BioFuels

Corn ethanol

Pluses: May reduce U.S. reliance on oil imports and enable moderate reduction in emissions of greenhouse gases compared with oil. Fosters the building of biofuels infrastructure.

Minuses: Ethanol is energy intensive to produce, and the recent boom has pushed corn prices to more than $5 a bushel (from $2 in 2006). That is increasing the cost of everything from beef to soft drinks. The biofuels craze is helping drive up grain prices worldwide as farmers devote more acres to corn and less to other crops. Over 450 pounds of corn are needed to fill a 25-gallon tank with ethanol_ enough calories to feed a person for a year.

Biodiesel

Pluses: Made from vegetable oils like soy and canola and animal fat, biodiesel provides 90% more energy than is required to produce it. Compared with petroleum-based diesel fuel, biodiesel is estimated to cut greenhouse-gas emissions 40% to 80%.

Minuses: Like corn ethanol, biodiesel's production from food crops boosts "agflation." European demand has been blamed for inducing farmers in Southeast Asia to burn and replant the rain forest with palm plantations, which has released large amounts of greenhouse gases. Production is limited at the moment_ just 250 million gallons in 2006.

Sugar-cane ethanol

Pluses: Sugar cane yields more ethanol per acre than corn, and it requires less energy to produce; hence, it is regarded as greener than corn ethanol. Sugar isn't a food staple, so making ethanol from it hasn't driven up food prices as has the production of large amounts of corn ethanol. Brazil makes nearly as much ethanol from sugar cane as the U.S. does from corn; cane provides nearly half of Brazil's transportation fuel from plants grown using about 1% of its arable land.

Minuses: Growing sugar cane requires a warm, rainy climate, which limits its potential as a global fuel source.

Cellulosic ethanol

Pluses: Made by breaking down wood chips, farm waste, and nonfood crops like grasses, cellulosic ethanol wouldn't require diverting the use of cropland. Scientists are making progress at breaking down plants' tough cellulose and lignin molecules, the key to turning nonfood biomass into fuel.

Minuses: Still costly and difficult to make, ethanol produced from nonfood plants is more energy intensive than that made from corn and sugar cane. By one estimate, putting all the grassland in the U.S. into fuel production could replace only about 10% of petroleum.

Algal biofuel

Pluses: The fastest-growing plants, algae theoretically can produce 30 times more energy per acre than other biofuel options. A particularly rich mix of byproducts can be made in algal-biofuels operations (everything from nutraceuticals to feedstocks for making plastics), potentially abetting their cost-effectiveness. This is the biofuels' dark horse.

Minuses: Unlike cellulosic ethanol, the biomass for making a lot of fuel from algae doesn't yet exist; it has to be grown from scratch. Harvesting is still expensive. Cost-effectively producing algal biofuels on a large scale may be many years away.

Source : http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2008/fortune/0804/gallery.green_biofuels.fortune/index.html

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How Green Are Biofuels? Comparison Chart

Biofuels are increasingly lumped into a single category of environmentally apocalyptic dead-end solutions. As the food vs. fuel debate rages on, it’s no wonder that the general public believes this.

But not all biofuels are created equal, as the chart above illustrates (click the image to see full size). It’s one of the best depictions I’ve seen of how each biofuel feedstock has completely different impacts on overall greenhouse gas emissions, water and pesticide use, and the energy required to produce the fuel. (Click on the chart for the full image)

Written by Clayton B. Cornell, Managing Editor

Source : http://gas2.org/2008/05/08/how-green-are-biofuels-comparison-chart-pic/

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Biofuels: 'Green gold' or problems untold?

Story Highlights
Biofuels have potential to make a positive impact on climate change
Boom in biofuel crops could increase competition between food and fuel
Opinion divided over claims that biofuels can meet growth in global energy needs
Strain on water supply and soil erosion possible down-sides to biofuel crops
By Rachel Oliver for CNN
(CNN) -- No subject appears to divide as many people in the climate change arena as biofuels. Their potential to positively impact greenhouse gas emissions is undoubtedly enormous.

But the pursuit of such non-fossil fuel energy replacements has raised concerns over the impact on the global food supply -- and the environment itself.

When people talk about biofuels they are essentially referring to ethanol or biodiesel, the former favored by the Americas (Brazil and the U.S. produce 90 percent of the world's ethanol between them); the latter preferred by Europe (accounting for 89 percent of global biodiesel production in 2005).

