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[CookinFlat6]

To avoid a number of threads getting polluted by the constant dribble of bodily fluids as well as irritating lies and non truths, and to avoid posting any response at all, I have created this thread to discuss Biofuels. Please read or do not read. Please dont complain and moan without reading, Instead of complain, please take a moment to not read any further and maybe ignore the thread from now.

This is an F1 site with a section for anything else, so 2 factual threads on Solar and Biofuels should be as valid as threads that a bit more 'light hearted' I will just continue to post interesting developments on both topics until the threads are locked.

So there is no need for anyone to contribute by complaining about the content posted inside. Read or dont read, comment or dont comment

The adoption of biofuels would be a humanitarian and environmental disaster for the planet


George Monbiot
Guardian Weekly

If human beings were without sin, we would still live in an imperfect world. Adam Smith's notion that by pursuing his own interest, a man "frequently promotes that of . . . society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it", and Karl Marx's picture of a society in which "the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all" are both mocked by one obvious constraint. The world is finite. This means that, when one group of people pursues its own interests, it damages the interests of others.

It is hard to think of a better example than the current enthusiasm for biofuels. These are made from plant oils or crop wastes or wood, and can be used to run cars and buses and lorries. Burning them simply returns to the atmosphere the carbon that the plants extracted while they were growing. So switching from fossil fuels to biodiesel and bioalcohol is now being promoted as the solution to climate change.

This month the British government will have to set a target for the amount of transport fuel that will come from crops. The European Union wants 2% of the oil we use to be biodiesel by the end of next year, rising to 6% by 2010 and 20% by 2020. To try to meet these targets, the government has reduced the tax on biofuels by 20p a litre, while the EU is paying farmers an extra 45 euros a hectare to grow them.

Everyone seems happy about this. The farmers and the chemicals industry can develop new markets, the government can meet its commitments to cut carbon emissions, and environmentalists can celebrate the fact that plant fuels reduce local pollution as well as global warming. Unlike hydrogen fuel cells, biofuels can be deployed straightaway. This, in fact, was how Rudolf Diesel expected his invention to be used. When he demonstrated his engine at the World Exhibition in 1900, he ran it on peanut oil. "The use of vegetable oils for engine fuels may seem insignificant today," he predicted. "But such oils may become in course of time as important as petroleum." Some enthusiasts are predicting that if fossil fuel prices continue to rise, he will soon be proved right.

I hope not. Those who have been promoting these fuels are well-intentioned, but wrong. They are wrong because the world is finite. If biofuels take off, they will cause a global humanitarian disaster.

Used as they are today, on a very small scale, they do no harm. A few thousand greens in the United Kingdom are running their cars on used chip fat. But recycled cooking oils could supply only 100,000 tonnes of diesel a year in this country, equivalent to one 380th of road transport fuel used.

It might also be possible to turn crop wastes such as wheat stubble into alcohol for use in cars. I'd like to see the figures, but I find it hard to believe that we will be able to extract more energy than we use in transporting and processing straw. But the EU's plans, like those of all the enthusiasts for biolocomotion, depend on growing crops specifically for fuel. As soon as you examine the implications, you discover that the cure is as bad as the disease.

Road transport in the UK consumes 37.6m tonnes of petroleum products a year. The most productive oil crop that can be grown in this country is ****. The average yield is 3-3.5 tonnes per hectare. One tonne of rapeseed produces 415kg of biodiesel. So every hectare of arable land could provide 1.45 tonnes of transport fuel.

To run the country's cars and buses and lorries on biodiesel, in other words, would require 25.9m hectares. There are 5.7m in the UK. Even the EU's more modest target of 20% by 2020 would consume almost all available cropland.

If the same thing is to happen all over Europe, the impact on global food supply will be catastrophic: big enough to tip the global balance from net surplus to net deficit. If, as some environmentalists demand, it is to happen worldwide, then most of the arable surface of the planet will be deployed to produce food for cars, not people.

