IPCC Admits The Scientific Consensus Was Wrong in a Stunning Reversal on Biofuels

“To give Gore his due (IIRC), he did admit that his tiebreaking vote to allow Archer Daniels Midland to ramp up tortilla prices throughout Mexico by turning corn into gasoline was a mistake.”
Such admissions are always snuck in, a holiday weekend, back of page 9 middle of the page, not reported on by MSM, wait for a big tragedy for cover of darkness, so many tricks to use… all cowardly.

If these people would just listen to sceptics once in a while, they could avoid these mistakes and actually help preserve, rather than, destroy, the environment and people’s lives & livelihoods..
I guess to them, making claims unsupported by evidence and trying to deny a platform to those who point out their many errors is more fun than doing useful work though..

“to allow Archer Daniels Midland to ramp up tortilla prices throughout Mexico by turning corn into gasoline was a mistake.”
Please explain exactly how ADM managed to increase tortilla prices in Mexico by growing feed corn in the US.

Boy!! the Brazilians (and Greenies) will be ######## angry. They practically cut down 20% of the Amazon rainforest to plant biofuels according to IPCC directives in the 90’s LOL

Subscription to The Telegraph isn’t required, just block their cookies in your browser.

I don’t know if this is part of the same reversal of the IPCC, but Spiegel reports that IPCC backpedals from their warning of a Global Warming induced mass extinction.
German:
http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/natur/artensterben-ipcc-report-zum-klimawandel-zieht-vorhersagen-in-zweifel-a-960136.html
Spin, spin like the Wind, IPCC!

The ADM check must have bounced.

@Caleb

In glee you clap your hands and smack your lips over all the loot you heap, until one day you look up from your bank statements, and out the window you see a devastated landscape.

No, most certainly you can see a lovely landscape looking out of your window. But beyond that there is double barbed wire fence with guard towers and devastation starts only on the other side. However, you can never know when your own armed guards decide to come for you and confiscate all your riches at gunpoint. And there will be no wide &. proud middle class out there whatsoever to stand up for your property rights, your right to pursuit of happiness, liberty or life itself. Happened multiple times in history.

ABC & Fairfax Media in Australia are promoting Caldecott’s ANU Canberra appearance, but not asking who is funding the tour, nor are they reporting his Bloomberg connection:
16 July 2013: Bloomberg: Caldecott joins Bloomberg New Energy Finance
Ben Caldecott, one of the UK’s thought-leaders on energy and climate change issues, is joining research firm Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
Caldecott, who spent the last four years as head of policy for investment bank Climate Change Capital, will take on a new role at Bloomberg New Energy Finance as head of government advisory. His focus will be on helping to build the company’s engagement with governments and international institutions, working closely with chief executive Michael Liebreich, as well as Chief Editor Angus McCrone and global head of policy Ethan Zindler.
Caldecott’s experience includes periods on secondment to the UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change, and to the Conservative Party’s Implementation Unit before the 2010 General Election. He is also programme director and research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, a role he will continue to hold.
ABOUT BLOOMBERG NEW ENERGY FINANCE
Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) is the definitive source of insight, data and news on the transformation of the energy sector. BNEF has staff of more than 200, based in London, New York, Beijing, Cape Town, Hong Kong, Munich, New Delhi, San Francisco, São Paulo, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo, Washington D.C., and Zurich.
BNEF Insight Services provide financial, economic and policy analysis in the following industries and markets: wind, solar, bioenergy, geothermal, hydro & marine, gas, nuclear, carbon capture and storage, energy efficiency, digital energy, energy storage, advanced transportation, carbon markets, REC markets, power markets and water.
http://about.bnef.com/press-releases/caldecott-joins-bloomberg-new-energy-finance/
Wikipedia: Climate Change Capital
Climate Change Capital (CCC) is a private asset management and advisory group authorized and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority in the UK. CCC was founded in 2003 with a mission to channel capital into the solutions to climate change and resource depletion…
The asset management business, which was established in 2005, includes: a carbon finance fund that invests in emission reduction projects, predominantly in developing countries; a Private Equity fund that invests in late stage technology and services companies headquartered in Europe and a property fund that buys commercial green buildings or retrofits existing commercial properties in the United Kingdom.
The company’s think tank was established in 2009 to promote discussion of how capital can be deployed to mitigate and adapt to climate change…
In April 2012, Bunge Ltd acquired 100% of Climate Change Capital Group Limited. The parent company of Climate Change Capital, Bunge Ltd is a global agribusiness and food company founded in 1818 with over 35,000 employees in more than 40 countries.
Climate Change Capital’s Chairman is James Cameron, a member of General Electric ‘s ecomagination board, Vice-Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Measuring Sustainability and its Advisory Board of the Global Competitiveness Index, a trustee member of the UK Green Building Council and the Carbon Disclosure Project . He was also a member of the UK Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Group (2010-2012) and the Green Investment Bank Commission (2010).
Climate Change Capital’s Chief Executive Officer is Alfred Evans. He is also responsible for the Bunge Environmental Markets team. Prior to joining Bunge, Alfred was employed by GE Energy Services, Cargill’s Financial Markets Group and Clifford Chance and the US Environmental Protection Agency .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_Change_Capital

