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Big agriculture mislead the public about the benefits of biofuels

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Re: Big agriculture mislead the public about the benefits of biofuels

#181
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grain overproduction is also a significant driver of climate change. Fossil fuels, meat, and GMO monocultures aren't ecologically sustainable in current form, they continue because of capture of factions of governments by corrupt lobbying interests who threaten elected officials into driving more cash and favorable regulations their way.

People need to stop pointing the finger at food production, with such massive blinders on. Food "overproduction", are you actually serious? Are people so removed from farming, and food production, that they think it's a simple thing? Plant X food, get X food? Absolutely not! Even with irrigation, there are years with drought, yes even in the West. There are years that are too cloudy, or too sunny (yes, too sunny is a…

I agree, but we have to take care that getting rid of excess production (i.e. post reserve building/maintenance) is not going to fuck up supply chains in other countries, like it did in Africa.

Re: Big agriculture mislead the public about the benefits of biofuels

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not nearly as energy dense. Useful for some applicatons but liquid chemical fuels deliver more energy when space or weight are factors - despite the inefficiency.

E-Fuels. Specifically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyl_ether for agricultural engines in California because with no C-C bonds it is a soot free diesel fuel.

Not that it can't work, but that looks like oil companies trying to kill what we have today with a promise of something better in the future so they can keep selling oil.

Re: Big agriculture mislead the public about the benefits of biofuels

#183
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trouble with corn is that its yield band is huge. Get a good growing year and suddenly you have twice as much as you need — and more than you can store, leaving it out to rot. Recapturing that energy as fuel instead of disappearing waste heat is a win and what corn-based ethanol was introduced for. The trouble with humans is that they aren't very good at moderation. As soon as they see a little opportunity to do…

Excess corn crops in the 1800s were used to make (corn mash) whisky.

[deleted]

Re: Big agriculture mislead the public about the benefits of biofuels

#184
Literary Hub needs an editor. That title's grammar is appalling.

And the problems start there. Grunwald, adjectives spilling all over his page, needs a thesaurus for "uphill battle." Stylistically, this is a mess.

Style aside, Grunwald implies that maize is field corn and not sweet corn. It actually means both. This is clearly not a well-researched article on ethanol.

Beyond that we see his politics on his sleeve, tying ADM to Watergate. And a misunderstanding of the meaning of "corps," as the "Corps of Engineers" is not "the Army Corps." This is sadly childish. No, that's unfair to children. I've seen better journalism from high school kids.

Re: Big agriculture mislead the public about the benefits of biofuels

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At what rate do they produce degraded pasture land? Is it renewable?

Brazil is a big place, and growing sugarcane properly actually regenerates the soil, such as if no or low till techniques are used (which are popular in Brazil).

Farming basically never replenishes soil unless youre very carefully rotating mixed crops and animals through the area.

Re: Big agriculture mislead the public about the benefits of biofuels

#186

Just because you can drive 2’ and casually get 100 liters of gasoline does not make fossil fuel infinite. People forget that oil is not like air. We waste a ton of resources for drilling, transporting and refining, creating in the process huge externalities, to ensure reliable production and supply. And it will only get worse as we are running out of easy to tap sources. Looking for cheap and viable alternatives to f…

> Just because you can drive 2’ and casually get 100 liters of gasoline does not make fossil fuel infinite.

The finiteness of fossil fuels is not an issue we need to worry about right now.

> it will only get worse as we are running out of easy to tap sources.

As it gets worse, we'll just move on to other sources. No problems at all. At least none that would be easier to prevent than to solve.

> Looking for cheap and viable alternatives to fossils is not a conspiracy or a game

No, this is a pure, large-scale corruption conspiracy.

Re: Big agriculture mislead the public about the benefits of biofuels

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world is more complicated than a 17th century lab experiment in combustion. Forests sequester carbon through forest fires producing charcoal. Humans could actually cut down old trees, dry them, and convert them to charcoal later used for soil enrichment. Wetlands capture carbon by incorporating wood from dead trees in anoxic conditions. > When plant productivity exceeds decomposition, net soil carbon accumulation…

Dead trees and other plants in a mature forest are decomposed and in that process, carbon is released back into the atmosphere.

His point is charcoal doesn't decompose which is why we find soil with 5000 year old charcoal in it. It's basically permanently sequestered.

