7 ms·

> Why would growing corn for ethanol and burning it in an engine be any climate-friendlier than growing that same corn for food and burning an equivalent amount

by tzs 1y ago

> Why would growing corn for ethanol and burning it in an engine be any climate-friendlier than growing that same corn for food and burning an equivalent amount of gasoline in an engine? The carbon absorbed in the field wouldn’t change; neither would the carbon emitted from the car. If the only difference was that producing ethanol emitted much more carbon than producing gasoline, where were ethanol’s benefits? Where the carbon comes from matters. When you burn gasoline all of the carbon emitted is carbon that until we took the petroleum it was in out of the ground had been out of the atmosphere for millions of years. When using gasoline on an ongoing basis the result is a large net increase in atmosphere carbon from burning the gasoline, plus whatever similarly old carbon is emitted during the processing of the petroleum into gasoline. When you burn ethanol that was made from corn all of the carbon emitted is carbon that was in the atmosphere until the corn took it out of the atmosphere to use in photosynthesis. When using ethanol from corn on an ongoing basis there is no increase in atmospheric carbon from burning the ethanol. There is just an increase from whatever old carbon is emitted in the process of growing the corn and turning it into ethanol.

jayd16 1y ago
Yeah, seems like they're forgetting the part where they need to bury the corn in bedrock to keep the carbon sequestered.
- lazide 1y ago
  No they aren’t. Biofuels in use, keep atmospheric carbon neutral. Fossil fuels increase atmospheric carbon. Now, if we did make biofuels and reinject them into the ground, yes it would reduce atmospheric carbon. But neutral is strictly better than increasing, regardless yes?
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - theurerjohn3 1y ago
    i think there may have been some confusion about the parent comment you are both agreeing that where the fuels come from matters. If you want to burn fossil fuels in a manner to keep atmospheric carbon neutral using the approach specified in > Why would growing corn for ethanol and burning it in an engine be any climate-friendlier than growing that same corn for food and burning an equivalent amount of gasoline in an engine? then the correct approach would be > Why would growing corn for ethanol and burning it in an engine be any climate-friendlier than growing that same corn for *burying in the ground* and burning an equivalent amount of gasoline in an engine? unless i am misunderstanding these two comments? some clarity would be great!
    - lazide 1y ago
      If we could grow the same amount of corn (to offset the carbon in the gasoline) and bury it where it would not rot/decompose (turned that carbon into now fossil carbon), then turn around and burn fossil fuel gasoline, then from a carbon neutral perspective, yes that would ‘balance the scales’. It also seems quite silly and a lot of work, doesn’t it? Especially if you can do the same thing by turning the corn into ethanol, and leave the fossil fuels out of it? (* of course current agriculture uses a lot of fossil fuels itself, so the math isn’t that simple. For it to actually work, we’d need to ensure the entire vertical was fossil fuel free) Of course, it’s a lot more direct and effective to use electric vehicles, near as I can tell.
      - jayd16 1y ago
        Yes, it wasn't a serious suggestion. It was meant to be so ridiculous so as to illustrate the point, but I guess no one got it.
  - passwordoops 1y ago
    "Biofuels in use, keep atmospheric carbon neutral." No they do not. The accounting generally doesn't take into account the full emissions of agriculture, which for corn is particularly carbon intense. Not to mention the downstream pollution impacts of over fertilization, such as coastal dead zones
    - jkhdigital 1y ago
      This is the salient point that is glossed over without so much as blinking. To get 1J of biofuel-based fuel, how many J of fossil fuel is burned? If it’s like 0.9J then you really have to ask how much carbon is released when turning carbon sinks into farmland, because it will take many many crop cycles to recoup that from biofuels.