This prospect sounds, at first, ridiculous. Surely if there were unmet demand for food, the market would ensure that crops were used to feed people rather than vehicles? There is no basis for this assumption. The market responds to money, not need. People who own cars have more money than people at risk of starvation. In a contest between their demand for fuel and poor people's demand for food, the car owners win every time. Something very much like this is happening already. Though 800 million people are permanently malnourished, the global increase in crop production is being used to feed animals: the number of livestock on Earth has quintupled since 1950. The reason is that those who buy meat and dairy products have more purchasing power than those who buy only subsistence crops.

Green fuel is not just a humanitarian disaster; it is also an environmental disaster. Those who worry about the scale and intensity of today's agriculture should consider what farming will look like when it is run by the oil industry. Moreover, if we try to develop a market for rapeseed biodiesel in Europe, it will immediately develop into a market for palm oil and soya oil. Oilpalm can produce four times as much biodiesel per hectare as ****, and it is grown in places where labour is cheap. Planting it is already one of the world's major causes of tropical forest destruction. Soya has a lower oil yield than ****, but the oil is a byproduct of the manufacture of animal feed. A new market for it will stimulate an industry that has already destroyed most of Brazil's cerrado (one of the world's most biodiverse environments) and much of its rainforest.

It is shocking to see how narrow the focus of some environmentalists can be. At a meeting in Paris in October, a group of scientists and greens studying abrupt climate change decided that Tony Blair's two big ideas tackling global warming and helping Africa could both be met by turning Africa into a biofuel production zone. This strategy, according to its convenor, "provides a sustainable development path for the many African countries that can producebiofuels cheaply". I know the definition of sustainable development has been changing, but I wasn't aware that it now encompasses massstarvation and the eradication oftropical forests. Last year the Britishparliamentary committee on environment, food and rural affairs, which is supposed to specialise in joined-up thinking, examined every possible consequence of biofuel production from rural incomes to skylark numbers except the impact on food supply.

We need a solution to the global warming caused by cars, but this isn't it. If the production of biofuels is big enough to affect climate change, it will be big enough to cause global starvation.



Fuel for nought

[CookinFlat6]

The Coming Biofuels Disaster
by
Joe Brewer
Have you ever tried to solve a problem only to discover that you made things worse in the process? This is happening right now with biofuels. We are on the road to disaster because the problem we are trying to solve has been framed inadequately. Harmful impacts from large-scale biofuel production are largely overlooked. And we aren't even addressing the right problem! The truth can be seen when we frame issues in the context of livability.

Solving the Wrong Problem

Policy makers have been grappling with the fact that an excessive amount of carbon dioxide is polluting our atmosphere, disrupting global weather patterns and shifting the world's climate beyond safe boundaries. The solution required by this problem is that we stop increasing greenhouse pollution levels. This can be accomplished by shifting our energy sector in a direction that ultimately reduces the amount of heat-trapping gases that have accumulated since the dawn of the industrial revolution.

On the surface, biofuels present the ideal solution to this problem. We can grow them in large amounts and the carbon that is released by burning them is equal to the amount they breathe in as they grow. This simple mental accounting is very appealing, but woefully inaccurate for describing what is really going on.

The real problem is that the way we use energy is out of balance with natural processes, driving us away from the equilibrium necessary for our communities to survive. This is evident in the planet's atmosphere where global warming is running rampant, our cities are submerged in toxic gases, and the protective ozone shield is tattered. It is also evident in the biosphere, where we are in the midst of the Earth's sixth mass extinction (the first in the planet's four and a half billion year history caused by a single species - humans). Soils in our agricultural plains are lost to wind and water, reducing the land's capacity to produce food. And our water supplies are being diverted, drained, and contaminated by toxic run-off. We need to find livable solutions to this problem.

A glance at biofuels in the context of livability shows how woefully inadequate they are for solving it. In truth, they will make things worse. The biofuels hoax, as ecologist Eric Holt-Giménez calls it, is based on several misunderstandings that arise in the language of the energy debate.

The Biofuel Myth of Renewal

Biofuels are not the clear solution they seem to be. For starters, the word biofuel is problematic. The augmentation of the word fuel with the prefix bio- creates a meaning that uses our experience with biological organisms (namely that they are able to reproduce themselves). This meaning implies that biofuels are renewable because the crops used to create them can also be reproduced. But biofuels are not renewable without dramatically changing the ways we grow crops and manufacture/distribute products.

