Our problem is that we are going to need more and more fuel, even counting with a reduction in car use in the west and all the mpg efficiency you can throw at it. We just need to stop this stupid car culture, starting from the ones who act as an example for the undeveloped world (that in turn would mean solving our urbanising problem, did you know that in Europe we are sprawling too!!?? at least in Spain)

We can throw and throw solutions, alternative fuels, efficiency, but I have my doubts about our chance to win over the Growth for Growth Sake Culture. Growth seems to keep ahead of us...

Your thesis is based on a rather narrow definition of biofuel feedstock as being agricultural.

Add waste biomass to the definition and you start opening up possibilities. Waste has concentrations where people are in urban, agricultural, and forest environments. Convert waste biomass into ethanol - which new, clean bioconversion technologies are accomplishing in pilot programs - and you turn liabilities (corn stover, MSW, rice straw, infected trees, sewage, switchgrass, sulfurous coal, tires, auto fluff, etc.) into energy assets (ethanol and co-generated green electricity) without toxic emissions. Not to mention the positive environmental impact of ridding yourself of the waste.

Don't get hung up on "subsidies." Subsidies are spurring overdue investments that are going to get us from fossil fuel crisis to renewable fuel solutions. Biofuel subsidies are a pittance compared to fossil fuel subsidies with a much greater rate of environmental return.

Excellent post and a great start for a thread.  Unfortunately, I am not a good enough chemist to dispute any of your major points, which all seem pretty straight forward, and within the normally accepted framework on carbon exchange.

My area is much more in the design side of the physical environment, and  mechanical techology side.  If you and others concerned about carbon release (including me, so that should be "those of us concerned") seem to agree on any major accepted points, then the broadly accepted view would be (a) burn less fossil fuel and (b) keep more live plants.  I know that's a great simplification but it gives us a great place to start.

I will not for this moment go into burning less fossil fuel, since volumes have been written about this right here on TOD, and in books and articles around the world.  Since we know burning less FF  is a good thing, all debate becomes how we can best achieve that humanely and effectively, leaving people able to heat their homes, cook their food, and move about to some degree greater than walking/bicycling, which are laudable but do have their limits (time, weather, safety, health,etc.)  We have of course discussed a multitude of methods to reduce fossil fuel consumption and of course, more will be forthcoming.

Right now, I want to turn to the other point, that being (a) Plants, and how to retain them in quantity, quality, and variety, and (b) soil, the place from which plants are born, live, and die.

Having already given myself away as a non-chemist with no real expertise in soil chemistry (only the rudimentary basics) what could a "technical type" possibly have to say about soil/plant conservation?

Don't underestimate the contribution the designer/technicians can make in this area, especially those that are willing to read a bit broadly and outside their own normal field.

I have read here on TOD references to the great environmental/ecological writings of my fellow Kentuckian Wendell Barry, who has made the eloquent case for topsoil preservation, actually more, he means "respect" of the extremely valuable and prolific medium that topsoil is.  I will not go deeply into this in this post, for sake of brevity, but if you put "Wendell Barry on topsoil" in a google search bar, it should give you an idea of the variety of thought, and depth of feeling Mr. Berry brings to this subject.

Think for a moment.  Counting from about 6 inches above the ground, to about 18 inches below it (roughly) you have an 2 foot thick medium of extreme biological variety, chemical complexity, and the most extreme value in supporting life, and in fact, acting as the womb of life that can extend hudreds of feet into the air, and dozen (s) of feet below the ground.  It is this thin layer that must be treated with the respect it earns by way of it's contribution to feeding animal and plant life, and feeding and purifying the atmosphere.  If you go much over a couple of feet off the ground, or much more than a few feet below ground, you get essentially "free space" to use, if you take proper care of that 2 foot blanket.  Digging below that blanket (topsoil) gets us resources, such as coal, oil and natural gas, plus the metals, iron, nickel, copper etc.  We can dig hundreds of feet, thousands, but we must be careful about that "blanket" of topsoil at the surface.  Likewise, we can build towers upward thousands of feet, and encase in them the equal of hundreds of city blocks, while only occupying the one block or so the building sits upon in terms of topsoil space.

The secret is verticalization, both upward and downward.  

