Hulabaloo: Have Biofuels Really Failed?

There has been news all over the press about how the biofuels "solution" to the 'global warming crisis' just hasn't worked out. You can find it in a number of more conservative news journals, of course, such as New Zealand's Stuff -- which is of course owned by Fox-With-A-British-Accent. But if it's also hit Wired Magazine, then you know there's something to it.

Quoth said Wired article:

Several studies have intimated it, but two blockbusters published in the lofty journal "Science" yesterday confirm that biofuels cause more emissions than fossil fuels when everything is taken into account.

Both studies take a detailed look at the effects of converting large tracts of land worldwide into cropland used to raise fuel. While it is true that biofuel crops such as sugarcane, corn, switchgrass and the like absorb greenhouse gases as they grow, they absorb far less than rain forests and even scrubland. Also, turning plants into fuel creates its own emissions, especially when transportation is figured into the equation.

The "Science" article, "Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases Through Emissions from Land Use Change," (subscription), maintains that the clearance of grassland for fuel releases 93 times the amount of greenhouse gas that would be saved the fuel made annually on that same land. Of course, not everybody agrees with the study.The Renewable Fuels Association, a coalition of ethanol producers, called the researchers' view of land-use changes "simplistic" and said the study "fails to put the issue in context."

[...]

This is of course a major issue. But the question is, how much of one is it, really? There are of course a number of angles -- a wide number of them -- that one could take to approach the problem that, apparently, biofuels produce more CO₂ than they pull out of the air. So what, then, are we to do? Is the world doomed to turn into a charred cinder thanks to the human contribution?

Obviously, such hyperbole answers itself: No. For one, no person who was serious about biofuels looked to corn ethanol or palm oil as even a viable solution to the fuel problem. Certainly, this author saw through that deception quite some time ago (at least, "quite some time ago" in political terms -- who remembers anything more than two years ago in that arena?):

To compare, the most effective gallon-per-acre biofuel crop right now is palm oil, which hovers around 680 gallons-per-acre. So this is more than triple the amount -- and it's good ol' fashioned gasoline to boot! Here comes the number crunching. In 2004, the US used approximately 318 billion gallons of oil. At 2,000 gallons per acre, that comes out to roughly 159 million acres of arable land -- and this is assuming that the cellulosic starch problem can be overcome -- for which there are no hypothetical solutions yet available. According to the CIA's "World Factbook", the US has 9,161,923 square kilometers of land, 18.01% of which are arable. That's 1,650,62 square kilometers. 1 acre = 0.00404685642 square kilometers, so the US has 407,739,281 acres of arable land. To maintain the energy usage levels of 2004 purely from biofuels derived from this process would require ~40% of all arable land in the nation.

For the record, the cellulosic ethanol problem has been pretty much licked -- or so the press reports would tell us, thanks to many different approaches, one of which piques this author's amusement simply because it calls on the same bacteria you'd find in the gut of a termite: moorella thermoacetica (depicted in abstract crystalline form below). The process is simple enough, yet of course that's only true if you're a science geek. From Biopact.com:

ZeaChem replaces yeast with a type of bacteria called Moorella thermoacetica, which can be found in a number of places in nature, including termite guts and the ruminant of cows, where it helps break down grass. Instead of making ethanol and carbon dioxide, the bacteria convert sugars into a component of vinegar called acetic acid, a process that releases no carbon dioxide.

To convert acetic acid into ethanol, ZeaChem turns to chemistry.

(The entire process is explained over at BioPact. H/T for this to Al Fin).

This development of course means that starchy or "woody" materials -- such as, oh say, wood) can be harvested for ethanol production. But there are easier, cheaper solutions than ethanol production: algal biodiesel is something that seems cannot be harped enough: Rather than a mere 2,000 gallons per acre, the current expected yields of the startups building factories or putting their factories into production now is 30,000 gallons per acre. This would reduce the needed landmass for energy production to .0036% of the available landmass (arable and non-arable combined).

Is it even necessary to worry at all? Well, current weather patterns would seem to indicate otherwise -- but don't expect to hear that from the mainstream media.