
Turning Soybeans into Diesel Fuel Is Costing Billions - happy-go-lucky
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/01/16/577649838/turning-soybeans-into-diesel-fuel-is-costing-us-billions
======
paulmd
Biodiesel is still way more environmentally friendly than ethanol, which is
also heavily subsidized. And the idea of biofuels displacing food production
also generically applies to any biofuel, again including Ethanol.

This kinda reads like a corn industry hit-piece on a rival technology.

Besides, having third-world countries be dependent on US exports of (heavily
subsidized) surplus food is one of the things that causes famines (shortages
in the US come out of exports first), and continues the cycle of economic
dependency (domestic producers cannot compete with heavily subsidized US
exports). The actual fix here would be to develop foreign food production _and
then have the US reduce emissions to offset_.

~~~
jogjayr
Ethanol has never made much sense to me. Drill and pump petroleum, process
into gasoline (for tractors), and fertilizers, grow corn, turn into ethanol.,
It's the equivalent of getting a crisp new $100 bill from the bank, recycling
it immediately and printing a $1 bill from the "recycled" paper and calling it
an environmental success.

~~~
beat
It depends on whether the ethanol is generating net positive energy. If I burn
one joule of petroleum to get two joules of ethanol, it's a net success. If I
burn two joules of petroleum to get one joule of ethanol, it's a net failure.

I very much doubt it would have survived as long as it has as a technology if
it were a net energy loss.

~~~
bsder
> I very much doubt it would have survived as long as it has as a technology
> if it were a net energy loss.

Most of the assessments I have seen generally always show that bio-ethanol is
a net loss. Only subsidies keep it afloat.

None of the bio-* will make any sense until we have a lot more renewable
electricity on the grid. At that point, producing bio-* will basically become
an energy storage solution and a way to soak up excess energy production that
you couldn't store any other way.

~~~
eximius
economically a net loss or ecologically?

I sort of assume both, but I'd like to hope for one of them.

~~~
someguydave
Both. Here's some data from the late Prof. MacKay:
[http://www.withouthotair.com/Errata.html#284](http://www.withouthotair.com/Errata.html#284)
:

" 1 acre produces 122 bushels of corn per year, which makes 122 x 2.6 US
gallons of ethanol, which at 84000 BTU per gallon would mean a power per unit
area of {0.2 W/m^2}; however, the energy inputs required to process the corn
into ethanol amount to 83,000 BTU per gallon; so 99% of the energy produced is
used up by the processing, and the net power per unit area is about {0.002
W/m^2}. The only way to get significant net power from the corn-to-ethanol
process is to ensure that all co-products are exploited; including the energy
in the co-products, the net power per unit area is about 0.05 W/m^2."

------
curtis
Fueling ground transport with bio-fuels probably doesn't make long-term sense
-- the economics for battery electric already look like they're better. Bio-
fuels for jet aircraft may make long-term sense though, because aircraft are
vastly more weight sensitive than ground transport. Even though jet aircraft
individually consume a lot of fuel, the entire air transportation sector is
only responsible for a relatively small fraction of overall petroleum usage
(on the order of 5%, I think). Fueling the worlds entire transportation sector
with bio-fuels just isn't practical. Fueling 5% of it with bio-fuels might
well be, though -- in particular the 5% where battery-electric is just not
going to be feasible. That doesn't mean the current soybean to diesel programs
make sense, but instead of canceling them, maybe we should be modifying them
to produce jet-compatible fuel instead.

~~~
stcredzero
I was also once an advocate of bio-fuel for mobile size/weight restricted
transportation applications. For a 5% minority, it seems to make sense.
Soybeans to fuel doesn't make sense, however. For awhile, the cheapest
biodiesel in Houston was made from animal slaughter byproducts. You had to
watch out for the winter, however, as that stuff had a rather high gelling and
solidification temperature. It also has very high hysteresis, so the melting
temperature of the resulting wax-like substance can be much higher than the
freezing temp, as high as 60 degrees F. I know, because it temporarily bricked
my car, and ruined my relationship with my Mercedes mechanic.

