Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Ethanol: Fuel of the Future?

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Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has announced a ‘National Fuel Ethanol’ program with plans to mandate ethanol blend E10 for vehicles and in this way reduce dependence on imported oil saving an estimated $1.8 billion. The ethanol will be made from sugarcane, corn, grain, sorghum, wheat and other agricultural crops, according to today’s Farm Online.

‘Fuel-injected feed fear’ was the headline on the front page of The Land newspaper on 25th August. Following the headline was a story suggesting beef lotfeeders, dairy, pig and poultry producers are expecting feed grain prices to increase as a consequence of Australia’s “fast expanding ethanol fuel lobby”. The article continued … A report by Canberra-based Centre for International Economics (CIE) puts present ethanol production (in Australia) at 130 to 140 million litres and lists 14 proposed ethanol plants, more than 80 of which would use grain as the base ingredient.

Is ethanol a “fuel of the future” as suggested by Arroyo. How will feedlots compete?

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Phil Done says

    The issue with bio-fuels is how much arable land do we have available. And if we further convert all the crop trash to fuel perhaps what effect does that have on soil structure with carbon run-down. Anyone got a calculator? My friends assert we don’t have the land area to substitute in.

  3. Phil Done says

    Australia consumed around 50,000 Ml in petroleum products in 2002-03, with 18,875Ml for automotive gasoline and 13,888Ml for automotive diesel[1], together approximately 65 percent. Ethanol can be made at a rate of approximately 350 litres per tonne of feed stock from sugar cane molasses or cereal grains such as wheat or sorghum. Most of Australia’s agricultural land is suited only to low yielding cereal crops, such as wheat which produces approximately 1.5 tonnes of grain per hectare. It would require somewhere near 142,857,143 million tonnes of feed stock grown over 95,238,095 million hectares to replace 50,000 Ml of petroleum products. For comparison, in 2001-02 the total area of all Australian crops was 24,000,000 million hectares, so even if all crop land were given over to producing ethanol, it would still only produce a quarter of current needs. To fulfil the gasoline and diesel demand would equate to approximately 62 million hectares, or almost three times the size of the total cropped land in Australia. Hence, even a mere 25 percent substitution ratio, that is an E25 blend where 25 percent of gasoline and diesel demand is offset, would still use up almost all of Australia’s crop land unless there is a dramatic reduction in demand for transport energy.

    [1] ABARE, 2003. Australian Commodity Statistics, Item 312.

  4. Rick says

    Alcohols, particularly methanol, can be produced from biomass other than human-consumable grain.

    I’m wading through a paper at present which discusses the global productive capacity of existing agricultural land for bioenergy. In theory we could grow everything we need. Amongst its references are

    Hoogwijk M, Faaij APC, van den Broek R, Berndes G, Gielen D, Turkenburg WC. Exploration of the ranges of global potential of biomass for energy. Biomass and Bioenergy 2003; 25(2):119-133.

    And a thesis manuscript (don’t understand why so many authors for a thesis)
    Hoogwijk M, Faaij APC, Eickout B, deVfries B, Turkenburg WC. Potential of grown biomass for energy under four GHG emission scenarios, Part A the geographical and technical potential. Manuscript 2003.
    I’ve googled the authors and the title and have come up with http://www.novem.nl/ default.asp?menuld=10&documentld=115827 but so far no success with downloading the pdf file.

    The Utrecht University in the Netherlands is right into all this stuff, so you might find something on their website.

    If you are particularly interested I can chase up some papers that discuss the productive capacity of the Australian wheatbelt for the production of woody biomass. If you grow trees and annual crops in combination, the combination of the two, in the right layouts, has the potential to be more productive than either pure annual cropping or pure tree plantation. This is because if say 10% of the paddock is under trees in narrow belts, the trees use resources that escape from the annual crop systems. The productive potential of this modest proportion of tree cover is in the same order of magnitude as our national coal consumption.

    There is competition between the two systems, but there also a good deal of complimentarity.

    For example, I think about 80% of the nutrients applied to a wheat or canola crop are lost by leaching below the root zone. Huge waste of energy. If you have deep-rooted trees nearby that can tap into those nutrients at depth, the overall efficiency of the paddock is improved.

    It’s a big subject with many details, and I should get back to my reading (why am I reading Jen’s blog you might ask) but I could be more helpful if you want to follow it up.

