9 ms·

Dedicated biomass is not a good idea

75 points by gk1 4y ago

adastra22 4y ago
Land value tax fixes this.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  There’s no problem LVT won’t fix.
  - asdff 4y ago
    The big one is probably getting individuals to vote to tax themselves out of ownership of property they can't afford to improve
    - eternityforest 4y ago
      Why can't it just be a progressive tax that starts at 0% for the bottom 70% of lot size in your area?
      - asdff 4y ago
        I'm not sure how well that would work or not, but in cities with a housing crisis, the issue is not really people having acreage, but that they have a single family home or some other low usage building on the land at all in a place where there is demand for a lot more housing than what there is.
      - adastra22 4y ago
        It's all still too low. LVT should be 85% of the assessed value of the unimproved land, as a flat tax with no brackets and no controls.
        eternityforest 4y ago
        Wouldn't that be a bit of an issue for low income people, to make it flat?
        adastra22 4y ago
        The core underlying problem is that economic rents are extremely distorting. It is at the root of why we end up with hideous suburban sprawl with no affordable housing, and no walkable downtowns that nobody wants to live in. Taxing land value flips the incentives around and makes it more likely that we get nice, walkable, affordable cities. Because the ideal cost-minimizing strategy is to have clusters of nice high density housing near public transit and mixed-use urban markets, which is largely what people want. But not if you offer exemptions. If you offer exemptions the winning strategy is to build tons of spread out, cramped, single- or two-story residences with most of their land value exempted. But how will people pay their land value tax? Well for the most part, low income people will pay it the same way they currently do: rent. It's the landlord that pays the tax. (And preemptively: no, studies have shown that higher taxes aren't just passed back to the renter. So they'll pay the same rent even if the land value increases.) For other small homeowners, (1) there is expected to be a lot of disparity in land value in an 85% LVT regime. People in desirable places pay high LVT. People on the outskirts pay close to $0 because their land is valued close to $0 (compared to today, at least). And (2) there could be other social welfare programs (e.g. basic income, or unemployment LVT forbearance) which help those in need.
        Spooky23 4y ago
        Usually the explanation is that big high rises with cheap rent will magically appear, and landlords will be unable to raise rents, because LVT magic. So the promise is a scenario like 1970s Bronx. The real answer, which the GOP was able to test the waters on with the SALT cap, is for the federal government to slowly back away from supporting mortgages. 0% down mortgages with rates linked to T-Bills depend on the policy to back mortgages. As the country gets poorer, that is less relevant.
    - nibbleshifter 4y ago
      Define "improve". If I accumulate some land, its becoming a forest. For at least as long as my direct descendants live.
      - adastra22 4y ago
        And if your land is in a highly desirable location and/or contains desirable resources, you end up paying ever increasing property tax to keep it that way.
        nibbleshifter 4y ago
        Y'see, frankly, fuck that. You try do something good for the world (put a forest somewhere, do a bit of rewilding), then that area becomes desirable, then some LVT prick comes along and tries take what's yours so some property developer can flatten it to build magnolia shitboxes. Edit: the LVT people on here remind me of the arseholes who want to replace most of the good public parks in Berlin with housing, lol.
        adastra22 4y ago
        LVT policies tend to end up with more dense urban areas and more wild landscapes, on the whole. It's the current landowner-favoring policies that have resulted in suburban sprawl and car-focused cities. National parks and land trusts are a good thing, but such exemptions ought to be publicly managed since there are societal costs involved.
kfk 4y ago
I am the angel investor of a small startup trying to scale insect larvae production. The idea is to use larvae as a more eco friendly animal feed. I am still collecting numbers, but I was wondering if planting biomass to grow insect protein for humans is a good idea or not, it should be multiples better than growing crops to feed animals as a source of protein. I am just saying, dedicated biomass can mean a lot of different things, no?
- adrian_b 4y ago
  Chicken protein is quite cheap. Divided by the protein content, the price of chicken breast is only 2 to 2.5 times higher than that of beans or lentils. To have any chance on the market, the price per protein content of the insect larvae must be at least twice lower than that of chicken meat. Therefore it must be about the same as for legumes like beans or lentils. To be able to judge whether investing in such a thing is worthwhile, you need a very accurate prediction of the production costs, to determine whether it is possible to match the legumes in price per protein content. I would be very wary about the risk that the estimation of the future production costs might be exceedingly optimistic. Currently some cereals are the cheapest source of proteins suitable for human consumption, but they cannot provide much more than a half of the daily protein intake of a human, because they lack lysine, so they must be combined with a more expensive source of proteins, like meat, legumes, or perhaps insect larvae.
  - dsr_ 4y ago
    Some people object to eating insects. Some object to eating meat. Nearly nobody has an objection to eating legumes (I am ignoring, among other things, people on ultra-low-carb diets, specific allergies, and Ashkenazi Jews during Pesach), so an improved yield of legumes, or a reduction in water usage, or a tolerance for greater temperature extremes, or... would be extremely valuable.
    - belorn 4y ago
      I would think there is plenty of people who objects to eating legumes based on culture and taste. Culture has always been the dominating factor in influencing people to eat different kind of food, and its fairly common for one country to have food that people from other countries wouldn't touch. As a person living in Sweden, we have candy that people from other countries find as torture to eat.