Large-scale agricultural practices deplete soils, contaminate water supplies, and are vulnerable to pests and disease when single crops (monocultures) are grown in large fields. The widespread use of pesticides - manufactured using fossil fuels - is also contributing to the cancer epidemic wreaking havoc on our communities. Current agricultural practices also require non-renewable resources and utilize vast distribution networks that are very high in resource demand - including the need for lots of energy.

In some areas, such as Indonesia and Malaysia, entire forests are decimated to grow biofuel crops. The plant life destroyed in this process releases huge amounts of carbon dioxide as the dead trees and undergrowth decompose, exacerbating the problem they are meant to address.

Biofuels are not renewable! Soils are depleted. Water supplies are depleted. Highways and factories deplete mineral resources. Entire forests are depleted.

This truth is hidden by the blending of the concepts for living organism and fuel in the word biofuel.

Frankenfuel Monster

The word biofuel tells us that the fuel is natural. Things that are natural are considered to be safer than things that are manufactured. This understanding of natural tells us that biofuels are better than manufactured fuels.

The natural frame leads to two false impressions:

1. Biofuels are presumed to be good for the environment 2. Biofuels are presumed to be better for us than manufactured fuels
The first impression is false because of the agricultural production systems we currently use. The second impression is false because biofuels are manufactured in two ways. First, the fuel is produced through an industrial refinement process where ethanol is extracted from plant materials. And second, there is considerable emphasis on genetically engineering plants to be grown as fuel sources. These plants - including corn, palm trees, switch grass, and algae - are not natural if they are the product of intentional design by genetic engineering.

One area of genetic research that isn't talked about nearly enough is devoted to increasing plant resistance to pests. With something like switch grass that grows quickly, the prospect of making it resistant to pests is a recipe for a super weed. The last thing we want is an aggressive weed that is immune to natural predators.

We shouldn't call genetically engineered plants biofuels. They are frankenfuels. By tampering with plant DNA, we run the risk of getting further out of balance, possibly introducing new and unexpected harms like invasive species that take over croplands and natural ecosystems.

The precautionary principle, which tells us that possible threats with dire consequences should be avoided, automatically applies when the discussion is about finding livable solutions.

Myth of Transition

The energy debate has explored biofuels as a "transition" to renewable energy. The livability lens already shows us that they are not renewable, but supporters often reply to such critiques by stating that biofuels are a step in the right direction. They claim that biofuels are better than oil (in the context of the carbon emissions problem) and are a significant step toward a society based entirely on renewable energy.

This is simply not true. We are dependent on oil because the massive infrastructure of our societies is based on the use of fossil fuels. Changing over to a biofuel society involves building a similarly massive infrastructure. An honest account of this option includes this truth.

In order to meet current energy demands, we must grow crops over huge areas, build factories and storage facilities, redesign automobiles to run on biodiesel, and more. We would be entrenched in a biofuel society as much as we are now in a fossil fuel society. Either way, we are still dependent on some kind of fuel.

Feeding Cars or People?

Another kind of transition will happen if we invest significantly in biofuels. We will shift crop yields away from food production. Basic economics tells us that the cost of goods go up when supply decreases. The growing demand for grains to produce fuel has increased the cost of food.

The economic incentive to grow crops for fuels instead of food will drive down food production in the long run, permanently inflating the cost of food. At the same time, less food will be produced. This combination creates a situation where landowners are motivated by profits to grow fuel crops, which will lead to an increase in the number of hungry people in poor countries.

We are starving poor people to feed our cars!

This economic truth does not emerge in the context of carbon dioxide levels. Only by framing the problem in the context of livability does the impact on poor people become apparent.

Bypassing Disaster with Livability

The biofuels debate has been centered on the wrong question. The problem is not simply the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. If we address the "carbon problem" without recognizing the "livability problem" our solutions will fail. This is the challenge. We have to look at these problems holistically to see the impacts of our choices.

