A recent guest op-ed in The New York Times identifies some of the problems with biofuels that make them much less environmentally friendly than their promoters claim. The most common biofuels in the United States are ethanol and biodiesel, refined primarily from corn and soybeans, respectively.
The article, “The Climate Solution That’s Horrible for the Climate,” written by Michael Grunwald, describes many detrimental effects of using ethanol and biodiesel. Some examples include that they “accelerate food inflation and global hunger,” because the crops produced and land used to grow them them could otherwise be used to feed humans and animals. Indeed, a study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison estimated that the impact of the Renewable Fuel Standards program, which mandates the use of increasing amounts of biofuels, was a 30 percent increase in corn prices.
Additionally, Grunwald says:
“[B]ut they’re also a disaster for the climate and the environment. And that’s mainly because they’re inefficient land hogs. It takes about 100 acres worth of biofuels to generate as much energy as a single acre of solar panels; worldwide, a land mass larger than California was used to grow under 4 percent of transportation fuel in 2020.”
Corn-based ethanol in particular is a problem, he says, because it “uses almost as much fossil fuel — from fertilizers made of natural gas to diesel tractors, industrial refineries and other sources — as the ethanol replaces.”
Although Grunwald is wrong when claims later in his editorial that traditional fuels are “broiling” the planet, he is correct that biofuels do not help the environment, and they contribute to the waste of land that otherwise could go towards producing food.
The New York Times is not the only mainstream media outlet shedding light on biofuels’ deficiencies recently. Climate Realism reported a few months ago that Time Magazine had soured on corn ethanol. In that post, a Time staff writer said that ethanol blend mandates “are just a way of locking in higher corn prices while actually making the climate situation worse.”
If an individual is concerned about carbon dioxide emissions or actual pollutants, biofuels are not the answer. Data presented in Energy at a Glance: Ethanol and Biodiesel shows that, in kilograms of CO2 per energy output equivalent, ethanol emits more CO2 than pure gasoline. It takes 1.5 times more fuel to travel an equivalent distance on ethanol than with gasoline, due to ethanol’s lower energy density.
In terms of pollutants regulated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) an agency study confirmed that “air quality modeling suggests that production and use of ethanol as fuel to displace gasoline is likely to increase such air pollutants as PM2.5, ozone, and SOx in some locations.”
Writing for Climate Realism, “Real Threats to Biodiversity and Humanity,” Paul Driessen says this concerning the environmental impact of biofuels:
Keep-fossil-fuels-in-the-ground lobbyists need to calculate how many acres of soybeans, canola and other biofuel crops would be needed to replace today’s petrochemical feed stocks; how much water, fertilizer, labor and fuel would be needed to grow harvest and process them; and how much acreage would have to be taken from food production or converted from bee and wildlife habitat.
Biofuels are neither a practical nor desirable replacement for fossil fuels, even if they needed replacing, which they don’t. The New York Times and Grunwald are correct that they are land-hungry, polluting, and serve to raise the cost of food. Despite some of the unsubstantiated climate change claims made in the article, they at least got those facts right.
Linnea Lueken is a Research Fellow with the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy. While she was an intern with The Heartland Institute in 2018, she co-authored a Heartland Institute Policy Brief “Debunking Four Persistent Myths About Hydraulic Fracturing.”
Ethanol is a farm subsidy, first and last.
Tom, disagree. See explanatory post below just made.
Got to love this One NYT finally gets it right .lol
Partly. They still got it wrong on a couple of bits.
“energy density”
Once the anti-nuclear crowd moves on, people can learn what the phrase energy density means again. Add it to the ten mile long list of items that ought to be taught in a school room, on that list written by people who have never taught in a school room.