  5. Phil Done says

    Our figures suggest we have to consume large amounts of current cropped areas to make a signficant difference. If we don’t harvest wheat for bread I guess we don’t have the bread (or sugar if we’re talking sugar). Or if we plant trees instead of wheat we don’t have the bread either. In terms of trees – we’d have to make the calculations of what it would take and how practical it would be. We have to do the maths – not an easy calculation but doable. Available land x productivity – also have to factor in – what if there’s a big drought – El Nino and climate change ? If we practically sacrificed a known % of our national wheat and sugar crop, and substituted further with methanol from timber what would be the % of the national fuel bill be…

  6. Rick says

    Another one – a conference in Sweden in May this year looked at a range of transport fuels from biomass. There are swag of powerpoint presentations at

    http://www.ecotraffic.se/Synbios/Conference/main.aspx

    Ethanol from grain is the easy route, but the real future is utilising a feedstock we can’t eat to provide transport fuels.

    If you really want to get into the efficient utilisation of resources, feeding grain to ruminants is hardly the way to go. The 7:1 conversion efficiency is so poor, it’s not efficiency at all, but we all want our nice pink beef. None of this dark-cutting dog food for me!

  7. jennifer marohasy says

    We currently export most of our sugar and wheat crops -so we wouldn’t necesssarily be eating less of them. I can go the ‘dark-cutting dog food’ – and we have almost as many of them as sheep. Now, what would the greenhouse gas savings be by using the ethanol blend?

  8. Rick says

    Phil

    I don’t know your background (I don’t want to bore you with something you already know) but there is a bit of analysis of this issue being done in Oz. This is a small extract from an abstract of a paper that colleagues of mine have submitted for publication. I’m sure my relaying it here won’t compromise their paper.

    “We have utilised a plant productivity-economics model, constrained by water availability, to predict potential yield from commercial woody crops in the region. For a biomass price of A$35/t (green) and a crop water use efficiency of 1.8 dry g/kg of water, the model indicates that some 39 million t/year of dry biomass could be profitably produced from a woody crop occupying 1.5% of the agricultural land in the 300-400mm rainfall zone, and up to 8% in the 401-600mm rainfall zone.”

    I can chase up published papers if you want. Just thought this one was a nice summary. I don’t have all the papers to hand because my work is narrowly focused upon biomass supply chains.

    The objective here is to not displace agriculture because we all eat and as I mentioned above, the complimentarity of woody perennials and annual crops and pastures is a way to greater land use efficiency.

    The initial motivation behind this work was the problems of rising water tables and salinity. That issue remains as a strong motivation, but we aren’t factoring in the economic value of controlling salinity, the increased shelter for annual crops and pastures, shelter benefits for livestock etc etc, because its hard to put real numbers on these benefits at this stage.

    Drought and climate change are factors to consider, but woody native vegetation is much more stable in the face of such shocks than annual crops. If there’s a run of good years, trees grow faster so the resource accumulates more quickly than you harvest it. Then in the dry years, you dip into that accumulated standing resource. These woody crops can even take advantage of short term events like cyclones – we’ve seen growth responses for over a year after one extreme summer rainfall event.

    We aren’t talking about logging the Tassie forests here. These “trees” are native shrubs and eucalypts such as mallees. A number of species from several genera are showing potential.

  9. rog says

    A seemingly infinite number of ideas all swimming around waiting for the one “wink” of Gaia. Isnt life amazing?

    Back to this fuel thing, if you feel this ethanol has real potential, and is viable, buy shares in the company that is behind the idea and go for it. Dont let them be starved for capital.

    Bowens have been selling methanol for some years (Bogas)

    CSIRO have already spawned companies that will commercialise their discoveries and they are doing well.

    Just look at CSL!!!! (I know, it aint CSIRO but it almost is)

    (I can already hear the mumbling excuses, the escape clauses, “arr but…..multinationals….men in black suits…conspiracy…liars…)

  10. Rick says

    We’re doing the energy balance analysis of the woody crops in Oz as we speak. Hopefully a paper later in the year.

    A lot of bioenergy is used in Scandinavia, supported in part by a carbon tax on fossil fuels. They use forest residues (they live quite happily with forestry in the moral superpowers of the world) and they also have purpose grown woody bioenergy crops, plus a lot of wood waste from industry and building demolition ends up in power stations.

    From memory, something like 5-10% of the recoverable energy content of wood residues from forestry is used in growing, harvesting, collecting, chipping and transport of the wood to the power station. If you used these biofuels to produce a diesel substitute, you could close the carbon cycle and have a system that uses solar energy via photosynthesis to yield about 90% of the captured energy to other uses. But for the present, less than 10% of the energy yield has to be returned in the form of fossil fuel inputs.

