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66 comments on Peak Oil in the Mainstream Business Press
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66 comments on Peak Oil in the Mainstream Business Press
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I was discussing with afriend of mine about Biodiesel, but I didn't know the numbers by heart. He claimed that an area the size of France was enough to provide west europe with Diesel. Seemed a bit optimistic to me.
Does anybody have the numbers:
- How much diesel per Ha
- What is the EROEI (+ error margin)
- How much Diesel does europe use?
and if possible
- How much land is available to do this, i.e. not used for food crops?
Thanks
Hello Richard
On the farm I owned until 1996 I grew rapeseed for oil.
Average approx 1000 l /ha) of rapeseed oil. More details can be read here (in English) http://www.folkecenter.net/default.asp?id=9192
Ignoring the finer print you get.
Rapeseed oil approx = 34 MJ/l ;
Diesel approx 36 MJ/l
1 ha = 1000 l rapeseed oil can supply 15.000-20.000 km driven with European! diesel cars. This is close to 1 cars yearly consumption.
So a very simple assumption is 1 ha = 1 car and In Europe there are 1 passenger car per 2 people so
1 Ha = 2 people;
EU 25 = 400 million people = 200 million Ha = 2 million km2 which is 4 times France ( 540.000 km2)!
Currently agriculture accounts for over 40% of all land use in Europe (around 5 million km2)
http://countdown2010.net/archive/agriculture.html
So Passenger car transport alone would need 2/5 = 40% of all agricultural land in Europe.
EROEI for crops like wheat are 4.5-6 if straw is included and Rapeseed is possibly somewhat poorer, because of the lower total yield. Maybe 3.5-4.5.
Kind regards/ And1
I just consulted Robert Rapier who says:
I suspect the land use / land availabiity issue will be as much a clincher for bio diesel as eroei.
Apart from farming effort biodiesel gets a fossil boost from NG derived methanol. If say it consumes 20% unrecovered methanol worth 20 MJ/L that could be a gimme of 4 MJ/L.
The other thing that could kill canola is increasing pesticide resistance. Some say the acrid oil in mustard will compensate for lower yields. I think biowaste gasification based processes like Choren Sundiesel have to be the way to go if the capital cost and logistics can be simplified.
Here are some notes I took from a conversation I had with Pimentel protege Tad Patzek about the potential of biofuels, last month:
Jatropha:
Soy: yields around 500 kg/ha
Switchgrass: Takes 4 to 5 years to grow a mature crop.
1-2 years to establish, then crop for 3 years (adding progressively greater amounts of fertilizer) and then it peters out.
Any way you slice it, with biofuels you wind up depleting the soil.
The U.S. couldn’t possibly even produce 10% of total fuel mix (~2 mbpd) of biofuels…it would be too much. Plus the environmental risks of even a 10% offset would be too high to even try it.
CNG and EVs first, not biofuels! 10% offset using EVs is easy and available right now
--C
Energy consultant, writer, blogger www.getreallist.com
I pretty much agree with that Chris. CNG = compressed nat gas? We've had vehicles running on that for decades in the UK - but not very many of them - no room for golf clubs in the trunk.
Yes on the CNG. I am a little dubious about them too but T. Boone seems to think they have a bright future. I take it he (and others) believe that there is going to be a revolution in converting stranded NG to CNG/LNG as oil depletion sets in.
--C
Rapier also said that if we planted all four billion arable acres of land in the world with the most popular biodiesel feedstock, rapeseed, we could produce just under 30 million barrels per day of biodiesel, or just over a third of our present usage of petroleum. And when we take into account all the energy inputs to grow, harvest, and process the rapeseed into fuel, the net yield will be very low, or even negative.
--C
Anecdotal evidence from France
My neighbour works for a market gardener, who plnted one hectare of rapeseed this year for biodiesel, and is running it through his tractors. Hasn't yet decided whether to plant more next year, or drop the idea (apparently the newer tractors are fussy about biodiesel).
It's interesting because it's purely an economic decision with no subsidies involved (and I suspect, not captured in any statistics). As it happens, this guy has plenty of spare land, currently in pasture, that he could convert to biodiesel if he wanted.
Which leads me to speculate about a trade-off between transport and meat... beef and dairy are the biggest consumers of agricultural space around here. I have given up beef, which is about the most costly of foods in terms of energy and land use. What is the pasture footprint of your average beef-eater, I wonder?