At present, the US has about 90 million acres in corn, of which the US uses about 30 million acres to produce enough ethanol for a 90/10 mix of gasoline and ethanol
Biden’s rabid handlers want to expand that to 60 million acres in corn to produce enough ethanol for an 80/20 mix of gasoline and ethanol, which likely would cause a host of reliability issues in colder climates
I do not know where that additional 30 million acres of crop land would come from
POLITICALLY INSPIRED, MARGINALLY EFFECTIVE, CORN-TO-ETHANOL PROGRAM
http://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/politically-inspired-marginally-effective-corn-to-ethanol-program
EXERPT
In the 2016/2017-crop year, the US had 85.8 million acres planted with corn, of which 31.4 million acres were planted to produce ethanol. The corn production was 14.440 billion bushels, of which 5.30 billion bushels were for corn to ethanol. The 169 bushels of each acre yielded 478 gallons of ethanol. Ethanol blended with gasoline was 14.80 billion gallon, about 10% of the gasohol fuel for vehicles. See table 1.
https://www.agmrc.org/renewable-energy/renewable-energy-climate-change-report/renewable-energy-climate-change-report/july-2016-report/looking-ahead-corn-usage-mandates-and-ethanol-production/
Biofuels are never cheap, nor will they be plentiful compared to fossil fuels. Crop based fuels will also never have a major impact on GHG emissions due to the energy input vs energy output of crop-based fuels. However, fuels produced from wastes including agricultural waste and MSW can reduce GHG emissions if that is a desired goal, but more importantly they consume what otherwise is left to rot in fields or landfills. So that is somewhat beneficial although also costly.
What I do agree with is creating a market for forest waste and residues such that there is an economic incentive to manage forests correctly to reduce and/or prevent massive wildfires. After decades of mismanagement, California is beginning to recognize the need to actually do something about forest fires and is considering the need for using forest waste as feedstock for fuel production. The good thing about this approach is that the fuels produced do burn cleanly and are compatible with the current fuel infrastructure. They are non-toxic and biodegradable as well. All better for the environment than food-based fuels.
But the so-called environmentalists must realize that fossil fuels are never going to be replaced as the alternatives are not available in quantity. And the replacements for ICE’s are just as bad or worse for the environment than the ICE itself.
“What I do agree with is creating a market for forest waste and residues such that there is an economic incentive to manage forests correctly to reduce and/or prevent massive wildfires.“
Exactly, but catch is in the permitting. After the beetle kill of millions of acres back in ’06
there were a good number of well designed projects to do just that but they never
got off the ground for a number of reasons. Apparently to use these dead trees for
say a solids to liquids energy via fischer-tropsch process it requires the approval of
the Wood Products Industry. And wouldn’t you just know it the WPI wouldn’t approve
that use. There was a pulp mill that closed in W. Montana during the big recession
and the governor at the time was being term limited out and he wanted to convert
this mill into a solids to liquids plant but gave up. Same thing for a couple
of cement plants that seriously looked into using biomass for their plants. I heat
my house with a woodgas boiler. It turns wood into ethlyene and hydrogen said
to be 99% efficient. The company that made it worked in Canada during that
time building several (6) large biomass plants in the 300MW size and I have
a good bit of knowledge in that area. Sweden uses biomass extensively and
Volvo has produced a portable fischer-tropsch plant that is a continuous feed
plant that turns slash into diesel at the landing, only needs a tank of LNG on site.
The possibilities are endless but the hoops are daunting.
Googled the 2018 paper, “Debunking Four Persistent Myths About Hydraulic Fracturing.”
Link in case it can be edited: https://heartland.org/wp-content/uploads/documents/PBFrackingMythsFinal.pdf
“Franking wells are generally 6,000–10,000 feet beneath the Earth’s surface.”
Franking?
Like they stuff the wells full of hot dogs?
Two very serious comments on liquid biofuels.
First, they could never replace petroleum from first principles. I did the fairly complex math (you need to know root/shoot ratios and such) in a chapter of my first ebook Gaia’s Limits. A fantasy with many commercial attempt failures already. A simpler illustrated summary is essay ‘Bugs, Roots, and Biofuels’ in ebook Blowing Smoke. I
Second, the demonization of E10 is doubly misplaced.
