Unintended Consequence: Biofuels = Rising Food Prices
 

In this article: The end of cheap food (Economist.com) it says:

Always the unintended consequences that get ya.

.
A third of the corn harvest? I had no idea it was so high!
But in the thread on Alternative Energy, I expressed concern over just such a development.

Equally disturbing is the fact that it takes a four quarts of Diesel to get five quarts of ethanol.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/bu...hanolside.html
Not to mention the amount of land that will need to be plowed under so we can fuel our cars with food...

Who Killed the Electric Car?
 

The real reason this is such a concern is that efficient biofuel crops like hemp are illegal. Corn is probably the most inefficient biofuel crop, however some profitable by-products are extracted from the manufacturing process. For example, "high fructose corn syrup" is a digestive excretion of the bacteria that processes the corn. As we all know, "corn syrup" is an ubiquitous food product (even though it is poison) and therefore a very lucrative by-product of corn ethanol. As corn ethanol becomes more prevalent, we can expect more health problems from Corn Syrup fed to an unsuspecting population. Health problems that taxpayers will end up paying for.

Another reason that high-grade crops are favored by industry is because the seed supply is easily controlled by Big Agribusiness, like Cargill, ADM and Monsanto. Low grade crops like switchgrass and rapeseed are hard to control (ie, patent). As we all know, a corporate monopoly is better than some farmer growing a resource on the family farm. As a result, American consumers are under a Corporate Tyranny.

Watch the movie Who Killed the Electric Car? and you will get an idea of how corporate greed has suppressed alternative energy.

Oh, my. The corn - hog ratio is going to be skewed for a while.

www.animalgenome.org/edu/PIH/119.html

Here's another good article:
- http://opinionjournal.com/weekend/ho.../?id=110009587

Note the comments on the complexity of producing ethanol from switchgrass.

See also: http://securingamerica.com/ccn/node/4932 for a good discussion on the pros and cons of switchgrass.

I liked this quote: "making ethanol from corn is a process by which a certain amount of energy in the forms of natural gas and diesel fuel are used to create an equivalent amount of energy in the form of ethanol, with the primary output being money from government subsidies."

Old news. If there is a way forward with biofuels, it is using methods such as mass producing it with algae, which will not compete with food production.

The benefit of bio-fuels, specifically ethanol and biodiesel, is that they will work in existing automobiles with little or no modification. It is not an ideal long term solution, but as a short term solution, biofuels appear to be second only to significant conservation efforts.

In the long term, we need not only a new energy source, but also a new technologies to use that energy more efficiently than the internal combustion engine.

There lies a big rub. IC engines are (roughly speaking) between 25% and 33% efficient (1/5 to 1/3 of the energy in the fuel does useful work, and the rest is approximately split between heating water and heating exhaust). The high end figures are for very large supercharged diesels like those in a ship propulsion system.

The big waste with cars is the bums in seats factor -- miles per unit of fuel consumed per person moved, which is why public ground transportation is a big win -- it increases the per-person-moved factor.

Conventional (fuel burning, water cooled) electric power plants are about 33 to 36% efficient (with the remainder roughly split between hot water and hot gas), so charging an electric car's batteries from the power utility's lines is a rather small improvement in fuel burned somewhere to move your car. What it does is to concentrate the pollution in one place (and in the case of California, not in California) while it is consumed in another.

As an aside, heating your home electrically is a really big loser. Most home furnaces are 80 - 90% efficient at transferring energy from the fuel to the home with the remainder going up the flue as heated gas. Electric heat therefore consumes substantially more fuel than simply burning it yourself. Modern heat pumps are better -- they consume about half the energy of pure resistive heating when they're heating but are big losers when they're cooling.

My point (if it isn't obvious) is that burning something is the problem, not where you burn it or the fuel you burn.

Unless, of course, the source is renewable and non-polluting. Such as hydroelectric power or geothermal. Norway may be a major oil producer, but for our domestic power we run everything almost exclusively on hydropower.

Which really makes the problem one of size: vehicle size, home size, and the size (length) of your commute. Americans love their SUVs, their 3000+ square foot homes, and they commute dozens of miles to work. My guess is that they're not going to give up any of those until the system collapses.

Yes, whether one burns hydrocarbons or carbohydrates, one is still putting carbon into the atmosphere. The problem with burning hydrocarbons instead of carbohydrates is that by burning hydrocarbons, carbon is released that had long since been removed from the earth's environmental cycles. Burning carbohydrates does not share this problem, since the carbon is already "in circulation," if you will. The carbon that is released is the same carbon which the plant had previously absorbed.

This is beneficial because it makes it MUCH easier and less expensive to clean up the pollution when it is concentrated, compared to when it is released from the exhaust pipes of every car on the road. Even if the actual power usage is not reduced, the ability to concentrate the pollution is an improvement over the current status quo.

The underlined is only true if you're worried about pollution in cities. I thought we were discussing global warming -- in that discussion, it doesn't matter where you burn something.

