Nobel Prize winning biochemist says all biofuels are nonsense

http://climatesanity.wordpress.com/2012/02/25/nobel-prize-winning-biochemist-says-all-biofuels-are-nonsense/

by sasoon • 14 years ago

181 109 14 years ago

climatesanity.wordpress.com

"nonsense" feels like an understatement. It competes with our food sources and even more so with ecological diversity. It should be one of those factors that assure that food prices rise to the sky with fuel prices and as they both go up, nature will fold. Feel free to criticise my ignorance of economics. I'm probably mostly wrong.

baq3• 14 years ago

common sense didn't fail you here, you're basically describing what happened last couple of years.

Cowen• 14 years ago

I don't know a single thing about biochemistry or biofuels, but in reading this I can't help but be reminded of Arthur C. Clarke's first law of prediction:

> When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

craigyk• 14 years ago

Hear Hear. Haven't heard that one before but it probably has quite some truth to it. Sort of like the old: "Science advances one funeral at a time" - Max Planck.

Anyways. His criticisms are all good ones, and yet I can't help but feel like he's missing the big picture- that or he thinks we are just doomed.

In the short to medium term future (5-25years) biofuels are probably not the answer they've been hyped to be. Yet there are still some places where they will still work well, such as any thing that isn't in contact with the grid. These biofuels will be competing with oil that must be drilled through kilometers of ocean and earth, or from injecting massive amounts of steam into the ground... talk about inefficient.

Further, biofuels do not necessarily need to use arable land or potable water.

In particular I'd like to know specifics about reports of "higher efficiency" than should be possible. I wonder if these reports aren't based on efficiency as calculated from creating biomass. One thing that immediately comes to mind, is that perhaps simple circulation and dispersal of light in water can account for increased "surface area" that makes up for the "max efficiency at 20% sunlight" statement.

mdemare• 14 years ago

But this distinguished but elderly scientist makes neither of those claims; he states that growing plants for biofuels is a Bad Idea.

guscost• 14 years ago

We're actually burning edible plants. Isn't it obvious?

takluyver3• 14 years ago

It's been obvious for some time that using food crops as fuel (first generation biofuels) is a terrible idea. Well, obvious to everyone except the governments subsidising them.

What people are still interested in is 2nd gen - converting inedible biomass (mainly cellulose) into liquid fuel - and 3rd gen - growing algae, which have all sorts of cool properties. In theory, you can engineer the algae to produce a usable fuel directly. In practice, it's still proving tricky.

hcarvalhoalves2• 14 years ago

No. Not all ethanol is made from corn or wheat - for instance, in Brazil it's made from the rejects of sugar cane, the other half goes for sugar.

The real problem is that you compete with food crops and water for fertile land, or destroy native forests.

JoeAltmaier3• 14 years ago

"Competing with food crops" is a curious notion. When did we run out of space for food crops? Not on this planet.

Corn grown in Iowa could feed 2 United States. So we make all sorts of other things out of it, or the govt pays folks (me for instance) to NOT grow corn and keep the price up.

At this point in history, with our current distribution system, biofuels can make money. In the future they will become more efficient, perhaps orders of magnitude more in ways we haven't thought of yet (oil-drop lenses on the leaves; kelp that fills its pods directly with waxy carbohydrate films; seeds that can be eaten OR converted to fuel etc).

The dumb thing would be to stop innovating now, because of FUD about imaginary issues.

uvdiv4• 14 years ago

Oh that's easy to solve: simply insert a gene that makes biofuel corn toxic to humans, rendering them non-edible and solving the fictitious moral dilemma.

SilasX• 14 years ago

I think you were joking, but the sad part is, yes, that is what they do (minus the genetics) in order to avoid import restrictions (that apply to food but not "denatured", inedible corn/biofuel).

And it's long been practice to make alcoholic substances toxic if they're not intended for human consumption so that they avoid regulations and taxes that apply to alcoholic beverages.

pyre• 14 years ago

Depends on the biofuel. I remember watching something a few years ago where Brazil (I think it was Brazil) was processing sugar cane waste into bio-fuel. Granted, sugar cane waste is a much better bio-fuel than corn ethanol is (I think on the order 8 times better).

Edit: Should have read @hcarvalhoalves's comment. ^^;;

morsch• 14 years ago

How is its edibility relevant? Being edible means it's in a certain configuration that the human "engine" can process. I don't think it's obvious that this configuration is inherently inefficient for non-biological engines, even if it is the case.

e12e• 14 years ago

Well, there is the definition of modern argiculture, which goes something like:

"Modern agriculture is the process of converting hydrocarbons to carbohydrates."