someweirdperson 4y ago
> For each energy source, we pulled out the figure for LUIE (land-use intensity of energy), i.e. the amount of land required to produce a given amount of electricity. Turning bio-mass into electricity comes with a lot of losses. If the desired product is fuel, the numbers for bio-mass are a lot better, and the numbers for all other sources that first produce electricity are a lot worse, because turning electricity into fuel comes with a lot of losses.
- plaidfuji 4y ago
  > turning electricity into fuel comes with a lot of losses. This is true, but when generating fuel, the end goal is usually to move a vehicle X miles. Now that electric cars are nominally competitive with ICE vehicles, the metric should be something more like “land required to drive a truck X miles/year” - and assume the best of either electric vehicle efficiency or ICE efficiency, not force an arbitrary electrical->chemical conversion for the metric’s sake. Biofuels probably wouldn’t look like as much of an outlier as they do here, but I would still wager that they’re among the least efficient options.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    Biofuels would be focused on applications where electrical vehicles would suck, such as aircraft.
    - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
      Tran-oceanic shipping and long haul airplanes are the 2 places where biofuel theoretically has some merit, but it still has the problem that it is about 25% worse than just using fossil fuels.
      - pfdietz 4y ago
        That 25% argument was addressed elsewhere in the comments.
JasonFruit 4y ago
In the US, isn't the main lobbying on behalf of this coming from industrial agriculture that has become addicted to the renewable fuel standard, which mandates that ethanol be added to gasoline, providing welfare for the ethanol industry at the expense of petroleum refiners (and eventually the driving public)? A good first step to end this idea would be to drop the mandate the same way the subsidies and tariffs supporting ethanol production were dropped.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  That will require a constitutional change, as the makeup of the Senate makes it impossible to make such a reform barring a significant economic change. It’s either that or the depletion of aquifers.
  - JasonFruit 4y ago
    I'm afraid you haven't made clear what constitutional change you mean, at least to me. Can you elaborate?
    - adastra22 4y ago
      He's referring to the fact that a bunch of low population states in middle America are the ones that benefit from all those corn-based biofuel mandates, and the fact that every state gets two senators irregardless of population means that these middle states get an oversized influence on the annual farm bill. The constitutional change would be changing the makeup of the senate. (This is what I infer his argument to be. There are a million other ways to solve this problem besides changing the senate.)
andrewmutz 4y ago
Why does this article focus primarily on the land cost of biofuels and ignore other costs? I am not a fan of biofuels, but the article would be much more persuasive if biofuels were 25x more expensive than the alternatives, rather than just 25x worse in land usage
culi 4y ago
Dedicated biomass is indeed a terrible idea, but the usage of what would otherwise be waste products to produce biofuels still benefits from this research
- culi 4y ago
  On that same note, it's crazy to me how much energy and effort we spend on getting rid of what is potentially one of our most valuable resources: manure. Specifically humanure In 18th century Japan for example, landlords often had rights to their tenants manure. "Night soil" became especially valuable as fertilizer prices grew. There have been fights over who is entitled to these biosolids. Even up into the 1980s much of Japan used special vacuum trucks to deliver night soil collections to treatment facilities Contrast that with the West where we spend billions of dollars on sewage systems that often cause ecological harm https://daily.jstor.org/a-history-of-human-waste-as-fertilizer/ https://daily.jstor.org/a-history-of-human-waste-as-fertiliz...
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    That would be a great idea in a world without pathogens. Consider what would happen if there's a nasty prion that survives sewage treatment and then gets absorbed into crops.
    - culi 4y ago
      Why would this same prion not make its way in our ocean or soils with the current sewage system set up? If the treatment fails, I don't see why dumping it in the oceans is safer. The food chain there is much more complex and therefore the prion would be exposed to many more possible hosts. In fact, prion biology shows that exposure from fish is a much greater concern than foodplants https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925443910002139 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092544391...
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
bob29 4y ago
Really beating up a strawman. No one's proposing or implementing "dedicated" biomass. Corn ethanol utilizes the starch from corn, and leaves behind proteins, fats, minerals, and yeast cells which are used as animal feed, where its superior to plain corn. Likewise woody biomass isn't coming from clear cutting forests, its from necessary thinning to keep forests healthy (thats otherwise burned in slash piles) and mill waste thats a byproduct of lumber production.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- snewman 4y ago