Yes, it does. By concentrating the pollutants, they are more easily and less expensively cleaned up, which, at a minimum, contributes less to global warming than by burning the same amount of fuel, but neither concentrating or effectively cleaning up the pollution.

If biofuels lead to rising palm-oil prices and junk food manufacturers are forced to find a cheaper and possibly healthier oil which leads to a reduction in obesity which leads to people living longer they would be emitting more carbon over their lifetimes.

According to that Popular Mechanics article, algae farming could produce something like 10000 gallons of fuel per acre per year. Or, since I'm Canadian and like to think in metric, 40000 litres of fuel per year per acre (I know a US gallon is slightly less than 4 litres, but I'm just throwing out a rough calculation).

On the other hand, the current production of crude oil by the top 15 producers is 10 billion litres of oil per day (as of 2006). That's 3.65 trillion litres of oil per year! Thus, by my rough calculation (which assumes that algae oil and crude oil are energy equivalents - I seriously doubt they are!), we would need to dedicate just over 91 million acres to algae oil production in order to match the crude production volume of the top 15 producers.

That is roughly 400 thousand square kilometres of land reserved for algae oil production. The surface area of Earth is approximately 500 million square kilometres. So, according to Popular Mechanics, we only need 0.08% of the Sun's energy hitting the Earth in order to meet the current demand for oil. The total amount of solar energy transferred to the Earth from the Sun annually is 3850 ZJ. So assuming 100% of the energy is transferred to the algae, and not lost to the environment, that is 3 ZJ per year trapped by algae.

Assuming that the energy density of algae oil is equivalent to biodiesel (at 33 MJ/litre and 33% burning efficiency), that means that the annual algae oil production would contain roughly 360 EJ of energy. Given that photosynthesis is only about 6.6% effective in capturing sunlight, this means that 5.5 ZJ of energy would have to be absorbed. 5.5 ZJ != 3 ZJ.

Consider that I assumed that 100% of the sunlight was hitting algae and that I didn't factor in the energy overhead of running these farms. Also consider that all of my numbers came from Wikipedia (if you care to look any of them up), so their veracity is uncertain. Even so, I was quite surprised that the numbers come out on the same order of magnitude. This little gedanken experiment was quite interesting for me :p

I guess the only real question then, aside from questioning my assumptions above, is how true is the claim that 10000 gallons of algae fuel can be produced per acre per year?

If we look for a single magic bullet, we'll be looking for a very long time. The solution will have to be multi-faceted. It will most likely require a combination of biofuels, solar, wind, and other energy technologies, some of which may not have even been adequately developed yet, coupled with a healthy dose of energy conservation and energy efficient designs.

Biofuels still offer a few advantages over some other energy options for transportation. One major advantage is that there is little to no modifications necessary to use primarily bio-fuels in vehicles that are already on the road. Rudolph Diesel designed the diesel engine specifically to run on vegetable oil; it's not a new concept.

Tangentially, there was a new development in solar technology recently:
http://www.inl.gov/featurestories/2007-12-17.shtml
Perhaps, alongside continued development in electric vehicles, like the Tesla Roadster,
this can become a new reality sometime in the next century or so…

edit - actually, probably longer than that…

At 165kW (221hp) in a 2-seater roadster, I don't think I would classify the Tesla Roadster as being particularly environmentally friendly. The energy still has to come from somewhere!

IIRC, the Tesla Roadster is intended to offer an electric car that was "sexy" enough for it to appeal to those with lots of money, in order to invest money into electric car technology while such technology is still relatively young and expensive. It is supposed to make environmentally friendly automobile technology more readily available rather than being especially environmentally friendly itself.

It can come from solar, wind, and hydro power, all of which are much better than any internal combustion engine. No two seat sports car is ever going to be as environmentally friendly as a family sedan using the same basic technology, but the Tesla is far more environmentally friendly than an SUV. Even a hybrid SUV can't compete with Tesla's all electric sports car, which according to their site gets the equivalent of 135mpg!

Edit: It's important to note that you won't get the equivalent of 135mpg while doing 0 - 60 in under 4 seconds. ;) Drive it like a normal car though, and you're sure to use less energy than even the best hybrid.

Anyone know if this technology is for real?
- http://www.preignitioncc.com/us/index.htm

Sounds too good to be true! Watch the video, if you have time.

If there's something to it, then we ought to expect it to show up as standard equipment in more and more vehicles, it would seem.

A quick Google came up with lots of advertising and lots of questions but not much independent testing.

Might be a wait and see.

Similar claims were being made for modifications back in the 70s... basically took the fuel line and wrapped it around the exhaust manifold a few times before the line went to the carb. Claim was it would heat the gas to vapor, which would burn more efficiently and thus increase mileage. Never caught on.

This seems to be doing the same thing... i.e. heating the gas to vapor before burning.

I'd definitely wait and see. At best, I think the claims are wildly exaggerated.

