Guest essay by Eric Worrall
US investment in biofuels are to be expanded under proposals advanced by the US EPA.
Under the proposed rule announced Friday, the amount of ethanol in the gasoline supply would increase in coming years, just not as much as set out under federal law. That approach drew criticism from ethanol and farm groups that have pushed to keep high volumes of ethanol in gasoline.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton has called for a robust renewable fuels standard while campaigning in Iowa, host of the leadoff presidential caucuses next year.
…
In a bid to ethanol producers, the administration also announced Friday that the Agriculture Department will invest up to $100 million to help improve infrastructure for delivering ethanol to cars, such as fuel pumps capable of supplying higher blends of renewable fuel.
Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/epa-proposes-lowering-amount-ethanol-gas-143928039–finance.html
When will this madness to stop? Even green journalists like George Monbiot, and former members of the UN like Jean Ziegler, people who believe wholeheartedly in the alleged dangers of anthropogenic climate change, think biofuels are a crime against humanity.
Burning hundreds of millions of tonnes of staple foods to produce biofuels is a crime against humanity. Since 2007, the EU and US governments have given lavish support to agribusinesses to fill car fuel tanks with food – compulsory targets, and tax breaks and subsidies(pdf) worth billions annually. The result? Increased hunger, land grabbing, environmental damage and, ultimately, hundreds of thousands of lives lost.
…
EU policies promoting biofuels have, since 2008, diverted crops out of food markets at the bidding of powerful agribusinesses, in their pursuit of private profit. This use of large quantities of food and commodity crops for relatively small amounts of transport fuel has had three disastrous consequences.
First is an increase in world hunger. Almost all biofuels used in Europe are made from crops, such as wheat, soy, palm oil, rapeseed and maize, that are essential food sources for a rapidly expanding global population. Europe now burns enough food calories in fuel tanks every year to feed 100 million people.
If there is ever a reckoning, a demand by victims of green policies for redress for the injustice and brutality they have suffered, at the hands of well meaning fools, the biofuel lunacy will surely top the list of wrongs to be righted.
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So Obama plays the EPA tune and the world dances. Point at the source of the problem.
Coal is a biofuel.
Coal has profound energy density. Its everywhere and its kinda gross. I actually hate coal, but it can’t be argued that coal has huge advantages over ethanol. Also its viable
I grew up across the street from a coal yard my uncle ran, where Union Pacific coal cars would pull up and dump their loads for him to distribute to the locals with coal furnaces. I used to play in it and get very black. I always liked the smell, kinda similar to diesel which I like also. I like the stuff.
You hold an emotion, hate, towards coal? Too funny! In my experience, coal fuelled the lives of millions. Coal is even discounted for retireies in Ireland.
Hanlon’s Razor – Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Stupidity on this scale simply is not plausible. This is a good thing. Stupidity cannot be fixed. Malice can be fixed.
Biofuels from waste products makes some sense, but bio fuel production for its own sake is a question mark. Land loss. I see nothing wrong with playing with energy sources, RandD. Clearly the propagation of ethanol policy is a green political play and nothing more. Most people on the left know this, and most on the right do as well. Biofuels viability to date is a big fat question mark.
Please publish comment on our lack of a serious ground game. Its a valid critique and one we should discuss.
Thanks
Troe
Look at the face of the sun…once again nearly blank. It has been thus for a few weeks now, and it seems likely that those predicting a gran solar minimum have gotten it right.
In the past week it has snowed in a large numbers of places all over the world, in which seeds are already planted and trees were already blooming.
And now this insanity from the EPA.
We are truly living in a world controlled by insane politicians who are supported by scientists guilt of criminal malfeasance.
Of course Clinton will campaign in Iowa for higher utilization of biofuel, but ask her about an overall energy plan. I’m sure she has none, the response will be something like “we need to keep our options open.”
It should be interesting how her energy plan, implied as a series of opportunistic statements in varied locales, will unfold. Wonder what she’ll be saying about coal in West Virginia?
We should be equally tough on any and all Repbubs. This country sorely needs a coherent energy plan that is codified so that the EPA doesn’t have latitude to impose random acts of insanity.
Just as Al “Bigcarbonfoot” Gore hypocritically ran on a cheap gasoline pledge in 2000 (“folks ought to be to able to get in their cars and drive wherever they want whenever they want with affordable access to fuel”), it appears Hillary “Whatdifferencedoesitmake” Clinton is undergoing a similar polling year conversion…
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/04/14/hillary-s-big-iowa-flip-flop.html
She, of course, is counting on her base to exercise their usual standards of critical thinking come voting time.
It would be interesting to tally up all the costs of the ethanol fuel programs. Government subsidies, higher cost of road fuel, more tankers on the highways (can’t use pipelines), rotting out of fuel systems (cost me $110 for a ruined carburetor for example), additives to counteract the ethanol in fuel, reduced highway mileage, incompatibility in aircraft creating a need to have a separate distribution system, loss of wild habitat, greater use of water, increases in food prices ($44B a year just in higher chicken feed prices), unnecessary deaths due to starvation and other causes, and general disruption of the free market system come to mind. There are likely a hundred other unintended consequences.
