The Very Stable Genius of Biofuels.

[NNadir]

In several recent posts in this space, I've reproduced, from the 2021 International Energy Agency'S annual edition of the World Energy Outlook, the following table (Table A1A, Page 294) of historical energy production by various sources, along with prognostications of future energy sources in future decades:



Let's start with some "percent talk," since in marketing - it should not be a surprise that some marketing consists of something called at best "misrepresentation" and at worst "lies" - it often pays to obscure small numbers by noting them as percentages of other small numbers. I have broken out the figures for so called "renewable energy" from the table above, represented in absolute numbers of Exajoules - absolute numbers, being facts, matter - and translated them into "percent talk." The "scaling" figures represent what the current distribution of forms of so called "renewable energy" would have required if we had been living on "100% renewable energy" in 2020 and what would be required with the same distribution if we were to have 100% renewable energy, "by 2050." This "100% renewable energy by..." bull has been going on my whole adult life and I'm not young. One can be absolutely sure that "by 2050" there will be a bunch of people proclaiming "100% renewable energy" will be realized "by 2080" or "by 2100" cult running around with no respect for the history of all the similar predictions that went before. Here is the percentage of the 68.5 exajoules for each form of so called "renewable energy:"



After decades upon decades of wild eyed cheering, including references to "studies" - usually by engineering illiterates at places like, say, Greenpeace, sometimes including "Professors" at august institutions, (Professor M. Z. Jacobson, august King of "science by lawsuit" comes to mind) - stating that so called "renewable energy" could supply "100%" of our energy needs" "by (insert year here)," so called "renewable energy" comes to 68.4 EJ out of 589 EJ consumed by humanity, down from 613 EJ in 2019. Obviously the decline resulted not because of worldwide enthusiasm for Amory Lovins' "conservation will save us" rhetoric, but rather as a result of a tragic plague and associated worldwide lockdowns. In "percent talk" so called "renewable energy" provided, as of 2020, again, a plague year, 11.65% of world energy. This means, in case anyone missed it, that 88.35% of the world energy supply was not provided by so called "renewable energy."

The results of our on going failure to produce "100% of our energy needs" "by 2000" or "by 2010" or "by 2020" - years for a coming "renewable nirvana" I heard, or close to years I heard, throughout my overly long adult life, only to hear it's now "by 2050," even "by 2100" - are in:

AApril 07: 420.85 ppm
April 06: 419.17 ppm
April 05: 419.72 ppm
April 04: 420.14 ppm
April 03: 420.63 ppm
Last Updated: April 8, 2022

Recent Daily Average Mauna Loa CO2 (Accessed April 8, 2022).

Note that in contrast to the IEA predictions are based on "stated policies." My spreadsheet makes the assumption, clearly ridiculous - not that "ridiculous" is out of the question - that the proportional components of so called "renewable energy" will remain the same with respect to its forms in 2030 and 2050. There is a method to my madness.

Over the years as a nuclear energy advocate, I've heard again and again and again and again that we didn't "need" nuclear power because solar and wind energy were growing exponentially and were enormously "cheap." I've been hearing this for better than 35 years.

The anti-nuclear paper of record, the New York Times, inexplicably in a week that a new record was set for concentrations of the deadly dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide set a new record, 420.37 ppm published this bit of delusional nonsense in the email they send to subscribers each Sunday morning:

Good morning. We have reason for hope on climate change. (German Lopez, The Morning, NYT subscriber email, 04/03/22, link unavailable.)

Against despair

Among the headline-grabbing wildfires, droughts and floods, it is easy to feel disheartened about climate change.

I felt this myself when a United Nations panel released the latest major report on global warming. It said that humanity was running out of time to avert some of the worst effects of a warming planet. Another report is coming tomorrow. So I called experts to find out whether my sense of doom was warranted.

To my relief, they pushed back against the notion of despair. The world, they argued, has made real progress on climate change and still has time to act. They said that any declaration of inevitable doom would be a barrier to action, alongside the denialism that Republican lawmakers have historically used to stall climate legislation. Such pushback is part of a budding movement: Activists who challenge climate dread recently took off on TikTok, my colleague Cara Buckley reported...

... Reasons for hope

The world has made genuine progress in slowing climate change in recent years. In much of the world, solar and wind power are now cheaper than coal and gas. The cost of batteries has plummeted over the past few decades, making electric vehicles much more accessible. Governments and businesses are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into clean energy...

The numbers for solar and wind energy in the table from the 2021 IEA WEO speak for themselves. Combined, solar energy and wind energy, after decade after decade after decade of hype, produce 10.4 EJ on a planet that was, in 2020, a plague year, 589 EJ, in "percent talk" less than 2.0% of world energy demand in 2020. Two percent is 98% away from 100%.

Yet, it's a "reason for hope?" After half a century of wild cheering? Trillions of dollars thrown at solar and wind? Two percent?

With due respect for Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, Only a fool would say that.

