The Sustainable Development Forum 2007 - Ethanol and Biofuels.

The part of your post above I made bold is False.

Thanks for the link, but please read my four comments following extracts from that TIME article (in blue below) and my {brief inserts} in TIME’s text below:
A summary of my POV is: TIME either distorted or did not understand the deforestation process well. An alcohol energy based economy is susatinable and can make life better for almost everyone.

From his Cessna … he watches men converting rain forest into cattle pastures and soybean fields with bulldozers and chains. … deforestation is on track to double {see 1 below} this year … explosion in demand for farm-grown fuels has raised global crop prices to record highs, which is spurring a dramatic expansion of Brazilian agriculture, which is invading the Amazon {see 2} at an increasingly alarming rate.
… trendy way for {US} politicians and corporations to show they're serious about finding alternative sources of energy and in the process slowing global warming. The U.S. quintupled its production of ethanol--ethyl alcohol, a fuel distilled from plant matter--in the past decade

Corn ethanol … turns out to be environmentally disastrous. Even cellulosic ethanol made from switchgrass, … looks less green than oil-derived gasoline. Meanwhile, by diverting grain and oilseed crops from dinner plates to fuel tanks, biofuels are jacking up world food prices and endangering the hungry. The GRAIN it takes to fill an SUV tank with ethanol could feed a person for a year. {3}

only a tiny portion of the Amazon is being torn down to grow the sugarcane that fuels most Brazilian cars. More deforestation results from a chain reaction so vast it's subtle: U.S. farmers are selling one-fifth of their corn to ethanol production, so U.S. soybean farmers are switching to corn, so Brazilian soybean farmers are expanding into cattle pastures, so Brazilian cattlemen are displaced to the Amazon.{4}

(1) Even if it doubles, the rate of deforestation will be less than it was decades ago, even less than the peak rate of centuries ago! The cause of Amazon’s deforestation is US and other rich country’s demand for beautiful woods, like mahogany. When this demand started, “pau brazil” was Brazil’s main export. (Here un-capitalized “brazil” is an adjective telling the type of wood. “Pau” is Portuguese for “wood.”) When Napoleon invaded Iberia, the king of Portugal fled to his colony (now called Brazil after its principal export 300 years ago). Until last year, the rate of deforestation has been dramatically decreasing for more than a decade as Brazil strengthen the policing of forests.

(2) True, if “Amazon” refers to a region. False if “Amazon” refers to a forest. The agriculture use of land that was once forest begins after the forest has been illegally destroyed to export wood. SEE (4) for more details.

(3) If corn were used, it would be about 8 months. If sugar cane were used it would be less than one month. If the SUVs were replaced by the typical poor person’s car in Europe or the also smaller 100% alcohol-capable car most Brazilians use, about 10 days. If more than half of the miles driven by these smaller, more-efficient cars were replaced by electrified public transport, only about 6 days (urban areas only). If “tele-commuting” were extensively used, less than 3 days. (Half of the “suburbanites” work from house, have their internet-ordered groceries etc. come by the store’s electric van, etc.). If better schools more luxury apartments existed in US cities, instead of extensive “suburban sprawl,” about 1 day! I.e. then half of the worlds agricultural could be producing food and half (mainly in or near the tropics) be producing energy. (Brazil already imports most of it wheat. Perhaps in an ideal “Adam-Smith world,” someday Brazil is a net importer of food and exporting more than 40 times its own domestic energy needs to pay for it. Such a mutually dependent world would probably be free of wars and their huge costs. I.e. Everyone could be richer and live better, but the current shallow “conspicuous consumption” attitude would also need change to the New England Yankees’ “Make it do, use it up, wear it out.” POV. )
My point is: The current petroleum based economy is very energy intensive and totally unsustainable. ** ($1000/ Barrel oil will follow “peak oil” in less than a decade.) Thus, rich economies will disastrously and permanently collapse, if conversion to a sustainable alternative is not started immediately. (It may already be “too late.”) ALL of the tropics producing only alcohol cannot sustain the current energy inefficient economies of the rich world. Peak Oil is a certainty, but I think there may be enough time still to avoid a return a “stone age” economy in US and EU. Do you know that >95% of the cost of an Idaho potato, eaten in NYC, is oil’s processing costs (for fertilizer, pesticides, etc. and shipping)? How would you fare if even potatoes were 20 times more expensive and you car was never driven? IMHO, if you are not older than 40, that is your future, if no drastic change to the economy’s energy base is started now. It took Brazil 35 years to get to be “energy independent,” but still criminally (against future generations) burning petroleum for its heat.