I don't think that stuff would be good for aviation. Maybe palm or algae
derived?

~~~
curtis
I know jet aircraft have been tested with bio-fuel of some sort, but I don't
know how they handle the gelling problem. I'm kind of assuming that the fuel
tanks would need to be heated to make it work. On the flip side, if you wanted
to use ethanol then the low temperatures wouldn't be a problem, but the big
trade-off there is ethanol has a much lower energy density per unit weight.

~~~
scythe
There are two ways to convert a fatty acid to a volatile fuel: you can convert
it to an ester or an alkane. Biodiesel is comprised of esters; biokerosene is
made of alkanes. Converting fats to biodiesel is a much simpler process, which
is why biodiesel is common and biokerosene has yet to take off -- currently,
biokerosene is made by hydrogenation, and hydrogen usually comes from fossil
fuels. This is described here:

[https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ulf_Neuling/publication...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ulf_Neuling/publication/269290472_Conversion_routes_for_production_of_biokerosene-
status_and_assessment/links/57ecd5b908ae92eb4d266cfc.pdf)

The most land-efficient way to produce fats from crops is by far the palm oil
fruit (
[http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_yield.html](http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_yield.html)
), but because most cropland is already used for growing food, most palm oil
plantations are on recently cleared forest, which gives palm oil an
undeservedly bad reputation (farmers in Southeast Asia would simply grow
something else on cleared forest if not for oil palms).

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Johnny555
From the end of the article:

 _In fact, China wants so much soy meal that it 's boosted global supplies of
soy oil, because soybeans, when they're crushed, yield both meal and oil. By
satisfying China's demand for meal, soy processors inevitably end up with
plenty of oil to sell, too._

So if soy meal is what's driving the Soy market, doesn't that limit the
environmental cost for soy used for oil, since the oil is effectively a waste
product from the soy meal production?

~~~
digi_owl
Soy oil a waste product? Hardly. It can be used for all manner of food
preparations.

~~~
skj
Waste product according to the driving force.

~~~
supreme_sublime
Just as Diesel used to be a "byproduct" of gasoline refinement. But of course
manufacturers want to monetize everything they possibly can and did so with
diesel.

~~~
ptaipale
Originally, gasoline was a byproduct of kerosene (lamp oil) refinement, and
simply thrown into waste (even dumped into rivers). The man best known for
getting rich by utilizing this byproduct was John D. Rockefeller.

------
jimrandomh
The US used to have a policy of paying farmers to maintain unused production
capacity - ie, to leave some of their fields fallow. This creates an
emergency-response capability: if some event shrinks the country's or the
world's food production capacity, then that capacity can be activated. This
policy was politically problematic because of the conspicuous waste, and
economically problematic because fallow land can't necessarily be converted
into food production fast enough.

Mandating use of biodiesel seems like a better way of achieving the same goal:
it ensures extra food-production capacity is maintained.

Plus, it reduces the amount of soybean oil being used in food. That stuff's
unhealthy (very high omega-6 content), and apparently there's a huge amount of
it being produced essentially as a byproduct of soy meal.

~~~
digi_owl
I dunno. Back in the day farmers used a system called crop rotation to
maintain the soil.

One year they planted crop A, the next they planted crop B, and the next they
left it fallow.

This was before industrial fertilizes mind you, but leaving part of the land
fallow is not a bad thing.

~~~
lostapathy
Farmers today still understand this - better than most non-farmers appreciate.
Anybody still farming today is a decent business person, and that means making
sure your land stays healthy so your farm has a future.

Industrial fertilizers have definitely changed the rules and allow farmers to
shift the traditional cycles, but the same principles of caring for the land
still apply. Crop rotation is still common, but some land is so much more
productive for some uses than others that it makes sense to "weight" the
rotation with fertilizers.

~~~
digi_owl
Yeah i fear that very few acknowledge, never mind appreciate, the kind of long
term outlook one develops as a farmer.

Lifestock, crops, all that happens over years, not weeks or months like in
most industries.

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xster
Is it me or terms like 'dumping' is only ever used in one direction and when
the US exports heavily subsidized agricultural products, it's just plain old
free market trade.

~~~
tbihl
I don't think it's uncommon to say that the US dumps cheap corn on the world
markets, especially Mexico. Or, in so much as that's talked about at all,
'dumped' isn't uncommon terminology.

Or maybe I just have cynical friends.

~~~
xster
Ya, I don't mean in private conversations. In corporate media.

