Cellulosic ethanol is a false hope.

[Christopher Calder]

Cellulosic ethanol is a destructive false hope. The biological approach to energy production will only destroy the environment faster because it will always have a enormous ecological footprint. You need highly concentrated energy to get a small ecological footprint, and that means nuclear energy. It is a matter of physics, not philosophy or poetry. The poetic feel-good energy schemes that have sweet sounding names are all the most destructive.

http://www.mdpi.org/energies/papers/en1010035.pdf

"Cellulosic ethanol is being touted as the replacement for corn ethanol. Unfortunately, cellulose biomass contains only minimal amounts of starches and sugars and therefore requires major fossil energy inputs to release these tightly bound starches and sugars. With existing technology, about 170% more energy (oil and gas) is required to produce ethanol from cellulosic biomass than is in the ethanol produced <4>.

The production of corn ethanol is highly subsidized by U.S. government by more than $6 billion per year according to a 2006 report, “Biofuels – at What Cost? Government Support for Ethanol and Biodiesel in the United States,” released by the International Institute for Sustainable Development in Geneva. These subsidies for a gallon of ethanol are more than 60 times greater those for a gallon of gasoline.

The environmental impacts of corn ethanol are serious and diverse. These include severe soil erosion of our valuable cropland, plus the heavy use of nitrogen fertilizer and pesticides that pollute rivers. During the fermentation process, about 25% of the carbon from the sugars and starches is released as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. These major releases of carbon dioxide significantly contribute to global warming. Also, each gallon of ethanol requires 1700 gallons of water (mostly to grow the corn) and releases 12 gallons of noxious sewage effluent from the fermentation process into the environment <5>.

Using food crops, such as corn grain, to produce ethanol raises major nutritional and ethical concerns. With nearly 60% of humans in the world now currently malnourished, the need for grains and other basic food crops continues to be critical <6>. Associated with the use of corn for ethanol are increases in the price of U.S. beef, chicken, pork, eggs, breads, cereals, and milk of 10% to 100%. Jacques Diouf, Director General of the U.N. Food & Agriculture Organization, warns that using corn for ethanol is causing food shortages for the poor worldwide <7>. Basically growing crops for biofuels squanders cropland, water, and energy resources vital for food production needed for people."

For the real energy story, see: http://renewable.50webs.com/

[valerief]

1. When they learn how to sell wind in addition to the energy

produced by wind, we'll see wind turbines everywhere.

[Christopher Calder]

2. Wind is symbolism, not substance

Yea, Gone with the Wind, the Wind on Your Back, Ride the Wind, etc.

It's all so romantic, but what about when the wind stops blowing? Are you only going to watch TV when there is a strong wind and the sun is shinning? The cost of wind power is ridiculously high because of its intermittent nature and the long power lines it takes to get the electricity to consumers. Wind energy is very inefficient and has an enormous negative ecological footprint. Windmills everywhere? Is that what you really want? Do you hate birds that much?

To satisfy 100% of New York City's electricity needs with wind power would require impossible around-the-clock winds within a limited speed range, and a wind farm the size of the entire state of Connecticut.

To meet 100% of United States electricity demand with wind power would require impossible weather conditions and a wind farm covering an area larger than Texas and Louisiana combined.

What are the costs?

The Energy Information Administration (EIA), which provides official energy statistics from the United States Government, has projected the 2016 Levelized Cost of New Generation Resources from the Annual Energy Outlook 2010. This is the current best estimate of the cost of electricity from United States power plants of different varieties that will come into service in the year 2016. These average levelized costs, expressed in 2008 valued dollars, includes all costs of construction, financing, fuel, and all other operating and decommissioning costs. Federal and state government subsidies are not included in these figures. Additional costs of back-up and/or storage systems for unreliable energy sources are not included. The significant costs of long transmission lines for projects that must be built far away from electricity consumers are also not included in these projections. These are national average costs, which means there is variation in cost from state to state and project to project, depending on local circumstances. The EIA also listed the expected Capacity Factor (CF) for each power plant type. A power plant with a CF of 85% generates energy at its rated capacity an average of 85% of the time during a given year. The ideal power plant would have a CF of 100%, meaning it could output energy at full power 100% of the time. As capacity factor drops, electricity grid efficiency drops, and real-world costs increase. In the comparison below I have inflated the projected cost of electricity produced by LFTRs from the projected 3 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh) to 6 cents per kWh in order to allow for unexpected cost overruns.

Natural Gas in Conventional Combined Cycle @ 8.31 cents per kWh (87% CF) - Not carbon free, high CF, medium ecological footprint, cost effective and cleanest fossil fuel available.

