Guest Post by Ira Glickstein
The lastest issue of Nature Climate Change to reach my mailbox has some startling news, particularly considering that it comes from a generally Warmist publication. One might say is is “topsy-turvy” (upside down) from a Warmist viewpoint, but quite in keeping with a Skeptic point of view.
1) Total emissions from biodiesel are WORSE than emissions from fossil fuels, when considering both Direct and ILUC (Indirect Land Use Changes) Emissions.
2) Natural gas is WORSE than that “filthy fuel” coal when considering the net warming effects due to leakage rates of methane associated with natural gas and the cooling effects associated with aerosols from burning of coal.
3) Pure electric vehicles are WORSE than petroleum-burning hybrids, considering overall lifetime cost/benefits.
Here are some of the details:
1) A BIOFUEL CONUNDRUM. Biofuels get their energy from the Sun and absorb CO2 from the Atmosphere, making them carbon-neutral. Right? WRONG.
The graphic (from http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v1/n8/fig_tab/nclimate1265_F1.html, annotations added by Ira) shows total emissions, which is the sum of Direct and ILUC (Indirect Land Use Changes) Emissions. Note that all sources of biodiesel produce more total emissions than the equivalent amount of energy derived from fossil fuels. Also note that bioethanol, while better than fossil fuels in this accounting, are far from carbon-neutral.
The orange and grey dashed lines across the bars show the threshold for a 50% and 35% emission saving, respectively, compared with fossil fuels. Initially biofuels will have to deliver a 35% saving under EU law, but this will rise to 50% in 2017. Indeed, when policymakers talk about raising the threshold in the context of the ILUC debate, they are reportedly talking about raising it to 50% — this graphic shows that according to what we know about the scale of ILUC, this policy approach wouldn’t solve the problem. ILUC data is from a draft report of the International Food Policy Research Institute; direct emissions data is from the EU’s Renewable Energy Directive, © European Union, http://eur-lex.europa.eu.
According to this research, bioethanol from wheat saves less than 50% of emissions as compared to fossil fuels. Other bioethanol sources are only about 50-60% carbon-neutral.
2. A NATURAL GAS CONUNDRUM. Natural gas (methane) produces only half the CO2 of coal per unit of energy, so it must be cleaner and greener. Right? WRONG.
According to research by Tom Wigley of NCAR [Climate Change, 108, 601-608 2011]. It turns out that burning of coal releases aerosols that have a cooling effect. Of course, that is not news to those of us familiar with the 1974 National Science Board report that warned of Global Cooling due to human-caused aerosols. In addition, it seems that up to 10% of methane, a potent “greenhouse” gas, leaks out into the Atmosphere. Leakage rates need to be kept below 2% to beat fossil fuels.
3. AN ELECTRIC CAR CONUNDRUM. Pure electric vehicles, like the Nissan Leaf and my golf cart, release no direct emissions, so they are “greener” than hybrids or conventional cars that burn gasoline or diesel. Right? WRONG.
According to research from Carnegie Mellon University [Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., 108, 16554-16558 2011] hybrid and plug-in hybrid vehicles that burn some fossil fuels benefit society over their lifetimes more than either pure electric battery-powered vehicles or conventional gasoline-powered autos. Hybrids have smaller battery packs than pure electrics and therefore cost less to build and maintain.
… The work takes into account, for example, the power plant emissions associated with charging a plug-in car, the direct cost of oil as well as the military expense associated with defending against disruption in its supply, the impact of greenhouse-gas emissions from exhaust pipes, and vehicle recycling and land filling. …
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
“According to research by Tom Wigley of NCAR [Climate Change, 108, 601-608 2011]. It turns out that burning of coal releases aerosols that have a cooling effect.”
I guess Big Coal has finally paid up.
I lived in Southeast Asia for many years and saw firsthand the vast areas of tropical forest that have been cut down to grow palm oil for biofuel.
The worst ecological disaster of my lifetime.
It’s worse than we thought!
This information is unacceptably inconvenient.
Next issue’s “Letters to the Editor” section should be interesting.
There may be a problem with sugar beet as opposed to sugar cane. Sugar beet (as grown in Europe) needs around 5 times the land per tonne of sugar compared to sugar cane (as grown in Brazil). As land is scarcer in Europe than Brazil, even comparable crops require greater energy input. It might only be the physical factors that are considered here?