(4) True, but how did the forests become “cattle pasture”? Answer:
A small percent of the forest trees were illegally and selectively harvested for the wood the rich world wanted to buy. (Wood from a single mahogany tree can be sold for more than $8,000 in the US!)
The best way to hide the crime is to set fire to the forest so it looks from the air like lightning-strike fire. (An old tire placed on the mahogany stump first is a good idea in case one of the police’s 4-wheel-drive truck comes by a few years later on the dirt road the loggers made.) With the forest gone the locals, mostly Indians, can no longer make the cash they need from it (Trapping for illegal sale small animals, especially parrots, etc.). So despite the poor soil, they try to farm it. Pot (“grass”) in small isolated spots is the best cash crop but bigger drug suppliers do not like the competition, so soon a few cows, pigs and lots of chickens are trying to find food between the burnt stumps. Eventually, the stumps are cleared and the land is seeded by a rich, absentee owner, who employs a few of the natives and the rest go to nearby cities. That is how the rich countries demand for pretty woods made the pasture now being converted to soy beans, etc. by high food prices. Sugar cane had nothing to do with the conversion. Essentailly no sugar cane will grow in the Amazon, nor is it economically feasible even if it would. Brazil’s sugar cane is grown 100 miles, or less from the populations that will use the sugar and alcohol. The Amazon is more than 1000 miles too far away, to be economically competitive. Perhaps someday it will be with alcohol capable pipe lines and river tankers etc.
While not false, Time’s article is very miss leading. - Perhaps telling US readers that they are the cause of the Amazon’s deforestation is not good for sales?



In closing, I note: that yes a mature forest stores more carbon that a field of growing cane, but an economy based on sugar cane energy stores a huge amount of carbon in alcohol, probably more that the difference between cane fields and forests on the same land. This carbon storage is in tanks of many different sizes – Perhaps 100 “Capesize” ocean going tankers, more still in the various near port tanks, and even more in the tiny fuel tanks of individual cars, etc. – Not at all a balance POV to only consider the forest cut down, especially as world’s growing population and rich peoples love of pretty woods, not sugar cane, is responsible for the destruction of the forests. One also essential step towards sustainability is the control of populations. Here China is leading the way, but creating huge problems for itself by the way it is doing so. (Women are already being stolen from rural villages and it will get much worse still due to the cultural preference for your one child to be a boy.) I gave a much better approach to population control as point (2) in a prior post.
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*In Portuguese, adjectives such as ”brazil” in “pau brazil” or “oak” in “pau oak”, follow their noun. Brazil, the country, takes its name from a type of wood, which once was the dominate wood of the forests but is now rarely found. – So extensive was the first “rape of the forest” by rich countries. You are part of that rape still continuing today when you buy something made of mahogany etc.

**Brazil is leading the way: half the cars on road now burn alcohol, essentially all cars made in Brazil now can, but the rich still import their BMWs etc. I would make that illegal, except that it exports part of the flood of dollars coming to Brazil, which is causing the “de-industrialization” of Brazil’s labor intensive industries.(Exports cannot cover the worker’s salaries, especially with the now rapidly rising minimum wage. These industries will be badly needed when machine cutting of cane terminates hand cutting, is it rapidly is. - Despite great expansion of cane fields, the demand for cutters is already decreasing. Hand cutting requires the fields be burned first. – A source of pollution and waste of vegetable material.)

 

BD:
>Essentailly no sugar cane will grow in the Amazon, nor
>is it economically feasible even if it would. Brazil’s sugar
>cane is grown 100 miles, or less from the populations that
>will use the sugar and alcohol. The Amazon is more than
>1000 miles too far away, to be economically competitive.
>Perhaps someday it will be with alcohol capable pipe lines
>and river tankers etc.