Natural Gas in Advanced Combined Cycle with Carbon Capture and Storage @ 11.33 cents per kWh (87% CF) - Not carbon free, high CF, medium ecological footprint, cost effective and cleanest fossil fuel available.

Conventional Coal @ 10.04 cents per kWh (85% CF)

Advanced Coal with CCS @ 12.93 cents per kWh (85% CF) - Conventional coal fired plants are not carbon free, high CF, large ecological footprint, and cause approximately 24,000 U.S. deaths per year due to air pollution, which also damages buildings. Judged in total, traditional coal fired power plants are not cost effective due to the environmental damage and deaths they create. Will Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) techniques make coal an acceptable choice?

3rd Generation Light Water Reactor Nuclear Power @ 11.9 cents per kWh (90% CF) - Carbon free, very high CF, small ecological footprint, and cost effective. *Note - These figures are for new construction projects coming on-line in 2016. Our older legacy light water reactors currently produce electricity at a cost of about 2 cents per kWh.

Geothermal @ 11.57 cents per kWh (90% CF) - Carbon free, very high CF, small ecological footprint and cost effective.

Wind @ 14.93 cents per kWh not including the cost of needed energy storage and/or back-up systems (34.4% CF)

Wind - Offshore @ 19.11 cents per kWh not including the cost of needed energy storage and/or back-up systems (39.3% CF) - Carbon free, very low CF, extremely large ecological footprint, not cost effective due high construction cost, unreliability, and very low CF. Most wind turbines shut down when wind speeds drop below 3 to 4 meters per second or rise above 25 meters per second, greatly reducing their total average energy output and making their contribution to our nation's energy grid unpredictable.

Solar Thermal @ 25.66 cents per kWh not including the cost of needed energy storage and/or back-up systems (31.2% CF) - Carbon free, extremely low CF, extremely large ecological footprint, not cost effective due to high construction cost and a CF even lower than wind power.

Solar Photovoltaic @ 39.61 cents per kWh not including the cost of needed energy storage and/or back-up systems (21.7% CF) - Carbon free, extremely low CF, extremely large ecological footprint, very high construction cost, cannot be upgraded after manufacture, and short lifespan. Solar photovoltaic panels are absolutely not cost effective for large scale power production.

Biomass @ 11.11 cents per kWh (83% CF) - Not carbon free, high CF, large ecological footprint and causes depletion of forest topsoil.

Hydroelectric @ 11.99 cents per kWh (51.4% CF) - Carbon free, medium CF, large ecological footprint. Our old legacy hydroelectric dams have been a great investment, and Hoover Dam is still producing electricity at just .0186 cents per kilowatt hour. New hydroelectric project have to be judged on a case by case basis. They create large lakes, which in some areas may be a positive gain, while in other areas their large physical footprint may cause significant disruption to people and the environment, such as the case of China's massive Three Gorges Dam project.

Liquid Fluoride Thorium Nuclear Reactor @ 6.0 cents per kWh (over 90% CF) - Carbon free, highest CF, smallest ecological footprint, can be built anywhere resulting in much lower transmission line costs, highest power to weight ratio, highest cost effectiveness. If things go well, the actual eventual cost per kWh may be at or even lower than the original 3 cents per kWh projection. As an added bonus, LFTRs can be made small enough to power spacecraft.

http://renewable.50webs.com/

[Sinistrous]

3. Interesting segment quoted:

An assertion in the first paragraph about the fuel requirements of cellulosic ethanol, and then three paragraphs touting the negatives of corn and other grain-based ethanol production.

Poorly written, almost to the point of being misleading.

[Christopher Calder]

4. You have not said anything of value.

You don't even express your complaints in detail. I would say your statement is poorly worded and misleading. If you have a real idea, then spell it out. Anyone can brand other's writing as poor, but you have to prove your case. You have not proved your case or even made an intelligent argument.

[madokie]

5. Are you serious?

[Christopher Calder]

6. Those who can think and reason read this.

William Jaeger, an Oregon State University agricultural economist, found that to achieve a given improvement in energy independence using ethanol from corn, biodiesel from rapeseed (canola oil), and ethanol from wood-based cellulose at maximum estimated scales of production in Oregon would lead to a net energy gain of just two-thirds of one percent of Oregon’s annual energy use. None of the biofuels were found to be marketable without large taxpayer subsidies, and the much hyped cellulosic ethanol was found to be the most expensive of all the biofuels to produce. See Biofuel Potential in Oregon

see: http://extension.oregonstate.edu/catalog/pdf/sr/sr1078.pdf

Jaeger stated that "Given currently available technologies, it is difficult to see the net contribution of biofuels rising above 1% of our current fossil fuel energy consumption – for either Oregon or the U.S."