      - lazide 1y ago
        That is the implementation detail that makes the whole thing a scam, yes. None of that is fundamental to bio-fuels, but rather a property of it being cheaper to do it that way in our current fossil fuel economy, and people not being interested in looking all that closely because they don’t really care.
        9rx 1y ago
        What is not factored into the above is how much is going to be grown anyway. Corn yield in particular can quickly surprise you. Even if you try to only grow enough for food, there will be years where you still have way more than you can handle. That is why we started producing corn-based ethanol. It wasn't intended to see people grow corn for it, but rather clean up the unmanageable excesses realized in the due course of growing it for food-based reasons that otherwise would have been left out to rot. In that vein, J is insignificant as it is spent either way. The problem is that humans aren't very good at moderation. A little ethanol production is quite sensible, but once humans get it into their head something might be sensible in small doses they have to take it to a ridiculous extreme... You see that in everything.
        1y ago
  - jayd16 1y ago
    You're misinterpreting what was meant to be a humorous comparison for illustration purposes. If you mine the fossil fuels, you have to bury the corn to keep the atmospheric carbon neutral. What I'm not saying is you need to bury the corn to use biofuels.
- mapt 1y ago
  This is such an off-base critique that it seems like deliberate trolling. The biofuel renewable carbon cycle takes carbon from the air, and burns the carbon once it's in the form of ethanol. It stops taking carbon from the ground and putting it into the sky. The problem in corn's case, the reason none of this works, is you need to burn lots of fuel to produce corn. LOTS of fuel. Enough that you could barely (in some studies) or not even (in others) produce more fuel than you burned. If you electrify your farming you don't have this problem. A far-future use-case is that we have eliminated 95% of fossil fuel use, and use solar-battery-powered tractors, trucks, and combines to harvest biofuels in order to fuel long-haul aviation and certain other legacy hardware that proved difficult to electrify.
  - Null-Set 1y ago
    So fuel would basically become a corn based battery. (Ideally something more efficient than corn would be grown though)
  - jayd16 1y ago
    I was trying to illustrate that growing corn and burning fossil fuels means you need to bury the corn to keep atmospheric carbon neutral. It was just meant to be a humorous hyperbole in agreement with the parent but seems like folks didn't get it.
scaramanga 1y ago
It's explained in the article. People aren't going to starve to fill their gas tank so you need to grow more corn to offset that used for biofuel. To do that can require destroying other carbon sinks (wetlands are the example given, sometimes dried and then burned) to turn them into fields. But in any case, carbon from the ground is used to fertilize the fields to grow the corn. For every unit of energy produced by corn using carbon sequestered from the air, it matters how much carbon from oil buried underground is released in the atmosphere to produce that unit of energy. If it's greater than or equal to the amount offset by not burning gasoline, it's a net loss. All of these factors have to be included in lifecycle assessments, which are the tool to use for deciding if a proposed policy is going to lead to lower atmospheric carbon in the future, rather than simplistic models. Selling someone a simplistic model instead of an LCA is basically lying.
- merelysounds 1y ago
  To be fair, it seems there are already regulations, both in the US and worldwide, that take into account LCA in some way. But yes, looks like the subsidies/etc mentioned in the article are not as accurate.
- motorest 1y ago
