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
CO2 is generated in 4 ways with ethanol:
Farming the crop – Fertilizer, harvest and transport
Fermentation
Heating – to dry the ethanol
Burning – to get the energy
“In response to the increased demand for maize, farmers convert additional land to crops…”
For an allegedly ‘environmentally friendly’ project, the proponents of this seem to forget about its costs in wildlife habitat and thus biodiversity. This effect is most obvious for so called biofuels harvested fron ‘natural’ sites but it also has the same effects indirectly as more farm land is used making more marginal land economically viable to convert.
The net result is like a plague of locusts.
Of course, they come up with some explanations of why this isn’t so bad. For example, they claim that they will not harvest some biofuels when birds are nesting. Great. Except for all the birds and other wildlife which would use these areas when they are not nesting. Etc., etc.
But now that the farm lobby is on this teat, it will be tough to stop.
John if it is so efficient and cost effective, how about stopping the subsidies. Also, good job there is all that natural gas abvailable in your equation.
rb Wright (13:04:32) :
There are much cheaper sources of domestic energy – such as drilling and using your own oil and gasoline and diesel from coal, if necessary.
First government identifies a problem that doesn’t exist -CAGW.
Then government mandates a solution that doesn’t work – Ethanol.
And you wonder why I’m a Libertarian.
This is the outfit that got $500 Million from BP if I’m not mistaken.
It’s total nonsense.
Which is too bad, because I like CO2. It makes the crops grow.
John from MN: Outside the US corn is mostly used for food, especially in Africa, but also in Latin America (ever heard of tortillas?) and Asia. Since the US corn market is not isolated from the rest of the World using corn for fuel inevitably drives up food prices.
By the way corn is one of the least efficient crops for biofuel production. Sugar Cane for example is vastly better.
The point, by the GW alarmists, seems to be to reduce the amount of CO2 emissions from “fossil fuels”.
Doesn’t seem to matter to them that more CO2 might be released in the effort.
Remember, it’s control and power, not actual science that rules in this arena.
Nobody ever seems to mention the ammonium nitrate needed to grow the maize (sugar cane in these parts). An AN plant uses massive gallumps of electricity (mostly coal fired power stations hereabouts). The C02 savings seem to be counted meticulously, but the C02 inputs seem to get skimmed over at best.
Many people here are quoting a plethora of studies that claim a range of benefits/costs from corn ethanol as a vehicle fuel. The problem with all of these studies is that they are written not as informative, but as advocacy and – as such – the parameters are selected to “prove” the particular point.
For example, people who want to show that corn is good compare the neutral CO2 emissions and the energy production to gasoline it replaces and even include some of the energy needed for production (tractor diesel). This comes out nicely positive. People who want to show corn in bad include all kinds of things in the energy production system – fertilizers, transport, fermentation and distillation etc. The corn is good people come back and include energy needed for production of gasoline in the equation…. and so it goes. You get the study you “pay” for.
Now the land-use issues really only raised their head in 2008 when a poor wheat harvest in Australia got commodity traders all excited (it got more complicated with export bans on rice, but these were nationalist responses to swings in the commodity futures market and had little relation to actual production levels). As pointed out a couple of times, US corn exports have not been affected by ethanol production, but US wheat production has gone down, giving some people room to blame the price spike on ethanol subsidies (there are PhD theses on the many reasons for the decline in wheat acreage, but I am not sure ethanol is one of them since wheat would actually be a decent source of ethanol – it is in Europe).
However, what the “food price shock” revealed in 2008 was that there was a lot of agricultural land not in production at the time, due to low world prices for most commodities and the response to the high prices was exactly what you would expect – increased production. World stocks of cereals were pretty low at the start of 2008, so a possible shortfall made for a good speculative opportunity. With stocks recovering since then, this isn’t as likely any more and nobody is starving because US corn farmers are being subsidized to make ethanol.