  > woody biomass isn't coming from clear cutting forests, its from necessary thinning to keep forests healthy From what I've seen, claims to this effect often turn out to be false. For instance, from https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/a-little-xmas-cheer-for-trees https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/a-little-xmas-cheer-for-...: > ...the world’s largest supplier of wood pellets for power generation ... has long insisted that it doesn’t use big, whole trees, but only uses wood waste, “tops, limbs, thinnings, and/or low-value smaller trees.” It insists it only sources wood from areas where trees will be regrown, and that it doesn’t contribute to deforestation. > As it turns out, Mongabay reporter Justin Catanoso found a management whistleblower who pointed him in the direction of clearcuts that the company was making: Catanoso watched as a feller-buncher machine grappled down a fifty-acre forest and fed the old oaks straight into a chipper, producing tons of wood to be turned into pellets. The whistleblower said that was par for the course: “We take giant, whole trees. We don’t care where they come from. The notion of sustainably managed forests is nonsense. We can’t get wood into the mills fast enough.” > He continued: “The company says that we use mostly waste like branches, treetops and debris to make pellets. What a joke. We use 100% whole trees in our pellets. We hardly use any waste. Pellet density is critical. You get that from whole trees, not junk.”
jasonhansel 4y ago
> each box represents a source of electricity. The higher the box, the more land that source uses. [...] If you look carefully, you might notice that the vertical axis uses a log scale. I think this graph wins the hotly contested "most misleading use of a log scale" award. Anyone glancing at it quickly would vastly underestimate the differences between energy sources.
- sfink 4y ago
  Yeah, I was thinking a linear graph with a scrollbar would emphasize the point a lot better, and then add a toggle for the log scale so you could actually see the data without scrolling. But then you'd need to explain why you're seeing so little and that you need to scroll.
- lukeasrodgers 4y ago
  Based solely on my personal experience, this log scale graph is no more misleading than a typical log scale graph. What in your mind makes it unusually bad? Do you have examples of better log scale graphs?
  - jasonhansel 4y ago
    First, the use of a log-scale seems to serve no purpose. The point is to illustrate that biomass is vastly worse than the alternatives; a comparison between those alternatives is irrelevant. So the log scale obscures the point rather than elucidating it. But secondly: some log scale graphs have unevenly-spaced lines along the Y axis to make the use of a log scale more obvious. This is an example of what I mean: https://www.geol.lsu.edu/jlorenzo/geophysics/graphing/semilog1.gif https://www.geol.lsu.edu/jlorenzo/geophysics/graphing/semilo... On this graph, though, the lines along the Y-axis are evenly-spaced, increasing the confusion. Thirdly: the use of a log scale should be mentioned in the graph's caption, not buried in the text.
    - yuliyp 4y ago
      Do they not teach log scale graphs in math classes any more? The scale visually reading as 10000, 1000, 100, 10, 1 immediately clues readers in to its log-scale nature. I found the graph incredibly clear to read, and it told me what I needed to know about many of the alternative types of electricity generation: which ones are comparable in efficiency, which have larger variances, where those variances overlap and do not overlap, as well as where the differences are large or not. I could see this as a critique of a log-scale graph appearing in a newspaper article or something where the reader is likely to be skimming, but in an persuasive essay readers would probably be more engaged and able to spend time synthesizing the arguments vs just storing information.
pfdietz 4y ago
I think the biggest argument against biofuels is that if they achieved large scale use, it would encourage people to mine biomass from existing forests instead of growing it.
- cbsmith 4y ago
  Existing forests aren't good biofuel sources. You'd be better off mining the oceans, tbh. Neochloris oleoabundans or even industrial rapeseed are just so much more dense sources of fuel...
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    Mining the oceans? How does that work? A forest should be a much denser source of carbon, particularly reduced carbon, than the ocean. CO2 fixed per hectare per year should be much higher in lignocellulose than in seed oils. And if the forest is already there, you don't even have to wait for it to grow. The temptation to strip mine forests will be strong.
    - cbsmith 4y ago
      > Mining the oceans? How does that work? A forest should be a much denser source of carbon, particularly reduced carbon, than the ocean. Algae tend to grow in large clumps, and you can very efficiently filter for them from water. I don't think it's a great strategy, but it's more practical than extracting from forests. > CO2 fixed per hectare per year should be much higher in lignocellulose than in seed oils. Forests are definitely way better for CO2 capture, but we're talking about producing fuel here. I'm speaking in terms of the net energy produced per hectare, so factoring in the energy consumed to extract fuel, industrial rapeseed oil beats the forest every day of the week.
      - pfdietz 4y ago
        I don't know of any algae, anywhere, that are more concentrated sources of carbon than existing trees. Even if we had to grow both sides, algae are still problematic, since separating them from water is apparently quite a difficult problem. Yield of rapeseed in the US in 2020 was 2.16 tonnes/hectare/year. Yields of lignocellosic biomass (dry mass) in the US (miscanthus, eucalypt) is almost an order of magnitude higher. Above ground forest biomass in Guyana: 499 tonnes/hectare.
dec0dedab0de 4y ago
There is one aspect of biomass generators I always thought was overlooked. The process is very similar to making charcoal. If we used wood as a fuel source, heated it enough to release methane and other violitile gases to power a generator, but not enough to release the majority of carbon, that would leave us with charcoal. Instead of trying to extract the remaining energy from the charcoal, we could bury it. Which would sequester the carbon, and be fertilizer. Growing clovers or legumes would add nitrogen. I am sure I have something wrong, and maybe a better answer is to just not do it with dedicated crops as the article suggests. Maybe we could grow corn for food, but cram the stalks into the generator and sequester the remaining carbon?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- habitue 4y ago
  Seems like an idea worth trying to pencil out on paper to see if the numbers are in the right ballpark. A couple of questions I have: How much carbon could be captured this way, vs other carbon capture methods? How are cornstalks etc dealt with today by farms? Maybe they're already doing something efficient with it