  > It's explained in the article. People aren't going to starve to fill their gas tank so you need to grow more corn to offset that used for biofuel. To do that can require destroying other carbon sinks (wetlands are the example given, sometimes dried and then burned) to turn them into fields. The key point is that biofuel replaces fossil fuel. Meaning, instead of having a system that inputs carbon into the environment, you have a system that recycles carbon already in the environment. It's impossible to argue against this is a significant and unequivocal improvement. The points you raised were about corn-based biofuel. Surely you are old enough to hear the comotion about switchgrass, and how it would be the primary crop driving biofuels. I feel like framing biofuels as a corn-based crop is a red herring. > All of these factors have to be included in lifecycle assessments, (...) Yes, including those from fossil fuels.
  - bravesoul2 1y ago
raverbashing 1y ago
That being said, growing corn for fuel ethanol is stupid. Other crops are more efficient (Unless we find a way of turning the whole plant into fuel)
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  What crops are those, and do they grow in the same climates and soils as corn does at the moment?
  - dherikb 1y ago
    Sugarcane, I believe.
    - brabel 1y ago
      Yes sugar cane is much cheaper and efficient. But you need very warm climate to grow it. Brazil has that and uses sugar cane for the most part. The USA does not so it uses what grows well in its interior , which is corn.
  - raverbashing 1y ago
    Sugarcane, but I think in terms of total plant weight vs yield even sugar beets beat corn
    - HDThoreaun 1y ago
      I live in the corn belt and can assure you that sugarcane does not grow here
      - red-iron-pine 1y ago
        that sugar does not grow there does not change the fact that corn is very inefficient for biofuel
        1y ago
mapt 1y ago
Yes, that is indeed what was sold to us 30+ years ago. This background context is in the article; The rest of the article is about how that was a lie. By about 20 years ago we understood that this was nonsense, that farm equipment and transportation infrastructure for corn cultivation chugs diesel, that somewhere between half, all, or twice (depending on study) the fossil fuels saved by corn ethanol would be burned to produce it. Corn ethanol and soybean biodiesel suck. Sugarcane ethanol works with high EROI. WVO biodiesel is almost pure profit. There were suggestions that cellulosic ethanol (switchgrass, miscanthus) and algal biodiesel could be productive enough to be worthwhile, but they have not taken over, and subsidy has been directed consistently to boosting existing corn producers in order to win the Iowa Caucus.
- circlefavshape 1y ago
  if it's half, then corn ethanol is totally worthwhile, right?
  - mapt 1y ago
    Not necessarily. If it's half, it may be worthwhile on an energy basis in a narrowly defined sense. But there are far-reaching secondary energy costs beyond this explicit accounting. How do you account for the fuel burned in the jetski that your combine operator uses in his free time, or the cost of forging the steel that went into his combine blades? We live in a global economy and in this sort of analysis, there are probably hidden emissions not noted in the study that make 2:1 EROI insufficient. There are non-EROI issues as well. What happens if we devote all our land to biofuel production? People starve. What happens if we devote all our land to 10:1 biofuel production and it doesn't cover 1% of current demand? We have crops with higher Energy Return on Investment, just none (so far) that are economical to produce in Iowa in order to win the Iowa caucus. Brazillian sugarcane ethanol is perhaps 5:1. Daytime, immediate-use solar is something like 30:1. Less when you factor in batteries. Wind turbines around 20:1. Hydropower is maybe 100:1. Oil varies enormously. Used to be, sweet light Saudi crude from the Ghawar field might break 100:1. Most fields globally more like 10:1-20:1. Alberta heavy oil sands are something like 5:1. If you dip all the way down into ultraheavy kerogen fuels, solid at room temperature and demanding lots of processing, there are certainly deposits that are less than 1:1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment There was a bit of an obsession in the mid 2000's with the concept of a global "peak oil" production, limited by supply-side constraints involving all the low-hanging fruit effectively