That might have worked with a carburetor, but you can't pump vaporized gas through a fuel injector. And even more silly, the article describes it as converting the gasoline to a plasma state. Which means that super-heated gasoline would somehow be introduced to the intake manifold in the presence of oxygen... Now that would be fun to watch!
From a distance!

They have a list of EPA tested devices on this site, with many similar to the PICC, none of which measured up to their claims.

Gasoline-saving products & devices

The bottom line is that there is only so much energy available in a gallon of gasoline if one chooses to consume it in an internal combustion engine. The causes of efficiency loss are quite well known, and current engines are not that far from the efficiency that technology allows within the constraints of providing what the industry thinks that consumers are willing to buy. As dumb as the auto industry has tended to be, they are not that dumb.

While it is certainly possible to optimize things around the edges by improving efficiencies related to mixture, or ignition, and such, improvements of this type tend to be incremental, i.e., on the order of fractions of a per cent, or, at most, a few per cent.

I find any claims of dramatic efficiency improvement, e.g., tripling or more of current mileage as in this case, hard to swallow. Confirmation of claims like this via a controlled test from reputable, independent sources would obviously be sufficient to reconsider my skepticism, but I don't think those confirmations will be forthcoming any time soon.

I agree with Pete. The efficiency of a gasoline engine is related to the combustion temperature of the fuel which is primarily a function of chemistry, the cooling water temperature, the compression ratio of the engine (which is why Diesel wins and superchargers work -- increasing the pressure in the cylinder increases the combustion temperature), and a few other details. Preheating the fuel would have negligible influence on any of them.

Without a completely sealed fuel delivery system, I don't see how it would work. Vapor lock is not generally considered a good thing.

Seems the jury finds PICC to be a hoax?

I'm not competent enough on this topic to reply to the criticisms made by some of you. I hope you've at least looked at the video and not responded to what you "think" they're saying. There are testimonials on the site from users and mechanics. Might be phoney, I know, but you can buy the kit and have it installed with a guarantee of 50% increase in fuel efficiency or your money back. You don't usually see hoaxers doing that.

Should it turn out there's something to this, it would be a good stock to own. :)

Phil, go back to their site, there are two parts to this process. The first part is the Hydro assist, the second is the PICC. The PICC isn't even designed yet! They haven't built one of them.

The Hydro assist part is a hydrolysis converter that separates water into hydrogen and oxygen then feeds the two gases into the intake manifold. This is insanity for two reasons: it takes energy to split water molecules, that energy comes from the car's engine and you can't get more energy out of a system than you put into it. It will decrease gas mileage, not increase it!
The second reason is safety, hydrogen and oxygen love to combine in the presence of heat, electricity or even sufficient physical motion. An intake manifold is perfect for all three.

Just for the hell of it, I did sit through the video. Based on common knowledge physics and chemistry, there are fundamental flaws with the concept as described.

The most obvious one involves the claim that water is broken down into hydrogen and oxygen in the converter and is then burned in the engine. Firstly, it takes a non-trivial amount of energy to dissociate water. This energy has to come from somewhere. Simple thermodynamics tells us that the usable energy produced from the "burning" of the hydrogen (btw, oxygen doesn't "burn" but is combined with the hydrogen) will be less than the energy required to produce it in the first place.

If I were on a jury, and absent controlled test results from reputable, independent sources to back this up, my vote is that it's pure BS. In my view, the bottom line is the old "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch" principle.

I take the refund guarantee the same way I take the "guaranteed to make big money in your spare time" schemes so common on the internet today.

Edit: Sherman made the main point while I was wasting my time watching the video.

Vapor lock was a common occurrence in 60-70s US autos if one drove in hot weather and in particularly high altitudes such as Colorado and western New Mexico where steep grades were the norm. The simple solution was to pour a coke bottle of cold water over the fuel pump and let it cool a while, which worked every time. In these cars, the fuel pump was mechanically driven by the engine and was bolted to the block near the bottom.... a good five feet of line before it got to the carbs. Being bolted to the block, the pumps were always at risk of getting too much heat if the engine was running hot.

Never put the system on one of my cars, so can't say for sure vapor lock wasn't a problem for those who did. Had a couple friends who swore the system worked.... in Kansas.

Ahh yes -- pour cold water on the cam-driven, short-block-mounted fuel pump only a short distance from the radiator; brings back memories of actually sacrificing a cold can of beer to that purpose on a boat engine. Those fuel pumps were the ones that occasionally ate the fuel pump membrane, and where changing it was such a PITA.

Yeah, changed a couple of those out. If you're doing it alone it was a constant getting out from under the car to tap the ignition one more time to get the cam in the right spot so you could slip the pump in and bolt it down. It was a big time chore.

Even though some of my friends thought the pre-heated fuel thing worked, I was never convinced. Having overhauled a couple of the old Chevy Rodchester carbs as a kid, I knew the carbs worked basically like a toilet... engine sucked gas, the float would drop opening a valve and more gas would run into the bowl for the engine to suck out. Just like a toilet... and I just couldn't understand how that float would work with a vapor (suspect it didn't). :)