Ethanol Volumes in USA by David Blume

[Eclipse Now]

Hi all,

 

I once thought this David Blume was just a crazy hippie and wrote off his claims as just that.

 

However, smarter people than me seem to be lapping up his work. I'll copy in one review and then a few of the other reviewers.... these appear to be smart people. Then I've added the 3 most disturbing "Myths" about ethanol he claims to debunk. I have to say, I tend to believe these "myths"... as I have seen them cited by too many government reports and other credible sources. But there is something about his angle here that makes me want to take another look at my assumptions.

 

Check out the book reviews.

 

References:

 

EG: “Humanity has used up roughly half of the world's oil and topsoil. Just in time, David Blume has given us Alcohol Can Be A Gas! It's a practical road map for supplying all of our energy needs without drilling, strip-mining, and/or depleting the soil. In fact, following Blume's model, soil fertility would actually increase worldwide; energy production would be not only sustainable, but democratic—and highly profitable on the small scale. This is a brilliant visionary work. And, with Mr. Blume's witty personality, reading it is certainly a gas.”

—Larry Korn, Soil Scientist, Translator, and Editor of The One-Straw Revolution: An Introduction to Natural Farming

 

—Albert Bates, Author of The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook: Recipes for Changing Times

 

—Ernest Callenbach, Author of Ecotopia, Ecotopia Emerging, and Ecology: A Pocket Guide

 

—John Schaeffer, President and Founder of Real Goods, and Executive Director of the Institute for Solar Living

 

—Dr. Jack Martin, Appropriate Technology Program, Appalachian State University; Vice-Chair of Renewable Fuels and Transportation Division, American Solar Energy Society

 

more reviews here

Book Reviews | Permaculture & Alcohol Can Be A Gas

 

 

Now check out the myths he takes on.

I'd love some technical feedback on what he's claiming here. For instance, when he talks about growing energy crops on sub-standard soils and sloping terrains, how does he imagine we'll be harvesting them? Can the crops grow the quantity of fuel he's talking about and what about other issues like water and nutrient supply?

 

His podcasts are longer and more detailed than these brief paragraphs, but I'll sum them up here.

 

Myth #4: It’s Food Versus Fuel—We Should Be Growing Crops for Starving Masses, Not Cars!

 

Humankind has barely begun to work on designing farming as a method of harvesting solar energy for multiple uses. Given the massive potential for polyculture yields, monoculture-study dismissals of ethanol production seem silly when viewed from economic, energetic, or ecological perspectives.

 

Because the U.S. grows a lot of it, corn has become the primary crop used in making ethanol here. This is supposedly controversial, since corn is identified as a staple food in poverty-stricken parts of the world. But 87% of the U.S. corn crop is fed to animals. In most years, the U.S. sends close to 20% of its corn to other countries. While it is assumed that these exports could feed most of the hungry in the world, the corn is actually sold to wealthy nations to fatten their livestock. Plus, virtually no impoverished nation will accept our corn, even when it is offered as charity, due to its being genetically modified and therefore unfit for human consumption.

 

Also, fermenting the corn to alcohol results in more meat than if you fed the corn directly to the cattle. We can actually increase the meat supply by first processing corn into alcohol, which only takes 28% of the starch, leaving all the protein and fat, creating a higher-quality animal feed than the original corn.

 

Myth #2: There Isn’t Enough Land to Grow Crops for Both Food and Fuel!

 

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. has 434,164,946 acres of “cropland”—land that is able to be worked in an industrial fashion (monoculture). This is the prime, level, and generally deep agricultural soil. In addition to cropland, the U.S. has 939,279,056 acres of “farmland.” This land is also good for agriculture, but it’s not as level and the soil not as deep. Additionally, there is a vast amount of acreage—swamps, arid or sloped land, even rivers, oceans, and ponds—that the USDA doesn’t count as cropland or farmland, but which is still suitable for growing specialized energy crops.