being picked. While this is often dismissed as neo-malthusianism catastrophism, most of the ideas involved are unscheduled eventualities rather than some defined apocalypse. It introduced a lot of people too young for the 1970's OPEC embargo to the concept of energy scarcity, and effectively ironed out a great deal of the discourse using a fairly active forum. http://theoildrum.com/node/9249 http://theoildrum.com/node/9249 The major errors of that community's consensus were: A) The particular shape of the Hubbard Peak bell curve is somebody's fit, not related to fundamentals, and extrapolating sigmoid / logistic curves have both huge error bars when the reasoning is sound, and little merit if the reasoning is not fundamentally sound. You simply can't predict a peak well in advance based on inflection points of this wide of a variety of sources, central limit theorem be damned. B) Natural resource reserve estimates are both highly subjective and something that suffers from game-theoretic problems. If a speculator 'knows' that the ridge on the horizon is probably full of gold, but has an incentive to work the claim he already started a few miles away, he has no reason to report it. The same applies to countries and companies. Honest reserves estimates are also always quoted in terms of "Economically extractable at current prices", but prices can change and dramatically shift the number. C) While the underlying fracking and injection technologies to expand the horizons of what constitutes an extractable reserve date to the 60's, they were not ubiquitous or as readily controllable until recently. D) There is more than enough long-tail low-payoff hydrocarbon fuel out there for us to boil the planet in a CO2 oven, unfortunately.
7952 1y ago
Ultimately what matters is the total amount of carbon in the atmosphere. Biofuels could help or hinder that effort. It all depends on the wider system.
thelastgallon 1y ago
>Where the carbon comes from matters. Your underlying assumption is carbon is required. We could use the same land for solar panels. 40 million acres are used to grow corn for ethanol subsidies (out of 93m total). If we use these 40m acres for solar, Annual Energy Production (in watt-hours): 52,272 terawatt-hours (TWh) To put that in context: The total electricity consumption of the U.S. is about 4,000 TWh/year. The energy generated from 40 million acres of solar panels could theoretically meet U.S. electricity demand more than 13 times over. But, we'll need a lot less energy when we use solar/wind. We only need a third of the energy we use today, > 65% of the energy is wasted. So, solar panels on the same land used for ethanol production (and subsidized -- which is a lose-lose-lose idea) can produce 39x times US electricity demand (assuming ChatGPT calculation is correct). When we produce this much electricity from solar, without fossil fuels, we'll also save 40% of water withdrawals. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, electric power generators are the largest source of U.S. water withdrawals and account for about 40% of total water withdrawals in the United States:https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=37453 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=37453
- quickthrowman 1y ago
  Just one question: can you eat photovoltaic cells? Corn is edible, and I’d be more than happy to eat cornmeal for years in the event of a global war that stopped food imports/exports. This is precisely the reason for agricultural subsidies, to ensure our nation can feed itself if all agricultural trade is cut off. We’d grind up field corn and eat cornmeal instead of starving to death with plenty of electricity but no food.
  - thelastgallon 1y ago
    If a global war can stop food imports/exports, you are very close to a civilization collapse if dependent on fossil fuels. Once the oil supply is cut off (which happens long before food), everything stops. You'd be better off relying on solar panels and having energy security, which is the most critical thing to have. Fossil fuel-based power plants can be bombed, but solar panels all over the country can never be bombed. And, there is already an overabundance of food production, specifically corn, soybeans, and milk, in the US.

