I think there is an important conceptual difference between thinking of ethanol as “a battery” instead of “a fuel.” Of course petroleum and coal are also just energy-storage systems, but we don’t make the choice to create them; they’re already there. (Not that I’m advocating fossil fuels as the solution to anything.)

If people think of ethanol as “a way to store solar energy in the form of corn” rather than as “a source of energy,” the costs will make more sense. Many non-scientists aren’t trained to think of it this way, so it’s worth emphasizing the point.

The real questions, undoubtedly, come down to cleanliness and efficiency etc, as I said in the post. But on those measures, biofuels do badly.

No no! We will then escape into the past and destroy Japan! We need to get cracking on that Paradox Machine!

I have pondered the way of Cosmic Wind-Turbine Energy?
..if http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_turbine could work on a ship sailing the oceans (wind-turbine propelling ships instead of diesel or sails)..then it seems a natural progression would be to have a facility orbiting a country, storing energy, and transporting it down to Earth, via entanglement maybe?..or space-shuttle cargo hold sized rechargable batteries?..plugged directly into the Cosmic wind!

@George Musser:

Suppose you have to burn two liters of ethanol to produce one liter of ethanol, and suppose, for the sake of argument, that a liter of oil and a liter of ethanol are equivalent. Then there’s no way you can run on pure ethanol: If you start with a million liters of oil, you can produce only half a million liters of ethanol. But you can’t just burn that ethanol, you need some to produce more ethanol. If you keep all of it to make more ethanol, you only get a quarter million liters of ethanol; if you sell some of it to SUV drivers, you make even less ethanol in the second generation. The third generation’s problems are even worse. It’s like using one battery to charge another: it works, but you lose some. If you then use the second battery to charge the first, you’re behind where you started. This is what agrofuel opponents are claiming occurs.

Then, too, there are the problems of agriculture: it can be extremely hard on land, requiring large amounts of fertilizer and destroying wild land cover. Jared Diamond’s book “Collapse” argues persuasively that deforestation is a more serious environmental concern than global warming (and he thinks global warming is pretty serious). It is responsible for much of the mass extinction we are producing. An increasing amount of agriculture can be very destructive.

That said, I have long wondered whether there isn’t some kind of plant that can be grown on salt water in desert areas and burned for fuel. Carbon-neutral, in principle, and using only land we have already made barren. Unfortunately things like the sulfur in salt water pose serious difficulties to this plan.

Ethanol catches hell from the right wing because it is supported by government mandates and it catches hell from the left wing because it is industrial. And the extreme greenies publish the most amazing crap that gets repeated by the media because it is of human interest in the sense of “Man Bites Dog.”

Our plant in Moses Lake uses barley. Barley is grown without irrigation water on dry land that would not otherwise have a crop on it. We’re not starving the poor and we’re not using more energy to create ethanol than we’re burning.

The concept that agriculture, which is only a tiny fraction of the US economy, is driving prices higher is ridiculous. A bushel of corn still costs under $7. That’s 14 cents per pound. It’s not contributing much to food prices. Food (and everything else) is up 15% in price because energy is up 100% and transportation is about 25% of US GDP. It’s $112 oil that is running prices up and ethanol helps reduce that.

Brazil has almost eliminated its use of oil as transportation fuel by using ethanol. They make it from sugar cane because that is the most efficient way currently to do it. The US is a colder climate and we can only get about 2/3 as much ethanol per acre as Brazil but we are still the world’s most efficient corn producer and our corn is nearly as efficient as sugar cane. The difference is largely in the fact that the waste product of a sugar ethanol plant is burned for energy while the waste product of a corn ethanol plant is fed to cattle (as a partial replacement for the feed corn).