Biofuels can be produced from any number of plant crops; most ethanol in the world today being derived from corn, with sugar cane increasingly gaining favor (the latter providing double the yield per acre of the former).


Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/02/24/eco.biofuels/index.html

Biodiesel emanates mainly from vegetable oils or animal fats, and waste cooking oil from China's restaurants has been to thank for supplying China's growing biodiesel industry.

Cellulosic ethanol, also fast becoming the darling of the biofuel movement, is produced by breaking down plant cell walls. And as cellulose is the most common organic compound around, it can be sourced from many more places and has the added bonus of turning things that used to be regarded as waste -- corn stalks, wood chips, grasses -- into incredibly useful sources of energy.

Are biofuels carbon neutral?

Biofuels are often referred to as being carbon neutral -- that is, the carbon dioxide (CO2) that is released through burning them is roughly equal to the amount they sequester when in plant form. In that way, growing biofuel crops helps ease global warming, their proponents argue, as they act as "carbon sinks" reducing CO2 levels.

In that way, relative to petroleum, biofuels could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by "more than 100 percent", World Watch says. Switchgrass and other grasses rate the highest in this regard, with the possibility of reducing emissions by between 70 and 110 percent (relative to petroleum fuels) compared to corn and wheat only offering maximum reductions of 40 percent.

According to the U.S. Departments of Energy and Agriculture, the 1.3 billion tons of "biomass feedstock... potentially available in the U.S. for the production of biofuels" is currently enough to replace around 30 percent of the country's existing gasoline consumption.

Most existing cars can use them immediately -- in small doses anyway (most gasoline-fueled cars can take up to a 10 percent ethanol blend in their fuel without any conversions). They are generally much better for your health when burnt too, reducing tailpipe carbon monoxide emissions by up to 30 percent, and fine particulate matter emissions by 50 percent, according to the Renewable Fuels Association.

Growing pains: Food vs. fuel

Biofuels currently only represent one percent of fuel used in transportation globally, but around one percent of the world's fields -- that's around 12 million hectares -- has already been turned over for their production.

But there are already questions over whether there is enough land available for biofuels to be able to replace even 50 percent of our fossil fuel use. According to The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, a maximum of 300 million hectares worldwide could be used for biofuels, but even if the biofuel industry used up 290 million hectares of that, it would only meet one tenth of the projected energy demands for 2030.

Europe only has a limited amount of land to set aside for biofuels, and according to the Soil Association, quoting OECD figures, if the EU gave up 72 per cent of its arable land, it would only only be able to serve 10 percent of its fuel needs.

Biofuels will however offer some economic incentives for developing nations. The concern is whether the pursuit of economic growth through biofuel production in developing countries will spur further deforestation and land conversions.

According to the World Food Programme (WFP) more poor African farmers are opting to sell crops like cassava for use as alternative energy instead of food -- purely for economic reasons. Some say, at least they are decreasing their reliance on increasingly expensive oil at the same time as 25 out of the 47 poorest countries on earth import all of their oil.

However others are warning of a vicious cycle being created by a dangerous food versus fuel competition, which will lead to food shortages, driving up food prices, and encouraging even more farmers to choose to grow fuel over food crops to meet the increasing demand (exacerbated by population growth) and clearing more land in the process.

It was on the subject of land clearing that the biofuel industry was chastised this month, in what could be the biggest blow dealt to biofuels yet.

A report from the Nature Conservancy and the University of Minnesota has raised serious questions over how biofuels are grown. Converting rainforests, peatlands, savannahs or grasslands to grow fuel crops releases CO2, in some cases a staggering 420 times more CO2 than from burning fossil fuel, the report says.

And that, they say, creates a "carbon debt" (with the emissions savings of biofuels fully considered) that could take as long as 840 years to cancel out depending on what land you are converting.

The worst land to convert is tropical peatland rainforest (creating a carbon debt of 840 years) or Amazonian rainforest (320 years) with the lowest carbon debt of 17 years created by converting the wetter woodland-savannahs of Brazil's Cerrado.

Creating new problems?

The methods used to grow fuel crops continue to be held under a magnifying glass; the initial furore over this new form of energy quickly dampened by realizations that in the pursuit of climate change solutions, nothing is ever simple.

Some have even questioned the role fertilizer is playing in climate change, with George Monbiot recently pointing out in The Guardian (based on a recent claim by the Nobel Laureate, Paul Crutzen) that using fertilizer on biofuel crops will be emitting enough nitrous oxide (more than 296 times more powerful heat trapping gas than CO2) to "wipe out all the carbon savings biofuels produce."