Ira,
I was 100% with you until this tid bit:
“The work takes into account, for example, the power plant emissions associated with charging a plug-in car, the direct cost of oil as well as the military expense associated with defending against disruption in its supply”
Military expense? C’mon!
On the other hand, I think the report seems to have missed a very important and obvious factor. Biofuels displace FOOD. If we proposed to burn food, the greeny grimies would be up in arms. Oh…maybe that’s where the military expense comes in? Anyway… the bottom line is, that is exactly what biofuels are… food raised to be burned instead of eaten. If we were to factor in the increased cost of food due to burning it for fuel as part of the “carbon footprint” of foodfuel (biofuel! what a dopey term) it would be even higher…much, much higher.
We can’t save the starving masses by burning the food. Convert it into foodfuel first and then burn it, it is still the same as burning the food. In fact maybe foodfuel isn’t right either. How about foolfuel?
Did the wheat and maize figures include methane released from rotting human corpses ? … from all the people who will die of starvation when a big chunk of the world’s food supply is converted to fuel vehicles …
It’s sad to see the Greens, who once supported Natural Gas, go against it as soon as we find that we have plenty of it.
Wigley’s imaginary particulate cooling is particularly sad. It is only a fudge factor to make the GCMs agree and has close to no actual evidential basis. It’s a convenient stick to beat Natural Gas with though.
Likewise the high leak rate will turn out to be mostly bogus. Those oil companies don’t drill extremely expensive wells so that they can lose all their product to leaks.
Natural gas has one flaw. It is cheap and abundant.
Sounds like they ruled out nuclear power as an option from the outset. Electric vehicles and hydrogen powered vehicles only make sense as a carbon reduction strategy if the electricity they consume was generated without burning fossil fuels. Otherwise you are just powering vehicles with fossil fuels in a less efficient and more complicated manner than simply burning the fuels in an internal combustion engine to power the vehicle directly.
There is a lot of variability (as you would expect) in individual processes/plants/locations. For example, ‘no till’ agriculture has been promoted for a while now in the US, while Europe is mandating sustainability criteria meaning that land-use changes are out (essentially this means that you can’t new-plough land to plant energy crops, and planting trees on arable land or grassland is out too). For many crops the issue is distance from field to fuel processing; overall it is how much fossil fuel is used in a) growing and harvesting the crops, b) taking it from the field to the processing facilty and c) processing it in the facility, and that’s often a lot.
There’s a lot of effort going into developing more energy efficient processes, in using byproducts to produce energy to run fuel processing operations, but, yep, the shine has definately gone off biofuels.
Mooloo;
Wigley’s imaginary particulate cooling is particularly sad. >>>
I’m old enough to remember one liners from the 70’s:
“Itz the smog… I inhaled a piece.”
“I shot an arrow into the sky… and it stuck there.”
If indeed Wigley wants to blame aerosols for cooling, then the LACK of aerosols from all the regulations that have improved our air quality over the last few decades would be what’s responsible for what little warming we can measure at all…not CO2.
At day’s end…the aerosols will prove to be just as miniscule as CO2, but if Wigley wants to count ’em, well then, let’s count ’em. How to you extrapolate aerosol levels from the number of arrows you can stick in the smog?
Chickens and roosts…
I love the smell of diesel exhaust in the morning. There is something just wrong about a diesel truck going down the road smelling like stale (insert your favorite fast food retailer here) french fries.
/sarc off
It’s about time someone published a lifetime cost analysis for these all electric vehicles. To have that included with a look at CO2 issues with biofuels is a bonus. I think the AGW argument is finally beginning to consume itself, even among the “true believers”.
I note that Anthony has written on several occasions about LED lights in his home, his electric car
(hybrid???) and the like, as examples of how to reduce energy consumption. Nothing wrong with that in my opinion. There is something “just wrong” about consuming something just because you can. To be judicious in our consumption – of any resource – is good because it reduces our direct costs for the item (usually energy related) and also often times lets us all tread more lightly in using the earth’s resources which like it or not are finite.
