http://science.reddit.com/info/2nhwp/comments

if you are so inclined...

My feeling is that diesel-like engines with be with us for decades. Despite thermal efficiencies less than 50% these engines are tough and reliable and seem to be able to work on a range of fuels. For example lipids based diesel includes methyl ester, ‘thermal depolymerization’ and hydrogenated variants which seem to be your ‘green diesel’. There is the US military’s JP8 which I understand powers both Humvees and helicopters. Fischer-Tropsch diesel can be made from both coal and woodchips. Diesel engines can be modified to run wholly or partly on dimethyl ether or compressed natural gas. The different liquid diesel fuels can be blended and even a touch of ethanol added to make diesohol. Now Citroen and other car makers have diesel hybrids not to mention the mythical GM Volt if it ever makes it.

However looking ahead I think the best form of diesel fuel will be from waste biomass probably via gasification. The early signs on algae farming are not good. The population will be too large and hungry and the climate too variable to grow soybeans and oil palms to make fuel. To use the fashionable term diesel is ‘resilient’.

I think a key is VMT (vehicle miles traveled). Cut that significantly !

I have my 1982 M-B 240D (manual transmission). 30 to 31 mpg of diesel BUT if I drove as much as my brothers do, I would still have a large carbon footprint.

But I use 5 to 6 gallons/month on average (last 30 days, maybe 2).

Several people have asked me why I have not switched to bio-diesel (home made) and my response was that it was not worth the hassle. I have enough on my plate as is.

Best Hopes for Using Waste Fats & Oils,

Alan

Robert, Thanks for a nice summary of how people fool themselves into thinking they are doing the right thing, when they are actually justifying what they really want to do. This will all eventually drop by the wayside as we get squeezed more by PO.

I personally own a 4 cylinder Mazda 626 and a 50cc Honda scooter with mpg of 30 and 100, respectively. There is no way any non-gas vehicle will ever compete with these. Vehicles like mine will rule the next generation. Even at $10 a gallon I can continue to motor along. I hope everyone at TOD obtains transportation systems that they can live with. Any day unforeseen events could make the purchase of a scooter look like absolute genius.

I think the saddest part of this scene is that the newspaper prints that as some kind of scientific reality. Many, possibly even most people will not voluntarily give up their energy addiction -- they still don't see it that way-- and the media will not educate them.

"I wonder where they think the gasoline and diesel that the soybean farmers use comes from. How was the biodiesel transported to the filling station? Where did the plastics and rubber in all of those vehicles came from? "

Robert, I have to say these don't seem significant (I don't have a sense of the magnitude of the methanol input) - in you blog I seem to remember a rough estimate that ethanol required roughly a 80% FF input, and that 60% of the 80% was process heat, leaving only 20% for miscellaneous items like this. I would expect biodiesel to be even less, with a much lower fertilizer input.

These all seem like very small inputs, which could be supplied for a long time even with reduced oil availability. The modest size of these inputs would give a reasonably long transition time, which would allow relatively simple substitution: eventually the soybean farmers certainly could use the biodiesel they produce; so could the transport to the filling station; The plastic & rubber can come from biomass; The tractors & other transport can be electrified eventually.

Do you have numbers on the size of these inputs?

I'm trying to get a feel for the actual fossil fuel usage calculations. If Brooks gets 10 mpg on B80 she is using at least as much fossil fuel at the pump as a 50 mpg Prius, possibly a little more because gasoline has a process gain benefit and requires about 10% less crude. That is just comparing the obvious petroleum quantities. She might be using B100, in which case the fossil fuel inputs to soybean oil are the main story.

I can't find a definitive quantification of the petroleum energy inputs to growing soybeans. Much more seems to be written about corn ethanol EROEI than biodiesel. But this article disputes one study claiming that 127% petroleum input is required, and supports another claiming that 30% petroleum input is required. My understanding is that caloric EROEI for U.S. food crops in general is well under 1 (10% comes to mind), so I am inclined overall to agree with Robert.

Thanks for this Robert. As we'e discussed, waste biodiesel is "green", but there's only so much of that to go around.

Waste (or any other) Biodiesel is only part of a very elaborate and futuristic vision of sustainability. It would probably help the rest of the world if we discussed the type of society and preconditions for things like ethanol and biodiesel to truly be considered "sustainable".

1. Agriculture needs to become a lot more oriented toward local self sufficiency and wean itself of using fossil fuels for fertilizer, running heavy equipment. ie lots more small local farms instead of corporate factory farms. It probably means eating a lot less meat and employing a lot more people in the agrcultural sector.

2. We all need to drive a lot less and transport around less freight by trucks. 70-80% less VMT

3. The vehicles we do drive the remain 20-30% of the current VMTs should be a lot more efficient and have the ability to use electric-only for the first 20-50 miles of any trip.

4. Then we can use biodiesel and ethanol that is preferrably:
A. Used for an essential "need" (municipal service vehicles - police, fire, sanitation)
B. Locally sourced (on-site or within 10-20 miles)
C. From a waste stream (something that would otherwise go down the drain or to the dump)

One way to identify typical magnitudes and costs of inputs for crops in a region is to locate the state agricultural extension enterprise budgets produced by the state extension agricultural economists. These represent typical costs for that commodity for the region and are intended to provide a comparison basis for farmers to see how they are doing and to make choices. These vary considerably in detail so you may have to search to find one that includes the fuel amounts per acre for the farming operations.

