The Limits of Biofuels
Posted by Kyle on May 9, 2006 - 1:18am
Topic: Alternative energy
Tags: biodiesel [list all tags]
One question that always arises with biofuels is "How much can we really produce?" For most fuels, this depends upon the feedstock, i.e., corn versus cellulose for ethanol. However, there are definite limits, and as time progresses, my guess is that we will see more and more proposals like the one below the fold:
To help lessen the U.S. dependency on foreign oil, Dynoil's commitment to producing an alternative diesel fuel is under way with its plan to build a 1.5 billion gallon per year (bgy) refinery that will process vegetable oil feedstock into environmentally friendly biodiesel. The intention was announced by A. Vernon Wright, Chief Executive Officer of Dynoil LLC, a Delaware Limited Liability Company.
The company concluded from its market studies that the current market for biodiesel in the U.S. Gulf Coast is at least 100,000 barrels per day, and it identified markets on the U.S. East, West Coasts and on the Great Lakes where it intends to expand its production of biodiesel. A site for the refinery has been selected near Houston, Texas, and the U.S. Gulf Coast. The plant will process conventional vegetable oil into biodiesel fuel that will contain zero sulphur and nearly zero nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions. Dynoil's biodiesel can be blended into various grades of diesel fuel that can contain anywhere from five percent (B5) to 20 percent (B20) biodiesel to meet market demand requirements.
The refinery will process approximately 100,000 barrels per day of vegetable oil into fuel that can be used as a blending stock with petroleum diesel. The company plans to use state-of-the-art technology to convert vegetable oil into consumable fuel oil. Biodiesel can also be used for home heating or electric power generation.
The company concluded from its market studies that the current market for biodiesel in the U.S. Gulf Coast is at least 100,000 barrels per day, and it identified markets on the U.S. East and West Coasts and on the Great Lakes where Dynoil will expand biodiesel production.
In normal business speak, there clearly is a market for that much biodiesel, so full speed ahead! However, the detail that is missing is that the entire US production of soybean oil (the main kind produced here, as our climate is too cold for palm oil and too warm for rapeseed) is 2.5 billion gallons per year. In other words, this single "bio-refinery" will consume roughly 60% of the soybean oil produced annually in the US! It seems that at some point we may need a "third party" to keep ourselves from burning all of our food just to keep those vehicles on the road...
Just for reference, world production of all vegatable oils is about 600 million barrels annually (1.65 million barrels/day), about 1 weeks worth of oil usage.
But supposing our present style of life will continue with biofuels means presupposing a lage carless laboring class hacking away at the sugarcane by hand so the elite few can drive their SUVs. Unfortunately I'm not convinced the WIRED/Mother Jones/Earth Island Foundation types have any real gut-level problem with this.
The Scientists involved with lipids, oil seeds and biodiesel know they can not replace even a large fraction of petroleum with biofuels. I know, I just got back from a conference where this was discussed in context of food lipids. Many speakers kept saying biological lipids are just a fraction of the oil we burn every year. No one is expecting total replacement of petroleum with ethanol and biodiesel.
But this misses the point entirely. People are thinking about making money and to some extent being a little bit self sufficient. As oil prices keep going up biodiesel and ethanol become ever more attractive as money making operations even if they don't replace all the current supply. In fact one could make the case that if petroleum oil gets very scarce (after peak) that biofuels will become gold mines in an energy starved world.
Also consider farmer coops that are invested into biodiesel. They know there is a positive return, energy wise, in shunting some of their crop into fuel. This can come back to them and allow them to plant a new crop at lower cost than if they were 100% dependant on oil. This helps moderate their costs. Even a small percentage helps.
This is all nibbling around the edges at present. A little more supply here. A little bit cheaper there. A little better price for a commodity for fuel use rather than CBTrade prices. It all has real economic impact on the producers of the raw material, which is agricultural products. These people are not thinking about saving the world from peak oil. They are trying to make a living based on the best mix of crops and markets currently available to them. And ultimately they may save our butts if energy becomes very scarce and they have a ready system in place to continue mechanized agriculture using liquid fuels grown on site.
My point here is that yes ethanol and biodiesel are positive EROEI. NO this will not allow us to continue in our present energy use. Yes these fuels will have some impact mitigating peak oil. No we should not convert all available land to fuel production. Yes we should divert some land to biofuel production to determine how efficient this system is. We are always going to need some liquid fuels. We are in the infancy of determining what will replace petroleum in delivering that liquid, even if it is at very reduced volume from today. In the absence of a coherent national energy strategy I see no other way for things to progress at this time.