"German" seems completely oblivious to the fact that the highest priced electricity in the OECD is found in Denmark, followed by Germany.

Facts matter.

Quoth German Lopez later on:

Some people now use therapy to calm their climate anxieties.

I have nothing against getting psychotherapy, particularly if it helps one disabuse one's self of wishful thinking. If one is concerned about climate change, however, one may wish to open a science book and see what is possible and best and work to support it. Drinking Koolaid at a strength of 2% will not cut it, nor, regrettably, will getting personal psychotherapy. The situation requires work untrammeled by wishful thinking.

Is there a cure, other than disaster, for wishful thinking?

There is no reason for "optimism," none, zero, because we still haven't awoken to the fact that people like German Lozez have no idea about what they are talking. Our media is still on the level of pure bullshit. (German Lopez represents my often stated belief that one cannot get a degree in journalism if one has passed a college level science course with a grade of C or better. There is not enough nickel - of which 50% comes from Russia, cobalt, mined by modern day slaves, or coal to produce steel, to make wind turbines and batteries come even close to address climate change.)

German likes biofuels too, so let's talk about them:

Almost half of the so called "renewable energy" provided on this planet, in "percent talk" 46.36%, comes from what the IEA calls "modern bioenergy." Even if a prominent body like the IEA calls it "modern" - and to be clear I rely on IEA data quite a bit - to the extent to which it's "modern" doesn't mean that it's better than "traditional biofuels" which the IEA doesn't include with so called "renewable energy" since that might put this important agency in the difficult position of praising - since so called "renewable energy" is generally always an object of rote praise - of including poverty as praiseworthy.

Recently I wrote a post in this space showing that despite much public rhetoric to the contrary, the construction of a single nuclear plant replete with "first of a kind engineering" (FOAKE) issues that led to much delay, over a period of 17 years actually will be able to produce more energy in a single building than all the wind turbines in Denmark constructed in the same 17 year period, spread over an entire country's landmass and its coastal regions. It's here:

The Growth Rate of the Danish Wind Industry As Compared to the New Finnish EPR Nuclear Reactor.

The point of the post was to offer evidence, in 2022, as we approached record setting concentrations of the deadly dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere, that the widely held fantasy that so called "renewable energy" can (or will or has) grow(n) faster than nuclear energy, is just what the parenthetical statement in this sentence says, a fantasy.

This evidence offered in that post however was limited in scope: It applied to an offshore oil and gas drilling country that has become a poster boy or poster girl, however you prefer, for wind energy, Denmark, and a country that whose energy policies are largely ignored, but gears its climate policies using nuclear energy, Finland. This piece of evidence was thus limited to a comparison of two forms of primary energy wind and nuclear in two northern European nations. (I won't say "two Scandinavian nations," because as linguists know Finno-Uralic - or Finno-Ugric, depending on one's linguistic opinion - is more closely related to Hungarian and Estonian than it is to Danish, Swedish or Norwegian.)

A correspondent in the thread of my post decided I was being unreasonable, because the chart above from the IEA WEO shows that so called "renewables" as a class provided more energy than nuclear energy. Of course, as just mentioned, that class was dominated by what the IEA calls "modern" biofuels.

Having studied the issue, in fact, I've come to the conclusion that what the IEA calls "modern" biofuels are worse than traditional biofuels in many ways, because they have the added requirement of the consumption of dangerous fossil fuels for their utilization, as in fact, do almost every form of so called "renewable energy" with the possible exception of geothermal energy.

I remarked in the comments that a class of people to whom I refer to as "'I'm not an anti-nuke' anti-nukes" fail to appreciate that the world once relied - at nearly 100% levels - on biofuels for many thousands of years, to wit:

For the record, the entire world lived pretty much on biomass for tens of thousands of years. There is not one "I'm not an anti-nuke" anti-nuke in my experience who has ever considered why that is no longer so.

I was called to task on this statement in the comments in my account of Finnish nuclear compared with Danish Wind with a specious off topic claim that "modern biofuels" are different than the biofuels abandoned after thousands of years of use.

Really?

Here from a history book is an account of a trip up the Mississippi River in 1862 by Captain (Later Admiral) David Farragut during his failed attempt during the US Civil War to take Vicksburg from the water using salt water ships ill equipped for the vicissitudes of the Mississippi River's shoals and flows:

...It is no wonder Farragut had his big ships sail only in daylight. At night, the rested at anchor, close to shore, where the could purchase wood from local slaves when their supply of coal ran low..."

(Donald Miller, Vicksburg, The Campaign that Broke the Confederacy. Simon and Schuster, NY, copyright 2019 by Donald Miller, page 122.) I added the bold.

