16 ms·

Nobel Prize winning biochemist says all biofuels are nonsense

181 points by sasoon 14y ago

worldsayshi 14y ago
"nonsense" feels like an understatement. It competes with our food sources and even more so with ecological diversity. It should be one of those factors that assure that food prices rise to the sky with fuel prices and as they both go up, nature will fold. Feel free to criticise my ignorance of economics. I'm probably mostly wrong.
- baq 14y ago
  common sense didn't fail you here, you're basically describing what happened last couple of years.
Cowen 14y ago
I don't know a single thing about biochemistry or biofuels, but in reading this I can't help but be reminded of Arthur C. Clarke's first law of prediction: > When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
- craigyk 14y ago
  Hear Hear. Haven't heard that one before but it probably has quite some truth to it. Sort of like the old: "Science advances one funeral at a time" - Max Planck. Anyways. His criticisms are all good ones, and yet I can't help but feel like he's missing the big picture- that or he thinks we are just doomed. In the short to medium term future (5-25years) biofuels are probably not the answer they've been hyped to be. Yet there are still some places where they will still work well, such as any thing that isn't in contact with the grid. These biofuels will be competing with oil that must be drilled through kilometers of ocean and earth, or from injecting massive amounts of steam into the ground... talk about inefficient. Further, biofuels do not necessarily need to use arable land or potable water. In particular I'd like to know specifics about reports of "higher efficiency" than should be possible. I wonder if these reports aren't based on efficiency as calculated from creating biomass. One thing that immediately comes to mind, is that perhaps simple circulation and dispersal of light in water can account for increased "surface area" that makes up for the "max efficiency at 20% sunlight" statement.
- mdemare 14y ago
  But this distinguished but elderly scientist makes neither of those claims; he states that growing plants for biofuels is a Bad Idea.
guscost 14y ago
We're actually burning edible plants. Isn't it obvious?
- takluyver 14y ago
  It's been obvious for some time that using food crops as fuel (first generation biofuels) is a terrible idea. Well, obvious to everyone except the governments subsidising them. What people are still interested in is 2nd gen - converting inedible biomass (mainly cellulose) into liquid fuel - and 3rd gen - growing algae, which have all sorts of cool properties. In theory, you can engineer the algae to produce a usable fuel directly. In practice, it's still proving tricky.
- hcarvalhoalves 14y ago
  No. Not all ethanol is made from corn or wheat - for instance, in Brazil it's made from the rejects of sugar cane, the other half goes for sugar. The real problem is that you compete with food crops and water for fertile land, or destroy native forests.
  - JoeAltmaier 14y ago
    "Competing with food crops" is a curious notion. When did we run out of space for food crops? Not on this planet. Corn grown in Iowa could feed 2 United States. So we make all sorts of other things out of it, or the govt pays folks (me for instance) to NOT grow corn and keep the price up. At this point in history, with our current distribution system, biofuels can make money. In the future they will become more efficient, perhaps orders of magnitude more in ways we haven't thought of yet (oil-drop lenses on the leaves; kelp that fills its pods directly with waxy carbohydrate films; seeds that can be eaten OR converted to fuel etc). The dumb thing would be to stop innovating now, because of FUD about imaginary issues.
    - hcarvalhoalves 14y ago
      It competes with food crops for fertile land. That means: it pushes food production to places with worse water, farther from consumption centers, increasing waste and costs related to transport. Maybe in the US the situation is not clear because you have vast plains so it doesn't matter if you cover the entire surface with corn, but here in Brazil, my state vanished with an entire forest just for sugar cane and soy crops. Google "Atlantic Forest".
alokv28 14y ago
Here's a direct link to Michel's article that the blog post pulls quotes from. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201200218/pdf http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201200218/pd...
- Gravityloss 14y ago
  This is a html version: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201200218/full http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201200218/fu...
Angostura 14y ago
Damn, better jettison my wood burning stove.
doublerebel 14y ago
Headline is misleading. The important, specific point is in the conclusion: ...we should not grow plants for biofuel production. Using biofuels from what would otherwise be waste (decomposing waste biomass, used fry oil) is still efficient and valuable. Reading between the lines, if we want to run cars on solar power, we should do it with electrics and solar cells, not photosynthesis.
- nhaehnle 14y ago
  This sounds quite reasonable. If left to their own devices, plants don't optimize for energy content, they optimize for spreading. However, we humans already managed to genetically modify them (using simple selection of seeds over the millenia) to optimize plants for nutritional content instead. It would be interesting to know to what extent human selection and other forms of genetic manipulation could improve the efficiency of photosynthesis in plants to make them viable for biofuels. After all, large scale agriculture is still much simpler to pull off than the kind of industrial process needed to build solar cells on a large scale.
  - doublerebel 14y ago
    The kind of large-scale agriculture most often used today relies on a huge amount of hydrocarbons. As I mentioned above, the need for hydrocarbons would still be compounding -- the more biofuels grown, the more biofuels required to grow them -- unlike capturing and transporting electricity on the already-existing infrastructure. I would love to see large-scale sustainable agriculture that doesn't require such a staggering amount of resources. There are many smart people working on this problem. Unfortunately I don't see those advances outpacing the advances being made in electricity storage and transport.