From a talk at AOCS here are the numbers I copied down. For details on this survey contact Professor Frank Gunstone at St. Andrews University, he gave permission to cite his numbers. I'm sorry but I don't have the original sources he cited for this data.
As of 2005 total lipids on the world market was 135 million metric tons (MMT) from all sources - land and sea. Of that total 108 MM tons went to human food usage, about 80% of the total. This assumes the productive capacity of all the agricultural land currently being farmed, plus fish stocks both wild catch and pen raised. This is only the lipid portion of that productivity stream. Obviously there is a larger volume of starch and protein that is being produced simultaneously.
For 2005 the 108 MMT divided by the 6.44 Billion people on earth gave about 16.8 kilos of fat per person per year. But this was distributed unevenly with the EU-25 countries consuming 50.8 kilos per person per year, the U.S. was 49 kg/p/yr, China was 19.6 kg/p/yr, India was 11.7 kg/p/yr and Bangledesh was at the bottom at 7.5 kg fat per person per year.
Estimates are that China and India will be raising their caloric intake, as well as their population, so that the lipids required just for food will double by 2030. That would be 216 MMT of fat required with most of the increase going to Asia and Africa by 2030. For 2020 it should be well under 200 MMT required, say a 50-60% increase over 2005.
At the same time that lipid for food will increase the EU-25 and U.S. have biodiesel targets. The EU-25 want to produce 20 MMT of biodiesel by 2020, they produced 4 MMT in 2005. The US goal is 2 MMT in 2010 and 12 MMT in 2020. So the stated goal is to produce about 40-50 MMT of biodiesel in 2020, which is in addition to the less than 200 MMT for food.
Interestingly India has a law that says no food oil can be used for biodiesel so they are researching other oil producing tree crops that can't be used for food. Clearly production would be constrained for all lipid production by land availability, yields, sustainability and climate change. Yes all these limitations were brought up in the talk. He was realistic about what could be produced not pie in the sky optomistic.
So the conclusion of the talk was that Food lipids would need to increase by 40-70 MMT and Oleochemistry uses (mostly biodiesel) would increase by 40-50 MMT, for a total lipid increase of 80-110 MMT by 2020 from all sources. Almost all of this increase is expected to come from oil seeds.
So the final conclusion was that oil supply would be tight for the expected demand (no one talked about a rapid decline after peak petroleum) but that supply might not be distributed uniformly as it is not distributed today. A main point is that much of the lipid production today is as a biproduct of some other production. Very few acres or food streams are dedicated to oil production. A small percentage of acreage dedicated to high oil production could meet much of the oleochemical needs. But no one is talking about replacing 80+ million barrels of petroleum oil per day with biological oil. The numbers just don't add.
Does this bother anyone?
By far the most egregious wasters of energy are the corporate kingpins who exploit illegal aliens and fire them once injured on the job, especially in Texas. Are they going to care who starves - of ANY colour - so they can get a fill-up for their jet?
i notice that "doctors without borders" ...
"In 2004, MSF's worldwide income was $568 million. In the United States, nearly 380,000 private donors contributed more than $91 million to MSF-USA."
that wouldn't happen if the glass was truly empty.
A journalist friend of mine was working a big story a few years back - an expose about child slavery on cacao plantations in Africa. Her office had been boycotting chocolate for months while they worked on the story in secret. She thought it was going to be huge.
Instead, it was barely noticed. Americans didn't care if their chocolate was grown by children sold into slavery by their impoverished parents, or kidnapped off the streets by slavers. I doubt they'll care if the fuel in their tanks takes food from the mouths of the hungry, either.
The best hope for Africa, IMO, is for peak oil to unwind globalization. Perhaps in the post-carbon age, it will end up being too expensive to import ethanol from Africa.
I don't know if there is a solution except to keep plugging away. Is the story online somewhere?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chocolate_and_slavery
But the average American doesn't even know...or care. There seems to be more concern in Europe, where apparently some people are making an effort to by "free trade" chocolate...enough for it to be a marketing point.
Everything in Starbucks doesn't have chocolate in it, but almost everything does. In fact, I'm not much of a chocolate eater (these 3 little chocolate bars I got at trader joe's are 3 of maybe 6 a year I eat), but overall Americans are chocoholics.
And this issue is utterly unknown in the US.
The growth of the movement is one of the very few really encouraging developments in the recent years.
