THE Biofuel Thread pt 3 (merged)

[lper100km]

Well, here we have the perfect solution to two of the biggest world problems – energy and population. One has to marvel at it’s simplicity, elegance and malevolence. It can be marketed as a ‘good thing’ for the environment, something that all the eco supporters can get behind. Bio fuels! The answer to all our problems! It’s a solution worthy of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell’s darkest imaginations.

What will really happen is that the agricultural land base will gradually and increasingly be turned over to grow biofuel raw stock. There’s more profit in fuel than food. Start with poor countries or poor areas and pay a small premium to grow biofuel stock. It’s happening now in Sierra Leone where rice is being supplanted by sugar cane (for conversion to ethanol, not sugar). Then as starvation sets in and the population begins to decline, the agricultural land base can be taken over and raided more and more. After all, there are now fewer people to feed. Governments would either be complicit or powerless. Eventually there will be sufficient fuel available for the fortunate who have managed to survive and no further reductions in agricultural land will be necessary. Thus new eco balances will have been formed (economics and ecosystems) for a vastly reduced population and after a few generations, who would remember or even know about the old? All that the history books would say is that there was great world famine brought about by blighted crops or mismanaged agriculture (which would be true, but for the wrong reasons).

I can’t believe I am writing this. I don’t want to think that people, corporations, governments could be so evil in thought as to actually implement such a deliberate policy, but I’m not so naïve as to think that it is not possible. Maybe it starts as a simple business plan for alternative energy but mushrooms out of control once avarice and power plays take over.

What is scary is that building blocks are already in place. Farming and agriculture is now agribusiness in NA and Europe. GM bio products are an established fact.

Sustainability is the way of the future? Maybe, but at what price? Be careful what you wish for.

[americandream]

You really capture the tension between endless annual growth in capital and the effects such a system must have on world food production and the general destruction of our civic values as a communal species, reducing us all to mere disconnected units in pursuit of that growth. Terrible!

Well, here we have the perfect solution to two of the biggest world problems – energy and population. One has to marvel at it’s simplicity, elegance and malevolence. It can be marketed as a ‘good thing’ for the environment, something that all the eco supporters can get behind. Bio fuels! The answer to all our problems! It’s a solution worthy of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell’s darkest imaginations.

What will really happen is that the agricultural land base will gradually and increasingly be turned over to grow biofuel raw stock. There’s more profit in fuel than food. Start with poor countries or poor areas and pay a small premium to grow biofuel stock. It’s happening now in Sierra Leone where rice is being supplanted by sugar cane (for conversion to ethanol, not sugar). Then as starvation sets in and the population begins to decline, the agricultural land base can be taken over and raided more and more. After all, there are now fewer people to feed. Governments would either be complicit or powerless. Eventually there will be sufficient fuel available for the fortunate who have managed to survive and no further reductions in agricultural land will be necessary. Thus new eco balances will have been formed (economics and ecosystems) for a vastly reduced population and after a few generations, who would remember or even know about the old? All that the history books would say is that there was great world famine brought about by blighted crops or mismanaged agriculture (which would be true, but for the wrong reasons).

I can’t believe I am writing this. I don’t want to think that people, corporations, governments could be so evil in thought as to actually implement such a deliberate policy, but I’m not so naïve as to think that it is not possible. Maybe it starts as a simple business plan for alternative energy but mushrooms out of control once avarice and power plays take over.

What is scary is that building blocks are already in place. Farming and agriculture is now agribusiness in NA and Europe. GM bio products are an established fact.

Sustainability is the way of the future? Maybe, but at what price? Be careful what you wish for.

[Graeme]

Shell set to ink Brazilian biofuel megadeal

Shell is poised to complete a multibillion-dollar deal with Brazilian ethanol producer Cosan, instantly establishing the company as a major player in the fast-expanding biofuel market.

Cosan's chief executive Marcos Lutz told analysts and investors late last week that plans for the two companies to launch a $12bn joint venture are now close to finalisation.

Lutz could not say when the deal would close, but insisted that it was at a "very advanced" stage.

The companies announced back in February that the deal would create a new biofuels powerhouse. Cosan is to pool its 23 sugar mills and fuel stations with the bulk of Shell's existing biofuel operations.

Cosan is also set to double its existing bioethanol production, establishing it as the third-largest fuel distributor in Brazil and providing the new joint venture with a direct route into the European and North American markets.

businessgreen

[hillsidedigger]

There's that much more land, water and bio-diversity to be wasted.