As a child I was told to use the right tool for the right job. This applies here I think. By seeking the right solution to our pollution issues (and we do have them folks!) we make this a better place to live. By falling headlong down the rabbit hole with these AGW claims, we waste resouces, money and time that could be better spent helping others to live well.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!!!
Mike
” the direct cost of oil as well as the military expense associated with defending against disruption in its supply”
How exactly did they differentiate the military expense of defending our oil supply from other military expenses, like providing a defense umbrella for our NATO and EU allies who’ve been underfunding their own defense for decades to keep their socialist dependencies afloat. I know the left’s fallback position is that all our “wars” have been “Blood for Oil” but from what I’ve observed the only oil we end up with has to be purchased on the open market just as it would have been without any military action. Often we end up subsidizing the renovation of oil production facilities and still don’t get a hint of a discount.
Since most of our wind generation has been shipped in from China, the cost of protecting the world’s shipping lanes could just as accurately be described as protecting our access to wind turbines.
Not wishing to be arrogant or supercilious/facetious – but to anyone with a modicum of common sense, these figures are well known/demonstrable and easily deduced from basic knowledge of the facts.
The way I see it is simple – take a car, any make, doesn’t matter which one – and then try and argue that that car is better than ‘another’ one…..it isn’t, it’s a case of horses for courses and if the flippin chevvy volt (or whatever) was the most cost effective and best car out there – we would all have one! Why should ‘fuel’ be any different? There are (few) places where solar is viable, and hydro, and wind, bio, etc – but NONE of them is permanent generation and even if you worked it out on a cost per square metre/kilometre/mile basis, or whatever – they would NEVER provide the required power demand for the current population without some other ‘loss’ (e.g. land for food production).
I don’t care which side of the fence you sit in the AGW debate, the fact remains that the worlds population NEEDS power (I’d like to know if anyone can sensibly argue against this basic point?) – and right now, the only sure fire guaranfeckingteed future RELIABLE power source is NUCLEAR or Fossil fuels, but of course the latter is ‘limited’ to some degree. Sure, we can use low energy bulbs and become more fuel/power efficient – but we still need power and will continue to do so. Whether the world gets a ‘temperature’ or cools to an ice age – it makes no friggin difference – power is what is needed to mitigate that change and keep millions of people fed and watered.
As far as I can see, in the longer term – that power demand needs to be met by nuclear and the billions spent on bio/wind/solar,etc would be far far better spent developing safer, cleaner and more efficient nuclear power – fusion even?. Just think of the advances a few tens of billions of dollars could have had in the nuclear field over the last decade or so, instead of being used to line the pockets of Jones, Mann, Hansen, et al!!!!
Mike Bentley wrote: “As a child I was told to use the right tool for the right job. This applies here I think. By seeking the right solution to our pollution issues (and we do have them folks!) we make this a better place to live. By falling headlong down the rabbit hole with these AGW claims, we waste resouces, money and time that could be better spent helping others to live well.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!!!”
That’s a good story. I’m going to stick to it too. 🙂
Amazing.
Looks like they’ve discovered that things are never quite as simple as they look at first blush.
In a similar vein is this story from Reuters, as carried on Yahoo:
http://news.yahoo.com/analysis-coals-bridge-future-might-lie-past-220642158.html;_ylt=ArLkAcFgZmO4k87pUBvkYous0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTNsdnFtbmFxBG1pdANUb3BTdG9yeSBGUARwa2cDOGQ0YTNlYzctMDVlYy0zYWU2LTgxY2YtYjczYThiMDU5OTYxBHBvcwM4BHNlYwN0b3Bfc3RvcnkEdmVyA2MyNTZjY2IwLTI0NDQtMTFlMS1iZmNiLWU1NzFjZjMzY2RlMw–;_ylg=X3oDMTFvdnRqYzJoBGludGwDdXMEbGFuZwNlbi11cwRwc3RhaWQDBHBzdGNhdANob21lBHB0A3NlY3Rpb25zBHRlc3QD;_ylv=3
An answer to the question of what price to put on carbon dioxide. It’s not from those phony carbon markets. It seems that enhanced oil recovery (EOR) needs the gas to pump into old oil fields to extract oil. They’ve been doing this for years, using naturally occurring gas. But they’re running out of the easily obtained gas. Now all they need are pipelines to receive recovered carbon dioxide from coal-burning plants and then we’ll see what price for the gas in a real market.