And no, this shit doesn't bother Americans at all. Biodiesel creeps me out more day by day. I mean, the idea of a biodiesel industry. We're already overstraining Mother Earth to make food, now we're supposed to start stripping, essentially, the surface of Mother Earth to come up with gas for our cars? All those calories of fuel we were getting from oil stored up over millions of years, millions of years ago, becomes uneconomic so we're supposed to strip the biomass from the surface to make up for it? I find it scary as hell that there are people working on this.
I saw somewhere, a calculation of how many thousands of years of sun and biomass we use a year in the form of oil. It's like a savings account - you can put in $5 a a day and you save and save and save, and then after 50 years or something you decide to start binging at $50 a day. This is what modern "civilization" is doing with the Earth's oil savings account.
And no, Americans don't care about children dying in slave labor camps so Starbucks will have chocolate bars for sale, or likewise children dying in labor camps so "coltan" (columbium-tantalum ore) can be dug up, by hand, to make the tantalum capacitors in our electronic products, or any of this stuff. I'm typing away on a computer just full of tantalum caps and eating a chocolate bar while I'm doing it. I'm a good Amurrikan I don't care. So, this is why it all needs to come crashing down. The crashier the better as far as mother earth, living things, and little children (better to not be born or die quickly than die slowly in a labor camp) everywhere.
The animal makes fertiliser while making the CO2, and the plants recycle it all with solar power. By using too much biofuel, you screw up that balance, depleting topsoil. If you use algae > biofuel, you screw up the seas the same way.
Good point. A gallon of gasoline has what, 30,000 calories? Are we really going to grow fifteen times everyone's nutritional needs in biofuels just for the morning commute?
The prospect of a low energy future isn't what scares me. The fact is we could live quite comfortably on far less energy than we do. What scares me is how a low energy future will be managed. Will we live in low energy eco-villages, or will "they" starve so we can drive (or maybe the other way around)?
In answer to my own question, I'd like to share a story from the latest Earth Day.
A friend of mine that was watching the biofuels booth wandereed off, and a sudden gust of wind was blowing the booth down and scattering the literature. I staked it back up and collected the pamphlets, when a nice looking, middle class couple came up to ask me about biofuels.
Since I was the only one around, I gave them my own schtick, that you can buy a "cracker," or biofuels refinery, for $4 - 7K through REal Goods, and get all the used cooking oil you wanted from Burger King. But once other people started to get into the act, Burger King would start to charge for their waste oil.
Then I said that in the longer run, biofuel markets would buy up the cooking oils from the third world, and they'd really start to starve.
After a pause, ne of them looked at the other and said "I'm glad we hung onto that diesel Volkswagen."
The other smiled and nodded, and they walked off, looking quite contented -- even happy.
It was like being in a Dilbert cartoon. Perhaps this is a parable for our age.
Yes, like what someone wrote here about a week ago, making a joke based on Soylent Green, "You mean this fuel's made of people? Like brown people? Whay-hey! Fill 'er up, Jack!"
This kind of behavior started with the Agricultural Revolution, people are ugly but they got REALLY ugly when farming was invented. That's when you got feast/famine cycles, desertification, and killing off every man woman and child of the other tribe because their noses are a slightly different shape (hutu-tutsi) but really because there's not enough food to go around.
And yes, the solution for Africa and for everywhere, is to localize. The sooner we hit real depletion and hopefully things really do collapse, the better. Cheap oil is what feeds the IMF, the UN, oil-for-food programs, all the various tentacles of beast. The modern international trade system makes it possible for people to exploit others who are thousands of miles away, and they're out of sight, out of mind.
Remember that a lot more food lipid is already produced outside Africa and Asia. Increasing supply there for food, but increasing supply even more in EU and US for food and fuel can improve food intake everywhere. It's just that most of the biodiesel will be in the wealthy countries. The way most of the oil and gasoline is in wealthy countries today.
We haven't been able to distribute food equally around the globe when we have had cheap oil for 100 years. Why expect this to change when oil is scarce? This is not a technical problem. It is a political one, without technical solution.
Awhile back I was in a store, and I saw a young man and his wife. She was beautiful, and he was about 25, with huge sholders, arms as thick as my legs, and generally someone who looked like they could take on the world. They were buying a T-shirt with a picture of Bush and a gas pump on it that had the quote "Taking it up the gass". They seemed like nice people, and but when they made a joke about the shirt there were undertones of real suffering. As they walked away from the counter I noticed the man had one leg.
Now as I see my friends go off to war, as I see the suffering in Darfur I think, "all for oil". Yet every week I'm at the pump, filling up.