 

Of its nearly half a billion acres of prime cropland, the U.S. uses only 72.1 million acres for corn in an average year. The land used for corn takes up only 16.6% of our prime cropland, and only 7.45% of our total agricultural land.

 

Even if, for alcohol production, we used only what the USDA considers prime flat cropland, we would still have to produce only 368.5 gallons of alcohol per acre to meet 100% of the demand for transportation fuel at today’s levels. Corn could easily produce this level—and a wide variety of standard crops yield up to triple this. Plus, of course, the potential alcohol production from cellulose could dwarf all other crops.

 

 

 

Myth #1: It Takes More Energy to Produce Ethanol than You Get from It!

 

Most ethanol research over the past 25 years has been on the topic of energy returned on energy invested (EROEI). Public discussion has been dominated by the American Petroleum Institute’s aggressive distribution of the work of Cornell professor David Pimentel and his numerous, deeply flawed studies. Pimentel stands virtually alone in portraying alcohol as having a negative EROEI—producing less energy than is used in its production.

 

In fact, it’s oil that has a negative EROEI. Because oil is both the raw material and the energy source for production of gasoline, it comes out to about 20% negative. That’s just common sense; some of the oil is itself used up in the process of refining and delivering it (from the Persian Gulf, a distance of 11,000 miles in tanker travel).

 

The most exhaustive study on ethanol’s EROEI, by Isaias de Carvalho Macedo, shows an alcohol energy return of more than eight units of output for every unit of input—and this study accounts for everything right down to smelting the ore to make the steel for tractors.

 

But perhaps more important than EROEI is the energy return on fossil fuel input. Using this criterion, the energy returned from alcohol fuel per fossil energy input is much higher. In a system that supplies almost all of its energy from biomass, the ratio of return could be positive by hundreds to one.

 

Busting the Ethanol Myths | Permaculture & Alcohol Can Be A Gas

[gregdevid]

Hello Friend,

 

Ethanol is a straight-chain alcohol, and its molecular formula is C2H5OH. Its empirical formula is C2H6O. An alternative notation is CH3-CH2-OH, which indicates that the carbon of a methyl group (CH3-) is attached to the carbon of a methylene group (-CH2-), which is attached to the oxygen of a hydroxyl group (-OH).

 

 

Thanks,

 

Parkar

[Eclipse Now]

OK, but what I'm really after is whether or not it can be grown in the quantities mentioned above. I guess I need an agricultural & energy & sustainability expert panel.

[gregdevid]

Hi Friend,

 

 

Some of the resources here have more to do with drinking than driving, but the home brew hooch specialists make good ethanol of high purity, though generally in smaller quantities, and some of the most knowledgeable people on the subject and best resources on distilling are found among the home brewers.

 

Thanks,

Parkar

[JMJones0424]

I find the idea of tying the energy market to the food market directly through corn based ethanol production abhorrent. Cellulosic ethanol is a way to use what is now waste biomass to produce fuel, but it has it's own limitations. Ultimately, I think your reservations against pie in the sky dreams of growing our own fuel are well founded. One obvious fear is the whole-scale clear cutting of rain forest in order to grow crops for ethanol production.

 

The notion that oil has a negative EROEI is flat absurd. If this was the case, where then are we getting the extra energy to use the massive amounts of petroleum that the world uses. The fact that products made from oil are used to drill for, pump, refine, and transport oil does not mean that oil use is a negative EROEI, it is just evidence of how compact it is as a power source.

 

Ultimately, the problem is twofold. Fossil fuels are both a high btu to weight ratio power source, and also relatively stable and easy to ship and store. Replacing this fuel source will not be easy. Replacing oil alone does not even begin to approach solving the whole problem, as burning coal for electricity production is far more of a concern if you are worried about CO2 production than replacing transportation fuels. PV cells and the like are great for generating power, but few people are focusing on storing energy, which ultimately is the problem unless we create an entirely new infrastructure of powered roads and figure out a way to generate electricity at night. Geothermal and wind are only localized options, they can not begin to replace fossil fuels entirely, although they do supplement quite well. Check out this site for a brief overview of how to store energy in various ways.