- snewman 4y ago
  > Maybe we could grow corn for food, but cram the stalks into the generator and sequester the remaining carbon? This is a thing; it's called "BECCS". You can also sequester the carbon without trying to burn it first; see, for instance, https://charmindustrial.com/ https://charmindustrial.com/.
phas0ruk 4y ago
Well the story is pretty different if we are using waste like animal manure to create fuel.
golemotron 4y ago
Based on the chart, nuclear is the clear winner.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  If you ignore the land needed by the transmission and distribution network. If you include that, the ratio is not nearly as large.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  It's ignoring PAZ (which would give a similar Nuclear+ category about half of PV) and much more importantly is ignoring mining of the >90% of deposits that aren't like cigar lake or ranger which puts it somewhere around coal. Look at how much space a mine like Inkai or Husab 2 takes up for what would be typical of expanding the indistry.
choeger 4y ago
Correct me if I am wrong, but did the author make a calculation error? The number of required energy comes in at the order of 10^20 J or 90000TWh: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=300+quadrillion+BTU+in+TWh https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=300+quadrillion+BTU+in+... but if I multiply the energy return from biofuels with these alleged 1billion hectares of land, I get much, much more energy, billions of TWh: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=582Mwh%2Fm%5E2+*+1billion+hectares++in+TWh https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=582Mwh%2Fm%5E2+*+1billi... So unless there's a mistake somewhere, only a marginal fraction of land would be needed to cover all needs. So what went wrong here? I think it's the MWh per square meter number. 500MWh in PV would be a 500kW solar installation in Germany. I am quite sure you cannot fit that into a square meter. But even if we assume 580MWh per hectare per year, the output from 1billion hectares would be 580000TWh. So there's probably more wrong in that post.
- fsh 4y ago
  Your units are completely off. From the article: > According to Google, the world’s total arable land is about 1.38 billion hectares. Using the biomass LUIE figure of 580 m²/MWh/y, we get a total potential electricity production of 23,793 TWh / year. This is correct: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%281.38+billion+hectares%29%2F%28580+m%C2%B2%2F%28MWh%29%29+to+TWh https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%281.38+billion+hectare...
- snewman 4y ago
  [Author here] The LUIE figure we found for dedicated biomass is 580 m²/MWh/y: 580 square meters to generate one megawatt-hour per year. You multiplied this by hectares, meaning you multiplied area times area. If you want to determine the amount of energy you can produce from a given area (e.g. 1 billion hectares), you need to divide by 580, not multiply by 580.
  - choeger 4y ago
    Ah, it's 1/580 MWh per square meter, I completely misread the unit there. Meter per MWh is somewhat unusual in these discusst.
scythe 4y ago
>“24% more carbon-intensive than gasoline” is not a ringing endorsement for [ethanol fuel]. The US really ought to stop doing this. Ethanol in the current US gasoline supply, as I understand it, is not really an energy source. Rather, the purpose is to increase the octane rating. Other octane additives were added in smaller amounts (tetraethyl lead, methyl tert-butyl ether) but they tended to be persistent pollutants, while 10% ethanol is foolproof and non-polluting. But it's bad for food prices: 40% of the US corn crop is used for ethanol. I could be way off, but that's what I heard.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  It's an indirect way to convert natural gas or coal BTUs into liquid fuel.
SkeuomorphicBee 4y ago
I don't get it, Brazil has been using biofuels (sugarcane ethanol) successfully in large scale since the 70s or 80s. Like a third of the car fleet of the country was ethanol fuelled in the 90s, and all cars since the 00s are dual fuel "flex" motors. All petrol stations have pumps for ethanol and gasoline side by side. And Brazil is no micronation, that is a fleet of millions and millions and millions of cars. So how can something that has been working for so long be unworkable?
- andrewflnr 4y ago
  When they're being careful, they state "dedicated biomass for electricity production", which is... not something I'm aware of anyone doing? Seems more like trying to head off a future bad idea than criticizing something that happens today... again, when they're being careful with their phrasing.
- fsh 4y ago
  Brazil has one of the lowest population densities on earth, less than half of the world average. Even so, sugar cane farming in Brazil is not exactly known for being sustainable. If anything, this example proves the author's point about dedicated biomass being unsustainable at large scale.
Hani1337 4y ago
These numbers were compiled by a mathhead who knows nothing about renewable agriculture meets new technologies. To be clear I'm not saying growing crops to turn them into biofuels is a good idea, but there are plenty opportunities to render the calculations based on arable land and energy output irrelevant.
VectorLock 4y ago
Trying to use biofuel to replace ALL sources of energy sounds pretty silly. Is anybody actually suggesting that? What about how much land would be required to replace the _gasoline_ usage with ethanol? "Each year, one acre of corn produces 551 gallons of ethanol, which is the equivalent of 386 gallons of gas." "According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), Americans consumed 140.43 billion gallons of gasoline in 2015" 363.8 million acres to make enough corn to replace gasoline - not factoring in all the other negative externalities. A little more than 4x land area what the US uses now.
pl-94 4y ago
No one is claiming that 100% of our final energy should come from biomass. In France, the research institute Negawatt has computed numbers when using biomass to fill the gaps when solar panel and wind turbines are not producing electricity. They show we could replace nuclear power only by using current farming wastes (no need to allocate more area to bio fuel). (But they also assume a serious reduction of our current electricity usage)

