Robert Zubrin wants to destroy OPEC. I won't argue against that. Whether it is doable is debatable, but using alcohol as the fuel to reduce oil demand is not just a bad idea, it's suicide. Corn-based ethanol drives the cost of all staple crops up. Converting food into fuel will result in hundreds of millions starving to death while a relatively small rich upper class drives (I doubt you will be among them). Converting corn to ethanol actually produces more greenhouse gases than burning gasoline instead. And corn-based ethanol may actually use more energy than it produces.
In his first Dailykos diary, Mr. Zubrin made a lot of claims which were not backed up by any cites, making ethanol out to be a panacea.
Below the fold I examine his post and put his claims to the test.
Dr. Zubrin thinks cellulosic ethanol will save us:
Ethanol can currently be made from a wide variety of starchy or sugar-rich crops, but new means of making it are on the way which will radically expand its resource base to include many kinds of crop residues and weeds that have no food value.
Emphasis mine.
It is best not to count one's chickens until they are hatched:
Despite repeated claims to the contrary, there is no energy-efficient and scalable industrial technology for producing ethanol from biomass.
snip
Contamination. In corn ethanol production, normal fermentation times in batch mode are 48 hours; up to 72 hours is acceptable. Over 72 hours, the number of failures increases exponentially due to bacterial contamination. Typical enzyme processes for cellulosic alcohol take 5 to 7 days, or about 120 to 170 hours.
snip
Enzyme yield vs. rate. The rate of cellulose hydrolysis and fermentation can be increased by pre-treatment, but rates will slow down rather rapidly before high yields are obtained. It simply takes time and energy to chew into the sturdy lignocellulosic particles.
So basically, ethanol from switchgrass and waste biomass is not ready to go, and may never be. Here's another article about the limitations of cellulosic ethanol.
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Dr. Zubrin thinks corn ethanol production doesn't affect the food supply:
Ethanol has been criticized by certain opponents who have alleged that its production from corn takes away from the food supply
However, the IMF and WEO say that biofuel production has been pushing up prices of staples:
The rise in food prices reflects a combination of factors. Higher biofuel demand in the United States and the European Union (EU) has not only led to higher corn and soybean prices, it has also resulted in price increases on substitution crops and increased the cost of livestock feed by providing incentives to switch away from other crops.
And the UN says food stocks have dwindled as a result:
On the supply side, these include the early effects of global warming, which has decreased crop yields in some crucial places, and a shift away from farming for human consumption toward crops for biofuels and cattle feed.
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Dr. Zubrin said high fuel costs are to blame:
So its not corn ethanol that is driving up global food prices, including those for fish, fruit, and every kind of crop. Rather it is high fuel costs, which have been rising at an average rate of 30 percent per year for the past 9 years due to vicious OPEC price rigging.
I'd like to know what data Mr. Zubrin is basing this on. In a post over at The Oil Drum called The Fallacy of Reversibility, Stuart Staniford shows that fuel and fuel-related commodities like fertilizer are a small fraction of the cost of producing corn. See graph here . Demand from biofuels and poor harvests from global warming-induced droughts are causing the high prices. It's econ 101: high demand and low supply.
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Dr. Zubrin is a bit misleading here:
Ethanol has been criticized by certain opponents who have alleged that its production from corn takes away from the food supply, and that large irrigation requirements draw power that exceeds that provided by the ethanol.
This is kind of tricky, and a bit of bad framing. Actually, the energy inputs do not exceed the output of the ethanol obtained. But the energy returned on energy invested (EROEI) for corn-derived ethanol is one of the least efficient. From the Energy Bulletin:
EROEI (Energy Return on Energy Invested) for Various Fuels
Biodiesel- 3:1
Coal- 1:1 to 10:1
Ethanol- 1.2:1
Natural Gas- 1:1 to 10:1
Hydropower- 10:1
Hydrogen- 0.5:1
Nuclear- 4:1
Oil- 1:1 to 100:1
Oil Sands- 2:1
Solar PV (2) - 1:1 to 10:1
Wind (2) - 3:1 to 20:1
The USDA has calculated the EROEI of corn ethanol a couple of times, coming up with 1:1.36 and 1:1.24. And, in fact, there have been a few studies that have shown the EROEI less than 1 for corn ethanol, like this one from Cornell's David Pimental. Dr. Pimental argues that it costs more energy to produce the ethanol than you get out of it. In either case, given the poor return on investement relative to other types of energy, it would be a poor use of limited resources to focus on corn ethanol when other renewables like wind and solar produce much higher returns.
