Korean Job Discussion Forums

[kiwiduncan]

I just sent a long-winded reply to someone's PM about biofuels and thought I should cut and paste my reply here, as hopefully it might provide some food for thought (certainly better than food for cars).

The problem with many biofuels is that they can actually do more harm than good. I understand that in the case of American corn-based ethanol it takes more energy to produce the fuel than the fuel actually provides. Also, critics have noted that if the United States' entire farmland was 100% dedicated to growing corn purely for fueling cars it would still only provide 25% of what American motorists consume.

Proponents of corn-based ethanol have claimed that they will dramatically increase the amount of fuel produced in the future by using the entire corn plant rather than the corn cobs alone. This means however that every season the whole plants - leaves, stalks, cobs - will be dragged off to the refineries. They'll need more trucks and fuel to haul the corn plants and the completely denuded soil will lose nutrients and vegetable matter, which will then require more polluting and energy-intensive fertilizers. Finally, the lack of soil cover in the form of rotting corn plants will dry out the soil and increase wind erosion. Combine this with increasingly erratic rainfall and the Americans will have another dust bowl.

Biodiesels are problematic too. If you can use old cooking oils that's great, but it won't take many bio-diesel cars in a town to consume the town's entire waste cooking oil supply. A very large proportion of the rainforest clearance in Indonesia these days comes from clearing land for palm oil plantations. And it's turning out that palm oil is also becoming increasingly expensive, as the palm oil processing plants are heavily dependent on conventional energy supplies in order to operate.

In the European Union most vegetable oils come from rape seed (those massive fields of yellow seen all over the UK). The EU had been making some progress in the last couple of decades with encouraging farmers to set aside marginal land as wildlife meadows and so on. Now, with the biofuel boom and increasing food prices, this policy is being abandoned in favour of a return to intensive farming that leaves very little space for wildlife.

Basically, most biofuel options seem to be a bunch of dead ends.

The simplest answer to so many of our energy, traffic congestion, pollution, obesity, and quality of life problems comes on two wheels. When I lived in Wellington, New Zealand I had beaten up little Nissan Sunny that was used so rarely that I would always worry if it would start. 90% of my travel was done by bicycle and the car was only used for long trips. From my hilly suburb I would zoom downhill in the morning to the city centre and change into my suit at work. Riding home was a bit more of a drag back up the hills but was bloody good exercise.

By all means have a car if you need it for the weekly shop or longer trips, but keep this in mind - the best way to halve your car's pollution is use it half as often.

Discuss.

[mistermasan]

i am from the land of E85. even i think corn is a passing fancy. they'll get to where they can make fuel from anything.

[Kimchi Cowboy]

[mistermasan]

IIRC correctly some folks have it down to where they can take biomass waste and produce a gallon for less than a buck. as always the question will be over distribution as fuel can now be made from anything. grass clippings will no longer be trashed, they are fuel.

[TheChickenLover]

I just bought a car that gets double the mileage of my old one.

Hence my carbon footprint from my car has been reduced by half while driving the same distance



Chicken

[mistermasan]

exceptin' what it took to mfg the new car vs. using the perfectly good old car that was already rolling. and the old behemoth is still out there racking up the miles. but if it makes you feel good, that's all that really matters.

[4 months left]

[dutchy pink]

In the US a majority of the corn grown is used as animal feed. It is possible to make ethanol from the corn and retain the protein which can be used for the animal feed. In this case, ethanol is a useful byproduct.

Full scale production of ethanol is a bad idea.
Growing food to feed cars.

[kiwiduncan]

[BS.Dos.]

I recently completed an assignment for my MSc in Environmental Decision Making where we analysed the overall energy, materials and emissions efficiency of a cassava-based fuel ethanol LCA case study in China (Sorry, but you have to pay for download). The report concluded that cassava fuel ethanol (in this instance) was found to have a conversion efficiency of 1.28 and therefore had a positive effect on the environment.

It should also be noted that despite revealing significant energy and material inefficiencies and also considerable emissions, the conversion was still proven to produce favourable environmental results. With improvements to both upstream processes and to the actual cassava-ethanol conversion, more gains were anticipated.

The organic matter you mention which is taken from the soil is not irretrievably lost as you suggest as considerable organic sludge is generated during both the conversion process and the fermentation stage, which in itself, produces valuable quantities of combustible methane. The waste sludge can be used again as fertilizer.

[Justin Hale]

Good article on alternative energy, from the Independent.

Cars are responsible for 20% of world Co2 emissions and planes 2%. The lion's share is from fossil fuels and eliminating them should be our priority.

[4 months left]

BS.Dos, I did a little research - It is one of the 10 most important food plants. So is it better to use than corn, sugar? How about compared to cellulosic?

The product is heavily subsidized by Beijing - from Sept. 2006.

I found "But worried over food security, Beijing said it would use non-grain raw materials for fuel ethanol as part of its effort to cut dependence on imported oil." But isn't is used in flour?

One Chinese co - Gofar is developing it, know anyway to play it through other companies on world stock markets?

[kiwiduncan]

[BS.Dos.]

[kiwiduncan]