For example, one of the hits from Googling "soybean crop enterprise budget" is a rather complete Excel spreadsheet for no-till, Roundup-ready soybeans in Ohio
Soybean Production Budget

I gotta a believe that in 20 years people will look back and laugh at the misguided efforts being made today tweaking automobiles to be less damaging to our world. The writing is on the wall, get out of your cars if you want to keep this world as we know it. Nothing less than this will truely matter in the long. This conversation is a reflection of our inability to come to grips with the reality in which we find ourselves, and that is without a radical drop in our energy use, we will have no hope for any kind of adequate future. Continuing to invest in automobiles (requiring massive amounts of energy in their manufacture and ongoing business model) is a very large symptom of the disease we share.

I am having trouble with this being called 'green' even. Doesn't buring biodiesel produce as much CO2 as fossil fuel?? It may help our dependence on 'foreign' oil, but does it address CC or GW in any meaningful way?

Robert - if you keep posting this stuff, you'll end up a Doomer!

The vast majority of people can not begin to imagine a world without cars. Given the way we've built our infrastructure, I sometimes have a hard time imagining how we could get there (or rather a hard time imagining that we'll do so in a planned manner), but that is different from being unable to grasp the concept.

Personal, private transportation that involves driving around these enormous, heavy, luxury-filled machines is an unsustainable extravagance, made possible only by our use of fossil fuels. And I think it will end.

Beyond that, take a look at what we have sacrificed to the almighty automobile. I grew up in the heart of the car culture. When I was 10 I could tell you the make, model, and year of any car just from a glimpse of the tail lights. For so many years cars were my passion and hobby - I can fix or modify anything on a car, I can heel-toe double clutch downshift while trail braking through a corner, and my wife drove race cars. I've been within a whisker of dying in a bad wreck. I bought into the car culture hook line and sinker.

But now, when I look at a neat old machine that once I would have dreamed of, all I think is "what a colossal mistake", both on a societal and personal level. I only wish we had not ripped out the train lines, and how I wish I had put my mental energies into learning organic farming, and a hundred other things that might be useful in the future. At least I learned to fix mechanical things, but I don't know if it was worth it - the wasted opportunities may yet turn out to be a fatal mistake.

I'm over the auto addiction (they are just appliances to me that I must still use and keep running for now), but most never will be, and they will make excuses until the bitter end.

This misunderstanding of fuels and their sources is going to become more common. I recently had a friend who proudly announced that she was going to buy a Prius so that she wouldn't have to worry about petrol in the future. When I pointed out that while the Prius is a great vehicle they still use petrol, she was incredulous and it took a lot to convince her that I was not joking. She cancelled the order.
I think we will hear more of these types of stories in the future.

http://www.uidaho.edu/bioenergy/NewsReleases/Biodiesel%20Energy%20Balanc...

Some data on Bio from University of Idaho.

While I sincerely appreciate her intent, someone walking, riding a bike, or even driving a Prius running entirely on gasoline could say the same to her.

Robert, this woman is obviously going beyond the absurd, but you've provided no data to support this claim about the Prius.

While we all need to reduce our VMT ultimately to zero, in the transition biodiesel has a more useful role to play than ethanol - depending on the feedstock. Razing tropical rain forest to grow palm trees to support Europe's thirst for diesel is one thing. Soy oil from the Midwest is another. And quite another is what's being done here in Oregon: making biodiesel from a combination of waste veggie oil (from food processing plants as well as fast food places) and oil from rapeseed (canola) grown in eastern Oregon. Rapeseed has a higher energy content than soybeans, and the farmers say it's an ideal rotation crop for their main winter wheat crop. I've provided links previously here on TOD to that story and another about small mobile biodiesel producing units, developed in Oregon, that can produce fuel close to the feedstock source for local use. Too tired to look them up again, but would appreciate more nuanced analysis of biodiesel inputs.

For the record, I have a 1981 Mercedes 300D. I live in a walkable neighborhood in Portland and drive it as little as possible.

http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/Research.html

At the above link, it states that it takes well over 2,000 gallons of oil just to produce an average car (I'm guessing more for larger ones), which is about 12% of the oil that the vehicle will ever use in its lifetime. With her "at least 10 vehicles" she has, even if she didn't use one drop of oil, just the manufacture of them would be at least 120% of all the oil a single car would use up in its lifetime. And of course, what with biodiesel not being free energy, she's up way, way farther than that. So I don't think that she has anything to feel superior about, except for maybe her pocketbook to be able to have that kind of life. (But heck, I guess it's still better than doing nothing. Nobody has to write an article about her, though.)

I've gotten the municipal government that I work for to start using B20 biodiesel in their street repair equipment and sanitation trucks. These are vehicles that were already in operation, and would otherwise have been using straight petrodiesel. I don't for one minute think that biodiesel is "THE ANSWER". Any benefit that is obtained by having this equipment run biodiesel rather than petrodiesel is pretty marginal at best; even a very small net benefit might be worth doing, though.

When my father was a Marine in China back in 1946, the Chinese were running buses in a similar fashion with coal.

However, while all of this may be very nice, the image of the frizzy haired, obviously "Progressive" lady all pimped and pleased with herself is disturbing. She plainly hasn't thought the logistics train through from the beginning. That has already been throughly discussed here, so I will not recap.

The end game is that sooner or later, willing or not, Americans are going to get a divorce from the personnal automobile. Period. When the myth that we can continue driving as we do gets propogated by everyone from Gov. Arnold to this lady, it only delays the real changes that have to take place in transportation. What is now a question of "Delay" could rather uncomfortably become a fact of "Too late" if this trend persists.

If that happens, all further bets are out the window.

JS Mosby