
Nobel Prize winning biochemist says all biofuels are nonsense - sasoon
http://climatesanity.wordpress.com/2012/02/25/nobel-prize-winning-biochemist-says-all-biofuels-are-nonsense/
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gojomo
Here's an even harsher assessment of plant-derived ethanols from Dr. Tad
Patzek, chairman of the Department of Petroleum & Geosystems Engineering at
The University of Texas at Austin:

 _Basically, [corn] ethanol is obtained from burning methane, coal, diesel
fuel, gasoline, corn kernels, soil and environment. We destroy perhaps as many
as 7 units of free energy in the environment and human economy to produce 1
unit of free energy as corn ethanol, and make a few clueless environmentalists
happier and a few super rich corporations richer. The story is even worse for
switchgrass ethanol._

(As quoted from <http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9619> )

~~~
raverbashing
He's talking about corn. Generalizing this to "plant-derived ethanols" is a
stretch

But yes, Corn ethanol is not good for a series of reasons. Other plant based
ethanols may not suffer from the same problems.

Ok, I read the article, typical "only oil is good" atitude.

And by the way: efficiency with respect to sunlight _doesn't matter_ because
sunlight is free. (enough) free * anything -> free (It matters in respect to
other processes)

~~~
rcthompson
Sunlight is not free. In order to collect it you must use some land, and that
incurs the opportunity cost of not doing something else with that land, such
as growing plants for food.

~~~
ricardobeat
That's not what he means. A solar energy harvester with 0.1% efficiency might
still be worth it if the costs are low, it doesn't matter that you "wasted"
the other 99.9% since it's unlimited.

~~~
mbreese
It does matter when it comes to CO2 fixation though... if you only get 0.1%
efficiency in fixing CO2 with biofuel production, but would get 1% with normal
forestation, then there is a quantifiable difference.

~~~
raverbashing
But suddenly when it's the oil industry that uses vasts swathes of forest and
arable land then it's ok and it's free
[http://www.greenpeace.org/canada/en/campaigns/Energy/tarsand...](http://www.greenpeace.org/canada/en/campaigns/Energy/tarsands/)

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uvdiv
He really, really misses the point: what matters most is economics, not
technical metrics in vacuo.

 _“… these values even do not take into account that more than 50% of the
energy stored in the biofuel had to be invested in order to obtain the biomass
(for producing fertilizers and pesticides, for ploughing the fields, for
transport) and the chemical conversion into the respective biofuel.” [...]
“The production and use of biofuels therefore is not CO2-neutral. In
particular, the energy input is very large for the production of bioethanol
from wheat or maize, and some scientists doubt that there is a net gain of
energy. Certainly the reduction of CO2 release is marginal.”_

In real world economics, biofuels are not energy; they are high-density liquid
transport fuels. The economics make it clear: e.g., gasoline costs ten times
as much as coal, per unit energy. You're paying for the chemistry, not the
joules.

It matters _very litte_ in real life, that much of the energy (cheap) is
wasted; that much of the energy comes from (cheap, external) sources. If
biofuels are viable, they can be seen as a conversion of energy to
hydrocarbons: of (comparatively) cheap electricity and methane/hydrogen to
expensive liquid fuel. Not as a primary energy source. It's the carbon that's
valuable.

Farming machinery can be electric powered. Nitrogen fertilizer can be created
from nuclear- or solar- powered hydrogen. And voilà, it is carbon-neutral.
Nuclear electricity, solar electricity, hydrogen -- these are only marginally
viable fuels (c.f. the world market for EV's; opinions may differ). Converting
them to liquid hydrocarbons is a very useful thing.

