Turning Soybeans into Diesel Fuel Is Costing Billions

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/01/16/577649838/turning-soybeans-into-diesel-fuel-is-costing-us-billions

by happy-go-lucky • 9 years ago

225 138 9 years ago

npr.org

bognition• 9 years ago

Sure but how much is it saving us in the long term by being carbon neutral?

cantrip7• 9 years ago

Are they carbon neutral?

Sure the initial carbon dumped into the atmosphere to plow the fields is a short term increase, but then you're also deforesting lands to grow them, which permanently adds more carbon into the atmosphere.

s0rce2• 9 years ago

And, I assume producing and transporting vast quantities of fertilizer which is not carbon neutral.

jandrese5• 9 years ago

They're more carbon neutral than dino diesel. Of course energy is still needed to convert the soybeans into something you can burn in an engine, plus all of the cultivation and transportation costs.

The intent is that this is grown on lands that would otherwise lay fallow, so there shouldn't be a large deforestation concern.

bequanna• 9 years ago

but then you're also deforesting lands to grow them

Other than anecdotal evidence, do you have any source for this?

The cost to remove trees and put that land into production is quite high. Even then, most forested land is poor for growing crops. I would be very surprised to learn that in the US, farmers are removing trees and preparing the land to till on a large scale.

paulirwin2• 9 years ago

The biodiesel.org site, which is run by the National Biodiesel Board (a biodiesel industry trade group), references [1] a 1998 study that shows biodiesel to have a 78 percent reduction in net CO2 emissions. So not carbon neutral, but significantly less net emissions. I'd be interested in seeing the results of a more up-to-date study.

However, that's the net reduction for B100, or 100% biodiesel. The more common and engine-friendly B20 blend at 20% biodiesel / 80% petroleum diesel would be a 15.6% net reduction in CO2.

[1] http://biodiesel.org/what-is-biodiesel/biodiesel-faq's

rch2• 9 years ago

Industrial agriculture methods probably aren't carbon neutral anywhere, and it would be almost impossible if mature forests are cut down to grow soybeans.

olivermarks• 9 years ago

TLDR 'Scott Irwin, an economist at the University of Illinois calculates...the extra cost for biodiesel comes to about $1.80 per gallon right now, meaning that the biofuel law is costing Americans about $5.4 billion a year'.

'Biodiesel is very expensive, relative to petroleum diesel'

'Defenders of biodiesel insist that it's a much cleaner fuel than regular diesel, because it doesn't come from the ground, but from soybean plants that capture carbon dioxide from the air as they grow. In fact, by the EPA's calculations, replacing petroleum-based fuel with biodiesel will cut greenhouse emissions at least in half.

A growing number of environmentalists, however, say that this calculation is dead wrong. They say that if more soybeans are needed to make fuel in addition to food, it inevitably means that people somewhere on Earth will have to plow up grasslands or cut down forests in order to grow that additional supply — and clearing such land releases huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.'

jandrese5• 9 years ago

As long as the subsidy is US only I think they can avoid having too much forest land plowed over to make room for Soybeans.

tamcap• 9 years ago

The effects are connected. Converting more soybeans into fuel means it costs more to buy soy for food - higher incentive to make a new soy field anywhere.

wonderwonder• 9 years ago

Not really, the soybeans used don't have to be grown in the US. So forests in south america are destroyed to make room for soybeans that will be used in the US to make biodiesel.

digi_owl4• 9 years ago

Never mind that biodiesel can be made from something other than soy. Perhaps a weed plant that can grow on lands unsuitable for food crops?

ams61103• 9 years ago

Rapeseed?

soneca• 9 years ago

In the case of Brazilian Amazon forest, indeed there is a negative impact of soybean.

Up to 2006 was a direct impact causing deforestation. But a law passed making it hard to sell soybean cultivated in deforestated areas (specially to the USA).

But still there is an indirect impact, since then. Cattle raising is the main force behind direct forestation of the Amazon on brazilian area. But once the cattle extinguish the resources of the land and move to a new land to deforestate, the soybean farms occupy the empty land they left behind.