Addressing the climate crisis requires us to do a lot more than change from fossil fuels to plant-based fuels. Global warming is a problem because the way we live is out of sync with nature. The solution is to rethink how we relate to our natural environment. This is where livability is paramount. We need to be thinking about family farms, not factory farms. In the family farm frame, people are interacting with the earth to produce food. The factory farm frame has people interacting with the earth to produce money.

All of the problems with biofuels have been largely overlooked because of the way the situation has been framed. Experts have known about these problems for a long time, but public discourse has been too narrow to recognize them.

When thinking about the essential features of a livable community, we can see that biofuels will not work in their current incarnation. A livable community:

* Provides essential resources like potable water and breathable air * Preserves these essential resources for future generations * Provides food security (now and into the future) * Promotes the flourishing of life (including the millions of species we co-exist with - and cannot exist without!)
A livable community promotes life. This means it is not destructive. Current emphasis on pesticides and herbicides, for example, are chemical killers that destroy life. By growing diverse crops locally, we don't need nitrogen fertilizer that runs off into rivers and kills life in lakes and oceans. Instead, a livable community's central activities involve growing food in a way that supports many different kinds of plants and animals. This diversity provides a buffer for the community to protect it against changes in climate (where some plants may no longer grow, but others will). In a livable community, energy is generated to serve the needs of people. A variety of ways to generate energy provides another kind of buffer against change. Some sources - such as coal and oil - will be phased out when they threaten the security of people in the community.

It is not even clear whether biofuels can be part of the solution at all. The family farm that supports life is inherently local and small. Introduction of an economic incentive to grow fuel crops will drive local farmers to grow ever larger biofuel crops, resulting in the pattern that is occurring now.

We can solve the "livability problem" by looking for ways to promote life. The carbon dioxide problem will get fixed along the way.

[CookinFlat6]

Biofuels: 'Irrational' and 'worse than fossil fuels'
Matt McGrath
By Matt McGrath
Environment correspondent, BBC News

The UK's "irrational" use of biofuels will cost motorists around £460 million over the next 12 months, a think tank says.

A report by Chatham House says the growing reliance on sustainable liquid fuels will also increase food prices.

The author says that biodiesel made from vegetable oil was worse for the climate than fossil fuels.

Under EU law, biofuels are set to make up 5% of the UK's transport fuel from today.

Continue reading the main story
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Start Quote

It creates a financial incentive to buy refined palm oil, cook a chip in it to turn it into used cooking oil and then sell it at profit...”

Rob Bailey
Chatham House
Since 2008, the UK has required fuel suppliers to add a growing proportion of sustainable materials into the petrol and diesel they supply. These biofuels are mainly ethanol distilled from corn and biodiesel made from rapeseed, used cooking oil and tallow.

Deep fried fuel
But research carried out for Chatham House says that reaching the 5% level means that UK motorists will have to pay an extra £460m a year because of the higher cost of fuel at the pump and from filling up more often as biofuels have a lower energy content.

The report say that if the UK is to meet its obligations to EU energy targets the cost to motorists is likely to rise to £1.3bn per annum by 2020.

"It is hard to find any good news," Rob Bailey, senior research fellow at Chatham House, told BBC News.

"Biofuels increase costs and they are a very expensive way to reduce carbon emissions," he said.

The EU biofuel mandates are also having hugely distorting effects in the marketplace. Because used cooking oil is regarded as one of the most sustainable types of biodiesel, the price for it has risen rapidly. Rob Bailey says that towards the end of 2012 it was more expensive than refined palm oil.

"It creates a financial incentive to buy refined palm oil, cook a chip in it to turn it into used cooking oil and then sell it at profit,"

"It is crazy but the incentives are there."

Rapeseed oil
Oil made from rapeseed is widely used for biodiesel across the EU
There are also worries that taking EU land out of production to grow rapeseed oil in particular is creating more climate problems than it solves. The more fuel of this type that is put into cars the bigger the deficit created in the edible oils market. This had lead to increased imports of palm oil from Indonesia, often produced on deforested land.

"Once you take into account these indirect effects, biofuels made from vegetable oils actually result worldwide in more emissions than you would get from using diesel in the first place," said Rob Bailey.