The people advocating for ethanol fuel know all this, but their zeal to “save the planet” and screw everyone else trumps everything. It is malice and arrogance, and a strong corn lobby in Washington, that perpetuates this mistake. Write your Reps and Senators to end subsidies and reduce mandates.
Tack on the costs and deaths associated with the so-called Arab Spring, which began with a series of food riots in various countries. Since ISIS came to power as part of this whole sequence of events, make sure to figure in all of the past, present and future consequences of those lunatics.
Including what it will cost to fight the inevitable war to rid the world of them. Since this may not occur until after they succeed in striking us here in the US, add that in too.
Agree with CarlF but believe another letter writing campaign will be a damp squib until we develop the grassroots. Websites and a few friendly media organizations are not enough. The ability to muster 100 regular folks at an obscure utility hearing is what we are missing. The Sierra Club and others provide that. What have got to counter.
The holy grail in bio-fuel is still an efficient conversion of cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin to gaseous/liquid fuels.
I can subscribe to that aim.
You won’t find Greenpeace or “climate scientists” contributing much to that aim. Same as it ever was: People who might provide real solutions vs people who make a living finding problems.
In the chemical warfare that the organisms on the earth have engaged in for billions of years, one of the most significant was and is the one involving lignin and cellulose.
Much evidence exists that it took over 60 million years for any organism to develop the means to break down lignin, and so end the carboniferous period by making coal formation much more rare. Even today, it is a difficult feat that only a handful of organisms manage.
But for those sixty million years, the amount of lignin present in plants and trees was far higher than it is today, and hence vast quantities of solar energy were stored and deposited in concentrated form.
It may be far easier said than done to devise the means to easily and cheaply convert lignin and cellulose back to their constituent monomers, short of burning them directly.
The beta 1-4 bond that differentiates cellulose from starch and other digestible carbs, together with the close association of lignin in the structure of plants, and the problems attendant with breaking it down, makes certain of this.
And scaling the processes that have been developed has proven to be a huge hurdle.
In any case, the Earth’s biosphere is starved to get the carbon, that was sequestered during the carboniferous, back.
We should not damage it further by preventing new lignin from being deposited into soil, where it serves several vital functions.
Even if we could
Removing the cellulose from fields and farms would be an ecological catastrophe.
.
Edit…removing the cellulose and lignin from fields and…
Imagine we develop the means to easily degrade cellulose and lignin, and it gets loosed on the biosphere and incorporated into the genetic material of one or more species of microbe.
The plants and trees of the world would lose the means to resist structural attack, and a catastrophe could ensue which would rot every plant and tree on the Earth.
I can think of no surer way to cause the end of the world as we know it, and as it has existed for many hundreds of millions of years.
We should not try to develop the means to do this, given the risk.
What say you to that?
Btw we suffered a complete financial collapse on our big green economy bets here in Tennessee. We bet the ranch on a particular solar solution and it blew up in our faces. An empty billion dollar plant is just the most visible sign of a wider disaster little covered in the States media. The same media outlets that were cheering the politicians on when the bet was laid.
The peoples memory is short and sometimes they forget things they never really knew. Easier than thinking I suppose.
Where are the Unicorns? When it comes to energy you may want to go back to some earlier posts
http://www.energytrendsinsider.com/2015/05/20/where-are-the-unicorns/#more-17879
For those with problems with algae in their swimming pools and other places of entertainment… a simple solution I cam across while building and operating re-cycled water aquaculture systems involved running the treated re-cycled water through a bag of barley straw – seems it contributes stuff that algae find reprehensible. Downside is you have to change the straw fairly frequently… you will have to experiment to find the right timing.
There IS a place for SOME biofuels. I totally agree using good cropland is a horrible idea! That said, we could instead use marginal lands that cannot support our main crops. Non irrigated low input systems could make it feasible. No need to mess with actual crop lands.. But then that is intelligent so will likely be ignored in favor of emotions.
Poor lands would yield a very diffuse source of energy. The means to gather and concentrate the material would likely exceed the energy gotten back. And the effort to do so would deprive the soil of the materials it needs to form, persist, and increase.
No, I grow forests on dry lands now, fertility and soil water holding capacity increases over time. There is a wide range of trees and bushes that have multiples more useful material per growing area then lets say corn. Siberian peashrub seeds to name just one. I am not well voiced in what plants would yield the most ideal dryland materials for fuels, but considering the range of things I grow outproducing corn and getting materials with similar make ups with less input is not a problem at all.
Even for corn on prime farmland, when all of the inputs are accurately calculated, it is likely that the fuels used to make the ethanol exceeds the ethanol produced.
Many studies have shown this to be true.