Richard, the eroei for temperate latitude bio-ethanol is around 1.2 at best. I believe bio-diesel is marginally higher, but this is still a hopeless way to try and power an industrial economy.
The land question boils down to whether or not fuel crops can be grown where food crops won't grow, or whether they can be produced from the waste products from food crops - celulosic ethanol et al. In either case, there are serious issues with the amount of energy that needs to be added to get the crop to grow and nutrient depletion of the solis.
The current trend where good agricultural land is being used for fuel crops is contributing to a global food disaster. In addition to food production lost to biofuels, climate change (man made or not) is pressuring crop production and growing prosperity in Asia is leading to more meat being consumed - which eats into plant availability at a ratio of around 7:1 - I beleive.
The future of transportation has to be electric - IMO. Both electric cars and collective transport. The electricity will have to be provided by a combibation of nuclear and renewables, where wind and direct solar look like having the greatest potential.
Re EROEI , Richard and Euan
I agree fully on Euan's conclusions for farmland. And the electric future.
Bioethanol is a terrible waste of land and the food/energy produced in farming. And Bioethanol EROEI in temperate climate is < 1.7 even when including the use of the remains from the ethanol fermentation for animal feed.
What I was exemplifying was the growing of rapeseed for biodiesel, using the straw and rapeseed cake directly for district heating, and using the rapeseed oil directly as Diesel replacement- no Bioethanol involved. The higher EROEI comes mainly from the direct combustion of the biomass coproduced, which can be made with > 95% thermal efficiency. Now back to data.
http://www.folkecenter.net/default.asp?id=9192
1 Ha : gives (optimistic data)
rape seed oil : 37,53 MJ/l x 1086 l/ha = 40,76 GJ/ha
rape cakes : 19,32 MJ/kg x 2000 kg/ha = 38,64 GJ/ha
rape straw : 14500 MJ/ton x 3,9 ton/ha = 56,55 GJ/ha
Total: 135,95 GJ/ha (100%)
Recent Danish energy numbers for growing Wheat (which needs more fertilizer than Rape) (fertilizer, spraying, Tractor, harvesting etc.) are 14.5 GJ/ha and for Barley 13.7 GJ/ha.
(http://ing.dk/artikel/69914); http://www.agrsci.dk/djfpublikation/djfpdf/gvm260.pdf
So you get approx. 40 GJ fuel by spending ca. 14 GJ. Which should give an EROEI close to 3.
Soil will be depleted, when all the biomass is removed. On top of that, rape has to be sprayed with pesticides insecticides/ fungicides or you could loose your crop completely (EROEI = 0).So monoculture is very difficult/ impossible and crop rotation must be used. Altogether not promising for a sustainable future.
Kind regards/And1
.
This is for bio-ethanol, but most bio-diesels using current production methods fall in between the best and the worst (excluding fossil oil of course).
This is from a recent meta-study last year that calculated averages from various studies.
Unfortunately I don't have enough data for sugar cane and various bio-diesels. Also, it'd be nice to have a box-plot of these, but again - I lack the data.
It is quite obvious that even though the fossil oil net energy ratio may vary quite a lot these days depending on country, field, phase, etc, that it is still superior to all known current bio-fuel production methods.
Theoretical paper only productions and theoretical models excluded.
The ratio of energy output to energy input is not a good parameter for characterizing the economic quality of bio-fuels (or any other form of energy production for that matter). What matters is the net energy produced per unit of some non-energy related production resource expended. For the production of bio-fuels the most obvious resource to be concerned about is acres of cultivated land. If the gross energy output from A acres of and is O and the input energy is I then the efficiency with which land is converted into fuel (i.e. net energy per acre) is given by:
η = (O-I)/A = [(O-I)/O]×(O/A)
The term in square brackets is the fraction of the output energy which is left over after the input energy is subtracted out. I call this factor the energy utilization rate µ. Since EROEI = O/I, µ=(EROEI-1)/EROEI. The second factor (O/A) is the land efficiency of gross energy production. This factor is important in understanding the energy productivity of land and it cannot be calculated from energy inputs and outputs alone. The table below converts the EROEI numbers for corn, wheat etc. into energy utilization rate.
