If we could replace 100% of transportation fuels with renewable, carbon-neutral sources, what are some of the new problems that this would create? The obvious one would be if the source was also a food source, but suppose that it wasn’t. If the fuel were significantly cheaper than oil, I can see it causing economic chaos in the Middle East.
Thanks for your help,
Rob
The big argument against bio-fuels is that they use more energy to produce than they provide. I don’t know if this is accurate since the results of experiments are so politicized. But even if that’s true now, bio-fuels should still be pursued. All new technologies suck when they’re still being introduced. It’s idiocy to refuse to consider any kind of innovation because it isn’t an immediate panacea.
And I know that Brazil is a huge consumer of ethanol from sugar-cane. So at least one nation has committed to the technology.
How do you make CO2 emissions carbon neutral?
The neutral term comes from the fact that the source of the fuel is a plant which takes carbon out of the air to build itself. Petroleum and coal take carbon out of the ground where it was sequestered out of the system and then add it to the air.
They don’t have to do that though - I think you went on to cover this, although not in explicit wording, in the rest of your post.
One of the other problems with biofuels is scalability - fossil fuels are good sources of energy because they are the results of millions of years worth of stored-up sunlight - obviously with biofuels, we can only harvest the energy from sunlight (via plants) as it falls.
In a thread about a year ago about cellulosic ethanol, one of the posters said that if you were able to extract ethanol from, say, switchgrass and use corn stover, municipal waste streams and other agricultural waste, you would still come up short. He claimed that only algae could scale up enough.
Mine intent with the question was to assume that we could do it. If so, what would the problems be?
Thanks,
Rob
I know that’s what the term means, but in terms of renewable energy – crops – then it’s not possible to be carbon neutral. You’ll always put more CO2 into the air than you take out of it. Aside from crops, there’s no such thing as renewable energy, e.g., hydrogen’s not a renewable source, because you’re using electricity to make it. Of course you have to draw a line somewhere lest we just call crops a converted form of solar energy.
You’d still have Kyoto-minded people worrying that instead of feeding the world’s poor, the United States is using all of the arable land to fuel its vehicles. Venezuela would overthrow Hugo Chavez since the demand for oil would no longer pay for his socialist agenda. I imagine the energy companies (BP, Shell) would mostly be okay since they’d’ve already integrated themselves into the new status quo. It might spur the the desalination industry since all of these crops would need fresh water. The jimadores would be out of work as all of the Mexican agave famers burn their crops in favor of corn production, and the price of tequila would skyrocket again like back in 2001.
Overall, I can’t imagine any real insurmountable problems other than the original premise (no offense intended at all, because if I’m wrong I always take value in being corrected).
This is tangential, but how do you figure that you will be creating more CO2 than you take in?
Rob
It’s assuming the harvesting process is run on non-carbon neutral equipment. Since you’ll eventually be releasing everything you produce AND the carbon from your equipment it’s not really carbon neutral.
You could solve this by making the creation and collection process carbon-neutral. (Either through using more carbon-neutral equipment or less equipment in general.)
If you’re producing bio-fuels, it seems natural to use it in your equipment. Personally, I favor a multiple source approach. Biofuels augemented with wind and solar power. A harvester with hybrid engines and additional batteries charged from wind or solar stations would help reduce the carbon emmissions of production. This could really help make bio-fuels carbon neutral.
I hope I’m not fantasizing.
So what’s the straight dope on biofuels?
I haven’t followed the science nearly as much as I should have. On one hand, I’ve seen tons of reports saying that switchgrass, corn based fuels operate at a “deficit.” That they require more energy to produce than they create.
I’ve seen contradictory reports to that.
For example the other day on the history channel I was sort of listening to a documentary they were running on biofuels as “background” noise while doing some paper work and I repeatedly heard the people on the documentary say that biofuels are efficient and that they do produce more energy than they use.
Is there a legitimate answer, and is the discrepancy between the differing explanations one of ill-defined terminology or methodology or are there genuinely people out there spreading misinformation to advance an agenda? I can imagine interested parties on both sides who would distort the data one way or another (farmers for example and their lobbying groups would probably distort the data in favor of it being efficient while producers of fossil fuels would probably be doing the opposite.)
One approach to improve the system is genetically altering the plants so that every part of the plant is usable. This really helps but I have not heard if it has been successful or not.
Martin, you seem to have hit the nail on the head on the confusing nature of the issue. The straight dope on bio-fuels seems to depend on who you want to believe. And yes, it is highly debated topic that gets spun very heavily.
