41 comments on A Life Cycle Assessment of Energy Products: Environmental Impact Assessment of Biofuels
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Ok, maybe I was too harsh, but here is my point: Do we really care about the EROEI of "ethanol" or do we care about the EROEI of sugar cane?
Wouldn't a lot depend on how the EROEI is defined?
Jack attacks a statement that fossil fuels were required to get an EROEI of greater than one. You respond by saying: No, it's EROFEI.
I really haven’t looked at the studies too much yet, but I don’t need to because your argument doesn’t make sense.
You can’t just say that EROEI can’t be 10 because it takes more than 8000 btu to distill it. If the energy to distill the ethanol comes from bagasse, then you do not count it as an input.
Please show why the studies are wrong, i.e. show that energy in the ethanol is less than ten times the energy that was invested. Use a starting point of a bare field and an endpoint of ethanol. Lets say I had a field, with an ethanol plant on it. The EROEI is the energy out of the field divided by the energy into the field.
Thank you for keeping this going while I was asleep here in Thailand.
It seems clear that the original comment tacked on to Prof Goose's call to promote the story was an uneducated hit piece that doesn't show any evidence that the author even read the study.
However, Sparaxis does have a point, although it doesn't directly contradict mine. Yes, sugar cane-based ethanol looks very different on EROEI and EROFEI metrics, largely because of the use of bagasse to provide heat and sell power externally (which provides an offset).
If there were a perfect regulatory environment and significant use of energy in transport, things could be quite different. In that case, demand for electricity for bagasse could compete directly with demand for ethanol as a transportation fuel. Then, maybe the energy is bagasse would not belong to the sugar cane alone, but would be already a part of the energy system. Then, it would not be included in the ethanol EROEI calculations.
I am not a huge advocate of liquid biofuels. Over time, it seems to be crop acreage will be a base resource that goes into fuel production, like it or not. In that case, I think electricity is a far better pathway. But we are not there yet.
It seems that for developing countries in tropical regions, sugar-cane based ethanol makes sense economically and environmentally in the meantime. I don't have any problem with diverting sugar from the food chain. I do not think tropical forests are being impacted much by ethanol (although they may be for soy and palm oil) and do think that sugar cane for fuel will be largely unirrigated.
Corn-based ethanol seems to be completely bankrupt and would not even be looked at without subsidies in the forms for cash, free water and externalization of environmental damage. I don't think all ethanol sources combined will ever provide much more than 5% of liquid fuels.
But in the right environment and until transportation moves to electricity as a fuel source, I do think some ethanol can make sense.
Good remarks Jack, I share your opinions (electricity, Brasil-EtOH, USA-EtOH) as one of the authors of the study. Biofuels may be ok under very specific conditions, but for the future we have to look at alternatives with much higher efficiencies (yes, sunlight-to-electricity!). Biofuels produced out of organic wastes look very promising, but produced out of food it's not only problematic from an ethical point of view.
Thank you. I do think we are on the same page. I tend to agree that there are disturbing potential ethical issues related to competition between fuel and food. However, it is not as clear cut as some make it out to be.
One could make an argument that the poor benefit more from fuel than from sugar, tobacco, alcoholic beverages, etc. So, we would have to infer that there could be ethical issues involved in using so much land for these products. Likewise there is so much waste in processed foods and meat consumption.
Why do some people consider diverting sugar to ethanol as evil, when diverting corn to livestock feed is just fine?