Economically, one bushel of $6.00 corn will make 2.9 gallons of $2.50 ethanol and 1/3 bushel of “distiller’s grains”. The distiller’s grains replace corn, so really what you end up with is $4.00 worth of corn making $7.25 worth of ethanol. That’s right, even with the subsidy ethanol is much cheaper than gasoline. And if it took more gasoline than $7.25 to grow and transport a bushel of corn, then how the heck do they sell corn so cheap? The guy who wrote the scientific papers claiming otherwise is a nitwit who is well known for his other bizarre left wing political beliefs.

For the real story on ethanol, read “Energy Victory” by Zubrin.

Energy sort of DOES grow on trees.

I’ve got a whole pile of pollarded Ash that burns quite nicely in the Multi-Fuel burner and just grows back again in a few years. But I’m not suggesting that this could heat everyone’s home.

One point though, regarding growing any form of cereal crop: –
The growth in agricultural production over the past 50 years has been dependent on nitrate fertilisers.
Current world production is over 100 million tons per year.
Almost all of it comes from the production of Ammonia using the Haber process, almost entirely fed from natural gas and coal.

So in the long term, it might make sense to concentrate on nitrogen fixing plants as a source for both bio-fuel and animal feedstocks, rather than Maize.
Lupins anyone?

There is a lot of lazy language in this entry that detracts from the conversation.

biofuels (such as ethanol) and hydrogen are not actually sources of energy — given the vagaries of thermodynamics, it costs more energy to create them than we can get by actually using them, as there will inevitably be some waste heat and entropy produced.

Actually, anything with mass is a source of energy, since e=mc^2

More to the point, biofuels are a storage media for solar energy. The “cost of production” is the amount of energy necessary to prepare biofuel to release its energy, analgous to the initiation energy needed for many chemical reactions. Nobody who has ever lit a firecracker knows that the initiation energy releases much more energy than initially required.

This of course is not necessarily the case with biofuels. Corn for example has a very high water content – to prepare the corn for use in an industrial furnace a lot of water needs to be evaporated, which is an expensive process. Much of the frustration with the biofuels issue is the way industrial corn producers have hijacked the topic away from fuels that require much less energy to prepare, leveraging political power in pursuit of another market for their product.

Almost all of the useful energy we have here on Earth comes ultimately from nuclear reactions of one form or another — either directly, from nuclear power plants, or indirectly from fusion in the Sun.

A nuclear power plant here on earth presents a number of challenges, including significant questions of how to handle nuclear waste. The sun, despite being highly radioactive, happens to be several million miles away, and its threats are fairly well known and primarily in the ultraviolet and infrared bands (at least on the earth’s surface).

A more accurate comparison might be of biofuels to petroleum products. Both are plant-based storage of solar radiation. Petroleum has the advantage of several million years of geothermal heat and pressure increasing the concentration of energy per volume. If we had several million years to work with, we could grow crops of almost anything and come out with petroleum at the other end, too.

People seem to be gradually catching on to the fact that biofuels are an especially wasteful and dirty energy storage system. Paul Krugman devoted a column the other day to how ethanol is a boon to Archer Daniels Midland, but terrible for the world’s food supply. (We told you the Farm Bill was a travesty.) And Time has published a cover story on the “Clean-Energy Scam.”

This conflates the frustration of the hijacking of the biofuels movement by the corn industry with the extremely early state of biofuel technology. How clean were the coal and oil industries when they were only a decade old? The denial-motivated hand of the oil industry can be seen behind such major-media concern-trolling by Time and other large media.

Propelled by mounting anxieties over soaring oil costs and climate change, biofuels have become the vanguard of the green-tech revolution, the trendy way for politicians and corporations to show they’re serious about finding alternative sources of energy and in the process slowing global warming. The U.S. quintupled its production of ethanol–ethyl alcohol, a fuel distilled from plant matter–in the past decade, and Washington has just mandated another fivefold increase in renewable fuels over the next decade…

Terms like quadruple and quintuple can suggest overinvestment, OR one can realize that the industry was so small to begin with that very little is required to increase investment by an order of magnitude.

