Fuel or folly? Ethanol and the law of unintended consequences

[Mugu]

By Cinnamon Stillwell, sfgate

In the pantheon of well-intentioned governmental policies gone awry, massive ethanol biofuel production may go down as one of the biggest blunders in history. An unholy alliance of environmentalists, agribusiness, biofuel corporations and politicians has been touting ethanol as the cure to all our environmental ills, when in fact it may be doing more harm than good. An array of unintended consequences is wreaking havoc on the economy, food production and, perhaps most ironically, the environment.

Biofuels are fuels distilled from plant matter. Ethanol is corn-based, but other common biofuel sources include soybeans, sugar cane and palm oil, an edible vegetable oil. In the search for alternatives to fossil fuels, many countries have turned to biofuels, which has led to a booming business for those involved. In the United States, ethanol is the primary focus and, as a result, corn growers and ethanol producers are subsidized heavily by the government.

But it turns out that the use of food for fuel is wrought with difficulties. Corn, or some derivative thereof, is a common ingredient in a variety of packaged food products. So it's only natural that, as it becomes a rarer commodity due to the conflicting demands of biofuel production, the prices of those products will go up. The prices of food products containing barley and wheat are also on the rise as farmers switch to growing subsidized corn crops. During a time of economic instability, the last thing Americans need is higher prices at the grocery store, but that's exactly what they're getting.

At the same time, corn is the main ingredient in livestock feed and its dearth is causing prices of those products to rise as well. Farmers have had to scramble to find alternative sources of feed for their livestock and, in some cases, have had to sell off animals they can no longer afford to feed. This, in turn, has led to an increase in the price of meat and dairy products for consumers.


Complete article at:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2008/04/02/cstillwell.DTL

[mrcheerful]

1. Who says it was unplanned? Come on everyone knows sugar cane is better then

grains at alcohol production. So if thats the case why aren't they using sugar beets? After all GW's give away to cane producing countries has caused sugar making plants in michigan to shut down.

[truedelphi]

3. The corn lobby people were told that if corn syrup replaced sugar

The USA would turn into a nation of fat overweight diabetics.

Apparently it takes about four times as much water to break down a corn syrup compound as to break down sugar. (Ten ounces of soda containing sugar requires about 8 ounces of water tobreak down - corn syrup requires about 32 ounces of water for same 10 ounces.)

But who cares about people's health? Not the corn lobby.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

5. harvest time, we would find beets in the road..what a treat!

Sugar beets used to be a huge crop in Colorado. By the time I was a teenager though, all the farms had switched crops. :(

[mrcheerful]

11. Same here, as a kid dad would take the family on a drive out to the area's he grew up in, mostly

sugar beet farms and we would get the farmer to let us pick a few, then take a pocket knife and cut a chunk off. Boy those were the days of simple joys, sure cost less then chasing women lol.

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

9. I was just going to comment about sugar cane. I believe it's 6 times more cost effective

than grains. It is being used very successfully in Brazil.

[Muttocracy]

2. Corn is not an environmentally-friendly crop

requires lots of nitrogen fertilizer, which is produced using fossil fuels.

One more reason I'm not crazy about the Iowa caucuses and midwestern control of the Farm Bill.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

8. Nitrogen is poisoning the Ogallala aquifer... the biggest in the world.

Pesticides are getting into the groundwater in the Ogallala Aquifer faster than authorities expected, according to officials with the U.S. Geological Survey.

``The aquifer is more susceptible than we ever thought it was,'' said Bill Andrews, chief of studies for the survey's office in Oklahoma City. Andrews said experts had thought it could take hundreds or even thousands of years for materials to seep into the aquifer.

A survey of groundwater samples taken in cooperation with the Oklahoma Water Resources Board found traces of pesticides that have been in use for only 30 years.

The survey looked at well water samples from 12 sites in the Panhandle. The samples showed a median nitrate concentration of 3.5 milligrams per liter of water. For comparison, the results of 167 samples taken between 1940 and 1992 showed a median nitrate concentration of 2.3 milligrams per liter of water.

http://www.uswaternews.com/archives/arcquality/ttraof10.html

[Muttocracy]

12. yes, nitrate gets into our drinking water and is killing the Gulf of Mexico nt

[lapfog_1]

4. Once again, biofuels make sense IF you pick the correct feedstock

http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_yield.html

The above table shows that corn is an especially BAD feedstock, yielding 18 gallons of oil per year per acre, whereas oil palm is much better at 635 gallons of oil per year per acre. However, oil palm only grows in some very sensitive environmental areas of world.