[eXpat]

Biofuel is big in Brazil, another thing that is big, is the destruction of the tropical rainforest.

Nick Mathiason wrote in Guardian last month, "Cosan is Brazil's leading bioethanol producer in a country where virtually all new cars run on sugar cane. But there are serious reservations among environmentalists that the growing attraction of biofuels in Brazil could see agricultural land earmarked for food shifted to fuel crops, creating pressure to chop down more rainforests. Kenneth Richter, who campaigns against biofuels, said: "Massively expanding sugar cane plantations to produce biofuels will significantly threaten Brazil's rainforest. The biofuels industry is pushing agricultural activity on to forested land where trees are cut down to make space for farming. (Shell dismisses and disputes these concerns.) To be truly green energy companies should invest in clean, renewable and safe forms of energy like wind and solar power." Shell has significantly scaled down its wind and solar investments, sparking fierce criticism from environmentalists. It is now concentrating on biofuels and carbon capture and sequestration."

It is widely known and believed that the (relatively) recent trend of increasing production of crops to make more biofuels has raised the price of food globally. Many critics have labeled this trend as 'crime against humanity'. Brazil's president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva , however rejected that notion at a UN conference in 2008, and offered his own (and novel) explanation for the rising food costs. He said that food is getting costlier, because people in developing countries are now eating more due to their newly improved economic conditions.

http://www.beinformedjournal.com/beinformed-journal/2010/3/3/shells-12b-deal-with-brazils-cosan-for-biofuels.html

I have not doubt that Cosal is a good partner for Shell, after all, they are very budget-conscious people.
Shell makes deal with Cosan in brazil despite slave labour claims

The oil giant Royal Dutch Shell has announced a $12 billion (£7.5 billion) deal with Cosan, one of the world’s largest ethanol and sugar producers, despite claims that the Brazilian company used slave labour.

On 31 December Cosan was included in the Brazilian Labour Ministry’s slave labour ‘dirty list’ after an inspection in June 2007 by the country’s anti-slavery taskforce, the Special Mobile Inspection Group, rescued 42 people from Cosan’s Junqueira refinery. The refinery in São Paulo State produces 24,000 bags of sugar and a million litres of ethanol a day.

The enslaved workers had been trafficked from north east Brazil, the poorest region of the country, with false promises of a good job and decent wages. Inspectors found workers were left unpaid after deductions were taken from their wages for rent in unhygienic lodgings and for basic necessities, including protective hats. The workers, which included one minor, did not have proper contracts and were left without clean drinking worker.

http://www.antislavery.org/english/press_and_news/news_and_press_releases_2009/030210_shell_makes_deal_with_cosan_despite_slave_labour_claims.aspx
But hey! how cares? as long as we can keep business as usual everything is fine...

[dbruning]

"Shell has significantly scaled down its wind and solar investments, sparking fierce criticism from environmentalists. It is now concentrating on biofuels and carbon capture and sequestration.""

Biofuels allow them to continue the same strategies they have always used for selling and marketing. If they switched to wind and solar, they get electricity instead of liquid fuel, and we all know how pervasive the electric cars are...

Perhaps if fully electric vehicles become the norm, then the fuel companies will embrace the other renewables, but until then, it's unlikely they will throw their support behind a technology that requires them to change. These mega-corporations are run by humans, and people are reluctant to change unless they are forced to.

[pstarr]

Just another tool to strip legacy organic carbon from the earth and send it spiraling into the atmosphere as CO2. When we are done with petroleum, coal, peat, forests and topsoil then I imagine we will have to burn people.

[dissident]

When we are done with petroleum, coal, peat, forests and topsoil then I imagine we will have to burn people.

Yes, the management will never do the right thing since it is filtered for BAU drones. As they say for science, innovation comes after the retirement of the current generation through death. The corporations are going to have to "die" before the right decisions can be made. Looks like all the prattle about the flexibility of the market system is a load of wishful thinking. I see the same ossification as the system that croaked around 1991.

[pstarr]

When we are done with petroleum, coal, peat, forests and topsoil then I imagine we will have to burn people.

Yes, the management will never do the right thing since it is filtered for BAU drones. As they say for science, innovation comes after the retirement of the current generation through death. The corporations are going to have to "die" before the right decisions can be made. Looks like all the prattle about the flexibility of the market system is a load of wishful thinking. I see the same ossification as the system that croaked around 1991.

Which croak was that? The microcomputer revolution croaked around 2000 after the Y2K purchase and run-up ended. The internet revolution croaked around 2005. What was the previous croak?

[dissident]

What was the previous croak?