In other words, the way we feed the large human population, is by leveraging a diminishing supply of fossil fuels to grow food. Replacing fossil fuels with food in that equation doesn't really work; we need to think of something else.

Not because making biofuel is impossible, but because one of the main uses for fuel would be to make food -- and making food and making biofuel is in direct competition for resources.

alokv28• 14 years ago

Here's a direct link to Michel's article that the blog post pulls quotes from.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201200218/pd...

Gravityloss2• 14 years ago

This is a html version: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201200218/fu...

Angostura• 14 years ago

Damn, better jettison my wood burning stove.

doublerebel3• 14 years ago

Headline is misleading. The important, specific point is in the conclusion:

    ...we should not grow plants for biofuel production.

Using biofuels from what would otherwise be waste (decomposing waste biomass, used fry oil) is still efficient and valuable.

Reading between the lines, if we want to run cars on solar power, we should do it with electrics and solar cells, not photosynthesis.

nhaehnle2• 14 years ago

This sounds quite reasonable. If left to their own devices, plants don't optimize for energy content, they optimize for spreading.

However, we humans already managed to genetically modify them (using simple selection of seeds over the millenia) to optimize plants for nutritional content instead.

It would be interesting to know to what extent human selection and other forms of genetic manipulation could improve the efficiency of photosynthesis in plants to make them viable for biofuels.

After all, large scale agriculture is still much simpler to pull off than the kind of industrial process needed to build solar cells on a large scale.

doublerebel3• 14 years ago

The kind of large-scale agriculture most often used today relies on a huge amount of hydrocarbons. As I mentioned above, the need for hydrocarbons would still be compounding -- the more biofuels grown, the more biofuels required to grow them -- unlike capturing and transporting electricity on the already-existing infrastructure.

I would love to see large-scale sustainable agriculture that doesn't require such a staggering amount of resources. There are many smart people working on this problem. Unfortunately I don't see those advances outpacing the advances being made in electricity storage and transport.

Symmetry• 14 years ago

I seem to recall that people were working on genetically engineered algae that would create hydrocarbons directly.

raverbashing7• 14 years ago

Best efficiency in conversion solar -> energy: Solar thermal.

And doesn't require expensive equipment for that.

My money is on that.

fleitz• 14 years ago

That's the real key, black paint is really cheap and really good at converting most of the spectrum to heat, combined with the fact that mirrors are orders of magnitude cheaper than solar panels and you've got a winning combination.

It's also really cheap to store energy as heat and we've got two centuries of knowledge around turning heat into mechanical energy.

It's also really easy to apply heat and pressure to most organic material and directly convert long chain hydrocarbons to short chain hydrocarbons.

Also if you can generate steam you can just inject it into the ground and recover the oil in bitumen, your friendly neighbours to the north have like a trillion barrels of it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization

MikeTaylor• 14 years ago

In the end, aren't coal and oil biofuel? Just fuels that take millions of years to make. That seems to be proof by counterexample that not <i>all</i> biofuels are useless. But at doublerebel says, the headline should really be "we should not grow plants for biofuel production". Which is not the same thing at all.

ams61102• 14 years ago

Ultimately, our energy is almost all solar (nuclear fission being the big exception, geothermal being another).

mseebach• 14 years ago

Taken to the extreme, yes. In practicality, the term is reserved for the kind that can be made in quite a bit less than millions of years.

Compare "natural materials" and "natural ingredients". In the end, it's all made from naturally occurring atoms, right?

gojomo3• 14 years ago

Here's an even harsher assessment of plant-derived ethanols from Dr. Tad Patzek, chairman of the Department of Petroleum & Geosystems Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin:

Basically, [corn] ethanol is obtained from burning methane, coal, diesel fuel, gasoline, corn kernels, soil and environment. We destroy perhaps as many as 7 units of free energy in the environment and human economy to produce 1 unit of free energy as corn ethanol, and make a few clueless environmentalists happier and a few super rich corporations richer. The story is even worse for switchgrass ethanol.