So soybean farmers have an interest in supporting cattle raisers deforestation of the Amazon.

source: http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1414...

testplzignore• 9 years ago

I think deforestation isn't going to be solved by going after a single industry/product. Humans will eventually find a reason to destroy any forest we can find. We can target soybeans and cattle, but that'll be replaced by gold prospecting, logging, housing, parking lots, nuclear weapons testing, spaceports, or anything else humans can think of to make a dollar.

For large swaths of the Earth, we need to say "You can't touch this area for any reason. Don't even step foot here. Go away."

Spooky23• 9 years ago

Mandating its existence has other strategic advantages as well -- oil price shocks can and will happen in the future, so having the infrastructure to manufacture biodiesel and ethanol in place has a benefit as well.

There's a short, medium and long term outlook here. In the short term, there's a wastage of $5.4B. In the long term, burning things for fuel is bad. In the medium term, being able to moderate swings or ensure minimum supply of fuel mitigates risk that endanger the economy as a whole.

DanWaterworth• 9 years ago

Also in the medium term, artificially increasing the price of fuel incentivizes research and development of alternatives.

nate_meurer4• 9 years ago

But this doesn't actually work yet. Oil prices are transmitted through to biofuels because the biofuel supply chain depends critically on fossil fuel inputs. For example, planting, harvesting, and transport of corn and soy feedstock is currently completely reliant on fossil-fueled machinery. This may change in the future, but the current reality is no better than a 1-to-1 transformation of fossil fuel into biofuel.

swarnie_• 9 years ago

Is that $1.80 on top of the average $3.00 for regular? What i would give to buy fuel that cheap...

ams61103• 9 years ago

Don't forget that when this law was passed, diesel fuel was well over $4.00 per gallon. Recently it's been about half that.

jimrandomh• 9 years ago

The US used to have a policy of paying farmers to maintain unused production capacity - ie, to leave some of their fields fallow. This creates an emergency-response capability: if some event shrinks the country's or the world's food production capacity, then that capacity can be activated. This policy was politically problematic because of the conspicuous waste, and economically problematic because fallow land can't necessarily be converted into food production fast enough.

Mandating use of biodiesel seems like a better way of achieving the same goal: it ensures extra food-production capacity is maintained.

Plus, it reduces the amount of soybean oil being used in food. That stuff's unhealthy (very high omega-6 content), and apparently there's a huge amount of it being produced essentially as a byproduct of soy meal.

toomuchtodo4• 9 years ago

This is a poor policy decision in order to maintain ag production readiness (or, possibly, is blatant handout to the ag industry), very much the same way corn ethanol is a net negative. Crop production should never create competition between human nutritional consumption and transportation.

You also can't give away your overproduction to less well off countries, as you cripple their ag market, preventing them from bootstrapping their own economy.

It's a moot point with transportation electrifying as quickly as it is. I don't have enough knowledge to say what crops we should be planting above and beyond what meets human consumption needs, but I can say without a doubt we should not be subsidizing crop based biofuels (only algae based fuels, only to be used for air and marine transport).

LeifCarrotson2• 9 years ago

If an emergency created a huge shortage in global food supply, the policy's assumption is that the market competition for nutritional vs. transportation crops would shift (food would be more expensive and valuable to sell) so that the new nutritional needs were satisfied.

You are correct that in the current equilibrium state it is sub-optimal. Prices are settled right now where a small number of hungry poor people are out-competed by the transportation market because they can't pay more than it can.

That is bad, I completely agree. But fixing that isn't what the policy is for, the policy is for preventing starvation during World War 3.

So you have to compare the suffering of people here and now against the potential suffering expected without the policy in place multiplied by the probability that WW3 occurs.

varroa• 9 years ago

corn ethanol is a net negative

Some amount of ethanol added to gasoline serves as a fuel oxygenator, reducing emissions of soot and carbon monoxide. A discussion of whether there is a better oxygenate than corn ethanol could be interesting, but 5% or 10% ethanol is really there for emissions, not biofuel.

danjoc• 9 years ago

Plus, it reduces the amount of soybean oil being used in food.