Where land use issues will have an impact though is the developing world which is suffering because of high, fluctuating, oil prices. They are really looking for replacements for imported oil (as a percentage of GDP the US has nothing like the oil issues many developing countries have) and because of the lower agricultural productivity is many of these countries, ramping up production of non-food crops might have an impact. So far, it hasn’t really happened yet (palm oil from South East Asia is the biggest non-food crop and this is highly productive, if no less controversial because of that fact alone), but it might do if too many people buy into the biofuel deal.
Biofuels only work when you have efficient, highly productive, agriculture as whatever you grow (corn, sugar-cane, switch-grass, jatropha – the list is a long one) has to be done with little or no impact on absolute food production. We also need to get a lot more efficient in our biofuel production as well and this is happening as a side effect of the subsidies, although perhaps would be better being supported more explicitly.
The current biofuel projects in developed countries, however, are simply agricultural support by another name – corn farmers in the US, sugar cane farmers in Brazil, wheat and canola farmers in Europe. Once again, this doesn’t erally do anyone any harm (taxpayers in these countries are already being stung by fuel taxes), but if the developing world takes on these policies, there is likely to be some serious fall-out. Doesn’t this sound depressingly familiar to other climate change policies?
The whole idea was that we would have to plant more corn (we haven’t,) which means we’d plant less beans (nope, wrong again,) which means that Brazil would have to chop down the rainforest to plant beans (strange assumption since there are 150 Million Acres lying fallow in the Cerrado, but . . )
Well, in 2003 Brazil planted 58 million acres in Beans.
In 2008 Brazil planted 53 million acres in Beans.
Ethanol is being shipped by pipeline as we speak.
Ethanol is retailing for $1.30 Less than gasoline (the difference between E0 and E10 is $0.13 today.
Deduct the $0.45/gal blenders credit, and $0.55 for reduced mileage, and you are still getting $0.30/gal better value with ethanol than with gasoline with all subsidies accounted for.
Corn is still a tisch over $0.06/lb.
Well just put a fence around your bio-fuels free clean green renewable energy plant, so nobody can come in and steal your product; or worse yet try to poison it, by surrepticiously bringing in Fossil fuels; or the products thereof.
Yep, I can’t wait for the end of fossil fuels, and free clean green renewable energy.
I notice from Radio ads from commercial suppliers of solar PEV electric plants, that now about 50% of the total cost of your roof installation is now paid for by the taxpayers aka your next door neighbors. They made the profits to help you buy your free electric plant using fossil fuels.
So as they say, your electricity is free after you pay for the ploant. Don’t forget to repay what the taxpayers kicked in for your free electric plant.
Better yet; the most practical way for you to repay the cost of your plant so you can get free electricity, is to simply use your free electricity; along with some trucked in sand, to build a duplicate of your electricity plant for your next door neighbor. Then after that everything is free to you; and your neighbor may join you in the free energy club maybe in 40-50 years.
Right now, I can’t make up my mind whether to buy myself a free clean green renewable bio-fuels plant for my house; or a soalr PEV plant, with help from my tax paying neighbors.
I just hope the fossil fuels hold out long enough for us all to have free electricity from sand.
David S: me too.
In Australia we are getting ethanol mandates in petrol. Of course it makes no sense.
Near Wollongong there is an industrial plant making starch from wheat. Ethanol is a waste product.
The owner was selling it locally where it was mixed in petrol to 10%. Wollongong isn’t that large and he still had ethanol to get rid of. Some service stations started selling it at 20% which at the time was illegal so they stopped selling it and the plant owner still had a problem. It was suggested he shipped it to Sydney where there would be no trouble getting rid of it in petrol. He claimed he could not do that as it was uneconomical to ship the ethanol 100km to Sydney!
That put ethanol in perspective for me. Fortuitously there was an accidental fire in the ethanol storage tanks at the plant not long afterwards and all the backlog of ethanol waste was burned.
Kum Dollison (14:09:12) :
Ethanol can be shipped by pipeline but it cannot be sent through the same pipes as gasoline.
Where are you buying E10 for 10% less than gasoline? (City & state will suffice.)
