...the bulk of the material. Unless it is very close to the generating plant, the cost of transport negates the benefits.

Of course, that's the same problem that refining ethanol from waste products like wood chips creates. It can't be done on a large scale because the source material must be close to the refinery, and the sheer volume disallows that on a large scale. In the case of wood chips and waste products the material is bulky and not very energy dense.

Corn is a denser product and more easily transported. However, while there is potentially a small increase in the amount of energy produced from corn, most advocates do not include all energy inputs into the equation. As in, the cost of making a tractor, the tires, etc. (When you wear them out, they have to be replaced.)

I did inhale.

To understand the effects of biofuel use, the entire lifecycle must be considered, including the manufacture of inputs (e.g. fertilizer), crop production, transportation of feedstock from farm to production facilities, and then biofuel production, distribution, and use.

...

While the six studies compared here are very similar, each uses slightly different system boundaries. To make the results commensurate, we adjusted all the studies so that they conformed to a consistent system boundary. Two parameters, caloric intake of farm workers and farm worker transportation, were deemed outside the system boundaries and were thus set to zero in the adjusted versions. (These factors are very small and the qualitative results would not change if they were included.) Six parameters were added if not reported: embodied energy in farm machinery, inputs packaging, embodied energy in capital equipment, process water, effluent restoration, and coproduct credit.

They say that even in the dead of a Yellowknife winter, workers at the old Con mine on the edge of the city used to come up from the depths dressed in T-shirts and shorts due to the heat of the bedrock.

Now the northern capital is considering using that heat to extract a different kind of gold from the defunct mine - cheap, greenhouse gas-free energy to warm its buildings on frigid Arctic nights. Early in 2008, Yellowknife will begin studying what could eventually become Canada's first large-scale geothermal heat plant.

``We've got heat resources below our community,'' said Mark Henry, the city's energy co-ordinator. ``We just have to come up with a way to move it.'' Yellowknife is ideally positioned to take advantage of geothermal energy, said Mory Ghomshei, a University of British Columbia engineering professor who's been pushing the idea since 1988.

``We've been working on that for the last 25 years, waiting for the right time and the right place,'' said Ghomshei, who has already completed one report on the project for the city and is expected to bid on a feasibility study.

Geothermal energy is heat created by pressure deep within the earth. Temperatures rise 20 to 30 degrees per kilometre of depth, said Ghomshei, and the Con mine reaches down 2.5 kilometres.
More

using geothermal for many years and is looking to expand:

http://www.pge.com/news/news_releases/q2_2007/070510a.html

the local utility burned mill waste from logging operations to generate electricity and provide steam to heat downtown businesses. But the decline of commercial logging in the Pacific Northwest has doomed the operation, which is now purchasing more power from Bonneville and burning fossil fuels to meet its needs.

But even in its heyday, it was waste chips and bark from the mills that served as fuel. On-site logging waste was piled into huge slash piles and burned in place--just too expensive to haul what's largely water from a mountainside or deep ravine. Consider, for example, that a tree is felled, limbed and bucked high up on a hillside and either carried by suspended cable or dragged using a choker and cable setup to the decking and loading site, leaving the waste where the tree fell.

Some of the larger commercial loggers chip their on-site waste when practical, but leave it to rot. Smaller operations still burn slash piles.

...ethanol. (Except for drinking). It's in favor of good ratios of (dollar value of inputs):(dollar value of outputs) that alcohol fuels can provide (plus the fact that the tech is here now).

(And BTW, the Berkeley study has a good explanation of why the ratios can be deceiving.)

aren't the only ones that matter. Energy ratios matter more in the long run. You can't run a modern society on 2:1 energy ratios. Ethanol is part of a solution, but imo, it's a small part of it unless you can get a much better ratio.

Not when all costs are factored in.

I've seen many businesses fail when some accountant tells people how much it costs to operate. In the real world, things cost more to do than estimates suggest. And I am not just talking dollars here. Not all energy inputs are considered in most estimates.

(As an example: in the world of training Thoroughbreds to race, low level trainers are always broke. They figure their expenses. So much for feed. So much for shavings. I pay the groom this much, the gallop boy that much so my cost is this. Then they set their rates. But they forgot that they have to replace tack. That they spend gas driving back and forth from home to work and also hauling horses to the races. Even if they charge for the hauling, they forget that they're wearing out their vehicle. You'll hear--I was doing good until my tires blew out. You wouldn't believe how much it costs...)

However, one overlooked part of the equation for the plus column is that the grain left over after the fermentation process is still valuable as an animal feed, and perhaps even for other uses.

I did inhale.

The Berkeley paper (which is basically an examination of 6 other studies, normalizing and recalculating) talks about why ratios are a problem. All of these techniques yield liquid fuel and energy rich solid outputs. Some subtract the solids from the inputs (looks like it makes sense - you can burn it to power the refining), some add it to the outputs, some ignore it (including Pimental - the one who said ethanol was a net loss).

Now try that with switch grass. More solid fuel than liquid (in joules). Subtract it from inputs, you get a negative ratio. Ignore it and you get a terrible ratio. Add it to outputs, and you get like 4:1 or 8:1.

that's why I front paged it. ;)

...(particularly from corn) is that it's here now, and has caused the development of the flex-fuel vehicle. A crappy first step, but if we take it we can leave the crappy part behind. If you don't take it, you're stuck with the crap.

But I don't know why you have to blame biofuels for current agricultural practices. If you eat anything remotely resembling a typical American diet, you are contributing to these problems. We already grossly overuse corn in our own diets and the diets of our livestock.