But several new studies show the biofuel boom is doing exactly the opposite of what its proponents intended: it’s dramatically accelerating global warming, imperiling the planet in the name of saving it. Corn ethanol, always environmentally suspect, turns out to be environmentally disastrous. Even cellulosic ethanol made from switchgrass, which has been promoted by eco-activists and eco-investors as well as by President Bush as the fuel of the future, looks less green than oil-derived gasoline.

Studies paid for by which oil industry, one is forced to wonder, since the studies themselves are not named. And, again, how early in its life is biofuel technology?

More to the point, what should we then do? While wind is certainly a valuable alternative that needs to be explored, the nation has sufficient resources to explore more than one path at a time, and prudence suggests not investing all our R&D eggs in one basket. Even before oil runs out, the need for our petroleum-addicted nation to escape the influence of its foreign suppliers is amply evident. It is critical that we find alternate energy sources, and this will involve research to improve technologies by making them cleaner and more efficient.

we can build big million-square-kilometer solar power collectors in space. Not in my lifetime, I would bet.

We don’t have until 2050 or 2075 or whenever you were planning on perishing in order to find alternative fuels, hence the need to explore and research.

Eventually the Sun will run out, of course.

I’m going to risk being un-PC here, and say that this is a problem that I’m willing to leave to my offspring..

Sean
Nuclear fusion deserves a mention here. At a talk last year, Chris Llewellyn-Smith, director of UKAEA, made convincing arguments for commercial fusion plants in 30 years, producing no isotopes with half lives greater than 10 years (see Fission Impossible).

At the end he was asked an interesting question. If the next US president has a JFK moment and sets us the goal of making a viable fusion plant in ten years, could it be done?

But there are other Suns. In the even longer run, once all of the stars have run out and we are all virtual processes running on a computer, perhaps we can tap into the Hawking radiation from the supermassive black hole at the galactic center. Once that is gone and the universe has settled into empty de Sitter space, we’ll be in thermal equilibrium. At that point there’s probably little hope,

If any small part of us, or our technological descendants, ever survive to this point, they’ll have long since figured out a way to to exit this universe and/or create their own new one. And out of hundreds of millions of galaxies and billions of years, it is utter hubris to assume that we are the first and only forms to even contemplate the question, and that other forms wouldn’t have, say, a few billion years lead on us…

George depends on the kindness of strangers.

Sean,

I agree with the assessment medium term nuclear, long term solar. However one other “bio”-fuel is intriguing and that is algae. Not in competition with food supply and very high yields per acre. I would also consider this transitional, like nuclear until solar is there.

The other issue with solar to electricity is storage. Batteries are heavy and inefficient. Thats why I am thinking algae based bio-fuel, either biodiesel or xxx-onol (not necessarily ethanol) for transportation.

That’s my two cents.

Regarding nuclear waste folks. Go google around and find the total volume of all nuclear waste. I’m not saying it is not a problem but the answer will surprise you.

e.

Nuclear is fine for near short term, but will require a certain amount of government involvment to bypass all the redtape. As it stands eco organizations can successfully stall a nuclear power plant for 10 years or so in legal battles and permit battles. Only a broad bipartisan mandate can push that through to sensible timeframes

The other issue is its still damn expensive in terms of capital costs so really does require some strong backing.

But by and large the energy problem is not really a western issue. We will cope with it just fine in our lifetime. The major problem is for developing countries with exploding populations and high GDP growth. They will invariably have their growth severely stunted as a result of power shortages and this conflict could very well lead to wars in the future.

Solar will never be anything but a good mechanism to shave some money off ones bills. At least in so far as earth based solar. The numbers are easy to compute, and even with 100% efficiency it will never be able to account for the worlds energy needs.

For instance atm, assuming perfect photovoltaic efficiency, it would take something like 4 or 5 US states worth of land to power the worlds needs. Keep in mind, thats land that you cannot have tree’s or any other carbon sinks. Now, extrapolate the numbers to 50 years (energy demand is on an exponential) and you see the problem. Fundamentally energy space scales as an area here, vs nuclear/gas/coal scaling as volume.