"Plus you are asking motorists to pay more for the fuel - it makes no sense, it is a completely irrational strategy."

Biofuel benefits
The European Biodiesel Board (EBB), which represents the industry across the EU, said it was aware of the problems caused by the mandate. But it believes that biofuels have many positives.

"Blaming biofuels for all the troubles in the world is a bit too exaggerated," said Isabelle Maurizi, project manager at the EBB.

"It has brought lots of benefits. It has improved the security of our diesel; it has reduced EU dependency on animal feed imports, thanks to the rapeseed we grow for biodiesel."

"If there was no biodiesel farmers would just make their land idle - no food, no feed!"

As the UK hits the 5% of liquid fuels mark, the government faces some difficult decisions on how to move forward on this issue as it faces tripling the costs for motorists by 2020.

Insiders suggest its preference would be to try and get agreement in Brussels on the impacts of indirect costs which might constrain what counts as biofuel. However getting agreement from countries with powerful agricultural sectors who benefit from the current arrangement will be difficult.

"When you have a lobby which includes the agricultural sector and the oil sector it is very hard for Governments to make a U-turn," said Rob Bailey.

[CookinFlat6]

Leave the algae alone

Algae_close


While the first generation of biofuels is wreaking havoc on the environment and the food markets, the second generation is set to make things even worse.

Since it has become clear that ethanol and biodiesel made from food crops are doing more harm than good, the hope for finding a substitute for oil has shifted to algae and cellulose. If we can believe the advocates of this ‘second generation’ of biofuels, these combustibles will deliver way more energy than it takes to make them, without threatening the world’s food and water supplies. Upon taking a closer look, however, this is very hard to believe. They might even cause bigger problems than biofuels made from food crops. Maybe this time around we could sort this out before the damage gets done?

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The biofuel disaster

Just two years ago, ethanol and biodiesel were heralded by almost everybody as a green substitute for oil. Today, almost everybody realizes that it is a foolish idea. Several studies have confirmed by now that it takes as much or even more energy to produce biofuels than they can deliver themselves.

That’s because the crops have to be planted, fertilized, harvested, transported, and converted into fuel, all processes that require fossil energy. If one also takes into account the land that is cleared to plant the energy crops, biofuels have become an extra source of greenhouse gases, while they were meant to lower them. Biofuels also helped to fuel a rise in food prices by competing for agricultural land. And very recently it also became clear that their production poisons water bodies.

In spite of this horrible record, both the European Union and the United States keep encouraging ethanol and biodiesel, mainly with the excuse that there is a 'second generation' of green fuels on the way, particularly cellulosic ethanol and algal fuel, which have no harmful effects. Sadly, this promises to be another dangerous illusion.

The cellulosic ethanol disaster

It is too early to say whether or not cellulosic ethanol can ever be produced with a net energy gain as a result – at the moment, it is impossible. We can only hope that scientists will never succeed, because what we do know for sure is that cellulosic ethanol will be an even larger threat to the world’s food supply than the first generation of biofuels.

Cellulosic ethanol is not made from the edible parts of crops, but from their stalks, roots and leaves. It can also be made of non-edible plants, like switchgrass. Therefore, at first sight, it seems unlikely that turning cellulose into fuel could present a danger for agriculture. However, there is one, literally invisible problem: the soil.

In nature, the concept of waste does not exist. The so-called “waste” that we plan to transform into fuel, is an essential element to keep the soil productive. Leaves, twigs and stalks are decomposed by underground organisms, which turn it into humus that can feed a next generation of plants.

If you take away this material, the soil will become less and less fertile until all you are left with is a desert. Of course, this process can be offset by adding more and more artificial fertilizers. But, here's the rub: fertilizers are made from fossil fuels. Almost 30 percent of energy use in agriculture is attributed to fertilizer production (both their production process and their content). This means that the more energy we produce from cellulose, the more energy we will need to keep the soil fertile. In short: this makes no sense.