 

What I would like to know is why more focus hasn't been placed on simple sun tracking reflectors that reflect up to 90% efficiency to a tower containing molten sodium or some other material with an appropriately high phase change temperature that could be used to store energy as heat. When energy is needed for the grid, water would be pumped through this to create steam and generate electricity conventionally. If designed correctly, this may be able to produce electricity even after sunset and during extended times of low luminosity.

 

The "debunking" of the myths in the original post are factually incorrect, though I wish they weren't.

 

Myth 1 Oil most obviously is not a negative EROEI.

 

Myth 2

Even if, for alcohol production, we used only what the USDA considers prime flat cropland, we would still have to produce only 368.5 gallons of alcohol per acre to meet 100% of the demand for transportation fuel at today’s levels. Corn could easily produce this level—and a wide variety of standard crops yield up to triple this. Plus, of course, the potential alcohol production from cellulose could dwarf all other crops.

Lets assume his calculations are correct, even though I think they are a bit high on gallons per acre. This ignores the fact that the land he proposes to use for growing corn for ethanol is now used for growing something else. His calculations require replacing the entire prime flat cropland of the US. This is not a task to be taken lightly.

 

Myth 4 So what if 87% of the US corn crop is fed to animals. If you were to remove this, it must be replaced with something else. I am a believer in grass fed meat, but this guy is proposing replacing the single most abundant feedstock for livestock. He just glosses over this as if it were no big deal. Are we all to become vegetarians in the interest of corn ethanol? While that may seem like an acceptable solution to some, I challenge anyone to come up with a realistic method of accomplishing this. Shall we open a black market for beef? As for silage, this guy obviously has no clue what he is talking about. Corn does not need to be fermented to be fed to livestock, doing so would be counter-productive. What is usually done, is to slow ferment high-cellulose products like hay, corn stover, cotton seed meal, barley straw, etc. to make more of the biomass more accessible to the livestock's digestive system. Corn and other grains are already highly digestible, and I know of no one that would consider pre-fermenting feed corn. It is the starch content in corn kernels that makes it useful as a livestock feed. There are thousands of websites dedicated to getting every bit of useable nutrition for livestock out of crops.

[Eclipse Now]

Thanks for the input.

 

A few responses...

 

I'm a peak oiler for 5 years now, and totally agree that oil's ERoEI has been some of the highest "kick" we've ever seen. (Practically "free" energy, especially in the early days when the ERoEI was about 100!)

 

I guess I was just wondering from someone in the US whether or not that land is actually available if it is "farmland", not "cropland", as he suggests in his podcasts. He claims it is available. He also claims that if we brew up ethanol from various beans/corn/fodder materials, we can then siphon off the ethanol and feed the leftover pulp to cattle so it's food AND fuel. Then there's his whole "thang" on sewerage feeding cat-tails, whatever they are... I assume some sort of reed plant. How to harvest cat-tails growing at the end of someone's massive sewerage laden field? Eeewww. Ease of harvesting has, I think, been massively over-assumed in his calculations. First world economies can NOT have 15% of their population manually doing this stuff! (He talks about growing ethanol crops on land not suitable for agriculture because it is sloping? Is HE going to pick it all for us?)

 

Anyway, I see peak fossil fuels as an energy infrastructure crisis, not an energy crisis. There is stacks of energy out there, but at this stage it seems a bit more expensive, and NOT a liquid fuel as we of course currently need. But with a decentralised, dispersed, diverse energy grid we can pretty much guarantee base-load power (or so the experts tell me, I'm not even a scientist myself!) as we transition our transport systems to electric (where I'd prefer to see more trains, trams, and trolley buses rather than personal EV's because a good train stop also encourages New Urbanism to spring up around it, saving even more energy and resources and actually creating a rare social asset these days... something called a "community".)

 

I love solar thermal which you quote, and there's an even better technology for storing the energy which is basically these big graphite blocks! It can also be used to store wind energy.