    At the other end of the scale is biodiesel from canola. For every joule of energy you put into growing the canola oil, you get about 1.5 joules out of the biodiesel. I am told that much of this relatively poor efficiency is due to the high inputs required for canola – a lot of fertilser and pesticides.

    Wheat and sugar cane I don’t know. As inputs for wheat are much lower than canola, and the grain yields are pretty similar, I suspect dry grains to ethanol would be better than canola. Cane has higher inputs than wheat, but the yields are so high (C4 plant?), it may be relatively efficient. Not much of the world can grow sugar cane.

    Done properly, it would be hard to have a net energy loss from a biofuel because of the massive input of photosynthesis. I expect all these fuels would reduce CO2 emissions. If not, they would be least economic and hence never see the light of day. But there are technical barriers ahead of some of the uses for woody biofuel e.g. pyrolysis conversion of wood to oil. I believe alcohols from woody material are technically okay but we have to wait for oil to rise a little further before they can displace petroleum on economic grounds alone.

  13. rog says

    You know that for a fact Ender?

    *The yields would be much lower without fossil fuel fertilisers and pesticides*

  14. Rick says

    Ender

    If you’re talking about the yields from woody crops, yes, there are inputs currently from fossil fuel sources, but like the analyses of Scandinavian forest residues, those inputs are recognised and accounted for. The net energy yield is still very much positive and it’s renewable.

    When grown alongside annual crops, we don’t anticipate much, if any, need for fertilising the trees because they can scavenge from the 80% of nutrients wasted by the annual crops. That excess from 90% of the paddock is far in excess of the amount of nutrients that would be required for the trees occupying 10% of the paddock. The unknown is how accessible are those excess nutrients to the trees. Pesticide use may be a factor some of the time e.g. for plague locust control. These events are typically sporadic and inputs should be low over the long term. Herbicides are essential for successful tree establishment, and the rates are high, but they are normally applied for only one or two years until the trees are well established.

    In the energy balance analysis currently under way, we are accounting for everything we can think of, the energy expended in collecting the seed used for the trees and the diesel used by the planting crews when they put the trees in. Tree nursery irrigation pressure, the energy it takes to keep all the relevant humans alive, the diesel used by the harvester. The energy embedded in the harvester’s rubber tracks and its fuel filters. If you can think of anything we have forgotten, I hope we’ll hear from you in due course. This paper better be accepted.

    Overall, we anticipate that for every fossil joule of energy put in, we should get maybe 8 joules of usable renewable energy out that does not emit any fossil CO2. In theory, it should be feasible to close the loop completely, but I am talking very long term at best.

  15. Ender says

    rog – How are present yields sustained?

    Rick – True enough however you are still putting in artificial fertilisers even if it is from the annual crops. Without this fertiliser the soil will quickly become depleted even if it is trees that are growing. The main energy constaint as I see it is the fertiliser required to sustain the growth of the biomass.

    An 8:1 energy ration is OK however a solar PV panel’s energy return is about this. If we are talking transport then an electric car charged from a solar panel will have about the same energy return as ethanol burnt in a IC car engine as and IC engine returns about 15% of the energy in the fuel.

    It seems to be a lot of effort of both land use and resources to then throw away 85% of all that effort in an IC engine. An electric car charged from renewable energy uses more than 85% of the energy input as electric motors and batteries are vastly more efficient than IC motors.

    As I said in my blog post ethanol could be viable as a plug in hybrid fuel however as a wholesale replacement for oil it is not in my opinion a viable option. Having said this if you can get the energy return to 8:1 then you are better than shale or tar sand oil so this could be something to mention in the paper.

  16. Rick says

    Fair enough Ender. Our first motivation here was to mop up the surplus water and nutrients from annuals agriculture. As the concept grew to match this objective, we found we were facing a conceptual avalanche of biomass that would need a few markets. Energy is one of the few that is big enough to use the large amounts of low grade material left after we have taken all the good quality chips, eucalyptus oil and any other extractives out. Now it is becoming difficult to know whether we have the cart before the horse, or even which end is the horse anyway, because diversifying the economics of agriculture may become as big a driver as the original objective.

    Early days yet. We only have about 25-30 million mallees in the ground and there’s room, and need, for billions more.

  17. Phil Done says

    Rick – I’d be interested in your assumptions in modelling. Regions where trees will be grown. Growth rates. Total areas, Typical yields. Are we talking methanol ?

    Assume you’re familiar with Barney Foran’s work on methanol.