~~~
tbihl
Oh, then I'm afraid I'm unqualified to say.

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carapace
For those of us interested in agro-ecology (Permaculture, etc.) David Blume
makes a great case for small-scale alcohol fuel production integrated into
your permie farm. Pretty much any sugar or carbs can be fermented to make
alcohol. The byproducts can all be reused directly on the farm. The chemical
elements that make up the fuel all come from air and water so your nutrients
and trace minerals etc. are retained on the farm, the alcohol fuel is
essentially packaged sunshine.

He's got a comprehensive book "Alcohol Can Be a Gas!"
[http://alcoholcanbeagas.com/](http://alcoholcanbeagas.com/)

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bognition
Sure but how much is it saving us in the long term by being carbon neutral?

~~~
cantrip
Are they carbon neutral?

Sure the initial carbon dumped into the atmosphere to plow the fields is a
short term increase, but then you're also deforesting lands to grow them,
which permanently adds more carbon into the atmosphere.

~~~
bequanna
> but then you're also deforesting lands to grow them

Other than anecdotal evidence, do you have any source for this?

The cost to remove trees and put that land into production is quite high. Even
then, most forested land is poor for growing crops. I would be very surprised
to learn that in the US, farmers are removing trees and preparing the land to
till on a large scale.

~~~
njarboe
Most of the land in the US East of the Mississippi was forested, cut down, and
turned into farmland. Some marginal lands have returned to forest like in
upstate New York and in the Appalachia Mountains, but Illinois, Indiana, Ohio
and other mid-western states are/were the heart of US agricultural production.
They are slowly beginning covered by urban and suburban development. I believe
that people thought farming was not possible if the land did not already
support trees. They were mostly right before irrigation and scientifically
bred crops.

------
acd
Background. My family are gardeners since generations back. We are on a
sourcing trip in Brazil to buy new plants where bio ethanol are made. Farmers
inform us on the fields that the bio ethanol production is very resource
instensive. Basically growing sugar plants which are the source used to make
ethanol sucks up all the nutrients from the ground. It also uses a lot of
water. Politicians back home fully sold on the “green” aspects of bio ethanol
subsidies the ethanol fuel without knowing the growing damaging consequences.

Soybeans may be similar to Sugar. You have to ask if it’s really clean also
the growing part not just the fuel.

A greener way is to put up electricity lines over highways. Then trucks can be
driven electrically without hauling lots of resource instensive batteries. The
mining of lithium in truck production scale probably is not clean. Mining is
one of the largest emitters of co2 in the world.

Cop report on largest co2 emitters doing 70% of the emissions.
[https://b8f65cb373b1b7b15feb-c70d8ead6ced550b4d987d7c03fcdd1...](https://b8f65cb373b1b7b15feb-c70d8ead6ced550b4d987d7c03fcdd1d.ssl.cf3.rackcdn.com/cms/reports/documents/000/002/327/original/Carbon-
Majors-Report-2017.pdf?1499691240)

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jvanderbot
I personally believe that much of the requirements on bio-diesel and other
crop-fed fuel sources are likely at least half motivated by courting heartland
swing states.

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llccbb
Recognizing it is a little tangential to this article, it seems to me there
would be a great benefit to the USA's domestic environmental policy if the
Iowa caucus wasn't so early. Food to fuel is a tragic waste of resources.

------
abakker
I guess my take is simpler than a lot of the arguments floating around here.
if the current price tag is not acceptable, what price would be? Or, are we
really saying that we'd rather spend the money elsewhere?

Biodiesel has some advantages, and many disadvantages. To me, I could see this
being a part of a energy mix, but it doesn't seem like it is worth the money
we are spending on it today, given that we could get better renewable
energy/dollar in several other ways. If anything must be spent here, it seems
we need some research to figure out how to do this better.

------
TaylorGood
Just learned from a neighbor that unwanted meat scraps is used to create
diesel or biodiesel. Can't recall which; either way, he said they're not
selling drums above plant costs but have to keep the machines running for
environmental compliance. Specifically, Crude Oil plants with less demand are
switching to this.

------
GreenStodd
There is an episode from West Wing that touches on how awful Ethanol really
is, really opened my eyes.

------
partycoder
What I understand is that ethanol can be produced from, among many things,
byproducts of corn.

------
olivermarks
TLDR 'Scott Irwin, an economist at the University of Illinois calculates...the
extra cost for biodiesel comes to about $1.80 per gallon right now, meaning
that the biofuel law is costing Americans about $5.4 billion a year'.

'Biodiesel is very expensive, relative to petroleum diesel'

'Defenders of biodiesel insist that it's a much cleaner fuel than regular
diesel, because it doesn't come from the ground, but from soybean plants that
capture carbon dioxide from the air as they grow. In fact, by the EPA's
calculations, replacing petroleum-based fuel with biodiesel will cut
greenhouse emissions at least in half.

A growing number of environmentalists, however, say that this calculation is
dead wrong. They say that if more soybeans are needed to make fuel in addition
to food, it inevitably means that people somewhere on Earth will have to plow
up grasslands or cut down forests in order to grow that additional supply —
and clearing such land releases huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere.'