75 points by gk1 4y ago

adastra22 4y ago

Land value tax fixes this.

Spooky23 4y ago
There’s no problem LVT won’t fix.
- asdff 4y ago
  The big one is probably getting individuals to vote to tax themselves out of ownership of property they can't afford to improve
  - eternityforest 4y ago
    Why can't it just be a progressive tax that starts at 0% for the bottom 70% of lot size in your area?
    - asdff 4y ago
      I'm not sure how well that would work or not, but in cities with a housing crisis, the issue is not really people having acreage, but that they have a single family home or some other low usage building on the land at all in a place where there is demand for a lot more housing than what there is.
    - adastra22 4y ago
      It's all still too low. LVT should be 85% of the assessed value of the unimproved land, as a flat tax with no brackets and no controls.
      - eternityforest 4y ago
        Wouldn't that be a bit of an issue for low income people, to make it flat?
        adastra22 4y ago
        The core underlying problem is that economic rents are extremely distorting. It is at the root of why we end up with hideous suburban sprawl with no affordable housing, and no walkable downtowns that nobody wants to live in. Taxing land value flips the incentives around and makes it more likely that we get nice, walkable, affordable cities. Because the ideal cost-minimizing strategy is to have clusters of nice high density housing near public transit and mixed-use urban markets, which is largely what people want. But not if you offer exemptions. If you offer exemptions the winning strategy is to build tons of spread out, cramped, single- or two-story residences with most of their land value exempted. But how will people pay their land value tax? Well for the most part, low income people will pay it the same way they currently do: rent. It's the landlord that pays the tax. (And preemptively: no, studies have shown that higher taxes aren't just passed back to the renter. So they'll pay the same rent even if the land value increases.) For other small homeowners, (1) there is expected to be a lot of disparity in land value in an 85% LVT regime. People in desirable places pay high LVT. People on the outskirts pay close to $0 because their land is valued close to $0 (compared to today, at least). And (2) there could be other social welfare programs (e.g. basic income, or unemployment LVT forbearance) which help those in need.
        Spooky23 4y ago
        Usually the explanation is that big high rises with cheap rent will magically appear, and landlords will be unable to raise rents, because LVT magic. So the promise is a scenario like 1970s Bronx. The real answer, which the GOP was able to test the waters on with the SALT cap, is for the federal government to slowly back away from supporting mortgages. 0% down mortgages with rates linked to T-Bills depend on the policy to back mortgages. As the country gets poorer, that is less relevant.
  - nibbleshifter 4y ago
    Define "improve". If I accumulate some land, its becoming a forest. For at least as long as my direct descendants live.
    - adastra22 4y ago
      And if your land is in a highly desirable location and/or contains desirable resources, you end up paying ever increasing property tax to keep it that way.
      - nibbleshifter 4y ago
        Y'see, frankly, fuck that. You try do something good for the world (put a forest somewhere, do a bit of rewilding), then that area becomes desirable, then some LVT prick comes along and tries take what's yours so some property developer can flatten it to build magnolia shitboxes. Edit: the LVT people on here remind me of the arseholes who want to replace most of the good public parks in Berlin with housing, lol.
        adastra22 4y ago
        LVT policies tend to end up with more dense urban areas and more wild landscapes, on the whole. It's the current landowner-favoring policies that have resulted in suburban sprawl and car-focused cities. National parks and land trusts are a good thing, but such exemptions ought to be publicly managed since there are societal costs involved.

kfk 4y ago

I am the angel investor of a small startup trying to scale insect larvae production. The idea is to use larvae as a more eco friendly animal feed. I am still collecting numbers, but I was wondering if planting biomass to grow insect protein for humans is a good idea or not, it should be multiples better than growing crops to feed animals as a source of protein. I am just saying, dedicated biomass can mean a lot of different things, no?

adrian_b 4y ago
Chicken protein is quite cheap. Divided by the protein content, the price of chicken breast is only 2 to 2.5 times higher than that of beans or lentils. To have any chance on the market, the price per protein content of the insect larvae must be at least twice lower than that of chicken meat. Therefore it must be about the same as for legumes like beans or lentils. To be able to judge whether investing in such a thing is worthwhile, you need a very accurate prediction of the production costs, to determine whether it is possible to match the legumes in price per protein content. I would be very wary about the risk that the estimation of the future production costs might be exceedingly optimistic. Currently some cereals are the cheapest source of proteins suitable for human consumption, but they cannot provide much more than a half of the daily protein intake of a human, because they lack lysine, so they must be combined with a more expensive source of proteins, like meat, legumes, or perhaps insect larvae.
- dsr_ 4y ago
  Some people object to eating insects. Some object to eating meat. Nearly nobody has an objection to eating legumes (I am ignoring, among other things, people on ultra-low-carb diets, specific allergies, and Ashkenazi Jews during Pesach), so an improved yield of legumes, or a reduction in water usage, or a tolerance for greater temperature extremes, or... would be extremely valuable.
  - belorn 4y ago
    I would think there is plenty of people who objects to eating legumes based on culture and taste. Culture has always been the dominating factor in influencing people to eat different kind of food, and its fairly common for one country to have food that people from other countries wouldn't touch. As a person living in Sweden, we have candy that people from other countries find as torture to eat.

