Are biofuels just a con?

13th Oct '08 by Murakami

11 comments 8641 reads

It seems like the social, scientific and economic case for biofuels is quite weak. Many biofuels barely cut emissions at all, and others can lead to rainforest destruction, drive up food prices, or prompt rich firms to drive poor people off their land to convert it to fuel crops.

http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/mg19626343.800-is-the-biofuel-dream-over.html

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19726380.100-debunking-biofuel.html

Am I missing something? Is it all about "energy independence" from those who don't like our reliance on the Middle East for oil? Anything else to suggest that these stocks are supported by anything other than just hype?

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Murakami

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11 comments

Murakami

13th Oct '08

This is an interesting quote from Peder Jensen, of the European Environment Agency in Copenhagen. "If you make biofuels properly, you will reduce greenhouse emissions... But that depends very much on the types of plants and how they're grown and processed. You can end up with a 90 percent reduction compared to fossil fuels - or a 20 percent increase... Its important to take a life cycle view". This suggest that it's down to good execution but equally it makes it difficult to know whether a given biofuels stock stacks up or not...

Mattybuoy

6th Feb '09

Biofuels may work where they do not displace food crops. The most important factor is the EROEI (Energy Return on Energy Invested). There is a lot of good stuff available on the net at places like e.g. The Oil Drum http://www.theoildrum.com

Cellosic ethanol and algae biodiesel are possibly the best avenues for long-term success. These are quite a long way from commercialisation though.

grumpy5

23rd Oct '15

If I may report from the real world? we installed a biomass boiler in Jan, and get subsidies from the government which makes a 5 year payback for us without taking into account the below. 90% of what we burn is wood from our land, that needed felling anyway. We have decommissioned an old inefficient oil boiler. So we have reduced the nation's consumption of (probably imported) oil by 2-3000 litres p.a. I think it stacks up for us, and the nation, in our case.

schober

2nd Nov '15

Well, it looks like that's what the CCC are saying

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2015/11/02/ccc-question-future-of-biomass/

article concludes " ................ The bottom line is that biomass was never introduced to cut emissions, but simply as a stopgap way of meeting EU targets."

Richstead

2nd Nov '15

I agree with the idea that Grumpy5 has, but did the sums for myself as I have wood that can be felled usefully, but the labour and time cutting,splitting etc was far more expensive than the fuel required to heat a well insulated house. I did not add in the cost of fuel for the chain saw and the transport from the wood to the wood shed, and the bother of filling the boiler. Oil and Gas are easy and the world temperature has not increased in the slightest since 1998. The world is a tougher place than the ecologists like to think.

Growing biofuels as a policy is a complete non starter and would require us to turn over more than half our arable land to the project just to keep the cars on the road, without thinking about heating and industry.

JollyBiologist

4th Nov '15

Hi Richstead,
Regardless of any arguments for or against biofuels, I'd be interested in your source for the statement

the world temperature has not increased in the slightest since 1998

the Met Office has a good page on this: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate-guide/science/temp-records. Check out the graph. If that was showing the share price of a company, would you wish you had invested?

Regards

Paul

schober

4th Nov '15

re - "
the world temperature has not increased in the slightest since 1998"

you might like to look at the data presented in these articles

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2015/04/10/the-global-temperature-standstill-simply-explained/

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2015/04/08/the-pause-is-real-get-over-it/

for example, using hadcrut data ............... looks flat to me (it's better to do the regression from 2001 as 1998 was a big el nino year)

trend_thumb1.png?w=620&h=470

the RSS data shows a decline since 2001!!!!!

cig

5th Nov '15

As far as I can see, the y-axis on this chart is the rate of change, where all post 1998 numbers are well above 0, so it is debunking the original claim that "world temperature has not increased in the slightest since 1998" and making a much weaker claim that the rate of increase is not itself increasing (that is global warming is linear rather than exponential).

peterg

5th Nov '15

I'd also add that it's a noisy graph, and there are a number of time periods you could pick where the rate of increase has not changed. It's fairly spurious to try and make an argument out of the fact that you can pick a time period that gives a flat regression out of a part of the graph. The clear message to anyone looking at that graph is that the rate of increase of temperature has increased since 1988. There may be signs of a levelling off in the rate of increase over the past few years, but it's far too soon to be confident about.

JollyBiologist

5th Nov '15

Plus picking 1998 as the reference year is a clear case of cherry picking data to fit a pre-conceived position. It's exactly what Globo investors did to justify their investment, in the face of all conflicting evidence. In both cases, I like to listen to the experts - Paul Scott on how to interpret accounts, the MET office (and so many others!) on climate change data.

Mark Carter

5th Nov '15

I voted Richardstead up.

One of the big problems I see is that alternative energy is highly politically charged with plenty of vested interests espousing their own viewpoints, long on soundbites, but short on economic discussion. As Mattybuoy pointed out, you cannot really have a sensible discussion without considering EROI.

My take on fracking is that it's too expensive which is why - who'd have thunk - they're closing down. You hear lots of horror stories about "earthquakes". Whilst technically "true" in that they can be picked up by seismographs, they are undectable by humans. If I start my car in the morning, no doubt a seismograph situated 100m away will detect its vibrations.

It's very difficult to separate signal from noise when it comes to discussions on alternative energy. We can be sure that much capital will be malinvested in this area.

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Are biofuels just a con?

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Murakami

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