So why are we doing so much environmental and economic damage, and starving the world by raising food prices if the net contribution of all biofuels is less than 1% of fossil fuel consumption? Biofuels are not leading us to a world of Utopia, they are leading us to a world of Soylent Green. We are running out of topsoil to grow food in and phosphates to make fertilizer with. Why are we wasting those precious resources to grow biofuel crops that do not help us replace fossil fuels? It make no sense at all unless your a greedy ethanol manufacturer trying to make more money, or you are a power hungry, egocentric politician trying to get the farm vote. It's all a scam, a hoax, a fraud, a lie, and it is killing people all over the world through malnutrition and related illness. It is also leading to the destruction of rainforests in the Amazon and Indonesia.

Biofuel advocates ignore the fact that when we pump up grain prices through biofuel production, we raise grain prices all over the world, which gives other countries a strong financial incentive to burn down more rainforests in order to plant more food. United States corn-ethanol production is a major driving force in the rapid destruction of the Amazon basin. A recent Stanford University study confirms biofuel production speeds destruction of tropical forests. "We can't find a way that it makes greenhouse gas sense to grow ethanol in the United States," says Holly Gibbs of Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment

see: http://news.mongabay.com/2007/1213-amazon_corn_sub.html

see: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100903092515.htm

[Sinistrous]

8. Actually, "Those who can think and reason" and who are also informed,

know that cellulosic ethanol production and distilation from grain are not the same thing.

[Sinistrous]

7. Your quoted segment does not support the assertion in the subject of the OP.

Your assertion "Cellulosic ethanol is a false hope.", is supported only by a single objection: specifically that it takes more energy to produce than does grain-based ethanol. As I stated quite accurately, the rest of your quote applies to grain-based ethanol, which is not the stated subject of your post.

Your premise may be true, but it is not supported by the quotation provided.

You will have to do better.

[Christopher Calder]

9. No one said they were the same.

Read the entire pdf file which I quoted from. http://www.mdpi.org/energies/papers/en1010035.pdf

No one said they are the same. Professor Pimentel and I both say that any form of growing plants for ethanol production is bad for the environment, the food supply, and our economy. The biological approach to producing energy is all wrong, and that is why Steven Chu, our Secretary of Energy, is such a walking ecological and food supply disaster. Thomas Vilsack, our Secretary of Agriculture, should be protecting our food supply, not turning the USDA into an ethanol manufacturers lobbying organization. Biofuels are the biggest crime of the 21st century, and Democrats should not have their fingerprints all over the crime scene.

From my web site at: http://renewable.50webs.com/

"The outlook for biofuels is dismal - All present and future biofuels have the same problems. Biofuel crops are all too low in energy, too light in weight, and thus too bulky and expensive to transport to be of any real value. Biofuels require too much land, water, and fertilizer resources to be beneficial. By contrast, dirty old coal, which we need to replace as an energy source, has been historically successful as a fuel because it is very heavy and compact, high in energy content, and thus makes energy sense to transport. Coal already exists in the ground so you don't have to plant it, water it, and fertilize it. All biofuel schemes, planned or imagined, will never amount to a hill of beans because of the basic limitations of their solar based production process. A requirement for vast amounts of sunlight will always equal a requirement for vast amounts of land area to collect that sunlight, thus solar power schemes can never replace the massive concentrated energy reservoir of fossil fuels.

Growing switchgrass to produce ethanol from lignocellulose has most of the same drawbacks as making ethanol from corn. We will use land, water, fertilizer, farm equipment, and labor to grow switchgrass that will be diverted from food production, with soaring food prices the result. If we grow switchgrass on land currently used to graze cattle, we will reduce beef and milk production. If we grow switchgrass on unused "marginal" prairie lands, we will soon turn those marginal lands into a new dust bowl, which they may turn into anyway due to global warming. Computer models for the progression of global warming show the America Midwest and Southwest getting hotter and dryer, with much of our farm and grazing land turning into desert. We know that biofuel production will speed up greenhouse gas release, so if the global warming theory is true, we soon won't be able to produce enough biofuels to run our cars, or enough food to fill our bellies.

Switchgrass and other biofuel weeds will be grown by ordinary, profit motive driven farmers, not by environmentally trained scientists. Farmers will grow switchgrass on land that could be used to grow corn, wheat, or soybeans, and farmers will want to maximize yield so they will use lots of fertilizer to increase output. The plans biofuel idealists are trying to sell the American public will never produce the kind of "green," food friendly energy resource they promise. The next great scandal will be how to get rid of all the millions of acres of invasive, deep rooted biofuel weeds once society inevitably realizes that even growing second generation biofuel crops is a tragic mistake.