In the middle of the 19th century the world was well on its way to abandoning the solid bioenergy source wood in favor of coal, largely because of the invention of the steam engine. Still, in an emergency, where coal was not available, steam engines could be run on wood. I don't believe that the steam turbine was known in Farragut's time; almost certainly Farragut's steam engines were Watt type piston engines. One would not be surprised to hear, of course, an idiot declare that the piston to turbine makes burning wood "modern." All kinds of excuses and rationalizations for the failure of so called "renewable energy," pop up regularly.

This said, I noted, as an aside in my post on the rate of growth of nuclear power in Finland as compared to the rate of growth of wind power in Denmark using units of energy that the Drax power plant in the UK, one of the largest if not the largest coal fired plant in Europe, recently switched to burning wood "harvested" in the United States.. In the 19th century, people were chopping down trees to fuel steam engines and to my mind, chopping down trees to pelletize them to fuel the Drax steam turbines doesn't strike me as particularly "modern." It's not even clear that the pelletizing machinery is not run on dangerous fossil fuels. There is a high probability, in fact that it is.

As stated, I'm not much on serious issues like climate change being addressed by journalists who show little evidence of ever having passed a science course with a grade of C or better, but I was impressed by an article written by a journalist named Sarah Miller in the New Yorker, this one:

The Millions of Tons of Carbon Emissions That Don’t Officially Exist,

How a blind spot in the Kyoto Protocol helped create the biomass industry.

(Sarah Miller, The New Yorker, December 8, 2021.) In the article, Ms. Miller, who went on the "official" tour of the "green" Drax plant pays a skeptical eye to the notion that the pellets come only from waste wood side products, suspecting that the real source is whole American and Canadian forests.

An excerpt:

...According to William Moomaw, an emeritus professor of international environmental policy at Tufts University, and lead author of several I.P.C.C. reports, negotiators thought of biomass as only a minor part of energy production—small-scale enough that forest regrowth could theoretically keep up with the incidental harvesting of trees. “At the time these guidelines were drawn up, the I.P.C.C. did not imagine a situation where millions of tons of wood would be shipped four thousand miles away to be burned in another country,” Moomaw said.

In the end, negotiators decided only to count land-use emissions. “But these emissions are very difficult to estimate, and the United States and Canada aren’t even part of the Kyoto agreement,” Moomaw said. The loss of future carbon uptake due to the removal of forests, even the plumes chugging out of a biomass plant’s smokestacks—these did not go on the books...

I added the bold.

So much for "modern" biofuels.

There is little difference between heating a boiler wood to generate steam for Farragut's trip up the Mississippi 160 years ago than there is to generate steam for the Drax power plant 160 years later with the possible exception that Farragut probably had a Watt Engine and Drax a turbine.

Modern?

Of course, since so called "renewable energy" has failed and failed miserably to address climate change, it's not entirely clear, particularly because of the role living forests play in the global water cycle, that the chopped and pelletized forests will grow back. Perhaps the word "harvest" applied to clear cutting forests might better be replaced with "mined." Even if the forests do grow back, it will take centuries for the carbon to be recovered by trees.

I'm not attached to the IEA's arbitrary definition of what is called "modern biofuels," any more than I'm attached to their soothsaying about 2030, and 2050. I certainly hope they're wrong about 2050. It would be a disaster for the world to consume about 3/4 of a billion EJ per year while obtaining only 40.5 EJ from nuclear energy.

I would now like to change the subject, briefly, to "very stable genius," the noun phrase, as opposed to the adjective phrase which a rather famous idiot applied to himself, generating lots of laughter during what was otherwise a tragedy:

Amory Lovins won a "genius" award - the McArthur Prize - based on his insipid 1976 article, not in a scientific journal but in the magazine, Foreign affairs, that all the world's energy problems could be solved by conservation and so called "renewable energy."

Energy Strategies: The Road Not Taken.

The earliest edition of the World Energy Outlook in my files is the 1995 edition. The dominating form of energy discussed was oil and in fact, the unit of energy throughout the text (which remained so in subsequent issues until 2021) was "MTOE," million tons oil equivalent, which is 0.0419 Exajoules, the SI unit for energy.

Given that the "genius" of Amory Lovins was very stable in the level of appreciation for his junk rhetoric, and given that the "peak oil" scenario was coming to the fore, the 1995 WEO offers two "scenarios" for predicting energy consumption in the future, which then was 2010, the "Capacity Constrained" case - the case where we run out of stuff to burn - and the "Energy Savings" scenario, we take Amory's advice and conserve our way to Nirvana.

Here, from Page 18 of that year's edition is a chart showing the "current" situation, 1992 - accounting was slower then - some 16 years after the "genius" Amory Lovins predicted conservation could save the world and projections for the two scenarios:



8000 "MTOE" is about 335 EJ. The roughly 11,000 "MTOE" predicted in 1995 for 2010 translates, for the "energy savings scenario" is about 460 EJ "by 2010" and the roughly 11,500 "MTOE" predicted for the "capacity constraints" scenario translates to about 480 EJ. It would appear that the "stable genius" that energy conservation could save the day was already in conflict with reality by 1995, not that anyone, presumably Amory himself, questioned, given that energy consumption had reached 544.7 EJ by 2010, whether he was, in fact, a "very stable genius." After all he had won a lucrative "genius" award and by that time had already built a super energy efficient aerie in the very upscale community of Snowmass, Colorado. (Was there snow in Snowmass this winter?)