by tzs 1y ago

jayd16 1y ago

Yeah, seems like they're forgetting the part where they need to bury the corn in bedrock to keep the carbon sequestered.

lazide 1y ago
No they aren’t. Biofuels in use, keep atmospheric carbon neutral. Fossil fuels increase atmospheric carbon. Now, if we did make biofuels and reinject them into the ground, yes it would reduce atmospheric carbon. But neutral is strictly better than increasing, regardless yes?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- theurerjohn3 1y ago
  i think there may have been some confusion about the parent comment you are both agreeing that where the fuels come from matters. If you want to burn fossil fuels in a manner to keep atmospheric carbon neutral using the approach specified in > Why would growing corn for ethanol and burning it in an engine be any climate-friendlier than growing that same corn for food and burning an equivalent amount of gasoline in an engine? then the correct approach would be > Why would growing corn for ethanol and burning it in an engine be any climate-friendlier than growing that same corn for *burying in the ground* and burning an equivalent amount of gasoline in an engine? unless i am misunderstanding these two comments? some clarity would be great!
  - lazide 1y ago
    If we could grow the same amount of corn (to offset the carbon in the gasoline) and bury it where it would not rot/decompose (turned that carbon into now fossil carbon), then turn around and burn fossil fuel gasoline, then from a carbon neutral perspective, yes that would ‘balance the scales’. It also seems quite silly and a lot of work, doesn’t it? Especially if you can do the same thing by turning the corn into ethanol, and leave the fossil fuels out of it? (* of course current agriculture uses a lot of fossil fuels itself, so the math isn’t that simple. For it to actually work, we’d need to ensure the entire vertical was fossil fuel free) Of course, it’s a lot more direct and effective to use electric vehicles, near as I can tell.
    - jayd16 1y ago
      Yes, it wasn't a serious suggestion. It was meant to be so ridiculous so as to illustrate the point, but I guess no one got it.
- passwordoops 1y ago
  "Biofuels in use, keep atmospheric carbon neutral." No they do not. The accounting generally doesn't take into account the full emissions of agriculture, which for corn is particularly carbon intense. Not to mention the downstream pollution impacts of over fertilization, such as coastal dead zones
  - jkhdigital 1y ago
    This is the salient point that is glossed over without so much as blinking. To get 1J of biofuel-based fuel, how many J of fossil fuel is burned? If it’s like 0.9J then you really have to ask how much carbon is released when turning carbon sinks into farmland, because it will take many many crop cycles to recoup that from biofuels.
    - lazide 1y ago
      That is the implementation detail that makes the whole thing a scam, yes. None of that is fundamental to bio-fuels, but rather a property of it being cheaper to do it that way in our current fossil fuel economy, and people not being interested in looking all that closely because they don’t really care.
      - 9rx 1y ago
        What is not factored into the above is how much is going to be grown anyway. Corn yield in particular can quickly surprise you. Even if you try to only grow enough for food, there will be years where you still have way more than you can handle. That is why we started producing corn-based ethanol. It wasn't intended to see people grow corn for it, but rather clean up the unmanageable excesses realized in the due course of growing it for food-based reasons that otherwise would have been left out to rot. In that vein, J is insignificant as it is spent either way. The problem is that humans aren't very good at moderation. A little ethanol production is quite sensible, but once humans get it into their head something might be sensible in small doses they have to take it to a ridiculous extreme... You see that in everything.
        1y ago
- jayd16 1y ago
  You're misinterpreting what was meant to be a humorous comparison for illustration purposes. If you mine the fossil fuels, you have to bury the corn to keep the atmospheric carbon neutral. What I'm not saying is you need to bury the corn to use biofuels.
mapt 1y ago
This is such an off-base critique that it seems like deliberate trolling. The biofuel renewable carbon cycle takes carbon from the air, and burns the carbon once it's in the form of ethanol. It stops taking carbon from the ground and putting it into the sky. The problem in corn's case, the reason none of this works, is you need to burn lots of fuel to produce corn. LOTS of fuel. Enough that you could barely (in some studies) or not even (in others) produce more fuel than you burned. If you electrify your farming you don't have this problem. A far-future use-case is that we have eliminated 95% of fossil fuel use, and use solar-battery-powered tractors, trucks, and combines to harvest biofuels in order to fuel long-haul aviation and certain other legacy hardware that proved difficult to electrify.
- Null-Set 1y ago
  So fuel would basically become a corn based battery. (Ideally something more efficient than corn would be grown though)
- jayd16 1y ago
  I was trying to illustrate that growing corn and burning fossil fuels means you need to bury the corn to keep atmospheric carbon neutral. It was just meant to be a humorous hyperbole in agreement with the parent but seems like folks didn't get it.

scaramanga 1y ago

It's explained in the article. People aren't going to starve to fill their gas tank so you need to grow more corn to offset that used for biofuel. To do that can require destroying other carbon sinks (wetlands are the example given, sometimes dried and then burned) to turn them into fields. But in any case, carbon from the ground is used to fertilize the fields to grow the corn. For every unit of energy produced by corn using carbon sequestered from the air, it matters how much carbon from oil buried underground is released in the atmosphere to produce that unit of energy. If it's greater than or equal to the amount offset by not burning gasoline, it's a net loss. All of these factors have to be included in lifecycle assessments, which are the tool to use for deciding if a proposed policy is going to lead to lower atmospheric carbon in the future, rather than simplistic models. Selling someone a simplistic model instead of an LCA is basically lying.

