Environment & Energy

wtmusic

(39,166 posts) Sat Dec 1, 2012, 09:28 PM Dec 2012

Nobel Prize-winning biochemist says ALL biofuels are “nonsense."

[div style="float: left; padding-right: 10px;"]"Hartmut Michel won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on photosynthesis. So, it is fair to say that he knows a thing or two about energy transport and storage in plants. Today he is director of the Molecular Membrane Biology at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysics.

He recently penned an editorial in Angewandte Chemie International Edition in which he hammered the use of biofuels for alternative energy. Note that Angewandte Chemie International Edition has the world’s highest impact factor of all chemistry journals. His simple but pointed criticism condemns all varieties of biofuels and supports my previous posts on this subject.1, 2

The problem is the inherent inefficiency of photosynthesis. He points out…"

http://climatesanity.wordpress.com/2012/02/25/nobel-prize-winning-biochemist-says-all-biofuels-are-nonsense/

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1988 was awarded jointly to Johann Deisenhofer, Robert Huber and Hartmut Michel for the determination of the three-dimensional structure of a photosynthetic reaction center.

9 replies

= new reply since forum marked as read

Highlight:

Nobel Prize-winning biochemist says ALL biofuels are “nonsense." (Original Post) wtmusic Dec 2012 OP

we should keep on burning oil and natural gas then? dlwickham Dec 2012 #1

Of course! After all, we don't want to hurt God's feelings. Speck Tater Dec 2012 #2

Nice strawman NickB79 Dec 2012 #4

Tell it to Brazil Politicalboi Dec 2012 #3

Yeah, all they had to do was clear a little rainforest NickB79 Dec 2012 #5

dlwickham

(3,316 posts)

1. we should keep on burning oil and natural gas then?

Reply to wtmusic (Original post)

Sat Dec 1, 2012, 09:47 PM

Dec 2012

not sure what you're getting at here

Speck Tater

(10,618 posts)

2. Of course! After all, we don't want to hurt God's feelings.

Reply to dlwickham (Reply #1)

Sat Dec 1, 2012, 10:58 PM

Dec 2012

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/11/30/bryan-fischer-enormously-insensitive-to-hurt-gods-feelings-by-not-using-oil/

The fact is, there may not be ANY way to sustain our rate of energy usage. No law of physics guarantees the survival of industrial civilization. And there are probably a dozen good reasons contained within the laws of physics why industrial civilization cannot survive.

NickB79

(19,270 posts)

4. Nice strawman

Reply to dlwickham (Reply #1)

Sun Dec 2, 2012, 01:24 AM

Dec 2012

Those aren't our only options, you realize. There are far more options than just those at our disposal.

Politicalboi

(15,189 posts)

3. Tell it to Brazil

Reply to wtmusic (Original post)

Sat Dec 1, 2012, 11:12 PM

Dec 2012

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/17/us-climate-sugarcane-idUSTRE73G1N820110417

NickB79

(19,270 posts)

5. Yeah, all they had to do was clear a little rainforest

Reply to Politicalboi (Reply #3)

Sun Dec 2, 2012, 01:27 AM

Dec 2012

Completely innocuous, that Brazilian biofuel

NoOneMan

(4,795 posts)

6. More on that

Reply to NickB79 (Reply #5)

Sun Dec 2, 2012, 03:20 AM

Dec 2012

However, indirect land-use changes, especially those pushing the rangeland frontier into the Amazonian forests, could offset the carbon savings from biofuels. Sugarcane ethanol and soybean biodiesel each contribute to nearly half of the projected indirect deforestation of 121,970 km2 by 2020, creating a carbon debt that would take about 250 years to be repaid using these biofuels instead of fossil fuels.

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/02/02/0907318107.abstract

See, after 250 years its all savings!

wtmusic

(39,166 posts)

7. The carbon debt from using fossil fuels takes millions of years to be repaid

Reply to NoOneMan (Reply #6)

Sun Dec 2, 2012, 03:47 AM

Dec 2012

so I'm not sure what their point is.

Ultimately, don't have millions of years and we don't have 250 years.

joshcryer

(62,276 posts)

9. Irony: deforestation in Brazil is for EU grass fed beef.

Reply to NoOneMan (Reply #6)

Sun Dec 2, 2012, 06:14 AM

Dec 2012

They scorch and burn, raise cattle, then leave behind large swaths of land for "ethanol" crops. It's disgusting to be sure.

The EU, supposedly the most progressive states against climate change.

wtmusic

(39,166 posts)

8. The Reuters article is misleading.

Reply to Politicalboi (Reply #3)

Sun Dec 2, 2012, 03:56 AM

Dec 2012

Sugarcane grown to power Brazil's cars and trucks as an alternative to climate-warming fossil fuels has a beneficial side effect: it also cools the local air temperature, scientists reported Sunday.

The reason this is misleading can be understood using analogy.

Evaporative coolers are a sort of air conditioning "on the cheap" used primarily in arid desert environments, and cool the air by using its thermal energy to break the hydrogen bonds between water molecules. Water vapor, however, is a more significant contributor to global warming than CO2. So while sugarcane field may create a microclimate of cool air, the water vapor they thrust into the atmosphere is soaking up the heat energy from sunlight even faster and providing a positive feedback that's worse than no sugarcane at all.

Sugarcane is used in biofuel that powers about a quarter of the motor vehicles in Brazil, and in that way, it helps to keep some of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, which affects global climate.

The question is: how does sugarcane farming add carbon dioxide to the air? Dr. Michel addresses that directly:

For German “biodiesel” which is based on rapeseed, (conversion efficiency) is less than 0.1%, for bioethanol less than 0.2%, and for biogas around 0.3%. These values even do not take into account that more than 50% of the energy stored in the biofuel had to be invested in order to obtain the biomass (for producing fertilizers and pesticides, for ploughing the fields, for transport) and the chemical conversion into the respective biofuel. Taken together, the production of biofuels constitutes an extremely inefficient land use. This statement is true also for the production of bioethanol from sugar cane in Brazil.

Reply to this discussion