(As quoted from http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9619 )

uvdiv4• 14 years ago

We destroy perhaps as many as 7 units of free energy in the environment and human economy to produce 1 unit of free energy as corn ethanol

And yet they still make a profit, and it is still highly rational to do so. Because it turns out 1 Joule of liquid hydrocarbons is more valuable than 7 Joules of methane or coal or sunshine.

gojomo3• 14 years ago

But would they make a profit without government subsidies and set-asides for corn-derived fuels? That's what is at issue.

alsocasey• 14 years ago

A comment below mentions subsidies - that's certainly part of the answer. In addition, for mobile applications, not all energy sources are equal. Transportability (stability, energy density, etc.) also contribute to liquid hydrocarbon Joules being more valuable than methane, coal or sunshine.

raverbashing7• 14 years ago

He's talking about corn. Generalizing this to "plant-derived ethanols" is a stretch

But yes, Corn ethanol is not good for a series of reasons. Other plant based ethanols may not suffer from the same problems.

Ok, I read the article, typical "only oil is good" atitude.

And by the way: efficiency with respect to sunlight doesn't matter because sunlight is free. (enough) free * anything -> free (It matters in respect to other processes)

gojomo3• 14 years ago

He also mentions switchgrass as a problematic source. What other plant sources of ethanol should be considered that would offer a better tradeoff?

btilly4• 14 years ago

Sunlight is free. But efficiency with respect to sunlight translates to efficiency with respect to land use. And land use is emphatically not free.

According to Elon Musk, even if you assume perfectly ideal biofuel production through photosynthesis (which no existing plant is), the amount of land that you'd need to devote to biofuel production to meet current energy needs is similar to what is currently devoted to human agriculture.

rcthompson• 14 years ago

Sunlight is not free. In order to collect it you must use some land, and that incurs the opportunity cost of not doing something else with that land, such as growing plants for food.

johnrgrace5• 14 years ago

Almost everything on TheOildrum.com is not a mainstream view, some of the minority views are right many are not.

An ethanol plant has more outputs than ethanol. Distillers Grain is a major output stream, which is a useful lifestock feed.

The paper, which I have read, counts as energy inputs all the energy required to make ALL of the inputs and takes every step possible to make the largest energy input amount possible.

Ethanol isn't the most efficent process, but the tech is being pushed ahead and the end output is a liquid high energy density fuel which is more useful that some of the energy input into the system.

And yes, I am energy economist iaee.org

btilly4• 14 years ago

As an energy economist would you mind commenting on Elon Musk's assertion that the best case with a perfect plant for making biofuel, the efficiency per unit of land used is still 2 orders of magnitude less than capturing energy with solar cells?

He also claimed that for most nuclear power plants, if you covered them and their exclusion zones with solar cells, you'd generate more energy than the plant itself generates.

(Both assertions seem pretty strong. Both were made during the interview at Oxford that was put online yesterday.)

jeremyjh3• 14 years ago

He is absolutely correct that biofuels are not efficient use of land. But the market would quickly sort that out if it were not for biofuel subsidies. That is what needs to be stopped.

takluyver3• 14 years ago

I'm not sure that the market would sort this out. People in the first world already pay more to fill up their car than people in the third world spend on food. And biodiversity often isn't given a monetary value at all (although there are people working on valuing ecosystem services). Subsidies aren't helping, but the underlying problem is that we want and are able to use more than our 'share' of resources.

jeremyjh3• 14 years ago

That isn't what the article is about. He is talking about the energy efficiency of capturing solar power via photosynthesis. From the perspective of this article, growing crops for food is just as inefficient.

If acquiring solar energy through biofuels is less efficient than through photoelectric cells or other means then the market will definitely sort this out (though would not directly account for externalities such as carbon pollution).

adestefan• 14 years ago

Subsidizes for corn based ethanol were cut in the US in FY12.

baq3• 14 years ago

market can't solve the current CO2 problem - it assumes the price of emissions is zero, when it clearly isn't. belief that it'll fix biofuels is naive at best. carbon and other products of burning fuel need to be taxed to have a price; musk also talks about it.

jeremyjh3• 14 years ago

You are right that externalities need to be captured and charged.

nickik3• 14 years ago

Seams to me that the market it the only way we can slow global warning down. Its companys like Tesla that make a diffrence not some goverment that tries to regulate existing stuff.

The have neither the insentive nor the knowlage to do so.

Electric cars, solar cells are the things that will change the world, not goverment regulation.

uvdiv4• 14 years ago

He really, really misses the point: what matters most is economics, not technical metrics in vacuo.