In the 1970's, when the energy crisis was at it's worst, and the "green" movement was being born, there were many plans laid for underground cities.  Underground homes were built.  Certain industrial and storage facilities found it to be the perfect solution.  Humans can easily survive at 58 degree tempeture, whch is approximate tempeture throughout most of the populated world at only a few beet below ground.  It is much easier and less fuel consuming to heat or cool from a point of 58 degrees to a comfy 68 or 70 degrees than it is to heat from a point below 0 (in northern states like Wisconsin or Michigan) or to cool from a point above 100 in California or Texas. Climate control solutions from going underground for many buildings and even city secttions make it worth it on energy savings and greenhouse gas reduction alone, but it gets better.

If I design sections of a city to exist underground, I can use the topsoil land surface for....yep, you got it, soil preservation and plant diversity.  It's a win/win propositon, except....of course, the capital cost of excavation and building underground.

But with good architectural design, and creative construction techniques, it can be done, and in fact, if people could understand what the saving of plant life and the retention of the treasured layer of topsoil were worth in real terms, for the survival of the planet and the humans on it, it would be done now.  It will be done in the future.   The better thinkers have always known this.  

In his legendary Public TV series "Cosmos", the late Dr. Carl Sagan was speaking of how an "advanced" civilization could be identified from long distance in space, either by telescopic view, or by passing space probes.

Sagan postulated (this in the 1970's) that beside our radio and television signal, going in a wave out into space at the speed of light, we would also be visible by our lights on the surface.  The surface of the earth shows the population of a technical civilization by it's lit cities, lights visible to a spacecraft, and giving a pattern of rich/poor, technological/non-technological.  This along with the television/radio wave makes an advanced civilization visible, and for Earth, it has only been true this last century.

Unless....Sagan speculated, if the civilization is MUCH more advanced than we are....then, it would move below surface to conserve bio-diversity, resources, and topsoil, and be more protected from weather, or enemy attack by bomb/missile.  Underground cities of millions would be networked by high speed tunnel transport, and networks of fiber optic cable, one to another, to dispatch information at the speed of light....thus, the surface would again go dark, natural as it had been for millions of years, and the television and radio signal would go more and more silent, as more information was dispatched to the fiber optic intercity network....we would become essentially invisable (or very low visible at close range only) again, and the surface of the earth would host plants (including our cultivated ones, play areas, recreation, and one thing that would be visible once a passerby was close enough.....the giant solar and wind arrays in deserts and on the plains, now able to provide a great percentage of power to the extremely energy frugal underground cities.....

In such an arrangement, could bio-fuels make sense?  Possibly, but they would not be anything like the current image of giant, square fields being combed over by fossil fueled machines, and sprinkled with massive herbicide/pesticide.

Instead, it would be much closer to "detritus" hunter gathering, with the dead fallen growth, and decayed plant matter collected for methanol or methane production, combined with plant and animal waste including human waste....a unique "natural gas" by dying plants and animals and their byproduct.

I will leave it at this, and let you folks look at the side of verticalization I did not address, the more controversial one.  Allow me to give you a starting place:  

A well designed, ecologically planned skyscraper is the environment and topsoil's best friend.

If we verticalize upward correctly, and downward correctly, the surface of the Earth with it's treasured layer of topsoil and plant diversity can be our protector from greenhouse gas and global warming.  The stable climate of the Earth below ground would reduce our heating/air conditioning cost to a fraction of what it is today.

It's all in the design.  We have thousand of feet, miles in fact, of earth and sky to use without harm, if we do it right....and we would never be far from trees, plants, gardens, waters, and life mixed right into our verticalized cities and homes.

The point that I don't think people understand correctly is this:
Humans are NOT  having an energy/carbon/food/space crisis because we are "too advanced".

We are having these problems because we, and our technology, are still so unbelievably primitive.

Roger Conner  known to you as ThatsItImout

Of course, maybe I don't need to worry about that.  You say it may not be impossible in principle to hit 8Gt/yr ... but in practice?  In practice do you have that much diesel for the tractors, trucks, ...

My "up too early" brain (3:56 AM here) can only think that while properly managed forests(*) are good on a micro-level, but it would take kind of a hippie utopia (all of us swarming over the hills in sandals with mules) to get that 8Gt without spending more.

