Interesting Facts about Biofuels

TIDBITS

Rudolf Diesel, the inventor of the diesel engine, designed it to run on vegetable and seed oils like hemp. In fact, when the diesel engine was first introduced at the World's Fair in 1900, it ran on peanut oil.

Two decades later, Henry Ford was designing his Model Ts to run on ethanol made from hemp. He envisioned the entire mass-produced Model T automobile line would run on ethanol derived from crops grown in the U.S.

Even in the 1920s, the oil industry had massive lobbying power in Washington. Lobbyists convinced policymakers to create laws favoring petroleum based fuels while disgarding the ethanol option.

Nearly a century later, amidst oil wars in the Middle East, Global Warming, and a nearly depleted oil supply, the U.S. government is finally shifting attention to fuels that are more along the lines of Diesel and Ford's original ideas.

In an interview with the New York Times in 1925, Henry Ford said: "The fuel of the future is going to come from fruit like that sumac out by the road, or from apples, weeds, sawdust -- almost anything. There is fuel in every bit of vegetable matter that can be fermented. There's enough alcohol in one year's yield of an acre of potatoes to drive the machinery necessary to cultivate the fields for a hundred years."

Learn more: http://www.organicconsumers.org/2006/article_666.cfm

I have no problem with using waste from agriculture to produce fuels, but you have to ask why Bush would want biofuels to be used when his family has a vested interest in oil.

The following may provide an answer to that:


"There is just no energy benefit to using plant biomass for liquid
fuel," says David Pimentel, professor of ecology and agriculture at
Cornell. "These strategies are not sustainable."

Pimentel and Tad W. Patzek, professor of civil and environmental
engineering at Berkeley, conducted a detailed analysis of the energy
input-yield ratios of producing ethanol from corn, switch grass and
wood biomass as well as for producing biodiesel from soybean and
sunflower plants. Their report is published in Natural Resources
Research (Vol. 14:1, 65-76).

In terms of energy output compared with energy input for ethanol
production, the study found that:

-- corn requires 29 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced;
-- switch grass requires 45 percent more fossil energy than the fuel
produced; and
-- wood biomass requires 57 percent more fossil energy than the fuel
produced.

In terms of energy output compared with the energy input for biodiesel
production, the study found that:

-- soybean plants requires 27 percent more fossil energy than the fuel
produced, and
-- sunflower plants requires 118 percent more fossil energy than the
fuel produced.

In assessing inputs, the researchers considered such factors as the
energy used in producing the crop (including production of pesticides
and fertilizer, running farm machinery and irrigating, grinding and
transporting the crop) and in fermenting/distilling the ethanol from
the water mix. Although additional costs are incurred, such as federal
and state subsidies that are passed on to consumers and the costs
associated with environmental pollution or degradation, these figures
were not included in the analysis.

"The United State desperately needs a liquid fuel replacement for oil
in the near future," says Pimentel, "but producing ethanol or
biodiesel from plant biomass is going down the wrong road, because you
use more energy to produce these fuels than you get out from the
combustion of these products."

Although Pimentel advocates the use of burning biomass to produce
thermal energy (to heat homes, for example), he deplores the use of
biomass for liquid fuel. "The government spends more than $3 billion a
year to subsidize ethanol production when it does not provide a net
energy balance or gain, is not a renewable energy source or an
economical fuel. Further, its production and use contribute to air,
water and soil pollution and global warming," Pimentel says. He points
out that the vast majority of the subsidies do not go to farmers but
to large ethanol-producing corporations.

"Ethanol production in the United States does not benefit the nation's
energy security, its agriculture, economy or the environment," says
Pimentel. "Ethanol production requires large fossil energy input, and
therefore, it is contributing to oil and natural gas imports and U.S.
deficits." He says the country should instead focus its efforts on
producing electrical energy from photovoltaic cells, wind power and
burning biomass and producing fuel from hydrogen conversion.

Source: Cornell University

The economic viability of ethanol is the topic of much discussion in the DU Energy and Environment forum. P&P badly overestimated the energy input required to grow and develop ethanol; more recent scientists have shown that ethanol has an EROEI (Energy Return On Energy Investment) greater than 1.0, which is the "magic number". Anything below 1.0 is an energy loser.

There are several active threads on these issues; you should check some of them out.

Incidentally, I am not a detractor of either Patzek or Pimentel. Their paper was one of the first to take on the question of ethanol production viability, and they did not have the very latest data to draw from. Each have done excellent work in their fields of petroleum geology and sustainable energy sources (Patzek) and agriculture (Pimentel); Pimentel is currently raising the alarm over the rapid loss of topsoil and soil nutrients, which ought to also be of concern to the environmentally-conscious. His opposition to ethanol production from cropland may be informed by that troublesome development. Sadly for all of us, the Era of the Quick Fix is over.

--p!

I'm aware of the continuing defense of their work and I'm not so sure about their overestimation of the energy input. We covered this topic years ago in Bio Sci 372 when I did my undergrad, American agriculture is heavily dependent on energy input from petroleum. It makes sense for food production to do this.

It is likely that huge investments will be made in ethanol generation in the next few years. If the real-world financial return on ethanol is less than 1.0 (EROEI), this could be disastrous.

My main concern about agricultural ethanol, though, hasn't been the EROEI math; its been the guns-or-butter math. How much food production will we give up to produce energy? Ultimately, how much starvation will the continuation of our lifestyle require?