The ones that were used to justify ethanol mandates to begin with have been shown to be flawed.
Good thing then that you can multiply the amounts grown with treecrops with less inputs, and labor. You mention prime farmland next to corn as if corn on prime farmland out produces trees on marginal lands, it does not come close. We are talking an order of magnitude difference or so. Also I might point out that this HAS been done with mesquite, and they just harvested wild grown stuff, they didn nothing such as my own work does that greatly magnifies the biomass a tree will grow. So say what you like but it really could likely work on the small scale, without messing with actual croplands. No where close to enough lands to replace fossil fuels.
My own work is taking lands generally left to cattle, adding in trees set up with what we might call “tarraforming”, which gives us various treecrops (non irrigated) while also building soil and multiplying the amounts of grass (that the cattle eat) that can be grown. So we can literally ADD crops and fertility while getting multiples more out of a system that covers much of the high desert in one variation or another…
@ur momisugly Randy-
Your comments about your work is fascinating. I’d like to know more about what you’ve found, especially with Mesquite, which is rampant around many places where my feet fall…
I’ll see if there’s any info on the web and will be delighted if you decide to tell us more.
Was years since I read about that specifically alan. I had seen things like… http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Mesquite_Energy_May_Be_Harvested_For_Ethanol_999.html
So I decided to look for the newest info and found…
http://bionews-tx.com/news/2014/08/11/texas-agrilife-research-study-highlights-mesquite-complementary-biofuel-feedstock/
Looks comparable to corn. But they arent purposely increasing what the tree can do as my work does so I expect it can be some amount better then this. In either case certainly better then using space we use for corn now. Use mesquite from the marginal lands.
Thanks Randy!
The trick becomes to utilize marginal lands while simultaneously increasing their capacity to be productive. The planet has millions of square miles of unproductive/marginal lands and mankind will eventually figure out how to make better use of them. The best method we’ve found so far is the increase in atmospheric CO2.
I find it highly unethical to use food or farmland for fuel.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2014/04/20/its-final-corn-ethanol-is-of-no-use/
Please see the response from Eric McAfee to this article that I have posted below. It’s now in moderation, but should exit from there soon.
While it’s in moderation, here’s the link:
http://talk.newagtalk.com/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=471380&DisplayType=nested&setCookie=1
If making ethanol from corn was so good for the economy and for the animal feed industry, why has the cost of grains and chicken and beef exploded since the mandate went into effect?
…. and not come back down with corn prices being halved back to ’07 prices? I don’t know the answer to either. Nor do I know the answer to why my gasoline cost at the pump went down to almost $3:00 a few months ago, and is back over $4:20, with the price of crude not moving much.
I have noticed that prices of some things have begun to abate, but (opinion follows) surely the ceaseless operation of gov’t printing presses churning out $bills has some effect.
Phil, crude was down in the low 40’s for a while there, and falling fast. And WTI and Brent were near the same price.
Brent is now back to a 10% premium over WTI, and WTI is now back at around 60, and trending up.
One must also look at whether the out months are in contango or backwardation to get the big picture anyway.
Just looking at spot price for front month tells an incomplete tale.
And besides for all of that, refined products have their own markets, separate from the prices of crude.
The crack spread can widen if, for examples, many refineries are transitioning from one blend to another, or are down for maintenance, or for a host of other factors.
I am very concerned about the economic and environmental costs of transition to biofuels.
I am also very concerned about the obesity crisis.
Could we not obtain subsidy funding to offer free liposuction and possibly solve both these problems in one go.
We could call it “arse fracking”. That would be sure to make the enterprise popular with all the leftist/eco pressure groups.
I can’t really believe that my idea has so far been so widely ignored.
Of course, we’d still be converting valuable food resources into energy. But in my system – people would get to have all the fun of eating the food first.
Sometimes things are so corrupt that only a scorching blaze will allow the “intelligent” uses room to grow. Elongated Musk moved quickly from technological saviour to YIELDCO. Perhaps its because the otherwise useful possibilities of the underlying technology never added up to the hype. Peter Thiels ” 140 characters vs jet packs” scenario. Not much money ti be made if the thing stays small.
Eric, this “essay” is very misleading, unless you meant to bring out the type-before-thinking vitriol spewers who still think the bioethanol industry has much if anything to do with phony climate change.
If people want to be educated on what corn-based bioethanol plants actually do, you should read the response to the similar Forbes magazine article, copied in its entirety below.
I hope you will educate yourself on DDGS and the conversion of the valuable food constituents of corn to higher value cattle, chicken and pig-feed. Here’s a start:
http://www.ethanolrfa.org/page/-/rfa-association-site/studies/2012_DDGS_Handbook.pdf?nocdn=1
Also, I don’t see much mention of the price of food in general coming down as corn prices have come down from almost $8 per bushel to as low as ~$3.50 per bushel recently. That’s probably because they haven’t.
http://farmpolicy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/corn1.png
…. and no, I’m not in the industry. I just have to understand it for what I do.