This is a good development.

They still have that ‘could’ in the text. I won’t hold my breath for this leaked document to become official. — John M Reynolds

A good example of the mindlessness of a “consensus”. But I doubt the lesson will be heeded by those promoting the mass hysteria.

A temporary strike of common sense??????
Why don’t they take the consequence of their scare mongering, bad advice and reports and simply pull the plug on this organization.

They are giving up the obvious common sense stuff now like bank robbers pushing the wounded out of the getaway car to lighten the load and distract the chase.

I have accessed the article without a prescription and emailed it to both of my U S Senators. I didn’t bother to sent it to my Congressman because he is a complete idiot .

We may now expect our politicians to halt tax payer funding for bio-fuels, right?

sherlock1 says: March 24, 2014 at 5:52 am

…so how stupid malevolent do you have to be to put these policies in place..?

Fixed.

DirkH says:
March 24, 2014 at 1:57 am
“Spin, spin like the Wind, IPCC!”
I think I’d prefer “Spin, spin in the wind, IPCC”.

The subsidies! Think of the subsidies! They wont just disappear on their own you know.
Lots of inertia in play. I don’t expect much change anytime soon. If this was a mistake these people and the things they do would make me feel ill. As it is no mistake they just make me angry.

This last because if the prices of corn are bid up, then more arable land, more labor, more petrochemical fuels are devoted to growing corn, displacing the growth of wheat and rye and sorghum (another variety of cattle feed) and soybeans and…..
For the love of Beer, man, don’t forget the humble barleycorn. Basis of human civilization, foundation of the English system of weights and measures, and all that…
Ethanol in gasoline actually has numerous negative effects. It drops the “octane” rating of the gasoline. It dissolves certain kinds of plastic parts used in non-automotive fuel systems (notably in my boat engine, but also elsewhere in the world of gasoline engines). It costs more than gasoline, and actually costs a lot of carbon-dioxide-generating energy to manufacture and distill (gasoline or diesel to plow and plant and reap, electricity to make both fertilizer and insecticide used while it grows, sometimes additional electricity to pump water to it if it is being grown in anything but perfect weather, then the grain has to be sprouted, malted, mashed, fermented (releasing a substantial amount of carbon dioxide as the yeast eat some of the sugars and produce the enzymes that turn the rest into alcohol) and distilled. Distillation is basically boiling off the alcohol differentially, and requires adding enough energy to raise the temperature of the fermented byproduct by order of 60-70 C and then chill and condense the alcohol-rich fumes that rise off of the fermented mash before the water starts to boil. Since water is being evaporated as well during this process, one usually has to distill in several stages and then use lime to absorb the last bits of water to achieve the 200 proof anhydrous ethanol required for gasahol. Lime, of course, is made by reducing limestone with coal, producing prodigious quantities of CO_2 — rough 40% of the weight of the original limestone plus all of coal-based CO_2 required for the calcining. I suspect that it is possible to prove that one can never win the CO_2 production game with anhydrous alcohol unless one uses e.g. solar energy exclusively in its production, and even then the cost-inefficiency of using solar energy to make alcohol instead of just using the energy directly for other things makes it a silly game.
Biodiesel actually makes a lot more sense to me — that is much closer to break even out of the box, and one can easily imagine bioengineering things like algae or yeast to eat things like raw sewage or generic cellulose and turn it into recoverable fats at low overall cost (and probably making other useful things, such as sterile compost, in the process). I don’t think we are particularly close to success here yet, but this is at least a moderately promising area of research. It’s also possible that existing oil-seed plant bases might make biodiesel competitive with actual diesel in at least some venues without subsidy or legislated stimulus.
What the politicians need to get through their comparatively thick heads is that the day something becomes cost effective, nobody needs to subsidize it or mandate it. Adam Smith’s good old invisible hand takes over, and people will make biofuels not because they want to save the world, but because they want to make money and can undersell diesel fuel refined from mined fuel oil and make a good profit. In the meantime it is FINE to invest taxpayer dollars in research that might lead to such a profitable pathway as research is chickenfeed compared to the long run payoff and even if it never pays off no doubt we’ll learn useful things and probably break even on the cost.
The same is true of rare earth mining and Thorium, and ever so many other things. Western North Carolina (and many other states in the US) have an abundance of Monazite Sand, which is basically rare earth ore mixed in with thorium ore. We need rare earth metals to make super-powerful magnets for the efficient production and utilization of electrical power, but the “waste” from the mining is basically enriched radioactive thorium. Since we have almost no use for thorium commercially outside of making lantern mantles, nobody wants to mine the monazite (except China, who has bought up all of the rare earth mines in the world and is stockpiling the thorium produced as a side effect of mining it).