I included conventional diesel fuel rather than oil. The 20 to 1 number often quoted is for oil at the well head. Since we do not burn raw crude oil in our transportation engines the correct comparison is to refined petroleum fuels. Refining crude oil is an energy intensive process. The numbers in the table were derived from a DOE report comparing the life cycle energy balance of bio and petroleum diesel fuels. The ethanol outputs per acre were taken from Lester Brown’s book Plan B 2.0.
I am not in any way suggesting that the energy utilization rate µ can by itself be used to compare the economic quality of bio-fuels and refined petroleum fuels. The economic quality of energy can never be determined from energy outputs and inputs alone. In the case of bio-fuel it is clearly necessary to know the gross output per acre in addition to µ in order estimate the energy productivity of land using a specific crop. From the table below it is clear that sugar beets will far outperform wheat even though its energy utilization rate (or EROEI) is only slightly higher. The land intensity of net energy production is the key to understanding the limitation of bio-fuel use. Of course petroleum diesel does not require farm land for its production. The amount of gross fuel output produced per unit of labor or per unit of capital equipment expenditures would be more relevant to determining its economic quality.
Roger, thanks very much for this contribution. I am not an expert in this particular area but two points you are making here are clearly important.
The first is linking productivity per acre to eroei. From the above table, sugar beets looks like the best bet so far. But of course we also need to link in soil sustainability.
The second is the low eroei figure you quote for petroleum diesel. Nate has banged around some low eroei numbers for petroleum from onshore USA and its quite clear that biofuels need to be compared against contemporary petroleum sources - and here I believe we have a bit of a data vacuum.
SamuM - thanks for your contribution too. Its good to get these figures.
Thanks Roger K.
Do you have a good reference(s) on that?
I'd really appreciate it.
I am not sure exactly what references you are looking for. The idea of resource efficiency as the ratio of the net output of a production process to the net expenditure of a particular kind of production resource is a very general economics idea which I have picked up by osmosis. The application of this concept to energy production and the definitions of the energy utilization rate and the resource efficiency of gross energy production are my own (currently unpublished) ideas. At least I have not stumbled on any other writers who analyze energy production in these terms.
If you are interested in the energy balance of refined petroleum fuels, here is a link to the NREL study I mentioned which compares the energy balance of bio-diesel to conventional petroleum diesel. This report is 314 pages long, so there might be more information there than you really want.
http://www.nrel.gov/docs/legosti/fy98/24089.pdf
Too much is always much better than too little. Much appreciated!
This is an interesting analysis. The idea of net energy (or EROEI) is to attempt to look beyond metrics that just parse things down to dollars, in a world when everything can't easily be parsed to dollars.. But land is just one of the inputs that may be limiting. Your 'energy utlilization rate' shows much higher numbers for diesel from petroleum than for biofuels; if you include water or soil in the analysis, the difference would even be greater. In other words, fossil fuels are SO superior to others in many of these respects that we have taken for granted the land intensity, water intensity, soil intensity, etc. Cutler wrote a good guest post on that here
To just focus on EROEI as a replacement for $ROI, falls fallacy to exactly why we shouldn't be using dollars in the first place - its too narrow a metric. Multicriteria analysis that treats water, soil, etc not only as inputs but as potentially as limiting inputs as energy itself will be important. I have a paper will be online soon in AMBIO on this - i can send to anyone who wants a copy.
In other words, fossil fuels are SO superior to others in many of these respects that we have taken for granted the land intensity, water intensity, soil intensity, etc.
I agree completely. Energy is not the only important production resource. Fresh water and fertile soil are in finite supply. We are never going to have enough energy to grind up bedrock to make our own soil. Using such resources to produce energy carries substantial opportunity costs with respect to lost economic production of other types. Single resource analysis of economic production is inevitably inadequate. I will check out your paper when it becomes available.
The key phrase is "current production methods". It is possible to eliminate fossil fuels from the equation by changing production methods. Modern organic farming methods can remove anhydrous ammonia from the equation. Fermentation and partial distillation (140 to 180 proof) could be done on or near the farm using corn stover for fuel. Wind and solar could also be used as heat sources. Final rectification could be done at a central distillery that uses renewable energy. The ethanol can be used to fuel the tractors and trucks needed for production. The same could be done with biodiesel from the corn oil.