~~~
Spooky23
Mandating its existence has other strategic advantages as well -- oil price
shocks can and will happen in the future, so having the infrastructure to
manufacture biodiesel and ethanol in place has a benefit as well.

There's a short, medium and long term outlook here. In the short term, there's
a wastage of $5.4B. In the long term, burning things for fuel is bad. In the
medium term, being able to moderate swings or ensure minimum supply of fuel
mitigates risk that endanger the economy as a whole.

~~~
nate_meurer
But this doesn't actually work yet. Oil prices are transmitted through to
biofuels because the biofuel supply chain depends critically on fossil fuel
inputs. For example, planting, harvesting, and transport of corn and soy
feedstock is currently completely reliant on fossil-fueled machinery. This may
change in the future, but the current reality is no better than a 1-to-1
transformation of fossil fuel into biofuel.

~~~
gr3yh47
>This may change in the future, but the current reality is no better than a
1-to-1 transformation of fossil fuel into biofuel.

I was with you until this. a brief thought experiement makes it seem
impossible that it would be 1 to 1, but rather that some smaller amount of
fossil fuel used would yield a much larger amount of biofuel

~~~
nate_meurer
This topic is way too complex to be experimented upon by mere thought. For
example, take a gander at this discussion on corn ethanol EROEI a few years
back. Lots of data, detailed analysis, vigorous debate, and a headline
conclusion of an EROEI of 1.07.

There's a lot of debate about this, with numbers varying due largely to
differing assessments of inputs and credits for byproducts, but I have never
seen a convincing EROEI for corn ethanol over about 2.

EDIT: I forgot to include the link! Here it is:
[http://netenergy.theoildrum.com/node/6760](http://netenergy.theoildrum.com/node/6760)

------
diesel_health
Diesel exhaust is carcinogenic (causes cancer) [2012]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IARC_Group_1_carcinoge...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IARC_Group_1_carcinogens#Mixtures)

"IARC: DIESEL ENGINE EXHAUST CARCINOGENIC" [PDF]
[https://www.iarc.fr/en/media-
centre/pr/2012/pdfs/pr213_E.pdf](https://www.iarc.fr/en/media-
centre/pr/2012/pdfs/pr213_E.pdf)

... Soybeans are also useful for bioplastics.

~~~
jandrese
That's for dinosaur diesel. Biodiesel would have a different set of combustion
byproducts. Probably still carcinogenic though, at least in the state of
California. High combustion temps tend to do that.

~~~
MisterTea
It's not so much what comes out chemically but what comes out physically. And
happens to be particulate matter meaning partly combusted hydrocarbons in the
form of soot. The soot is an inhalation hazard and has been linked to asthma
and lung cancer.

~~~
zentiggr
Do I remember correctly that fully burned pure diesel yields water and CO2?
Soot is usually partially burned fuel plus a percentage of contaminants?

~~~
jandrese
That can't be right because where would the sulfur go? Not to mention all of
the other junk in there.

~~~
zentiggr
Per wikipedia, pure diesel is moderate size hydrocarbon chains. Everything
else is impurities... so burning pure diesel in a 100% oxygen environment
would yield water and COn gases.

Of course, the rest of the world introduces different combustion products,
including sulfur as part of the fuel oil fractions not completely distilled
away.