Below is the energy demand table from the 2012 IEA WEO which reports the measured energy demand for 2010, 34 years after Amory Lovins shared his very stable genius with the world:



12,730 "MTOE" is roughly 532 EJ, in "percent talk" 110% of what was predicted in the worst case in 1995, and 159% of what was observed in 1992, again, 16 years after Amory Lovins published his stable "genius" drivel.

In the post mentioned previously about the rate of growth of wind power in Denmark compared to the rate of growth of nuclear power in Finland owing to the (often delayed) construction of a single nuclear reactor, I was informed that since I was too puerile, the critic who told me that "modern" biofuels were, um "modern," and who had spent an hour searching for them, was not going to send me two "scientific" papers on biofuels as punishment. It was mentioned that in the opinion of the correspondent, who objected to the way I think and the way I classify a set of people of a certain type, I was oblivious to the fact that we could get biofuels from sugarcane, as was clear from the two scientific papers he or she took an hour to collect.

How could I possibly be so misinformed and oblivious to um, sugarcane? It's sweet.

So let's talk about what the IEA calls "modern liquid bioenergy" which as of 2020 grown to 4.1 EJ out of 589.1 EJ humanity was consuming that year, in "percent talk" to 0.70% of world energy demand.

It was nice to hear that someone was thinking of "enlightening" me on the subject - even if (regrettably?) I was denied because that person thought me to be "too puerile" to read two more papers on the subject - but truth be told, I arguably already know a fair amount about the topic and was, in fact, writing about the topic years ago. It's kind of cute to hear all about sugarcane in this context, since I wrote on this subject about 14 years ago over at Daily Kos: Those Happy Sugarcane Workers In Brazil: The Car Culture and Urinary Carcinogens. This text - how time flies when one's having fun! - was written just before the "outbreak" of 2008, roughly 14 years and change ago.

The primary scientific paper in that "diary" - which was what they called those things over there in the years before I was banned over there for telling the truth - was this one: Effects of genetic polymorphisms CYP1A1, GSTM1, GSTT1 and GSTP1 on urinary 1-hydroxypyrene levels in sugarcane workers (Rosa Maria do Vale Bosso, Lidia Maria Fonte Amorim, Sandro José Andrade, Ana Rossini, Mary Rosa Rodrigues de Marchi, Antonio Ponce de Leon, Claudia Marcia Aparecida Carareto, Nívea Dulce Tedeschi Conforti-Froes, Science of The Total Environment, Volume 370, Issues 2–3) (The link in the original Daily Kos post is dead.)

(I certainly don't miss Daily Kos, by the way, stupid pills are very popular over there it appears. When I was there, there were a fair number of people who claimed they were "I'm not an anti-nuke" anti-nukes; from this bit of benighted commentary I assume they've gone full bore honest-to-God anti-nuke over there, with lots of cheering. More on how on my criteria for anti-nuke grades which represent my less than gracious and perhaps sloppy short hand for categorizing anti-nuke grades.)

Anyway.

In that long ago "diary" made reference to the environmental activist working to save the Pantanal - the world's largest wetland - from being rototilled to make sugarcane fields devoted to the production of ethanol, Francisco Anselmo de Barros, who depressed by his failure to save the parts of the wetland already destroyed for sugarcane plantations, wrapped himself in blankets soaked in ethanol and set himself on fire in protest.

He killed himself because he couldn't save a world resource from ethanol production.

He killed himself.

He. Killed. Himself.

And of course, the sugarcane workers, about whom we certainly care less than we care about our automotive "renewable energy" nirvana dream, live under dire conditions. Poverty has always been associated with traditional biofuels and Iowan farmers notwithstanding, it is as well with so called "modern" biofuels as well. In the West anyone and everyone can suffer enormously elsewhere as long as we can declare ourselves "green" in our suburban aeries.

Human suffering notwithstanding, I certainly understand how depressing the destruction of wilderness feels. I, however, am still alive, but will pass on soon enough, depressed by the world my generation is leaving for all after us. Francisco Anselmo de Barros was far more emotionally involved in environmental issues than I am, but he was my kind of "environmentalist" in the sense of his focus if not his approach, in that he was actually for conservation of wilderness as opposed to its industrialization, the latter approach being being very popular these days among people among people who announce they're "green," like say the members of the, um, "Sierra Club" who never saw a wilderness they didn't want to convert to industrial parks for wind turbines, even though John Muir, the Club's founder, founded it to prevent the industrialization of the Hetch Hetchy Valley, a task in which he, like Francisco Anselmo de Barros he failed. (Muir however didn't drown himself behind the reservoir created by the Hetch Hetchy dam.)