The average gallon of ethanol (76,000 btus, 113 Octane) has about 25,000 btus of nat gas, and about 5,000 btus of diesel embedded.
Some have much less in that the biorefineries run largely on biomass (waste wood, syrup from the process, etc.)
The new refineries that will be operating in a year, or two will convert corn cobs, switch grass, etc. to ethanol. They will be powered by burning the lignin from the feedstock.
Ethanol is, already, a Better Value than Gasoline, and it doesn’t come from the Middle East with all that that entails.
Some of you people lose All credibility when you come on a “Science” blog, and make statements about an industry of which you know nothing.
Oh, and by the way, we had the biggest corn crop in history this year, and planted 5 Million fewer acres than in 2007 (the 2nd biggest.)
And, what in the world feed corn (for livestock feed) has to do with growing rice in Communist China I can’t possibly imagine.
I would say that you have to be pretty dumb to think that Biofuel grown on a farm is Carbon Neutral.
First of all, its grown with fertiliser, to produce this you need energy and produce CO2
Second, you need a tractor, it runs on diesel, that also makes CO2
Third, it needs transportation, that makes CO2
And finally, it substitutes land that would otherwise be growing food, which does not spontaneously combust or derelict land, which is of course doing nothing.
I remember the days when Bush was promoting this stuff, ahh, another great idea from the Bush era!
Robert of Ottawa said ” 4 ways Co2 come from ethanol”
What a farce, plain and simple, Gasoline (which is the only comparitive to ethanol release 100% of the Co2 that once was permantly trapped bewlow the surface. The plant originally got it’s Co2 millions of years ago when it grew and sucked Co2 out the air, just as corn does today. So if were not for the Natural Gas and a the little diesel used create corn and than ethanol and animal feed in the form of DDG’s, it would be 100% carbon nuetral. But as it is figures with-out some bogus land use add on (like new land is being plowed up by the millions to plant corn NOT) it is around a 50% savings in Co2 comapered to gasoline. But I am npot saying ethanol can replace all the gasoline (we are reaching the max point already) but it does help that we can import just that much gasoline, fuel and oil from foriegn countries that may not like us much, plus ship dollars out of the country, when the portion for the 10% ethanol copuld stay here. I am not a believer that GW is any thing to be concerned about, but putting 10% ETHANOL IN GASOLINE to Oxygenate (ethanol is 35% oxygen by weight) to rid cities of smog and keep USA people employed and send less dollars over seas and feed our livestock all at the same time is Win, Win, Win aand Win……….The rest is just lies made up by detractors…….John…….
PS remember an acre of land here where I farm will grow 500 gallons of ethanol and 3,000 lbs of animal feed, one year after another, and all I use is about 6 gallons of diesel to plant tend to and harvest it. Now yes their is some Domestic Natural gas used for fertilizer and used in the distilling prosesss. But way less than what I get of just one acre of land in the form of liquid fuels to blend with gas and also feed my animals. Always remember their are peopel out their that don’t want you to know the truth…..John…
The Trouble with “Models”
Someone posted a link upthread where this year’s corn crop was expected to be smaller than last year’s. They predicted 12.1 Billion bushels.
It came in at 13.2 Million bushels. 165 bu/acre. Both New Records.
Searchinger in Science predicted more soybeans would be planted in Brazil. Nope. 5 Million Fewer acres planted in Brazil.
Somebody mentioned “Tortillas.” Tortillas (in Mexico) are made with White Sweet Corn. We plant Yellow Field Corn. Two different products. Two different farming methods. NO connection.
We Pay Farmers NOT to plant 32 Million Acres of idled farmland. We import oil from Saudi Arabia, and Iraq for $80.00/bbl.
Oh, and I’ll blow the doors off of any Chevy Impala with a 3.5 L engine running gasoline. Don’t believe me, bring your title.
