Ethanol as we currently do it isn't terribly efficient: put a barrel of oil in and get one and a quarter barrels out. It is more correctly a derivative fuel rather than any sort of "alternative".
There have been food riots in Haiti, Egypt, Kuwait, Pakistan, India, and there are just the ones I recall off the top of my head. The European powers already have populations that are concerned about palm oil plantation deforestation killing of orangutans and with it starting to affect people in places where we can't stand any more trouble ... well ... look beneath the fold.
PARIS, April 11 (Reuters) - Production of food must take precedence globally over biofuels as prices surge and the threat of famine grows, France's farm minister said on Friday, calling for a European Union initiative on world supplies.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/feedarticle?id=7455178
Germany's development minister is calling for greater regulation of the global biofuels market to prevent its expansion from driving up food prices.
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/04/12/business/NA-FIN-US-Finance-Mee...
Alistair Darling has demanded an urgent review of international biofuel programmes as part of a plan to tackle the world's mounting food crisis. The Chancellor said he had asked the World Bank to produce an analysis - for June's G7 meeting of global leaders - on the impact of green policies, including America and Europe's biofuel programmes, on global food shortages.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/apr/13/biofuels.energy
So ... England, France, and Germany are having problems with biofuels at the ministerial level. We here in Iowa have blinders painted green and gold on the inside - the hammer could fall here on ethanol in the blink of an eye if destabilizing the Persian Gulf states through food stress is what is at stake ... and that would seem to be the case.
Unwrap this problem a bit
The "biofuels" issue is not a simple one. Sites like oildrum.com have moved to a consensus on this issue, but again their scale is global and their rhetoric overwhelms the threads so fast they are not making progress on this front. Biodiesel is one set of issues. Ethanol is another, as Robert Rapier pointed out in his diary. A stalwart opponent of corn ethanol, he has decided to join a company working on biodiesel.
The gold rush into corn ethanol has many roots. The political clout of agricultural states is one big one. Sugar beet farmers in the United States would love to be getting the attention the corn farmers are, and we would in a better balance with food if sugar beets were being supported with investments like corn is now. Moreover, cellulosic ethanol is not rocket science, and is proven technology. Along with pyrolysis producing both agrichar and methanol, we have industrial processes which could be brought into the mix with the right political climate and investment flows.
Each of these issues should be discussed in detail wherever we can have cooler heads prevail than sites like oildrum. Especially in Iowa, where the canard that biofuels production will involve cutting down rain forests is not an issue. Focusing our attention more narrowly to what Iowa can do, even corn ethanol has a role to play -- only a role, but still a role. I have clients asking about technology to make their own biofuels for use on their own farms -- reliable enough to change over their fleet of engines and abundant enough to supply their neighbors and coop members. At this scale and in this context, even corn ethanol becomes a very different issue.
Moreover, combining technologies allows us to enter a brave new arena -- advanced EROI analysis, adapting the work of Dr. Hall and others to solving problems which can be solved at a local scale instead of posing problems worldwide which no one can solve at that scale with any one technology. A brave experiment along those lines was e3 in Nebraska. Unfortunately, a fire in their ethanol plant threw them a curve, but they were employing synergy to combat the involiable reality of entropy. If they survive bankruptcy and finish their project, we should examine their approach and encourage more approaches along those lines.
Indeed, the Freedom Fertilizer Plant in this site's FAQ invites many opportunities to build synergistic designs in which the energy inputs are reused in various processes to produce biofuels without any biological inputs. As I have been modelling this design and expanding on it, some interesting synergies suggest themselves. The ammonia itself can be used as fuel in an HEC generator gang as well as sold as fertilizer, as can hydrogen in 3500 psi stainless steel tanks like the setup at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado. To keep the ammonia plant constantly at work, it could be buffered by vanadium redox batteries instead of using the local grid and the variable excess from windmill used to create a surplus of hydrogen. By being able to provide firm power to the local utility, better prices for each KWh could be negotiated and the whole operation could be off-grid.
The excess heat from the ammonia processes could be used to maintain the temperature of a Sabatier reactor to produce pure methane and water from our stored hydrogen and the CO2 feed already planned from a local ethanol plant to enrich the air in the greenhouses. The exhaust from burning ammonia to produce electricity could supply water and N2 to recycle into the processing plant.
Thus the Freedom Fertilizer Plant could also be used to produce natural gas (pure and without having to scrub out H2SO4 like obtaining methane from manure processing) and could use both ammonia and methane to produce continuous electricity with HEC engines. The VRB batteries have the ability to charge DC and discharge AC, so they could be configured to discharge three-phase power at exactly 120 volts and 60 cps -- a quality "firm" power source no utility would refuse and which could be supplied at any time needed. In addition, VRB batteries can charge from the grid during off-peak hours and sell power back during peak hours.
The methane can be sold back to the ethanol plant to replace their natural gas usage. As the price of natural gas rises, ethanol plants are already turning to wood, gassification of distiller's grain and other energy sources, as discussed in this PDF of a presentation in Minnesota. The electricity can be sold directly to them as well. A Freedom Plant next to every ethanol plant would make the EROI equation, and the carbon-reduction calculation, change massively. Indeed, it may become necessary for every ethanol plant to become part of a synergistic system of technologies tied to the surrounding farms, providing feed, fertilizer, fuel and electricity through local coops. These energy plantations could then support small towns.