 

Check out these 2 podcasts... one on the solar graphite technology (which can run a local suburb on a small scale solar farm, up to running an entire nation if need be... but of course it's better to have a mix of technologies).

Graphite solar... GREAT podcast!

Beyond Zero Radio - World's Leading Climate Science and Solutions Radio 3CR

 

WIND podcast...

Mark Z Jacobson, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University talks about the current shift to renewable energy in the USA. | Zero Emissions Climate Change Global Warming Solution

 

Happy listening! (Some people find the kids in the intro cute, but I find them annoying. Just ignore).

 

vital transcript from WIND podcast below (and remember, from graphite podcast above, wind can now be baseload if needed! And "The Oil Drum" says wind's ERoEI can be 18 to 24, while a Danish study says 50 to 60!)

 

Mark: I think it really depends on willpower, because as I mentioned at the beginning a lot of the problem in the past, even though there's been a desire to do something good, is that there are so many quote ‘stakeholders’ in the game, there a lot of different energy sources that want to be a part, but it turns out that many of these energy sources are not so good and they get a lot of attention. And some of these are the bigger ones. Coal, for example, even with carbon capture, is one of these that really has marginal benefits. Biofuels are really marginal, or even sometimes negative benefits. Even nuclear is not quite so good than these other technologies. But they have more financing and more lobbyists, so they actually go out to the forefront and drive the discussion whereas things like wind and solar and geothermal and tidal wave, which are completely under-represented, really have very little say.

 

So, if the administration really focuses on the things that are good, and doesn't get distracted by things that are less good, or bad, then it doesn't take long to ramp up a huge renewable energy infrastructure. For example in World War II the United States produced over 300,000 airplanes in a period of seven years with most of them in the last 3 years of the war. To power the entire U.S. vehicle fleet on wind for example, if we converted all our cars to electric cars which is another conversion, but just ignore that for a second, to power those electric cars with wind we need 73,000 to 145,000 large 5 MW wind turbines. That's around 100,000 wind turbines that are large, less than the number of airplanes we produced in World war II.

 

So, we need to convert our infrastructure to do this thing on a large scale. If we decide that's what we want to do, and if other countries decide that's what they want to do, they could do it. I mean, they could really push for it. But the practical problem is there are so many competing interests that it makes something done on a large scale really difficult unless there is an emergency or unless there's just some catastrophe looming. And that's what my fear is, that what will happen is, things will plod along slowly because it is hard to change.

 

Matthew: That's interesting what you said about the 70,000 wind turbines. If you compare that to the giant umbilical cord that feeds the United States with its oil habits today to inefficiently power that huge mass transportation system you've got based on internal combustion engines, that 70,000 wind turbines isn't really that much industrial plant, is it?

 

Mark: No, it's not. In fact, if you actually did a calculation, if you put all those wind turbines – they're basically a tube touching the ground – (they would take out) the actual amount of land area to power the entire U.S. vehicle fleet, is less than 3 square kilometres - the physical land touching the ground. Of course you need spacing between these turbines, but just to give you an idea how much space that is compared to, let's say corn ethanol for doing the same thing, you'd need about 0.5%, or half of one per cent, of United States land, or even ocean area if you put it over the ocean, to power all these vehicles you need that for spacing of these turbines, half a per cent. But to do the same thing with corn ethanol, or even cellulosic ethanol, which is kind of the next generation of ethanol, you'd require thirty times more land than to do the same thing with wind. That thirty times more land is actual, physical footprint in the case of the ethanol, the corn ethanol or cellulosic ethanol. Whereas that's just spacing, as open spaces, for the wind except for that 3 sq. km touching the ground.

So it's not a lot. Again, you have to put your mind to it.

 

Of course, to do that for vehicles you have to generate the vehicles as well. And there are right now 70 electric cars from a new company Tesla on the road actually right now. So we do have electric cars, although they're not being mass-produced at prices that are affordable to most people.