I have no reason to contest your assertion that E10 benefits your farm operation. The only question is whether or not this benefit would exist absent the government’s mandates to blend EtOH into motor fuels.
Interesting Rud ,
I also are an owner of a dairy farm in the Waikato, New Zealand .
We still grow maize for silage and feed large tonnages of it over the winter as we supply winter milk to Fonterra for town milk and also an export UHT factory that exports UHT milk and cream to the world .
We calve a separate herd in our autumn that is milked through the winter to mid summer and another herd that is calved in the spring that are milked till the end of Autumn ,May.
We chop green maize for silage also. But all the mature maize goes to ethanol so we can get back the distillers grain.
Rud,
You are using a benefit to your farming to root for alcohol in fuel. The discussion, however, is about cost:benefit to a larger society, most of whom do not own a large farm.
Next time you comment here, why not advertise your farm brands for more publicity and sales? Geoff S
1) Substituting one unneeded additive for another, is not a plus.
2) You have demonstrated that corn based ethanol is a good deal for you, you haven’t demonstrated that it is a good deal for anyone else.
BTW, if ethanol in fuel is such a great deal, it should be able to survive on its own without the mandates.
Gasoline has always used an octane enhancing additive to max gallons of gas from a barrel of crude. First it was tetraethyl lead. That caused lead air pollution in cities, so was force out in favor of MBTE. But that caused ground water pollution anywhere an underground stoage tank leaks, and proved hard to remediate. So the switch to E10 with the two benefits cited.
The EPA’s war on octane didn’t end with the elimination of TEL, so at some point they’ll come after EtOH. As for leaking tanks, EtOH, a polar molecule, is corrosive, which is why it is blended into gasoline when tanker trucks are loaded at the local rack. Aside from all this, you haven’t answered why there needs to be a blending mandate in the first place.
MBTE is not an octane enhancer, it’s primary usage is as a source of oxygen so that gas will burn cleaner. Ditto ethanol. With modern engines, neither is necessary.
Both MBTE and ethanol are mandated by government. Neither would have been selected without the mandate.
‘MBTE is not an octane enhancer,…’
Actually it is/was, and of the many potential mogas blending components, its octane properties are only surpassed by EtOH.
But as you correctly note, there is absolutely no need for either MTBE or EtOH as an ‘oxygenate’ in modern automobile engines and the real question remains as to whether or not farm-based EtOH would be produced to the extent it currently is without the Federal mandate.
Here’s a screenshot of mogas components by octane.
This subject takes me back to my foray into various “green” energy projects – all of which were my brainchildren, attempting to save my technology company from the downturn in its market by capitalizing on what appeared to be new opportunities ca. 1999.
In particular, I came up with a gasoline oxygenate based on some off-the-wall intuition, and it turned out to work better than anticipated. The chemical was methyl salicylate (MS), an ester produced by a number of plants including the American Wintergreen plant Gaultheria procumbens. Oil of wintergreen (methyl salicylate) can be extracted from the plant by steam extraction, and it is available from other plants by similar processes. The cheapest way to make it would probably be the Bayer process for making aspirin, using methanol instead of ethanol as the feedstock.
In any event, it took only 6% by weight of MS to meet gasoline oxygenation requirements, and tests conducted by a motor fuels research company showed that it provided a marked increase in octane. It also has no deleterious effects on automotive fuel or engine components, is “non-toxic”, and biodegradable.
We even had Toyota interested enough to send a delegation of technical people from Japan to look at what we had. There were some fundamental properties of the MS/gasoline blend, such as density and Reid vapor pressure, that we hadn’t yet fully measured, and which Toyota said they believed would not meet automotive fuel specs. I suspect they made their own measurements later, but don’t know. They declined to make an investment in “Kelly Green (TM)”, which is what we called it.
Too bad. I had run enough numbers to know that if we had gotten the last 9/1000ths of a dollar of every gallon in the US, we would have been fabulously wealthy.