In practical terms, there is not enough usable land area to grow a sufficient quantity of biofuel plants to meet the world's energy demands. According to professors James Jordan and James Powell, "Allowing a net positive energy output of 30,000 British thermal units (Btu) per gallon, it would still take four gallons of ethanol from corn to equal one gallon of gasoline. The United States has 73 million acres of corn cropland. At 350 gallons per acre, the entire U.S. corn crop would make 25.5 billion gallons, equivalent to about 6.3 billion gallons of gasoline. The United States consumes 170 billion gallons of gasoline and diesel fuel annually. Thus the entire U.S. corn crop would supply only 3.7% of our auto and truck transport demands. Using the entire 300 million acres of U.S. cropland for corn-based ethanol production would meet about 15% of the demand."

Growing algae to make biodiesel is being touted as a cure-all for all our biofuel problems, but we are still stuck with the fact that algae need solar energy to turn carbon dioxide into fuel. To make biodiesel, algae are used as organic solar panels which output oil instead of electricity. Researchers brag that algae can produce 15 times more fuel per acre of land than growing corn for ethanol, but that still means we would need an impossibly large number of acres (about 133 million acres) of concrete lined open-air algae ponds to meet our highway energy demands. Those schemes that grow algae in closed reactor vessels, without sunlight, necessitate the algae being fed sugars or starches as a source of chemical energy. The sugars or starches must then be made from corn, wheat, beets, or other crop, so you are simply trading ethanol potential to make oil instead of vodka. If we construct genetically engineered super-algae that are capable of out-competing native algae strains that contaminate open air algae ponds, the new gene-modified algae will be immediately carried to lakes, reservoirs, and oceans all over the world in the feathers of migrating birds, with unknown and possibly catastrophic results.

If we try to guard algae from contamination by growing them in sealed containers under glass or in plastic tubes, the construction costs for building large enough areas to collect sufficient sunlight would be prohibitive. Even then the containers are still subject to contamination over time, and must be periodically flushed and rinsed with chlorine or other caustic agent. The current cost of biodiesel made from algae is about $14.00 a gallon.

Using "agricultural waste" to make biofuels has its own problems. Removing unused portions of plants that are normally plowed under increases the need for nitrogen fertilizers, which release the most potent greenhouse gas of all, nitrous oxide. Residual post-harvest crop biomass must be returned to the soil to maintain topsoil integrity, otherwise the rate of topsoil erosion increases dramatically. If we mine our topsoil for energy we will end up committing slow agricultural suicide like the Mayan Empire.

Using wood chips to make ethanol or biodiesel sounds like a good idea until you remember that we currently use wood chips to make fuel pellets for stoves, paper, particle board, and a thousand and one building products. The idea of sending teams of manual laborers into forests to salvage underbrush for fuel would be prohibitively expensive. Our forests are already stressed just producing lumber without tasking them with producing liquid biofuels for automobiles. Such schemes would inevitably drive up the price of everything made from wood, creating yet another resource crisis. Making fuel from true garbage, such as used cooking oil and winery waste, is environmentally harmless, but is it really worth the large infrastructure and vehicle maintenance costs required to sell ethanol and biodiesel as fuels? Our usable true waste resources are very limited in quantity, and not a major energy solution for a nation that uses over 8 billion barrels of crude oil every year.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is just no energy benefit to using plant biomass for liquid fuel. These strategies are not sustainable." - David Pimentel, Professor of Ecology and Agriculture at Cornell University
On biofuel advocates: “You have money and media access, and now everybody believes that two plus two equals twenty-two.” - Tad W. Patzek, professor of geoengineering at the University of Texas in Austin, and formerly of UC Berkeley

"Every day more than 16,000* children die from hunger-related causes -- one child every five seconds. The situation will only get worse. It would be morally wrong to divert cropland needed for human food supply to powering automobiles. It would also deplete soil fertility and the long-term capability to maintain food production. We would destroy the farmland that our grandchildren and their grandchildren will need to live." - Professors James Jordan and James Powell, Maglev Research Center at Polytechnic University of New York <*2009 statistics estimate approximately 20,000 children die from hunger-related causes every day>
---
The Democratic Party should oppose all biofuel production. This is going to be the century of mass starvation, and all those who support biofuels will be remembered for their belligerent criminal foolishness, not for their wisdom.

[Sinistrous]

10. No one exept you -- if one reads and understands your

selected quotations.

Give it up.

[poopfuel]

11. David Pimentel supports small scale ethanol

Ask him, since you seem to be on such close terms with him.
Go ahead. Make my day.