“… these values even do not take into account that more than 50% of the energy stored in the biofuel had to be invested in order to obtain the biomass (for producing fertilizers and pesticides, for ploughing the fields, for transport) and the chemical conversion into the respective biofuel.” [...] “The production and use of biofuels therefore is not CO2-neutral. In particular, the energy input is very large for the production of bioethanol from wheat or maize, and some scientists doubt that there is a net gain of energy. Certainly the reduction of CO2 release is marginal.”

In real world economics, biofuels are not energy; they are high-density liquid transport fuels. The economics make it clear: e.g., gasoline costs ten times as much as coal, per unit energy. You're paying for the chemistry, not the joules.

It matters very litte in real life, that much of the energy (cheap) is wasted; that much of the energy comes from (cheap, external) sources. If biofuels are viable, they can be seen as a conversion of energy to hydrocarbons: of (comparatively) cheap electricity and methane/hydrogen to expensive liquid fuel. Not as a primary energy source. It's the carbon that's valuable.

Farming machinery can be electric powered. Nitrogen fertilizer can be created from nuclear- or solar- powered hydrogen. And voilà, it is carbon-neutral. Nuclear electricity, solar electricity, hydrogen -- these are only marginally viable fuels (c.f. the world market for EV's; opinions may differ). Converting them to liquid hydrocarbons is a very useful thing.

stcredzero3• 14 years ago

> In real world economics, biofuels are not energy; they are high-density liquid transport fuels. The economics make it clear: e.g., gasoline costs ten times as much as coal, per unit energy. You're paying for the chemistry, not the joules.

Somehow, this is hard to get through people's skulls. Liquid hydrocarbons are a really potent energy storage medium with fantastic economics. (Compare a metal tank to Li-ion battery.) So long as we have need of bulldozers and heavy equipment at sites outside of fully established infrastructure, like construction sites, we will have a good use for such fuels. It's not overall efficiency that's important here. It's efficiency in a mobile context.

> Farming machinery can be electric powered. Nitrogen fertilizer can be created from nuclear- or solar- powered hydrogen. And voilà, it is carbon-neutral.

This really bothers me, and it happens all the time. Of course everything in our current infrastructure has a carbon footprint!

doublerebel3• 14 years ago

A large amount of the "bulldozers and heavy equipment at sites outside of fully established infrastructure" are the giant machines used to pull oil and natural gas from remote locations (tar sands, arctic and offshore oil rigs) and transport them the large distances to places inside fully established infrastructure. The need for hydrocarbons is compounding.

Similarly with biofuels, even if we are to genetically engineer more efficient plants to grow fuel, it still must be grown in a remote location, processed, and transported to places with existing established infrastructure.

In comparison, most places where people need energy already have the electric infrastructure to support it. We should be using liquid fuels in cases where it is truly necessary, not just for the short distances and minor wants of most.

jpwagner• 14 years ago

I'm having trouble following your point. He says the "input is very large" and you're arguing that the input doesn't have to be large?

uvdiv4• 14 years ago

More than one thread:

* He says the energy input is very large. I say it's reasonable for it to be so, because it's converting a cheap form of energy into a valuable one

* He says it is CO2-intensive because of the large energy inputs. I say this is just a reflection of the whole energy economy being CO2-intensive; that in principle the inputs can be CO2-free, and so biofuels can be CO2-neutral. (And they unique in this aspect; there is no other way to make CO2-neutral hydrocarbons, short of chemically scrubbing CO2 from the atmosphere.)

johnrgrace5• 14 years ago

Yes, the input is large (if you accept his numbers), but the inputs are stationary power and the output is portable power.

jcfrei• 14 years ago

It matters very litte in real life, that much of the energy (cheap) is wasted; that much of the energy comes from (cheap, external) sources.

you are just arguing that the production of bio fuels is cheap and that hence they are economically viable. obviously you'll make a profit with selling bio fuels, but that's because the market incentives are botched and a lot of the external costs have not been internalized in agriculture. ultimately the production of bio fuels is not ecologically viable - it competes against the food production and requires significant energy for the conversion (as you say) into hydrocarbons.

If biofuels are viable, they can be seen as a conversion of energy to hydrocarbons: of (comparatively) cheap electricity and methane/hydrogen to expensive liquid fuel. Not as a primary energy source. It's the carbon that's valuable.

that doesn't make any sense, because hydrocarbons have a very small intrinsic value - the (most common) usage you derive from hydrocarbons is motion energy. and the most efficient source for motion energy is again the electric motor (which could be powered more efficiently by electricity from solar panels).

mayneack• 14 years ago

There are different types of biofuel research. He seems to ignore the whole sector that is bioengineering the plants to solve these problems. One example that comes to mind (and I can't find a link to on my phone) involves changing the color of the leaf to absorb more light.

http://biomassmagazine.com/articles/7341/cutting-edge-bioene...