The critiques of the work of P&P have given me some hope that ethanol could be a viable energy source, but I'd like to have an adequate foundation to base my opinions on. If there is still a strong argument being made against ethanol, I would like to keep it in the conversation.

--p!

I think the Pimental considers all of the energy input and he applies the Second Law of Thermodynamics where any step in processing will cause a loss in the energy of the system...it's never a closed system. It's his calculations using the 2nd Law to come up with his final figures. His contention is that not all of the energy inputs are being considered.

You also have to wonder why Bush would propose the use of alternative fuels, so many of us are suspecting that his family would stand to gain even more if we had a mass shift to this type of fuel.

For example:

"Major oil companies like Shell Oil, Chevron Oil, and Occidental Petroleum have huge facilities and subsidiaries devoted to nothing but pesticide development and manufacturing."

That is taken from http://www.eroei.com/the_chain/oil_gas.html

and if you follow the page, you will see that:

"The average American diet is 3,500 kcal per day.
If you add up all the petrochemical energy used in the production of food (as above) the figure is between 30,000 kcal - 35,000 kcal (Pimentel, D. 2004. Livestock Production and Energy Use. In: Encyclopaedia of Energy. Cleveland, C. (ed.). Elsevier, San Diego, CA, vol. 3. pp. 671-676 ). That is 10kcal of hydrocarbon energy used to produce 1kcal worth of food or 10 times the energy is used to grow the food than is released by eating it."

This is consistent with what I learned years ago when we studied energy flows through biological systems.

And when you process that food into a fuel, you will lose even more along the way in processing.

Pimental has also stated that in order to fuel the entire United States, you would have to cover 97% of the surface area of the U.S. with corn fields.

Just curious, don't see it listed there.

Stands to reason that a weed would require much less effort to grow than corn.

hemp is not considered at all by any of these guys. Switchgrass, corn, rapeseed/canola but god forbid not the evil weed.

All the same, there are some serious concerns not being addresed and too many people are jumping on this bandwagon.

Again, I'll point to Bush touting ethanol as an alternative and remain highly suspicious. What does he know that he's not telling the rest of us.

We should also consider the higher nitrogen emmisions that ethanol produces...that's the brown dome over L.A. in the summer. Bad bad bad

Which?

I assume that "better" is typically measured in units similar to (energy)/((volume)(dollar)) ?

sugar cane, too.

looking up link...will repost in edit.

Edit: This article is great, but it doesn't mention hemp. Below is a sidebar from it:

http://www.motherearthnews.com/Alternative_Energy/2006_Februrary_March/Biodiesel-Homegrown-Oil

CROPS FOR MAKING BIODIESEL
Oil-producing crops are found all over the world. Below are oil yields from crops that can be used to produce biodiesel.

Oil Crop
Yield per Acre

Oil Palm
635 gallons

Coconut
287 gallons

Jatropha
202 gallons

Rapeseed (canola)
127 gallons

Peanut
113 gallons

Sunflower
102 gallons

Safflower
83 gallons

Mustard
61 gallons

Soybean
48 gallons

Corn
18 gallons

"There's enough alcohol in one year's yield of an acre of potatoes to drive the machinery necessary to cultivate the fields for a hundred years" is just hyperbole; in fact, bio fuels are less efficient than normal ones, (but of course much easier to obtain)

No, this is not a pro-oil point. This is me being pedantic.

Finally, if we can get some good renewable electricity sources, Hydrogen is the way to go IMO. Fuel cell chem now operational (and nearing the final stages of independent investigation, with confirmed results), at 65 mg/g.

(I think you can tell that I like Hydrogen)

Fuel cells could be the real way to go, the internal combustion engine is inefficient by nature.

Also we need to look at mass transit, bicycle paths and sidewalks. My God, people live 50 miles from work, drive alone and live in communities that have no sidewalks or any other way of getting to the store besides driving to a supermarket.

it seems to me that anyone that can produce the fuel with
less input will win out in the long run.

If in fact the petroleum input is in excess of return,
the rising price of gas will put the new fuels out of the market.
I believe, great potential exists for increased efficiency, especially
in changing the mix of feedstocks, using for instance, algae, and
moving to biological based refineries instead of
coal or oil fueled processes.
If this is true, the more earth friendly processes should
beat out the more brain dead ones.

makes ethanol out of sugar cane. It appears to have a positive return on energy-- at least, they keep brewing it and selling it (there's an ethanol pump in every Brazilian gas station). I assume they use more economical "best practices" techniques not known to Archer Daniels Midland.

What I don't know is whether they're just fermenting the sugar, or also cracking the cellulose into fermentable monomers. This latter idea is gaining currency now, and it's what will allow us to use switchgrass and other weeds (and old newspapers) as feedstock.

It seems to me that there are so many more potential sources of ethanol than of combustible oils as to outweigh the advantage of biodiesel's much simpler processing, over and above the energy cost. What am I missing?

One thing is that Brazil gets much more solar radiation than the US, they are also destroying rainforest to grow crop such as sugar cane.

Actually I think a lot of the clear-cutting is to create pasturage for livestock raising. To be used as ethanol feedstock, the cane would have to be grown within easy reach of the processing plant. (Although I admit the Amazon provides cheap and reliable transport.)