If the US would invest in researching and proving thorium based nuclear power production at anything like the rate that they invest in other alternative energy technologies, they could conceivably break a Gordian knot — enable e.g. melt-down-proof LFTR nuclear power production, provide an instant market for the Thorium we have in sufficient quantity to provide our electrical power for tens of thousands of years, enable new domestically owned rare earth/thorium mines to reduce our dependence on Chinese rare earths, enable efficient electrical cars and generators and motors and solid state electronics via the cheaper rare earths and sure, reduce our “carbon footprint” and allow our valuable coal and oil reserves to be stretched out for decades to centuries.
Of course this is just one of many technologies that really could — and in the long run probably will — substantially reduce the production of CO_2 while burning mined prehistoric carbon sources to make energy. Solar power is precisely marginal at the moment — better than break even in much of the US, but only when amortized over far too long a time to make it attractive (without an inappropriate subsidy). Time and economy of scale and technological advances will probably reduce the cost of solar at a fairly steady rate over the next decade or two, though, so that in ten to twenty years it is a no-brainer — Adam Smith’s invisible hand will cause solar to be widely implemented precisely to the extent that it is demonstrably profitable to do so. Thorium-based nuclear energy could easily form the intermediate step in this process, as well, providing power at night and other times that solar is not productive while still eking out fuel (nuclear or otherwise) consumption and keeping costs optimally low. And one day, perhaps the fusion ship will come in and the energy crisis and the carbon “crisis” will be solved overnight as human civilization converts as rapidly as humanly possible to a truly inexhaustible fuel resource. Humans will evolve before we measurably deplete the fusion fuel available cheaply in the oceans, let alone what we can mine in the solar system (the gas giants and their moons are basically enormous reservoirs of deuterium, from one point of view).
It would be so very lovely if the IPCC would reverse a number of its positions. I’ve long said that I’d be much more inclined to believe CAGW enthusiasts if they aggressively promoted nuclear power, as that is really the only viable alternative to carbon produced power that won’t cause civilization to collapse long before it produces enough power to sustain it. It would also be encouraging to see the US and other governments in the developed world stop funding “climate research” that is failing at everything but the production of alarming predictions that are not borne out by the data and put a lot of that money into funding energy production research that might lead us to produce or utilize energy more cheaply and more efficiently and hence more profitably for all concerned. Positive ROI needs no public policy, no massive sales campaign, no “save the planet” advertising. It just requires humans acting in their own self-interest, trying to make money or save money and live better as a consequence.
In the meantime, I’ll batten down the hatches here, as we are expecting our tenth or twelfth snow of the winter tomorrow — oops, I mean the first of the spring. In the 41 years I’ve lived in NC, I’ve never seen snow, sleet, frozen precipitation more than maybe five days in a single winter, and there have been plenty of winters with only a single brief snow or none at all. My mother-in-law in Michigan tells me that they’re up to some truly phenomenal total for winter snowfall there — 70 or 80 inches or the like — with more on the way, if the great lakes melt enough from their near-record ice coverage to enable lake effect snow to start happening again — so far they’ve been getting along without it as only 10% or so of the great lakes are free water. The global surface temperature anomaly last month was roughly 0.1 C colder than it was in the comparable month of 1983. And the sun is just beginning its long, slow trip down from one of the weakest solar cycles in a century towards the next cycle, widely expected to be the weakest in several centuries. Perhaps ENSO will (finally) turn positive and release heat into the atmosphere again — recently it has been predicted that it will — but previous predictions have often proven to be false, because we simply don’t understand ENSO well enough to do a good job of predicting it yet and don’t know how or if it is tied to things like solar cycle. If the anticipated El Nino turns into yet another stretch of doldrums or worse, a strong La Nina returns, we could actually see a stretch of global cooling for a few years.
I wonder what the IPCC will do about that? At the moment, their only hope is a super-ENSO that pops global temperatures another few tenths of a degree C all at once like it did back in 1998. And the straight-up odds of that are probably comparable to the odds of a La Nina and/or volcanic event that might have the exact opposite effect. The heterodyning of La Nina and a volcano might knock several tenths off the average temperature all at once, and sustain it lower for years as the planet settles in around a new attractor. It is useless to pretend that we know that will not or can not happen, as the GCMs are pretty useless and the Earth has done more than this on its own in the past. Or, of course, it could ENSO-up. Data talks, bullshit walks. Eventually.
rgb