someweirdperson 4y ago

> For each energy source, we pulled out the figure for LUIE (land-use intensity of energy), i.e. the amount of land required to produce a given amount of electricity. Turning bio-mass into electricity comes with a lot of losses. If the desired product is fuel, the numbers for bio-mass are a lot better, and the numbers for all other sources that first produce electricity are a lot worse, because turning electricity into fuel comes with a lot of losses.

plaidfuji 4y ago
> turning electricity into fuel comes with a lot of losses. This is true, but when generating fuel, the end goal is usually to move a vehicle X miles. Now that electric cars are nominally competitive with ICE vehicles, the metric should be something more like “land required to drive a truck X miles/year” - and assume the best of either electric vehicle efficiency or ICE efficiency, not force an arbitrary electrical->chemical conversion for the metric’s sake. Biofuels probably wouldn’t look like as much of an outlier as they do here, but I would still wager that they’re among the least efficient options.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  Biofuels would be focused on applications where electrical vehicles would suck, such as aircraft.
  - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
    Tran-oceanic shipping and long haul airplanes are the 2 places where biofuel theoretically has some merit, but it still has the problem that it is about 25% worse than just using fossil fuels.
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      That 25% argument was addressed elsewhere in the comments.

JasonFruit 4y ago

In the US, isn't the main lobbying on behalf of this coming from industrial agriculture that has become addicted to the renewable fuel standard, which mandates that ethanol be added to gasoline, providing welfare for the ethanol industry at the expense of petroleum refiners (and eventually the driving public)? A good first step to end this idea would be to drop the mandate the same way the subsidies and tariffs supporting ethanol production were dropped.

Spooky23 4y ago
That will require a constitutional change, as the makeup of the Senate makes it impossible to make such a reform barring a significant economic change. It’s either that or the depletion of aquifers.
- JasonFruit 4y ago
  I'm afraid you haven't made clear what constitutional change you mean, at least to me. Can you elaborate?
  - adastra22 4y ago
    He's referring to the fact that a bunch of low population states in middle America are the ones that benefit from all those corn-based biofuel mandates, and the fact that every state gets two senators irregardless of population means that these middle states get an oversized influence on the annual farm bill. The constitutional change would be changing the makeup of the senate. (This is what I infer his argument to be. There are a million other ways to solve this problem besides changing the senate.)

andrewmutz 4y ago

Why does this article focus primarily on the land cost of biofuels and ignore other costs? I am not a fan of biofuels, but the article would be much more persuasive if biofuels were 25x more expensive than the alternatives, rather than just 25x worse in land usage

culi 4y ago

Dedicated biomass is indeed a terrible idea, but the usage of what would otherwise be waste products to produce biofuels still benefits from this research

culi 4y ago
On that same note, it's crazy to me how much energy and effort we spend on getting rid of what is potentially one of our most valuable resources: manure. Specifically humanure In 18th century Japan for example, landlords often had rights to their tenants manure. "Night soil" became especially valuable as fertilizer prices grew. There have been fights over who is entitled to these biosolids. Even up into the 1980s much of Japan used special vacuum trucks to deliver night soil collections to treatment facilities Contrast that with the West where we spend billions of dollars on sewage systems that often cause ecological harm https://daily.jstor.org/a-history-of-human-waste-as-fertilizer/ https://daily.jstor.org/a-history-of-human-waste-as-fertiliz...
- pfdietz 4y ago
  That would be a great idea in a world without pathogens. Consider what would happen if there's a nasty prion that survives sewage treatment and then gets absorbed into crops.
  - culi 4y ago
    Why would this same prion not make its way in our ocean or soils with the current sewage system set up? If the treatment fails, I don't see why dumping it in the oceans is safer. The food chain there is much more complex and therefore the prion would be exposed to many more possible hosts. In fact, prion biology shows that exposure from fish is a much greater concern than foodplants https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925443910002139 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092544391...
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bob29 4y ago

Really beating up a strawman. No one's proposing or implementing "dedicated" biomass. Corn ethanol utilizes the starch from corn, and leaves behind proteins, fats, minerals, and yeast cells which are used as animal feed, where its superior to plain corn. Likewise woody biomass isn't coming from clear cutting forests, its from necessary thinning to keep forests healthy (thats otherwise burned in slash piles) and mill waste thats a byproduct of lumber production.

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snewman 4y ago
> woody biomass isn't coming from clear cutting forests, its from necessary thinning to keep forests healthy From what I've seen, claims to this effect often turn out to be false. For instance, from https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/a-little-xmas-cheer-for-trees https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/a-little-xmas-cheer-for-...: > ...the world’s largest supplier of wood pellets for power generation ... has long insisted that it doesn’t use big, whole trees, but only uses wood waste, “tops, limbs, thinnings, and/or low-value smaller trees.” It insists it only sources wood from areas where trees will be regrown, and that it doesn’t contribute to deforestation. > As it turns out, Mongabay reporter Justin Catanoso found a management whistleblower who pointed him in the direction of clearcuts that the company was making: Catanoso watched as a feller-buncher machine grappled down a fifty-acre forest and fed the old oaks straight into a chipper, producing tons of wood to be turned into pellets. The whistleblower said that was par for the course: “We take giant, whole trees. We don’t care where they come from. The notion of sustainably managed forests is nonsense. We can’t get wood into the mills fast enough.” > He continued: “The company says that we use mostly waste like branches, treetops and debris to make pellets. What a joke. We use 100% whole trees in our pellets. We hardly use any waste. Pellet density is critical. You get that from whole trees, not junk.”