It reduces the land being used to produce food.

http://hungerreport.org/2017/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/hung...

"In 2014, Italian and U.S. researchers, examining a global dataset of large-scale land acquisitions, published a study showing that between 300 million and 550 million people could be fed by crops grown on these acquired lands. The land in these deals was in countries with some of the world’s highest rates of hunger and malnutrition. Govern-ments in fragile states, desperate to attract foreign investment, have proved all too willing to trade land to investors at bargain rates. Agri-businesses typically claim that they will reduce hunger by applying modern technologies to increase productivity on the acquired land. In fact, many of these deals are intended to produce crops for export or to produce biofuels. Reducing hunger and poverty in the host country is not a priority when crops can instead go to paying customers."

beat4• 9 years ago

You're on the right track, but getting the wrong conclusion. Green revolution agriculture is about a move from subsistence farming to cash farming. Nobody grows soybeans at scale for subsistence; their value is as a cash crop. It's not just for biofuels. The famed Ethiopian famine of the 1980s? That was caused by the introduction of export cattle farming, fencing off "property" and breaking the traditional grazing cycle that protected the land. Public land got overgrazed, and rivers got silted. And the export cattle? They were for the European pet food market. And European financial interests were all too happy to work with Western governments to put compliant Ethiopian governments in place to do it.

digi_owl4• 9 years ago

I dunno. Back in the day farmers used a system called crop rotation to maintain the soil.

One year they planted crop A, the next they planted crop B, and the next they left it fallow.

This was before industrial fertilizes mind you, but leaving part of the land fallow is not a bad thing.

bluGill2• 9 years ago

There are millions of different soil types. The right answer is different for each. Follow is just one useful technique farmers use to build soil, it works in some cases not in others.

lostapathy3• 9 years ago

Farmers today still understand this - better than most non-farmers appreciate. Anybody still farming today is a decent business person, and that means making sure your land stays healthy so your farm has a future.

Industrial fertilizers have definitely changed the rules and allow farmers to shift the traditional cycles, but the same principles of caring for the land still apply. Crop rotation is still common, but some land is so much more productive for some uses than others that it makes sense to "weight" the rotation with fertilizers.

diesel_health• 9 years ago

Diesel exhaust is carcinogenic (causes cancer) [2012] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IARC_Group_1_carcinoge...

"IARC: DIESEL ENGINE EXHAUST CARCINOGENIC" [PDF] https://www.iarc.fr/en/media-centre/pr/2012/pdfs/pr213_E.pdf

... Soybeans are also useful for bioplastics.

jandrese5• 9 years ago

That's for dinosaur diesel. Biodiesel would have a different set of combustion byproducts. Probably still carcinogenic though, at least in the state of California. High combustion temps tend to do that.

MisterTea• 9 years ago

It's not so much what comes out chemically but what comes out physically. And happens to be particulate matter meaning partly combusted hydrocarbons in the form of soot. The soot is an inhalation hazard and has been linked to asthma and lung cancer.

vvanders• 9 years ago

Hard to tell from the PDF if that's Tier IV or traditional Diesel exhaust.

I can tell you inhaling anything from our pre-DPF '81 tractor isn't something you want to do but I'd be curious to know how much modern DPF(Diesel particulate filters) make a difference.

fenwick67• 9 years ago

Tier IV reduces NOX and particulates quite a bit... but they are still definitely there.

Johnny555• 9 years ago

From the end of the article:

In fact, China wants so much soy meal that it's boosted global supplies of soy oil, because soybeans, when they're crushed, yield both meal and oil. By satisfying China's demand for meal, soy processors inevitably end up with plenty of oil to sell, too.