Biofuel crops could also put an unbearable strain on the global water supply, Sweden's Stockholm Environment Institute has warned. It says replacing 50 percent of the fossil fuels to meet 2050 transport and electricity demands with biofuels would require up to 12,000 extra cubic kilometers of water a year (the total annual flow down the world's rivers is 14,000 cubic kilometers).

China and India are at particular risk of water scarcity issues, the International Water Management Institute has warned.

The "best case scenario" many believe is making biofuels from native grasses and woody biomass grown on lands unsuitable for crop growing. The U.S. Agricultural Research Service recently found, for example, that growing native switchgrass on the prairies of Nebraska and North and South Dakota resulted in cellulosic ethanol yielding 5.4 times more energy than all the energy that went into producing it.

Native plants are also viewed as "carbon negative," as they are able to store excess C02 in their roots and the surrounding soil. But there are even downsides to using some agricultural and forestry waste products, as not only are they carbon sequesters but they provide nutrients for the soil. Removing them can lead to rapid soil erosion.

What Monbiot recently wrote in The Guardian reflects what many are increasingly coming to believe: "Apart from used chip fat, there is no such thing as a sustainable biofuel."

(Sources: New Scientist; Renewable Fuels Association, Treehugger, National Resources Defense Council; Department of Energy: Biofuel News; The Guardian; World Watch: Reuters )