merelysounds 1y ago
To be fair, it seems there are already regulations, both in the US and worldwide, that take into account LCA in some way. But yes, looks like the subsidies/etc mentioned in the article are not as accurate.
motorest 1y ago
> It's explained in the article. People aren't going to starve to fill their gas tank so you need to grow more corn to offset that used for biofuel. To do that can require destroying other carbon sinks (wetlands are the example given, sometimes dried and then burned) to turn them into fields. The key point is that biofuel replaces fossil fuel. Meaning, instead of having a system that inputs carbon into the environment, you have a system that recycles carbon already in the environment. It's impossible to argue against this is a significant and unequivocal improvement. The points you raised were about corn-based biofuel. Surely you are old enough to hear the comotion about switchgrass, and how it would be the primary crop driving biofuels. I feel like framing biofuels as a corn-based crop is a red herring. > All of these factors have to be included in lifecycle assessments, (...) Yes, including those from fossil fuels.
- bravesoul2 1y ago

raverbashing 1y ago

That being said, growing corn for fuel ethanol is stupid. Other crops are more efficient (Unless we find a way of turning the whole plant into fuel)

Cthulhu_ 1y ago
What crops are those, and do they grow in the same climates and soils as corn does at the moment?
- dherikb 1y ago
  Sugarcane, I believe.
  - brabel 1y ago
    Yes sugar cane is much cheaper and efficient. But you need very warm climate to grow it. Brazil has that and uses sugar cane for the most part. The USA does not so it uses what grows well in its interior , which is corn.
- raverbashing 1y ago
  Sugarcane, but I think in terms of total plant weight vs yield even sugar beets beat corn
  - HDThoreaun 1y ago
    I live in the corn belt and can assure you that sugarcane does not grow here
    - red-iron-pine 1y ago
      that sugar does not grow there does not change the fact that corn is very inefficient for biofuel
      - 1y ago

mapt 1y ago

Yes, that is indeed what was sold to us 30+ years ago. This background context is in the article; The rest of the article is about how that was a lie. By about 20 years ago we understood that this was nonsense, that farm equipment and transportation infrastructure for corn cultivation chugs diesel, that somewhere between half, all, or twice (depending on study) the fossil fuels saved by corn ethanol would be burned to produce it. Corn ethanol and soybean biodiesel suck. Sugarcane ethanol works with high EROI. WVO biodiesel is almost pure profit. There were suggestions that cellulosic ethanol (switchgrass, miscanthus) and algal biodiesel could be productive enough to be worthwhile, but they have not taken over, and subsidy has been directed consistently to boosting existing corn producers in order to win the Iowa Caucus.