    - nhaehnle 14y ago
      Theoretically, it seems to me that if the plants were efficient enough, one should be able to obtain the hydrocarbons from them there are needed during the process of agriculture. I guess the really important point is your second paragraph: As long as there are advances in both the plants and the technology, the plants may simply be unable to catch up.
MikeTaylor 14y ago
In the end, aren't coal and oil biofuel? Just fuels that take millions of years to make. That seems to be proof by counterexample that not <i>all</i> biofuels are useless. But at doublerebel says, the headline should really be "we should not grow plants for biofuel production". Which is not the same thing at all.
- ams6110 14y ago
  Ultimately, our energy is almost all solar (nuclear fission being the big exception, geothermal being another).
- mseebach 14y ago
  Taken to the extreme, yes. In practicality, the term is reserved for the kind that can be made in quite a bit less than millions of years. Compare "natural materials" and "natural ingredients". In the end, it's all made from naturally occurring atoms, right?
gojomo 14y ago
Here's an even harsher assessment of plant-derived ethanols from Dr. Tad Patzek, chairman of the Department of Petroleum & Geosystems Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin: Basically, [corn] ethanol is obtained from burning methane, coal, diesel fuel, gasoline, corn kernels, soil and environment. We destroy perhaps as many as 7 units of free energy in the environment and human economy to produce 1 unit of free energy as corn ethanol, and make a few clueless environmentalists happier and a few super rich corporations richer. The story is even worse for switchgrass ethanol. (As quoted from http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9619 http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9619 )
- uvdiv 14y ago
  We destroy perhaps as many as 7 units of free energy in the environment and human economy to produce 1 unit of free energy as corn ethanol And yet they still make a profit, and it is still highly rational to do so. Because it turns out 1 Joule of liquid hydrocarbons is more valuable than 7 Joules of methane or coal or sunshine.
  - alsocasey 14y ago
    A comment below mentions subsidies - that's certainly part of the answer. In addition, for mobile applications, not all energy sources are equal. Transportability (stability, energy density, etc.) also contribute to liquid hydrocarbon Joules being more valuable than methane, coal or sunshine.
    - sliverstorm 14y ago
      Tangent- we have LPG, and from what I understand it's actually very successful in niche applications. Have we tried liquefied methane gas? We have many more sources of methane than propane.
      - surrealize 14y ago
        Methane has a much lower boiling point (-182 C) than propane (-42 C), so liquefying methane (and keeping it liquid) is substantially harder.
jeremyjh 14y ago
He is absolutely correct that biofuels are not efficient use of land. But the market would quickly sort that out if it were not for biofuel subsidies. That is what needs to be stopped.
- takluyver 14y ago
  I'm not sure that the market would sort this out. People in the first world already pay more to fill up their car than people in the third world spend on food. And biodiversity often isn't given a monetary value at all (although there are people working on valuing ecosystem services). Subsidies aren't helping, but the underlying problem is that we want and are able to use more than our 'share' of resources.
  - jeremyjh 14y ago
    That isn't what the article is about. He is talking about the energy efficiency of capturing solar power via photosynthesis. From the perspective of this article, growing crops for food is just as inefficient. If acquiring solar energy through biofuels is less efficient than through photoelectric cells or other means then the market will definitely sort this out (though would not directly account for externalities such as carbon pollution).
    - takluyver 14y ago
      That makes more sense. But we still pay a premium for energy in a high-density, liquid form that we can pump into vehicles. Of course, that's changing as battery technology improves.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- adestefan 14y ago
  Subsidizes for corn based ethanol were cut in the US in FY12.
- baq 14y ago
uvdiv 14y ago
He really, really misses the point: what matters most is economics, not technical metrics in vacuo. “… these values even do not take into account that more than 50% of the energy stored in the biofuel had to be invested in order to obtain the biomass (for producing fertilizers and pesticides, for ploughing the fields, for transport) and the chemical conversion into the respective biofuel.” [...] “The production and use of biofuels therefore is not CO2-neutral. In particular, the energy input is very large for the production of bioethanol from wheat or maize, and some scientists doubt that there is a net gain of energy. Certainly the reduction of CO2 release is marginal.” In real world economics, biofuels are not energy; they are high-density liquid transport fuels. The economics make it clear: e.g., gasoline costs ten times as much as coal, per unit energy. You're paying for the chemistry, not the joules. It matters very litte in real life, that much of the energy (cheap) is wasted; that much of the energy comes from (cheap, external) sources. If biofuels are viable, they can be seen as a conversion of energy to hydrocarbons: of (comparatively) cheap electricity and methane/hydrogen to expensive liquid fuel. Not as a primary energy source. It's the carbon that's valuable. Farming machinery can be electric powered. Nitrogen fertilizer can be created from nuclear- or solar- powered hydrogen. And voilà, it is carbon-neutral. Nuclear electricity, solar electricity, hydrogen -- these are only marginally viable fuels (c.f. the world market for EV's; opinions may differ). Converting them to liquid hydrocarbons is a very useful thing.
- stcredzero 14y ago