The main problem with biofuels is that they don’t make a dime’s worth of difference in energy supply. I did an analysis of biofuel potential way back in 2005 and got it published in Oil and Gas Journal. Last year the EIA says the US produced 13.3 billion gallons of ethanol. Reduced to barrels and adjusted for net yield and energy content, this is equivalent to 77,332,850 barrels of petroleum, about four days at current rates of consumption. Here is the letter:
Oil and Gas Journal August 1, 2005 Letters Biofuel Potential
As the price of crude oil continues to rise, political leaders and public officials have called for increased reliance on biomass-based fuels, such as ethanol made from corn and biodiesel made from soybeans, as substitutes for petroleum-based fuels. What is the potential contribution of biomass-based fuels to relieving America’s dependence on petroleum (of which 60 percent is now imported from foreign sources)?
To answer this question I calculated the amount of ethanol and biodiesel that could be produced from the 2004 US corn and soybean crops and compared it to our nation’s annual consumption of petroleum. Crop totals are from the USDA, the biofuel potentials of corn and soybeans are from industry sources.
The 2004 US corn crop totaled about 11.7 billion bushels, the largest ever. One bushel of corn yields 2.66 gallons of ethanol, so hypothetically the 2004 crop could be converted into 31.122 billion gallons of ethanol. However, a portion of the energy in the ethanol represents energy invested in growing, harvesting, transporting, fermenting and distilling the corn. According to the corn ethanol industry, the energy yield is 1.67 btus for each btu consumed in production, or a net yield of about 40.1 percent of total ethanol produced. Multiplying the hypothetical 2004 production of corn ethanol by this factor leaves a net yield of 12.48 billion gallons. But ethanol has less energy content than petroleum. One gallon of crude oil contains about 138,100 btus, while a gallon of ethanol contains about 84,100 btus, or about 60.9 percent of petroleum. So on an energy-equivalent basis, 12.48 billion gallons of ethanol would equal about 7.6 billion gallons of petroleum.
Using the same methodology one can calculate the potential contribution of soy-based biodiesel (soybeans constitute about 90% of the total US oilseed crop). The 2004 US soybean crop was 3.15 billion bushels, also an all-time record. One bushel of soybeans yields about 1.4 gallons of biodiesel. The energy yield of biodiesel is about 3.2 btus for each btu consumed in production, or a net of 68.75 percent, a much better rate than ethanol from corn. The energy content of a gallon of biodiesel is much higher, 128,000 btus, about 92.7 percent of petroleum. The 2004 US soybean crop converted to biodiesel would equal about 2.81 billion gallons of petroleum (3.15 billion bushels times 1.4 gallons of biodiesel per bushel is 4.41 billion gallons; adjusted for net yield, 4.41 billion gallons times 68.75 percent is 3.032 billion gallons; in terms of energy equivalency, 3.032 billion gallons of biodiesel would equal 2.81 billion gallons of petroleum).
The entire 2004 US corn and soybean crop, converted to biomass fuels, could replace about 10.41 billion gallons of petroleum (7.6 billion as ethanol and 2.81 billion as biodiesel). Petroleum is measured in 42-gallon barrels; the 10.41 billion gallon biofuel total would be equivalent to 248 million barrels of petroleum. The US consumed about 7.49 billion barrels of petroleum last year, or about 20.5 million barrels a day. This means that the total biofuel potential of the record 2004 US corn and soybean harvests would offset about 12 days of US petroleum consumption, or about 3.3 percent of our total yearly petroleum consumption. Given that most of the US corn and soybean crop is already committed to other uses, this analysis indicates that biomass-based fuels will have a negligible role in reducing US petroleum consumption, which in turn underscores that replacing petroleum in the US economy will be a monumental challenge.
Ted Lofstrom
Ellis & Associates, Inc.
Minneapolis, Minn