jasonhansel 4y ago

> each box represents a source of electricity. The higher the box, the more land that source uses. [...] If you look carefully, you might notice that the vertical axis uses a log scale. I think this graph wins the hotly contested "most misleading use of a log scale" award. Anyone glancing at it quickly would vastly underestimate the differences between energy sources.

sfink 4y ago
Yeah, I was thinking a linear graph with a scrollbar would emphasize the point a lot better, and then add a toggle for the log scale so you could actually see the data without scrolling. But then you'd need to explain why you're seeing so little and that you need to scroll.
lukeasrodgers 4y ago
Based solely on my personal experience, this log scale graph is no more misleading than a typical log scale graph. What in your mind makes it unusually bad? Do you have examples of better log scale graphs?
- jasonhansel 4y ago
  First, the use of a log-scale seems to serve no purpose. The point is to illustrate that biomass is vastly worse than the alternatives; a comparison between those alternatives is irrelevant. So the log scale obscures the point rather than elucidating it. But secondly: some log scale graphs have unevenly-spaced lines along the Y axis to make the use of a log scale more obvious. This is an example of what I mean: https://www.geol.lsu.edu/jlorenzo/geophysics/graphing/semilog1.gif https://www.geol.lsu.edu/jlorenzo/geophysics/graphing/semilo... On this graph, though, the lines along the Y-axis are evenly-spaced, increasing the confusion. Thirdly: the use of a log scale should be mentioned in the graph's caption, not buried in the text.
  - yuliyp 4y ago
    Do they not teach log scale graphs in math classes any more? The scale visually reading as 10000, 1000, 100, 10, 1 immediately clues readers in to its log-scale nature. I found the graph incredibly clear to read, and it told me what I needed to know about many of the alternative types of electricity generation: which ones are comparable in efficiency, which have larger variances, where those variances overlap and do not overlap, as well as where the differences are large or not. I could see this as a critique of a log-scale graph appearing in a newspaper article or something where the reader is likely to be skimming, but in an persuasive essay readers would probably be more engaged and able to spend time synthesizing the arguments vs just storing information.

pfdietz 4y ago

I think the biggest argument against biofuels is that if they achieved large scale use, it would encourage people to mine biomass from existing forests instead of growing it.

cbsmith 4y ago
Existing forests aren't good biofuel sources. You'd be better off mining the oceans, tbh. Neochloris oleoabundans or even industrial rapeseed are just so much more dense sources of fuel...
- pfdietz 4y ago
  Mining the oceans? How does that work? A forest should be a much denser source of carbon, particularly reduced carbon, than the ocean. CO2 fixed per hectare per year should be much higher in lignocellulose than in seed oils. And if the forest is already there, you don't even have to wait for it to grow. The temptation to strip mine forests will be strong.
  - cbsmith 4y ago
    > Mining the oceans? How does that work? A forest should be a much denser source of carbon, particularly reduced carbon, than the ocean. Algae tend to grow in large clumps, and you can very efficiently filter for them from water. I don't think it's a great strategy, but it's more practical than extracting from forests. > CO2 fixed per hectare per year should be much higher in lignocellulose than in seed oils. Forests are definitely way better for CO2 capture, but we're talking about producing fuel here. I'm speaking in terms of the net energy produced per hectare, so factoring in the energy consumed to extract fuel, industrial rapeseed oil beats the forest every day of the week.
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      I don't know of any algae, anywhere, that are more concentrated sources of carbon than existing trees. Even if we had to grow both sides, algae are still problematic, since separating them from water is apparently quite a difficult problem. Yield of rapeseed in the US in 2020 was 2.16 tonnes/hectare/year. Yields of lignocellosic biomass (dry mass) in the US (miscanthus, eucalypt) is almost an order of magnitude higher. Above ground forest biomass in Guyana: 499 tonnes/hectare.

dec0dedab0de 4y ago

There is one aspect of biomass generators I always thought was overlooked. The process is very similar to making charcoal. If we used wood as a fuel source, heated it enough to release methane and other violitile gases to power a generator, but not enough to release the majority of carbon, that would leave us with charcoal. Instead of trying to extract the remaining energy from the charcoal, we could bury it. Which would sequester the carbon, and be fertilizer. Growing clovers or legumes would add nitrogen. I am sure I have something wrong, and maybe a better answer is to just not do it with dedicated crops as the article suggests. Maybe we could grow corn for food, but cram the stalks into the generator and sequester the remaining carbon?