Soviet communism. The western capitalist system is afflicted with an unwritten dogmatic core that is a terminal disorder when facing a dramatically changing environment. The management at Shell thinks that playing the same game is the proper way to ensure success in the long run. Supposedly capitalism was able to respond to changing conditions instead of trying to impose continuity. But instead we have a rather small number of people in various directorial boards making inane decisions much like central planning in the other failed system. These people are certainly not selected for radical change which is what is needed.

[Graeme]

Huge challenges in scaling up biofuels infrastructure

Ramping up biofuels production to replace fossil fuels and provide a significant portion of the nation's energy will require nothing short of a transformation of the U.S. agricultural, transportation and energy sectors in the next few decades, according to a bioenergy expert in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences.

In an article, titled "Challenges in Scaling Up Biofuels Infrastructure," published in the Aug. 13 issue of the journal Science, Richard contends that converting to a system in which biomass provides much of the country's energy will require new ways of thinking about agriculture, energy infrastructure and rural economic development.

"It is estimated that bioenergy has the potential to provide up to 60 percent of the world's primary energy, and biomass seems poised to provide a major alternative to fossil fuels," he wrote. "The International Energy Agency estimates that a 50 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 will require an exponential increase in bioenergy production, to 20 percent of our total energy supply in less than 40 years."

But the massive demand for lignocellulosic biomass will require major changes in supply chain infrastructure, Richard warned. "Even with densification and preprocessing, transport volumes by mid-century are likely to exceed the combined capacity of current agricultural and energy supply chains, including grain, petroleum and coal," he wrote. "To reach the International Energy Agency 2050 target for primary energy from biomass would require 15 billion metric tons of biomass annually."

physorg

[efarmer]

I picked up rough numbers on a few google searches:
In recent years, we have a global harvest annually of 2.3 billion tons of grain (wheat, corn, rice).
This is triple the global harvest of 1961 while the population of earth doubled in the same time.
So let's add 2.3B tons of grain, with .314B tons of spuds globally, .16B tons of sweet potato, .047B tons of yams, .2B tons of cassava, .2B tons of soy beans, and we see the grain and starch crops plus soy add up to roughly to:

3.2 billion tons globally - I know I missed some starch crops like beets and plantains.

15 billion tons of biomass to gather and process to convert to energy is indeed a huge challenge by 2050 in addition to growing the increase in food crops to meet the projected population.

It seems to be an equal challenge to pull off the increase in food production to meet 2050, likely by abandoning the large scale eating of meat fed by crops, much less going from .7B tons of biomass
to 15B tons in the coming years simultaneously.

I am drawing a blank, okay Pops, I give, how do we do this?

[Graeme]

Genetic engineering.

Scientist IDs Genes That May Make Biofuel Production More Economical

A University of Illinois metabolic engineer has taken the first step toward the more efficient and economical production of biofuels by developing a strain of yeast with increased alcohol tolerance.

Biofuels are produced through microbial fermentation of biomass crops, which yield the alcohol-based fuels ethanol and iso-butanol if yeast is used as the microbe to convert sugars from biomass into biofuels.

"However, at a certain concentration, the biofuels that are being created become toxic to the yeast used in making them. Our goal was to find a gene or genes that reduce this toxic effect," said Yong-Su Jin, an assistant professor of microbial genomics in the U of I Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition and a faculty member in the U of I's Institute for Genomic Biology.

Jin worked with Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the microbe most often used in making ethanol, to identify four genes (MSN2, DOG1, HAL1, and INO1) that improve tolerance to ethanol and iso-butanol when they are overexpressed.

"We expect these genes will serve as key components of a genetic toolbox for breeding yeast with high ethanol tolerance for efficient ethanol fermentation," he said.

poweronline

[efarmer]

Genetic engineering can boost yields and reduce the tonnage required for the energy, but it is improbable if it is a corporate tool of profit and exclusivity as it has been to date.
The sheer tonnage of harvesting and processing biomass in addition to the sheer tonnage and processing of food crop mass flies in the face of the reduced presence of liquid fossil fuels that was the mainstay of tripling of grain production in the last 50 years and was a constant in which the gains in yield via GMO crops took place as they have been developed, introduced, and evolved.

Our way of life is going to have to match up with available resources and we are going to have to get very pragmatic and intimate with the idea.

Our economic system says that a shortage creates a demand and a price point that creates a replacement if the shortage is not met by the resulting process. This economic model was exploded by the incredible EROEI of petroleum exploitation and we are under the impression the miracle was our economic system and not the EROEI of petroleum.