* - and not abused forests branded with the "managed" name

That said though, maybe some calc could be done on the fraction of plant Gt(s) captured there, and then compare it to other areas.  It could provide an upper limit - actually a number of limits as the Chinese output has been recorded through the many 'fuel ages.'

1. A huge amount of good quality land is used to grow grain and fodder crops to feed meat-producing livestock.  Up to 10 units of fossil fuel energy are used to produce meat with one unit of food energy in it.  The same land used to grow crops to be eaten by humans directly could, even with mechanised farming, produce 10 food energy units.  Ok, not everyone wants to be a vegetarian, but if meat consumption were reduced more land would be available for growing foods, energy crops, etc.;

2. Large amounts of land are used to grow non-food crops - tobacco, flowers, ornamental plants, vines, crops for making beer and spirits (well yes, cutting out those last three would be a last resort!);

3. Lots of good land is used to grow luxury food crops - area-intensive things like asparagus and TODers could name lots of other examples of crops which take up a lot of space but don't produce many calories;

4. So-called intensive ("mechanised" would be a better term) agriculture does not necessarily get the best yield per acre.  It's simply the cheapest at present because fossil fuel and fertiliser are cheap and with machines on huge farms you need few people working.  Many studies have shown that in most countries - especially USA - small farms get higher yield per acre than big ones.  With more people working each acre of land the crops get planted at more suitable times, get looked after better and harvested more effciently.  The ultimate expression of this is Permaculture where crops are intermixed, layered, etc. to give very high yields per acre, but nearly everything needs doing by hand. A post-peak world might see the reversal of the trend that has been going for centuries, of less and less people working on the land.

Best to let the numbers do the talking.

The net primary productivity of the best ecosystems (warm, wet, tropical sun) is 9000kcal/m2/year.  That is 36,000 btu.

Assume that your ecosystem is a magic imaginary engineer ecosystem and makes 100% biofuel.

There are 5,800,000 btu in a barrel of oil.  Best case scenario, you need 160m2 to "grow"a barrel of oil.  To grow 3x10^10 barrels of oil per year you need 4.8x10^12m2.  That is a square plot 2200km on each side - not counting access roads or housing for the workforce and their machines.  Don't forget that you also need a comparable piece of land to replace the natural gas and coal.

Ok, now you are going to destroy upwards of ten million square kilometers of the tropics to grow biofuels to run your machines.  After all, the thermal depolymerization of all the megafauna would be only a one time harvest.  This is a project that would inspire countless youths to be saboteurs at the very least.  As treebeard said, a wizard should know better.

Can we go back to talking about a system of maglev "rocket trains" in evacuated tunnels?  That was more realistic.

And here's another one, the ITER experimental fusion reactor: "If all goes well with the experimental reactor, officials hope to set up a demonstration power plant at Cadarache (France) by 2040."  

It also says that if all goes well, fusion may be producing "10-20% of our power by the end of the century".  A huge "if" and how many tens of billions will have gone into it?  Will we even have energy to build the things!?

Article at:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/5012638.stm

Now I don't know enough to say how much that flow could be increased, nor how bad the resulting environmental impacts would be.

Well, you could start by observing that our current flow rate is already causing massively unsustainable degradation of ecosystems all over the world (via overharvesting, deforestation, desertification, islandisation, soil erosion and aquifer depletion) and then make the not unreasonable assumption that increasing that flow by a factor of three isn't likely to improve matters. We're already facing very serious environmental problems even if you completely discount climate change - and of course, the impacts of climate change are likely to make matters worse.

I am afraid that magic is not available. All options with better moral then having people starve are reasonable.

Well, that's a question of timescales, isn't it? We might be able to put off such drastic consequences for a generation or two, but if they then come back with a vengance then we've not only made matters worse in terms of human suffering (by increasing the number of people affected), but we've also managed to destroy many additional species and ecosystems.

You're right - magic is not available. The idea that we can accelerate the already unsustainable exploitation of our environment by a factor of three with no adverse consequences smacks somewhat of magical thinking.

We have to start regarding our natural ecosystems in much the same way you would regard the life support systems on a small spacecraft, and stop tinkering until we really know how it all works!