  > In real world economics, biofuels are not energy; they are high-density liquid transport fuels. The economics make it clear: e.g., gasoline costs ten times as much as coal, per unit energy. You're paying for the chemistry, not the joules. Somehow, this is hard to get through people's skulls. Liquid hydrocarbons are a really potent energy storage medium with fantastic economics. (Compare a metal tank to Li-ion battery.) So long as we have need of bulldozers and heavy equipment at sites outside of fully established infrastructure, like construction sites, we will have a good use for such fuels. It's not overall efficiency that's important here. It's efficiency in a mobile context. > Farming machinery can be electric powered. Nitrogen fertilizer can be created from nuclear- or solar- powered hydrogen. And voilà, it is carbon-neutral. This really bothers me, and it happens all the time. Of course everything in our current infrastructure has a carbon footprint!
mayneack 14y ago
There are different types of biofuel research. He seems to ignore the whole sector that is bioengineering the plants to solve these problems. One example that comes to mind (and I can't find a link to on my phone) involves changing the color of the leaf to absorb more light. http://biomassmagazine.com/articles/7341/cutting-edge-bioenergy-projects-earn-arpa-e-funding http://biomassmagazine.com/articles/7341/cutting-edge-bioene...
TomAnthony 14y ago
Elon Musk, in the Q&A section of his recent talk at Oxford (download here: http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/videos/view/211 http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/videos/view/211) also said he believes all biofuels are useless. His point was that putting energy into biofuels is an inefficient way to use the suns energy, and then getting it out is also inefficient. He compared the efficiency to solar.
- btilly 14y ago
  Not just "an inefficient way". In the best case, biofuels are 2 orders of magnitude less efficient than solar. That said we could theoretically produce around our current energy needs with a perfect biofuel. (Existing biofuels are much, much worse than this theoretical fuel.) We'd just need to convert all land we currently use for agriculture to that purpose. (And then what would we eat?) If his numbers are correct - and I see no reason to doubt it - biofuels have to be a dead end.
  - nickik 14y ago
    The thing is that you can produce energy at one place and then move it around the world cheaply. This does not work with solar. You can produce it but storing and disributing is much, much harder.
siculars 14y ago
Elon Musk addresses this around 1hr 17min here http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/videos/view/211 http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/videos/view/211
readymade 14y ago
Way to link to a Climate Change denial blog, HN.
stcredzero 14y ago
Plant based biofuels are only problematic if you imagine replacing all transportation energy needs with them. Cut that out! Develop all technologies and let the market decide. I predict that there will be specialist niche applications for biofuels, and that most of transportation will be electric. For a cheap, robust means of storing lots of energy, it's really hard to compete with a metal tank of hydrocarbon fuel, but this doesn't doom us to run everything this way.
anovikov 14y ago
Biofuels are of course nonsense from energy efficiency standpoint. Biogas is produced for a different purpose: it results in storable energy, which is theoretically supposed to balance energy produced by intermittent sources. Overally, biofuels are not supposed to be energy-efficient or net energy positive. If we can one day produce oil from nothing spending 2x the energy the resulting oil will contain it will be a great achievement, even a holy grail of all renewable energy work: storable, high density renewable energy good for peak loads and for transport (worst case: airplanes).
- sliverstorm 14y ago
  My pet theory is the reason they are so popular is "biofuels" has the word "bio" in it, which excites the sorts of greenies that don't examine things too closely. Supporting evidence: aggressive marketing of "probiotic" supplements
ChuckMcM 14y ago
I like how everyone comes into this debate with a different concept of what bio-fuels "do." If you think about supplying the worlds energy needs using bio-fuel it is a non-starter, and that is basically what the editorial says. Converting incident sunlight into useful energy through existing photo synthesis processes is inefficient and does a great harm in terms of food production. If you think of it as a way of converting sunlight into something that pre-existing infrastructure can use (fuels) that can be justified on the expense of swapping out the existing infrastructure. Big picture -> move everything to electricity and gas, since those two forms of energy are pretty readily convertible into the other forms we need. Intermediate points -> you need a petroleum fuel cycle while you're converting everything else.
alberthartman 14y ago
Damn you math! PV works just fine. Too bad we don't have a high density mobile energy storage method to compare to liquid oil. When that happens, sub power will rule all.
jpalomaki 14y ago
Biofuels are also being produced from waste: http://www.st1.eu/index.php?id=2876 http://www.st1.eu/index.php?id=2876
tehwalrus 14y ago
I thought we knew this already.
JoeAltmaier 14y ago
Headline: oil industry experts slam alternative energy. Alternatives have only just begun being explored. Innovation in this area are very likely to surprise that chemist. E.g. steam from room-temperature water posted on HN today: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4824205 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4824205 Bioengineered plants may work any way we can imagine, not just the way an oil-industry chemist imagines.
SpikeDad 14y ago
Irrelevant. If if a renewable source is 10x less efficient than non-renewable sources, the key here is NON-RENEWABLE. We've got to take the pressure off of petroleum based fuels until such time as we come up with some alternative system - hydrogen, high-capacity battery storage, etc. PS. Adding Nobel Prize to someone's argument doesn't have the gravitas as perhaps it once had. I think Linus Pauling and vitamin C diminished that.