The huge casualties among mostly innocent, women and children and the old, etc., and things like the leveling of Falluja don't bother Americans.
This is probably why the big permenant bases are being built and the HUGE embassy. Nice safe places for Americans to work, and from which to issue orders to the mercenaries.
I've been following biofuels on various websites for some time now - with a focus on cellulosic ethanol rather than corn with its poor EROEI. But there is one twist I haven't seen yet: paper manufacturing technology as the foundation for cellulosic biofuel manufacturing. Paper companies are already into processing cellulose in a big way; they already digest pulp and refine various by-products - some of which they use for process power.
Plus paper manufacturers already deal with commercial scale issues - moving huge amounts of materials, environmental protection, optimizing plant size versus distances from raw materials, etc.
There are some damn knowledgeable people discussing cellulosic ethanol in theoildrum and elsewhere, so it really puzzles me why paper manufacturing technology is not mentioned...
That's not what has happened historically. Due to the marginal EROI, as fossil fuels become more expensive, ethanol becomes more expensive due to the large input of fossil fuels. I have posted a link to a Nebraska government site that shows for the past 20 years, ethanol has consistently been more expensive than gasoline on the spot market, and has risen and fallen in lock-step with gasoline. That's the thing so many people don't seem to understand. Unless you can substantially improve the EROI, or use a fuel source that does not rise with the price of oil (coal, for example, but it has its own baggage) then higher oil prices don't make ethanol more economical.
My point here is that yes ethanol and biodiesel are positive EROEI.
That's situation dependent. Nebraska, for example, has a marginal EROI due to the need to irrigate the land. If you make ethanol in Nebraska and ship to the coast, your EROI is probably not >1.0. You can look at the USDA studies and calculate this for yourself. When people quote EROI numbers, they are quoting an average for the highest yielding corn states. Even among those states, some have a far worse EROI than the average.
RR
I totally agree with you and used to think that ethanol and biodiesel could never compete. And I am certain that biofuel can never replace current petroleum liquid fuels volume, only supply some liquid fuel when petroleum gets very scarce. I live in Iowa and almost nothing is irrigated. I still have doubts about ethanol from corn but as long as it is subsidized it makes people money.
For biodiesel, soybeans don't require such high rates of nitrogen making them less input intensive than many crops. In addition a farmer can run biodiesel through his equipment to plant the next generation crop. So closing the loop on biodiesel means that the cost of biodiesel going forward could be determined primarily by the cost of making biodiesel. Since each soybean multiplies itself 100's of times using the sun there is a theoretical geometric progression for cost reduction. But ALL petroleum has to be taken out of the equation before you can do the calculations. It is difficult to seperate energy from cost when the two sources are intertwinned in the market. Even then it makes my head hurt trying to account for all the costs and co-products from farm though liquids back to farm!
... why isn't there a soybean biodiesel lobby to fight the corn ethanol lobby?
One variable this year is that there may be a late season drought (August time frame) that will put water stress on a crop in the midwest. Corn has done most of the grain filling (growth) by mid August but almost all the soybean pods are filled right until early September. For that reason an August hot dry spell would really hurt soybeans but have almost no effect on corn yields. This is all on non irrigated land, which is western Iowa east to the mountains.
So this year lots of farmers in my state are getting lots of corn acres in early as a hedge against drought. So corn acres might be up a little bit even though a nice premium expected on beans. Farmers are living calculators when it comes to risk management.
Last thought on crops in the midwest. Corn and beans are often grown together and in rotation to each other for lots of reasons. The biggest is that you can use the same equipment to plant and harvest, just swap out combine heads and planters. Typically about 2/3 of row crops in Iowa is corn and 1/3 soybeans. Other states have different ratios plus other small grains thrown in. Each farmer makes his own calculations so the market really has to send a strong signal before everyone plants a lot more beans nation wide. Too much of any one crop causes over supply, a drop in prices, and no one makes any money.
Biodiesel: King of Alternative Fuels
I firmly believe that between biodiesel, GTL, CTL, and ultimately BTL, we are eventually destined to have a diesel economy.
RR
There are a lot of concepts being hyped which have no real potential for ever replacing petroleum, and some of them compete with others for feedstocks (e.g. cellulosic ethanol vs. gasification BTL). Unless we can get several billions of tons of biomass per year, there's no way these things can make much of a dent (and we need far higher yields than 26 gallons per ton - like 3 times that). I am beginning to wonder if they aren't being pushed by coal and oil interests to guarantee that they get every last cent out of us that they can.
RR