30 years, it just doesn't pay to invest in them.
Re:Biofuels Do Nothing (or Worse) for Global Warmi (Score:3, Interesting)
As another poster pointed out [can't find the post right now, so no link, sorry], the difference in the source of the C02 that is released by burning petro- or bio-diesel matters. Fossil fuels contain carbons that would not ordinarily be dumped into the atmosphere in the billions of tons a year without we extract them and burn them.
Plants, on the other hand, bind atmospheric C02 into themselves, and that carbon is re-released when the plant (or its derivatives) is burned. It's a "zero sum" problem.
I think this argument is fallacious, esp in the longer term. If you have bio-diesel, why are you burning petro-diesel to farm corn? I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I would bet that an Iowa farm co-op can produce more bio-diesel from a soybean crop than fuel is required to farm that crop. That's a net gain in fuel, and the more efficient the farming techniques are, the greater the gain.
Furthermore, what causes you to think that pesticides can't be manufactured from bio- sources? So far, every thing I've looked at leads me to believe that there is not a single petro-based product (including e.g. plastics, packaging, etc) that cannot be produced better and more cheaply from bio-based sources.
And all this before we even start talking about refining bio-diesel into lighter fuels (bio-gasoline, anyone?) and perhaps blending it with something like ethanol.
Finally, I would point out that the main reason for moving to bio fuels generally, and bio-diesel in this particular instance, has a lot less to do with Global Warming than it has to do with National Security - both economic and materiel - in the US.
Bio-fuels represent a sustainable solution to the problem of fueling our transportation [and some other things] without totally distrupting the entire system as it exists at this moment (in the petro-based world). Bio-fuels can be implemented progessively much more quickly than we can e.g. develop the tech for vehicles powered using Hydrogen - or even electricity. Bio-fuel tech not only exists, it is well understood and is a low tech solution that trumps the high-tech, petro-based solution across the board. Any R&D we do is pure profit and long term gain.
In short, all the crap arguments like those presented in TFA have been addressed and solutions proposed. The continuing FUD is almost certainly funded entirely by short-term profit motive. What kind of an idiot goes to all the trouble to cut down a rain forest to create arable land, after all? The profit from rain forests is in things like pharmaceuticals, not bulk crops that are trivially grown far more cheaply in the millions of hectares of existing farmland we already have? The trivial case [for US bio-fuels]: If we produce the soybeans in S. America, we have to pay to ship either the beans or the oil or the finished product from there to here, and with the reasoning you present above [i.e. running tractors on petro-diesel to produce bio-diesel], the ships would be burning bunker C...
Re:Happened in the past with renewables (Score:2, Interesting)
What's amazing about those articles presented is their alarmism and assumptions that biofuels will cause the jungles to be reclaimed for use in agriculture and that is the fault of biofuels. It sounds like the authors are being subsidized by the arabs protecting their oil industry to influence public opinion against biofuels to protect their turf or promote their world jihad against all infidels and any muslems who disagree with them.
Considering some biofuels are being produced (maybe even commercially) in new zealand using sewage or waste water reclaimation processes, it should be obvious - since this wasn't mentioned in any of the stories - that it was an attack on biofuels in general and not something created to inform readers about the nature of 'good' and 'bad' methods of creating biofuels.
There was even the notion presented that the jungle was a genuine carbon sink with some sort of long term capability of absorbing carbon. Like deserts, jungles encroach on areas that didn't used to be part of them. It is a continual effort to beat back the encroachment. The assumption that the jungle is a great carbon sink is malarky. The plants absorb and hold carbon as long as they survive. When they're dead, they decay rather quickly - releasing co2 in the process. When fires happen, they release co2 very quickly. There are estimates that around 2000 pounds of termites exist for every person on the planet - many residing in the jungle. These small creatures have significantly higher metobolic rate per pound than people do - and very few people have a carbon foot print that could equal 2000 pounds of termites - other than maybe algore.
Note too, these termites convert some carbon into methane rather than co2 - much more so than would normally be released by decaying trees and plants. While the supposed environmentalists claim methane isn't important because it does stay as long in the atmosphere - over 20 years the effect by weight (mass) is a factor of 63 times more in potentcy of methane over co2.
It seems like the wikipedia articles on this also mentioned that methane level was up 150% since the 1700s. This would be the equivalent effect of co2 going up 3000% or so. Guess they forgot to notice that in the UN report and study.
It would also be interesting to know what sort of influence the catastrophic alarmist industry has had on the radical islam types leading the jihad. Maybe they bought it hook line and sinker and are merely doing what the algore crowd is still afraid to mention about there being too many people around. If that enviro crowd had been right about anything 30 years ago - we'd be extinct now.
Re:GE food (Score:3, Interesting)
If there were studies showing GMO food as anything other than a way to grow more, better food on the same land, I'd be the first in line, but there isn't.
Ah but there is. Some people are allergic to brazil nuts, some have gone into shock and have died. Soy was gentically engineered with a gene from the brazil nut. In a study it was shown those with an allergy to brazil nuts were also allergic to the soy. The gene inserted encoded for a protein that's an allergin.
What's more, you say "some have gone into shock and have died." This is not true of GMO foods, as far as I know.