181 points by sasoon 14y ago

"nonsense" feels like an understatement. It competes with our food sources and even more so with ecological diversity. It should be one of those factors that assure that food prices rise to the sky with fuel prices and as they both go up, nature will fold. Feel free to criticise my ignorance of economics. I'm probably mostly wrong.

baq 14y ago
common sense didn't fail you here, you're basically describing what happened last couple of years.

Cowen 14y ago

I don't know a single thing about biochemistry or biofuels, but in reading this I can't help but be reminded of Arthur C. Clarke's first law of prediction: > When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

craigyk 14y ago
Hear Hear. Haven't heard that one before but it probably has quite some truth to it. Sort of like the old: "Science advances one funeral at a time" - Max Planck. Anyways. His criticisms are all good ones, and yet I can't help but feel like he's missing the big picture- that or he thinks we are just doomed. In the short to medium term future (5-25years) biofuels are probably not the answer they've been hyped to be. Yet there are still some places where they will still work well, such as any thing that isn't in contact with the grid. These biofuels will be competing with oil that must be drilled through kilometers of ocean and earth, or from injecting massive amounts of steam into the ground... talk about inefficient. Further, biofuels do not necessarily need to use arable land or potable water. In particular I'd like to know specifics about reports of "higher efficiency" than should be possible. I wonder if these reports aren't based on efficiency as calculated from creating biomass. One thing that immediately comes to mind, is that perhaps simple circulation and dispersal of light in water can account for increased "surface area" that makes up for the "max efficiency at 20% sunlight" statement.
mdemare 14y ago
But this distinguished but elderly scientist makes neither of those claims; he states that growing plants for biofuels is a Bad Idea.

guscost 14y ago

We're actually burning edible plants. Isn't it obvious?