Perhaps I should be honored that someone would spend an hour to collect scientific papers to "school" me about biofuels. For the record, as I have managed to work in places where major academic libraries were five or ten minutes away for over 20 years, from 2000 to 2020 (Covid broke the practice) I mostly took my lunch hour in those libraries, feeding my brain rather than my fat gut. Many evenings I returned to the libraries, and most weekends, I put in another five or ten hours, let's say, conservatively, adding up to, on a weekly basis, to maybe 15 hours a week in libraries. This crude estimate adds up to about 15,000 hours, apparently including the paper about "Those Happy Sugarcane Workers..."

Just for fun, in case anyone is inspired to feel bad for me because I didn't get to read the two papers by which I might have been "schooled" here's some sample snapshots, hardly close to being comprehensive, from my directories and some subdirectories devoted to biofuels:



.
.
.

The subdirectory "Fluid Fuels:"



.
.
.

The subdirectory DME.MeOH.DMC:



.
.
.

...and so on.

(The directories connected with nuclear energy are huge compared to these.)

Actually, even though I'm not quite sure I would have been, again, "enlightened" by two more by a person who "spent an hour" "researching" the subject, this suggests - and I assure doubters this is probably true, I may have thousands of papers on biofuels in my files, although only a small fraction my 15,000 hours was devoted to the subject.

Besides the willful destruction of the Pantanal for the wonderful benefits of biofuels, two other major ecosystems have been dolorously impacted for the same, um, "benefit."

Another case:

In 1997-1998 vast stretches of the Southeast Asian rain forest burned when slash and burn approaches to clearing land for palm oil plantations to help meet German "renewable energy portfolio standards" with biodiesel, got out of control and burned through much of the forest. So profound were the fires that their carbon signature was observed on a planetary scale:



Annual Mean Growth Rate for Mauna Loa, Hawaii

1998 was a record setting year, with an increase in CO2 concentrations of 2.98 ppm until 2016, when the failure of all of our fucking biofuel/wind turbine/solar cell/batteries/electric car fantasies overwhelmed even that disaster with a reading of an increase of 3.03 ppm.

Now, it is true that palm oil is utilized in many processed food items, but it remains clear that the biodiesel industry - I actually once thought of going into it, to be perfectly transparent - isn't going away, and thus the economics of destroying rain forests for palm oil plantations - the price being elevated by nonfood use - is an ongoing phenomenon. Perhaps "modern" men and woman couldn't care less - but the ancient and endangered "man of the forest" the orangutan, our closest primate relative is losing - more than even "those happy sugarcane workers in Brazil" - their very right to exist. Here is a link to a prepublication excerpt of a book under production in 2022, almost one quarter of a century after the German "renewable energy portfolio standards" helped produce the worst climate year of the 20th century, but, unhappily, not the worst of the 21st century: The last stand of the orangutan, state of emergency: illegal logging, fire and palm oil in Indonesia's national parks. The table of contents is superimposed on a picture of a slash and burn fire in the Bornean forest. ...in National Parks no less.

It's funny, I'm so old that I remember thinking rain forests were "green." Apparently they're not as "green" as biodiesel, and let's all cheer for biodiesel, fuck the old man of the forest, the orangutan, the "new" man can drive a modern Ram 2500 Power Diesel Truck right through the wilderness powered by "green" biodiesel. The "green" biodiesel industry is "taking off!" We're saved!



Source: Statistica Global Biofuel Production.

My biodiesel directories:



And then there's the environmental issue with ethanol that is slightly different than that against that for which Francisco Anselmo de Barros protested by self-immolation: Corn Ethanol.

In early 1976 then "Former Georgia Governor" Jimmy Carter rose to national prominence by winning the Iowa Caucus. As a farmer, he had some slight advantage in that agricultural state, and he worked very, very, very hard for his (then) improbable win. At the time Iowa was a "swing state," unlike today where it is solidly committed to the Fascist White Supremacy GQP Trump Worship Party.

I do not know the rhetoric he utilized in his intense Iowa campaign, but one can assume quite readily that corn ethanol fuel was on the agenda, since during his Presidency he actively pursued as an energy policy.

As an aside, I admire Jimmy Carter for many reasons, however his energy policies, many of which are still highly praised on the political left where I reside, were atrocious in my opinion. They included coal to oil (Fischer Tropsch, FT) and worse, a ban on nuclear fuel reprocessing and biofuels.

Of course, President Carter had some good reasons to be suspicious of nuclear energy, even though he campaigned as a "nuclear engineer," something he never actually was. (He did take a six-month non-credit course in Naval nuclear plant operations in 1953.) He had, after all, participated in the clean up of the very first nuclear reactor to melt down: President Carter is among roughly 350,000 "liquidators" involved in nuclear reactor "clean ups." (You can read stupid hyperbolic stuff about how he "saved Canada" which is pure nonsense, but statements along these lines do demonstrate the depth of the ignorance that has prevented nuclear energy from saving the world.)

