Biofuels need not cause extra increases in food costs....

Today's post: Wednesday, 2-16-2011

We need an 80% reduction in fossil fuel use by 2050 to avoid the worst global warming effects. And, practically speaking, we need to also double our electricity generation and double the useful work done per unit of electricity & other energy sources as well during that same time to have a decent economy.

At some point, the oil that we’ve been using to power much of our economy will begin to run low enough that our world economy will shrink due to lack of supply or excessive costs or both. Kuwaiti scientists recently predicted peak oil in 2014 – just 3 years from now.

And, once the demand for oil picks up again with the apparent economic recovery or supply begins to plateau or drop, the prices will again go back up. That will cause more hard times economically unless we have enough alternative sources of energy to turn to.

Today’s post:

Biofuels need not cause extra increases in food costs....

Earlier this week TIME online news had this story:

Food Prices: Crisis Deepens as Biofuels Consume More Crops

The article explains that while recently bad weather is much of the reason causing the currently higher grain prices, using corn for ethanol, may also have a price-boosting effect by cutting the amount of corn available for food use.

But using more and more of the corn for animal feed and the increases in world population and the resulting demand for food also drive up corn prices.

Since eating corn oil, refined corn meal, and high fructose corn syrup -- and meat from grain fed animals fed corn has recently begun to be increasingly found to be bad for people, using corn for ethanol might seem a better choice. In fact, once the corn is grown, this evidence suggests making it into ethanol may be a far superior choice due to the avoided medical care costs for obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.

But that ignores two more serious problems.:

Before the current corn monoculture, that same land was used to raise a variety of foods including fruit and vegetables of many kinds that WERE good for people to eat.

If we can make ethanol or other biofuels without this land, we WOULD be better off.

Secondly, by the time the corn is grown and turned into ethanol, it takes close to as much fuel to do -- or maybe even more -- than the ethanol produced.

That is NOT a wise solution to producing biofuels.

The much better news is that there are other ways to produce ethanol and other biofuels or to get similar effects that do not share these two problems.

1. If you make ethanol and other biofuels from agricultural waste or weeds grown on land not otherwise arable or from algae grown on land not useful for growing food or from feeding such algae the CO2 produced by power plants still using coal, or oil, or natural gas, you get biofuels, including ethanol, jet fuel, gasoline, biodiesel, and other carbon based chemicals now made from petroleum.

Brazil already grows quite a bit of sugar cane. The waste is used to make ethanol.

Further, the company Amyris now has biotech methods to convert this waste to ethanol more efficiently.

Solazyme now is making jet fuel for the US Navy from biofuels.

And, there are many more new experimental companies working on biofuels from a variety of sources that do not use farmland.

There are so many, due to the increasing demand expected, that it’s hard to keep track of them all.

I found one article tracking such biofuels.

Genencor has produced an enzyme process to make cellulosic alcohol. On their website,
http://www.genencor.com , I found they have a separate website, http://www.accellerase.com about that product and other biofuels. And, on that website, I found a story about what the current status is for many venture backed biofuel companies.

(See http://bit.ly/idABn7 And, if I succeeded in copying it all, see:
http://gigaom.com/cleantech/next-gen-biofuel-cheat-sheet-where-are-they-now/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+earth2tech+%28GigaOM%3A+Cleantech%29 .

If that doesn’t run, go to the previous website listed as their link works or did as of yesterday.

2. In their blog, the founder of Nanosolar once published an analysis showing that the electricity harvestable by Nanosolar’s thin film photovoltaic cells per acre of land was something like 100 times a great as growing a crop on it, turning that into biofuels, and then making electricity with them.

So, in the long run, sharply increasing the use of solar generated electricity to power transport instead of liquid fuels and biofuels is likely a better choice.

That IS beginning to happen. But the amount of vehicles now in operation that depend on liquid fuels is so great, that biofuels will remain extremely important for 30 years or more. And, for such uses as jet fuel, liquid fuels will still likely be needed.

The good news is that there are superior ways to produce the needed biofuels that do NOT need agricultural land -- or land that is currently forest that removes CO2 from the air at no charge to us.

We need to do far more to put those in place and to speed up the development and large scale use of transport powered by electricity made from renewable sources.