Study: Bioelectricity bests biofuels on miles per acre
Growing plants to make electricity is a more efficient and environmentally sound way to power vehicles than biofuels, according to a study meant to spark a debate over energy policy.
The study's authors modeled how far different classes of cars could go based on the available energy from a unit of land and found that bioelectricity--burning biomass to make electricity--far outperforms ethanol.
The paper, published on Thursday in Science, found that bioelectricity delivered 81 percent more distance per unit area of crop land than ethanol. Greenhouse gas emissions per area of land were 100 percent less than cellulosic ethanol. (Click here for PDF of results.)
In one example, they found that a small truck powered by bioelectricity could travel almost 15,000 miles compared with 8,000 comparable miles for an internal combustion equivalent.
Click on the image to see how bioenergy and biofuels compare for transportation.
(Credit: UC Merced)Making electricity from biomass, such as switchgrass, is made by burning the plants to make steam to turn an electricity turbine. That electricity could be used to charge up a plug-in electric car.
The starting point for the study is that there's a limit to the amount of land available for transportation energy without affecting food prices and impacting greenhouse gas emissions. The Environmental Protection Agency earlier this week proposed measuring greenhouse gases from biofuels to include changes in land use, a decision fiercely opposed by the ethanol industry.
"Our hope is just to bring this general point to the forefront: Maybe we should be thinking about how efficiently we use our land, and not just about what's the best way to do ethanol," study lead author Elliott Campbell, an engineering professor at the University of California at Merced, told MSNBC.
The study did a lifecycle analysis that accounts for both the energy produced by each technology--ethanol versus bioelectricity--and the amount of energy consumed in the production of vehicles. Working on the side of electricity was the fact that electric powertrains are far more efficient than internal combustion engines, Campbell said in a statement.
Liquid fuels have one clear advantage over electric vehicles in that refueling is far faster. Also, internal combustion engine cars can be converted relatively cheaply--estimated at about $100--to run both gasoline and ethanol.
"If the goal is to have more of those gallons come from renewable sources rather than imported oil, fuels like ethanol are the only technologies that are having an impact today," Matt Hartwig, a representative for the Renewable Fuels Association, an ethanol trade association, told Scientific American.
Although bioelectricity used in a plug-in vehicle was a clear winner over ethanol in terms of efficiency and greenhouse gases, the study's authors said they intended to open up a debate rather than make specific policy recommendations.
"We found that converting biomass to electricity rather than ethanol makes the most sense for two policy-relevant issues: transportation and climate," said co-author Chris Field, director of the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution. "But we also need to compare these options for other issues like water consumption, air pollution, and economic costs."
Martin LaMonica is a senior writer for CNET's Green Tech blog. He started at CNET News in 2002, covering IT and Web development. Before that, he was executive editor at IT publication InfoWorld. E-mail Martin. 
so, make plug in hybrids that resemble traditional cars: carrying 4 or more passengers, trunk space for shopping, ethanol hybrid engine. then make smaller, more affordable plug in electrics for daily commutes and errands. the smaller cars will get more range than larger cars thanks to reduced weight. if you can make a 2 passenger car that is half the size of a hybrid, and half the cost, then the typical two car garage can hold 2 mini-electrics and one plug in hybrid.
you can use bioelectricity to charge all of them.
Bio-Diesel is the way to go. Farmer plants oil-seeds, soybeans, etc - crushes them for bioidesel and then the remaining meal is a high-protein animal feed that he can feed to his hogs, cattle, dairy cows, chickens, etc. Biofuels work because the land utilized is DUAL USE.
Isn't anyone one else upset that every time they add ethanol their gas, they get less milage but get to pay the same $/gallon? Isn't that fraud?
If you really want truly affordable energy for your vehicle that has less of an environmental impact, there's a better way. The infrastructure is already in place, and the energy source has proven to meet the needs for everyone in a vehicle in terms of shipping, range, and efficiency.
It really is quite simple: DRILL FOR THE TRILLIONS OF BARRELS OF OIL WE HAVE RIGHT HERE IN THE UNITED STATES. Auto-emissions are showing to NOT harm the ozone, or have any effect on global temperatures. We don't have to waste good farmland to fuel cars, or pump more water out of the aquifer to water those water and nutrient-hungry crops.
All it would take would be for regulators to get the hell out of the way.
If only...
Are you trying to be a comedian here or is Fox "News" your primary source of information?
Your facts and logic are about as good as your grammar and sentence structure.
Martin, the 3rd para needs to be corrected/re-worded. "Greenhouse gas emissions per area of land were 100 percent less than cellulosic ethanol." That would mathematically mean 0 emissions for bioelectricity. I guess they meant 50% less or something.
Think about it liquid fuels need to refined, packaged into fuel cells, or in the case of food based fuels the crop growing process as well as the conversion has to be counted as energy expended in creating this liquid fuel. All this energy comes from our existing power grid which includes many coal power plants. So all these clean and efficient fuel sources are actually adding a massive amount of energy use that the public does not think about. They think driving a fuel cell car is good for the environment and they get a tax credit for it but in reality the carbon footprint for their vehicle is actual higher than say an efficient compact car fueled by plain old gas.
