As this black stuff is available to fuel cars, why are we turning precious food growing land over to fueling vehicles?

For the boffins out there, here are a couple of questions:

1) How much land is required to provide biofuel for a typical car doing 10000 miles a year?

2) How much land is required to feed one person for a year?

you need to add another…

3) How much rainforest is destroyed yearly to grow biofuel crops.
4) Does the net effect of question 3’s loss mean biofuels are more polluting than fossil fuels.

Why, because biofuels are carbon neutral i.e. they absorb the co2 when you grow them then release it when you burn them. Repeat.

Whereas the black stuff just releases. The official argument against is the fear south American countries would chop down rain forest to grow it, releasing stored carbon and destroying carbon absorbers. Instead they chop down rain forest and farm cattle which produce more green house gasses.

What also seemed to worry politicians was the prospect of countries that currently struggle to feed their population i.e. Africa and India would switch from food to biofuels production & export if it became more economically viable to do so.

Or, that in places like Europe we would switch to biofuel production and import our food from South America / New Zealand etc with the obvious carbon footprint.

Still not convinced it is not viable or Europe to grow it with the addition of some import taxes. But then we get political not rational.

One measure that was popular is that one tank of bio-fuel requires enough grain that a person could live for a year on it. So every time you fill up someone starves to death needlessly.

If course if you gave them £75 instead of filling up with petrol they’d do just fine too. So either way you’re a murderer. 🙂

biofuels = renewable
black stuff = finite

no?

Not really, no.

biofuels can only ever be marginal. It simply takes too much land to grow the crop s to make the fuel

Its generally accepted that oil (from the ground) isn’t going to last forever and accordingly supply-demand will push prices up and increase our reliance on parts of politically unstable parts of the world.

(1) It depends on the fuel (and of course the soil and environmental conditions) – but maximum yields are currently around 4700 L/ha – but some people suggest you could get 5 times that from algal production. So to fuel a modern car to travel 10000 miles, you would need roughly 0.2-0.25 Ha of land. If you use a less efficient crop it could be 4x that, but potentially this could fall with future developments.

(2) It depends on who the person is and what they eat. A full size standard UK allotment (about 0.025 Ha) is supposed to be capable of providing all the veg a family of four require. A diet including meat would require much more space (for both the animal’s welfare and growth of animal feed). This also doesn’t include wheat (so no bread) or e.g. barley/hops (so no beer). Google suggests that to feed our western diets you need about 0.5 Ha of land in active production. In other parts of the world much less could be managed; of course they also use much less fuel too.

(3) I’m sure the numbers are out there. Deforestation is an issue, for some of the most “efficient” fuel sources like palm oil. But actually most palm oil goes into food production – which contradicts the simple logic you might assume from 1 and 2.

(4) It depends how you define polluting. Potentially fast growing high yield crops are better at absorbing CO2 than old forests full of slow growing trees. If deforestation would happen anyway and it is simply a matter of the “purpose” to which the land is put then growing biofuels (low or positive “greenhouse gas” effects) might be better than giant cattle ranches producing loads of methane. Certainly measuring environmental impact on a single parameter (such as “carbon”) is stupid – but equally assuming that we in the ‘rich west’ should be able to determine what other countries do with their assets, so that they might catch up with our economic development, seems rather dumb/selfish to me.

Biofuels are potentially part of the energy solution, and there are some fuel sources emerging which are suited to growing on soils unsuitable for food production – but I think the question you have not asked is:

(5) Is an over reliance on biofuels simply moving our dependence on unstable/rogue states from one region to another?

You forgot to add in the fossil fuel requirement needed to grow biofuels. It takes 7-10 calories of fossil fuels to produce 1 calorie of ‘food’. So using grain for fuel is nothing more than an accounting trick.

I’m sure other crops make more sense but they’ll need fertiliser at the very least. And that comes from natural gas…

Why, it potentially provides a solution to oil running out. Like renewables, on it’s own it is not the answer but in combination with other options it will be.

There are better and worse sources of biofuels. Ones which compete with food consumption and require intensive farming are not so good (probably still more environmentally friendly than oil) but things like Jatropha are being looked into as they do not compete with food and grow on poorer land so don’t encourage deforistation and direct competition with food).

Current biofuel policy is deeply flawed. Esp in the US where they said ‘let’s use ethanol!’ and the price of maize tripled. Thanks to the free trade agreements that meant that Mexicans had to go without.

However biofuels as a concept still have merit. It’s possible to make ethanol out of any organic waste – wood, paper, grass clippings, you name it – and people are building and testing commercial scale plants as we speak.

There are also many fringe technologies, all of which could show massive promise. Like algae that can produce oil and grow on salt water; lichen that produces diesel; oil producing plants that can grow on salty deserts etc etc.

5th Elefant –

You forgot to add in the fossil fuel requirement needed to grow biofuels. It takes 7-10 calories of fossil fuels to produce 1 calorie of ‘food’. So using grain for fuel is nothing more than an accounting trick.

do you have a credible source for that? or are you talking about energy to produce tomatoes, cabbages etc? A proper biofuel crop grown in an efficient manner will produce at least 5x more energy than it consumes (indeed unless there was some perverse subsidy simple economics would require it).

I also heard that poly. I seem to remember that poorly produced grain ethanol could simply break even, given the energy costs of production and heating for fermentation – but it was possible even now to do much better.

However there is often perverse subsidies in this area.

http://www.renewablefuelsagency.gov.uk/sites/renewablefuelsagency.gov.uk/files/_documents/Report_of_the_Gallagher_review.pdf

Artificial Photosynthesis ?

A proper biofuel crop grown in an efficient manner will produce at least 5x more energy than it consumes (indeed unless there was some perverse subsidy simple economics would require it).

Depends what you call ‘proper’. Grain is popular in the US as a biofuel.

Lots of stuff floating around with lots of numbers. This one will do as it explicitly mentions ethanol: here…

All together the food-processing industry in the United States uses about ten calories of fossil-fuel energy for every calorie of food energy it produces.

Fuel alcohol already ranks second as a use for processed corn in the United States, just behind corn sweeteners. According to one set of calculations, we spend more calories of fossil-fuel energy making ethanol than we gain from it.

I’m sure that there are better ways of doing it (as I said) but grain is a popular bio-fuel and is nothing more than an accounting technique for manipulating subsidies and tax breaks.

Is turning corn into corn sweetners (ie junk food) actually more wasteful than using it for fuel though?

Some folk drink endless cans of HFCS glop just to put on weight that they they have to try and lose or it knackered their health, whereas some poor folk in Mexico could’ve made real food out of the corn.

Is turning corn into corn sweetners (ie junk food) actually more wasteful than using it for fuel though?

Yeah, I kind of said something similar in my first post.

Indeed you did.

I wonder if the indulgent way people feed themselves is a metaphor for the way they consume in general, or is there a causal link.. hmm…

Biofuels are getting more and more advanced and should get much better as the technologies are improved. 3rd and 4th generation biofuels have far more potential – but planting crops to replace petroleum is a farce.