Brazilian vs. Californian Ethanol
One of the more interesting propositions to face California’s voters in November 2006 is Proposition 87, which would tax in-state oil producers to fund alternative energy projects. Proponents of this bill air a television commercial, narrated by Bill Clinton, where the Brazilian ethanol industry is referenced. The closing message is “If Brazil can do it, so can California.”
This is preposterous. First of all, Brazil, which only replaces a bit more than 10% of their petroleum with ethanol, has a per capita petroleum and ethanol consumption of about 4.0 barrels per year per citizen (ref. EIA). California, the most energy-efficient of all US states, nonetheless has a per capita petroleum consumption of over 20 barrels per year per citizen (ref. DOE). For this reason, California, with 33 million inhabitants and sitting on maybe 40,000 square miles of fully utilized farmland (ref. NetState), requires nearly 700 million barrels of petroleum per year. This is almost as much as Brazil; with 186 million people, and nearly 10,000 square miles of farmland already dedicated to growing sugar cane, Brazil requires only about 800 million barrels of petroleum and ethanol per year.
Where is California going to find enough land to make any dent whatsoever in their petroleum consumption through planting biofuel crops? Let’s not forget that sugar cane doesn’t grow in California, but corn does. Sugar cane, best case, will yield maybe around 11,000 barrels of ethanol per square mile per year (ref. UCLA), but corn yields less than half that, around 4,700 barrels per square mile per year (ref. USDA).
This math is not encouraging: For California to replace 10% of its current petroleum consumption with ethanol, California would have to convert 50% of its existing farmland to grow biofuel crops. Not a chance.
Obviously California can import ethanol from America’s cornbelt, but the issue remains of how to find sufficient land. As we note in Biofuel vs. Photovoltaics, there are around 5.0 million square miles of arable farmland in the entire world, and even at yields of 11,000 barrels of oil per year, to get 80 million barrels per day (to match world petroleum consumption), you would pretty much have to replace 100% of the world’s farmland.
Proponents of biofuel correctly point out that it isn’t meant to completely replace petroleum, and that new techniques to extract biofuel from cellulose or to grow it in self contained reactors may greatly increase capacities. What they aren’t saying is that meanwhile food prices are being driven up all over the world, particularly in poorer countries, and deforestation is accelerating, because of this new cash crop.
Bottom line - if this is the best proponents of Proposition 87 can come up with, they don’t have anything worth voting for. Let’s not forget it was government bureaucrats who wasted billions of dollars on hydrogen fuel cells, delaying the introduction of hybrids and all-electric cars by a decade or more.
It’s tempting to support Proposition 87 if the bureaucrats would use 100% of the funds to expand photovoltaic capacity. But investments are already going into photovoltaic research and new manufacturing. And the private funds going into photovoltaics today are coming from the Silicon Valley, where investors are managing their own money with an eye towards breakthroughs, not patronage.
December 25th, 2006 at 7:32 am
Dear Sir,
We are interested in setting off a facility for mass production of spirulina algae in our land situated in the coastal district of Puri in Orissa. We want complete blue print for construction of spirulina ponds to produce organic spirulina in a scientific process. We have nop experience in this line. we would like to have a detailed project report(DPR) on production of spirulina. Can your organisation help.
Sinserely Yours
L.D.Pradhani
June 10th, 2007 at 2:10 am
Dear Sir,
We are interested in setting off a facility for mass production of spirulina algae in our land situated in the coastal district of Andhra pradesh. We want complete blue print for construction of spirulina ponds to produce organic spirulina in a scientific process. We have nop experience in this line. we would like to have a detailed project report(DPR) on production of spirulina. Can your organisation help.
Sinserely Yours
Venkat
March 1st, 2008 at 7:22 am
I just discovered this site, quite worth exploring further. My apologies for hastily posting text just composed elsewhere which involved citing this article in what is probably the wrong topic thread.
Our agriculture/grocery requirements won’t drop in a recession. We might see more Netflix, less theater, and more dehydrated grocery products. Amazingly, while most grocery costs have doubled in the last decade in LA, soda and breakfast cereal have remained stable. Apparently consumers won’t stand for artificial inflation anymore. During the earlier gas crunches of the decade, night life on the boulevards died around here, but it seems to have mostly returned (people couldn’t hold out indefinitely?) Bicycling is actually gaining ground here and I hear auto sales are at all time lows.
The potential for global catstrophe is strong, with an industrialized China competing for use of our already strained agriculture as fuel, but I’m not too worried. We can manage to adapt just in time with wind, tidal, and solar. I’m hoping to get into those industries myself in a few years, working my way up to atomic particle streaming for hand-held replicator devices. The biggest puzzle piece we need now is transnational power delivery with minimum transmission loss. Oil/H2 freighters powered by kites may actually be more efficient than masers and superconductor cables.