Famously he’s still alive as of this writing, having become the oldest man ever to have held the office of President of the United States.

Nevertheless his Presidential biofuel program, demonstrating his faith for his Iowa promises, for those who remember, had very little, close to nothing, to do with the environmental issues before us now, the most serious of which is climate change. His program was directed toward addressing the "Arab" oil embargos oil shortages, gasoline prices and the like. The political buzz word in those times, the late 1970s, was "energy independence."

The entire planet can be relieved that "coal to oil" scheme for "energy independence" went nowhere. From the perspective of climate change, FT processes, first industrialized in Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, and later in the century in South Africa in the apartheid era, are the absolute worst industrial processes possible.

The Carter era corn to ethanol program, however, which seems to have given him an edge in Iowa, remains with us, and is part of the US "Renewable Energy Portfolio," even if the citizens of Iowa are comfortable voting for racist fascists now.

A recent, open sourced publication on the climate effects of corn ethanol specifically and the US Renewable Portfolios in general can be found in one of the world's most prominent scientific journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS):

Tyler J. Lark, Nathan P. Hendricks, Aaron Smith, Nicholas Pates, Seth A. Spawn-Lee, Matthew Bougie Eric G. Booth, Christopher J. Kucharika and Holly K. Gibbs, Environmental outcomes of the US Renewable Fuel Standard, PNAS 2022 Vol. 119 No. 9 e2101084119

The paper is fully open sourced. Anyone who gives a rat's ass about climate change is free to read it.

The abstract however, pretty much says all one needs to know:

The Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) specifies the use of biofuels in the United States and thereby guides nearly half of all global biofuel production, yet outcomes of this keystone climate and environmental regulation remain unclear. Here we combine econometric analyses, land use observations, and biophysical models to estimate the realized effects of the RFS in aggregate and down to the scale of individual agricultural fields across the United States. We find that the RFS increased corn prices by 30% and the prices of other crops by 20%, which, in turn, expanded US corn cultivation by 2.8 Mha (8.7%) and total cropland by 2.1 Mha (2.4%) in the years following policy enactment (2008 to 2016). These changes increased annual nationwide fertilizer use by 3 to 8%, increased water quality degradants by 3 to 5%, and caused enough domestic land use change emissions such that the carbon intensity of corn ethanol produced under the RFS is no less than gasoline and likely at least 24% higher. These tradeoffs must be weighed alongside the benefits of biofuels as decision-makers consider the future of renewable energy policies and the potential for fuels like corn ethanol to meet climate mitigation goals.

I added the bold and italics.

The introductory paragraph makes a statement about the benefits of biofuels without specifying what they are. If the abstract is accurate, the presumed benefits have nothing to do with climate change, which is in fact, the case with all so called "renewable energy." Enthusiasm for it preceded the far more dire reality of climate change and was about entirely about other things.

And let's be clear, the corn ethanol scheme has destroyed a major ecosystem. Even a journal dedicated to biofuels makes that brutally clear by suggesting a band aid for the scheme:

Andy Van Loocke, Tracy E. Twine, Christopher J. Kucharik, Carl J. Bernacchi, Assessing the Potential to Decrease the Gulf of Mexico Hypoxic Zone With Midwest Us Perennial Cellulosic Feedstock Production, GCB Bioenergy volume 9, issue 5, P858-875 2016.

This paper is also open sourced, and anyone who gives a rat's ass about the once rich, now dead, Mississippi Delta ecosystem can read it. Anyone who doesn't can prattle on about "modern biofuels" with absolute contempt for the environment.

From the introduction:

Introduction

To meet the cellulosic targets set in place by the US 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA), the Mississippi–Atchafalaya River Basins (MARB) may require significant land use change. Production of the current dominant ethanol feedstock in the United States, maize grain, is capped at 15 billion gallons per year by the Renewable Fuels Standard 2 (RFS2; EPA, 2010) and is at maximum capacity, with ca. 40% of maize production devoted to ethanol (Wallander et al., 2011; https://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/crops/outlook/cornbalancesheet.pdf). Numerous studies implementing a wide range of statistical, empirical and numerical techniques have indicated that the leaching of excess nitrogen (N) fertilizer in the form of dissolved inorganic nitrogen (DIN) under current row crop production is a major driver of the Gulf of Mexico hypoxic zone or ‘dead zone’ (Rabalais et al., 1996; Goolsby et al., 2000, 2001; Donner et al., 2004a; Royer et al., 2006; Alexander et al., 2008; David et al., 2010; Turner et al., 2012; Deb et al., 2015).

