OSA WATER WORKS

BIOFUELS

Introduction

While separated from their igloos, presumably in transit between two bleak and desolate places, so the popular cliche goes, eskimos would depend on dogs at night to help keep warm.  And so the coldness of the night could supposedly be somewhat calibrated by the number of dogs needed to keep warm.  A three-dog night was presumably pretty cold.  At its most basic elemental base, dog-warmth is a form of biofuel.  Dogs, like corn, have a primary value that has nothing to do with the production of energy.  Like dogs, corn just has a side benefit that it can produce energy.  And lastly and most succintly, the day that mankind raises corn to use as fuel is the same day that husky breeding farms should be initiated to keep people warm at night.

There is no greater contemporary boondoggle than the corn-for-energy scam presently being perpetuated on the United States taxpayer.  Like all things that are too good to be true, there is a grain of relevance in the underlying argument and a whole lot of malarkey on the overlaying smokescreen.  Governmental subsidies are in place to encourage growing corn to jump-start an American biofuel industry.  Sadly, this places a strain on the otherwise stable economics of supply and demand of this basic commodity.  Long considered a food, corn's new classification as an energy feedstock has placed an incendiary and wholly artificial value on America's most important nutritional crop and forced its withholding from the American food manufacturing industry.  This has caused price increases that affect nearly all of American food products.  Corn syrup is the universal American manufacturing sweetener, and that is just for starters.  Corn is in nearly processed food that Americans eat.  It's artificial price inflation through governmental meddling is a potentially calamitous interference that is likely to cause hunger and to have a benefit only to an overpaid American farmer.

Energy Balance

Biofuels are not born as such.  Oil burns without having to do anything to it.  Oil is an intrinsic and pure energy source in this sense.  The manufacturing energy that produces vegetable oil has been invested incrementally over geologic time to create the naturally occurring energy source.  Similarly, across the lifespan of a whale, the conversion of plankton, squid, and other components of the cetacean diet to the lipids that release whale oil is already completed.  For biofuels, a manufacturing process is required to convert the energy present as starches and lipids in plants to ethanol and biodiesel.  The two involve completely different processes, the former consisting of the fermentation of alcohol and its subsequent concentration through the heat intensive process of distillation, the latter consisting of the burning of oils through a modified combustion mechanism that can be adapted to conventional diesel engines relatively easily.

In both cases, however, there is a dramatic energy investment that must be made to a raw feedstock that already contains nutritional energy content.  The application of energy X to pre-existing energy Y is capable in biofuels of producing an energy Z that is greater than the sum of X and Y.  So, it is indeed a mechanism of actually creating energy that was only there in a latent sense before.  While this is conceptually transcendental, it is also an incomplete analysis that discounts the value of the original feedstock and the inverse value of the byproducts of using that feedstock as a fossil fuel.

For example, ethanol production has an efficiency that varies as a function mostly of the useable sugar content of the feedstock.  It is the sugars that are consumed by yeast to produce ethanol in a fermentation process, so higher sugar feedstocks, like sugar cane, are capable of producing more alcohol per unit feedstock than grains or fruit with less sugar, like corn.

Table 1.  Percentage increase in BTU in product over the energy value of preceding feedstock.

The effect is that to produce ten gallon of ethanol requires the combustion of 9 gallons of ethanol.  This is great if ethanol is in great supply and if there are no adverse consequences to its combustion.

But it is not in great supply, because to make ethanol requires that we remove food sources to make the ethanol in the first place, causing food prices to rise.

Secondly, the combustion of ethanol contributes to global warming, so there is no reduction in carbon footprint in the increased use of a fossil fuel.

Conclusion

As in all things, there is an appropriate and inappropriate use of biofuels.  Ethanol production from sugar cane is arguably sufficiently highly efficient as to really warrant its development.  Also, sugar cane grows in marginal areas where other crops do not do well, so the cultivation of sugar cane in brazil for ethanol production is much different from diverting corn in the United States from the nation's food supply to feed commercial ethanol stills.  Similarly, the recycling as biodiesel of used cooking grease is arguably a sustainable activity, whereas the conversion of palm oil to biodiesel may not be sustainable for the XX % in energetic value at the cost of removal of a portion of the global supplies of a human food supply the planetary market.  If one were to put together a comprehensive economic analysis that accurately represented the feedstock value as food, it is almost certain that most biofuels would be seen as not at all sustainable, while a very few might be.  However, if the bar of environmental sustainability were to include consideration of emissions, biofuels would be in the same fossil fuel category as oil and gas and coal and consequently a form of energy use that has dramatically adverse consequences for the planet's health in the form of carbon dioxide during combustion.

Biofuels are on the whole a bad idea.  Any perpetuation of the internal combustion engine is by definition a planetary malefactor.  If you ignore completely the issue of emissions, then in a handful of cases, biofuel development may pose a minor energetic advantage.  In the vast majority of cases, the energetic gain is nominal and not worth the cost of trying to enter into the scale of production necessary to have an effect on a national or regional scale.

For additional discussion of bio-fuels in contemporary planetary energy and environmental policy, click here.

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