takluyver 14y ago
It's been obvious for some time that using food crops as fuel (first generation biofuels) is a terrible idea. Well, obvious to everyone except the governments subsidising them. What people are still interested in is 2nd gen - converting inedible biomass (mainly cellulose) into liquid fuel - and 3rd gen - growing algae, which have all sorts of cool properties. In theory, you can engineer the algae to produce a usable fuel directly. In practice, it's still proving tricky.
hcarvalhoalves 14y ago
No. Not all ethanol is made from corn or wheat - for instance, in Brazil it's made from the rejects of sugar cane, the other half goes for sugar. The real problem is that you compete with food crops and water for fertile land, or destroy native forests.
- JoeAltmaier 14y ago
  "Competing with food crops" is a curious notion. When did we run out of space for food crops? Not on this planet. Corn grown in Iowa could feed 2 United States. So we make all sorts of other things out of it, or the govt pays folks (me for instance) to NOT grow corn and keep the price up. At this point in history, with our current distribution system, biofuels can make money. In the future they will become more efficient, perhaps orders of magnitude more in ways we haven't thought of yet (oil-drop lenses on the leaves; kelp that fills its pods directly with waxy carbohydrate films; seeds that can be eaten OR converted to fuel etc). The dumb thing would be to stop innovating now, because of FUD about imaginary issues.
  - hcarvalhoalves 14y ago
    It competes with food crops for fertile land. That means: it pushes food production to places with worse water, farther from consumption centers, increasing waste and costs related to transport. Maybe in the US the situation is not clear because you have vast plains so it doesn't matter if you cover the entire surface with corn, but here in Brazil, my state vanished with an entire forest just for sugar cane and soy crops. Google "Atlantic Forest".

alokv28 14y ago

Here's a direct link to Michel's article that the blog post pulls quotes from. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201200218/pdf http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201200218/pd...

Gravityloss 14y ago
This is a html version: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201200218/full http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201200218/fu...

Angostura 14y ago

Damn, better jettison my wood burning stove.

doublerebel 14y ago

Headline is misleading. The important, specific point is in the conclusion: ...we should not grow plants for biofuel production. Using biofuels from what would otherwise be waste (decomposing waste biomass, used fry oil) is still efficient and valuable. Reading between the lines, if we want to run cars on solar power, we should do it with electrics and solar cells, not photosynthesis.

nhaehnle 14y ago
This sounds quite reasonable. If left to their own devices, plants don't optimize for energy content, they optimize for spreading. However, we humans already managed to genetically modify them (using simple selection of seeds over the millenia) to optimize plants for nutritional content instead. It would be interesting to know to what extent human selection and other forms of genetic manipulation could improve the efficiency of photosynthesis in plants to make them viable for biofuels. After all, large scale agriculture is still much simpler to pull off than the kind of industrial process needed to build solar cells on a large scale.
- doublerebel 14y ago
  The kind of large-scale agriculture most often used today relies on a huge amount of hydrocarbons. As I mentioned above, the need for hydrocarbons would still be compounding -- the more biofuels grown, the more biofuels required to grow them -- unlike capturing and transporting electricity on the already-existing infrastructure. I would love to see large-scale sustainable agriculture that doesn't require such a staggering amount of resources. There are many smart people working on this problem. Unfortunately I don't see those advances outpacing the advances being made in electricity storage and transport.
  - nhaehnle 14y ago
    Theoretically, it seems to me that if the plants were efficient enough, one should be able to obtain the hydrocarbons from them there are needed during the process of agriculture. I guess the really important point is your second paragraph: As long as there are advances in both the plants and the technology, the plants may simply be unable to catch up.

MikeTaylor 14y ago

In the end, aren't coal and oil biofuel? Just fuels that take millions of years to make. That seems to be proof by counterexample that not <i>all</i> biofuels are useless. But at doublerebel says, the headline should really be "we should not grow plants for biofuel production". Which is not the same thing at all.

ams6110 14y ago
Ultimately, our energy is almost all solar (nuclear fission being the big exception, geothermal being another).
mseebach 14y ago
Taken to the extreme, yes. In practicality, the term is reserved for the kind that can be made in quite a bit less than millions of years. Compare "natural materials" and "natural ingredients". In the end, it's all made from naturally occurring atoms, right?

