Biofuels… errr, Agrofuels
Posted on July 19th, 2007 By laura at 6:12 am (All, Two legs)
An interesting article on the organization GRAIN’s opposition to plant based fuels…
I have to admit that I find the whole ethanol issue highly confusing. I can’t seem to get my questions adequately answered. I found this study which set out to contradict the claims that it takes too much energy to make ethanol in order for it to be considered a viable option (the fact that they had an agenda makes the outcome of their research suspect). Their results essentially say that we get twice as much energy out of a field of corn as it takes to produce. I guess that’s a little better than breaking even, but you have to use half of what you make in order to make more, so that doesn’t seem so great to me. I also wonder about the fact that ethanol is not a 1:1 replacement for gasoline. It takes more ethanol to create the same energy of an equal amount of gasoline.
CATO (also up to its eyeballs in agenda) offers this statement on ethanol. They don’t think a lot of ethanol as a solution to anything, listing eight lies told about the ethanol.
Lie No. 4: Ethanol is a renewable fuel. According to a group of academics from the University of California at Berkeley who published in Science magazine, only 5 to 26 percent of the energy content of ethanol is “renewable.†The balance of ethanol’s energy actually comes from the staggering amount of coal, natural gas and nuclear power necessary to produce corn and process it into ethanol.
This matches what I’ve always been told about ethanol. That its too expensive to make and that it makes air cleaner in the same way that electric power does: by moving the dirty part of the process somewhere else.
One of GRAIN’s major issues is what the new push for grain based fuels will do to the truly poor of the world. They report that the governments of developing nations are actually pushing people off of their land in order to use it for agrofuel production (GRAIN objects to the term ‘biofuel’ because of the misleading positive spin ‘bio-’ gives it). Millions of hectares around the world are being made available through deforesting and other destructive methods (CO2 emissions anyone?). On top of that, farming creates as many CO2 emissions as our global travel needs do. So, what are we saving by jumping the gun on legislating grain based fuels?
E85 and gas mileage: Where lies the truth?
facts about ethanol
Brad K. said,
July 19, 2007 at 11:03 am
It seems to me that we should start with the biostuffs approach — harvesting weeds, grass clippings, and tree trimmings. The stuff that is harvested anyway and just discarded.
I also wonder if there isn’t a place to capture methane from the formation of silage. If we capture the methane, and use the feed, we might have some other gains. Maybe even go back and divert some of the silage to reclaim the alcohol that forms?
And could the tree trimmings and grass and weed clippings be put through a methane/alcohol capture process similar to putting up silage?
I would also like to see more effort put into low head pressure hyroelectric processes. Something that you could work on two feet of water, in a farm creek that might not run all year. From the very small to moderate sized installations, there are a lot of creeks and rivers that could generate a lot of electricity without flooding whole states every time.
Here in Oklahoma there are a number of wells with low pressures of natural gas. What about micro generators? Wells and refineries both regularly flare off various waste products — what about micro generators for that, too?
What about catalytic converters for small engines, like pumps, construction tools, tractors, combines, road building equipment?
I can’t believe that ethanol is the only hope. What about generating high-energy plasma in orbital solar farms, and dropping energy packets for use on the globe? What about the glories of fusion reactors, that were supposed to consume all this radioactive waste from fission reactors and weapons construction?
And why can’t we focus on restoring the ancient forests that have been removed in the US and the rest of the world in the last thousand years?
Grr.