Also, one of my rules of life in general, is that if George Monbiot supports something, then it must be a pile of lying crap.
Eric McAfee’s response to Forbes article (from just over a year ago) as promised:
____________________________________________________________________
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2014/04/20/its-final-corn-et…
James, thank you for your interest in cleaner, more sustainable fuels and chemicals. The oil industry currently benefits from a 90% gasoline mandate in the US (the artificial “Blend Wall” created by the oil industry due to an unwillingness to invest in biofuel blender pumps at retail gas stations). Your diligent efforts to break the 90% crude oil gasoline mandate in favor of renewable, 113 octane, high oxygen, cleaner, domestic, job-creating fuels are to be encouraged!
Due to your scientific background and experience cleaning up hazardous waste sites, you are probably aware that corn is not a single molecule or material. Rather, corn is comprised of about 72% starch, which converts to sugar in the body of an animal. The other 28% of a corn kernel is primarily protein, corn oil and fiber, which are the valuable “distillers grain” components of animal feed extracted from the corn kernel by an ethanol plant.
The enzymes in ethanol plants convert the 72% starch from corn kernels into sugar, which is fed to yeast in order to produce ethanol. So, ethanol plants are “waste processing facilities”, since none of the valuable corn proteins, oils or fibers are converted to ethanol.
Instead, ethanol plants extract the 72% of lower-value, starch “waste” from the corn kernel and produce a concentrated, high-value, Distillers Grain animal feed from the remaining 28% of the corn kernel. Since this concentrated animal feed is able to be fed without the 72% starch “waste” material, it is more valuable per ton than corn: especially to China and the other 80 countries that purchase Distillers Grain from the US to feed animals at a lower cost (including import tariffs) than purchasing and transporting whole corn with 72% starch from the US.
To update you on recent developments in the biofuels industry during the past three years, the $0.45 per gallon VEETC (known as the Blender’s Tax Credit since it was paid to oil companies and not to farmers or ethanol plants) was terminated by Congress in December 2011, along with the $0.54 per gallon tariff that protected US ethanol producers from heavily subsidized Brazilian sugarcane ethanol. You are probably aware that commencing January 1, 2012 the ethanol industry received no subsidies at all from the federal government on a per-gallon basis.
Since you have an interest in cleaner, less expensive fuels, you will be pleased to learn that biofuels have enabled the agricultural section in the US to no longer receive large farm subsidies that were required prior to the use of ethanol as a vehicle fuel. These USDA and other subsidies paid farmers NOT to grow corn – known as the Set-Aside Program – at a cost to taxpayers (the same people that buy food) of up to $5 billion per year. Due to the economic viability of corn production as a direct result of ethanol produced by waste processing facilities known as ethanol plants, farmers no longer qualify for billions of dollars of annual subsidies to not produce corn.
Ethanol is 113 octane and about 30% oxygen, allowing the lower quality 82 octane gasoline now being produced by oil refiners to meet fuel performance and federal air quality requirements. Oxygen makes crude oil gasoline burn cleaner. Without ethanol, the average gasoline currently produced in the US would not able to be legally sold as a vehicle fuel.
Increased octane is virtually certain in the future in order to comply with fuel economy laws. Your fuels and chemicals experience most certainly includes an understanding of the role of octane as an ignition inhibitor to allow engines to produce more energy from a gallon of fuel at high pressures caused by turbocharging smaller engines. Indy race cars run on 100% ethanol and NASCAR uses 15% ethanol in order to achieve higher mileage and more horsepower by utilizing the 113 octane in ethanol.
In 2013, the EPA stated that it would no longer accept engine tests that did not contain at least 15% ethanol in the test fuel, and the EPA sought engine manufacture standards for testing 30% ethanol. Why? The EPA stated that the 54 miles per gallon CAFE fuel efficiency standard would not be achievable in a gasoline engine without a 30% blend of the 113 high octane provided by ethanol. It looks like future engines will be closer to the 113 octane ethanol in Indy cars than the poor quality “bunker fuel” often used in the large engines of oceangoing ships.
Lastly, any commentary claiming “harm” by corn farmers or the use of ethanol or any other biofuel should consider that every gallon of biofuel displaces a portion of the $1 billion per day of US investment capital that is exported to purchase foreign crude oil. This is the equity for the growth of the US economy, being spent on the purchase of a consumption item, not a capital investment in future productivity. The economic “multiplier effect” is enjoyed by OPEC and other foreign crude oil producing countries, not the US. Simply noting the location of the multiplier effect is being transferred to US workers should be sufficient for the amateur economist to understand a basic cost of imported crude oil: a $1 billion daily economic drain on the US economy.
Since you have read this far, please consider any future articles about biofuels to be a comparison with the economic, environmental and social impacts of the mandated fuel that we are currently mandated to purchase by the monopoly that controls the fuel retail outlets in the US: the crude oil industry.
