Comment by lazide
Comment by lazide a day ago
This has been obvious for anyone doing the basic math since the beginning.
It was great for farmers though.
Comment by lazide a day ago
This has been obvious for anyone doing the basic math since the beginning.
It was great for farmers though.
There was a bunch of activity in the 2000s and 2010s trying and failing to do this commercially.
Never say never but for ground transport BEVs seem like they will eat the market well before anyone gets the technology working.
BEVs powered by PV use two orders of magnitude less land than ICEVs burning biofuels.
Biofuels are just incredibly land (and water) hungry. In the post fossil fuel age, biofuels will be reserved for special applications, if that (and for providing carbonaceous feedstocks for the organic chemical industry.)
> use two orders of magnitude less land
not if you use stover and cob. in those cases, you use net zero new land (you were growing kernels anyways)
yes I'm aware. in that era, which was last i tracked this field, BP had a pilot plant that reached commercial and greenhouse breakeven, but then they lost the deepwater horizon case and scuttled their biofuels research, I'd be surprised if no one caught up. did no one catch up?
this is as much evidence as i can find on the internet that this was a thing, i cant remember where i heard that it was breakeven:
> BP sought to experiment with ways to turn corncobs, sugarcane and other agricultural waste into biofuel
https://www.nola.com/news/business/bp-shutters-biofuel-plant...
There are people who use pyrolysis to turn left over biomass to biochar which can then be added to the soil and, depending on your energy use for other things, can turn the process carbon net negative. It is a roundabout way to sequester carbon though as you need to consider the opportunity cost of doing other things with the land (like leaving it for nature to take over and sequester carbon that way).
It's always worth being sceptical about some of these claims about processes magically being carbon net negative since cleaning up the atmosphere might not actually be what's paying the bills leading to inherent conflicts between selling a product (ethanol) and doing an environmental service. Switching to EVs will allow you to use much less land to fuel the cars with wind or solar energy and then the leftover land can be used for carbon sequestration and rewilding/biodiversity projects where that's the sole focus of the operation.
It was great for large investor backed farmers who bought out their neighbors via debt, leased expensive John Deere equipment via debt, and are now trapped.
iirc it is scientifically possible to take corn stover and convert it to bioethanol with net negative carbon emissions.