I'm not sure why you and SA insist on a strawman argument.

Neither I nor the article make the claim that the Amazon rain forest is being destroyed to grow suger cane.

The fact that you continue to argue this strawman after it's been brought to the thread's attention, makes me wonder what your motives are.

Again, the cane sugar associated forest deforestation to which I and the article refers to happening not in the amazon rain forest, but rather in the Cerrado Savanna. If you wish to argue the this deforestation is not an issue, so be it -- but at least end the obvious strawman.

I don't know "the truth", but currently you're not making any progress against their points because you want to argue a point they haven't attempted to make.

>While not false, Time’s article is very miss
>leading. - Perhaps telling US readers that they
>are the cause of the Amazon’s deforestation is
>not good for sales?

Actually, they were telling their US readers that they, through their insatiable appetite for fuel are absolutely responsible. The point of the entire article was exactly that. Perhaps they were wrong in that it is lumber rather than fuel that we (US consumer) wants, but Time still believes it is the consumer ultimately to blame.

So, in summary, would you like to argue that the deforestation of the Cerrado Savanna is:

A: not happening.
B: not being done to grow cane
C: replacing the natural flora with cane is carbon neutral
D: carbon doesn't matter
E: other.

I'm happy to listen to arguments, just make them on point please.

JB

 

That is technically true, but the article begins under an photo of a small forest patch, which is surrounded by soy bean fields. Then continues on the first page to state:

“There's a frontier feel to the southern Amazon right now. {An understandable, but missleading, way to refer to part of Cerrado region for TIME's readers.} … Brazil has remarkably strict environmental laws—in the Amazon, landholders are permitted to deforest only 20% of their property--but there's not much law enforcement.”
Finally on second page, article admits that the only previously forested land being used for growing sugar cane is the more populated Cerrado region. I have already noted that most customers must be not more than 100 miles away. Rio and Sao Paulo state regions is where about half of Brazil lives.

Thus, at least 90% of the casual readers (Perhaps SA was one) skimming the article come away with the false idea that the Amazon forest is being destroyed to grow sugar cane. I have read that many times, especially at websites like this but also in many other places. Correcting that wide spread error is not my "strawman," but my duty, especially as I believe converting to alcohol from petroleum based economy is the only currently feasible way to avoid the worse disaster in mankind’s history. – one that may be less than a decade away.

As the TIME article explicitly states, the correct answer is "B." Here is why:

Brazilians love to eat charcoal cooked beef. (We even have special word for those very popular restaurants – “churrascarias.” One chain of them operates in the US under the name “Fogon do Chao” (Fire on the floor”) It is partially the Brazilian demand for charcoal that has destroyed part of the Cerrado forests, as the article stated (on page 2). That charcoal is very inefficiently produced in small, mud-brick, hemispherical oven with poor ventilation to smolder part of the wood into charcoal and most into a week or more of continuous smoke.

The article failed to note a probably much larger cause of the destruction of that forest, which is also related to Brazilian eating habits: Pizza is very popular (as much cheaper than meat in a churrascaria) and 100% of the Pizzarias in Brazil bake their pizza in a wood fired brick oven. There is commonly a large stack of suitable length firewood stacked up on the sidewalk outside the Pizzaria. In the past, most of it came illegally from the forest of the Cerrado, but now that the supply is reduced and the laws are being better enforced, most of it is from planted forests.

Brazil has huge artificial forests – near the cities, part their wood now is used to cook pizzas, but most is made in to pulp for the paper industry. It is illegal to cut any native tree anywhere. These man-made forests are mainly eucalypts, has been genetically developed for very rapid growth* – Brazil is world’s largest exporter of “short fiber” eucalypts pulp. Canada and Scandinavia export more hard wood than Brazil, but there is a good chance your news paper came from Brazil.