gojomo 14y ago

Here's an even harsher assessment of plant-derived ethanols from Dr. Tad Patzek, chairman of the Department of Petroleum & Geosystems Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin: Basically, [corn] ethanol is obtained from burning methane, coal, diesel fuel, gasoline, corn kernels, soil and environment. We destroy perhaps as many as 7 units of free energy in the environment and human economy to produce 1 unit of free energy as corn ethanol, and make a few clueless environmentalists happier and a few super rich corporations richer. The story is even worse for switchgrass ethanol. (As quoted from http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9619 http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9619 )

uvdiv 14y ago
We destroy perhaps as many as 7 units of free energy in the environment and human economy to produce 1 unit of free energy as corn ethanol And yet they still make a profit, and it is still highly rational to do so. Because it turns out 1 Joule of liquid hydrocarbons is more valuable than 7 Joules of methane or coal or sunshine.
- alsocasey 14y ago
  A comment below mentions subsidies - that's certainly part of the answer. In addition, for mobile applications, not all energy sources are equal. Transportability (stability, energy density, etc.) also contribute to liquid hydrocarbon Joules being more valuable than methane, coal or sunshine.
  - sliverstorm 14y ago
    Tangent- we have LPG, and from what I understand it's actually very successful in niche applications. Have we tried liquefied methane gas? We have many more sources of methane than propane.
    - surrealize 14y ago
      Methane has a much lower boiling point (-182 C) than propane (-42 C), so liquefying methane (and keeping it liquid) is substantially harder.

jeremyjh 14y ago

He is absolutely correct that biofuels are not efficient use of land. But the market would quickly sort that out if it were not for biofuel subsidies. That is what needs to be stopped.

takluyver 14y ago
I'm not sure that the market would sort this out. People in the first world already pay more to fill up their car than people in the third world spend on food. And biodiversity often isn't given a monetary value at all (although there are people working on valuing ecosystem services). Subsidies aren't helping, but the underlying problem is that we want and are able to use more than our 'share' of resources.
- jeremyjh 14y ago
  That isn't what the article is about. He is talking about the energy efficiency of capturing solar power via photosynthesis. From the perspective of this article, growing crops for food is just as inefficient. If acquiring solar energy through biofuels is less efficient than through photoelectric cells or other means then the market will definitely sort this out (though would not directly account for externalities such as carbon pollution).
  - takluyver 14y ago
    That makes more sense. But we still pay a premium for energy in a high-density, liquid form that we can pump into vehicles. Of course, that's changing as battery technology improves.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
adestefan 14y ago
Subsidizes for corn based ethanol were cut in the US in FY12.
baq 14y ago

uvdiv 14y ago

He really, really misses the point: what matters most is economics, not technical metrics in vacuo. “… these values even do not take into account that more than 50% of the energy stored in the biofuel had to be invested in order to obtain the biomass (for producing fertilizers and pesticides, for ploughing the fields, for transport) and the chemical conversion into the respective biofuel.” [...] “The production and use of biofuels therefore is not CO2-neutral. In particular, the energy input is very large for the production of bioethanol from wheat or maize, and some scientists doubt that there is a net gain of energy. Certainly the reduction of CO2 release is marginal.” In real world economics, biofuels are not energy; they are high-density liquid transport fuels. The economics make it clear: e.g., gasoline costs ten times as much as coal, per unit energy. You're paying for the chemistry, not the joules. It matters very litte in real life, that much of the energy (cheap) is wasted; that much of the energy comes from (cheap, external) sources. If biofuels are viable, they can be seen as a conversion of energy to hydrocarbons: of (comparatively) cheap electricity and methane/hydrogen to expensive liquid fuel. Not as a primary energy source. It's the carbon that's valuable. Farming machinery can be electric powered. Nitrogen fertilizer can be created from nuclear- or solar- powered hydrogen. And voilà, it is carbon-neutral. Nuclear electricity, solar electricity, hydrogen -- these are only marginally viable fuels (c.f. the world market for EV's; opinions may differ). Converting them to liquid hydrocarbons is a very useful thing.

stcredzero 14y ago
> In real world economics, biofuels are not energy; they are high-density liquid transport fuels. The economics make it clear: e.g., gasoline costs ten times as much as coal, per unit energy. You're paying for the chemistry, not the joules. Somehow, this is hard to get through people's skulls. Liquid hydrocarbons are a really potent energy storage medium with fantastic economics. (Compare a metal tank to Li-ion battery.) So long as we have need of bulldozers and heavy equipment at sites outside of fully established infrastructure, like construction sites, we will have a good use for such fuels. It's not overall efficiency that's important here. It's efficiency in a mobile context. > Farming machinery can be electric powered. Nitrogen fertilizer can be created from nuclear- or solar- powered hydrogen. And voilà, it is carbon-neutral. This really bothers me, and it happens all the time. Of course everything in our current infrastructure has a carbon footprint!

mayneack 14y ago

There are different types of biofuel research. He seems to ignore the whole sector that is bioengineering the plants to solve these problems. One example that comes to mind (and I can't find a link to on my phone) involves changing the color of the leaf to absorb more light. http://biomassmagazine.com/articles/7341/cutting-edge-bioenergy-projects-earn-arpa-e-funding http://biomassmagazine.com/articles/7341/cutting-edge-bioene...

