Biofuel

There is a growing body of evidence that Biofuels from cultivated crops are not the environmentally friendly alternative to fossil fuels that they were once thought to be.

Several studies are listed below, but a very comprehensive April 2009 blog post compares data from several sources.  This is not light reading, be prepared to concentrate!

• April 15 2009 Growing plants to make electricity is a more efficient and environmentally sound way to power vehicles than biofuels, according to a study meant to spark a debate over energy policy.
  
  The study's authors modeled how far different classes of cars could go based on the available energy from a unit of land and found that bioelectricity--burning biomass to make electricity--far outperforms ethanol.
  
  The paper, published  April 15 in Science, found that bioelectricity delivered 81 percent more distance per unit area of crop land than ethanol. Greenhouse gas emissions per area of land were 100 percent less than cellulosic ethanol.
  

  
  Liquid fuels have one clear advantage over electric vehicles in that refueling is far faster. Also, internal combustion engine cars can be converted relatively cheaply--estimated at about $100--to run both gasoline and ethanol.
  
  "If the goal is to have more of those gallons come from renewable sources rather than imported oil, fuels like ethanol are the only technologies that are having an impact today," Matt Hartwig, a representative for the Renewable Fuels Association, an ethanol trade association, told Scientific American. (Click here for PDF of results.)

• December 10, 2008: The best ways to improve energy security, mitigate global warming and reduce the number of deaths caused by air pollution are blowing in the wind and rippling in the water, not growing on prairies or glowing inside nuclear power plants, says Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford."The raw energy sources that Jacobson found to be the most promising are, in order, wind, concentrated solar (the use of mirrors to heat a fluid), geothermal, tidal, solar photovoltaics (rooftop solar panels), wave and hydroelectric. He recommends against nuclear, coal with carbon capture and sequestration, corn ethanol and cellulosic ethanol, which is made of prairie grass. In fact, he found cellulosic ethanol was worse than corn ethanol because it results in more air pollution, requires more land to produce and causes more damage to wildlife.  The full article is Here

• February 7, 2008: Converting corn to ethanol in Iowa not only leads to clearing more of the Amazonian rainforest, researchers report in a pair of new studies in Science, but also would do little to slow global warming—and often make it worse.

  "Prior analyses made an accounting error," says one study's lead author, Tim Searchinger, an agricultural expert at Princeton University. "There is a huge imbalance between the carbon lost by plowing up a hectare [2.47 acres] of forest or grassland from the benefit you get from biofuels."  The article goes on to state it would take 93 years for the use of the biofuels produces on a hectare of land to offset the carbon released into the atmosphere when the land is plowed to grow biofuel crops.  The full article is Here

• September 21, 2007: Growing and burning many biofuels may actually raise rather than lower greenhouse gas emissions, a new study led by Nobel prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen has shown.  The findings come in the wake of a recent OECD report, which warned nations not to rush headlong into growing energy crops because they cause food shortages and damage biodiversity.  The full article is Here

Knowledge is power.  Empower yourself by doing your own research. The Internet is a powerful research tool.  (Just remember to check who is providing the information).