There are some not listed in this table, one is jatropha plant, which is non edible and produces about 1000 gallons of oil per acre and then there is various species of algae, one of which produces between 5000 and 10,000 gallons of oil per acre per year. Algae is very attractive in that it produces so much that one can start thinking of growing it in sealed or semi-sealed bioreactors and using land or even ocean acreage for the process, it also doesn't require fresh water for growth. Some bioreactor companies have reported extremely high yields (over 50,000 gallons of oil/year/acre) but I would take those reports as marketing hype.

[ThomWV]

10. I do not want to get down on your case but I do want to point out something to you

This applies to the Algae as an oil source. I don't know anything about it but I do know this, you can not get anything out of a system unless you put something in.

Take a container 1 acre in size (or 100, or 1,000, I don't care), fill it up with water, and let the sun shine on it. In no time at all you'll get algae. It is almost as if the magical hand of god came from the sky and made it so. Actually it was just shit in the air that landed in the pond and found enough nutrients and energy (sun light) to take root, so to speak. The thing is from that moment on if you want to take oil out of the tank you have to put in the basic building blocks of oil. True that the algae can take the raw nutrients and make something from it that can then be rendered into a useful fuel but it still leaves that original source unnamed. In open waters that's not a problem if you're in the right place I'm sure, but then when you have algae in open water you're not talking about a harvestable proposition either.

It the same old perpetual motion machine problem put in agricultural terms.

[Muttocracy]

14. they're not making oil from algae - other carbon compounds to store energy. nt

[lapfog_1]

16. Not sure what you mean...

but "they" ARE making oil from algae.

The big trick has been EXTRACTING the oil from the algae. However, there now seem to be answers for that problem as well (standard vegetable presses did not do a very good job of breaking down the cell walls in algae).

I suggest reading the yahoo group oil_from_algae for up to date information by researchers and backyard scientists (and some bigger companies) on the subject.

[Muttocracy]

17. I meant three things but didn't flesh them out

in response to that poster, maybe I misread them. It's not "oil" as in petroleum. Creating the oil is not a separate step from producing the algae since they make their own. And as far as a chemical feedstock, the oils are primarily coming from photosynthesis with CO2 so you're not adding a fixed carbon source to create another fixed carbon source, which might have been their thermodynamic argument.

I haven't followed it closely but read things once in a while; studied limnology in grad school.

[lapfog_1]

15. It's certainly NOT something for nothing

Algae is converting sunlight and CO2 (plus some other nutrients... but more on this later), into vegetable oil. Oil that can be converted to biodiesel.

The "magic" is picking the exact species of algae to be used, and making sure that your environment matches that of where that species was found (temperature, sunlight, nutrients, water salinity, etc) so that the species used out competes those that float in on the air (if you go with open pond). It turns out that many species studied by the NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory) only generate high lipid densities by starving them of other nutrients, in particular, the strain CCMP647 was found to generate nearly half of it's mass in vegetable oil under those growing conditions.

But there is no magic to this, no one is using petroleum based fertilizer in the process. Some are locating ponds next to coal or natural gas power plants and using the flue exhaust from those plants as a source for higher concentrations of CO2 dissolved in the pond water (and thus incorporated into the algae), but others are not doing so, just using the amount of CO2 that naturally dissolves in water from the atmosphere.

The nutrients are relatively insignificant part of the process, and many are using municipal waste water as a source for all of the nutrients needed by the algae, thus achieving a dual purpose (growing oil and cleaning waste water).

Anyway, you can read more on the subject here.

http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html

The article is a bit dated now and the author was perhaps just a bit over enthusiastic about the possibilities, but it does have a lot of useful information, especially about the aquatic species program of the NREL.

[Muttocracy]

13. I'll be interested to hear the results of those algae fuel startups - they sound promising. nt

[lame54]

6. I'm not a environmentalists, agribusiness, etc. but...

I can see that burning food for fuel is a bad BAD idea

[elocs]

7. The trouble is that people want that one magic bullet that will free us from petroleum dependence.

They (especially in the U.S.) want that one thing that will allow us to continue our energy wasting lives, be-bopping everywhere in our vehicles without interruption or pain. The trouble is that the magic bullet does not exist. The pie that was once mostly made up of oil will need to be replaced with one that has many different pieces with each depending upon need and location and what is best for the situation. We should not confuse the piece for the whole pie and when somebody is promoting something as that one big thing we should follow the money.