Cake or death?
Holly at Hen Waller opened my eyes last week to a wrinkle in the biofuel debate I hadn’t considered — given that they aren’t making any more acres, is it more worthwhile to grow food or fuel? And this NYT article from a couple of days later breaks it down further, clarifying for me yet another problem with ethanol subsidies — it makes less economic sense to grow food when the government is sending piles of money down the ethanol production chain.
The message I’m taking home is that we could concentrate a lot more efficiently on alternative fuel and oil independence, plus free up a couple of billion dollars of government money to grant alt fuel research if we’d just bump the Iowa caucuses back a few weeks.
And a bonus question: How many miles per gallon do you get if you’re riding a bike? I’m a machine, you’re a machine, and that food we use for fuel has to get a ride to our house somehow (at least most of it does).
And for the top of the pile: New Company to Produce Biodiesel From Algae
18 Responses to “Cake or death?”
Comment from KMc
Time June 28, 2006 at 11:14 am
Comment from etrigan
Time June 28, 2006 at 2:59 pm
That seems like a my-cost-only approach to bio-diesel/ethanol (BDE). It still doesn’t address the issue that creating BDE requires burning fossil fuel. As this article indicates, that really only has value if you want to displace pollution — which I think we’ve discussed similarly before — moving the pollution creation to the power plant and away from the car in the big city. BDE still doesn’t address foreign oil independence or overall CO2 generation.
Comment from KMc
Time June 28, 2006 at 3:27 pm
If you’re trying to get me to waste my afternoon by puzzling out what that link has to do with the price of ethanol in America, you’re too late
Comment from jank
Time June 28, 2006 at 3:47 pm
No, the only energy-neutral solution is to walk down to Corpus, commandeer a forty foot ketch, and meet me in Fiji, where we will set up a self-sustaining commune.
From what I understand, the biodiesel/ethanol costing more to make in BTUs than gasoline study is severly outdated and was sponsored by the petroleum industry. It assumed late 60’s era domestic, land-based oil-wells running on high-pressure oil reserves which severly understates the recovery cost (cost in BTUs, not $) of oil in 2004 where much of the oil is pumped from offshore around the world and shipped back. It also included the the BTUs that a growing plant absorbs from the sun in the “cost” of the gallon of ethanol. Almost all modern energy balances show non-grain only ethanol (ie, cellulosic production from corn stalks, sawgrass) at well-beyond the break even point. I want to say that yields are approaching the 2:1 point (2 bbls out for each bbl in).
Somewhere around the 3:1 point is where the oil industry operates (ie, gets 3 bbls out of the ground for 1 bbl burned). The upside to renewables like ethanol/biodiesel/hydrogen from microbes instead of electrolysis is that they’re greenhouse neutral – the CO2 that comes from burning ethanol was pulled from the air as the plant grew.
Comment from etrigan
Time June 28, 2006 at 4:43 pm
k- in the world of the interweb, mistakes never happened.
j- the link there is from a 7/2005 study. not exactly about the same things you discuss, but still indicates that BDE is not really much of an alternative.
Comment from jank
Time June 29, 2006 at 2:05 pm
I wish that the study linked was available, because the acres impact was somewhat confusing. The part I didn’t understand was if the calculation to determine the area for CO2 assimilation took into consideration the land being cultivated for fuel. I don’t think it did, given the total impact column in the graph (below)
Which, on its face, doesn’t quite make sense to me – how can the amount of C02 released when burning a given amount of biofuel be more than the CO2 absorbed while growing that amount of biofuel?
Comment from etrigan
Time July 11, 2006 at 11:38 am
Click and Clack weigh in on these heavy matters.
Comment from etrigan
Time July 11, 2006 at 12:53 pm
and more evidence that corn-based ethanol is a losing prop, but it’s looking like cane-based ethanol might work.
Comment from etrigan
Time July 11, 2006 at 12:54 pm
Oo! And maybe this would lead to the death of corn syrup (as an additive) and a resurgance of cane sugar!
Comment from KMc
Time July 11, 2006 at 1:36 pm
Ethanol and high fructose corn syrup are just two results of the same cause — the agriculture industry gets paid by the government to produce corn regardless of market pressures. There’s a mountain of corn we’ve already bought with our tax dollars and ADM et al are going to use it any way they possibly can.
Take away corn ethanol and corn syrup gets even cheaper, right?
Comment from KMc
Time July 11, 2006 at 1:44 pm
Oh, and I meant to add this in defense of corn syrup
Comment from etrigan
Time July 11, 2006 at 2:21 pm
My only defense for cane sugar is Mexican sodas.
Beat that.
Comment from KMc
Time July 11, 2006 at 2:41 pm
Oh sorry, I wasn’t defending HFCS, just throwing that out there. I’ll offer this — it’s really hard to garnish a Mojito with corn syrup.
Comment from Jank
Time July 12, 2006 at 8:22 am
Bill it as Katrina relief – lotsa good ‘cane growing down on the Gulf…
Comment from KMc
Time July 12, 2006 at 9:58 am
Here’s a new study on soy biodiesel and corn ethanol that says both are net energy positive, with biodiesel beating ethanol.
The study showed that both corn grain ethanol and soybean biodiesel produce more energy than is needed to grow the crops and convert them into biofuels. This finding refutes other studies claiming that these biofuels require more energy to produce than they provide. The amount of energy each returns differs greatly, however. Soybean biodiesel returns 93% more energy than is used to produce it, while corn grain ethanol currently provides only 25% more energy.
Comment from KMc
Time July 28, 2006 at 3:00 pm
“E85 fuel is not the solution. It is not even a part of the solution, it is a part of the problem.”
Comment from jank
Time August 9, 2006 at 8:27 pm
Which is why I was all upset that I didn’t hit the powerball this weekend (stupid cheesemakers) – still that far away from my very own biodiesel farm…
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Comment from etrigan
Time June 27, 2006 at 4:16 pm
My dad’s been saying this for years. It costs more in petroleum to make bio-diesel than it does to make gasoline. That’s not to say we shouldn’t keep researching the process to see if we can make it more feasible, but Willie isn’t helping out with foreign oil dependence right now.