Space based solar with beaming is a bit pie in the sky, but at least you can make the numbers work hypothetically.

ethanol is a boon to Archer Daniels Midland, but terrible for the world’s food supply.

Ironic, since ADM’s slogan used to be “Supermarket to the World”.

Where I can find some good “state of the fusion” report?

MedallionOfFerret writes:

George depends on the kindness of strangers.

Don’t we all? I look forward to your own kindness in explaining precisely where my reasoning goes off the tracks.

George

#27 What happened to Wind and Tidal Power?

Both of them can be situated offshore and have very little impact on the local marine ecology. Denmark produces 18% of its electricity from Wind Turbines and Spain is expected to reach 15% soon. Germany has a similar absolute level of wind energy production.

The Seagen tidal stream energy generator is currently undergoing trials in Stangford Lough and has the potential to supply up to 10% of the UK’s energy within a decade. There must be many other sites around the world where such technology could be employed

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/mar/31/tidal.power

There’s plenty of desert land for solar power plants to expand into and with some forms of solar photovoltaic plants it’s possible for animals to graze underneath the panels.

The other point is that we’re tremendously wasteful in how we use energy. Better heat storage could significantly improve this and reduce the need for big baseload coal and nuclear plant – something that should be kept to a minimum given the unsolved issues of carbon capture and storage and dealing with nuclear waste.

this can’t be serious

beaming down sunlight with millions of acres of orbital mirrors.

and then bullshitting about some co_2 causing global warming.

why then not building some exawatt nuclear power plants and equipping our planet with nice radiators like toe ones in todays computers?

Tidal energy ultimately comes from the moon-forming impact, and is a result of the gravitational collapse of the solar nebula. So that and the non-radiogenic fraction of geothermal energy (25-75%) are gravitational, not nuclear.

toymaker said:

The other point is that we’re tremendously wasteful in how we use energy. Better heat storage could significantly improve this and reduce the need for big baseload coal and nuclear plant – something that should be kept to a minimum given the unsolved issues of carbon capture and storage and dealing with nuclear waste.

and

Z said:

How much do you really need to stay alive and be happy?

If you think about it, the answer is “not very much, really.”

We live in cities designed by the automobile, and the automobile was the offspring of the discovery of underground oil. If you compare our city building accomplishments to the accomplishments of colonizing insects such as bees and ants, the bees and ants are ahead of us.

These are the most important comments made on the topic so far.

If ethanol is the new gold rush, then pack your handheld electric fan and sunscreen, we’re all going straight to hell. Literally. Starving from a lack of land to grow food that we’re already short of as its nutritional value plummets, while warring for resources to compensate our endless thirst to waste until each last one of us burns alive in our own atmosphere. Or until we dig a hole and hide for a thousand years or so. Either way, we’re still in some kind of hell.

Who knew Jesus had it (kind of) right? Just replace the Father by “peace and harmony” and Jesus with “CARING ABOUT SOMEONE ELSE OTHER THAN YOUR DAMN SELF,” and you have “No one comes to peace and harmony except through CARING ABOUT SOMEONE ELSE OTHER THAN YOUR DAMN SELF. Which, by the way, is essentially what Jesus talked about his whopping 3 years of ministry, which, in my opinion, he lacked the proper foresight in realizing humans weren’t ready for all of what he said, and could have cleverly kept his mouth shut when necessary to do more good in the world than 3 measly years of teaching.

Which leads me to this hilarious response to Nehemiah by jeff:

Jesus is coming back, and Time will Stop when He’s finished.

Well, I sincerely hope this time he can manage to do something a bit more useful than getting himself tortured to death, or starting even more crazy religious sects and wars.

So true. The guy tried to talk some sense and we crucified him for it. The crazy sects sprung out of holes in the ground partly because what he said was incomplete, and because no one really understands what he said. Again, humans are completely unprepared to follow that type of teaching, and still aren’t ready. Shows how open humans are to change, eh? Or how willing they are to accept constructive criticism.