In 2008, the Mississippi Basin/Gulf of Mexico Task Force set in place a goal to reduce the size of the hypoxic zone from ~20 000 to less than 5000 km^2 by the year 2015 (Mississippi River/Gulf of Mexico Watershed Nutrient Task Force 2008). However, that goal was not met and the target has now been extended to the year 2035 (Mississippi River/Gulf of Mexico Watershed Nutrient Task Force, 2015). It is predicted that annual DIN export would have to decrease by 30–55% to meet this goal (Donner & Scavia, 2007; Scavia & Donnelly, 2007). It has been suggested that reducing N fertilizer application by ~10% over the MARB could reduce DIN export by ~30%, approaching the EPA target (McIsaac et al., 2001); however, it is uncertain how this change in management might affect maize yields. Increasing maize production beyond current levels to meet cellulosic ethanol production mandates is predicted to increase in DIN leaching and the size of the hypoxic zone (Donner & Kucharik, 2008; Secchi et al., 2011).

Again, I added the bold and italics.

Note that the "by 'such and such a year'" goal for undoing the environmental destruction caused by biofuels wasn't met, any more than the past "by 'such and such a year'" for 100% renewable energy have been met; as is typical, a new "by 'such and such a year,'" date has been set, in this case, "by 2035." That probably won't be met either. An the goal is not even to restore the entire ecosystem but rather to reduce the size of what has been killed by "renewable energy," from 20,000 km^2 to 5,000 km^2.

We throw around large numbers like they mean nothing, so it is important to know what "20,000 km^2) means. The state of New Jersey, where I live, is smaller than the dead zone, roughly 19,000 km^2. Over 9 million people live their entire lives in that area. That's how much area has been destroyed, a ecosystem once rich with crustaceans, fish, seabirds, sea grasses, mangroves, all dead, and because of climate change, sinking beneath the waves to rot.

We. Couldn't. Care. Less.

So called "renewable energy" is sacred, useless, and in the case of the Pantanal, the habitat of the Orangutan, and the Mississippi River delta, destructive in the extreme, but nonetheless sacred.

I personally object to faith based belief systems being imposed on reality, but perhaps that's just me. I personally value the continued existence of the Orangutan over "renewable" biodiesel. No one will ever "renew" the Orangutan if the species goes extinct.

The spreadsheet I produced above with the "scale to 589 EJ" and "scale to 743 EJ" headings is clearly, and intentionally absurd. In "percent talk," 69.4% of all the renewable energy produced in 2020 came from two sources, biomass, dominated by what is clearly wood, and hydro. We are fresh out of major rivers to destroy and it is physically impossible for hydroelectricity - particularly with the death of major glacial systems around the world and massive climate driven droughts - for hydro power to reach 130 EJ, never mind 170 EJ "by 2050."

Because all of the prattling about so called "renewable energy" for the last half a century did nothing to address climate change, forests around the world are burning - never mind those being strip mined so the Drax Power Plant can declare itself "green," never mind slash and burn approaches to planting palm oil plantations. It is therefore impossible for biomass to get to around 400 EJ, which would represent more than 1% of the total photosynthetic energy of all CO2 fixing organisms on the planet.

In the past century human appropriation of net primary production (HANPP) of the biosphere has already doubled, and the biosphere is already degrading under the strain: Fridolin Krausmann, Karl-Heinz Erb, Simone Gingrich, Helmut Haberl, Alberte Bondeau, Veronika Gaube, Christian Lauk, Christoph Plutzar, and Timothy D. Searchinger, Global human appropriation of net primary production doubled in the 20th century, PNAS June 3, 2013, 110 (25) 10324-10329

And yet...and yet...in my post on the speed of the growth of wind energy in Denmark as compared to the growth of nuclear power in Finland (involving one building) a correspondent made the point of telling me how much better so called "renewable energy" was doing compared to nuclear energy by printing out, circling the numbers in the table produced at the outset of this post to let me know that so called "renewable energy" grew by 19 EJ, albeit in a world where energy demand grew by 44 EJ, the latter number only being so low clearly because of Covid lockdowns. 10.3 EJ of that growth was in either biomass or hydro, both of which have limited growth potential as stated above, unless some assholes around here want to cheer for destroying every forest, river, stream and puddle on the planet. (Their inattention to climate change for anti-nuke "renewables will save us" may do it for them in any case.)

Of course, for the last thirty or forty years, we have heard we don't need nuclear energy because solar and wind energy are so great. If one looks, these two forms of (trivial) energy are the most popular, wind in particular, since every ad these days that pretends to show corporations being concerned about climate change is accompanied by pictures of wind turbines.

Looking at the table at the beginning of this post it’s clear that numbers don’t lie, but people do, often to themselves. Of course marketing people do as well. (“We’re carrying on business as usual but let’s put up a picture of a wind turbine so we can say we’re “green,” net zero, and other bullshit.