I think it’s pretty close, and you come out with negative/positive net energy depending what assumptions you make for your data. I recall a long thread about this last year, and I came away with the impression that those who claim it’s negative efficient are relying on the work of one person and that the data he used is horribly out of date. Pimental was the name IIRC. Also, he made a lot of assumptions such as the energy cost of building ethanol plants, transporting the materials, etc., which I think would be mitigated over time once the infrastructure is in place.
One of the biggest advantages of biofuels is the variety of feed stok the fuels cam be made from.
Ethanol dosen’t need to be derived solely from corn…it can be fermented from any carbohydrate; cereal grain which has for some reason or other been deemed unfit for human consumption or animal feed, out-of-season candy, stale bread, waste from restaurants and other food prepatory businesses.
The same is said of Bio-diesel; can be brewed from a variety of lipidous (fatty) sources, such as vegetable oil from plants, and lard from animals. Can be sourced from dedicated crops, or from waste sources, such as used deep fryer grease.
One key point here is that there are different kinds of biofuels, and they’re not all equally efficient. Ethanol gets a lot of press, since vehicles designed to burn gasoline can also burn ethanol or gasoline-ethanol mixtures, but ethanol is currently in the red. Biodiesel, on the other hand, is used in diesel engines, and (depending on who you ask) is probably in the black. And then there’s diesel produced from various waste sources (from used fry-oil to sewage), which is certainly efficient (since you’d have that waste anyway, and have to do something with it), but which doesn’t scale up well (IIRC, if all fry oil in the US were converted to fuel, it’d only meet less than a percent of the country’s needs).
Indeed, last time I checked, biodiesel contains 3.24 times the energy invested in it’s manufacture.
I’d like to get back to the OP.
Pretend we (ie the First World, not just the USA) now have a way to grow & process bio-whatever at sufficient scale & efficiency such that we are burning zero petroleum for all transportation uses, and also for all production energy needs of bio-whatever. Ballpark the entire process is therefore carbon-neutral over a couple-year time frame.
Coal & natural gas are still used in electrical plants just as now.
What else changes in the world? My WAGs:
Russia (?), Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, etc., have only 5-10% of their current oil-fueled income. Economic & social chaos ensue.
Other oil-producing, but not oil-exclusive countries (Russia, Norway, Britain, Mexico, US (?)) have some upheavals on both the supply as well as demand side.
US, Japan, EU reduce their cost of imported energy to 5-10% of what it was. Major shifts in current account balances, trade deficits, etc. Major shifts in currencies.
China’s coal use for electricity becomes the lion’s share of all net carbon emmisions planetwide.
Large oil tanker fleets become uneccessary. Meanwhile, a new trade springs up between First World countries in either the feedstocks or the finished product. Come to think of it, we may still need those tankers; I doubt the Swedes can grow bio-whatever as cheaply as the southern US can.
etc.
That’s right. Ruin the earth so you don’t worry about possibly hurting someone’s economy.
I have a bias here. I’m a corn guy. Not an ethanol guy, but ethanol certainly touches on a lot of what I do.
The big problem will be scalability. It doesn’t matter whether you use corn, sugarcane, switchgrass, hemp or algae. You’ll need to grow a lot of it to turn it into fuel. Same with biodiesel – there aren’t that many restaurant grease traps around to fuel all the trucks.
Since you need to grow a lot, you’ll need a lot of land – some of that land might better be used to grow food crops, some for non-food crops (like cotton) and some might be environmentally fragile and thus better left alone.
Consider Brazil. It’s been on a crash course to produce ethanol for more than 30 years. Today ethanol accounts for 20 percent of Brazil’s fuel needs.
That’s it. 20 percent.
No serious advocates of biofuels claim they’ll completely replace petroleum fuels. That said, they can make a difference on the margins. When Katrina closed down the Gulf Coast refineries in 2005, it effectively cut off about 11 percent of the total U.S. oil supply. The price of gasoline went up 40 cents per gallon overnight.
If biofuels can replace (or more likely augment) 20 percent of the need for oil, it will be a good thing. But it won’t be a radical transformation.
Lowbrass is right about studies where the assumptions shape the data. For instance, if I harvest 150 bushels of corn, and I sell 100 for livestock feed and 50 for ethanol, how does the study assign the costs? Does it assign 1/3 of the cost of the tractor and combine, the fuel to run them, the fertilizer applied to the field, the money I pay to my accountant to do my taxes, etc. to ethanol? Does the study assume there would be no ethanol without the tractor, fuel, fertilizer, accountant, etc. and assign 100% of their costs to the ethanol? Or does it assume that I plant and harvest a crop anyway, and only assign the cost of the seed used to grow the extra corn that I sold for ethanol?