As is though, I think it’s already too late to rebuild a sweat labor infrastructure for places like LA. Katrina was a lesson in how non-liquid our rebuilding resources really are, When HUD and Habitat pointed out that we couldn’t increase plywood and tar paper production to fill emergency construction demands.
The other real issue is of course water. This planet has always lived on recycled water, but we need to step up the assisted degree of such as we move further away from living on the river banks. Alas, water recycling also translates almost directly into increased fuel demands.
I think the most promising route is city-state skyscrapers lined with hydroponic farming and total water reclamation, surrounded by wind/solar/tidal feeds. Commuting from home to factory, office, school, the mall, grocery, and entertainment would be done by elevator. Renting a car for a trip would be more like renting a plane or boat is now. Considering though that our metropolis’s are filled with 50 years old skyscrapers now, changes will be slow to come unless we simply retrofit. They won’t happen before oil peaks out, even if we radically redesign our new-construction infrastructure model this instant. For a place like LA this means tighter logistical control, making sure employees live near work, and replacing the sprawl of stores with online conveyor-belt-like postal delivery; or people moving out of the big cities entirely. Agriculture, ports, and factories are the physical anchors we need to congregate around to reduce distribution and commuting, but we already do for the most part, except for all the suburbs.
Tighter pricing would influensce that (supermarkets reflecting exact local distribution costs), though ‘what the market will bear’ will probably continue to reign instead.
All told, I think our only timely survival option is to create new energy sources. My vote is making a ground tethered sattelite launcher and robots to build nuclear reactors on the moon. Iron smelting and ceramic firing up there would be a hitch though. That tether would also have to plumb water up there for interrim solar hydrolysis processes. Even that plan is far fetched, and I think solar powered H2 generators in the mid–east is the first route to go, besides local jet-stream and gulf-stream kite turbines. I think diverting agriculture to fuel is a huge mistake. Solar based nano-ceramic-mettalurgy (growing building materials like crystals on-site) would be real useful around now.
Lastly, it’s absurd that we even have dumps in this age. I foresee robots with RFID chip scanners picking through all our garbage for recycling, perhaps starting at household dumpster locations to monitor individual garbage practices. Currently we aren’t informed if it’s efficient water/fuel usage to rinse a jar or can, or just recycle it dirty. Did you see The Island, in which the toilets monitored dietary concerns? I think that’s where we’re headed unless we have another dark ages, which frankly is easily possible within a century if no one with global power and vision steps in to change things. Bustling efficient civilizations have died in the past over the simple inability to rebuild infrastructure to reflect weathar changes. Running low on oil while the population increases is fairly comparable. We’ve come to rely on it for food, water, housing, clothing, building materials, construction, business, manufacturing, entertainment, commuting, and distribution. The average American will use 9 living rooms of oil for travel alone. It had to run out eventually.
I have heard (not sure if it’s true) that lighting is our main use of fuel. If so, we could just get up at sunrise and tell ghost stories at night, live a slower life. I got a new fridge which actually cut my electrical bill in half. Alas, my gas bill doubled now that coals is taking the place of diesel electric generation. I’m not too happy about tearing apart our beautiful mountains or drilling Anwar either. It’s an indication that we just go for desperate stop-gap measures and in fact do lack any powerful compasiionate visionary leadership. That model of infrastructure development will drive us back into the dark-ages when we run out of stop-gap measures. Things will get awfully tight if we plan to run the world on bio-fuel. It sounds green, but won’t be if we have to tear out the last rain forests to plant crops, and beef up global warming. It was already clear two centuries ago that we couldn’t sustain ourselves on bio-fuel when we moved from firewood harvesting to coal mining for the factories and home heating.
Living off the land isn’t going to happpen. For So. Calififornias 40M residents to live off the land at 5 acres each would require another 63,000 of our 40,000 arable square miles already producing global agriculture.
Here’s a useful article http://www.ecoworld.com/blog/2006/10/23/brazilian-vs-californian-ethanol/ which states “For California to replace 10% of its current petroleum consumption with ethanol, California would have to convert 50% of its existing farmland to grow biofuel crops. Not a chance.” The way I try to demonstrate it, I ask people to envision plowing through a ready to harvest cornfield everywhere they drive.
I do have plans for a solar steam moped though, and most of the parts gathered to build it. Alas, I almost only travel at night.
March 17th, 2008 at 4:20 pm
Dear Sir,
We are interested in setting off a facility for mass production of solar powered steam mopeds here in outer Slobovia. We have op experience in this line. we would like to have a detailed project report (DPR) on production of such mopeds. Can your organisation help?
Sincerely Yours
Howard Roark
Editor’s Note: We’re pretty sure Mr. Roark is just kidding - ref. “Slobovia.” Solar powered steam mopeds indeed!