~~~
jpwagner
I'm having trouble following your point. He says the "input is very large" and
you're arguing that the input doesn't have to be large?

~~~
uvdiv
More than one thread:

* He says the energy input is very large. I say it's reasonable for it to be so, because it's converting a cheap form of energy into a valuable one

* He says it is CO2-intensive because of the large energy inputs. I say this is just a reflection of the whole energy economy being CO2-intensive; that in principle the inputs can be CO2-free, and so biofuels can be CO2-neutral. (And they _unique_ in this aspect; there is no other way to make CO2-neutral hydrocarbons, short of chemically scrubbing CO2 from the atmosphere.)

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doublerebel
Headline is misleading. The important, specific point is in the conclusion:

    
    
        ...we should not grow plants for biofuel production.
    

Using biofuels from what would otherwise be waste (decomposing waste biomass,
used fry oil) is still efficient and valuable.

Reading between the lines, if we want to run cars on solar power, we should do
it with electrics and solar cells, not photosynthesis.

~~~
nhaehnle
This sounds quite reasonable. If left to their own devices, plants don't
optimize for energy content, they optimize for spreading.

However, we humans already managed to genetically modify them (using simple
selection of seeds over the millenia) to optimize plants for nutritional
content instead.

It would be interesting to know to what extent human selection and other forms
of genetic manipulation could improve the efficiency of photosynthesis in
plants to make them viable for biofuels.

After all, large scale agriculture is still much simpler to pull off than the
kind of industrial process needed to build solar cells on a large scale.

~~~
Symmetry
I seem to recall that people were working on genetically engineered algae that
would create hydrocarbons directly.

~~~
Gravityloss
He trashes those too.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
The article doesn't quote much on algae; it just dismisses them. In fact,
there is no comparison of the actual economies involved; its just a sunlight-
efficiency argument which is interesting but far from conclusive.

Solar cells cost something to build - ignored in the article. Using all sorts
of minerals and industrial processes, very hard to trace thru our entire
economy to get an 'energy budget' and thus a payback. So its easy to call them
more efficient, if you don't actually calculate their cost.

Plants 'build' themselves - essentially nanotechnology for free. They can be
built over and over again, or the land can be repurposed for food or grazing
or parks or whatever. Solar cell farms are heavy infrastructure investments
that have to be manufactured, hauled into place, installed, maintained,
replaced.

------
jeremyjh
He is absolutely correct that biofuels are not efficient use of land. But the
market would quickly sort that out if it were not for biofuel subsidies. That
is what needs to be stopped.

~~~
baq
market can't solve the current CO2 problem - it assumes the price of emissions
is zero, when it clearly isn't. belief that it'll fix biofuels is naive at
best. carbon and other products of burning fuel need to be taxed to have a
price; musk also talks about it.

~~~
nickik
Seams to me that the market it the only way we can slow global warning down.
Its companys like Tesla that make a diffrence not some goverment that tries to
regulate existing stuff.

The have neither the insentive nor the knowlage to do so.

Electric cars, solar cells are the things that will change the world, not
goverment regulation.

~~~
baq
engine type doesn't matter much, what matters is energy storage for use in
that engine. batteries aren't even in the same order of magnitude of both
energy density (energy per liter) and specific energy (energy per kg) compared
to liquid hydrocarbon fuel and that's the problem that needs solving. tesla
currently gets away with it by placing batteries in clever ways, but it's
still inferior to plain old gas in multiple areas (recharge speed, maximum
range, mass, etc.)

what's that got to do with the market? without pricing gas correctly, electric
will always be inferior. technology can only help so much - it's a question of
fundamental physics of chemical bonds.

~~~
nickik
Electirc cars are better in some respects. Nonreusable energy will get more
expensive while reusable energy will get better.

The market will figure out if electirc cars are a workable, maybe it want
work. Maybe we should have hydrogen cars or maybe something else. Maybe we
just have to live with it, use all the oil and only then we will stop. Sure
you can add a carbon tax or something but that will at most drag things out
(or maybe make the adoption of diffrent cars faster).

Fundamentally the way we will live and how we will produce energy will be
guided by markets.