So if soy meal is what's driving the Soy market, doesn't that limit the environmental cost for soy used for oil, since the oil is effectively a waste product from the soy meal production?

digi_owl4• 9 years ago

Soy oil a waste product? Hardly. It can be used for all manner of food preparations.

skj• 9 years ago

Waste product according to the driving force.

bluGill2• 9 years ago

That is misleading. IT is used for a lot of other uses. However those other uses are nowhere near taking up the supply.

curtis2• 9 years ago

Fueling ground transport with bio-fuels probably doesn't make long-term sense -- the economics for battery electric already look like they're better. Bio-fuels for jet aircraft may make long-term sense though, because aircraft are vastly more weight sensitive than ground transport. Even though jet aircraft individually consume a lot of fuel, the entire air transportation sector is only responsible for a relatively small fraction of overall petroleum usage (on the order of 5%, I think). Fueling the worlds entire transportation sector with bio-fuels just isn't practical. Fueling 5% of it with bio-fuels might well be, though -- in particular the 5% where battery-electric is just not going to be feasible. That doesn't mean the current soybean to diesel programs make sense, but instead of canceling them, maybe we should be modifying them to produce jet-compatible fuel instead.

stcredzero4• 9 years ago

I was also once an advocate of bio-fuel for mobile size/weight restricted transportation applications. For a 5% minority, it seems to make sense. Soybeans to fuel doesn't make sense, however. For awhile, the cheapest biodiesel in Houston was made from animal slaughter byproducts. You had to watch out for the winter, however, as that stuff had a rather high gelling and solidification temperature. It also has very high hysteresis, so the melting temperature of the resulting wax-like substance can be much higher than the freezing temp, as high as 60 degrees F. I know, because it temporarily bricked my car, and ruined my relationship with my Mercedes mechanic.

I don't think that stuff would be good for aviation. Maybe palm or algae derived?

curtis2• 9 years ago

I know jet aircraft have been tested with bio-fuel of some sort, but I don't know how they handle the gelling problem. I'm kind of assuming that the fuel tanks would need to be heated to make it work. On the flip side, if you wanted to use ethanol then the low temperatures wouldn't be a problem, but the big trade-off there is ethanol has a much lower energy density per unit weight.

paulmd2• 9 years ago

Biodiesel is still way more environmentally friendly than ethanol, which is also heavily subsidized. And the idea of biofuels displacing food production also generically applies to any biofuel, again including Ethanol.

This kinda reads like a corn industry hit-piece on a rival technology.

Besides, having third-world countries be dependent on US exports of (heavily subsidized) surplus food is one of the things that causes famines (shortages in the US come out of exports first), and continues the cycle of economic dependency (domestic producers cannot compete with heavily subsidized US exports). The actual fix here would be to develop foreign food production and then have the US reduce emissions to offset.

Florin_Andrei• 9 years ago

In a world where hunger is still an unsolved problem, burning food for fuel is not just unethical, it's downright stupid.

clementmiao• 9 years ago

The counter argument there is that hunger still existing is not so much a product of there not being enough food as much as the food not properly being allocated. There is easily enough food produced in the world to feed everyone as is.

Leader2light• 9 years ago

Hunger is solved, in any country that is not a shit hole.

geezerjay• 9 years ago

In a world where hunger is still an unsolved problem

At best its only a problem in specific locations and due to political problems. I don't believe its reasonable to demand that progress in renewable energy adoption should be aborted just because some nation on some random corner of the world is experiencing political problems.

empath752• 9 years ago

Hunger is a distribution problem not a food shortage problem. There’s more than enough food being produced for everyone.

sien• 9 years ago

Look at the trends:

https://ourworldindata.org/hunger-and-undernourishment

Even in sub-Saharan Africa under nourishment has gone from ~35% of the population in 1991 to ~18% today.

It's a problem that is being solved.

skybrian• 9 years ago

Crop failures can happen anywhere, so isn't supplier diversity a good thing? All other things being equal, it seems like excluding US exports from the global market would increase exposure to bad weather and make prices more volatile.

In particular, think about the case where US farmers have a good year and many other places have a bad year.

It seems like efficiency and environmental considerations would have us reduce the amount of land devoted to crops as much as possible, but guaranteeing safety of the food supply would mean increasing capacity. So there's a tradeoff here.

omegaworks• 9 years ago

This kinda reads like a corn industry hit-piece on a rival technology.