The first generation of biofuels might endanger the world’s food supply, but that process is reversible. We can decide at any moment to change our minds and use the corn to make food instead of fuel. A similar deployment of cellulosic fuels would destroy our agricultural soils, without any chance to repair them afterwards. We will have mined the soil – a process that is irreversible, because when the soil becomes too exhausted, even fertilizers are of no help. Cellulosic ethanol is a dangerous illusion. And if you don’t believe me, ask any soil scientist.

Nevertheless, as was announced earlier this week, the first cellulosic ethanol plant is scheduled to start working in 2009 (even despite the fact that scientists agree that a net energy gain is not yet possible).

The algae fuel disaster

Also earlier this week, the first algal fuel production facility went online and that generated lots of excitement. If we can believe the hype, it will not take long before we drive our cars and fly our planes on fuel made by algae. The figures sound impressive. Algae are expected to be able to produce 10,000 gallons of fuel per acre per year (some say 20,000 gallons), compared to 700 gallons for palm oil and less than 100 gallons for corn and soy.

Algae could also be used as a jet fuel and as a source to make plastics and detergents. Moreover, all this can be done with nothing more than sunlight and CO2 – and without the need for any potable water. If algal fuel plants are placed next to fossil fuel plants, as some companies are planning to do, the algae could even capture the CO2 from the emissions of the coal or gas plant. As one ecogeek summarized; “Welcome to the future, where single-celled plants eat our pollution and power our cars.”

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"There are very detailed figures on the amount of energy that will come out of the process, yet it is very hard to find any information on the energy and resources needed to make this energy output possible"

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This sounds too good to be true. If you take a closer look at the claims of these companies, essential information seems to be missing. They present very detailed figures on the amount of energy that will come out of the process, yet it is very hard if not impossible to find any information on the energy and resources needed to make this energy output possible.

If algae don't produce more energy than it takes to produce them, driving cars on algal fuel does not make much sense. And if they also use resources that are needed by agriculture, the game might not be worth the candle. These are important questions, as we have learned from the ethanol and biodiesel fiasco, yet nobody seems to wait for the answers.

Some twenty companies are planning commercial facilities to make algal fuel, often backed up by petroleum businesses and government subsidies (see here and here for an overview).

Water in the desert

Algae have higher photosynthetic efficiencies than most plants, and they grow much faster. Up to 50 percent of their body weight is oil, compared to about 20 percent for oil-palm trees. They don’t need fertile ground, so that they can be grown on soil that is not suitable for agriculture.

All this sounds very good, but algae also need a few things, most notably: a lot of sunshine and massive amounts of water. To grow algae, you also need phosphorus (besides other minerals), an element that is very much needed by agriculture.


Solix_bioreactor
Design of a desert algae production facility : where does the water come from?

Most algae are grown in brackish or salt water. That sounds as if water is no issue, since our planet has not a shortage of salt water. However, just like solar energy plants, algae plants are best located in very sunny regions, like deserts.

But, in deserts, and in very sunny places in general, there is not much water to find. That’s not a problem for solar plants, because they don’t need it. But, how are you going to get seawater to your desert algae plant? Check the websites of all these companies: not a word about it.

There are not that many possibilities. You can transport seawater to the desert, but that's going to cost you an awful lot of energy, probably more than what can be produced by the algae. You can also take freshwater from more nearby regions or underground aquifers and turn it into artificial seawater. But, you promised that algal fuel would not compete with food production. A third option is to put your algae plant next to the sea.

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"Algae need a lot of sunshine and huge amounts of water - how do you get seawater to the desert?"

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Now, there are places which are both close to the sea and have lots of sun. But chances are slim that they are as cheap and abandoned like deserts are. Most likely, they are already filled up with tourists and hotels, to name one possibility. So you might be forced to look for a less sunny place close to the sea – which inevitably means that your energy efficiency is going down. Which again raises the question: will the algae deliver more fuel than is needed to make them?

How much water does algae production need? This information is nowhere to find. “A lot” would be a good bet for an answer, since it’s not enough to fill up the ponds or tanks just once. The water has to be supplemented regularly. Being able to produce 10,000 gallons of fuel per acre per year might sound impressive, but what really counts is how many gallons of fuel you can produce with a certain amount of water.