*First harvest for “Pizza-wood” in less than two years! Then two shoots come back from each stump and twice as much pizza wood is available in less than three years more. If for pulp or construction timber, let it grow at least 6 or 7 years before cutting – it can grow more than 4 feet per year to 30 feet in 7 years! As part of the cost is harvesting, best economic age is about 10 to 14 years. Probably eucalypts planted land is now second only to soy bean land and may be larger, as I am just guessing. (Typically it is planted on hillsides, far larger area than coffee uses. Both tends to grow there instead of on the flatter lands of soy beans, which require mechanical harvesting to be economical.)

SUMMARY: Again the planting of cane or land used for pasture in what was once the Cerrado forests, IS ONLY AFTER THEY WERE BURNED for another use / reason first, but this time the illegally extracted product is or was transported to the cites of Brazil, not to the US.

 

Ok, for the sake of this discussion, let's assume that *currently* there is no deforestation being done to grow cane (I'm not completely convinced of this, but that's OK).

If the world it going to use more suger cane for fuels, it must be grown somewhere. My questions are these:

A: Where will it be grown?
B: What did it replace?
C: What is the carbon effect of the displacement?

Clearly of all the ethanol options, cane is the best -- but I'm still not convinced that we can expand the use of this fuel dramatically without going carbon negative. I just don't think the evidence supports that we can.

Convince me.

JB

 

You should be as it is at least 95% true. Certainly, it is now very dangerous to illegally cut down a forest in Brazil – not only huge fines but jail time if not politically well conected. – A few years ago a simple man cut some bark for a tree to make a tea for his sick wife and got time in jail, but that case was extreme and made the newspapers. As article stated Brazil probably has the toughest environment laws in the world, but Brazil is very large and they are difficult to enforce.

I’ll continue to try as it is important to get more to understand.

A:
In and near tropical lands, some of which are now forested and will need to be cut for growing the cane, I admit. Most of these areas are like the US was in 1700s, both economically and in the fraction of the land (at least East of the Mississippi River or West of the US's central grass land plains, once covered by buffalos, which the Buffalos keep free of forest). It may be sad, but large populations, (even of only herbivores) as in US, and large forests, can not co-exist. The history of the US shows this is true. I like forests – thus I wish the world’s population were less than China’s is.

B:
Forests and pasture, but much less of the forests if mankind would decrease the >6 fold loss of calories by feeding animals and then eating the animals. I think just making it illegal to use the words “beef” and “pork” (forcing use of “cow” and “pig”) on printed restaurant menus would help a lot to “SAVE FORESTS,” but the population control measures I have describe in earlier posts would do much more.

C:
I am not sure, but think it is “about a wash,” if one only looks at the destruction of the forests (B above) vs. the removal of CO2 from the air by growing cane fields. (By the effectively permanent storage of the alcohol in transit to markets by half* of approximately 100 or so of the very large “capesize” ocean tankers that are full of alcohol at anytime; by the half of the land storage tanks in port areas; and by the car fuel tanks that are on average half full. -That is an enormous amount of carbon TAKEN FROM THE AIR, and SEQUESTERED.)

Not doing this is certainly much much worse. Oil is NOT “produced” by oil companies. 100% of it is “DE –SEQUESTERED” by oil companies. Converting to solar energy alcohol instead of fossil fuel based economies is hugely carbon negative when one looks more broadly at the alternative of not doing so. In a few decades more, the oil, coal and natural gas that man has converted to CO2by burning them for heat (a crime against the future generations) will be greater than that man would release to the air if 100% of all the Earth’s forests were replaced by fields of sugar cane or crops.

Are you convinced yet? - Or do you want to “STAY THE COURSE” into certain disaster, economic collapse, with 90+% of current population dead and less than 10% nearly starving, and declining as that is still too much for a “stone age” wood-burning, economy to support after “peak oil.” To be sure there is still time for this major conversion, world needed to start 35 years ago when Brazil did. At least add your voice to mine now, please.
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*actually more than half would be full at any time as the trip back empty for refill is faster.

 

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April 3, 2008

SouthAmerica: This thread was about ethanol and biofuels then the Time magazine was mentioned to imply that the destruction of the Amazon area was due to the production of ethanol.