Eliminate the fuel ethanol boondoggle and prices might – just might – not rise as quickly as they do now. But I don’t believe they will go down. The suppliers will just cream off greater profits.
I’ve heard “if they do this, that, the other, prices will go down” over and over again. But I haven’t seen the prices go down.

Corn is the crop that pollutes the most. It is mostly responsible for the “Dead Zone” in the Gulf of Mexico every growing season.
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2013-06-14/gulf-of-mexico-s-extinction-by-ethanol
It receives more irrigation/water than any other crop. We have an inevitable crisis developing in the Plains because the main water source, the Ogallala Auquifer is being sucked dry. There is total lack of proper planning to conserve this vital source of water…………..in fact, we have 50% of the corn crop in Nebraska being irrigated out of the Ogallala and much of that water is being wasted to make corn for fuel/ethanol.

Another example of the nonsensical thinking when it comes to ethanol. The mantra is stop growing corn for fuel, that we should be growing it for food. Which means the corn would STILL be grown. With all the related issues.
Corn is corn – it doesn’t know what its going to be used for. Growing it is the same regardless of its intended end use. And even considering ethanol’s use of appx 40% of the corn crop, that still leaves 60% of the corn crop used for NON-ethanol purposes. Yet it is ethanol that is killing the gulf and creating all these other problems.
Sorry – but that claim is just plain ignorant … no other polite way to say it.
And growing corn for ethanol uses no more or less water than growing corn for any other purpose. Corn is corn. And again, the demand we stop growing corn for ethanol when we should be growing corn for food, because its using up all the water, is simply ignorant. If you grown corn – regardless of if for food or fuel – you use the same exact amounts of water for irrigation.

Col Mosby says:
March 24, 2014 at 7:58 am
The killer calculation is to show how the money spent for all these BS “solutions” from solar to wind to biofuels to whatever, could have been used to construct nuclear plants.
====================
Jeeeze, man, didn’t Saul Alinski teach you anything? DO NOT mention nuclear plants!
How many Head Start programs could have been paid for ?!?!

The fermentation process to turn ANY kind of “corn” into ethanol using yeast does create vast amounts of CO2, when the ethanol is made, and so burning ethanol although it may create only H2O when burnt, is not a “Carbon Free Fuel” as they say. It is a type of shell game, a confidence trick. Much energy is lost in the overall process, and so it isn’t even economic. It would make more sense to just burn the “corn”, yet that doesn’t seem to make any kind of sense at all.
The overall chemical formula for alcoholic fermentation is:
C6H12O6 + Zymase → 2 C2H5OH + 2 CO2
That’s 2 molecules of CO2 for every 2 molecules of ethanol.
AT THE PRODUCTION STAGE !!!
Zymase is the yeast enzyme.

milodonharlani says:
March 24, 2014 at 2:45 pm
A. Scott says:
March 24, 2014 at 1:50 pm
But using feed corn for ethanol has led to higher white corn prices as well:
http://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2013/10/ethanol-prices-drive-corn-prices.html

I see nothing in that link that in any way ties feed corn to white corn prices. And their claim that they can link ethanol to increases in corn prices is not proven. Correlation is not causation.
If as they allege ethanol demand drove the increase in corn prices, then how do you explain the fact that other commodities have almost exactly matched corn price changes.
Wheat vs Corn:
http://img855.imageshack.us/img855/5601/realcornwheat1784.png
Or perhaps you can explain why all these other commodities marched in lockstep with corn … were they all affected by ethanol as well?