Pimentel (who is cited by your link) is in favor of reducing the population of the US to 40 to 100 million. Not sure why he doesn't take the obvious step and use the 20+ billion pounds of biomass thus created to generate fuel.

Our dumps, sewers and septic tanks are overflowing with waste biomass.

A fuller context for that quote would be, if agriculture and related systems were practiced sustainably, as they one day must be, there will be no such thing as "waste biomass". Particularly in a world without fossil fuel-based fertizers, whatever is not eaten or otherwised used directly must go toward rebuilding the soil.

Clearly we are not anywhere near that point now, and so biofuels from "waste" organic materials do make sense on an interim basis. But even as such, they will not scale up to be a large-scale replacement for fossil fuels.

...replacement for fossil fuels right now; we need to compete with fossil fuels. We need to open the door.

We eventually need to replace fossil fuels, but there's no reason it has to be replaced by only one thing (and, of course, we can get a whole lot smarter about how we use energy). Most of the promising technologies are 10 or 15 years out before they get into wide use. And if we keep imagining problems and betting on silver bullets, they'll stay 10 to 15 years out.

Brazil's been doing this for 30 years. They seem to still be with us.

In addition to very favorable growing conditions, one of the very significant differences between sugar cane and corn is that cane fixates atmospheric nitrogen:

http://www.p2pays.org/ref/35/34080.pdf

that replacing current gasoline consumption in the US with ethanol from corn would mean more than doubling the current total acres of cropland under cultivation. This was assuming that the additional acres would be as productive as the land currently being farmed. This is not a good assumption. The environmental consequences of trying to do this would be severe.

Of course, we shouldn't be feeding corn to livestock; we shouldn't be eating so much meat; yadda, yadda ,yadda. But replacing current gasoline consumption is a huge undertaking and there will be consequences.

I've seen ethanol production in Brazil. It's done with sugar cane, which is much more efficient than corn. And it's done very intensively. The cane is planted so thick that you can't see 3 feet into a field. Some of it is planted on hillsides that are so steep that it looks like it would be quite difficult to walk on them. As you reach the top of a hill, often all you can see for miles is cane planted in fields that come so close to the highway that you can almost reach out the bus window and touch it. It's hard to believe that the soil can withstand this kind of cultivation for very long, especially when the biomass not used for ethanol production is burned in the fermentation process.

Brazillians drive much less per capita than we do. I'm sure they are trying hard to catch up. I hope they don't. Sugar cane production is one of the forces driving the expansion of agriculture into the rain forest. Planetary ecosystem services are being compromised as a result.

If you imagine cities along the Amazon to be lush tropical paradises, forget it. The cities and towns along the (lower) Amazon that I have seen are hot, dusty and treeless (except for some very small rich parts of town.) They are definitely not in danger of being overgrown with tropical vegetation. Once you cut down a clearing in the jungle, you don't have to worry about it growing back.

and based on a strawman assumption.

Sugarcane doesn't deplete soil. The Native Americans who showed the Puritans how to cultivate corn tried to tell them you can't grow it more than twice before you have to let the land go fallow. The point still hasn't gotten across. It's a terrible crop.

Also pressing on the rainforest: logging, cattle, mining. It used to fashionable to hate Ray Kroc for cutting down rainforests so he could raise beef. Now that honor goes to ethanol, and we hate Ray Kroc for the biodiesel, er, trans-fats in his fries. The more things change...

From sugar cane.

I did inhale.

That's because corn is more than just sugar. It contains minerals and protein in addition. Sugarcane is mostly pure sugar but the plant has to contain minerals and protein or it wouldn't grow. Sugar can be made from CO2 from the air but no plant can photosynthesize without iron, magnesium, copper, manganese, fixed nitrogen, etc. When the plant material is harvested and burned the fixed nitrogen and some of the minerals are lost, even if the ash is spread back on the land. And then there are the erosion and compaction issues that inevitably accompany planting and harvesting a crop.

I read that if all the arable land in the world was used for ethanol production it would only replace half the petroleum we burn.

We already consume all the food the world produces so as acres of land devoted to food production are taken out of production to produce ethanol, more people starve.

Profitable? Yes. To some.

Here's Fidel Castro's take on the subject.

I did inhale.

800 million or so people go hungry. It's not because the world doesn't grow enough food. Just think how rich you'd be if we were anywhere close to the margin.

a fifty day supply of wheat world-wide at the moment. The price of wheat on the future's market recently went over $10/bushel.

A drought in the Central US this year and you'll see worldwide famine in '08.

We may be closer to that margin than you expect.

I planted 300 acres of wheat--it's up and growing--but once again, we're getting dry in South Texas. Recently entered stage one drought conditions.

Of course, considerably over half the cultivated land in our region is slated for industrial corn. Farmers farm to fail around here. Pays better than actually growing food. (I guarantee you that if it weren't for subsidies, you'd see very few acres of corn going into the ground considering how dry our soil is. The only large scale farmer I have much respect for has already decided to plant cotton which is much more drought resistant.)

...(farming to fail, rescuing obsolete or mismanaged business) get subsidized so consistently and the right things (new ideas, experimentation, conservation) so rarely that I have to believe the political process of providing subsidies is ass-backwards.

Biofuels may well force us to confront the choice of eat-or-drive long before oil does. But that could be a good thing, because by the time oil forces the choice it's too late for either.

I was also talking only about gasoline, not oil consumption. I'll try to find where I posted that. I did provide sources for my numbers.