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Dr. Zubrin postulated this about the cost of petroleum:
In fact, for the expenditure of a given amount of petroleum, nearly ten times as much ethanol can be produced as gasoline.
I have no idea what he's referring to here since there are no references, but over at Oregon.gov they show that in an apples to apples comparison, ethanol costs more than gasoline:
Because a gallon of ethanol contains less energy than a gallon of gasoline, the production cost of ethanol must be multiplied by a factor of 1.5 to make an energy-cost comparison with gasoline. This means that if ethanol costs $1.10 [the current cost] per gallon to produce, then the effective cost per gallon to equal the energy contained in a gallon of gasoline is $1.65. In contrast, the current wholesale price of gasoline is about 90 cents per gallon.
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Dr. Zubrin isn't up on the latest data on greenhouse gas emissions for corn ethanol:
Since it is made from agricultural products, ethanol use acts as a net counter to global warming.
This has been proven incorrect, as ethanol actually produces more greenhouses gases than burning gasoline.
WASHINGTON — The widespread use of ethanol from corn could result in nearly twice the greenhouse gas emissions as the gasoline it would replace because of expected land-use changes, researchers concluded Thursday. The study challenges the rush to biofuels as a response to global warming.
See article an article here and the actual study here.
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Dr. Zubrin is being misleading when he says:
virtually no ethanol corn grown in the USA is irrigated
Hmm, I wonder if Ethanol Producer Magazine would have any information about that?
Irrigation has also enabled Nebraska to be an integral part of the Corn Belt. About 60 percent of corn acres in the state are irrigated, according to the Nebraska Corn Board. The state’s corn supply and ambitious development recently bumped its ranking to the second largest ethanol-producing state, after Iowa. Nebraska has more than 1,565,000 gallons of annual capacity built or under construction.
So, the second largest ethanol producing state irrigates 60% of it's corn.
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In sum, Dr. Zubrin paints an incomplete and overly optimistic outlook on ethanol in general, and especially corn-based ethanol. He cherry-picks his data and cheerfully omits any negatives that might tarnish his vision. He makes outlandish claims without backing them up. And he shows that he's not up on the most recent information regarding ethanol production and potential drawbacks.
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For a more realistic look at corn ethanol viability, let's examine the extensive, data-driven post by Stuart Staniford of The Oil Drum, titled Fermenting the Food Supply. First, how much energy does corn have, and how much fuel can you convert it to?
Let's just pause a moment and figure out how much food we are talking about when we discuss bushels of corn, or gallons of ethanol. A bushel of corn is 56 lb (or 25.4kg) of corn. At about 8000 btu/lb we get 113120 kCal/bushel. Given the average human diet globally contains 2800 kCal/day (see figure below), 1 bushel represents 40 days worth of calories for a person (if that person eat only corn!). Thus at current conversion efficiencies of about 2.8 gal/bushel, the corn in a gallon of ethanol represents a shade over two weeks worth of food (again, all corn). A 15 gallon fuel tank of ethanol is thus 7 months worth of corn calories for one person.
So you can either drive 40 miles or eat for 40 days on a bushel of corn (2.8 gal of ethanol is about 2 gal of gasoline, and most cars get about 20m/gal).
So what's the problem, exactly?