In the future, please compare the biofuels industry to the oil and gas industry, which receives more than $100 billion per year of direct cash subsidy from the US taxpayer: 1) 100% tax-free earnings using Master Limited Partnerships to own facilities and pipelines (MLP’s are illegal to use for biofuels facilities); 2) accelerated tax write-offs for well drilling (illegal for corn farmers and ethanol plants); and 3) more than $100 billion per year of military protection for shipping lanes and foreign oil fields.
Our generation has a burden to undertake the technology innovation, investment and operational management to provide renewable, sustainable alternatives to the dwindling crude oil reserves that are increasingly expensive and environmentally damaging to produce. Whether your view of Peak Oil is that 2006 was the high point for oil production, or whether you are bullish on fracking, Canadian tar sands and offshore drilling, the future of oil production is significantly higher costs of production.
A quick look at the stock prices and quarterly earnings of Green Plains, Pacific Ethanol and others will show that biofuels production is financially sustainable. Using sunlight to grow a crop, then removing the waste starch to produce a 113 octane oxygenate called ethanol and selling higher value protein/oil/fiber animal food is a less expensive way to produce fuel.
As a biofuels CEO recently stated: Ethanol is the least expensive molecule in the fuel tank, and a lot of domestic and foreign consumers want to buy it.
_______________________________________________
I’m surprised no one above has taken note of this:
April 28: EU restricts the use of agricultural crops for biofuel
http://goo.gl/Oubj0P
EXTRACT:
With Europe the world’s biggest user and importer of biodiesel – from crops such as palm oil, soy and rapeseed – the vote is expected to have a major impact around the world, notably in the European Union’s main international supplier countries Indonesia, Malaysia and Argentina. It is likely to signal the end to the expanding use of food crops for transport fuel.
“Let no-one be in doubt,” said Robbie Blake, Friends of the Earth Europe’s biofuels campaigner, “the biofuels bubble has burst. These fuels do more harm than good for people, the environment and the climate. The EU’s long-awaited move to put the brakes on biofuels is a clear signal to the rest of the world that this is a false solution to the climate crisis. This must spark the end of burning food for fuel.”
With the vote, the European Union has agreed to put a limit on biofuels from agricultural crops at seven percent of E.U. transport energy – with an option for member states to go lower. Before the vote, the expected ‘business as usual’ scenario was for biofuels to account for 8.6 percent of E.U. transport energy by 2020. Current usage stands at 4.7 percent, having declined in 2013.
Indirect greenhouse emissions released by expanding biofuels production will be reported every year by the European Commission and by fuel suppliers in an attempt to increase the transparency of the impacts of the policy.
Commenting on the vote, Kirtana Chandrasekaran, Friends of the Earth International’s food sovereignty coordinator, said: “While the EU has not gone far enough to stop the irresponsible use of food crops for car fuel, this new law acknowledges a reality that small-scale food producers worldwide know – that biofuel crops cripple their ability to feed the world, compete for the land that provides their livelihood, and for the water that sustains us.”
Around the world, 64 countries have policies to increase or maintain the amount of biofuels used ….
Don’t conflate Europe’s biofuel “bubble” with the US bioethanol industry.
“Cool Planet’s process uses wood chips, agricultural waste products or other nonfood organic matter, heating them in a pyrolysis unit to temperatures as high as 500C. The vapors that are emitted by the heated biomass are channeled through a proprietary catalyst and then condensed into a biofuel that Bolsen says is molecularly identical to conventional fossil fuels.”
“Further, according to Bolsen, the organic matter left over from the process can be enhanced and sold as a soil additive that retains moisture so well, it allows farmers to reduce their water use. This biochar product, which the company has branded CoolTerra, decomposes very slowly, which means it can lock carbon into the earth – and keep it out of the air – for hundreds of years, he said. This effect is why the company labels the whole production process “carbon negative.””
http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/may/29/biofuel-climate-change-carbon-negative-cool-planet-pyrolysis
I suppose CoolTerra could be applied to a crop field the same as granular fertilizer is. This would be low tech, as are wood chips. Rewind to 40 years back. We heated wood in a sealed test tube over a bunsen burner. Looked like charcoal was left over. We removed that and lit the accumulated gas. It exploded.
This CoolTerra product is nothing more than charcoal, with all the nutrients cooked out. It is worthless for enhancing the soil.
In their own words,
So the stuff will stay around forever, with no bioavailability at all, and no nutrients. Keeping soils fertile is not at all, just a matter of adding raw carbon. What a lot of people around the biofuels debate do not appreciate is just how much biomass must be returned to the field (or left there) to maintain the fertility of the soil. If you harvest every last bit of everything that grows as “biomass”, you have nothing left to return. In effect, you are “strip-mining” your soil, and the soil will rapidly become impoverished. Crop yields plummet and you can even get a “dust bowl” situation where nothing grows. This situation can develop quite rapidly, sometimes just a few years.