TomAnthony• 14 years ago

Elon Musk, in the Q&A section of his recent talk at Oxford (download here: http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/videos/view/211) also said he believes all biofuels are useless.

His point was that putting energy into biofuels is an inefficient way to use the suns energy, and then getting it out is also inefficient. He compared the efficiency to solar.

btilly4• 14 years ago

Not just "an inefficient way". In the best case, biofuels are 2 orders of magnitude less efficient than solar. That said we could theoretically produce around our current energy needs with a perfect biofuel. (Existing biofuels are much, much worse than this theoretical fuel.) We'd just need to convert all land we currently use for agriculture to that purpose. (And then what would we eat?)

If his numbers are correct - and I see no reason to doubt it - biofuels have to be a dead end.

nickik3• 14 years ago

The thing is that you can produce energy at one place and then move it around the world cheaply.

This does not work with solar. You can produce it but storing and disributing is much, much harder.

siculars• 14 years ago

Elon Musk addresses this around 1hr 17min here http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/videos/view/211

readymade• 14 years ago

Way to link to a Climate Change denial blog, HN.

stcredzero3• 14 years ago

Plant based biofuels are only problematic if you imagine replacing all transportation energy needs with them. Cut that out! Develop all technologies and let the market decide. I predict that there will be specialist niche applications for biofuels, and that most of transportation will be electric. For a cheap, robust means of storing lots of energy, it's really hard to compete with a metal tank of hydrocarbon fuel, but this doesn't doom us to run everything this way.

anovikov• 14 years ago

Biofuels are of course nonsense from energy efficiency standpoint. Biogas is produced for a different purpose: it results in storable energy, which is theoretically supposed to balance energy produced by intermittent sources. Overally, biofuels are not supposed to be energy-efficient or net energy positive. If we can one day produce oil from nothing spending 2x the energy the resulting oil will contain it will be a great achievement, even a holy grail of all renewable energy work: storable, high density renewable energy good for peak loads and for transport (worst case: airplanes).

sliverstorm3• 14 years ago

My pet theory is the reason they are so popular is "biofuels" has the word "bio" in it, which excites the sorts of greenies that don't examine things too closely.

Supporting evidence: aggressive marketing of "probiotic" supplements

ChuckMcM• 14 years ago

I like how everyone comes into this debate with a different concept of what bio-fuels "do."

If you think about supplying the worlds energy needs using bio-fuel it is a non-starter, and that is basically what the editorial says. Converting incident sunlight into useful energy through existing photo synthesis processes is inefficient and does a great harm in terms of food production.

If you think of it as a way of converting sunlight into something that pre-existing infrastructure can use (fuels) that can be justified on the expense of swapping out the existing infrastructure.

Big picture -> move everything to electricity and gas, since those two forms of energy are pretty readily convertible into the other forms we need.

Intermediate points -> you need a petroleum fuel cycle while you're converting everything else.

alberthartman• 14 years ago

Damn you math! PV works just fine. Too bad we don't have a high density mobile energy storage method to compare to liquid oil. When that happens, sub power will rule all.

jpalomaki• 14 years ago

Biofuels are also being produced from waste: http://www.st1.eu/index.php?id=2876

tehwalrus• 14 years ago

I thought we knew this already.

JoeAltmaier3• 14 years ago

Headline: oil industry experts slam alternative energy.

Alternatives have only just begun being explored. Innovation in this area are very likely to surprise that chemist. E.g. steam from room-temperature water posted on HN today: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4824205

Bioengineered plants may work any way we can imagine, not just the way an oil-industry chemist imagines.

SpikeDad• 14 years ago

Irrelevant. If if a renewable source is 10x less efficient than non-renewable sources, the key here is NON-RENEWABLE. We've got to take the pressure off of petroleum based fuels until such time as we come up with some alternative system - hydrogen, high-capacity battery storage, etc.

PS. Adding Nobel Prize to someone's argument doesn't have the gravitas as perhaps it once had. I think Linus Pauling and vitamin C diminished that.

Nobel Prize winning biochemist says all biofuels are nonsense

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