If any creature were on the outside looking in at us, they would weep at how we ravage such a perfectly gorgeous planet. Hell, I’d want to exterminate humans too, but the ironic thing is, we’ll end up doing it ourselves (but not entirely, just enough to maintain Earth’s equilibrium). We obviously don’t think about changing ourselves, but only changing everything else more to adapt to everything that we changed already. Instead of realizing, holy shit, WE DID THIS! Somehow, in the absolute insanity of it all, we still putz along doing the same thing, minding our own little orb of the present, mindless to anticipate what is inevitable. The only way we can fix the present energy/warming/nuclear threat conundrum is by fixing our personal lifestyles. No one wants that though, too hard.

Perhaps that’s why humanity’s civilizations continue, over and over again, to collapse and die, managing always to crawl back out of their shameful hole when everything else is dead and all the radiation dissolves. Then again, who cares if it’s shameful? The only ones here to judge us are us, and apparently we don’t care that much. I wonder how many times we’ve done this on a global scale. They say the Earth regenerates its oceanic crust every 150 million years. If you extrapolate this to continental crust, even triple the time, and assume geologists, paleontologists, and archaeologists don’t quite get everything that’s going on (having hardly a mile of crust to ponder for the past couple hundred years for all of their educated guesses about history and past geology), we could have started over at least a couple times (also assuming evolutionary theory’s time scales aren’t accurate either, which they aren’t).

Not bad eh? Screw it all up and your species hides in a hole for a few thousand years (just like paleontologists say the first rodent mammals did when whatever catastrophe hit the dinosaurs) then like a Groundhog (another rodent) poke your head out after all’s regenerated, and screw it up again.

The bit at the end of Sean’s post about the (absurdly science fictitious) transformation of humans to computer processes, which I’ll assume was to be funny and sarcastic, was also hilarious. Humans wish they were so cool to do something like that. In fact, they wish they were so cool that they could fix this mess. Almost seems like they can’t, or won’t, or don’t choose to. Thank the cosmos for evolution. Perhaps there’s something else on this planet that can peacefully live here in humanity’s stead, while still being able to traverse the cosmos and find others that were as cool as they who could live sustainably on such a great planet.

I think that’s enough. I apologize for any offense made about Jesus. Hey, I really like the guy and I respect him, but he didn’t do as much as he could’ve even though what he did was definitely on the right track. In this way, he can’t be as divine as most say he is. I don’t apologize for any offense made about humanity.

Flame on.

Wayne

#10 Carl Brannen: Barley is a food crop. Guinness is a food group all its own. (“,)
Seriously, though: if the big point was biofuels whatever the cost… Why has the USA a tariff on Brazilian ethanol?

Lab Lemming:
Tidal energy ultimately comes from the moon-forming impact, and is a result of the gravitational collapse of the solar nebula.

Interesting. I’m not sure that that can be said to be the ultimate source of the energy. Gravitational collapse essentially converts the potential energy of masses at a distance from each other into kinetic energy — angular momentum. But where did that potential energy come from? Again, the Big Bang?

I agree with many of the above commentators that this critique of bio-fuels goes too far. Yes, corn ethanol is problematic, but the even Bush has recognized that there are probably better sources of ethanol. Also, bio-diesel lacks many of the problems ethanol does. Nobody things that these things alone will guide us to our new petroleum free future, but they do help. With many bio-diesel source plants, it may be possilble to squeeze the oil out of them for the bio-diesel and then ferment the left over plant matter for ethanol. Or process it into fertilizer. There are many ways to make the process more efficient. Algae are another good possibility – some contain droplets of oil in ever cell which could be used for bio-diesel.

Finally, nuclear power is still a very good option. Even uranium cycle fission is much cleaner and safer than people think; however, the leftover waste will need to be dealt with somehow. Thorium cycle fission remains an untapped possibility. It’s harder to do (it requires stimulus by an external source of protons), but has no possibility of meltdown and leaves no long-lived radioactive wastes.