Re: Big agriculture mislead the public about the benefits of biofuels

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world is more complicated than a 17th century lab experiment in combustion. Forests sequester carbon through forest fires producing charcoal. Humans could actually cut down old trees, dry them, and convert them to charcoal later used for soil enrichment. Wetlands capture carbon by incorporating wood from dead trees in anoxic conditions. > When plant productivity exceeds decomposition, net soil carbon accumulation…

> Forests sequester carbon through forest fires producing charcoal Forgive me if I misunderstand, but the carbon in the charcoal resulting from forest fires isn't sequestered any more than the same carbon in the forest when in its un-burned state. The only difference is that, once you have a forest fire, a lot of the carbon is also just released into the atmosphere as CO2 in smoke.

His point is charcoal doesn't decompose. It's very long term sequestered once it gets into the soil.

Re: Big agriculture mislead the public about the benefits of biofuels

#189
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that is indeed what was sold to us 30+ years ago. This background context is in the article; The rest of the article is about how that was a lie. By about 20 years ago we understood that this was nonsense, that farm equipment and transportation infrastructure for corn cultivation chugs diesel, that somewhere between half, all, or twice (depending on study) the fossil fuels saved by corn ethanol would be burned t…

if it's half, then corn ethanol is totally worthwhile, right?

Not necessarily.

If it's half, it may be worthwhile on an energy basis in a narrowly defined sense. But there are far-reaching secondary energy costs beyond this explicit accounting. How do you account for the fuel burned in the jetski that your combine operator uses in his free time, or the cost of forging the steel that went into his combine blades? We live in a global economy and in this sort of analysis, there are probably hidden emissions not noted in the study that make 2:1 EROI insufficient.

There are non-EROI issues as well. What happens if we devote all our land to biofuel production? People starve. What happens if we devote all our land to 10:1 biofuel production and it doesn't cover 1% of current demand?

We have crops with higher Energy Return on Investment, just none (so far) that are economical to produce in Iowa in order to win the Iowa caucus.

Brazillian sugarcane ethanol is perhaps 5:1.

Daytime, immediate-use solar is something like 30:1. Less when you factor in batteries.

Wind turbines around 20:1.

Hydropower is maybe 100:1.

Oil varies enormously. Used to be, sweet light Saudi crude from the Ghawar field might break 100:1. Most fields globally more like 10:1-20:1. Alberta heavy oil sands are something like 5:1. If you dip all the way down into ultraheavy kerogen fuels, solid at room temperature and demanding lots of processing, there are certainly deposits that are less than 1:1.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment

There was a bit of an obsession in the mid 2000's with the concept of a global "peak oil" production, limited by supply-side constraints involving all the low-hanging fruit effectively being picked. While this is often dismissed as neo-malthusianism catastrophism, most of the ideas involved are unscheduled eventualities rather than some defined apocalypse. It introduced a lot of people too young for the 1970's OPEC embargo to the concept of energy scarcity, and effectively ironed out a great deal of the discourse using a fairly active forum.

http://theoildrum.com/node/9249

The major errors of that community's consensus were:

A) The particular shape of the Hubbard Peak bell curve is somebody's fit, not related to fundamentals, and extrapolating sigmoid / logistic curves have both huge error bars when the reasoning is sound, and little merit if the reasoning is not fundamentally sound. You simply can't predict a peak well in advance based on inflection points of this wide of a variety of sources, central limit theorem be damned.

B) Natural resource reserve estimates are both highly subjective and something that suffers from game-theoretic problems. If a speculator 'knows' that the ridge on the horizon is probably full of gold, but has an incentive to work the claim he already started a few miles away, he has no reason to report it. The same applies to countries and companies. Honest reserves estimates are also always quoted in terms of "Economically extractable at current prices", but prices can change and dramatically shift the number.

C) While the underlying fracking and injection technologies to expand the horizons of what constitutes an extractable reserve date to the 60's, they were not ubiquitous or as readily controllable until recently.

D) There is more than enough long-tail low-payoff hydrocarbon fuel out there for us to boil the planet in a CO2 oven, unfortunately.

Re: Big agriculture mislead the public about the benefits of biofuels

#190

While it's true that Big Ag in the U.S. has oversold corn ethanol as a climate-friendly alternative, it's important to distinguish between types of biofuels. Not all ethanol is created equal. Take Brazil, for example. Their ethanol program is fundamentally different. It's based on sugarcane, not corn, and it has a spectacular EROI (Energy Return on Investment) of about 8:1. That means for every unit of energy put int…

> Sugarcane is mostly grown on degraded pastureland far from the Amazon.

I vaguely recall campaigns against turning Amazon into pastureland via slash and burn.

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