The question, then, becomes, what is the EROI of such systems? Can we get to the point where ethanol production, supplemented in this way, is bound to be limited to 1.6:1? What if all the farms use locally-produced biofuels for all the production processes? Power their farms off-grid? All transporation to and from the plants are also locally-powered? What if the plant is sized to use the properly-rotated crops from the local community, without destroying the land? What if the plant is farm-sized and the surplus is marketed? The energy return on input rises for the system as-a-whole. Unlike petroleum, with a natural EROI which was high by itself, raising the EROI now means synergistic design.
The idea is not that this design is special, it is that when we focus on a local scale we can produce "biofuels" with wind, water, air and CO2 of superior quality without any "bio" involved. Combined with an ethanol or coal-fired plant needing to deal with CO2 emissions, or using a solar tower to capture the gas directly from the air, this plant could be located anywhere and provide high-quality power. Thousands of designs are possible with known technology.
In synergistic design, we reuse every output, including heat, possible so the energy inputs are supplemented by outputs from other elements of the system. In business planning, we look for markets where prices are rising and where each price-point of the rise will create opportunities for profit. Combined, we provide people willing to take risk a shot at doing so in the service of the greater good. If carbon cap-and-trade systems or taxes come into the picture, we want to solve for maximum EROI, minimum carbon output and maximum ROI. If a particular design doesn't work in Ames, Iowa, it might work in Chile -- this year. As prices rise and resources become scarce, there will be points at which each design will have a chance to help someone thrive.
By being able to produce fuels and electricity as needed, we can adapt to changes in prices of individual commodities and increase the odds we can optimize the total income to the operation in volatile markets.
The key is that synergy is possible. Seperate each process by itself and then globalize it, and we are reduced to despair because the calculations and logic are just impossibly complex. Scaled down to the level where any progress must be made, and problems become solvable.
That's the kind of force that can change the world. At the level of nations, there will be hue and cry, but none of these national leaders can solve anything. The food crisises around the world will also encourage those nations to turn from only growing food for export and start growing their own food from a more diverse selection of plants and supporting traditional food sources instead of using international cereal grains. They will have to develop their internal food distribution systems. They (and we) will have to stop urbanization, the bane of the Industrial Revolution, and start using technology to telecommute, cutting driving and flying to a minimum and still getting the work done. Big office parks in cities are an unsustainable design, just as planting only fuel crops is.
One of the biggest problems is that petroleum, water and food prices are subsidized in a complex and disconnected way. Phasing in real prices for these increasingly scarce resources would force multinational corporations to "go local" to survive -- and busting these behemoths into millions of small businesses by enforcing real antitrust laws in every country would do more to increase the energy and financial efficiency of nations than any other measure we can imagine. But it is exactly these steps governments will not take -- yet. The sooner utilities become common carriers -- like railroads -- and not power producers, the better for them and for the nation.
Producing variable power into the grid and drawing firm power from it is also an intermediate solution created by the lack of will and planning necessary to change the equation for real. Investing in systems which provide firm power from off-grid, fully self-sufficient enterprises selling their surplus to urban consumers would be a sustainable solution because it depends on synergy instead of base load generation from plants which will have to produce power even when not all of it is needed. In buffering millions of dependable, individual units of production through issuing Power Production Orders in cascading electronic form controlled from the utility control room and a new generation of computer systems able to communicate with individual generators secured through long-term contracts, base load levels can be lowered with confidence. In such a system, investment will flow naturally to those who can produce the power, and those producers will be able to use wind, solar, manure, wood, ethanol, methanol and every other thing they can beg, borrow or steal to produce the power and get those contracts.
From such a market, real synergy can emerge. It requires depending on small producers instead of huge plants, but like the Internet, it will be more reliable and dependable than any centrally-planned system ever could be. It requires faith in that kind of economy again. It requires designs for production systems which make sense at each price-point along the way as petroleum supplies dwindle worldwide. It requires the political will to end subsidies to huge corporations and break them up when they get too big to respond to the needs of the nations in which they operate.
All of these changes are coming, whether the world leaders like it, or even understand it, or not. Sites like the oildrum.com are leading the way to talk truth to power, but any one site can only do so much. This site can do things others cannot and vice versa. That's the beauty of synergy. No one part is expected to do the whole job, so it can concentrate on doing the best it can at what it does best instead. The current generation of ethanol plants were designed poorly and have to survive in a globalized fuel market still driven by petroleum flows. They will have trouble surviving alone. But they don't have to remain alone. They can be the rallying point for advanced synergistic systems which increase their EROI and ROI and position the community to generate revenue from more energy products. These plants were a first foray into an unknown economy. They need synergy locally developed to insulate themselves from having play by petroleum rules alone.
Synergy is how our ancestors built the Iowa we have today, and it will be the way we will leave a better place to our progeny. Ethanol plants are an experiment, and a risky one. The backlash has begun requiring them to adapt, just like our ancestors faced famine, drought and flood and still had to put food on the table. Their investors are our neighbors, and we and they can rise to the next level of the challenge. Some will not make it. Others have a chance, if they embrace synergy and use their political influence to encourage those synergies to be deployed. Like every gold rush, the reality must settle in. But after the rush, there is still energy to be mined and a market to consume it. Finding a way to bring those two realities together is the problem we have to solve. The rest will be history.
India doesn't like it, either
http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/business/no-food-grain-use-for-bio-f...