I have a few friends who are much smarter than I.
Here’s a question from a physicist answered by an engineer that explains why I am so fortunate.
From Dr. Hayden (Cork), physicist and publisher of The Energy Advocate to Sel Graham Petrol Engineer/Attorney.
Feb 16, 2014, at 6:40 PM, Howard (Cork) Hayden wrote:
Quite apart from the notion of CO2 emissions is whether there is any point whatsoever in biofuels (Graham: ” The government seeks to replace oil with biofuel.”)
The attached article from C&E News lays out what the productivity is for various biofuels, and what you need to get the results. Where the article fails is in doing the obvious — finding out how MUCH ENERGY you get HOW FAST on HOW MUCH LAND AREA. (Big deal. almost nobody has the good sense to do the obvious. When you use stupid units, you get nowhere.) The Letter to C&E News does the translation from tons of dry matter per year into watts per square meter. See especially the pasted-in problem on the left, and take heed!
Cheers,
Cork
From Sel to Cork,
I did that many years ago. I thought those issues were so old and obvious, they were dead issues. Yield and crop land are limiting factors. Corn ethanol yield is the highest yield with about 450 gallons per acre. There is an estimated 790 million acres of corn crop land in the United States. But, Americans will not allow two-thirds of the corn crop to go for ethanol and only one-third of the corn crop to go for food.
Cellulosic ethanol is ethanol made from anything other than corn, such as from switchgrass, poplar tree chips, sugar cane, palm oil and soy beans. Switchgrass yield is up to 1,150 gallons per acre. It would require 206.8 million acres of switchgrass crop land to replace current oil demand. This is a crop area of 323,000 square miles, more than the size of Texas and Louisiana. The US does not have that much switchgrass crop land. [Note the Range Fuels disaster.]
Poplar tree chips yield about 1,500 gallons per acre. Some 157 million acres or 245,098 square miles of poplar forest would be required each year to replace current oil demand. This would be an annual poplar forest area the size of California and Utah. The US does not have that much area in poplar tree forest to be cut down annually. Even if it did, the forests would not grow back each year.
Sugar cane yields up to 800 gallons per acre. Sugar cane would require 294 million acres or 459,300 square miles, an area the size of New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and Colorado. The US does not have that much sugar cane crop acreage.
Palm oil biofuel yields 650 gallons per acre. It would require a crop area of 361 million acres or 564,516 square miles, nearly the size of Alaska, to replace current oil demand. This is not possible.
Soy biofuel yields 50 gallons per acre. If the entire US was planted in soy, annual production would be only 2.9 billion barrels, about half of current oil demand. Soy should not be considered for biofuel.
Although the algae-to-oil scheme is not actually a biofuel per se, it should be discussed. Algea yield is 2,000 gallons of fuel per acre per year. Replacing the US oil demand with algea would require a chemically-controlled tank of 180,469 square miles. That would be a chemically-controlled tank one and a half times the size of California, our 3rd largest state. The US does not have that much area upon which to put a chemically-controlled tank.
Sel
John,
I hold a BSc degree in civil engineering and had a busy professional life as founding partner of a consulting engineering firm. A substantial proportion of the chemical and petrochemical capacity of Brazil was designed, commissioned and put on stream by it.
In retirement for the past twenty years, I have supported a family owned manufacturing company that has become a major player in the farm machinery business in Brazil. See http://www.montana.ind.br.
My personal contribution to structural engineering is shown at http://www.neubert.net, under the heading: Platonic spheres/ Geodesic spheres, fullerenes, virus/ Honeycomb spherical figure/ Ditchfield.
My address is alan.neil@lexys.com.br
Robert, I agree with all of your points but they miss the real crux of the debate. Should taxpayers be forced to foot the bill for currently inefficient or ineffective technologies while we wait for them to become profitable? Electric cars have been the next big thing for over 100 years now. Maybe the biofuels will do better and maybe they won’t. Should the federal government be the ones to pick and choose which technologies we spend our money researching? It’s a question of opportunity cost. What other technologies are being suppressed because of the current focus on ethanol? Imagine if the federal government had decided to support DC over AC at Edison’s behest. Will the relevant industries be motivated to improve their technologies if they are artificially made profitable by government interference? Most importantly, how long should the nation continue to throw good money after bad before demanding a return on investment or pulling out?
