You cannot replace fossil fuels with anything we grow, and trying to do so creates so much environmental damage, loss of topsoil, displacement of food production, that all biofuel research should be defunded. The biofuel hoax is the greatest ecological and human disaster of the 21st century, causing the deaths by malnutrition of millions of human beings, far more deaths than caused by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. We have increased the cost of food all over the world for nothing, because the net energy gain of any biofuel is so low that it is not worth the environmental and human carnage.
There are allot of people all over the world who want to make money producing biofuels, but they are doing tremendous harm to all of us. We can use up all our topsoil and all of Brazil's and Mexico's topsoil producing biofuels, we can skyrocket the price of fertilizers all over the world, and all we will get for it is higher and higher food prices and speed up the inevitable loss of topsoil which will cause a collapse of the human population due to mass global starvation. That day will come at some point in the century no matter what we do, but there is no reason to commit mass suicide intentionally out of our own ignorance and greed for biofuel profits. Topsoil is a limited resource all over the world, and if we waste our precious topsoil producing inferior quality, low quality ethanol fuel, then we will be trading human lives for short term profits.
All present and future biofuels have the same problems. Biofuel crops are all too low in energy, too light in weight, and thus too bulky and expensive to transport to be of any real value. They all require vast amounts of sunlight to grow and they take up too much land, water, and fertilizer resources to be economically beneficial. By contrast, coal has been successful as a valuable fuel because it is very heavy and compact, high in energy content, and thus makes energy sense to transport. Coal already exists in the ground so you don't have to plant it, water it, and fertilize it. All biofuel schemes, planned or imagined, will never amount to a hill of beans because of the basic limitations of their solar based production process. A requirement for vast amounts of sunlight will always equal a requirement for vast amounts of land area to collect that sunlight; thus solar power schemes can never replace the massive concentrated energy reservoir of fossil fuels.
Growing switchgrass to produce ethanol from lignocellulose has most of the same drawbacks as making ethanol from corn. We will use land, water, fertilizer, farm equipment, and labor to grow switchgrass that will be diverted from food production, with soaring food prices the result. If we grow switchgrass on land currently used to graze cattle, we will reduce beef and milk production. If we grow switchgrass on unused "marginal" prairie lands, we will soon turn those marginal lands into a new dust bowl, which they may turn into anyway due to global warming. Computer models for the progression of global warming show the America Midwest and Southwest getting hotter and dryer, with much of our farm and grazing land turning into desert. We know that biofuel production will speed up greenhouse gas release, so if the global warming theory is true, we soon won't be able to produce enough biofuels to run our cars, or enough food to fill our bellies.
Switchgrass and other biofuel weeds will be grown by ordinary, profit motive driven farmers, not by environmentally trained scientists. Farmers will grow switchgrass on land that could be used to grow corn, wheat, or soybeans, and farmers will want to maximize yield so they will use lots of fertilizer to increase output. The plans biofuel idealists are trying to sell the American public will never produce the kind of "green," food friendly energy resource they promise. The next great scandal will be how to get rid of all the millions of acres of invasive, deep rooted biofuel weeds once society inevitably realizes that even growing second generation biofuel crops is a tragic mistake.
In practical terms, there is not enough usable land area to grow a sufficient quantity of biofuel plants to meet the world's energy demands. According to professors James Jordan and James Powell, "Allowing a net positive energy output of 30,000 British thermal units (Btu) per gallon, it would still take four gallons of ethanol from corn to equal one gallon of gasoline. The United States has 73 million acres of corn cropland. At 350 gallons per acre, the entire U.S. corn crop would make 25.5 billion gallons, equivalent to about 6.3 billion gallons of gasoline. The United States consumes 170 billion gallons of gasoline and diesel fuel annually. Thus the entire U.S. corn crop would supply only 3.7% of our auto and truck transport demands. Using the entire 300 million acres of U.S. cropland for corn-based ethanol production would meet about 15% of the demand."
Growing algae to make biodiesel is being touted as a cure-all for all our biofuel problems, but we are still stuck with the fact that algae need solar energy to turn carbon dioxide into fuel. To make biodiesel, algae are used as organic solar panels which output oil instead of electricity. Researchers brag that algae can produce 15 times more fuel per acre of land than growing corn for ethanol, but that still means we would need an impossibly large number of acres (about 133 million acres) of concrete lined open-air algae ponds to meet our highway energy demands. Those schemes that grow algae in closed reactor vessels, without sunlight, necessitate the algae being fed sugars or starches as a source of chemical energy. The sugars or starches must then be made from corn, wheat, beets, or other crop, so you are simply trading ethanol potential to make oil instead of vodka. If we construct genetically engineered super-algae that are capable of out-competing native algae strains that contaminate open air algae ponds, the new gene-modified algae will be immediately carried to lakes, reservoirs, and oceans all over the world in the feathers of migrating birds, with unknown and possibly catastrophic results.
Using "agricultural waste" to make biofuels has its own problems. Removing unused portions of plants that are normally plowed under increases the need for nitrogen fertilizers, which release the most potent greenhouse gas of all, nitrous oxide. Residual post-harvest crop biomass must be returned to the soil to maintain topsoil integrity, otherwise the rate of topsoil erosion increases dramatically. If we mine our topsoil for energy we will end up committing slow agricultural suicide like the Mayan Empire.
Using wood chips to make ethanol or biodiesel sounds like a good idea until you remember that we currently use wood chips to make fuel pellets for stoves, paper, particle board, and a thousand and one building products. The idea of sending teams of manual laborers into forests to salvage underbrush for fuel would be prohibitively expensive. Our forests are already stressed just producing lumber without tasking them with producing liquid biofuels for automobiles. Such schemes would inevitably drive up the price of everything made from wood, creating yet another resource crisis. Making fuel from true garbage, such as used cooking oil and winery waste, is environmentally harmless, but is it really worth the large infrastructure and vehicle maintenance costs required to sell ethanol and biodiesel as fuels? Our usable true waste resources are very limited in quantity, and not a major energy solution for a nation that uses over 8 billion barrels of crude oil every year.
SEE: http://biofuel.50webs.com/
Christopher Calder - nonprofit food security advocate
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