The Oil Drum | DrumBeat: February 24, 2008

157 comments on DrumBeat: February 24, 2008

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Darwinian on February 24, 2008 - 12:36pm

One point of reference: the grain needed to make enough ethanol to fill an SUV tank once, can feed a person for a YEAR.

Vtpeaknik, I have no doubt that this statement is true. I would like to use it myself in some correspondence with others, that is true believers who think that biofuels will save the day. However I try, though I sometimes fail, never to make a statement that I cannot back up with references or data. My question is, where can I find a reference or calculation concerning the above statement? Anyone? Anyone?

Thanks in advance,

Ron Patterson

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xeroid on February 24, 2008 - 1:10pm

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,530791-4,00.html

"A simple calculation points out biofuel's less-than-stellar potential. To fill the roughly 100-liter (26-gallon) tank of an SUV, an ethanol producer has to process about a quarter of a ton of wheat. This is enough wheat for a baker to bake about 460 kilograms of bread, which has a total nutritional value of about a million kilocalories -- enough to feed one person for a year."

http://auto.howstuffworks.com/question527.htm

A gallon of gasoline (about 4 liters) contains about 31,000 calories. If a person could drink gasoline, then a person could ride about 912 miles on a gallon of gas (about 360 km per liter). Considering that a normal car gets about 30 miles per gallon, that's pretty impressive

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2431

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. Of course, the American corn crop is mainly fed to animals, and after conversion to meat, eggs, or dairy at efficiencies in the range of 1/10 - 1/3, the 15 gallon tank of ethanol is more like 1-2 months worth of food calories for a person.

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Darwinian on February 24, 2008 - 1:45pm

Xeroid, thanks a million. That was exactly what I was looking for.

Ron Patterson

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westexas on February 24, 2008 - 1:54pm

Based on the numbers that Stuart presented on his biofuels post, in round numbers I estimated that it would take 100% of current world food production to replace current US net petroleum imports with biofuels.

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majorian on February 24, 2008 - 3:49pm

This is one sided corn-bashing getting really STOOPID.

A 26 gallon tank of filled with ethanol would take 560 pounds of corn.

So replacing gasoline with say E85 in the SUV tank would take
560 pounds of corn(10 bushels of corn) PLUS 167 pounds of DDGS animal feed which is equal to 65 pounds of meat or 6 gallons of whole milk( milk is 90% water).

The average american eats 200 pounds of meat a year and 300 pounds of dairy products(mostly milk) a year.
That figures to require about 1200# of DDGS a year or 69 bushels of corn that would also produce 180 gallons of ethanol. E85 is gets 70% the mileage of straight gasoline. At 14 mpg, that will get his SUV about miserable 2520 miles.

So after 7 trips to fill his gas tank with E85 would produce enough dairy and meat to feed the average american for a whole year.

Producing corn ethanol would result in a bumper crop of food! If we could replace all 150 billion gallons of gasoline with E85 we would increase our meat and milk bounty by over 300%. But I don't want to eat three times the meat and dairy I eat now! (And it doesn't seem possible in terms of cropland acres.)

Attempts to turn this into a 'guns or butter' argument are futile. We would get a few 'guns'(energy) and a lot of 'butter'(animal products) with corn ethanol.

It's no wonder these food versus ethanol fanatics don't get it.

We don't have a FOOD crisis we have a FUEL crisis!

(But a FOOD crisis works so much better with their Malthusian doomer nighmares, does it not?)

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AlanfromBigEasy on February 24, 2008 - 4:04pm

Three errors.

Cattle, in particular, can take only a small percentage of their diet as distillers grains, Too much and they get "scours", diarrhea.

And the ethanol industry is fast approaching that limit.

One gets more meat & milk from unprocessed grains (you are taking away many of the calories when distilling).

And the BEST response to food shortages is less meat and milk and more tortillas, etc. Save some for your fellow man even if you can afford to keep your belly full (or obese).

Alan

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ET on February 24, 2008 - 7:27pm

And the BEST response to food shortages is less meat and milk and more tortillas, etc. Save some for your fellow man even if you can afford to keep your belly full (or obese).

RE: "Good Calories, Bad Calories"
It may be the case that 'we can feed more people' on veggie matter (carbohydrates) but that they would be much healthier eating a more ecologically expensive diet high in meats and fats and low in carbs. IMO Gary Taubes' hypothesis has been extremely well researched and presents us with quite a dilemma. Healthy but possibly ecologically unsustainable diet, or less healthy but ecologically sustainable diet.

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POBox on February 24, 2008 - 7:47pm

Taubes, Pollan, and Weston Price would probably all agree on the health aspects, especially their distaste for the highly manufactured Western diet. I've never seen a life cycle analysis of factory farming techniques versus the old fashioned ways - for example how much does grass-fed/grass-finished beef cost relative to the feedlot grain-fed variety? If you got rid of the manufactured fertilizers, processed animal feed, antibiotics and supplements would the cost of meat increase or decrease? How about dairy? I have no clue. What if you add in the cost of fouled water supplies,
increased need for expensive health care, natural gas depletion, soil depletion, .... Oh rats, I'm getting ahead of myself...