Related: Farmers back away from growing corn…

A physicist looking back through the replies on this thread, and on the original post, you will see that there are very few numbers or references. That’s because there is almost no informed comment on this subject. If you make a post on Clifford algebra few people will comment because they know they are ignorant about the subject but for some reason, everyone’s an expert on ethanol and biofuels.

“#10 Carl Brannen: Barley is a food crop. Guinness is a food group all its own. (“,)”

Yes, however, about 67% of the land formerly used to grow barley in Washington State is now fallow. This is due to lack of demand for barley. So any demand for barley by our plant will not impact food production; the land is currently not used for food. This is annoying to the greenies because they want all land back in its natural state so our little wild animal friends can have full and complete lives. They really don’t give a damn about the poor but just use their plight as an arguing point to help achieve their political goals (which are anti industrial).

“Seriously, though: if the big point was biofuels whatever the cost… Why has the USA a tariff on Brazilian ethanol?”

There never was a “big point”. The US tariff on Brazilian ethanol is there for the same reason that the US has a tariff on so many other agricultural imports. It’s to keep agricultural prices in the US high. It has nothing to do with “biofuels whatever the cost”, nor have I ever suggested that “biofuels whatever the cost” is a good idea, LOL. With a sufficiently low valued US dollar, the need for farm support will decrease and these sorts of things may go away. (And I hope they do, they are a waste of money.)

Even if there were no subsidies or tariffs on ethanol, heck, even if there were no ethanol production whatsoever anywhere in the world, the US would still have steeply rising agricultural (note difference between this and “food”) prices because the US dollar is dropping drastically (largely due to falling interest rates which are due to banking problems which are due to excessive mortgages, but also partly due to the fact that billions of dollars have been exported from this country over the last 20 years and now need to be imported back).

US corn exports last year were 2.25 billion bushels, 0.13 billion more than in the 2006-2007 export year, according to the USDA forecast. It’s impossible to explain an increase in corn exports while simultaneously blaming high corn prices on US ethanol policy. If corn prices are so damned high in the US because of its use in ethanol, then how come the US isn’t importing corn to feed those greedy ethanol producers? No, the US is a corn exporter and exports are increasing.

The crashing dollar makes everything the US can send abroad more attractive to foreign buyers who bid the price up. Of the things the US exports, corn is a great export crop, a commodity and easy to ship. What’s more, there were crop failures in the major southern hemisphere grain producers, Australia and Argentina. So the worldwide price of corn goes up, and with the falling dollar, the US price of corn goes way up. Blaming high food prices on ethanol is silly.

And when they talk about “30% of US corn” crop going to ethanol, remember that the distiller’s grain byproducts will replace 1/3 of that so it’s really only a net 20% reduction in corn. Furthermore, that is corn that was not used for human consumption, it was being fed to animals.

The effect of high feed prices on meat prices is much more direct than the effect of high grain prices on vegetarian food prices like bread. The reason for this is that grain is cheap, meat is expensive. So the real effect on human diet of ethanol production is, if anything, to reduce the amount of meat consumed by making the price of meat rise relative to the price of things made directly from grains. It’s probably good for our health.

And as far as starvation, the poorest parts of the world are the agricultural regions that people abandon in order to get jobs in the city. Rising agricultural prices will make rural regions wealthier and that is where the bulk of humanity lives. Look at the revolution in living standards in rural China as an example.

Some observations and questions from an increasingly ancient non-scientist:

I have trouble understanding how the energy problem can be rationally discussed in isolation without careful consideration of the economic and social ramifications of various alternatives. While I recognize how difficult such considerations are, if there is such a discussion I have not seen it and would be pleased to have a reference.

My sense is that fossil fuels (natural gas, petroleum and coal in order) currently remain the most efficient way to use stored solar energy and at this point, the most efficient way to produce any energy. Is this an accurate assumption?

