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

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