@A. Scott
“The mantra is stop growing corn for fuel, that we should be growing it for food.”
No, the mantra is to stop growing corn for fuel and using that land to grow crops for food.
Could be for corn or could be for something else.

Please provide legitimate, fact based evidence that the acreage planted for corn used for ethanol is needed for “food.” I provided links to the USDA Crop Production Reports for last 6 years… you can go thru them and see the acres planted for every field crop. They are available back to 1964.
You, or anyone else, can go to them and find the exact data on planted acres. IF as you claim the acres used for ethanol are displacing food crops you will find that data in the Crop Production reports.
Of you can find the data in “live” Excel format in the Field Grain Yearbook, I posted table 26 from it above.
America has been the worlds corn supplier for most of the last century, We have supplied as much as 60% of the worlds corn exports. Despite increased exports in recent years by other corn producing countries, we still export more corn than all of them combined. We provide 100% of the export demand and still have surplus every year to add to the corn reserves.
In 2012 with the drought and reduced corn production America still met all domestic and export demands and needs. The shortfall was made up by the ethanol industry, who reduced use of US corn to offset almost the entire reduced production due to the drought. In effect ethanol amounts to a nearly 5 billion bushel strategic reserve – protecting us in case of a real problem.
Everyone wants to make claims – an attack – but few will back that up with data.

stas peterson says:
March 24, 2014 at 11:48 am
To: R B Brown et al,
“The fusion ship” is nearing port and will be available long BEFORE the Thorium ship can arrive.

Well… you may be right but that “fusion ship” has been about 10-15 years from port for the last 40 years or so.
The public pronouncements not withstanding, I’ll believe it when it happens. It being an actual, commercial grade, working, fusion powerplant – not a lab experimental machine that has greater than unity gain.

The fermentation process to turn ANY kind of “corn” into ethanol using yeast does create vast amounts of CO2, when the ethanol is made, and so burning ethanol although it may create only H2O when burnt, is not a “Carbon Free Fuel” as they say. It is a type of shell game, a confidence trick. Much energy is lost in the overall process, and so it isn’t even economic.

I don’t know anyone that claims ethanol is “carbon free” …. that said overall emissions are lower, and the fuel is cleaner burning. But even it was’t – it is RENEWABLE … that fact alone is a huge positive benefit. We SHOULD use our fossil fuel resources, but using ethanol extends that supply.
“Much of the energy” is not lost. The net energy yield is in the 1.6 to 1 range for corn ethanol … 1.6 units of energy are produced for every one unit of energy expended in that production.
Every bushel of corn makes appx 2.7 gallons of ethanol. In addition there are several pounds of corn oil, corn meal and other co-products. AND every bushel of corn used for producing ethanol also creates Distillers Dried Grain Solids – a high quality animal feed. One bushel of corn used for ethanol, in addition to the other co-products, also produces enough DDGS feed to effectively replace appx 50% of the corn used to produce the ethanol.
Sorry again, but stating that ethanol “isn’t even economic” is uninformed and outright false.

Ethanol costs less than gasoline. E85 costs less than E10. In my market I currently pay $2.49 for E85. E10 is $3.59 … a 31% spread. E10 has appx 111,400 BTU, while E85 has appx 81,600 BTU – or an appx 26% spread.
Even after accounting for the lower btu (and MPG) of E85 – I save 5% using ethanol.
But that isn’t the real story – since my ACTUAL MPG only drops about 18% using E85.

p.s. an ‘ethanol mandate’ may not be a literal subsidy, but it sure acts like one.