As I see it, biofuels is what we shall have when the fossil fuel runs out. But I don't see them replacing current usage patterns nor supporting a global commodity market.

I see the future of biofuels as occupying a niche in the inevitable relocalization of all commerce and human activity. So instead of moving enormous 'oilbergs' of biodiesel or ethanol across oceans, we shall be producing a few gallons here and there around the farm, and using it locally.

When your metric is oil where you shoot'n at some food, up from the ground comes a bubbl'n crude of course biofuel looks bad.   When you compare the photon -> human useable energy path, biofuels look bad too.

Where biofuels make sense is as a way to 'fix' electrical energy from excessive renewable power generation.   Most bio-processes need additional physical prcoessesing be it a screw press to get seed oil, airflow to dry the grass (or whatever), grinder to get the particle sizes small enough for bacteria or yeast or fungus or whatever bio-process will be used, pumps, heating, cooling.   Any process that can be started or stopped w/o effect is well suited to act as a load leveler  (oil presses, some drying stages, grinding operations are examples of load leveling applications)    By using excessive renewable power this way, solar energy can be stored to be released as 'pulses' when needed.   Like, say, to make the fuel for rockets so weather sats can be launched.  (What farmer would not support keeping weather sats running?!?)

The "downside" is the farmstead becomes a producer of fuel watts instead of food calories and could break down the present large agra business model.    

Butyl alchohol might not be a 'loser', as you don't need to distill the product.  And as part of the old ABE process (acetone, Butyl, Ethyl), the ways to make it are well known.

These people have been playing with butyl
http://www.butanol.com/

Brazil is in a Tropical Rainforest Region.  Tropical Rainforests do not have great soils after the first few years of clearing them to use as Cane plantations or crop areas.  The lushness is because of the Bio-matter on the forest floor. Using to much of the Bio-matter to make fuels would turn some areas into wastelands because the bio-matter needs to stay in place not used to get your hummer to the mega-plex to watch the latest Holly-bio-unit Cleb-fest.

As a side note:
 Most cities and a lot of the less informed homeowners cut grass and rake leaves and put the bio-matter at the curbside to get hauled to a landfill. Wasting their own soil's and landscape's greatest prize the bio-matter produced on their own land that should be used to enrich the soil, so they don't have to use so many fossil-fuel imputs to make a green lawn again.

 Also we could ban-mowing of lawns and save many millions of gallons of gasoline a year.  Not to mention totally destroy most part time and full time jobs in lawn care, But they could go into sugar-cane production as farm hands and do it the human way instead of the machine way.

Let the insulting begin!

But to agree with you a bit, I don't think we have tapped into sustainable agriculture very much.  Using the Grow Biointensive Method for example, would be an enormous improvement in yield, supposedly (needing just 4000 square ft per person/year)?  And on top of that, human bodies are quite adept at thriving on many less calories than is consumed in the industrial world.  So while the calorie graph may be reassuring, insufficient calorie consumption is still rife in poor countries, because we humans don't distribute things equally.

If we keep reproducing exponentially, nothing can be done to stop the suffering from accelerating.  Period.  Damn, that Albert Bartlett lecture is a real slap in the face from reality, and perhaps I will regret watching it - knowledge torments me, that bastard.

My father-in-law was a county ag agent, and until he died he groused about "mining" the soil.  He was an advocate of processes like "no-till," which results in retaining much of the accumulated "waste" to house and feed those soil support troops, while they helped to restore tilth.  There is value in re-using such waste in that way, and in growing and turning under off-season cover crops, value that cannot easily be calculated in $ or energy balance.

The real need is to reduce the burning of fossil fuel, but we are stuck with the realities present socioeconomic patterns.  I favor biofuels as a stopgap while we reduce dependence on foreign oil, and while we retain as much as possible of domestic oil where it is in the ground.  Replacing the present petroleum-based lifestyle with one more sustainable, such as rail-bus-electric (by whatever means) vs auto-truck-oil, is a task that will take decades.  Do we have decades -- or just a few years?  It's a daunting prospect, but we can't give up.  The alternatives are worse.

-- Mort.  

Numerous studies (too lazy to cite right now) have shown that CO2 fertilization has limits and even in some cases actually impairs primary production above certain levels. In almost all cases, the primary limiting factor is soil nutrients such as nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and potassium (K).