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habitue 4y ago
Seems like an idea worth trying to pencil out on paper to see if the numbers are in the right ballpark. A couple of questions I have: How much carbon could be captured this way, vs other carbon capture methods? How are cornstalks etc dealt with today by farms? Maybe they're already doing something efficient with it
snewman 4y ago
> Maybe we could grow corn for food, but cram the stalks into the generator and sequester the remaining carbon? This is a thing; it's called "BECCS". You can also sequester the carbon without trying to burn it first; see, for instance, https://charmindustrial.com/ https://charmindustrial.com/.

phas0ruk 4y ago

Well the story is pretty different if we are using waste like animal manure to create fuel.

golemotron 4y ago

Based on the chart, nuclear is the clear winner.

pfdietz 4y ago
If you ignore the land needed by the transmission and distribution network. If you include that, the ratio is not nearly as large.
Schroedingersat 4y ago
It's ignoring PAZ (which would give a similar Nuclear+ category about half of PV) and much more importantly is ignoring mining of the >90% of deposits that aren't like cigar lake or ranger which puts it somewhere around coal. Look at how much space a mine like Inkai or Husab 2 takes up for what would be typical of expanding the indistry.

choeger 4y ago

Correct me if I am wrong, but did the author make a calculation error? The number of required energy comes in at the order of 10^20 J or 90000TWh: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=300+quadrillion+BTU+in+TWh https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=300+quadrillion+BTU+in+... but if I multiply the energy return from biofuels with these alleged 1billion hectares of land, I get much, much more energy, billions of TWh: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=582Mwh%2Fm%5E2+*+1billion+hectares++in+TWh https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=582Mwh%2Fm%5E2+*+1billi... So unless there's a mistake somewhere, only a marginal fraction of land would be needed to cover all needs. So what went wrong here? I think it's the MWh per square meter number. 500MWh in PV would be a 500kW solar installation in Germany. I am quite sure you cannot fit that into a square meter. But even if we assume 580MWh per hectare per year, the output from 1billion hectares would be 580000TWh. So there's probably more wrong in that post.

fsh 4y ago
Your units are completely off. From the article: > According to Google, the world’s total arable land is about 1.38 billion hectares. Using the biomass LUIE figure of 580 m²/MWh/y, we get a total potential electricity production of 23,793 TWh / year. This is correct: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%281.38+billion+hectares%29%2F%28580+m%C2%B2%2F%28MWh%29%29+to+TWh https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%281.38+billion+hectare...
snewman 4y ago
[Author here] The LUIE figure we found for dedicated biomass is 580 m²/MWh/y: 580 square meters to generate one megawatt-hour per year. You multiplied this by hectares, meaning you multiplied area times area. If you want to determine the amount of energy you can produce from a given area (e.g. 1 billion hectares), you need to divide by 580, not multiply by 580.
- choeger 4y ago
  Ah, it's 1/580 MWh per square meter, I completely misread the unit there. Meter per MWh is somewhat unusual in these discusst.

scythe 4y ago

>“24% more carbon-intensive than gasoline” is not a ringing endorsement for [ethanol fuel]. The US really ought to stop doing this. Ethanol in the current US gasoline supply, as I understand it, is not really an energy source. Rather, the purpose is to increase the octane rating. Other octane additives were added in smaller amounts (tetraethyl lead, methyl tert-butyl ether) but they tended to be persistent pollutants, while 10% ethanol is foolproof and non-polluting. But it's bad for food prices: 40% of the US corn crop is used for ethanol. I could be way off, but that's what I heard.

pfdietz 4y ago
It's an indirect way to convert natural gas or coal BTUs into liquid fuel.

SkeuomorphicBee 4y ago

I don't get it, Brazil has been using biofuels (sugarcane ethanol) successfully in large scale since the 70s or 80s. Like a third of the car fleet of the country was ethanol fuelled in the 90s, and all cars since the 00s are dual fuel "flex" motors. All petrol stations have pumps for ethanol and gasoline side by side. And Brazil is no micronation, that is a fleet of millions and millions and millions of cars. So how can something that has been working for so long be unworkable?

andrewflnr 4y ago
When they're being careful, they state "dedicated biomass for electricity production", which is... not something I'm aware of anyone doing? Seems more like trying to head off a future bad idea than criticizing something that happens today... again, when they're being careful with their phrasing.
fsh 4y ago
Brazil has one of the lowest population densities on earth, less than half of the world average. Even so, sugar cane farming in Brazil is not exactly known for being sustainable. If anything, this example proves the author's point about dedicated biomass being unsustainable at large scale.

Hani1337 4y ago

These numbers were compiled by a mathhead who knows nothing about renewable agriculture meets new technologies. To be clear I'm not saying growing crops to turn them into biofuels is a good idea, but there are plenty opportunities to render the calculations based on arable land and energy output irrelevant.

VectorLock 4y ago

Trying to use biofuel to replace ALL sources of energy sounds pretty silly. Is anybody actually suggesting that? What about how much land would be required to replace the _gasoline_ usage with ethanol? "Each year, one acre of corn produces 551 gallons of ethanol, which is the equivalent of 386 gallons of gas." "According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), Americans consumed 140.43 billion gallons of gasoline in 2015" 363.8 million acres to make enough corn to replace gasoline - not factoring in all the other negative externalities. A little more than 4x land area what the US uses now.

pl-94 4y ago

No one is claiming that 100% of our final energy should come from biomass. In France, the research institute Negawatt has computed numbers when using biomass to fill the gaps when solar panel and wind turbines are not producing electricity. They show we could replace nuclear power only by using current farming wastes (no need to allocate more area to bio fuel). (But they also assume a serious reduction of our current electricity usage)