PCT Pub. No. 2008/151149 describes methods and materials for cultivating microalgae for the production of oil and particularly exemplifies the production of diesel fuel from oil produced by the microalgae Chlorella protothecoides. There remains a need for improved methods for producing oil in microalgae, particularly for methods that produce oils with shorter chain length and a higher degree of saturation and without pigments, with greater yield and efficiency. The present invention meets this need.
This sort of thing is indeed what I was thinking of — I’ve seen a couple of videos covering some of the technologies under development, although obviously a lot of it is hidden as it is worth a vast fortune if/when fully successful. I don’t think that people appreciate the power of PCR and gene splicing — it isn’t just about “breeding” as in selectively evolving things such as chlorella (which IIRC has long been known as and used as a (possible) food source, a (current) over the counter diet supplement, and possible way of using biology to sidestep what is otherwise a costly and difficult organic chemistry synthesis problem. Chlorella can be grown in a slurry in e.g. tubes or ponds with high surface area, uses sunlight as efficiently as high sugar crops such as sugar cane, and some strains produce high fractions of lipids instead of sugars or starches. Some strains just run on water, sunlight, CO_2, and trace nutrients/fertilizers. Others can “digest” available starches, or can be twinned with other species as part of a processing chain that could for example utilize the raw cellulose that is often “waste” as far as energy production capacity is concerned when growing oil crops such as hemp or rapeseed.
Fermentation followed by distillation, frankly, sucks, and I say this as a home brewer who is quite fond of the fermentation part. But if one were to (as the stuff above says) wet-mash a slurry of not only corn kernels but the entire corn plant, or an entire crop of fast-growing bamboo or hemp, and use sunlight and bioengineered chlorella strains to convert (say) 50% or more of the complex carbohydrates present into pure biodiesel that requires nothing more than centrifuging and filtration before being poured into a tank and used, well, that’s pretty nifty. It’s the distillation of alcohol to the anhydrous level required for use as fuel that sucks, you see — alcohol is hydrophilic and will actually pull water in out of the air (and it does this, right in your gas tank, hoorah hoorah, over time in a humid environment). Distillations require heating that is a pure loss against the energy you hope to recover, followed by extracting the last little bits of water with quicklime pellets created by calcinating limestone at enormous temperatures (and releasing almost half the weight of the limestone as CO_2 even if you do the calcinating with a giant magnifying class instead of by burning coal in a kiln).
Separating oil from lipids, on the other hand, is largely a matter of doing nothing, as lipids are hydrophobic, have a different density, and typically rise to the top and float there. If one bioengineered an algae such as chlorella to produce a directly utilizable mix of unsaturated fats (so one doesn’t have to refine the oil at additional expense) mechanical separation and filtration are cheap and easy and don’t require much energy at all compared to the fuel produced.
There are lots of places that could grow fuel stock for such a process without impacting national or international food production. North Carolina, for example, could really use a high-value crop that can grow on its relatively poor red-clay soil in place of tobacco in a hot, usually humid summer climate. Hemp would be a good choice — basically a weed but with lots of industrial uses. I’m guessing that a wide range of possible fuel stock crops for a chlorella-based process might work as well, in addition to the solar farming of chlorella itself. Lots of the otherwise poor US Southeast would be similarly blessed with the sunlight and water to make this process run, leaving the breadbasket midwest and California alone. Internationally this could be a blessing for Africa and tropical wet-zone climates.
This isn’t enough to show that this is economically feasible or profitable — early days for that. But it has a lot of promise, where IMO ethanol was a non-starter from the beginning and only works as well as it does because of massive investment to achieve economy of scale plus prohibitive fuel taxes and arm-twisting that regulate gasoline prices so that they end up competitive. Take away the visible hand of government, and see how many fuel ethanol companies survive. I’m happy to be proven wrong, but I suspect that the answer would be “none”, not without some sort of “help”.
I agree, Roger, that it is high time that we break the “hegemony” of carbon-based fossil fuel producers not because I think it is immoral to produce energy and make money at it, not because I think CO_2 is an enormous risk, but because it is dirty, expensive, a waste of precious pre-synthesized organic molecules of enormous value UNburned, and not a suitable basis for a steady-state world civilization with a high global standard of living, the only kind of world that might one day transcend war, poverty, and widespread preventable human misery. It is also good to prevent any single corporate interest group from amassing enough wealth and structural dominance that they become a political factor at the expense of the people they serve, a tail wagging the dog, and this has long since been passed with e.g. oil companies (I would still love to see the minutes of Bush’s meeting with the oil companies in the weeks leading up to the Gulf war, the ones he concealed citing presidential privilege — I’m certain that they were completely innocent. Aren’t you?)
So I’m all for solar (sustainable forever, basically), thorium (sustainable for at least 1000 years, long enough maybe to solve the fusion problem sigh), fusion (sigh), biodiesel IF it is sustainably profitable without subsidy and ecologically no worse that oil wells, conservation measures based on clever technology that are themselves life improvements (faucets that go on only while you use them, toilets that flush themselves, lights that only go on when there is somebody there to see the light, heat that goes on only when somebody is there that needs to keep warm). A lot of this stuff has positive ROI just because the resources saved cost more money than the device with any reasonable amortization.
To be perfectly clear, I think that a lot of the “green” agenda is just peachy keen and good practice and part of ethical stewardship of the planet. I just don’t like selling it on the back of bad, or uncertain, science. It brings out the rats and the con artists and causes economically insane decisioning, and frankly it enriches the very interests (fossil fuel producers) it is intended to “combat” in some unsubtle way.
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A. Scott
thank you for the satisfying and interesting reply.