The way that this is framed really betrays either a bias or a significant gap in understanding on the part of the author. The big one is their neglect of the costs to society borne from extracting and refining diesel from fossil fuel. Instead they focused solely on the costs of the subsidy.

Look at how they mentioned the Argentine subsidy: "Argentina was doing the U.S. a favor, helping it satisfy its biodiesel demands more cheaply"

They're framing this as a net positive for America, but it betrays their perspective: they don't see disincentivization of biodiesel production by American farmers as a negative thing.

tom_mellior• 9 years ago

Biodiesel is still way more environmentally friendly than ethanol

"X is less bad than Y" doesn't mean that X is not bad. Both can be. In this case, both are.

then have the US reduce emissions to offset

Yes. One way to do that would be to stop planting huge cultures for "bio"-diesel and then fertilizing them to death.

empath752• 9 years ago

The only real fix is reducing energy usage.

beat4• 9 years ago

Or finding an alternative energy source. I'm pretty convinced that the not-distant future will be wind/solar cached in batteries.

neves• 9 years ago

In Brazil Ethanol is made from sugar cane. It is much more efficient and environment friendly than corn ethanol.

mirimir3• 9 years ago

I agree re the comparison.

However, the fundamental problem with biofuels overall is that fuel requirements are so huge. Indeed, total annual fossil fuel usage -- coal, oil and natural gas -- is an appreciable fraction of total annual biomass production through photosynthesis. Everything, all plants, everywhere. The reasons being that energy requirements are so much greater than food and feed requirements, and that photosynthesis is so inefficient compared to PV.

Human land use is a major factor in the current great extinction. Adding large-scale biofuel production would increase extinction rates. But of course, global climate change is also a major extinction driver.

PV and batteries are clearly the way to go.

thomastjeffery• 9 years ago

In the future, would you mind typing the word "photovoltaics"?

It's a bit frustrating to have to leave mid-read to define an acronym.

r00fus• 9 years ago

The whole concept of fuel-based transport should be at question here.

Hybridization would be more efficient by far.

EVs in general (energy production + transport to plug + battery efficiency losses) are more efficient than the biofuel option (growing/fertilizing/harvesting crops -> turning into fuel-> transport/storage->burning in a vehicle)

But what's being discussed? Which crop or where it's grown? Shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic.

jogjayr3• 9 years ago

Ethanol has never made much sense to me. Drill and pump petroleum, process into gasoline (for tractors), and fertilizers, grow corn, turn into ethanol., It's the equivalent of getting a crisp new $100 bill from the bank, recycling it immediately and printing a $1 bill from the "recycled" paper and calling it an environmental success.

eigenman• 9 years ago

Ethanol makes perfect electoral sense: Democrats get to pass "green" legislation which their base likes while Republicans get to give subsides to farmers, one of their main constituents.

beat4• 9 years ago

It depends on whether the ethanol is generating net positive energy. If I burn one joule of petroleum to get two joules of ethanol, it's a net success. If I burn two joules of petroleum to get one joule of ethanol, it's a net failure.

I very much doubt it would have survived as long as it has as a technology if it were a net energy loss.

eximius2• 9 years ago

If it takes one thousand gallons of gasoline to produce 10 thousand gallons of ethanol, then it could be a net win by requiring less gasoline production later or something.

But I have no clue how the numbers actually work out.

cesarb• 9 years ago

According to Wikipedia, the energy balance of ethanol in my country is 8 or more, so it would be more like getting a crisp new $100 bill and turning it into eight $100 bills.

fullstackwebdev• 9 years ago

modern tractors run on diesel (although I have two that run on gas) for the low end torque curve and slight increase in fuel-to-energy conversion efficiency. Although my person preference is gas tractors, commercial farmers all use diesel for these reasons. For me, gas tractors so much easier to rebuild a carburetor then a diesel injection pump. My diesel tractor has been down for almost a half year due to an injection pump rebuild (Case 530CK Roosamaster pump)

erikrothoff• 9 years ago

I don’t understand this argument. It assumes thay petroleum will always be needed to run tractors and other infrastructure around it, which seems unreasonable considering the vast number of alternative fuels out there?