I have been posting a lot of information on the last few years on this forum about ethanol made of sugar cane vs. ethanol made of corn. There are various threads with pieces of information on this subject.

But here is a thread explaining what has happened in Brazil regarding the evolution of its farming system and its impact in the Amazon area?

You can read about it on this thread:

http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showt...09106&highlight=Amazon+destruction#post909106

.

 

.
April 9, 2008

SouthAmerica: Here is an interesting article about ethanol and Brazil.


*****


“Cheaper ethanol outselling gasoline in Brazil”
The Dallas Morning News
Tuesday, April 8, 2008

SÃO PAULO, Brazil – Car owners in this giant city of 11 million people are giving the oil companies fits. Ethanol outsells gasoline here by a large margin. This year, it became the most popular fuel throughout Brazil.

Petróleos Brasileiro SA, or Petróbras, is trying to hold on to its customers. The Brazilian national oil company has held gasoline price increases to just 10 percent in the last three years. Other gasoline retailers, from ExxonMobil to Shell, have held back as well.

"Competition from ethanol is stiff," said Almir Guilhereme Barbassa, Petróbras' chief financial officer. "In the long run, we have to consider ethanol is going to be more and more competitive, so we have to be prepared to sell our gasoline to international markets." Even with the competition, fuel isn't cheap in São Paulo. Taxes are high.

After converting from Brazilian reais to dollars and liters to gallons, regular gasoline goes for about $5.08 a gallon. Ethanol sells for about $2.65 a gallon.

Ethanol is alcohol distilled from plants. U.S. ethanol is made from corn. In Brazil, sugar cane is the crop of choice.

Alcohol as a fuel is only about two-thirds as efficient as gasoline, which reduces its price advantage in São Paulo to 74 cents a gallon less than gasoline.

Because of the falling value of the U.S. dollar, Petróbras hasn't had to eat a lot of the price increases for oil that shot gasoline up in Dallas by more than 50 percent in the last three years.

After sifting all the variables of currency, fuel efficiency and unit conversions, motorists here recognize that ethanol is the better bargain. That's without even considering the geopolitical consequences of relying on oil.

It's fashionable to trash ethanol these days. Corn prices have skyrocketed as ethanol makers consume a growing share of the U.S. corn crop. That is contributing to higher food prices around the world. A U.N. official has called biofuels a "crime against humanity."

Time magazine, linking higher food prices to more tree clearing for soybean farms, last week blamed ethanol for the destruction of Brazil's Amazon rain forest. The article argued that it makes less sense to produce ethanol than to drill for oil.

While that logic undoubtedly pleases the oil industry, it's not embraced by Petróbras. The company is investing in pipelines to take ethanol to the Brazilian seacoast for exports. It's created a biofuels subsidiary that's investing in ethanol projects and biodiesel plants.

These biofuel investments amount to $1.5 billion – real money, but small change compared to the $112.5 billion Petróbras plans to spend on oil projects over the next five years.

But these renewable energy investments could help Petróbras offset some carbon emissions from its refineries and petrochemical plants. "We think we may get some carbon credits for that," said José Gabrielli, the company's president.

Brazilian sugar cane crushed and distilled into ethanol occupies a little more than 1 percent of the country's arable land. And it's grown "3,000 kilometers from the Amazon," Mr. Gabrielli said.

As with competitors everywhere, ethanol producers are wary of Petróbras. The oil companies were forced by the Brazilian government to install ethanol tanks and pumps at all gas stations in the country during the 1970s.

While Petróbras is building ethanol pipelines, the sugar companies are looking to build their own to have an alternative if the oil company ever applies the screws.

The 350 members of the Brazilian Sugar Cane Industry Association are pulling in $20 billion a year now. Some are thinking of opening their own retail fuel stations. "We're more than a flea on their back now," said Jose Velasco, the association's chief Washington representative.

That's a level of competition that doesn't yet exist in the United States. At the moment, corn-based ethanol loses the price/efficiency test.

And while stations that sell E85 (an 85 percent ethanol/gasoline mix) are spreading, there's a long way to go before U.S. gasoline refiners feel enough heat from alternate fuels to
hold back on price hikes.