  18. Ender says

    Rick – I was not aware that you were using mallees. That is the ideal biomass as the mallee can rehabilitate salt affected land – is that correct?

    In this case then arable crop land is not being used. Even in the worst case that inorganic fertilisers are either not available or in short supply then run off from organic type fertilisers should supply the mallees as well.

    All in all it should be a win-win situation. Let us hope multi-fuel plug in hybrids become popular – in this case the Autralia might be well placed post Peak Oil.

    I would really appreciate some details so I could write about it – if this is possible. My email address is on my blog stevegloor.typepad.com

  19. Rick says

    A quick reply and then I better dig out some papers that have been published to refer you to or email to you later.

    Phil – best covered by a paper or two as a starting point. I don’t know about Barney Foran’s work, but I am a small cog in a large machine. One of technological gaps in our system is the harvester and the related supply chain. “You grow’em, we mow’em” is my motto. The costs here are too high and so I am very focussed onto this small part of the overall system. The energy balance work is contracted out and I’m a foot soldier on this, collecting some of the detailed data from the industry. So the fact that I don’t know about Barney or other significant workers in the biomass conversion end of the system doesn’t mean our overall project is unaware of him.

    My involvement in this discussion implies that I am more broadly based than I am in reality. The rest of the system is an interest of course, but I’m quickly out of my depth on details.

    Methanol is one of the options being thrown around in discussions. The state govt organisation I work for is trying to stimulate and facilitate. Actual doing work is mainly tree breeding and species selection, plus the harvester development. Who actually utilises the biomass and how is a matter for the private sector. At present the market about to be commissioned is a factory built by Western Power Corporation (WA govt owned corporation) which will produce activated carbon products, eucalyptus oil and then use the waste process heat and spent leaf biomass to generate green electricity for the main grid. Small scale at present and it’s a strange and untested combination of processes in one factory, but it’s a first step. We’ll talk to all comers; more and diverse markets for the future will be good.

    Ender

    I’ll have to get back to you and send a paper or two. There are a couple of misunderstandings I would like to address here, but time has got away for now.

  21. Rick says

    Ender

    A couple more points in response.

    Energy yield – if we get 8J out for each 1J we put in, we may compare simply in Joules to shale oil and tar sand, but the 8J we produce are from carbon neutral woody crops. The others are fossil carbon sources, so we will be miles ahead of them. The fossil fuel inputs, including machinery and oil-based fertilisers, are included in the 1J input.

    Land use. We are planting in arable land, so we are displacing wheat/canola/pasture. For this reason we aim to match the economic returns that farmers make from their conventional agriculture, and we think we can do that in some circumtances but we may fall a bit short in others. The farmers are growing the mallees anyway in anticipation of a lot of other factors coming together, so they are putting a lot of their own money at risk in this. When the first returns for mallees start coming in, I expect we’ll be unable to keep up with the demand – farmers want to grow more trees but they need them to be profitable.

    There is little prospect in the foreseeable future of producing much more than saltbush and other halophytes on saline land. These are good things to grow and they are all part of the equation, but fodder plants still produce wool and meat, which doesn’t broaden the economics of agriculture. In real terms, the economics for all the agricultural products have declined for the last several decades and with so much surplus agricultural productivity around the world, this is likely to continue. Industrial products like wood and energy are increasing or holding their value.

    The introduction of productive deep rooted plants back onto the hillsides is part of the solution to salinity. “The solution” depends upon who you talk to – total revegetation back to scrub and woodland would do the job but we need to eat. Others argue that salinity is caused by declining soil health not rising water tables, or that the excess water should just be drained to the ocean. We aim to provide a very significant aid to the management of salinity. Using the excess water on the slopes, where a lot of the rain falls, will reduce the total volume that has to be dealt with. The rain that falls onto the saline valley floors is difficult to manage. The more perennial vegetation on those flats the better and there are some mallees and other small trees that show potential to be pushed out there, but at the moment they become less productive on salt land and it becomes difficult to even pay for the cost of establishment, let alone turn a profit.

    However we are using either selected wild plants or the first generation progeny of those wild plants, so there is a lot of potential to adjust things by breeding. We are now where wheat was about 10,000 years ago. GM technology, did I say that? Genetics should be able to improve productivity and profitability, and get us into parts of the landscape that don’t work for us at the moment.

    Post Peak Oil and other implied gloomy scenarios don’t have to be painted in dark colours. There are affordable and even profitable solutions to many or most problems. The thing that will bring us to our knees, should that happen, will be squabbling amongst ourselves in order to gain political influence. Mea culpa too.