I can’t find the biofuel conclusions at ipcc web yet. What am I to look for?

milodonharlani says:
March 25, 2014 at 6:47 pm
A. Scott says:
March 24, 2014 at 3:37 pm
Corn prices naturally affect wheat prices. When corn is too costly, ranchers feed wheat, & different grains can be substituted for in other applications. This isn’t theoretical for me. I was a wheat & barley rancher.

Then perhaps you’d comment on this chart ….
http://1drv.ms/OVl6OS
Corn, wheat, soybeans, barley, crude oil and gasoline … that using corn for ethanol must be really powerful to cause ALL those to move together.

gnomish … thanks

Dr. Strangelove says:
March 25, 2014 at 8:01 pm
Producing bio ethanol consumes more energy than what you can get out of it. It’s a waste of energy. Using ethanol in your car will decrease your mileage because its energy content is 33% lower than gasoline. It’s more expensive.

Repeating these completely false claims will not make them so. Perhaps some furious clicking of ruby red slippers might help, but I doubt that as well – they only return you to reality.
For corn ethanol processes the net energy balance of ethanol is at minimum appx 1.6. For every 1 unit of energy expended appx 1.6 units of energy are produced. In a 2008 USDA report the authors – who took into account the entire growing process – found:

A dry grind ethanol plant that produces and sells dry distiller’s grains and uses conventional fossil fuel power for thermal energy and electricity produces nearly two times more energy in the form of ethanol delivered to customers than it uses for corn, processing, and transportation. The ratio is about 2.3 BTU of ethanol for 1 BTU of energy in inputs, when a more generous means of removing byproduct energy is employed.
Some dry mills are already using up to 50 percent biomass power. The energy output for these
plants is near 2.8 times energy inputs, even using the conservative byproduct allowance.

http://www.usda.gov/oce/reports/energy/2008Ethanol_June_final.pdf
Yes, you will get lower MPG using ethanol. Straight gas has appx 114,000 btu/gal. Straight ethanol (E100) has appx 76,400 btu/gal. Gasoline today is E10, which has 110,200 btu/gal. And E85 has 82,200 btu/gal. E85 has appx 25.5% less energy per gal than E10 gasoline.
E85 however has a higher octane rating, which helps slightly. My 2003 Tahoe 5.3 liter flex fuel gets avg appx 14.5 mpg on E10, and appx 12.3 mpg on E85 – or appx 16% lower mpg in real world driving.
In my area – Minnesota – the avg spread between E85 and gas (E10) is 21.8%. Many areas however have a 25% to 31% spread, and I have a 31% station nearby. Even if we use the statistical 25.5% number i come out AHEAD – using ethanol would be more than 5% cheaper, even considering the lowered MPG.
In my actual case however, with real world appx 16% lower MPG, buying for 31% less means ethanol is considerably cheaper for me.
So if we apply actual facts to Dr Stangeloves claim we get:
‘Producing bio ethanol from corn provides at least 1.6 times, and up to 2.8 times, MORE energy than what you can get out of it. It generates considerable more energy than is consumed producing it. Using E85 ethanol in your car will decrease your mileage because its energy content is appx 25.5% lower than E10 gasoline. In the area’s where E85 is readily available the price differential is from appx 15% to 31% making ethanol on a net basis from slightly more expensive to significantly less expensive than E10 gasoline. Ethanol is also cleaner burning, has lower emissions and is a completely renewable fuel.’

Ha ha. I don’t doubt that there were some secret ethanol stills though during prohibition. Didn’t realize the scale was so vast.
You probably remember a similar thread, probably over a year ago where Gail Combs linked to some interesting machinations by futures traders. Unfortunately (well fortunately actually), I’m too busy to go dig them up.