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Biofuel: Green savior or red herring? By Paul Sussman for CNN (CNN) -- It has been touted as the magic bullet that will help slow and possibly reverse global warming; the renewable energy source that allows us all to carry on driving our cars while at the same time protecting the environment. George Bush and Tony Blair have sung its praises; car manufacturers are falling over themselves to adapt their vehicles to its use; more and more land, especially in the developing world, is being given over to its production. An entire industry has grown up around it, one that is fast becoming as vocally and economically powerful as the oil industry it is seeking to supersede. Despite the widespread fanfare of optimism, however, a growing body of scientists, economists, environmental campaigners and development experts are expressing doubts, in many cases grave ones, about the biofuel boom, arguing that far from saving the natural environment, the headlong rush into biofuel production is actually creating far more problems than it is solving. "The governments using biofuel to tackle global warming know that it causes more harm than good," George Monbiot, one of the UK's most outspoken environmental commentators, warned in a recent article in The Guardian newspaper. "Biofuel is worse for the planet than petroleum." From oil to sugar cane Biofuel -- bio-ethanol, bio-diesel and bio-gas -- is derived from "biomass," or recently living plant matter, in particular wheat, corn, soybeans, flax, rapeseed, sugar cane and palm oil. As such it is not merely a renewable energy source but, its advocates argue, a considerably cleaner and less environmentally degrading one than fossil fuels such as oil, coal and natural gas. This is because the carbon it contains was only recently extracted from the atmosphere by the growing plants. The burning of biofuels thus results in substantially less of a net gain in atmospheric carbon dioxide than that of fossil fuels. The potential of such biofuel has long been recognized. In the mid-19th century Nicolaus Otto, the German inventor of the internal combustion engine, envisaged his creation running on ethanol, as did Henry Ford at the beginning of the 20th century with his revolutionary Model T. Rudolph Diesel, inventor of the engine that still bears his name, likewise made a great deal of the fact that, as well as petroleum, his brainchild could also run perfectly happily on peanut oil. Many countries, notably Brazil, have for decades been using such fuels to power their vehicles (often blended with traditional petroleum). It is only recently, however, that the governments of major industrialized nations such as the U.S., the UK and Germany have really started putting their weight behind biofuel development and production, spurred on both by rocketing oil prices, dwindling oil reserves and growing concerns about the impact of fossil fuels on climate change and global warming. Thus in a recent directive the European Union called for biofuels to meet 5.75 percent of European transport needs by 2010, while in the UK the government is hoping that by 2050 33 percent of total national fuel use will be met by biofuels. George Bush, meanwhile has committed the U.S. to replacing a significant proportion of its petroleum consumption with ethanol in the next decade. On his recent visit to Brazil -- a visit in which the development of bio-fuels was high on the agenda -- Bush declared: "I'm very optimistic that America can benefit from alternative energy sources. "So optimistic that I laid out an ambitious goal for our country, and that is to reduce gasoline consumption by 20 percent over 10 years. "In other words, we have a mandated fuel standard of 35 billion gallons of alternative fuels to be used by 2017." A major step, but in which direction? All of which sounds like a major step in the right direction. Except that biofuels such as ethanol cannot be looked at in isolation. While there is broad consensus that such fuels are in themselves less carbon-emitting and therefore less atmospherically damaging than fossil fuels, their growth, production, distillation and transport to point of retail do all have a substantial environmental impact. An impact that, critics argue, offsets, and in many instances actually outweighs, the environmental benefits. Much of the concern has focused on the need for land to grow bio-fuel crops. Such is the increasing demand for these crops that more and more arable soil that would normally be used to produce food staples -- particularly for the world's poorest people -- is now being turned over to bio-fuel cultivation. To put that in a human context, the Swiss-based World Conservation Union (WCU) has calculated that the grain required to produce sufficient ethanol to fill the tank of a car such as a Range Rover would be sufficient to feed one person for an entire year. On the basis that the tank is refilled every two weeks, the grain needed would be enough to feed an entire village for the same period. "Biofuels set up a competition for food between cars and people," says Monbiot. "The people would necessarily lose: those who can afford to drive are richer than those who are in danger of starvation." U.S. economist Lester R. Brown of the Washington-based Earth Policy Institute agrees. "The food and energy economies, historically separate, are now merging," he explains. "In this new economy, if the fuel value of grain exceeds its food value, the market will move it into the energy economy. "The stage is now set for direct competition for grain between the 800 million people who own automobiles, and the world's two billion poorest people. "The risk is that millions of those on the lower rungs of the global economic ladder will start falling off as higher food prices drop their consumption below the survival level." "Deforestation diesel" Nor is it just upon arable land that the bio-fuel industry is impacting. Ever-increasing swathes of virgin forest are being felled to provide cultivation space for biofuel crops. Thus a recent U.N. report predicts that 98 percent of Indonesia's natural rainforest will be degraded or lost within the next 15 years, in large part because of the planting of palm trees for the production of the biofuel palm oil. The same trees, for the same purpose, are devouring 0.7 percent of Malaysia's total rainforest annually. In Brazil, meanwhile, huge swathes of Amazon rainforest are being lost to sugarcane plantations, again for the provision of raw materials to the biofuel industry. "Some of the cane plantations are the size of European states," says Fabio Feldman, a leading Brazilian environmentalist. "These vast monocultures have replaced important eco-systems." As well as destroying such native ecosystems, deforestation also diminishes so-called "carbon sinks" -- thereby reducing the Earth's capacity to absorb and re-process atmospheric carbon dioxide -- while also adding to air pollution through the burning of land to clear it for cultivation (sugarcane fields are traditionally fired prior to harvest to remove leaves and drive away snakes). A recent study by Wetlands International in conjunction with Dutch environmental consultancy Delft Hydraulics demonstrated that in Indonesia forest-burning for palm oil cultivation releases 33 tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide for every ton of palm oil produced -- ten times the amount released by a petrol-burning engine. "Little wonder," wrote Jeffrey McNeeley, chief scientist of the WCU, in a recent article, "That many are calling biofuels 'deforestation diesel.'" Finally, once the biofuel crops have been planted, grown and harvested -- often with the direct involvement of fossil fuels in the form of fertilizers, pesticides and petrol to power farm equipment -- they then have to go through a distillation and fermentation process to actually turn them into fuel. This also produces significant amounts of atmospheric pollution, as does the supply system used to deliver the finished biofuel to its retail outlet (a system that usually involves fossil-fuel powered tankers). "If you add in all the various factors involved in actually growing and manufacturing biofuels," says Deepak Rughani of BiofuelWatch, an organization that highlights the environmental drawbacks of the global biofuel industry, "then the latest scientific research shows that biofuel use results in between two and eight times the carbon emissions you get from burning fossil fuels." It is statistics such as these that are leading to louder and louder calls for a radical rethink of the underlying philosophy of biofuel use, and for a slowing or outright moratorium on biofuel production -- at least until ways can be found of ensuring that that production does not end up increasing the environmental damage it is seeking to obviate. No-one is denying that, if managed properly, biofuels such as ethanol can offer very subsatial benefits, and have a significant role to play in the battle against global warming and climate change. At present, however, that role would not appear to be quite as green a one as has been suggested. As John Hontelez, secretary-general of the European Environmental Bureau, puts it: "Biofuels are only part of the solution. Unless we produce biofuels sustainably, we'll end up with more energy-intensive and environmentally damaging farming practices and hasten the degradation of our ecosystems."

Find this article at: http://edition.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/04/02/biofuel.debate

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