I have some other comments as well. For plants and animals undergoing the stresses of a warming climate, the basic rule of thumb is change (through adaptive mutations), move (migration of species) or die. Again, numerous studies have pointed out how the range of species is moving in response to the climate. Adaptation is not an option in the short timeframe (a few hundred years) we're looking at--except if you're bacteria or a fungus. Furthermore, large carbon sinks like the Boreal regions of the high Northern latitudes and the various rainforests (the Amazon, SE Asia) are in trouble and there are serious indications of dieoff. Land use changes must also be taken into consideration everywhere on the Earth. Species have difficulties in moving their range in a human dominated environment. We are currently in the midst of a mass extinction. However, this is happening quickly (in Geological Time) but slowly enough such that humans do not notice it--but evolutionary biologists do.

We might expect land-based gross (and net) primary production to decrease in the future. Another example involves predicted (by climate models) droughts in primary food production areas in continental interiors (eg. the American midwest) and the Amazon has already experienced unusual drought conditions just recently.

I admire your attempt to find some hope going forward but this is a good example of how the twin problems of Peak Oil and Climate Change interact. Stll, biofuels are more helpful than fossil fuels generally and any contributions we can get from them are better than nothing.

nice post, best,

Dave

On the other hand, no mention has been made so far of bio-oil from algae, which is a far more productive source than any terrestrial plant (as well as an effective way to sequester carbon).  If you're going to talk about what can be done (as opposed to what will be done), leaving algae out of the picture is a pretty serious oversight.

Brazilian ethanol has reportedly got an EROEI of around 10.

Any biomass and lots of other stuff going to landfills could be easily turned into solid fuels that do a great job of space heating and displace some of the things used in buildings that could go into vehicles,  Not every fuel has to  be a liquid.  Silver bb's add up.

RR talked about the big energy cost of separating ethanol from water.  What about multiple effect evaporation?  What about parallel use of heat for both evaporation and other uses already going on?  What about----?

Point being you can grab a technical problem all kinds of ways, and if you are serious, you should  go ahead and grab at all of them, and winnow out the best ones.  (Pay? who said anything about pay?)

I have 4 grandkids.  If everybody had no more than that, we would  be slowly sliding down in world population with out need for genocide or lemming leaps.  Four grandkids does not make me feel deprived  the least bit. No saintliness required.

People have found that the right propaganda in the form of soap operas has a powerful effect on reproduction- and surely other things  might work as well.

I was born when Hoover was president.  Been around long enough to see it is silly to think in terms of fractions of generations-things keep going.  Sure, they can plunge off a cliff- I think of Hitler- but the best and only thing to do is to keep plugging away at whatever is your thing.  It all adds up in the long run.  

Sure, in the long run we are all dead, but not all at once.

It is not just the evil men do that lives after them.  EVERYTHING they (and women too) do does.  So I say, just go for it- how it turns out, ain't no way to know- don't fret on it too much.

I'm coming in late with a post although I've glanced at the thread off and on today so I've stuck it at the end.

It pisses me off when a bunch of people who don't have the capacity to do squat for their own survival pontificate about what should be done to assure the continuation of their lifestyle.

I'll be brief.

1.  You can't take "biomass" for "biofuel" without replacing the major and trace nutrients, that is, P, K, CA, S, Mg, Zn, B, Cu, Mo.  I'm not listing these to impress anyone with my knowledge of soils but rather because crops need these elements.  So, are the residues going to be trucked back to the farm at some kind of energy cost?  And, then spread by the farmer with equipment he doesn't have at additional energy cost?

2.  I'm not even going to get into the soil rhizosphere and organic matter.  A good link is

FWIW, it's a few hundred pages of excellent information.

3.  No one is set up to "harvest" biomass unless they spend a lot of money.  Rice growers might since they can't burn in CA (well, they rotate burning) as well as some wheat farmers who bale the straw.  But no one is going to spend upwards of $100k to buy some kind of attachment for their combine to glean corn stalks.

4.  Nonusable wood, what was it called in a post, "waste biomass" I think, is a looser too.  With the exception of pine plantations in the south with flat terrain, timber is harvested from hills and mountains.  I live in timber country and there is no way in hell that "slash" is going to be dragged to a central point, chipped (because that is the only way to move it efficiently) and hauled off with a positive ERoEI.