If you truly feel that a biofuel company has a big and bright future than I encourage you to invest your own money, but I’d rather not invest mine.
Doing some research to show you what I was talking about, I learned something. I was always told that it was tritium that made the hydrogen bomb. I learned today that a 50/50 deuterium/tritium mix is used. And the pursuit of controlled fusion for energy production is with that 50/50 mix as well. From what I gather from a few minutes on duh interweb, D-T is doable, and it produces significantly more energy that T-T fusion.
This still leaves a problem for Sir Ditchfield’s theory that we’ll get energy from deuterium. Sourcing the required tritium is far more complicated. We get it from neutron bombardment of lithium targets in nuclear reactors.
Leave me in the back of the classroom; I like to heckle.
Reblogged this on pdx transport.
Let me relieve your of your delusions.
Biofuels do not make any sense because they fail to deliver on the promise. They take and don’t give. Simple and dispositive.
When ever, will carbon based energy deliver from biological sources ever–THAT MEANS EVER–LIKE FOREVER–DELIVER ENERGY THAT IS COMPARABLE TO FOSSIL FUEL ENERGY PRODUCTION.
You, my friend, are living in a mythical world where good intentions produces real results. The real world demands that when you burn or treat or fire something that is supposed to be a source of energy–you better damn well produce some energy that is proportionate to the effort to extract.
I would suggest, for your consideration that burning non fossil fuel may make you feel good, but it is inefficient and bound to be STUPID.
If you don’t understand that, you understand nothing.
I am generally called a skeptic because I do not buy into the irrational hyperbole around climate, or warming, or even energy…
BUT, the argument your friend makes is flawed in the same way (but not magnitude) that arguments about peak oil were flawed – that is they fail to take into account the advance of technology:
1) Biofuel doesn’t have to replace fossil fuel to be effective. It can supplement. Eventually we can make fuels out of what is considered waste today. Just replacing a few percent of imported oil may have large benefits to price (demand versus availability price curve) sometime in the future (assuming demand outpaces yields on world markets).
2) Yields of biofuel crops will likely increase as genes are tinkered with and processes (and catalysts) improve.
3) Prices of Biofuels will drop as the technology matures.
I do not advocate price fixing, or incentives, or any government intervention of any kind. I just point out this is how technology and markets generally behave if left alone. I argued 15 years ago the exact same points on the decline of oil – I predicted technology would completely turn the curve on its head as prices rose and extraction technology improved. I see no reason biofuel will not be a player in the energy portfolio in 10 to 20 years.
Gamecock, do your really understand deriving energy from tritium and deuterium and such? If you do, please go to the head of the class.
Can i get some kind of pass for being stupid?
“The limit would be the availability and cost of energy, but with the advent of inexpensive fusion energy from deuterium this becomes a possibility.”
Quite a reach. We can’t even get fusion from tritium. Fusion from deuterium approaches being infinitely harder.
Where do I start. The only thing i can tell you about the club of rome is that a local very smart (Rice Grad ) businessman was very taken by the Lomborg book Skeptical Envinronmentalist that i provided for him and he was turned around on the Malthusian theory of apocalyptic warming.
So I repeat myself, where do we start.
I have no clue what you are about but I know one thing–you understand the insanity of this enviro theory of the world and what is happening to the environment.
I would pay money to be able to interview you and find out what you know.
But instead, i get to find out what you think on some web site. i am lucky.
Keep it up Ditchfield–you are a precious commodity in this debate–someone who knows something, rather than someone who is a slave to convention/political correctness, or worse yet, promoting bad science for a political agenda.
Dear John.
In June 1971 I was invited to a meeting of the Club of Rome held in Rio de Janeiro. It showed the results of a study of the predicament of mankind done by a team of MIT engineers. The team used the computer modelling techniques developed by Prof. Jay Forrester, whose work I knew from published books (Industrial Dynamics, Urban Dynamics). I had a professional interest in the subject because I was then engaged in location studies for large industries.
A dire future was predicted in the study. World population was growing at unprecedented rates and demanding ever increasing quantities of what they labelled “non-renewable resources”. This was not “sustainable”. A limited planet cannot support infinite economic growth, was their message. The book they published in 1972 is called Limits to Growth, of which I got a copy, one of the 12 million distributed by the Club of Rome.
