The problem with biofuels from non food sources

Discussion in 'The big picture' started by IntensiveGardener, Nov 16, 2007.

  1. IntensiveGardener

    IntensiveGardener Junior Member

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    The recent move towards biofuels has been criticised by many because it turns food into fuel and often causes enviromental degradation to produce the food.
    Cuba's Fidel Castro warned of massive starvation, "tortilla riots" occured in mexico due to the rising cost of corn and the UN briefly mentioned "crimes against humanity".
    On the environmental side of things Mr Steiner of the UN's environment program warned that the way the food was grown often causes more emmisions than the biofuels would save.
    reported here:
    https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7096819.stm

    Apparently much of the food being grown for biofuels is grown on cleared amazon rainforrest or destroyed indonesian peat boggs. :shock:
    Lots of burning and destruction of unspoilt nature is involved.

    Someone recently tryed to argue the case for biofuels with me. In terms of the first problem they proclaimed: "just make the fuel from waste products rather than the edible part". Corn cobbs was given as an example. Obviously growing any kind of food provides lots of agricultural "wastes"

    To the second problem they simply replyed "grow the food sustainably". As most of us know, growing food doesn't have to be an enviromentally destructive activity.

    Unfortunately these two solutions just don't fit together. If we use the waste products of food production then we have no organic matter with which to farm sustainably.
    Any thoughts or references on this issue?
    IG
     
  2. Jim Bob

    Jim Bob Junior Member

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    If you use the "waste products" of farming for making biofuels, you still have stuff you can use to put back on the land, because after all making biofuels from organic matter isn't a magical 100% conversion, there's a lot of stuff left.

    But basically we just can't grow the volume of stuff required to match how much fuel we currently use. Optimistically, we could scrounge up about 1/2 a barrel of biofuel per person annually, compared to current world consumption of 3.2bbl; world consumption is actually 4.6bbl each, but only 2/3 of that is used for transport, the 1.4bbl that go for power generation, chemical industry, plastics, etc, are more easily replaceable.

    See my analysis of biofuels in Fuelling the world.

    What it comes down to is that we can physically only grow enough plant material to feed us about three times over - about half a tonne each annually. But converting that into fuel, you only get 1/3 the stuff's weight in fuel. So you only get about 160lt of biofuel, even if you convert the entire world's food production into biofuels. And of course you can't do that, we have to eat before we can drive, so at best you get about 80lt, which is half a barrel.

    As for biofuels from non-food plants, the problem is that each kind of plant requires a different kind of machine to digest it and turn it into biofuels for us. So what you'd get is people cutting down vaste swathes of forest to grow a single crop for fuel. And then you get soil degradation, and all those other problems we're horribly familiar with.

    Biofuels can be very useful, but they won't allow us to drive hundreds of kilometres in our SUVs every day. We'll see a great reduction in the range of our lives.
     
  3. Ojo

    Ojo Junior Member

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    Eat the food first, make fuel from waste. You'll still have organic matter to apply to crops. Use the gas from a methane digester to heat a pyrolysis unit, you get more efficient fuel and agrichar.

    https://web1.msue.msu.edu/intext/biogas%20article.htm
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuRP0fpyIh4
    from above video
    https://www.arti-india.org/content/view/65/65/

    these guys don't look to have too much problem with it. It looks like they're making money. (and doing some interesting stuff)
    https://www.dynamotive.com/
     

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