Contamination

The water issue is not the only “detail” that threatens the energy efficiency of algal fuel. Compared to other plants, the photosynthetic efficiency of algae is high – almost 3 times that of sugar cane for instance. Compared to solar energy, however, the energy efficiency of algae is very low – around 1 percent, while solar panels have an efficiency of at least 10 percent, and solar thermal gets 20 percent and more.

So why would we choose algae over solar energy? One reason might be that it takes quite some energy to produce solar panels, while algae can be grown in an open shallow pond with nothing else but sunshine and CO2, which the organisms take from the atmosphere. You will still need energy to turn the algae into a liquid fuel, but other than that no energy input is needed.

However, these low-tech methods (comparable to growing corn, soy or palm trees to make ethanol or biodiesel) are being left behind for more efficient ones, using closed glass or polycarbonate bioreactors and an array of high-tech equipment to keep the algae in optimal conditions.

Even though some companies still prefer open ponds (like the PetroSun plant that started production last week), this method has serious drawbacks. The main problem is contamination by other kinds of algae and organisms, which can replace the energy producing algae in no time. Ponds also need a lot of space, because sunlight only penetrates the upper layers of a water body. It's the surface of the pond that counts, not the depth.

The laws of physics

Algae3 Transparent aquariums (called closed bio-reactors) solve all the problems of open ponds. These bioreactors can be placed inclined or suspended from the roof of a greenhouse so that they can catch more sun on a given surface. And since they are closed, no other organisms can enter. However, this method introduces a host of other issues. Bioreactors have a higher efficiency, but they also use considerably more energy.

First of all, you have to build an array of structures: the glass or polycarbonate containers themselves, the metal frames, the greenhouses. The production of all this equipment might consume less energy (and money) per square meter than the production of solar panels, but you need much more of it because algae are less efficient than solar plants.

Moreover, in closed bioreactors, CO2 has to be added artificially. This is done by bubbling air through the water by means of gas pumps, a process that needs energy. Furthermore, the containers have to be emptied and cleaned regularly, they have to be sterilized, the water has to be kept at a certain temperature, and minerals have to be added continuously (because also here, just as with cellulosic ethanol, "waste" materials are being removed). All these processes demand extra energy.

Are algal fuel producers taking these factors into account when they claim efficiencies that are 100 times higher than the ones from biodiesel and ethanol? Only they know. It could be that these businesses are greatly overestimating their energy gains in order to attract capital.

One of the few critics of algal fuel, Krassen Dimitrov, calculated that the figures of GreenFuel Technologies are defying the laws of physics. The company says that he is wrong, but his calculations surely look more convincing than the virtually non-existant information on their website (update May 2009: GreenFuel Technologies shuts down).

Feeding algae from smokestacks

Several companies plan to hook up their production facilities to a fossil fuel energy plant, in order to capture the CO2 and nitrogen emissions and "feed" them to the algae. This method is hailed as a way of reducing greenhouse gases emitted by coal and gas plants, which is a ridiculous claim. It's very curious that this capturing technology is criticized when used in the context of "clean" coal, but applauded when it is used to make algal fuel. In both cases, capturing CO2 from smokestacks raises the energy use of the power plant by at least 20 percent.

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"It's curious that capturing CO2 from power plants is criticized when used in the context of 'clean' coal, but applauded when it is used to make algal fuel"

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That not only makes the technology very expensive, it also means that more coal or gas has to be mined, transported and burned. Algal fuel can even be considered a worse idea than "clean" coal. In the "clean" coal strategy, at least the CO2 is captured with the intention to store it underground.

In the case of algae, the CO2 is captured only with the intention to release in the air some time later, by a car engine. Last but not least, capturing CO2 from power plants ties algal fuel production to fossil fuels. If we switch to solar energy, where will the algal fuel producers get their CO2 from?

Outsourcing energy use

Algae1Again, are algae producers considering the extra use of energy that arises by the capture of the CO2 when they claim that algae can deliver 100 times more energy than first generation biofuels?

This seems very doubtful. All these claims have one thing in common: they focus only on a small part of the total energy conversion chain.

