These comments show how to solve the nuclear waste problem just dilute them. (It is actually a good solution long lived radioactive elements exist in all soils maturallt.) By comparing to total world crop area and total US grain production it does not seem that corn should have much effect, but it is still a fact that all of the agricultural lands in the US could not make enough fuel for all automobiles in the US. It is also a fact that speculation in the corn market partially incited by ethanol production drove up corn prices substantially all over the world.

In a website about a wood fired power plant and a wood diesel test facility, it is admitted that all the forests in Austria could not produce a large fraction of the diesel needs of the automobiles of that country. It also admitted that electric cars are a more efficient use of the wood fuel energy. The same is more than true of the US. ..HG..

HG:

Wouldn't new and future high performance (30%) solar panels convert sun energy for e-vehicles (and HVAC) more efficienctly than corn-ethanol-ICE vehicles?

Why go through multiple land use polluting process when we can use a much more direct clean (unlimited) energy route.

Agro liquid fuel is not the easy (nor clean) way to produce essential energy for transportation (and HVAC) but to convert useless and harmful wastes (and surplus grains) into gas or liquid fuel may be more acceptable.

The world may need all the available land to feed and log the soon to be 10+ billion people and still have enough forest areas to absorb the surplus CO2.

HG:

Wouldn't new and future high performance (30%) solar panels convert sun energy for e-vehicles (and HVAC) more efficienctly than corn-ethanol-ICE vehicles?

Why go through multiple land use polluting process when we can use a much more direct clean (unlimited) energy route.

Agro liquid fuel is not the easy (nor clean) way to produce essential energy for transportation (and HVAC) but to convert useless and harmful wastes (and surplus grains) into gas or liquid fuel may be more acceptable.

The world may need all the available land to feed and log the soon to be 10+ billion people and still have enough forest areas to absorb the surplus CO2.

HarveyD,

You are completely right. And even forgetting the biggest advantage of the PV-EV solution: we can use none agricultural land for it, like deserts or rooftops. No competition with food production whatsoever.

Am I concluding correctly that the article says that sacrificing 1% of agricultural land for 15 billion gallons of biofuelse is no big deal? 15 billion gallons is ~8% of total US passenger vehicle fuel consumption. So would 100% biofuels cost 12% of the total world agricultural land? And how much land would powering all cars and trucks on this planet by biofuels cost? 50%? Am I missing something?

This year, the cost of a bushel of corn doubled, rising along with numerous other commodities being bought and sold by speculators, including wheat, sugar and soybeans. Rice, which has no impact on ethanol production TRIPLED in price. Some speculators withheld sizable blocks of commodities in order to create artificial shortages, and then sold at a much higher price. The commodities market was manipulating supply and driving prices.

The escalating cost of transportation fuels to ship corn and foods in general was a much bigger factor in food prices than the 5 cents per pound that was added to the cost of the corn itself. Ship a ton of corn from Iowa to China and see what happens to the price. The claim that corn ethanol is the main cause for the high price of corn and corn based foods can NOT be substantiated. Now the price of corn is back down to where it was a year ago, but did food prices drop? No, because the raw materials in processed foods represent only a small fraction of the huge overhead cost of foods sold in supermarkets.

There is no shortage of corn. This year, exports of whole corn increased by 20% after being flat for years. Corn farmers would export more if the demand was there. Almost all the corn we export is Not for human consumption. It is feed corn. Shipped to foreign countries gaining affluence, like China and India, to produce meat, dairy, and animal products. This year, the value of dry distillers grains, a byproduct of corn ethanol, increased dramatically, as foreign demand increased and exports doubled. High protein distillers grains, produced by ethanol refineries, is also a feed product that goes toward the production of food. Ten to fifteen percent distillers grains added to the feed of dairy cows increases their milk production by 10 lbs per cow per week. It also puts 10% to 12% more meat on livestock, and it makes fish farming more productive.

We grow all the corn suitable for human consumption that the world can stand, and we could produce much more. There’s plenty of corn and distillers grains available for sale, if you can afford the shipping cost. The cost of the grain itself is minimal.

The ethanol industry removes the starch from 25% of the feed corn crop to make fuel. That’s no great loss in the realm of feeding livestock, because cows don’t digest the starch very well anyway. So the industry is taking low value corn starch and converting it into a high value fuel product. And what we have leftover is the more digestible portion of the corn kernel, as animal feed, in the form of high protein distillers grains. Corn oil is another byproduct of ethanol refineries, transformed into value-added products.

Some corn ethanol critics make the false assumption that people are starving, because starch is being extracted to make ethanol from 1 out of 4 bushels of Feed Corn. When in reality, the corn ethanol industry makes a superior feed product that produces more meat, dairy, poultry, fish, and pork, in addition to corn oil and a renewable domestic fuel.

Ann - you are missing the notion of decreasing demand for biofuels as electrification increases. A typical commuter driving a E-REV with 40 mile AER, will never use the liquid fuel in the tank. On weekends, or on longer non-commute trips - the ICE kicks in and burns low volumes of renewable liquid fuel to recharge batteries. In the parallel PHEV the overall MPG averages 60-120 depending on the measuring formula.