So would political logic mean that someone is making a subsidy fortune from the E15 here in central Penna.? It is generally 60 cent per gallon cheaper than E10. I do find it is cost effective even with a drop in gas mileage per gallon in the summer for my commuter car.
Also, agree on the distillers grain as it is efficiently used as a protein supplemental in chop for beef cattle.
‘So would political logic mean that someone is making a subsidy fortune from the E15 here in central Penna.?‘
Quite possibly the local gasoline blender (Sheetz?). Every gallon of EtOH produced is identified by a RIN that accrues to the blender when it’s added to ‘unfinished’ gasoline at the local loading rack. The RINs are required by law to be reported to the EPA, but the so-called ‘obligated party’ is the refiner, not the local blender. So if you’re a merchant refiner without a captive downstream network, you may need to pay a blender a sizable premium to obtain the required RIN. Works well for large independent blenders, and perhaps their customers, but we’ll see how that works out in the long run as more and more refining capacity ‘transitions’ to making bio fuels.
Very nice that you’re profiting from the nation-wide taxpayer base that’s stuck with the mandated swill that would end the same day the mandate ended.
It was a gift made by Bush Jr. to mid western folks who reliably voted Republican.
Pretty sad if midwestern folks really need to be bribed not to vote for Marxists.
I grew corn for many years in New Zealand for grain .Here we call it maize.
It was dried and stored at our local maize co,operative ,with a large tonnage trucked to the New Zealand Starch Company in Auckland .
I was involved on behalf of growers negotiating the new seasons price with merchants who wanted to hold the price despite rising world prices in the 1980s.
The merchants lifted their price when we threatened to ship our maize overseas for a better price.
That shows that using corn in the US for ethanol affects the price paid around the world .
An acquaintance who grew maize for many years , talking about his life recently said that growing maize was like printing money ,which I did not really agree with but it was profitable .
Your acquaintance either undervalues their expertise or was born lucky and never realised their luck – maybe a combination of both. I can guarantee there have been a lot of maize growers who have gone bust. Maize crop failure can be mean starvation in developing countries.
This is New Zealand and I have been growing maize for over 55 years.
I have never had a crop failure but I have seen plenty ,from late frosts to summer flooding which occurred this year in January with two very large tropical cyclones hitting the North Island .
I had my own maize planter and combine harvester and we worked long hours to plant and again at harvest carting the maize to the dryer till 11pm at night then refiling our truck 12 Tonne of maize to take to the dryer in the morning .
We could not start harvesting untill late afternoon untill the leaves and stalks had dried off but we had plenty of work running over 1000 ewes and feeding hay and silage out to 350 beef cattle.Some years I supplied 8 to 10 % of the Co-ops maize .
What did you do in your spare time Graham?
Watching the corn grow.
It’s a crazy convoluted world- where false narratives and junk science rule for years in the MSM. In the mean time Tesla model Y is the best selling car so far 2023. How long before the grid wall of reality is hit? And then what happens?
People are making money on Tesla( stock) – does it turn into a tulip bulb at some point. I don’t know
Nio is China’s largest EV maker. It has recently been making considerable losses, has cut the price of its vehicles and scrapped the free battery swap out scheme it ran which provided 6 battery swaps. More than half of all EVs on the road are in China
No sh*t.
Making this comparison is the same stupidity as comparing installed capacity of wind turbines with dispatchable generation. It is naive to make such a comparison. The solar can only be used when it is being produced. It is incredibly expensive to store. The biofuel is an energy store with high durability.
For a valid comparison, it would require working out how many acres of solar panels it would take to produce a useful liquid fuel using just the solar panels for energy combining water and air. My bet it that bioethanol would come out on top. But obviously smarter to just use oil instead of the uneconomic virtuous biofuel.
This is simply an attack on farming states, i.e., Red states. He doesn’t think farming needs govt subsidies. I guess he’d rather buy food from overseas. No mention of wood burning.