TaylorGood• 9 years ago

Just learned from a neighbor that unwanted meat scraps is used to create diesel or biodiesel. Can't recall which; either way, he said they're not selling drums above plant costs but have to keep the machines running for environmental compliance. Specifically, Crude Oil plants with less demand are switching to this.

carapace• 9 years ago

For those of us interested in agro-ecology (Permaculture, etc.) David Blume makes a great case for small-scale alcohol fuel production integrated into your permie farm. Pretty much any sugar or carbs can be fermented to make alcohol. The byproducts can all be reused directly on the farm. The chemical elements that make up the fuel all come from air and water so your nutrients and trace minerals etc. are retained on the farm, the alcohol fuel is essentially packaged sunshine.

He's got a comprehensive book "Alcohol Can Be a Gas!" http://alcoholcanbeagas.com/

jvanderbot• 9 years ago

I personally believe that much of the requirements on bio-diesel and other crop-fed fuel sources are likely at least half motivated by courting heartland swing states.

partycoder• 9 years ago

What I understand is that ethanol can be produced from, among many things, byproducts of corn.

xster2• 9 years ago

Is it me or terms like 'dumping' is only ever used in one direction and when the US exports heavily subsidized agricultural products, it's just plain old free market trade.

acchow• 9 years ago

Some examples, please?

(tho, I bet if you read news from Brazil, it would go the other way)

beat4• 9 years ago

Sugar. The US has very highvpunitive tariffs on global sugar, and massive subsidies on American alternatives (beet sugar and high fructose corn syrup), enough that it is one of the top sticking points in trade agreements.

tbihl2• 9 years ago

I don't think it's uncommon to say that the US dumps cheap corn on the world markets, especially Mexico. Or, in so much as that's talked about at all, 'dumped' isn't uncommon terminology.

Or maybe I just have cynical friends.

xster2• 9 years ago

Ya, I don't mean in private conversations. In corporate media.

llccbb• 9 years ago

Recognizing it is a little tangential to this article, it seems to me there would be a great benefit to the USA's domestic environmental policy if the Iowa caucus wasn't so early. Food to fuel is a tragic waste of resources.

abakker• 9 years ago

I guess my take is simpler than a lot of the arguments floating around here. if the current price tag is not acceptable, what price would be? Or, are we really saying that we'd rather spend the money elsewhere?

Biodiesel has some advantages, and many disadvantages. To me, I could see this being a part of a energy mix, but it doesn't seem like it is worth the money we are spending on it today, given that we could get better renewable energy/dollar in several other ways. If anything must be spent here, it seems we need some research to figure out how to do this better.

GreenStodd• 9 years ago

There is an episode from West Wing that touches on how awful Ethanol really is, really opened my eyes.

acd• 9 years ago

Background. My family are gardeners since generations back. We are on a sourcing trip in Brazil to buy new plants where bio ethanol are made. Farmers inform us on the fields that the bio ethanol production is very resource instensive. Basically growing sugar plants which are the source used to make ethanol sucks up all the nutrients from the ground. It also uses a lot of water. Politicians back home fully sold on the “green” aspects of bio ethanol subsidies the ethanol fuel without knowing the growing damaging consequences.

Soybeans may be similar to Sugar. You have to ask if it’s really clean also the growing part not just the fuel.

A greener way is to put up electricity lines over highways. Then trucks can be driven electrically without hauling lots of resource instensive batteries. The mining of lithium in truck production scale probably is not clean. Mining is one of the largest emitters of co2 in the world.

Cop report on largest co2 emitters doing 70% of the emissions. https://b8f65cb373b1b7b15feb-c70d8ead6ced550b4d987d7c03fcdd1...

Turning Soybeans into Diesel Fuel Is Costing Billions

Related Stories