TomAnthony 14y ago

Elon Musk, in the Q&A section of his recent talk at Oxford (download here: http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/videos/view/211 http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/videos/view/211) also said he believes all biofuels are useless. His point was that putting energy into biofuels is an inefficient way to use the suns energy, and then getting it out is also inefficient. He compared the efficiency to solar.

btilly 14y ago
Not just "an inefficient way". In the best case, biofuels are 2 orders of magnitude less efficient than solar. That said we could theoretically produce around our current energy needs with a perfect biofuel. (Existing biofuels are much, much worse than this theoretical fuel.) We'd just need to convert all land we currently use for agriculture to that purpose. (And then what would we eat?) If his numbers are correct - and I see no reason to doubt it - biofuels have to be a dead end.
- nickik 14y ago
  The thing is that you can produce energy at one place and then move it around the world cheaply. This does not work with solar. You can produce it but storing and disributing is much, much harder.

siculars 14y ago

Elon Musk addresses this around 1hr 17min here http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/videos/view/211 http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/videos/view/211

readymade 14y ago

Way to link to a Climate Change denial blog, HN.

stcredzero 14y ago

Plant based biofuels are only problematic if you imagine replacing all transportation energy needs with them. Cut that out! Develop all technologies and let the market decide. I predict that there will be specialist niche applications for biofuels, and that most of transportation will be electric. For a cheap, robust means of storing lots of energy, it's really hard to compete with a metal tank of hydrocarbon fuel, but this doesn't doom us to run everything this way.

anovikov 14y ago

Biofuels are of course nonsense from energy efficiency standpoint. Biogas is produced for a different purpose: it results in storable energy, which is theoretically supposed to balance energy produced by intermittent sources. Overally, biofuels are not supposed to be energy-efficient or net energy positive. If we can one day produce oil from nothing spending 2x the energy the resulting oil will contain it will be a great achievement, even a holy grail of all renewable energy work: storable, high density renewable energy good for peak loads and for transport (worst case: airplanes).

sliverstorm 14y ago
My pet theory is the reason they are so popular is "biofuels" has the word "bio" in it, which excites the sorts of greenies that don't examine things too closely. Supporting evidence: aggressive marketing of "probiotic" supplements

ChuckMcM 14y ago

I like how everyone comes into this debate with a different concept of what bio-fuels "do." If you think about supplying the worlds energy needs using bio-fuel it is a non-starter, and that is basically what the editorial says. Converting incident sunlight into useful energy through existing photo synthesis processes is inefficient and does a great harm in terms of food production. If you think of it as a way of converting sunlight into something that pre-existing infrastructure can use (fuels) that can be justified on the expense of swapping out the existing infrastructure. Big picture -> move everything to electricity and gas, since those two forms of energy are pretty readily convertible into the other forms we need. Intermediate points -> you need a petroleum fuel cycle while you're converting everything else.

alberthartman 14y ago

Damn you math! PV works just fine. Too bad we don't have a high density mobile energy storage method to compare to liquid oil. When that happens, sub power will rule all.

jpalomaki 14y ago

Biofuels are also being produced from waste: http://www.st1.eu/index.php?id=2876 http://www.st1.eu/index.php?id=2876

tehwalrus 14y ago

I thought we knew this already.

JoeAltmaier 14y ago

Headline: oil industry experts slam alternative energy. Alternatives have only just begun being explored. Innovation in this area are very likely to surprise that chemist. E.g. steam from room-temperature water posted on HN today: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4824205 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4824205 Bioengineered plants may work any way we can imagine, not just the way an oil-industry chemist imagines.

SpikeDad 14y ago

Irrelevant. If if a renewable source is 10x less efficient than non-renewable sources, the key here is NON-RENEWABLE. We've got to take the pressure off of petroleum based fuels until such time as we come up with some alternative system - hydrogen, high-capacity battery storage, etc. PS. Adding Nobel Prize to someone's argument doesn't have the gravitas as perhaps it once had. I think Linus Pauling and vitamin C diminished that.