From the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t department”.
More Maize Ethanol May Boost Greenhouse Gas Emissions
From the American Institute of Biological Sciences
Read the full article (PDF)
In the March 2010 issue of BioScience, researchers present a sophisticated new analysis of the effects of boosting use of maize-derived ethanol on greenhouse gas emissions. The study, conducted by Thomas W. Hertel of Purdue University and five co-authors, focuses on how mandated increases in production of the biofuel in the United States will trigger land-use changes domestically and elsewhere. In response to the increased demand for maize, farmers convert additional land to crops, and this conversion can boost carbon dioxide emissions.
The analysis combines ecological data with a global economic commodity and trade model to project the effects of US maize ethanol production on carbon dioxide emissions resulting from land-use changes in 18 regions across the globe. The researchers’ main conclusion is stark: These indirect, market-mediated effects on greenhouse gas emissions “are enough to cancel out the benefits the corn ethanol has on global warming.”
The indirect effects of increasing production of maize ethanol were first addressed in 2008 by Timothy Searchinger and his coauthors, who presented a simpler calculation in Science. Searchinger concluded that burning maize ethanol led to greenhouse gas emissions twice as large as if gasoline had been burned instead. The question assumed global importance because the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act mandates a steep increase in US production of biofuels over the next dozen years, and certifications about life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions are needed for some of this increase. In addition, the California Air Resources Board’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard requires including estimates of the effects of indirect land-use change on greenhouse gas emissions. The board’s approach is based on the work reported in BioScience.
Hertel and colleagues’ analysis incorporates some effects that could lessen the impact of land-use conversion, but their bottom line, though only one-quarter as large as the earlier estimate of Searchinger and his coauthors, still indicates that the maize ethanol now being produced in the United States will not significantly reduce total greenhouse gas emissions, compared with burning gasoline. The authors acknowledge that some game-changing technical or economic development could render their estimates moot, but sensitivity analyses undertaken in their study suggest that the findings are quite robust.
Effects of US Maize Ethanol on Global Land Use and Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Estimating Market-mediated Responses
Thomas W. Hertel, Alla A. Golub, Andrew D. Jones, Michael O’Hare, Richard J. Plevin, and Daniel M. Kammen
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Of course. It’s carbon based. What do you get when you burn a carbon based fuel?
How did anyone ever get the idea there would be less CO2?
Can someone present a chemical equation and the the stoichiometry to demonstrate how the combustion of so called bio-fuels is supposed to produce any less CO2 than gasoline?
Not that buy into the CO2 = bad hoopla
Does the robustness of the last sentence of the summary “…but sensitivity analyses undertaken in their study suggest that the findings are quite robust.” indicate that we should take this analysis with 5 grains of NaCl? 😉
I wonder where this whole biofuel mess would be if Iowa weren’t the first Presidential primary.
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“..their study suggest that the findings are quite robust.”
Very good!
Not to mention the fact that food prices the world over will exlode, and food shortages will kill millions…..huh, maybe not such a bad idea after all, those bio-fuels. It will actually help the greenies reduce the human population…two flies in one stroke.
The IPCC is mandated to find excuses for retarding, or even better, culling human population growth.
They will stop at nothing to achieve this objective. Real scientific methods and reports be damned.
Is the distinction between fossil CO2 and recently captured CO2 made? That’s an important point.
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It really is the choice of liberals: don’t go into the country, kill a
bunch of people, and set it right.
Lets starve them to death. But only the poor ones.
So you’re telling me I can use the energy of the sun to get me down the highway but that same energy is in no way responsible for warming the globe? Hmmmm…. *does not compute*
Nothing said about the CO2 byproduct released from the fermentation process?
I have always maintained, from the absolute beginning of this mess, that burning our food is a bad idea.
A much better implementation of biofuels as an alternative source would be through the use of MEthanol, not ethanol. With alcohol-based methanol as a fuel, practically any sort of biomass can be used– particularly the ones we don’t eat. Grass, cat-tails, the stuff from corn that we DON’T use, etc. Higher yield, and we don’t mess with our food supply. And it’s easy to convert engines for this purpose as well.
But that would make too much sense, and would only line the pockets of average americans, instead of lobbyists and the thieves in power.
I look at our energy policy in the country and weep. We will be our own un-doing.