It’s recipe for disaster, besides starving poor people with rising food prices, more rain forest in third world countries will be cut down for farm land to grow bio-fuel crops to sell to the rich countries. If there is one single issue where I agree with environmentalists – we need to protect all the rain forest we possibly can.
The bio-fuel mandate MUST END, we are buying food right out of the mouths of starving children. The practice should simply be banned; no person on earth should ever have to compete against machines in rich countries for food – the machines will win every time.
I’ve never subscribed to catastrophic AGW but I do think it’s useful to pursue reasonable alternatives to fossil fuels. After all, you don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket. And I find it disappointing that the US has pursued this corn alcohol nonsense since ethanol actually could be a viable alternative. . .just not from corn. To my knowledge automobiles have been fueled for years by ethanol in Brazil. They distill it efficiently from sugarcane. The US certainly grows sugarcane and not just in Florida. Moreover, we grow sugarbeets, an even more efficient source. Ethanol unfortuneately, has about 60% of the heat content of gasoline. However the octane rating is far higher. Premium gasoline is 93 whereas ethanol is, I believe, over 120. Diesel engines get better mileage than gasoline engines for three reasons. The heat content of diesel fuel is higher than gasoline; diesel engines are unthrottled; and, most importantly, the compression ratios are far higher (up to 22:1 in some engines). Some gasoline engines, on 93 octane fuel are slightly exceeding 12:1 compression ratios. Think of the compression ratio on an engine designed solely to run on ethanol with its 120 octane level. That would largely compensate for the reduced heat content since compression ratios are all about efficiency. And instead of some pie in the sky notions about electric vehicles (the energy density of a cubic foot of gasoline is 1,000 times greater than a cubic foot of a storage battery), or megabuck, exotic hydrogen fueled cars, this is doable today as Brazil’s experience would indicate. But then, their primary campaigns don’t acquire momentum early on in the state of Iowa which no candidate is going to antagonize by speaking against the ethanol gravy train. It’s sad because ethanol from corn will tarnish the image of a viable fuel if acquired from other sources.
John Galt – Kum and Go – Ankeny, and Mason City, Iowa
Kum and Go are always super-competitive in price wherever I’ve seen them.
http://e85prices.com/iowa.html
The price given is for E0. You have to run your cursor over the little yellow “note” to get the E10 price.
And, yes Kinder Morgan is running ethano, and gasoline through the pipeline from Tampa to Orlando if I’m not mistaken.
“Biofuels do not decrease C02. BioFuel crops eat it. It must be present in order for photosynthesis to occur. Burning biofuels does not increase C02, they only release what they consumed. C02 is a renewable resource for storing energy.”
Maybe I’m wrong, but this statement is completely idiotic. If memory serves me correctly, OIL is made from organic life (plants) that did what the above paragraph states corn will do–they ATE it and now are holding it and we are freeing it… what is the difference? Oh, that green fiction called money, along with power.
Yeah, The carbon is trapped in oil and we are setting it free… BTW: I hate oil companies and their control over us (and gov) and the fact that they ARE invested in green. I think even the almighty google is invested in Petrobras even WITH gore on their board… hmmm.
There was that ONE scientist/engineer/exec that showed how, in the end, energy for energy, ethanol produces more CO2… Period. Same energy used = Higher CO2 from ethanol.
John, I just reread your question. I didn’t say ten percent less. I said $1.30 gal.
That’s $0.13 saved buying E10 vs E0.
Hmm, I just realized, that’s 47% less per gallon than gasoline.
Anyway, after figuring 20% loss in mileage, and the $0.45/gal blender’s credit it’s still $0.30 cheaper than gasoline.
Also, let’s not forget, there is NO PEAK OIL CRISIS at hand. As we do become more efficient through various means, the oil and other fuels will be stretched out… I don’t know how they predict a crisis unless, like always, they use a locked set of numbers and project them forward without factoring in newer tech.
Also, aren’t there ways to make all our appliances more efficient? Is the current 120v/60hz the most efficient use of our energy or could we start creating homes that convert it to something else and use appliances designed accordingly? (just a question)