The organiser of the Club of Rome, and sponsor of the study was Aurelio Peccei, an economist and president of FIAT, known for his marketing talent. He knew the value of brands and how they built up. MIT is a good one. The lavishness of the Rio de Janeiro meeting reminded me of the launching of a new model car.
I was unimpressed by the reams of computer printouts. I was then a computer user and I am a Fortran programmer. I was dismayed at the shallowness of the Malthusian reasoning, about a human population doubling at each generation and outstripping the means to support it.
I don’t label Peccei as dishonest, but as deluded by a fixed idea. I met him at my office. He had the grave bearing many associate with a senator of ancient Rome but struck me as a slick salesman, not as a profound thinker. The question that kept recurring in my mind was “would you by a used car from this man?”.
Ditchfield, do you really have that big a brain? Can I wash your car or carry your briefcase? I’m having a hard time here, getting my arms and whatever brain I have around what you have said, my friend. I will have to take notes, but I liked it. Thanks.
INNUMERACY
a,n.ditchfield
Innumeracy is a new word, coined as a companion to illiteracy. To those afflicted by innumeracy, the dozens, hundreds and thousands are mere words. The Innumerate talk about billions and trillions with no concern for what they say and are prone to bad judgment when it comes to large quantities.
A sense of proportion is needed to address issues requiring insight into magnitude. One billion seconds add up to about 32 years. One billion minutes is close to 1900 years, a span of time that takes us back to the Roman Empire at the end of the century of Christ. These facts throw some light on the dim perception of those not endowed with a mathematical background.
All grant that the planet is large, but how large is crucial in many issues. What is the content of the crust of the earth?
One cubic kilometre of the crust weighs 2.7 billion tonnes. A sphere with a circumference of 40 thousand km has a surface of 509 000 000 km². To a depth of 1000 m, the crust holds 1.366 billion billion tonnes:
1 366 000 000 000 000 000 tonnes
.Reckoning with a depth of 100 m, as readily accessible, only knocks off one zero from an astronomical number.
It is unlikely that mankind will ever assay the content of such a vast mass. Diehards will still hold as axiomatic that, ultimately, a finite planet cannot sustain infinite growth. But resources are so great that they may be regarded as infinite when compared to any conceivable human need. Does the innumerate talk about limited non-renewable resources make sense?
Common sense and mathematics make exhaustion of non-renewable resources a concept alien to mining businesses tuned into realities of supply, demand and cost. Consistent records of prices of commodities are maintained by a magazine, The Economist, since the middle of the 19th century. Far from rising in response to growing scarcity, all commodity prices have shown decline in response to abundance and falling costs.
An additional fact is that, ultimately, the planet is subject to the law of conservation of mass. Human consumption never subtracted one gram from the mass of the planet. All the stuff is still around in some form and may be recycled. The limit would be the availability and cost of energy, but with the advent of inexpensive fusion energy from deuterium this becomes a possibility.
How much? Each cubic meter of seawater contains about 102.8 x 10 ²³ atoms of deuterium with a mass of 34.4 grams. It holds the equivalent to the heat combustion of 269 tonnes of coal, or of 1360 barrels of crude oil. The world resource of seawater’s deuterium is around a billion times greater than the known fossil fuel reserve.
Quantification reveals a clash of two mindsets set apart by a chasm of understanding. The innumerate camp resorts to acts of faith in experts – and soothsayers they are incapable of spotting. Those with background in hard science don’t care about beliefs. Engineers use Euclidean geometry because its propositions stand demonstrated, not because they believe in Euclid. Richard Feynman said that science is a belief – in the ignorance of experts. The hard science people are trained to mistrust all doctrines and think for themselves. Getting unbeleivers to believe in a consensus of soothsayers is akin to referring an obscure point of a theological dispute to an irreverent atheist.
Quoting a scientific consensus in peer reviewed periodicals as the stamp of approval by higher authority hardens opposition to a suspect cause. Consensus forming is a political process that has no place in science, always open to inquiry and addition of new layers of knowledge. Who peer-reviewed the work of Isaac Newton? Nobody: Newton has no peer. Einstein over fifty years wrote five hundred articles, none of them peer-reviewed. Is Relativity Theory invalid because it lacks approval by self-appointed authorities?