So at this point, corn prices are indexed to oil prices via biofuel arbitrage. There are lags and imprecisions in that linkage, but corn prices cannot fall too far below gasoline prices, or biofuel production will become very profitable and the industry will quickly grow to the point that corn prices are bought back into relationship with oil prices. Furthermore, the large displacement of soybean and cotton acreage to corn in 2007 suggests that this arbitrage is quickly extending to other agricultural commodities. I by no means think that last process is complete, but it has started.
That's bad news because demand for oil is extremely inelastic, and the world is struggling to grow the supply of it at present, so over the medium term it seems fairly plausible that there will be further rises in oil prices. As we will see shortly, one can throw the entire global food supply at our fuel problems and still only make a modest impact on them.
So, as corn ethanol becomes more expensive, more farmers ditch other crops and move toward corn. Cereals account for about half the calories in the human diet world wide, so the potential to reduce the average person's calories is certainly there. So, how much fuel can ethanol produce? How much would we get if we converted the entire human food supply into fuel?
You can immediately see the problem here. The biofuel potential of the entire human food supply is quite a small amount of energy compared to the global oil supply - somewhere between 15-20% on a volumetric basis, so 10-15% on an energy basis.
So, if we convert all food on earth (yes, so that nearly seven billion people get 0 calories all year) we would have about 10% of our fuel supply. All the food in the world wouldn't provide even the amount of fuel that the US uses. To provide even a small replacement of oil with ethanol would require a huge diversion of crops from food to fuel.
Again, Stuart Staniford:
These estimates should be regarded as quite uncertain. Still, it seems hard to make a case that food price increases will cause a cessation of biofuel profitability before a significant fraction of the global population is in serious trouble. The poor will not be able to bid up food prices by factors of two and four and keep eating. In contrast, the quadrupling of global oil prices, and tripling of US gasoline prices, over the last five years has had very minimal impact on driving behavior by the middle classes.
So, the middle classes will keep driving as the poor starve.
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In fact, Zubrin has been called out before for making similar dubious claims about the feasibility of ethanol:
Credibility is slipping due to all of these half-baked claims [about corn ethanol]. If this were qualified by specifying methanol from gasification - as your earlier essays indicated - it wouldn't be a big deal. Coming toward the end of an ill-advised defense of corn ethanol, it is garbage.
If Zubrin continues to write essays like this, he will have no credibility at all on this issue.
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Other articles providing a realistic look at biofuels:
*Biofuels 'crime against humanity' From the BBC.
*The Ethanol Scam: One of America's Biggest Political Boondoggles By Rolling Stone magazine
*The biofuel myths From the International Herald Tribune
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We really need to avoid dead ends, making the problem worse, or making different, more intractable problems. Biofuels / Ethanol is simply going to create more problems that it solves.
So, what's the solution? If ethanol/methanol isn't going to save us, what can we do? JD over at Peak Oil Debunked has some pretty good ideas in this article. He suggests a combination of electrification (E) and conservation (C) of transportation:
Electrification = Hybrids + PHEVs (Plug-in Hybrids) + NEVs (Neighborhood Electric Vehicles) + Small EVs + Full-size EV cars + Electric bikes/scooters + Electric motorcycles + Electric buses + Electric trucks + New electric trains + Electrification of existing diesel train lines
Plus
Conservation = Walking + Bicycles + Mopeds + Scooters + Motorcycles + Carpooling + Van pooling + Telecommuting + Riding the bus + Riding the tram/train/subway + Moving nearer to work + Sleeping at/near work + NGVs + Ultralight/Ultraefficient conventional vehicles + Buying a used compact car as a second vehicle + Buying a moped etc. as a second vehicle + Converting oil-fired generation to coal/nuclear + Jacking up CAFE standards + Increasing downtown parking rates + Lowering speed limits + Compressed work week + etc.
The E+C Solution will be the default solution when liquids finally peak because it is the most practical and efficient.
Also, Dr. Zubrin, next time you post a technical essay at Daily Kos, please do the following:
- Cite your work. That will go a long way in helping us understand where you're coming from.
- Stick around for comments. No one likes hit and run diaries.