Another sense is that in the short to intermediate term increased efficiency in energy use can have the largest and surest favorable impact on energy sufficiency. Further, I suspect that much of the technology to pursue this path already exists. Is this reasonable?

Can increased efficiency in combination with attention to better control of the adverse effects of carbon based energy buy enough time to explore future alternatives in at least a semi- rational manner so that proposed saviors like bio- fuels can be thoroughly vetted before creating a bandwagon?

Thanks for the site and participants. I always enjoy following these discussions while marveling at the opportunity to do so.

Seems to me energy is a problem that is here to stay, no matter what technology is used – until humanity figures how to balance its population’s impact to be less than the planet can naturally regenerate.
Simply put, we just have too damned many people on this island we call Earth.

In the US you could build geothermal powerplants. They can actually be build anywhere, but in the US you have a lot of volcanoes so it is more easy to make geothermal energy them competitive with coal fired powerplants.

The magma underneath Yellowstone alone can power more than 1000 gigawatt powerplants for one century.

Pieter, below Yellowstone there is magma chamber containing about 15,000 cubic km of magma. It is located about 6 km below the surface. So, there is a finite amount of energy. If it is depleted you have to wait until new magma (perhaps produced by a mantle plume ) enters into the magma chamber.

If it is not energy does not grow on trees, then what is it that does? Why do you eat an apple if you get no energy from it?

The truth is, trees throughtou the world produce energy at 1000x faster pace than the menkind is able to consume from all fosil sources. But the environmentalists insist that it should be wasted by rotting rather than harvested by logging and farming.

And the trees could produce the energy at a faster rate, if they had more food in the air than the current 1/2500 CO2 contents currently available. But the enviromnmentalist will not alow you to double the CO2 levels.

Of course, you could keep the trees starving for CO2 food and rotting in waste as the environmentalists wish, and use the energy in the cleanest and leanest, original nuclear form, but only try to build a new nucelear plant and the environmentalists will shoot you.

In the retrospect, the environmentalists are the worst enemies of the mankind and all of its environment.

I heard in a lecture that if all of the good farmland was purely devoted to growing biofuels it would not be enough to sustain current demand. the fact is current technology is not where it needs to be, but that will change with time, as new research is conducted. I think the problem is politicians who think they know a little science overstep their bounds and make outlandish claims about the necessity of biofuels towards global warming (climate change is far more dynamic then simple warming and cooling) just so they can win a few more votes.

…Continuatiuon from where the web SW cut it:

…the highest detriment to increase in rate of fotosynthesis (of both food and biofulels) is the ridiculously small partial pressure of CO2 plant food (

Petrus – the issue with O2 depletion isn’t a matter of its amount relative to CO2 anyway. It has to do with how much O2 is produced by plant life versus the consumption by animals and plants (and include ambiguous microorganisms as well), not the direct conversion of O2 into CO2 (although that is part of it.) For example, if photosynthesizing plant matter is reduced to 1/2 of the previous amount, then the outflow of O2 to the atmosphere is about 1/2 what it was before, but if there are still lots of animals around (biologically, that includes people) then consumption outweighs production. Then, if we burn lots of fuel that reduces O2 even more.

Just consider equilibrium: d(O2)net/dt = d(O2)in/dt + d(o2)out/dt [where the loss, “out”, is negative to begin with, so we can add it to the first term at right.] Note that CO2 concentration or changes don’t appear directly in the equation. Look, we could be burning boron compounds and not even making more CO2, but their burning would still pull O2 from the atmosphere (and it would have nothing to do with how much boron oxides are in the atmosphere to begin with!)

Also, I don’t think plants are “starving” on the current 420 or so ppm, after all they were used to about 285 ppm for millennia and did well enough!

As for conservatives, well I can respect notions of e.g. adhering strictly to the constitution. But first, beliefs like that are no logical reason to doubt or be careless about atmospheric science. Second, what about the recent tendency of “conservative” administrations to wage war without declaration from Congress, overrule state laws by federal decree, extra-legal detentions, all that pork and indulgence of special tax breaks against the whole “simple and flat” tax idea, etc?