I guess what I'm trying to say is there's a system level view of this; we can't regard it as an isolated subsystem.

Chris

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karlof1 on February 25, 2008 - 2:32am

Do get a copy of All Flesh is Grass and read it as it answers many of your questions.

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POBox on February 24, 2008 - 5:04pm

Your numbers may be skewed by the American way of life. I suspect the average human worldwide can't afford anything near 200 pounds of meat a year. Try your calculations with 50 pounds of meat and the majority in grains and veggies. I think it will come out remarkably close to one tankful of ethanol.

On the other hand, if we outlawed high fructose corn syrup as a foodstuff and used a little less sugar, we'd have plenty of corn left for ethanol, and probably a healthier population.

It feels like we need to find a new balance point. As long as Big Ag runs things we'll have the most profitable food, not the most healthy or sustainable.

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practical on February 24, 2008 - 5:39pm

Corn is mostly animal feed. If human life is so valuable and threatened by an inadequate supply of corn, quit feeding the stuff to animals. There are 65 million hogs in the United States. Each hog consumes 15 bushels of corn to reach market weight. Kill the hogs! Save the people.

Straw man arguments that say that ethanol can not replace gasoline are silly. Of course it can't. No serious ethanol supporter would pose such and argument. We don't need to replace gasoline in the near future. We need to supplement it. Even the most rabid Peak Oiler does not say we will run out of oil.

Corn currently exported goes mostly to wealthier countries like Japan and China. They use it for animal feed just as we do. When it is sold to foreigners for animal feed or human food, a portion of the energy of corn is lost to the American economy since corn is inappropiately priced for its energy content. When I burn a bushel corn in my corn stove it is worth the equivalent of $9.00 of LP gas. When it is sold for export, it goes for about $5.00. $4.00 is lost to the American economy.

Those who are so worried about the starving should ask themselves if they are willing to have their taxes raised to pay for the corn they believe will save lives. Or do they just want farmers to sell corn for less than its energy value and make non economic decisions based on faulty analysis.

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dinAlt on February 24, 2008 - 10:17pm

Those who are so worried about the starving should ask themselves if they are willing to have their taxes raised to pay for the corn they believe will save lives.

There is no need to raise taxes. The elimination of corn ethanol subsidies should suffice to kill the economic viability of the stuff.

Another important issue is the marginal net energy gain of corn ethanol. The energy balance is near break even, so the only thing this is accomplishing is the consumption of valuable arable land while we pay more for energy and food with no net energy gain. What a bargain!

What about cellulistic ethanol? This would not be so bad, as it uses a waste product, but it is not technologically ready yet. Why even bother with converting the waste to ethanol? We can convert it directly into diesel with existing technology and one BTU of diesel goes further than one BTU of ethanol, as diesel engines are much more efficient than spark ignition engines.

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Engineer-Poet on February 24, 2008 - 10:33pm

The elimination of corn ethanol subsidies should suffice to kill the economic viability of the stuff.

You have to kill the mandates too, or the cost will just come out at the pump.

Which wouldn't be a bad thing; the "Live Green Go Yellow" ad campaign would be dead within days.

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Darwinian on February 24, 2008 - 5:51pm

Majorian it is your post that is really STOOPID! No one is talking about what the average American eats and no one is talking about wheat after it has been cycled through a cow. We are talking about the number of calories a citizen of the world normally consumes in a day and the number of calories, in wheat, it takes to fill the tank of an SUV. Here are the numbers:

A simple calculation points out biofuel's less-than-stellar potential. To fill the roughly 100-liter (26-gallon) tank of an SUV, an ethanol producer has to process about a quarter of a ton of wheat. This is enough wheat for a baker to bake about 460 kilograms of bread, which has a total nutritional value of about a million kilocalories -- enough to feed one person for a year.

Now dispute those numbers without talking about how much meat the average American consumes after it has been cycled through a cow. How many kilocalories does the average Haitian consume? How about the average Bangladeshi or Indian or Sub-Sahara African? A quarter of a ton of wheat would be 250 kilos per year or .685 kilos per day, or 1.5 pounds of wheat per day.

Does the average citizen of the third world consume, per day, the calories contained in 1.5 pounds of wheat? I don't know but that seems pretty close to me. So basically you could feed one person for one year on the amount of calories contained in one SUV tank of ethanol.

Ron Patterson

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Scotjen61 on February 24, 2008 - 11:09pm

I must say Majorian

your lack of compassion is breathtaking. Whether, the notion that the impoverished can afford a diet of meat, the lack of concern about what ethanol does to the price of grains - the principal diet of the world. Or the utter disregard for those poor animals force fed grain, let alone distillers grain.

We really have no hope.

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