Yellow Dent Corn (maize as you use in the article) is grown for animal feed. Ethanol can be made out the corn using the starch portion, and you still have a high protein highly nutritious feed left in the form of Distiller grain or DDG for short. With ethanol you get your cake and eat it too. I sure wish detractors would get the facts straight.
On my farm I can raise about 180 bushel per Acre of corn (5 tons) I will only use about 6 gals of Diesel fuel to produce that and that acre of corn will produce 500 (Five Hundred) gallons of ethanol and 3,000 lbs of High Protein DDG’s.
Besides the 6 gallons of fuel used there is a small amount of fuel used in mining the fertilizer and some Natural Gas used to produce the Nitrogen fertilizer. And some Natural Gas used in to distill the Ethanol from the starch and dry the Distillers Grain. But all in all the ethanol industry and my farm are very efficient, use much less energy and produce both liquid car fuel and high protein feed, that comes from mostly Solar Energy collected by the corn and some Natural Gas in the production of the corn and the ethanol. But nowhere near the 500 gallons of ethanol that will be produced per acre. Along with a ton and half (3,000 lbs) of High Protein feed. And feed is what my farm produced before ethanol came into favor.
All in All Ethanol gets knocked by the un-informed and groups with a political or financial angle to dis-credit the highly efficient Agricultural Farming and Ethanol production in the Mid-Western USA…….Sincerely John T.
I love the way these scientists address the possible shortcomings of biofuel production not in terms of rising food prices and the starvation and death of the world’s poorest, but rather because the CO2 balance is not right. Glad to know we in the first world have our priorities straight! sarc/
It takes more btu’s to raise grain, brew it and distill it to produce alcohol than the btus put off by the ethanol.
The heat is from natural gas.
The cycle is inneficient. I know where you can buy several new ethanol plants that are rusting in bankruptcy.
This is way-off topic (more or less), but can anyone here recommend a good book outlining the principles of solar energy and panels, and the subsequent applications and methods?
I’m not afraid of technical writing, either. Seen there are many for sale and there are many websites, but just wondering where to start.
Making big efforts to solve a fictive problem is likely to end up in disaster.
Anthony,
While the whole indirect land use issue is a concern, the problem with these papers is the exact same as the problem with global warming: they rely on models that are not easily reconciled with actual data. These models are assuming that we understand perfectly the economics of worldwide agricultural supply and demand. Needless to say, that’s absurd. And, so far, the indirect land use change (ILUC) models have failed to adequately express reality.
For example, this paper looks at a step change from 2001 levels of ethanol production to estimated 2015 levels (1.7 billion gallons to 15 billion gallons). From their model, they assume a 17% decrease in export production from corn grain and a 12% decrease in exports of soy. Makes sense, as we need a lot more corn to make all this ethanol.
However, we’re about 60% of the way there (current US ethanol production is ~9-10 billion gallons). So some of these effects should start to be seen. And what have we seen instead?
Our corn and soy exports are HIGHER than they were in 2001.
The model does not fit the current reality. If this was global warming related, you would rightly be criticizing this study for that. Of course, this isn’t meant to be incendiary or critical of you or this site. I’m assuming you’re not as well versed at the intricacies of biofuel research as you are of global warming. But honest scientific debate requires all information, so here’s a little extra.
(Full disclosure: as you might expect, I’m a researcher in the world of biofuels, although not necessarily corn-ethanol specific.)
There was a CARB study which showed bio-fuels produced 2.5 times as much CO2 as straight gasoline. Makes sense when you considered all the ‘mechanized farming steps’ involved. Then Gov Schwarzenegger forced it to be taken down and re-written to say just ‘more CO2’ than straight gasoline.
Proving that reducing CO2 isn’t the goal.
Shouldn’t we always ask that question when bio-fuels are talked about? And what about the consumer costs … shouldn’t that be the top line of the amazing bio-fuels arguments?
And isn’t all this weird when you find that according to the governments own EIA the USA has more fossil fuel reserves than any other nation on earth. Especially coal, which the NAZIs of WWII were able to turn into liquid transport fuel using 1920s technology. Still works today.
Biofuels derived from nominal food crops have never made sense in any fashion (economic, environmental, social).
Maybe if a special plant species was modified or genetically engineered….
But, even then, there is, apparently, so much energy inefficiency in producing the biofuel that I would not leap at them as any real solution.