circlefavshape 1y ago
if it's half, then corn ethanol is totally worthwhile, right?
- mapt 1y ago
  Not necessarily. If it's half, it may be worthwhile on an energy basis in a narrowly defined sense. But there are far-reaching secondary energy costs beyond this explicit accounting. How do you account for the fuel burned in the jetski that your combine operator uses in his free time, or the cost of forging the steel that went into his combine blades? We live in a global economy and in this sort of analysis, there are probably hidden emissions not noted in the study that make 2:1 EROI insufficient. There are non-EROI issues as well. What happens if we devote all our land to biofuel production? People starve. What happens if we devote all our land to 10:1 biofuel production and it doesn't cover 1% of current demand? We have crops with higher Energy Return on Investment, just none (so far) that are economical to produce in Iowa in order to win the Iowa caucus. Brazillian sugarcane ethanol is perhaps 5:1. Daytime, immediate-use solar is something like 30:1. Less when you factor in batteries. Wind turbines around 20:1. Hydropower is maybe 100:1. Oil varies enormously. Used to be, sweet light Saudi crude from the Ghawar field might break 100:1. Most fields globally more like 10:1-20:1. Alberta heavy oil sands are something like 5:1. If you dip all the way down into ultraheavy kerogen fuels, solid at room temperature and demanding lots of processing, there are certainly deposits that are less than 1:1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment There was a bit of an obsession in the mid 2000's with the concept of a global "peak oil" production, limited by supply-side constraints involving all the low-hanging fruit effectively being picked. While this is often dismissed as neo-malthusianism catastrophism, most of the ideas involved are unscheduled eventualities rather than some defined apocalypse. It introduced a lot of people too young for the 1970's OPEC embargo to the concept of energy scarcity, and effectively ironed out a great deal of the discourse using a fairly active forum. http://theoildrum.com/node/9249 http://theoildrum.com/node/9249 The major errors of that community's consensus were: A) The particular shape of the Hubbard Peak bell curve is somebody's fit, not related to fundamentals, and extrapolating sigmoid / logistic curves have both huge error bars when the reasoning is sound, and little merit if the reasoning is not fundamentally sound. You simply can't predict a peak well in advance based on inflection points of this wide of a variety of sources, central limit theorem be damned. B) Natural resource reserve estimates are both highly subjective and something that suffers from game-theoretic problems. If a speculator 'knows' that the ridge on the horizon is probably full of gold, but has an incentive to work the claim he already started a few miles away, he has no reason to report it. The same applies to countries and companies. Honest reserves estimates are also always quoted in terms of "Economically extractable at current prices", but prices can change and dramatically shift the number. C) While the underlying fracking and injection technologies to expand the horizons of what constitutes an extractable reserve date to the 60's, they were not ubiquitous or as readily controllable until recently. D) There is more than enough long-tail low-payoff hydrocarbon fuel out there for us to boil the planet in a CO2 oven, unfortunately.

7952 1y ago

Ultimately what matters is the total amount of carbon in the atmosphere. Biofuels could help or hinder that effort. It all depends on the wider system.

thelastgallon 1y ago

>Where the carbon comes from matters. Your underlying assumption is carbon is required. We could use the same land for solar panels. 40 million acres are used to grow corn for ethanol subsidies (out of 93m total). If we use these 40m acres for solar, Annual Energy Production (in watt-hours): 52,272 terawatt-hours (TWh) To put that in context: The total electricity consumption of the U.S. is about 4,000 TWh/year. The energy generated from 40 million acres of solar panels could theoretically meet U.S. electricity demand more than 13 times over. But, we'll need a lot less energy when we use solar/wind. We only need a third of the energy we use today, > 65% of the energy is wasted. So, solar panels on the same land used for ethanol production (and subsidized -- which is a lose-lose-lose idea) can produce 39x times US electricity demand (assuming ChatGPT calculation is correct). When we produce this much electricity from solar, without fossil fuels, we'll also save 40% of water withdrawals. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, electric power generators are the largest source of U.S. water withdrawals and account for about 40% of total water withdrawals in the United States:https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=37453 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=37453

quickthrowman 1y ago
Just one question: can you eat photovoltaic cells? Corn is edible, and I’d be more than happy to eat cornmeal for years in the event of a global war that stopped food imports/exports. This is precisely the reason for agricultural subsidies, to ensure our nation can feed itself if all agricultural trade is cut off. We’d grind up field corn and eat cornmeal instead of starving to death with plenty of electricity but no food.
- thelastgallon 1y ago
  If a global war can stop food imports/exports, you are very close to a civilization collapse if dependent on fossil fuels. Once the oil supply is cut off (which happens long before food), everything stops. You'd be better off relying on solar panels and having energy security, which is the most critical thing to have. Fossil fuel-based power plants can be bombed, but solar panels all over the country can never be bombed. And, there is already an overabundance of food production, specifically corn, soybeans, and milk, in the US.