He attacks stupid biofuel requirements to promote stupid wind and solar power.
Farms don’t need subsidies. If the only way for any industry to survive is via free money stolen from others, then we are better off without it.
The USA used to make the world’s computer chips in silicon valley.
That productions was shifted to Taiwan, and other places, to save money.
With the covid lockdowns, the supply chain was distrupted.
We are now contemplating war with China, and one argument is to protect our supply of computer chips from Taiwan.
Imagine if we had outsourced growing our food to Africa or South America, because it was cheaper.
We depend on India and China for our medications, too.
We import MD’s from India because it is cheaper, by far, to import a doc from there then to train an American to be a doctor.
We do all of this because the US dollar is the reserve currency, we run fantastic government debt, and we export inflation and pollution. Those days are coming to an end.
It is the need to finance the federal deficit that is keeping the dollar high.
If you think subsidizing everything is the way to make the country wealthy, you must vote Democrat.
Build new fossil fuel and nuclear generators and feed the corn and soy to people and animals.
It’s not easy imagining the stupidity required to “think” converting a carbohydrate into a hydrocarbon replacement is a good idea. My analogy is that’s like someone converting electricity into to coal.
When we burn food to fuel our cars, that is a problem. Have you seen the quality and the price of corn in the grocery stores since ethanol has been introduced?
Farmers and people in farming states vote. It’s all politics.
And it doesn’t help that the Presidential primaries kick off in Iowa, the state with the most ethanol plants. No candidate would ever survive the Iowa caucuses by telling the truth about the environment and economic damage ethanol causes.
Be sure and route the CO2 pipelines through NY and MA.
Note how the NYT came to this conclusion only after the coast was clear with removal of the Dems election primary focus away from Iowa and after EV production increased. Prior to that, it was the silent treatment unless the Clintons promoted it for votes.
Does this mean the Clintons are officially retired now?
Last year I did a 600 mile round trip not realising I’d filled up with E10. Well, I got 20% less range. Not sure how it is meant to be GREEN when you use 20% more fuel.
Forty years after conservatives explained that ethanol was worse for the environment than gasoline, diesel and jet fuel the NY Times allows an article that explains the same thing. But the author is wrong about how much fossil fuel is required to produce ethanol. There’s nothing “almost” as much about it, ethanol requires far more hydrocarbon than it yields as transportation fuel. It’s not unlike solar at high latitudes (>40 degrees). The payback never happens. Forty years from now the NYT should be expected to allow an article explaining the same thing.
Rud says what is left from the corn after ethanol production is good dairy cow feed. If this is true, would it not also be a good human food ingredient?
I don’t know what it is like but perhaps it could be used as an ingredient in breads, cereals, veggie burgers, and possibly many other processed foods. What is done with it in the areas of the world where corn going to biofuel has raised food costs significantly?
Since this website is mostly about CO2 and global warming/climate change, what is the effect of substituting ethanol for gasoline on CO2 emissions?
Burning one mole (36 g) of ethanol produces 1.235 megajoules (MJ) of energy and emits 2 moles (88 g) of CO2, for an emission/energy ratio of 71.3 g CO2/MJ.
If we assume gasoline to be iso-octane (2,2,4-trimethylpentane), burning one mole (114 g) of iso-octane produces 5.065 MJ of energy and emits 8 moles (352 g) of CO2, for an emission/energy ratio of 69.5 g CO2/MJ.
So, the effect of replacing some gasoline by ethanol on CO2 emissions is…not much.
The main problem with ethanol is that fossil fuels must be used to plant and harvest the corn, as well as convert it to ethanol. If corn was not used to make ethanol, the additional corn could be fed to people, or to livestock to produce more meat.
Quite simply, it comes down to the fact that we can burn both gasoline and ethanol, but we can’t drink gasoline and we can eat corn. It makes no sense to burn fuel in order to turn food into fuel, either from the point of view of reducing CO2 emissions or conservation of limited fossil fuel resources.