Plug-in vehicles eliminate this extra cost of manufacture, even if you are getting power from a coal power plant you have cut a huge amount of wasted energy out of the chain. What it comes down to is batteries and power consumption of a motor resulting in short or limited travel range. The technology is out there it is just too expensive. They could make an electric car that would go 600 miles on 1 charge right now, but it would b expensive as all hell.
Do you even know what a fuel cell is? From your post one gets an impression that you make it out to be some kind of fuel itself.
"Although bioelectricity used in a plug-in vehicle was a clear winner over ethanol in terms of efficiency and greenhouse gases..."
Cleaner doesn't mean clean, but it's still better. The problem with switching to bioelectricity seems to be the start up cost of implementing the system.
The ethanol side seems to be hanging onto the fact that it's so cheap to convert / keep using vehicles with ethanol that they don't want to switch, but the electricity side has a few things in place already, too: Power plants. Once you have cars that can use electricity, you can get that electricity from biofuels as suggested here, or from any other clean or coal-based power plant, can't you?
I would suggest that if we went to have alternative transportation, we should electrify all the rail lines (even India is 40% electric), and then electrify the major highways. That way we won't need to worry about batteries that only take us 40-100 miles.
I think these kind of innovations will never happen in the US. Instead they will happen in China and India.
1) Need for 2 contact points - both on rails in the ground or 1 above and 1 below - either one is a problem with vehicles having rubber tires that are insulators
2) uniform vehicle height - hardly the case when you have ultra low sports cars and 16' trailers
3) problem with changing lanes unless done at designated points like trains do at junctions etc.
and many more
This will never happen but it'd sweet right?
Solar farms could power stationary power plants, as could geothermal, wind and best of all for coastal areas, ocean tidal motion power generation. As many have pointed out, going after corn based ethanol is both too easy and obvious, as that version of biomass conversion is so upside down that it's insane. Such conversion is only justified for two things: 1. the farmer who already grows his own corn and this is a convenient way to fuel only his vehicles and 2. wartime or national emergency where every other form of fuel or energy conversion is mysteriously rendered unavailable.
I do not agree with the stats in the report, as they are neither scientifically defensible, nor statistically probable. I also do not believe that this is even a viable debate topic. Corn Ethanol is useless...let's move the debate forward to hydrogen versus biomass conversion or other alternate green technologies.
Zenbob96
I agree the study authors, who probably are not farmers, have not factored in the use of land that would NOT be used for other crops. A lot of land can be utilized for biofuel crops that can't or wouldn't
In addition, the algae fuel, when burned as biomass, can also power the refinery plant to make the refined liquid biodiesel or ethanol from the very same algae, making it a sustainable system.
http://www.hempcar.org/ford.shtml
Who is this SHILL for ethanol think he's kidding? Renewable? Average of 985 gals of precious water, which is seriously being depleted from groundwater and aquifers, per ONE GALLON OF ETHANOL. As much as 2100 gals per gal in some areas. Serious erosion and rapid depletion of topsoil. Rapid use of Oil-based fertilizers. Any accurate energy input study shows at absolute best ZERO GAIN in replacing fossil fuel energy. Pollution of river delta regions with agricultural run-off - the Ocean Dead Zones. And a secret, leaked World Bank Report concluded those Agro-fuels caused a 75% increase in Food Prices. And that has spurred further destructive effects - such as a rapid increase in deforestation in the Amazon - as hungry people try to grow expensive food - one of the highest GHG emissions regions on the planet.
What this study neglects to mention, is that 1 acre of the best Biofuels (with the exception of Algae ? the only good Biofuel), burnt in a ICE vehicle. can be replaced by 100 sq.ft. of Solar PV, fixed tilt, average USA location, used to power a comparable electric vehicle. And that means put the Solar PV up once and your good for 30-40 yrs, rather than for the 1 acre of land - seeding, irrigating, weeding, harvesting, transporting, processing and shipping by tanker truck - EVERY YEAR. And I haven?t included any of the large energy inputs of doing all that work - EVERY YEAR! With Corn Ethanol - according to Pimentel - that would boost it up to more like 11 acres of land - to replace 100 sq. ft of Solar PV. Agro-fuels are Wacky, Nutty, Evil - an absolute Crime Against Humanity. Mr. Hartwig should be chased back into the hole he crawled out of!
So what do you do until Electric Vehicles are more readily available? Simple. Switch to Methanol, produced from NG. There is load's of NG sitting in the Arctic and other isolated regions, that could be converted to Methanol for 25 cents per gallon, and transported in tankers to Southern Markets. And Methanol burns at 43% efficiency in a Port Injected, Spark Ignition engine - with a wide island of high efficiency - double the efficiency of a Gasoline engine.
Or is this too big of a paradigm shift for engineers and plant breeders to span?
Basically, it can be used to actually support our food crops and reduce the amount of damage that our precious food crops actually do to the environment.
This should also be economically viable to small farmers who would now have an additional crop they can grow with little investment and use as a new source of revenue when their farms would be otherwise unproductive.
- by marissagregory June 2, 2009 7:35 AM PDT
- I appreciate this discussion, however it begs the question: why invest so many resources into growing biomass for electricity when we have so much waste that can be converted into energy by burning (the same way)? Why use new resources rather than try to use materials that have already been consumed?
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