Stuart,

I couldn't agree more. I think what we need is a substantial tax increase on all fossil fuels. Not only will this encourage alternatives, but it will punish alternatives with a poor EROI and encourage maximum efficiency.

If you want to find out really quickly whether or not corn ethanol really has a positive EROI, jack the taxes up really high on natural gas, coal, gasoline, and diesel. If the EROI is poor, corn ethanol producers will be out of business. Those who developed processes focused on energy efficiency may survive.

RR

I applaud the dynamic approach Stuart is using, looking at the possibilities for future development and technologies. So often we analyze these situations with an implicit assumption that we will have no better technologies or tools than what we have in hand today. In fact, over the time frame of the 21st century, we will likely see great technological change, just as we have for the past several hundred years. From this perspective, the possibilities for biofuels are indeed probably much greater than they might seem today.

The bottom line is that the solar energy falling on earth is far greater than the amount we consume today. There is ample sunlight to power a lifestyle far more energy intensive than anything the world has ever seen.

One place where I differ with Stuart is in the suggestion that we are "commiting evil" in emitting carbon. I assume that he sees this as evil because the effects will fall on innocent third parties. (Normally one would not consider an action evil if the negative consequences fell on the actor.) Probably in this case most of those third parties are in future generations, when atmospheric carbon levels will have built to a much greater degree than today, and greenhouse warmth will have had more time to build up and become consequential.

The problem is that this view implicitly assumes a static perspective regarding the capabilities and potential of our descendants. Those future generations will not be helpless babes forced to passively live with consequences of our profligate ways. No, they will be powerful, capable adults when it is their turn to run the world, adults with technologies and capabilities that we can only dream of.

The world is not coming to a halt. Human knowledge, science and technology will continue to advance. The world of the future will be far more capable and competent, and in all likelihood, far wealthier than the world of today.

It is not evil to transfer problems from the less capable to the more capable. It is not evil for Mexicans to come from their impoverished country to the wealthy United States. It is not evil to offer health and income support to the poor at the expense of higher taxes on the rich. It is not evil for children to depend on their parents, or for their elderly and enfeebled parents to then depend on the children.

In the same way, it is not evil for us to transfer the problems of carbon sequestration and mitigation to future generations who will have far more capable tools for dealing with these problems than what we have today.

Let me provide a bit of quantitative support. What are the costs today of reducing carbon dioxide emissions? Unfortunately I don't have a quote handy, but I have seen estimates of about $50 per ton of CO2 in terms of the hit on the economy. Compare that to this article:

http://www.uni-hamburg.de/Wiss/FB/15/Sustainability/enpolmargcost.pdf

It surveys and reviews over 100 estimates of the actual discounted cost of CO2. There is a wide range of results, but the median is $14 per ton of carbon. That is much less than the estimated costs of reducing carbon emissions through conservation. According to these analyses, conservation today does not make economic sense.

The reason for this is because of the economic practice of "discounting" future harm. Harm tomorrow is less threatening than harm today, and harm 100 years from now is far less. Implicitly, this recognizes the tremendous uncertainty inherent in such distant estimates. I have outlined above some of the reasons to discount simplistic projections of harm, namely the unpredictable possibilities of future technologies to sequester CO2, to add aerosols to the atmosphere to cool the earth, or to mitigate the harm in many other ways that we may not have even thought of.

Given the knowledge that we have today, using the best analytical tools that we have at our disposal, CO2 appears to be a manageable problem over the time frame of the next century. Of course, there is room for disagreement when dealing with such an unpredictable time frame as 50 or 100 years in the future, but at this point there is no strong case to say that we are behaving in an "evil" fashion or that today's carbon emissions are irresponsible.

Source: The United States of America Meets Planet Earth

Other estimates of US primary productivity range as low as 70 EJ.

The fundamental problem is you can't substitute the use of stocks of stored solar energy by current solar income.

A Canadian company http://www.dynamotive.com/biooil/technology.html
has developed a way of boiling down (pyrolysing) woodchips in the forest so that an energy rich oil can be taken away for FT synthesis.  Maybe this technology would be as developed as grain ethanol if it had the same help.