So why would anyone engage in such a destructive, short term farming practice?
The only reason is subsidies or mandates which make it look profitable in the short term. This is especially true when people can take a short term lease on some land, and then walk away when the lease is up.
Okay, charcoal:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar
Consider natural forest fires. Lots of charcoal. The forest recovers and is arguably better off on long time scales. Not long ago I helped burn grass on my father’s farm. He was paid by the government to do that. My uncle tells me it’s an old family tradition. Renville County has some of the best farmland in the world. I have no idea if gasoline from trees is economical?
Tony, you make some very good points about soils and bio- availability of nutrients.
The use of charcoal as an agricultural soil supplement is very interesting and was sparked by the discovery of terra preta soils in tropical American jungles. I don’t know much about the subject, but it appears that the charcoal absorbs and then acts like a time- release agent of available nutrients. The origins of the terra preta soils seems to have been in the “pit privies” of jungle inhabitants long ago, who dumped fire pit ashes/charcoal and broken (porous) pottery pieces into the mix, where nutrients were not lacking. Over time, the soil’s beasties utilized those nutrients and worked their magic, building rich deposits of soils which are atypical of the nutrient- deficient laterite jungle/tropical soils.
charcoal is absolutely NOT worthless for enhancing the soil. It isnt a fertilizer itself, but it regulates water, nutrients and biological processes. It will store a bit of excess nutrients that might otherwise runoff, same with water. In my dry and marginal lands giving a place for the soil biota to live is especially useful. It also buffers PH issues, to much salt and several other issues. Roots also grow very well with a good amount of it, and unlike biomass that breaks down which is a different topic altogether, it remains in the soil.
I use it to great effect in my work, and yes I have plots with different variables and controls so I can see what works the best with the least effort. You might look into “terra preta” , lots of other people use charcoals for soil building as well.
Tony, the people that do not know already what you just said are the sort who pretend to know what they are talking bout, or may actually believe what they say, and are just incredibly ignorant.
Like the guy who thinks you can avoid ever using fertilizer by growing some legumes every other year.
He has never run the numbers, or even looked up the relevant data from actual farming.
The stories worth reading are from Japan where they have used biochar for centuries. The right crop with the right form of char (temperature of processing) inoculated with the right materials (urine, for example) will host microorganisms that are beneficial to plants. This is not hocus pocus, neither is it a panacea. Lost of biochar experiments fail.
At the moment biochar is a fave among stove designers because they imagine they are going to get credits far above the carbon market value under the Gold Standard for making char out of woody biomass and burying it underground.
The first carbon accredited project was registered by Servals in Chennai, India. They organised for 6000 homes to cook with furniture offcuts (i.e. waste biomass) making charcoal by using a top-lit updraft gasifier/pyrolyser. The charcoal is purchased and sold to a foundry, not buried in the ground. Because this saves the burning of coke, there is a carbon credit involved. Someone somewhere is buying the offset.
The women actually make a small amount of money while cooking in this way. Servals makes the stoves.
What this all breaks down too is believing that we can run our economy by using photosynthesis as a means to capture and store solar energy, and then convert the stored energy to liquid fuel, and somehow this is sustainable without outside inputs of energy.
It would be more efficient to use land capable of agriculture for agriculture, non arable land for grazing or just keep it for natural biomes, and capture solar the most efficient ways we know, that use no water, fertilizers, do not have to be gathered, and trucked…etc.
The energy produced is run through wires.
If that cannot be made to pay, how can the far less thermodynamically efficient processes needed to get liquid fuel from solar ever going to pay?
Menicholas 3:14 pm
Who said anything about “run our economy”, and why do you think this is speculative when today you can go and look at US bioethanol companies making 13+ Billion gallons/year of the stuff? Think area (Nebraska, Iowa, etc.).
After massive profitability in 2014 with no subsidies, the bioethanol companies are not in any hurt for now. See, for example:
http://www.ethanolproducer.com/articles/12175/green-plains-2015-outlook-strong-in-spite-of-q1-dip-in-profits
If you, and others, who still seem to think this is some kind of phony climate change scam, you should subscribe to Ethanol Producer Magazine or RFA SmartBrief, read it for a week, and see how much they’re driven by “greenhouse gases”. Sure they give it some lip service as an afterthought, but not much.
Menicholas:
“What this all breaks down too is believing that we can run our economy by using photosynthesis as a means to capture and store solar energy, and then convert the stored energy to liquid fuel, and somehow this is sustainable without outside inputs of energy.”
Energy density:
Wood 17
Coal 24-31
Crude Oil 42
I am more interested in woodlands and not farmland, though farmers can have more trees than they know what to do with? Crude oil transportation to the refinery can have many costs, hurdles and safety issues. Wood transportation might be a 120 mile round trip for a logging truck. Or less with waste wood chips. It will boil down I think to cost efficient extraction from the wood. Might never be possible.