MedallionOfFerret writes #55:

George–Instead of relying on the kindness of strangers perhaps you might reconsider your own reasoning. Anne’s scenario (#8) requires burning of two liters of fuel (oil or ethanol) to produce one liter of ethanol. You (#13) wish to provide “Another way to interpret” this, through producing three liters of ethanol from corn or sugar cane, then selling one of them, and using the other two to produce more ethanol. (Hints: how many liters of fuel will you need to purchase to produce those three liters? After you sell one, how many more liters can be produced from the two liters left? What is the comparison of the initial fuel input to the fuel produced?)

I appreciate your comments, though am somewhat perplexed by their tone (and indeed by the tone of other comments on this blog — I worry that Cosmic Variance is starting to go the way of other blogs in shedding more heat than light). Perhaps, before you comment, you might find it instructive to look at the entire thread of thought. My original comment came from the observation that news stories are not very clear when they say that “it costs more energy to create them [biofuels] than we can get by actually using them”. What exactly does this mean? *Every* fuel requires more energy to create than it releases during use. At face value, all this statement really says is that the efficiency of a fuel is less than 100 percent — which is a trivial statement. If the energy comes from sun, it doesn’t really matter what the efficiency is (at least not for energetics — obviously it makes a difference for land use).

Anne then suggests that this statement might be interpreted, in effect, as “it costs more energy IN THE FORM OF LIQUID FUEL to create biofuels than we can get by actually using them”. That is a stronger statement than the original, as I was trying to get across in the post that prompted your remark about the kindness of strangers.

All I am really asking for is a detailed accounting of the energetics of biofuel production.

George

Correction:

The d(O2)net/dt = d(O2)in/dt + d(o2)out/dt only works with 1% of the air, and 5% of atmospheric O2.

BTW, I hoped that you would read my post, understand it, recalculate it and found some real mistake. Please do the effort, I do not mind to be proven wrong as long as your corrections are valid. But at this point, I see no essential flaw in my numbers.

I found that a small correction for mass of Carbon is needed in:
You would need to increase CO2 concentration 35.94 times to 13656ppm to reduce O2 down to 18%, an equivalent to ascending to 800m (2700?) elevation.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2008/04/14/ccview114.xml

Return to math. When given a problem one finds that multiple approaches yield the same solution. Good for checking. Hurray! Return to Physics. Good old Feynman pondered that wave hitting all pathways really returns one and only end result.

Lesson to be learned. The solution is about bundling if the general result is to be the same. Something that the market speculators are so experienced in.

All solutions have + and – outcomes. The best that you can do is offset the – of some with the + of others. Rather than concentrating and promoting one less + and more – solution, or one more + and less – solution. Imbalance is a bad game. Equilibrium rocks.

When will politicians and scientists wake up to understand that.

Neil,

I undeiably refuted argument, that suggests that:
“Increase in CO2 can substantialy reduce O2″ .
Essentially because the whole biosphere does not have enought C to match O2 into CO2 molecules (Can match only 5% of O2, calculated with abgout +/-10% accuracy)

Moreover, I refuted argument:
” 1/2 photosynthesizing plant matter reduction (by byrning) reduces outflow of O2 to the atmosphere by 1/2 ”
Because this naive calculation overlooked 2x to 3x increase in photosynthesis under highger CO2 concentrations.

You did not point to any mistakes or omisisons in my detailed calculations posted above and that suggests that you do not have sufficient insight to debate them. Sadly, over again I find this the problem with environmentalists, that while undereducated, they presume to possess higher knowledge. But even during introdudtion to the scientirfic tenets of the theory they soon betray their inability to follow, let alone counterargument.

Why you might have lost this argument, I appreciate your honesty and willingness to study the subject. The proof seems to be self evident but I would be every glad to present clarification. Please point constructivelly to the specific staements that are unclear to you so that I may elaborate on them.