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Most of the worlds bio fuel that we use to reduce emission in transportation comes from crops farmed to be turned into bio fuel. How will the increase in LNG th

by belorn 7mo ago

Most of the worlds bio fuel that we use to reduce emission in transportation comes from crops farmed to be turned into bio fuel. How will the increase in LNG then do to the price of bio fuels?

adrianN 7mo ago
It's debatable whether biofuels reduce CO2. I think it's better to understand them as subsidies for agriculture.
- portly 7mo ago
  Could you elaborate?
  - pbmonster 7mo ago
    Very simplified: farming and distillation is so extremely energy intensive, it's not clear whether producing one ton of bio ethanol fuel consumes more or less than one ton of diesel (or equivalent). So producing bio ethanol is not a sustainability/ecology thing, it mostly gives farmers something to do.
  - adrianN 7mo ago
    If you wanted to save CO2 you'd slap solar panels on the fields instead of growing corn or whatever. Plants are rather bad at capturing solar energy and they need fertilizer and pesticides to grow and diesel to be planted and harvested. Then you lose a good part of the energy the plant captured until you have a product that you can burn in an engine. With solar panels you get like 20x the energy out and you can have a meadow with high biodiversity around the panels. Growing a nice little forest, maybe with a couple of wind turbines in it if the location is windy, would probably also save more CO2.
alephnerd 7mo ago
That will depend country to country. The US doesn't use urea to the same degree that Brazil, India, and China do. And Brazil (just like the US) doesn't rely on NatGas from the Gulf. It's mostly China and India that are impacted, but both have the Russian option. This isn't our first rodeo with elevated urea and NatGas prices - the same thing happened during the Russian Invasion of Ukraine in 2022 (and is reflected in the same dataset OP linked). This is also why Asian countries have been investing heavily in Hydrogen energy despite HN's hate boner to the technology.

by belorn 7mo ago

Most of the worlds bio fuel that we use to reduce emission in transportation comes from crops farmed to be turned into bio fuel. How will the increase in LNG then do to the price of bio fuels?

adrianN 7mo ago

It's debatable whether biofuels reduce CO2. I think it's better to understand them as subsidies for agriculture.

portly 7mo ago
Could you elaborate?
- pbmonster 7mo ago
  Very simplified: farming and distillation is so extremely energy intensive, it's not clear whether producing one ton of bio ethanol fuel consumes more or less than one ton of diesel (or equivalent). So producing bio ethanol is not a sustainability/ecology thing, it mostly gives farmers something to do.
- adrianN 7mo ago
  If you wanted to save CO2 you'd slap solar panels on the fields instead of growing corn or whatever. Plants are rather bad at capturing solar energy and they need fertilizer and pesticides to grow and diesel to be planted and harvested. Then you lose a good part of the energy the plant captured until you have a product that you can burn in an engine. With solar panels you get like 20x the energy out and you can have a meadow with high biodiversity around the panels. Growing a nice little forest, maybe with a couple of wind turbines in it if the location is windy, would probably also save more CO2.

alephnerd 7mo ago

That will depend country to country. The US doesn't use urea to the same degree that Brazil, India, and China do. And Brazil (just like the US) doesn't rely on NatGas from the Gulf. It's mostly China and India that are impacted, but both have the Russian option. This isn't our first rodeo with elevated urea and NatGas prices - the same thing happened during the Russian Invasion of Ukraine in 2022 (and is reflected in the same dataset OP linked). This is also why Asian countries have been investing heavily in Hydrogen energy despite HN's hate boner to the technology.