Will it work? Only time will tell.
I thought everyone already knew all this ?
Maybe not the lunatic fringe, but anyone capable of absorbing information or thinking logically.
Sigh.
One of the most insidious lies told by the nutters was that pouring food down our fuel tanks was a good idea. It was wrong on so many levels, and it remains so. It drove up the cost of food over the entire world. It limited the supply and cut down on the diversity of crops planted. Of course, there are other issues well known, ……. efficiency….. fuel, energy and other resources used for growing the crops…….
I have been in the solar business since 1978 and since 1982 most of my clients have been in the oil and gas business. I was a TV news reporter from 1970-75 and during that time filmed a UPI award winning documentary on coal. I am one of the few people on earth to have crawled to the start of the Browns Ferry Nuclear Power Plant fire. I understand biofuels to some extent and weather is my hobby. I listened to Al Gore Jr. talk about carbon before he even ran for any office and I know about the coal and nuclear empire his father and FDR helped create. It bothers me that in all the passionate blogging on these pages, reasonableness to me seems to have been mostly abandoned. The least expensive electricity in the US would be from low head hydro which is nearly illegal. As regards the hazards of other forms of energy, in my opinion, safer nuclear plants can be built but they are regarded as too expensive. Cleaner coal burning plants can be built but they are regarded as too expensive. So the least cost option de jour for now appears to be frac gas. Regardless, a society that cares about the cost of pollution in terms of health, birth defects and premature death, would be interested in decreasing that pollution with genuine conservation through appropriate architecture, plug in hybrid vehicles which an article above gives better status that straight electric or combustible fuel and, in my opinion, a marriage of solar electricity and plug in vehicles. Without any government subsidy, in most of the US, charging a vehicle with solar electricity is the cost equivalent of $2.50/gallon motor fuel. Solar is grossly underutilized world wide. Also grossly underutilized is biodiesel made from the millions of gallons of used fry grease from fast food restaurants and oil that can be skimmed from massive, urban sewage systems. Fuel crops are dubious options but used fry grease…why not???? More freight on trains…why not??? More efficient architecture, windows, insulation and motor efficiency…why not??? More efficient lighting…why not??? Solar water heating for process hot water in sunny places like Las Vegas for dishwashing, laundry, showers and baths…why not??? They wash a lot of hotel towels and sheets in Vegas! They was a lot of dishes in Vegas!
Nuclear is the needed source for electrical power production. This should be the focus on energy policy.
Large scale solar and wind seems to have been proven to be a bad joke.
Is coal good?
40 years ago I was at a mansion where the owner added some coal to the two fires burning in 2 of the 6 fireplaces. It was a marvelous fire of intense heat.
I presume that sort of coal burning can never be allowed again?
The biodiesel figures are for contemporary strains; those costs will decline as newer strains are bred for higher oil yield and more extreme climates and soils. Already salt-tolerant soybeans exist, and salt-tolerant strains of other plants are under development.
In the US, much if not all of the maize for ethanol came from the half of the maize crop that was used for cattle feed; the amino-acid rich leftovers were made into cattle feed. That was not true everywhere.
What the future holds can only be guessed, but there are many places on Earth where biodiesel from salt-tolerant feedstocks would be an improvement over what they have now. Like the Green Revolution and the Brazilian cane ethanol industry, it will require 2-3 decades of continuous crop breeding.
Mark says: Fuel crops are dubious options but used fry grease…why not????
This is a small but growing industry in the U.S. An example is Greenleaf Biodiesel in San Diego. Hobbyists do it in every state, and you can order varieties of the refining equipment online. It can’t be a large contribution to the US fuel supply, but every bit helps, and in some niches it fits well. Fuel is also being made more frequently from animal waste from factory farms and packing plants, and from feedlot waste; also, from municipal solid and liquid waste.
But the real future, I think,, will come from breeding better varieties.
Lots of good comments here, so I will add just one point which I think has been missed: Direct CO2 emissions from biofuels don’t count, because all their C is recycled. [But the loss of food does still matter, of course.]
Stop agriculture now, before we all die. Oh wait….