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  • From: Marimike6@cs.com
  • To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [permaculture] Interesting insight on biofuels
  • Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2005 13:19:56 EST

George Monbiot is a good source of intelligent analysis on a host of
subjects. Here's his take on biofuels, and to me the numbers certainly
support him.

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/11/23/feeding-cars-not-people/

We have a first rate example in the midwestern US, where corn states make
certain their congress members mandate the use of ethanol as a fuel additive.
It
costs more energy to grow, fertilize, transport, render (refine) and
distribute the corn than it would to get the therms just from petroleum.

Sites like the following paint a glowing picture of the efficiency we're
supposed to be gaining from the use of such "renewable" fuels

http://www.ethanolrfa.org/RFA_Fuel_Cell_White_Paper.PDF

http://www.phillips66.com/energyanswers/savingfuel.htm

but they fail to show the net energy loss from all the inputs involved in
putting an ear of corn in your gas tank.

One major drawback:

Tremendous energy inputs are required to make commercial fertilizers, which
are then transported and applied to the fields mechanically. There is a large
net loss from nitrates poorly applied and superavailable in the wrong form.
These excess nitrates get washed downstream from the Corn Belt into the Gulf
of
Mexico, creating the famous Dead Zone so fatal to shrimp populations offshore
from the Mississippi River mouths. The nutrient-rich sediment loads that
would
normally be returned to the land in seasonal flooding are now managed by the
Mississippi Authority and the Army Corps of Engineers at great expense to
avoid
flooding any land that doesn't want to be flooded. No more than a third of
the sediment load is deposited in such useful places as the Atchafalaya
Basin.

The net result? The land that replenishes the lower Mississippi now gets
washed out to be deposited on the steep slopes of the Gulf, creating the Dead
Zone. The Mississippi Delta is losing ground rapidly, and is a shadow of what
it
was a couple of decades ago. We spend millions trying unsuccessfully to
figure
out how to combat this soil loss because we're afraid to take the necessary
steps and flood the entire basin (odd details like New Orleans being right in
the way).

http://www.oceanconservancy.org/site/PageServer?pagename=bpm_feature3_5

On the other end of the equation, soil loss in Iowa is so pronounced that
farmsteads built in the 19th cebtury are now three feet higher than the
surrounding fields-- so much Iowa soil has been lost.

Corn-based ethanol, in my opinion, is not a good solution to weaning
ourselves from a dependence on fossil fuels. Other biofuels may be of local
interest.
In wholesale weed clearance projects, such as the freeing of waterways choked
with hyacinth, it may be a useful treatment for a material that would
otherwise be just a waste product.

And chopping wood is good for the soul. As well, it heats you twice-- in the
chopping and in the burning. But as a macro-solution for human society, we'd
have to cover the earth in fast-growing pulpwood just to satisfy our fuel
needs. The numbers just aren't there, I'm afraid, for most large biofuel
ventures.




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