Just spend all the money on development of nuclear electric energy and electric (or hydrogen powered — from H2O) cars.
In the mean time, continue on with oil, natural gas, and coal (with pollution controls — not CO2 controls). It seems like the most cost effective path to take — given what we know.
“…These indirect, market-mediated effects on greenhouse gas emissions “are enough to cancel out the benefits the corn ethanol has on global warming.”
The benefits of ethanol for global warming are zero. End of story.
Here’s the stoichiometry, for those who give a hoot:
C8H18 + 12.5 O2 –> 8 CO2 + 9 H2O
C2H5OH + 3 O2 –> 2 CO2 + 3 H2O
So each mole of octane produces 4 times as many moles of CO2 as ethanol. The ethanol doesn’t produce quite as much energy, though: Gasoline (roughly octane) has an HHV of 20.4 MBTU/pound; ethanol’s HHV is only 12.8 MBTU/pound.
Actually, this report shows better results than anticipated. The press release notes that the magnitude of CO2 emissions is only one-fourth of the previous estimate. Also, who ever said burning bio-fuel reduces total CO2 content in the atmosphere? Ethanol is added to gasoline as part of the RENEWABLE fuel standards. Finally, it is no surprise that ethanol from corn is no panacea. Even its supporters (outside of the farm lobby) readily admit that it is a bridge to more efficient biofuels of the future.
For those who don’t understand the difference in CO2 emissions from biofuels versus natural landscape, the conversion of wetlands or forests into cornfields is apparently not as efficient in capturing CO2 even when keeping the forests as is requires the use of more gasoline, i.e., [forest uptake of CO2 – use of gasoline instead of biofuel] > [cornfield uptake CO2 – energy used to raise corn and convert to ethanol].
Justa Joe (08:08:30):
In terms of energy density, ethanol is only minutely higher gram CO2/Joule fuel ratio than gasoline, and it’s essentially irrelevent. The difference is the source of CO2. With ethanol, the source is carbon from the atmosphere, so there is no net increase in CO2 emissions. With petroleum, the source is carbon locked underground, thus leading to a net increase in CO2 emissions.
That’s why bioethanol is seen as a renewable fuel. The problems with that assumption are two-fold. First, corn ethanol requires a great deal of processing, requiring a lot of natural gas in the process. Combined with all on-farm fossil fuel use (including the production of excess fertilizers, which doesn’t technically occur on the farm but needs to be included anyway), the CO2 savings from corn ethanol are slight (about 20-40% reduction compared to gasoline). Note that this doesn’t mean corn ethanol is useless: the big saving is in oil consumed (20 barrels of oil are saved for every barrel invested in ethanol).
In any case, the second issue is land use change. If we’re cutting down a forest to grow corn, that’s not good. If we’re taking degraded land that’s doing nothing and growing corn, that’s fine. The question is, what are we doing? That’s what the economic models like this one are attempting to find out. Unfortunately, they’re very complicated models on a topic that isn’t perfectly understood. As we all know from the climate change debate, these models are ripe for abuse.
Maize-derived ethanol? Really? People outside the corn and liquor industries have little interest in deriving ethanol from corn, especially ethanol fuel proponents. There are a lot of interesting technologies being developed to reduce the cost and energy usage of producing ethanol but the benefits of this will be outside of the fuel industry.
Butanol has a far better future than ethanol – except where ethanol is used as a specific chemical in industrial reactions and physical processes. Cultivating the best organisms to produce butanol continues and it won’t take much to alter some of the ethanol facilities to produce butanol. But then, the need for butanol assumes that all the oil reserves on the planet continue to be made inaccessible via environmental lobbying in the West and state-managed infrastructure collapse in the petro-states. While the latter is likely, the former depends on oil prices staying low enough that people can afford to let the greenies continue to have their way.
Not to mention sewerage, algae (which creates multiple revenue streams like animal feed, oil, biodiesel, and ethanol while reducing the glut of glycerol from biodiesel production – and yes the water issue is manageable), cellulose, new catalysts for synthesizing chemicals using whatever energy source you can make economical.
There are lots of options. Get rid of the government intervention and let the market do what it does best by finding the least expensive of these options.
Its even worse than the article says. If you believe in the greenhouse gas theories, a much more ptent greenhouse gas is NO2. Biofuels produce more N2O than gasoline.
http://www.co2science.org/subject/n/summaries/nitrousoxide.php