The Biofuel Industry – No Money, No Respect
For the moment, the price at the pump is reasonable. A spike in demand or a terrorist disruption, however, will quickly remind us that we are desperately dependent on oil as we continue to consume 140 billion gallons of gasoline per year. Even in these recessionary times of moderate demand, we are running out of easy to extract oil from dessert sands. We are turning to sources of unconventional oil, such as tar sands in Canada, to produce oil with ever increasing greenhouse gas emissions.
For a while, corn ethanol was viewed by some as a step in the right direction. Now we are like the character in a Woody Allen comedy who explains, “I used to be a heroin addict; now I’m a methadone addict.” At a time when a billion people go hungry, many as a result of disappearing water on this heating planet, fuel from food is not the answer.
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What is needed is fuel from wood and waste. Some of the world’s best minds are focused on fuel from cellulosic and waste sources, in some cases from biological sources that remove CO2 from the air and enrich depleted soil. I am writing this article from the 31st Symposium on Biotechnology for Fuels and Chemicals sponsored by NREL. 800 global bioscientists have gathered in San Francisco to share their research and showcase their progress.
Many at the conference expressed concern and discouragement. Companies that were once darlings of Wall Street have gone bankrupt. Dozens of ethanol plants have closed as oil prices dropped. Many promising second generation plants cannot get built due to lack of project financing. People with the money see the risk as too high.
There continue to be zero commercial scale (20-million gallon per year and bigger) cellulosic ethanol plants, despite past glowing press releases that declared that they would now be running.
The drop in “gasoline” prices are preditory pricing. I drive in Illinois, Missouri and Iowa, every week. Gasoline tax in Illinois is higher then Missouri and Iowa. Preditory pricing took place when I refuled my shuttle van that I drive through those states, and the price in Illinois was 20 cents less than Missouri and Iowa. Isn’t preditory pricing illegal? The illegal pricing took place to destroy the ethanol industry.
I saw nothing relating the use of algae as a source for biodiesel.
Why not?
I am glad that Gas 2.0 covers algae to biodiesel. This article and my next article cover biofuels that were to be at commercial scale of 20 million gallons per year by now. My next article will cover cellulosic plants that may get there in 2 years. I am not aware of any algal fuel plant that is coming on line at that commercial scale in the short-term.
“The grain required to fill an SUV’s 25-gallon tank with ethanol just once will feed one person for a whole year.”
You can get a bushel of corn for $4. That’s right, 56 pounds of corn for $4. I could eat 20 percent of my body weight each day for $4.
Why don’t I? Because it’s feed corn!!!!! Cripes people. Your Twinkie is marketing, packaging transport and a big ad budget. It’s not ethanol that’s driving up prices. It’s greed.
Congressional Budget Office said ethanol caused food prices last year to go up by 0.5 percent. That’s a penny for every $2 you spent. Oil caused a substantially greater increase.
Let’s get real about food vs. fuel. Kraft just reported a 10 percent profit increase in the last quarter. Didn’t they say they had to raise prices to maintain the status quo? Drop prices now!
The corn ethanol lobby will fight cellulosic:
http://i-r-squared.blogspot.com/2009/05/congress-kills-biofuel-project.html
Algae biodiesel is not close:
http://i-r-squared.blogspot.com/2009/05/greenfuel-bites-dust.html
The food issue does not have much to do with obese Americans. It has to do with the hundreds of millions of malnourished whose lives depend on the price of that bushel of corn.
The biofuels make 2 orders of magnitude less than what pv can make per acre. Thus all biofuel programs should be abandoned and electric cars mandated.
Orng Crush said on May 12th, 2009 at 10:18 pm
“The grain required to fill an SUV’s 25-gallon tank with ethanol just once will feed one person for a whole year.”
Absolutely true sir, but who is going to nature, collect, convert and supply the labour in order of getting the end products into the Gas Tank, the math doesn’t take much working out, I go on to say,
Civilisation is three meals away or 3 miles away, if there was no oil left and you used the land to grow fuel to run your car, you are going to die off rather quickly , its as simple as that.
Food is our life blood, and one that controls every living creature on the planet, it gives us the ability to fight wars for the oil and to reproduce without it our numbers will decrease, without the oil our food will decrease, and so on.
On the Algae fuel front, this is never going to come of anything and should be stopped right now, if we are to get 140 billion barrels a day which is our world daily supply, can you imagine an oil slick that big, and not forgetting that the amount of raw material would need to be many times larger in order of fermentation losses, it will never work and will use what oil we have left trying to make it so, its like peeing in the pacific and then expecting to see a rise in sea levels, do your math please.
Further to my last post.
What we are trying to do by adopting the bio methods whatever they may be, is simply converting the energy that the sun gives us every day into an alternative, if we needed to grow the raw materials then we would have to wait until the fuel types mature, the fossile fuels which we are using today is already converted and ready for immediate ues.
The growing time needed will not buy us enough time in which to keep everything running as of today, ask the farmer how long it was going to be before we can all drive our cars again and you will have one of your answers, but there’s more.
If we waste the better part of our natural resorces trying to get a smaller percentage of our energy needs back, which is just like burning one fuel source for another like the hybrid vehicle does an answer is already on the horizon, gone !
Once our ability to lubricate the engine has gone, the system will grind to a half within 48 hours, high tollerance engineering cannot be lubed by vedge based lubricants, they cannot withstand the high tempratures involved, ask some engineers and you will have another of your answers, and there’s more.
Less cam most definately be more.
There are some warning signs and answers here
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/Archives2008/HeinbergFiftyMillion.html