A very good example is the story of Solazyme, a company that cultivates (genetically modified) algae in non-transparent steel containers, similar to those of breweries. In this case the algae do not get their energy from the sun, but from sugar that is fed to them. This method, says the company, makes them produce 1,000 times more oil than they do in sunlight, because sugar is a much more concentrated form of energy than sunlight.

But, where does the sugar come from? The researchers simply leave that part of the process out of their calculation, and nobody seems to care. Growing sugar cane of course requires significant amounts of energy, land and water.

In fact, by turning off photosynthesis, the researchers eliminate the only advantage of algae compared to other plants: their higher energetic efficiency. The photosynthetic efficiency of sugar cane is not even half that of algae, which means that if the whole energy chain would be considered, this process can only be worse than that of algae produced in transparent bioreactors.

Stop this madness

While the first generation of biofuels is wreaking havoc on the environment and the food markets, the second generation is getting ready to make things only worse. Behind the scenes, scientists are already working on the third generation, whatever that may be.

In five or ten years time, when it becomes clear that algal fuel is devouring our water and energy resources and cellulosic ethanol is mining our agricultural soils, we will be promised that the third generation will again solve all the problems of the previous generation.

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"Producing fuels out of food crops could be a useful and sustainable solution if our energy consumption would not be so ridiculously high"

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It might be a better solution to bury the whole idea of biofuels right here and now and focus on real solutions. The trouble with biofuels is not the technology, but our unrealistic expectations. Producing fuels out of food crops could be a useful and sustainable solution if our energy consumption would not be so ridiculously high.

All our habits, machines and toys are built upon an extremely concentrated form of energy, fossil oil, and trying to replace that fuel with a much less concentrated form is simply impossible. In 2003, Jeffrey Dukes calculated that 90 tons of prehistoric plants and algae were needed to build up one gallon of gasoline. We burn this amount of organic material to drive 25 miles to pick up some groceries.

In one year, the world burns up 400 years of prehistoric plant and algae material. How can we ever expect to fulfill even a small part of our fuel needs by counting on present plant and algae material? The problem we have to fix is our energy consumption. Biofuels, from whatever generation, only distract us from what really should be done.

© Kris De Decker (edited by Vincent Grosjean)

A useful idiot is someone who supports one side of an ideological debate, but who is manipulated and held in contempt by the leaders of their faction or is unaware of the ultimate agenda driving the ideology to which they subscribe

Algae need all the phosporus and nitrogen in the world to make less than 10% of the worlds transport needs, how do you solve this?

Nothing to explain, if you're wanting to create algae from waste materials that would be one way. I'd place the algae farms as near as possible to some of the greatest carbon polluters on the planet, the electrical power generation plants - plenty of food for them there.

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Researchers may some day find a way to solve the nutrient problem by extracting and reusing nitrogen and phosphorus from the algal residue, but the biggest difficulty to scaling up is more intractable: how do you get your hands on all that CO2? Even if algae-growers could tap every last smokestack in the US, that would only be enough to produce about 75 billion litres of algal biofuel per year, according to Pate's calculations. That's less than 10 per cent of the world's current transport fuel needs. Moreover, tying biofuel production to fossil-fuel-burning industrial smokestacks merely wrings a second round of energy out of CO2. "This just postpones emissions," says Jonas Helseth, director of Bellona Europa, an environmental foundation based in Brussels, Belgium.

where does the battery in your mobile phone gets its rare earth elements [/quote]

Wish I had a choice. Where do you fill up your car?

You dont have a choice to a mobile phone????
You are forced to use your mobile phone and keep those poor slave workers at work???

[CookinFlat6]

Thats my 15 minutes contribution to the karma system for today

Anyone thinking of moaning should instead start considering the logistics involved in the kissing of my ring piece instead

[darwin dali]

[CookinFlat6]

To be fair, this is a balanced response to lies posted on the Solar thread. Its easier to juxtapose posts by a dedicated thread thats shielded from the sensibilities of those more interested in the 'finer' pleasures in life

It wouldnt be a proud moment if only one side of an already one sided dialectic was allowed for whatever reason

No one is forced to read this thread