  22. Davey Gam Esq. says

    Rick,
    A pleasure to read your cool headed, balanced and informative contributions.
    We could have done with you at Agincourt in 1415.

  24. Ender says

    Rick – I am planning on reading your papers however have not done so yet but I have a couple of points in response.

    1. Land Use – we are OK now but the question will come up in the future, especially in countries with limited land, is do you displace food crops for fuel crops?

    2. You have to listen to the EREOI. Fertilisers etc are based on oil and there will be increasing competition for oil to make these. Tar sands etc though not viable for fuel will provide raw materials for these fertilisers for thousands of years so it is not a problem however the cost will be higher. When your energy return is marginal would it be better just to erect a wind turbine and charge an electric car rather than devote the millions of hectares of land, megalitres of water and tons of fertilisers for an energy return of 8:1.

    My main objection to Ethanol is it is seen as a way to replace oil without our lives needing to change. By this I mean that we can today drive our petrol fuelled Prados and Monaros anywhere we want and tomorrow when the oil becomes scarce we can just switch these Prados and Monaros to ethanol and continue on. This is the public perception of ethanol and could result in millions of hectares of land being devoted to keeping this petrol fuelled dream alive. The reality is that the current situation is totally unsustainable and is ONLY possible because of Oil’s massive EREOI of 100:1 or better. Trying to replace this with a system that has an energy return of only 8:1 is doomed to failure from the start.

  27. Rick says

    Ender

    Land use – Hoogwijk et al (referred to in earlier comment) have looked at this on the global scale and my understanding is that most of the first world has a surplus of ag land and a problem with over-production of food behind tariff barriers. These heavy energy consumers could direct some of that land to energy production. Farmers in the northern hemisphere are being paid to do nothing with it now.

    Ethanol from sugar and maize/corn is in my opinion a doubtful long term approach, but because it is easy to do, it’s the current practice and raises the question of using a foodstuff to produce fuel for my car. The longer term objective, I think, should be to piggy-back on this initial use of biofuels to develop energy resources based upon cheap non-foodstuffs like low value woody materials and wastes such as black liquor from paper mills. Ethanol from food should drop out on economic grounds over time.

    Our proposal to splice woody crops into Oz agriculture is a multipronged attempt to improve landscape management and agricultural economics. It should improve the utilisation of fertilisers already applied and reduce water table recharge. If we can combine that with the displacement of fossil-fuel energy, we seem to me to be struggling in the right direction.

    EROI – the objective of bioenergy is to replace fossil fuels, with their admirable EROI, with renewable non-fossil fuel. The energy efficiency may not be as good, but the fossil CO2 reduction is one of the principal objectives. In theory in the long term, fertilsers could be produced using the energy from the renewable resource and close the loop. You can either have a fossil CO2 emitting fuel with a high EROI or a low fossil CO2 emitting fuel with a modest EROI. If tackling global warming and renewable energy are desirable, perhaps biofuels can be forgiven their modest EROI.

    No problem with wind turbines, but they are already having a lot of trouble with aesthetics and social resistance. Electric cars are fine too, but this transfers the energy issue to the electricity grid. As a source of electical energy, wind is an unstable source and needs the support of large base load systems. Storing fuel (coal, oil, ethanol or woodchip) is cheaper than storing electrical energy, so base load electricity systems, and transport systems, are currently founded upon sources of fuel that are cheap to store. Wind is also the most developed renewable resource apart from hydro, and it is being applied as quickly as possible. It will expand to the social and economic limit anyway, and soon.

    Personal transport is the source of many problems and it provides many social and economic benefits. The margin that we can probably argue about is recreational use of vehicles. I suspect this is small proportion of our overall energy consumption. Commuting to and from work in personal transport is also an issue but it’s a large topic on its own. In the end, as a commoner living in suburbs, I don’t see much scope for pushbikes and public transport making more than a marginal impact upon global energy requirements. The cost of fuel for personal transport will push us towards greater efficiency, but I am one of many who buy cars for about $10,000 – $15,000; it’s within my budget. Not many hybrid fuel vehicles on the market in that range – the solutions to this problem are currently only available for those on car-and-salary packages and/or the relatively wealthy. Consider to the most commonly paid wage level, not the average.

    Perhaps none of this is perfect, but I think the most effective and completely unacceptable solution to this and many other problems is to remove humans from the environment. We don’t have such a “zero impact” option here, we can only choose the least worst option and then live with the consequences. In many instances we’re already doing that, which is why the Club of Rome got it wrong(?).