Source: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcon...s/DN-landers_08bus.State.Edition1.c50449.html

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Just scimmed through these interesting posts about energy needs. Nowhere do I see a mention of hydrogen. Burns 100% clean and is easily made with ANY water, including seawater and electricity.
No need to devastate whole areas for the growing of crops to provide ethanol. Apparently the rising prices of staple foods in the 3rd world are soon going to cause huge famines ( rice and wheat ), to make biofuel.
Atomic power ( and/or renewables ) plus seawater = hydrogen - simple, clean, no famine, no cutting down the rainforest etc. etc.
I cant see the business guys liking such a neat solution unfortunately which may deprive some of them of the $$$$$$$$$$$ they crave.
oh well thats life I guess

 

Not only "life" It is physics and economics also that is blocking hydrogen. IMHO, most of the noise about hydrogen is oil company diversion. They know it will not be able to displace oil and fear tropical alcohol which can. Already has in Brazil - more than half of the cars burn only alcohol now and 90+% of all the cars produced in Brazil are able to. (A few luxury models still run on gasoline.) Initially flex fuel cars were about $100 more expensive, but now you would pay more for a gasoline car even if it were not a luxury model as the fixed cost would be distributed over much smaller volume of sales. Alcohol has only 70% of the energy / unit volume, but currently I buy it for my car at less than half the price of alcohol. - this despite the mainly government owned and fully controlled state oil company holding the line on gas costs (less than 10% increase in the last 3 years, but it will be going up after the elections - then probably alcohol will cost about 1/3 as much. If that is the case the per mile cost of driving on alcohol will be half what it cost to use gasoline! It certainly will sooln be as oil gets more expensive - very rapidly on the "downside" ot the "peak oil" cureve. (We appear to be about that the top of that curve now - perhaps already slightly turning down. Saudi Arabia can not produce at a faster rate already. New oil is much more expensive when found.)

Hydrogen, as fortunately you know, but the oil companies never mention in their TV ads trying to divert attention for a real competitor, is NOT an energy source, but must be made normally via electrolysis consuming electric which in the US is at least 90% fossil energy. When you recognize that the hydrogen production process has losses, you understand that using hydrogen in US would INCREASE the consumption of fossil fuels, including oil. Increase the CO2 component of global warming.

Thus you distort the facts if you look only at the clean burning of H2. - The production of H2 will INCREASE the fossil fuels burned MORE THAN CONTINUING TO BURN GASOLINE IN YOUR CARS DOES! True, in principle, non-fossil energy sources exits, but until the very distant day that they alone (not oil and coal) produce the electricity for non-moble use in the US these non- fossil fuels should be used for starionary power loads (homes, offices and factories).

Wind mills, nuclear power and solar cells are not even suitable for powering cars after that day for the other reasons given in this post. You might also note that the Oil Companies are the large sponcers of the various solar-cell car races etc. - for the same reason they are backing hydrogen. - I.e. neither is the real competitor that alcohol is.

Oil companies are not dumb. - The facts about converting to alcohol are too clear and strong - It could REDUCE CO2 release (Actually alcohol makes a net removal of some now in the air as the alcohol in the ocean tankers, the near-port and local storage tanks of the distribution system, and millions of car fuel tanks is sequestering carbon that was in the air.) They are doing an effective job of making people like you ignore the real alcohol alternative with the hydrogen diversion.

Even if hydrogen did not INCREASE CO2, and were not more expensive than gasoline, there is still the unsolved physics of how to store it in your car. Metal hydrides can hold a one to one atomic concentration, but a Hydrogen is the lightest element and metals that can hold hydrogen are among the heaviest - the fuel tank that can hold the energy equivalent of a gas tank would weigh about the same as the rest of the lighter weight cars the US must convert to - cars like used in Europe and Brazil.

SUMMARY: Physics, Economic and even the environment each separately rule out the hydrogen powered car - that is why knowledgeable people are not suggesting it and Oil Companies are.

 

"burn your bras" has become "burn your food"!


silly, silly, fools....