Yes, solar is terrific especially in sunbelts like the US has. Do we paper the landscape with 15-20% efficient PV now? No. We implement solar thermal to generate an increasing amount of renewable grid power - California requires investor held power companies to include a 20% renewable portfolio by 2010. It would be better to demand that municipal/government utilities do the same and grow the PV/solar utility industry by expansion. That will drive residential PV pricing lower - faster.

Claiming 50% of Earth's agricultural land will be required to biofuel the world's transport - is unnecessary, histrionic fear mongering that is being put to sleep daily by change.

What the report basically says is that if the past is any indicator of the future we will be able to sustain both food and fuel use with the same amount of land or land that is currently fallow. They look at the past and see that land dedicated to growing grain has actually decreased, despite the increase in demand from a higher human population and the spike in ethanol production. They also state that the use of a small percentage of abandoned agricultural land (fallow farmland) would more than cover a much higher demand. It also says that forested areas in many areas are increasing while deforestation in South American and Southeast Asia is decreasing. They state that corn (and soybean) exports were at or near record levels and that there are now major exports of ethanol co-product, distillers grain, that also offset some demand of other grains used as feed overseas. One thing stressed in this report was that 1 hectare of corn used to create ethanol yields about 4000 liters of ethanol and the distillers grain displaces the equivalent of 1/3 of a hectare of corn and almost 1/2 of a hectare of soy. So you’re basically recovering 78% of the harvest even after pulling out the ethanol. That’s a lot more than I realized.

Another interesting item was that fertilizer (nitrogen was the example) use has been cut by about a 1/3 since 1980 and that fertilizer runoff into the Mississippi has decreased by 20% since 1980.

DYK: There is currently some 30.6 million acres (general contracts-not counting 4.1 million high pri conservation lands) that we (as taxpayers) pay to keep fallow? That’s a cool $1.8 billion. I’m sure some percentage of that could be brought back into production…

Ethanol is not the answer, it is a transition. I say brew baby brew. I say we mandate that all new ICE cars be able to use the common mixes of ethanol (and meth/butanol - even cng). Break the oil monopoly, let demand do the rest. And yeah, phase out the subsidies over time, remove ethanol import tariffs. Get the blender's tax credits down to the reail level so they'll install the pumps. Put a floor on the cost of a barrel of oil so that investors have a steady mark to shoot for.

Bring on the Volt, get those plug-in Priuses out there, keep improving battery technology. Get the price of PV down to the point where it pays Joe the Plumber to put them on his roof. Yep, I'm on board. We need it all.

While we're doing that, give Joe the ability to choose his fuel. Every year we wait we put another 100 billion or so into the pockets of...well you know the rest...

I am skeptical of the rosy picture they paint.

quote:

"the US ethanol industry is projected to consume 2.9 percent of the world’s grain supply in 2008/09."

Considering the ethanol industry is still pretty small, I'd say that's a significant figure. If the ethanol usage were to increase from current levels, and if the rest of the world were to follow suit, what number would you get? Something closer to 20 or 30%?

However, they do say that they use the less valuable starchy parts, and the rest goes to animal feed.

I don't remember seeing any mention, although Paul mentioned it, of how the increased wealth of the developing world, and increased demand for meat products, which will require significantly more land area to support (via increased US grain production), will factor into the equation. There are a LOT of people over there. I wonder if the US actually could supply that much grain. Maybe I should have read more thoroughly.

Regarding life cycle GHG emissions, "the models currently used by EPA and others to assess potential indirect land use changes ”... have numerous limitations and cannot possibly predict with any certainty the extraordinarily complex causal interactions that drive land use change decisions.”
Of course....

Following their links I came to this huge list of FAO figures:

http://www.fao.org/statistics/sumfas/sumfas_en_web.pdf

I really wonder about the deforestation and arable land figures they come up with, especially for Latin America. The numbers about deforestation can be quite misleading, depending on how you define "forested" land. Out of curiosity, I wonder how they would they classify oil palm plantations in Indonesia?

But I agree, sensible biofuel programs do have a role to play in the short term for transportation applications that do not easily work with electrification, such as long haul trucking and aviation.

The price of any kind of solar cells or even thermal solar energy is quite high for the 200 watt-hours per mile needed, but it is a far more efficient use of the land. It turns out that every square yard of solar cells can produce about that much in a day. This figure may be off. It may not be a bad idea for individual farmers to use some bio-energy, but it is totally misguided to expect an industrialized society to be able to do it now when two hundred years ago, it led to the destruction of much of the forests in England and Europe. There are people who had a much lower caloric intake of corn itself because of the high prices that would not have been there except for the demand for ethanol. ..HG..

Of course, they paint a rosy picture; it's the Ethanol Trade Group.

However, their general conclusions appear correct. Future developments are uncertain though. The succes of EVs and SPHEVs and many other developments could result in downward pressures, whereas if 2 billion Asians want to eat 200 grams of meat per person every day, that's going to increase pressures. Incomes around the world are steadily increasing overall, and that means a bigger % of meat in the diet. And how many people will there be? 10 billion, 12 billion.

When people have to pick between food and fuel, they're likely to pick food. Unfortunately, high food prices could be a humanitarian disaster for the world's poor. Paradoxically, making the poor rich would result in upward pressures on agricultural prices through increased affluence (demand for food, particularly higher grade food).

Mark BC:

A skeptic on GCC is really a denier.