------
worldsayshi
"nonsense" feels like an understatement. It competes with our food sources and
even more so with ecological diversity. It should be one of those factors that
assure that food prices rise to the sky with fuel prices and as they both go
up, nature will fold. Feel free to criticise my ignorance of economics. I'm
probably mostly wrong.

~~~
baq
common sense didn't fail you here, you're basically describing what happened
last couple of years.

------
TomAnthony
Elon Musk, in the Q&A section of his recent talk at Oxford (download here:
<http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/videos/view/211>) also said he believes all
biofuels are useless.

His point was that putting energy into biofuels is an inefficient way to use
the suns energy, and then getting it out is also inefficient. He compared the
efficiency to solar.

~~~
btilly
Not just "an inefficient way". In the best case, biofuels are 2 orders of
magnitude less efficient than solar. That said we could theoretically produce
around our current energy needs with a perfect biofuel. (Existing biofuels are
much, much worse than this theoretical fuel.) We'd just need to convert all
land we currently use for agriculture to that purpose. (And then what would we
eat?)

If his numbers are correct - and I see no reason to doubt it - biofuels have
to be a dead end.

~~~
nickik
The thing is that you can produce energy at one place and then move it around
the world cheaply.

This does not work with solar. You can produce it but storing and disributing
is much, much harder.

------
Cowen
I don't know a single thing about biochemistry or biofuels, but in reading
this I can't help but be reminded of Arthur C. Clarke's first law of
prediction:

> When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is
> possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is
> impossible, he is very probably wrong.

~~~
craigyk
Hear Hear. Haven't heard that one before but it probably has quite some truth
to it. Sort of like the old: "Science advances one funeral at a time" - Max
Planck.

Anyways. His criticisms are all good ones, and yet I can't help but feel like
he's missing the big picture- that or he thinks we are just doomed.

In the short to medium term future (5-25years) biofuels are probably not the
answer they've been hyped to be. Yet there are still some places where they
will still work well, such as any thing that isn't in contact with the grid.
These biofuels will be competing with oil that must be drilled through
kilometers of ocean and earth, or from injecting massive amounts of steam into
the ground... talk about inefficient.

Further, biofuels do not necessarily need to use arable land or potable water.

In particular I'd like to know specifics about reports of "higher efficiency"
than should be possible. I wonder if these reports aren't based on efficiency
as calculated from creating biomass. One thing that immediately comes to mind,
is that perhaps simple circulation and dispersal of light in water can account
for increased "surface area" that makes up for the "max efficiency at 20%
sunlight" statement.

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MikeTaylor
In the end, aren't coal and oil biofuel? Just fuels that take millions of
years to make. That seems to be proof by counterexample that not <i>all</i>
biofuels are useless. But at doublerebel says, the headline should really be
"we should not grow plants for biofuel production". Which is not the same
thing at all.

~~~
mseebach
Taken to the extreme, yes. In practicality, the term is reserved for the kind
that can be made in quite a bit less than millions of years.

Compare "natural materials" and "natural ingredients". In the end, it's all
made from naturally occurring atoms, right?

------
ChuckMcM
I like how everyone comes into this debate with a different concept of what
bio-fuels "do."

If you think about supplying the worlds energy needs using bio-fuel it is a
non-starter, and that is basically what the editorial says. Converting
incident sunlight into useful energy through existing photo synthesis
processes is inefficient and does a great harm in terms of food production.

If you think of it as a way of converting sunlight into something that pre-
existing infrastructure can use (fuels) that can be justified on the expense
of swapping out the existing infrastructure.

Big picture -> move everything to electricity and gas, since those two forms
of energy are pretty readily convertible into the other forms we need.

Intermediate points -> you need a petroleum fuel cycle while you're converting
everything else.

------
mayneack
There are different types of biofuel research. He seems to ignore the whole
sector that is bioengineering the plants to solve these problems. One example
that comes to mind (and I can't find a link to on my phone) involves changing
the color of the leaf to absorb more light.

[http://biomassmagazine.com/articles/7341/cutting-edge-
bioene...](http://biomassmagazine.com/articles/7341/cutting-edge-bioenergy-
projects-earn-arpa-e-funding)

------
alokv28
Here's a direct link to Michel's article that the blog post pulls quotes from.

[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201200218/pd...](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201200218/pdf)