We need to get our heads around all of the best methods of demand contraction, and it goes against everything in our beings.

[pstarr]

When I read how some genetic modification is certain to be a game changer, and would allows us to continue our happy motoring ways . . .

Jin worked with Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the microbe most often used in making ethanol, to identify four genes (MSN2, DOG1, HAL1, and INO1) that improve tolerance to ethanol and iso-butanol when they are overexpressed.

"We expect these genes will serve as key components of a genetic toolbox for breeding yeast with high ethanol tolerance for efficient ethanol fermentation," he said.

. . . my bullpucky detector starts flashing and whirring and telling me "Danger, Will Robinson."

So many of these algae biofuel or "third generation" cellulosic ethanol programs depend on an as-of-yet unproven untested GMO. I am old enough to remember the Flavr Savr: Link

a genetically modified tomato, was the first commercially grown genetically engineered food to be granted a license for human consumption. It was produced by the Californian company Calgene, and submitted to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1992[1].

It was supposed to contain a genetic modification to delay ripening until the tomato landed in a consumer's shoppers cart. It was headlines all over the media. It was going to change the way we eat. It failed.

And then there was strawberry/flounder. Notice the confidence and serious CV's in the December 5, 2000 NYT article. As if the product really existed. As if the theoretical flounder/strawberries really smelled. Or not.

Since all organisms use the same genetic material (DNA), the power of the technique includes the abilityto transfer genes between organisms that normally would never interbreed.

Thus, an antifreeze gene from Arctic flounder has been introduced into strawberries to extend their growing season in northern climates. But contrary to what many people think, this does not make the strawberries "fishy" any more than the use of porcine insulin turned people into pigs.

Dr. Steven Kresovich, a plant breeder at Cornell, said, "Genes should be characterized by function, not origin. It's not a flounder gene but a cold tolerance gene that was introduced into strawberries."

Notice the confidence of the scientist. The public wants desperately to believe genetic modification of life forms. Maybe people need to feel they are gods? Or that we can beat sickness and death? Yet, except in very limited examples, this is not the case. There are no programmable ripening tomatoes or strawberries that don't freeze.

In the 18 years since the first modified organism was approved for sale, there have been TWO, exactly TWO, commercial agricultural/consumer GMO (of higher lifeforms than yeasts/bacterias) product successes--bT corn and herbicide resistant grains. (you might add a new papaya to the list). Ironically these two products have never been proven (in a well designed scientific study) to actually be more productive or effective in the field. You only have to understand the farmer is powerless to not plant the seeds in the face of grain cartels who both own the seed patents, and also controls the market for finished grain. They tell the farmer what to plant.

[efarmer]

I don't know enough about GMO versus hybridization to amount to much insight Pstarr. But the massive 15B tons of biomass when just contemplated as a gather, move, and process operation dwarfs the one we use for global food crops and yet would have to run concurrently with it.

[Graeme]

Decoding of wheat genome will aid global food shortage

Wheat production world-wide is under threat from climate change and an increase in demand from a growing human population. Liverpool scientists, in collaboration with the University of Bristol and the John Innes Centre, have sequenced the entire wheat genome and will make the DNA data available to crop breeders to help them select key agricultural traits for breeding.

Bread wheat, with an estimated world harvest of more than 550 million tonnes, is one of the most important food crops in the world and is worth more than £2 billion to the UK's agricultural industry. Wheat breeders, however, have few genetic tools to help them select key agricultural traits for breeding and do not always know the genes responsible for the trait they need. Scientists have analysed the wheat genome, which is five times larger than the human genome, to give breeders the tools required to select traits for a healthy yield.

Professor Neil Hall, from the Institute of Integrative Biology, explains: "Sequencing the human genome took 15 years to complete, but with huge advances in DNA technology, the wheat genome took only a year. The information we have collected will be invaluable in tackling the problem of global food shortage. We are now working to analyse the sequence to highlight natural genetic variation between wheat types, which will help significantly speed up current breeding programmes."

physorg

[The_Virginian]

pstar,

add in gm "roundup ready" suger beets....

but the gov. is now looking to keep that next planting from happening untill studies on health effects are done.

5X the round up for our GM crops = 5X the pesticides YUM!

[efarmer]

Does anyone know if the feedstock commonly used for glycophosphate is oil or natgas derived?

[Tanada]

Does anyone know if the feedstock commonly used for glycophosphate is oil or natgas derived?

I did a modest search online and it appears to be mostly Natural Gas based manufacturing for the organic components and energy.