“It would be more efficient to use land capable of agriculture for agriculture, non arable land for grazing or just keep it for natural biomes, and capture solar the most efficient ways we know, that use no water, fertilizers, do not have to be gathered, and trucked…etc.”
I happen to live next to some of this “non arable land” used for grazing. Im watching as the ranchers slowly fail over decades. People blame the drought and many other things, as the amount of grasses per acre slowly shrinks. Seems to me the cattle just dont let the grasses seed well enough and other plants slowly take the space.
So to keep i tshort, my own work alters the surface of the landscape a bit so water is maximized where it will have the greatest affect for trees, I am growing a range of trees non irrigated now. Productively I might add. All the while this set up builds up biomass, since these are deciduous and not evergreens. So at this point Im growing crops on lands this isnt considered possible while also maximizing the system already there.
Im not arguing we can provide lots of fuel like this, not my field, but we definitely can grow productively on large tracts of lands considered non arable atm with a more matured mindset. We can also get more meat from these lands while doing it, all the while the fertility is slowly increasing year by year. as I perfected this model Ive been told for years Im just a silly dreamer, but it does in fact work, and unless laws suddenly change I will have commercial orchards set up with this soon. We are currently looking for the initial lands to do it on, I have 5 acres now I test my projects on, but its to far out, going for 20 plus acres closer… HALF the world beef comes from simlar marginal lands!!! Most of these places could in fact ADD crops while getting more meats with the right mindset, and in all honesty once people see it in practice the methods will spread on their own just because you make more money.
I am not sure where the conversation about the article morphed into a discussion about the productivity of marginal lands, methods of improving soils, overall production of biomass of various plants, or whatever.
What I was talking about was the practical and real world effects that are happening now, and what might occur now that this mandate seems to be being extended.
If you read my comments above, I pointed out my concern with robbing the soil to produce cellulosic ethanol.
And pointed out that the practical reality is not where the pie-in-the-sky dreaming would have anyone believe. It present it has never been shown to be commercially feasible to produce liquid motor fuel from cellulosic materials of any sort. The chemical bonds are not going to yield to wishful thinking.
My best guess is that biodiesel is more likely to have a practical commercial impact at some point. Small scale processes have shown for years that under a certain type of high pressure and high temperature reaction, any organic material at all can be made into biodiesel. But the process has been impossible to scale up in a way which is commercially feasible.
Small scale trials of producing biofuels from such sources as algae, cellulose, and other non-food crop materials are not really the subject at hand. At least not as I see it.
And regarding this defense of the whole mandate as being somehow good for the feed industry, I am not buying it.
If it made economic sense, no mandate would be required.
There is an argument to be made for adding an oxygenating agent to motor fuel, during certain seasons and in certain locales, but that is not the issue here either. Methyl tert-butyl ether was used for a long time, but seems to have become impossible to use due to an unfortunate tendency to wind up in groundwater, although I am becoming less certain that this is/was a real issue, and not confabulated as part of the ethanol dealio.
And although new cars can handle 10% ethanol with few issues, the same is not true for small motors and such. And the hygroscopic nature of ethanol makes it problematic for several reasons even as an additive for cars.
Regarding the price of grains, these began to go up as soon as it became clear than the mandate would become law.
But the real shock did not come right away. The drought through the corn belt was a huge shock, as was the drought in Texas. Both events had repercussions which were far worse than had been the case in previous droughts, because so much acreage was being devoted to corn which was mandated be turned into ethanol.
Markets become highly distorted under conditions of such mandates, and the law of unintended consequences has shown itself in several places.
But the worst part about the whole thing is that there is overwhelming evidence that once one takes an accurate and full accounting, it takes as much or more energy to make the ethanol as will ever be gotten back.
The first time anyone shows a closed system in which a farm is able to make a profit producing ethanol and not use any outside energy sources, I will change my mind.
As it is now, no one can run a farm on liquid fuels which are obtained from crops grown on property, and do so while making a profit. Until someone can demonstrate such a closed system is possible and practical, there is no reason to suppose the ethanol mandate makes any sense at all.
Smoke and mirrors can do wonders, but it cannot turn BS into chocolate cake.
Ok, I do not know what that means either. 🙂
Good night.
How many gallons of fuel has Cool Planet produced in the last 5, 2, 1 years?
An insignificant amount of gallons of fuel.
“How can we help prevent soil erosion and provide clean air and water? How can we make this world more beautiful and green? The answer is, by growing more trees and then using more wood, both as a substitute for non-renewable fossil fuels and materials such as steel, concrete and plastic, and as paper products for printing, packaging and sanitation.” – Patrick Moore.
The fun part is, we get to cut down trees. Log until the cows come home. Then replant.
The processes have proved to be difficult to scale. And increasing the C to N ratio in soil is very bad for soil.
Soybeans fix nitrogen from the air into the soil. Corn, beans, repeat.
Corn beans repeat. Hey, thanks for telling everyone. I suppose farmers can stop buying fertilizers now.