~~~
Gravityloss
This is a html version:
[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201200218/fu...](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201200218/full)

------
guscost
We're actually _burning_ edible plants. Isn't it obvious?

~~~
hcarvalhoalves
No. Not all ethanol is made from corn or wheat - for instance, in Brazil it's
made from the rejects of sugar cane, the other half goes for sugar.

The real problem is that you compete with food crops and water for fertile
land, or destroy native forests.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
"Competing with food crops" is a curious notion. When did we run out of space
for food crops? Not on this planet.

Corn grown in Iowa could feed 2 United States. So we make all sorts of other
things out of it, or the govt pays folks (me for instance) to NOT grow corn
and keep the price up.

At this point in history, with our current distribution system, biofuels can
make money. In the future they will become more efficient, perhaps orders of
magnitude more in ways we haven't thought of yet (oil-drop lenses on the
leaves; kelp that fills its pods directly with waxy carbohydrate films; seeds
that can be eaten OR converted to fuel etc).

The dumb thing would be to stop innovating now, because of FUD about imaginary
issues.

~~~
hcarvalhoalves
It competes with food crops for _fertile land_. That means: it pushes food
production to places with worse water, farther from consumption centers,
increasing waste and costs related to transport.

Maybe in the US the situation is not clear because you have vast plains so it
doesn't matter if you cover the entire surface with corn, but here in Brazil,
my state vanished with an entire forest just for sugar cane and soy crops.
Google "Atlantic Forest".

------
anovikov
Biofuels are of course nonsense from energy efficiency standpoint. Biogas is
produced for a different purpose: it results in storable energy, which is
theoretically supposed to balance energy produced by intermittent sources.
Overally, biofuels are not supposed to be energy-efficient or net energy
positive. If we can one day produce oil from nothing spending 2x the energy
the resulting oil will contain it will be a great achievement, even a holy
grail of all renewable energy work: storable, high density renewable energy
good for peak loads and for transport (worst case: airplanes).

~~~
sliverstorm
My pet theory is the reason they are so popular is "biofuels" has the word
"bio" in it, which excites the sorts of greenies that don't examine things too
closely.

Supporting evidence: aggressive marketing of "probiotic" supplements

------
stcredzero
Plant based biofuels are only problematic if you imagine replacing all
transportation energy needs with them. Cut that out! Develop all technologies
and let the market decide. I predict that there will be specialist niche
applications for biofuels, and that most of transportation will be electric.
For a cheap, robust means of storing lots of energy, it's really hard to
compete with a metal tank of hydrocarbon fuel, but this doesn't doom us to run
everything this way.

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JoeAltmaier
Headline: oil industry experts slam alternative energy.

Alternatives have only just begun being explored. Innovation in this area are
very likely to surprise that chemist. E.g. steam from room-temperature water
posted on HN today: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4824205>

Bioengineered plants may work any way we can imagine, not just the way an oil-
industry chemist imagines.

------
SpikeDad
Irrelevant. If if a renewable source is 10x less efficient than non-renewable
sources, the key here is NON-RENEWABLE. We've got to take the pressure off of
petroleum based fuels until such time as we come up with some alternative
system - hydrogen, high-capacity battery storage, etc.

PS. Adding Nobel Prize to someone's argument doesn't have the gravitas as
perhaps it once had. I think Linus Pauling and vitamin C diminished that.

------
readymade
Way to link to a Climate Change denial blog, HN.

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siculars
Elon Musk addresses this around 1hr 17min here
<http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/videos/view/211>

------
alberthartman
Damn you math! PV works just fine. Too bad we don't have a high density mobile
energy storage method to compare to liquid oil. When that happens, sub power
will rule all.

------
jpalomaki
Biofuels are also being produced from waste:
<http://www.st1.eu/index.php?id=2876>

------
tehwalrus
I thought we knew this already.

------
Angostura
Damn, better jettison my wood burning stove.