As for biofuels, they are very much dependent on dangerous fossil fuel use, much as the wind and solar industries are. The first obvious case, from the Drax business mentioned above is transportation – chain saws run on gasoline and logging trucks run on diesel. Processing into pellets further demands energy. The nitrogen fertilizer for corn ethanol that runs off to kill the Mississippi delta is made in the Haber-Bosch process driven by dangerous natural gas (and occasionally coal). The extraction of bio oils for biodiesel is accomplished using mixed hexanes, a component of gasoline – this is also true of food grade bio oils as well – and the removal of the hexanes is accomplished using heat almost certainly derived from dangerous fossil fuels. Biodiesel is generally composed of methyl esters of fatty acids. Methanol is made by the partial oxidation of methane. (In theory, but seldom in practice, it can be made by the hydrogenation of carbon dioxide.) Ethanol requires the pumping of huge quantities of water into fermentation tanks using pumps generally powered by fossil fuel derived electricity, and the distillation from the batch reactors after complete fermentation is accomplished using heat, generally derived dangerous natural gas.

Besides natural gas, there are other major components that can hardly be described as “renewable.” One is phosphorus which contributes to the death of the Mississippi Delta along with nitrogen compounds, another is soil, and a third, although we don’t recognize it, is water.

If one reflects on this one can easily discern that it’s very obvious that modern biofuels are actually worse, at least from a climate change perspective. It’s also clear that there was nothing “modern” about David Farragut burning wood to run steam engines to head up the Mississippi River in 1862 and the steam heat engine that powers the generators at Drax.

Don’t worry, be happy, it’s “green.”

I do believe, concede, that biomass can provide some carbon in the future, but it’s marginal at best, and pushed too far (as it already is) it represents a crime against the future of the planet. This said, I’ve spent a lot of time considering in particular the very interesting chemistry of lignins, a component along with cellulose of wood and woody plants. As for cellulose, it’s fairly concentrated carbon, 40% roughly by weight, but this carbon is best utilized by high temperature reforming. The limits on the utility are primarily transport and concentration. (I see reforming heat as a side product of nuclear energy.) To the extent biomass is put to use, we need to be very, very, very, very careful, something we are not even close to doing.

People tell you a lot of things. They tell you biofuels are “green,” but a cognizant orangutan might see it differently – I’d rather take the orangutan’s point of view than that of some humans to be perfectly honest, not that I wish to insult orangutans by comparing them with “renewable energy will save us” humans, particularly anti-nuke humans.

Donald Trump tells you he’s a very stable genius and anti-nukes tell you they’re not anti-nukes, and that dependence on fossil fuels is OK as long as one can put the word “renewable” in front of it. Here’s the dirty secret: “Renewable energy” is not renewable; far from it.

I writing this long post I took inspiration from a member of a class of people I define as “I’m not an anti-nuke” anti-nukes.

These are the kind of people who while looking at a war in which children, daughters, sons, mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers are being ripped to pieces by weapons chiefly by weapons relying on dangerous fossil fuels, weapons bought with Euros from selling dangerous fossil fuels to “green” European countries, and then hear that a nuclear plant has been shelled and shout out with glee, “nuclear energy is too dangerous!”

I had intended to discuss my criteria for defining this class, but it’s not worth it, but I note that the “what’s a little sugarcane ethanol between friends” rhetoric disgusts me.

If no one else does, I remember Francisco Anselmo de Barros.

Iin my mind Francisco Anselmo de Barros stands with John Muir and many others who tried to save wilderness from the energy business but in failing, failed greatly.

I wish you a pleasant evening and day tomorrow.

[jpak]

1. LOL!

[NNadir]

2. There is definitely a set of people who find climate change amusing.

I'm not among them, but the ethics of the type will not be forgiven by history, not that they give a shit.

[hunter]

3. If I had some clever emoji for this post...

... it would be of hunter punching a hole in the drywall and repentant patching it up better than new.

My dad taught me that. If you break it, you fix it. I broke a lot of stuff in my reckless youth.

Not that there would be any point to that. The biofuel enthusiasts would burn the whole house down in their incinerators.

Calling it mixed wastes or something...

[NNadir]

4. The term "mixed biomass waste" is often used in the literature...

...in this connection; other terms are also used such as "forest litter." The issue with all of these it collection and transport.

Another issue is mineral transport, particularly phosphorous, the elephant on the table about which no one is talking. The phosphorous flowing into and destroying the Mississippi delta ecosystem is probably irretrievably lost, although I have mused about supercritical water recovery, including supercritical seawater recovery of phosphorous of eutrophic bodies of water.

Recently I came a paper in my files with the phase diagram of the NaCl water system up to 1000K. I forgot I had it, but found it when looking for a note to send to my son. I also came across a paper about the energy intensity of supercritical desalination of seawater and calculated what the energy demand would be to provide all of California's water demand via this route without considering the obvious routes to process intensification via heat exchange networks. It was interesting and I may post about it sometime.

Thanks for sparing me an emoji. Some of the most uninformed and ignorant people who write here depend on them or need them to address their lack of wit. To me they've become a horrible symbol of the refusal and inability to think.