Thanks, you just saved us all tens of billions per year.
Char in the soil remains char for hundreds of thousands of years. There is in fact a carbon cycle in the ground – lots of carbon leaches out of the soil into rivers. But the charcoal from fires of long ago can easily be seen in hominid digging sites.
There is a theory from India that adding char might be hosting organisms that are able to deconstruct P and K minerals from their bound mineral state and then they die, leaving the P and K in an form accessible to plants. There is plenty of P/K in soils but it is in inaccessible forms. Feeding those bacteria with sugar is one way to promote their release and avoid putting fertiliser on the fields. The reference work is by Dr Anand Dinkar Karve at ARTI, Pune.
Modern agriculture depends on maximizing every parameter to optimize yields.
I for one am not commenting on the tangential issue of adding charcoal to soil as an adjuvant or enhancer.
Slash and burn techniques are well known. The method provides for one or at most a few crops, and then the land must either be fertilized or left fallow for some number of years.
Fertilizer costs in a typical Minnesota corn and beans operation might be 10 to 15% of total costs.
I am just guessing, but I suspect if adding charcoal to soil, in the context of modern techniques, would serve as a substitute for more expensive phosphate and potassium, then someone in the field of commercial agriculture would have noticed by now.
I am not saying this is not true, but it stands to reason that there is more too it than that.
I have also found that what can be done on a small scale and in an unintensive garden situation, will not translate into a viable technique for agribusiness on the scale which feeds the hundreds of millions with a relative handful of people working the land.
Not recommended, but China does this:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/10/31/satellite-captures-masive-smoke-and-haze-over-china/
…. and that’s corn waste too. A colleague, by coincidence, was driving under that smoke, right at that time.
with slash and burn little is left as charcoal in the soil, what is left also isnt “activated” and doesnt work as well, and lastly… charcoal is not in fact a fertilizer it helps the soil in other ways. so relating charcoal use to slash and burn is basically meaningless. One is a growing system that is an entire failure imo. The other has measurable benefits that last millennia.
The economics of farming are not very much in dispute, being that it is well studied and not exactly a theoretical endeavor.
Corn following beans uses about 25% less nitrogen per year, but part of hat is given back in increased need for P and K.
But the market is tilting away from beans. It used to be that considerations such as sol condition and minimizing input costs factored heavily into decisions about what to plant. Less so now.
http://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/crops/pdf/a1-20.pdf
Ethanol is not going to be viable until it can made from farm and yard waste instead of food. Face it, the era of cheap oil is bound to come to an end once everyone in China, India, and Africa get their first gasoline powered car (something that billions of people do not have yet).
Getting it made from yard waste at least will be almost revolutionary here, as it comprises by a decent margin the largest chunk of what gets buried in landfills (and never decomposes because of lack of oxygen).
Totally off Topic but for anyone interested in the ‘Solar Powered’ aircraft “Solar2” making its way from Nanjing China to Hawaii you can watch it here–
http://www.solarimpulse.com/widget-instruments–
Also trackable on Flightradar24—
http://www.flightradar24.com/SOLAR2/6651d9c–
The speed at this moment is a remarkable 33 MPH.
P.S.
Just look for a ‘Stick thing’ on Flightradar24 in the Sea of Japan.
Update–It seems something has gone wrong, Solar2 has dissapeared off radar,hope everything O.K.
EPA sounds like it might be in another push
http://sppiblog.org/news/epa-plan-to-ban-coal-hits-major-roadblock
Via http://joannenova.com.au/2015/05/weekend-unthreaded-76/#comments
I read a story that shows the Germany officials lying about the objective facts concerning the blooming of forsythia blossoms in Hamburg and other matters. The link is:
I have seen this sort of real world data as well as proof of governmental lying all over the cAGW delusion for years. Some people are just misguided by propaganda. Some are deceiving themselves. Some just want to believe in spite of all evidence. There are other reasons people believe this nonsense … or claim they do.
Simply put; even though some here really believe that a cooler atmosphere can “heat up” a warmer surface the simple fact is that we have seen no cooling for almost 20 years in spite of the alarmists being in charge of the data sets. Their own figures, corrupt though they may be, tell us that CO2 does not control the climate and that by all logic CO2 looks to have no effect on net at all.
Will it take a mile of ice covering Wisconsin to stop this CO2 delusion?
Quotes to remember.
“ethanol in the gasoline supply would increase in coming years”
With Obama out office in January 2017 ! decrease can be coming.
“the Agriculture Department will invest up to $100 million to help improve infrastructure”
That means bribes, kick-backs and subsidies to the Farm Lobby and Farm Unions especially in California. But with Obama out of office in January 2017 ! Musk will have to buy Honda Diesel electric generators to re-charge his solar cars and solar homes.
EPA’s “Biofuels Cycle” looks to be just a wishful Washington DC Spin Cycle.
Here’s the Other Spin Doctors: