Caipirinha - Brazil's national cocktail
Source: Wikipedia. Public domain photo
Whichever way the independents go, they’re undoubtedly going to extract some concessions. Andrew Wilkie has just put out a 20-point list of priorities. And I’ve no doubt that Oakeshott and Windsor have some priorities of their own, for good or ill. Bob Katter, however, has revived an idea that was very popular before the great food price spike of 2007-08. Yep, biologically-derived ethanol as fuel is one of the cowboy-hatted one’s enthusiasms. But, personally, the best use of bioethanol derived from sugarcane is the rather fiery drink above.
We’ve discussed biofuels, including ethanol, on LP before, but some of the posts are still waiting to be re-imported into the archive. The fundamentals of “conventional” bioethanol are pretty straightforward to grasp . You use some sugary, starchy vegetable matter, throw in some yeast to ferment alcohol, and then run a still to purify it. You can then blend it with conventional petrol. Standard vehicles can (generally) run on up to about 10% ethanol blends; that’s the E10 you see in many petrol pumps. However, lightly modified petrol engines can run just fine on much more ethanol-rich blends; the standard one is an 85/15 ethanol/petrol mix known as E85.
Obviously, the carbon in the ethanol has been extracted out of the atmosphere; furthermore, the crops used are renewable resources. As such, it sounds great as an economically and environmentally sustainable substitute for petroleum.
However…
The first thing to note is that we can’t produce nearly enough ethanol through fermenting food crops to replace global petroleum usage. Rough calculations suggest that devoting all of Australia’s cane crop to bioethanol would produce about 7% of Australia’s liquid fuel needs.
Sugarcane ethanol at least has the advantage of making some sense from an environmental point of view (or, at least, a greenhouse gas). Most analyses I’ve read suggest that you get about 8 times the energy out of sugarcane that you put in; as such, even taking into account the diesel and whatnot to grow, fertilize, and harvest the cane, it’s a net win for the atmosphere.
Ethanol fuel made from temperate-climate crops like wheat and corn don’t even have that going for them. Like sugarcane, they can only supply a tiny fraction of the world’s transport fuel needs. Unlike sugarcane, they can supply that fraction only if almost as much energy (and greenhouse gas) is emitted in the production process as is saved by burning the product instead of petroleum. But given it’s Bob Katter we’re talking about, let’s restrict the discussion to cane ethanol.
We’ve also long been promised that “second-generation” biofuels will become available from more abundant feedstocks. Most relevant, in this context, is producing ethanol from cellulose, which makes up the cell wall of green plants. A variety of pilot-scale “cellulosic ethanol” plants exist. Their total production, however, is tiny. It’s not yet clear when, if ever, the processes involved will be commercially viable.
While sugarcane ethanol might be OK from a greenhouse gas perspective, the effects on the local environment aren’t so flash. To grow cane, you need fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides, and in tropical Queensland that means the runoff goes straight on to the Barrier Reef, causing bleaching and other nasty effects. Consequently, the state and federal governments have a plan to reduce pollutant levels drastically. While cane growers can (and will have to) change their practices to drastically reduce pollutant runoff, it’s going to be quite difficult to achieve that while simultaneously increasing production to turn into bioethanol.
While cane ethanol’s environmental benefits might be dubious, mandating its use (for instance, by mandating ethanol blending) does have one very attractive property as far as canegrowers in Bob Katter’s electorate are concerned. It’s a guaranteed market for their crop. Furthermore, it’s currently protected by tariffs – tariffs that end next year. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see Katter seeking both mandates for ethanol blending and an extension of the tariff.
Look, if pork has to be ladeled out to Katter to secure a minority government, fine. But it’s unlikely to be good policy. And, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, by far the best way of sorting out the greenhouse worth of schemes like cane ethanol is a price on carbon.
I would endorse the above. Relative to other food market biocrops, sugar cane to ethanol is less problematic. It has far better EROEI than corn, wheat and others, especially if one uses the waste part of the crop to produce energy. It’s C4, meaning it fixes N in the soil, reducing fertiliser demands. Producing butanol (four-carbon ethanol) would be even better as this would not require radical changes in fuel-system design to run neat in cars. (With ethanol, about 20% is as far as you can go without changes to the fuel system). Butanol can run in any mix with standard petrol or ethanol.
That said, the real question is not whether sugar cane is better than the alternatives but rather whether one should raise the crop at all. On balance, I’d say the overall ecological footprint of the crop argues against it, particularly as it is not a food staple and is actually harmful when consumed to excess.
If we were going with a biocrop, something like panicum or miscanthus (also both C4) would be better. These tend to have very deep roots and can be coppiced. They lock carbon into the soil and mitigate nutrient run off. In fact, they are an excellent fence crop for C3s. Significant potential to be invasive though, so use with caution.
Overall though, I’d be against using these crops. We really need to be radically reducing reliance on liquid fuels, and to the extent that we do rely on them, maybe algae and/or waste biomass from land fill and sullage might be better.
As to paying off Katter, that’s a totally separate question. I could probably live with it if he’d support a serious price on carbon — which might actually sit pretty well with his sugar-cane based biofuel scheme.
If Queensland’s flagship rum wasn’t such godawful tripe, I might have more confidence in your suggestion Robert.
Robert,
Don’t forget the second round effects of doing this as well. If we were to produce fuel from food (whether sugar, corn or wheat) it takes an awful lot of food off the market that would otherwise have gone to actually feeding people. The result is higher food prices and therefore more production from more marginal land – producing still more run-off.
Oh – and a higher cost of living, mostly impacting the poor.
Fran@1: ” It’s C4, meaning it fixes N in the soil, reducing fertiliser demands”
Fran, you must be on a bet with someone as to how big a porkie you can get away with here. Otherwise I hope they never allow you to do a relief biology teacher gig.
Yes, wikipedia, that instant expert’s friend, does say
“Some sugarcane varieties are known to be capable of fixing atmospheric nitrogen”
but you really should read beyond the first phrase of any para, especially if you’re about to make a pronouncement, or scandalize the kiddies: what follows that misleader is crucial
“…. in association with the bacterium Glucoacetobacter diazotrophicus.[5] Unlike legumes and other nitrogen fixing plants which form root nodules in the soil in association with bacteria, G. diazotrophicus lives within the intercellular spaces of the sugarcane’s stem.”
There is a C4 ( cf C3) photosynthetic phenomenon, which is about “fixing” carbon into plant sugars from atmospheric CO2.
Write this out in your exercise book:
“The C4 pathway was discovered by M. D. Hatch and C. R. Slack, two Australian researchers, in 1966, so it is sometimes called the Hatch-Slack pathway. In C3 plants, the first step in the light-independent reactions of photosynthesis involves the fixation of CO2 by the enzyme RuBisCo into 3-phosphoglycerate. However, due to the dual carboxylase / oxygenase activity of RuBisCo, an amount of the substrate is oxidized rather than carboxylated resulting in loss of substrate and consumption of energy, in what is known as photorespiration. In order to bypass the photorespiration pathway , C4 plants have developed a mechanism to efficiently deliver CO2 to the RuBisCO enzyme. They utilize their specific leaf anatomy where chloroplasts exist not only in the mesophyll cells in the outer part of their leaves but in the bundle sheath cells as well. Instead of direct fixation in the Calvin cycle, CO2 is converted to a 4-carbon organic acid which has the ability to regenerate CO2 in the chloroplasts of the bundle sheath cells. Bundle sheath cells can then utilize this CO2 to generate carbohydrates by the conventional C3 pathway.”
Pax
oops – maybe I should not have skipped that paragraph. You did refer to this, but, IMHO, the price effects on nutrition are at least as important as the rest.
“if pork has to be ladeled (sic) out to Katter to secure a minority government, fine.”
No, Robert, it isn’t fine.
It has been, I grant you, mildly amusing to watch the wonderfully principled Australian Left over the past 10 days switch instantaneously from self-righteous banging on about the need for debate based on values, substance, constructive costed and evidence-based policies, and all the rest of it, not pandering to media superficialities, to Julia, you go girl, whatever it takes to form government and make it as superficial as possible so Katter grasps it, who needs policy coherence and evidence anyway.
But mildly amusing is very different from fine.
You’re entirely right about bio-ethanol though.
A friend was working on this alternate fuel research at UQ:
http://www.cilr.uq.edu.au/UserImages/File/factsheets/Biodiesel_Pongamia_Factsheet.pdf
When she was explaining it all to me, it seemed to make sense. Instead of continuing to support environmentally harmful sugar cane, it’s probably better to invest in a non-food crop that doesn’t require large amounts of nitrogen fertilizer and can potentially be grown on soil unsuitable for other purposes.
Even with these benefits, there is still negative impacts to the environment when burning the fuel. It’s a better solution, but still not a good one.
Wozza said:
I also hope I never get a gig teaching on plant biology, though I would feel rather better than I did when I got a two-week teaching gig at Y9 Japanese. In that case I wasn’t even able to read the text book. Luckily, we had two fluent Japanese speakers in the class. Peer teaching — gotta love it.
So I plead guilty to not spotting the subtlety in the C4 status of sugar cane. I had assumed that it was similar to that of panicum and miscanthus. mea culpa and well spotted.
That said, I rather doubt the kiddies would have been scandalised, which is kind of a pity.
Wozza, it should abundantly obvious to you that I’m not a fan of arbitrary pork.
But the National Party’s entire reason for existence is the extraction of pork for rural Australia, and the Coalition were happy to oblige.
In this situation, whomever wins the allegiance of the independents is going to shovel some pork their electorates’ way. That is inevitable. The question is the magnitude of that pork, and the extent to which is represents a distortion of priorities.
And speaking as a vegetarian, I’m totally against pork … (unless of course it can be humanely and sustainably obtained)
Algae prolly in bioreactors, is the go wrt efficiency of C02 fixation per photon.
There’s gyro gearloose characters in California ( and China, no doubt, I sincerely hope) messing with blue-green algae genomes ( see op cit rubisco) so they take CO2 gas in, get struck by the sun, and put petrol gas out.
The average Australian car consumes about 11 litres/100 km. My calcs say that converting existing passenger cars to plug in hybrid would reduce liquid fuel consumption to below one litre/100 km for a typical urban trip length mix providing the battery was large enough to handle the daily commute.
It makes more sense from an emissions point of view to concentrate on reducing the average fuel consumption of new cars than adding 15% ethanol to petrol.
I read somewhere that, for some ethanol feedstocks, net emission reduction is better if the feedstock is used for biochar sequestration rathe than ethanol fuel production. Would be good in cane growing reasons given one of the benefits of bio char is reduced consumption and run-off of fertilizers.
Fran, you mean long pork? It does make for a somewhat novel “ethical vegan”, viz someone who draws the line at requiring consent.
Robert @9
Conceded. I was being a little naughty in tarring you specifically. You will appreciate I hope that I was merely seizing on the lead in to make the general point about the unedifying outbreak of whatever it takes-ism amongst the previously self-declared stout defenders of principles in politics against the predations of the evil Murdoch. And, to be even fairer, there is less of that about on LP than in some other places, so I should probably just piss off and leave your various cconversations here alone.
Moz said:
Confusing. I said nothing about “long pork” nor about being an ethical vegan. I’m against pork in general, although perhaps if someone could show that their pork was sustainably raised and cruelty-free, (as at least one producer I’ve heard of — Joel Salatin) has, then perhaps that would be OK.
When discussing the merits or otherwise of ethanol it is most important to consider the feedstock used. Production of sugar cane ethanol is more economical,environmentally friendly with less impact on food security than that produced from grain.
The problem with Katter advocating ethanol is that he has not specified the ethanol as sugar cane ethanol. This allows Tony Windsor and other grain ethanol advocates to attach themselves to his coat-tail and gain advantages that should only be granted to sugar cane ethanol.
With our variable grain harvests, with peak P and K fertiliser being reached before peak oil,with a relatively small hiccup in world grain production in Russia impacting world food security is is just stupid to subsidise the conversion our grain to ethanol.
FDB, the drink in the photo is made from a different kind of rocketfuel known as cachaca.
Great. We have a perfectly good discussion about bioethanol (is there any other kind of ethanol?), and Princess Fran turns this thread into a discussion All About Fran. I’m all for the comments policy, so long as it is extended to Fran. The rest of us run our own blogs Fran, the idea that Mark, Kim and the LP team run this blog for your benefit needs to be re-examined. Sustainably.
Take a deep breath before posting Andrew. You will avoid looking unintentionally ironic.
I made a tongue in cheek remark about pork. Moz responded with another tongue in cheek remark. I self-parodied. All in the spirit of good clean fun.
OK, that’s enough.
Al LP commenters might be well-advised to reread the comments policy. All of it.
I think you’ll find that this would meet all the demands of your scruples, Fran.
AE@18:”… bioethanol (is there any other kind of ethanol?”
Interestingly for the cockie reps, given the infernal politics of underground coal gasification (UCG) v agriculture in places like the darling downs, yes.
UCG ? 2CO + 4H2 (syngas) ? C2H5OH (ethanol) + H2O
Will these champions of the ethanol industry be so keen on promoting in when it plays into the hands of the (now chinese and Indian controlled) coal companies who are destroying the rural way of life, land, and actual artesian basin water so beloved of the members for Woop Woop? Mining based ethanol will be much cheaper than and out-compete any farming based “bioethanol”., These farmers reps lobbying for the ethanol industry will just be introducing a cuckoo into their electoral nest,
There are new ways to produce ethanol evenfrom cane as much as the sugars.In fact, nitrogen runoff isn’t the problem,land management is.Simply growing alongside and within the sugar cane other cropping will reduce the problem.Think strawbales,wherever there is run off,think growing similar to reduce all these effects.The sugar cane component of bioethanol isn’t the real problem,it is other crops.And that is a good enough incentive to ask why aren’t sugar cane growers attempting cereal crop production including rice,along more organic fertiliser processes.Machinery is highly adaptable.It is simply wrongheaded at this stage to confuse sugar cane bioethanol as reducing food availability.Rather encourage sound practices for longer term gain.And that may well be what the Masonic handshaker wants,until he is a 33 degree dan.
The simple fact is, Robert has quite clearly shown there is no easy replacement for petroleum and diesel. If we converted ALL of our crops into fuel, we woudl have about 1/3 of our fuel needs (imports still required) and no food (cattle feed gone too).
Likewise, most coal to oil schemes produce more than twice the CO2 of just burning oil, because of the conversion losses. Time to start building more trains.
Found this article on land being brought by biofuel companies in Africa. The area so far is larger than the Netherlands. Not a nice look and a case for UN action?
The food question with biofuels from Australian cane is will this make any difference to to world food supplies?
This is a more detailed link to the bio-fuel land grab I mentioned @25. The quote that really grabbed me was
We should oppose mandatory bio-fuels unless we are being very specific about where it is coming from and are confident that it is not going to affect world fuel supply.
What portion of our petroleum needs are simply economic needs (i.e. its currently cheaper to use petroleum based fuels) and what are technical needs (i.e. only high energy-density liquid fuels are capable of doing the job)?
The Victorian Government is investing in cellulosic ethanol research and pilot plants, designed to consume multiple sources of organic matter (crop stubbles, timber harvesting waste). The transportation costs however are a real killer, and it would require many small refineries dotted around rural area to be viable. And it’s five to ten years down the track of course.
That’s interesting wilful. Now that legalities in NSW are out of the way, I wonder if the industrial hemp lobbyists are knocking on Katter’s and Bandt’s doors. That would be a blast from the past alliance.
Has there been any movement on edible hemp seed?
JohnD (on 12):
11L/100Km? That’s a criminal waste of fuel – oh, sorry, I forgot: we are all supposed to be paying out tithes to the “too-big-to-fail” motor industry, aren’t we.
Why on earth can’t we have efficient public transport PLUS efficient non-scheduled (i.e. private) transport too? Why on earth can’t we have efficient engine systems (some of which have been around for more than a century) and efficient power transmission systems (ditto) – and bearings – and wheels (ditto) – and friction reduction systems? The science has been there for yonks – so too the technology – and if all the truly artificial barriers to marketing efficient vehicles (such as the Australian Design mis-Rules) were swept away, the new vehicles would drive the old-tech gas-guzzlers off our roads in no time at all.
Burning a petrol-ethanol mix in thump-thump reciprocal engines is a bit better than using straight petrol (despite all the scary rumours and fables) just as Dr Otto’s original concept was a bit better than putting a spirited horse between the shafts of a light sulky …. but surely we can do better than that!
Robert Merkel:
Bob Katter will never win any prizes as a public speaker but he is onto a winner with ethanol (produced in North Queensland, of course).
My new car has so far (mostly highway, but some city traffic) given me efficiency of 5.5l/100km. ‘B30′ biodiesel is available from my local servo, I’m just checking with the manufacturer whether it’s OK to run on.
Really, Katter should pitch the idea of growing actual street quality marijuana up there. Now there’s an export market for you, and as for all those farmers killing themselves, they could feel the love.
Wilful (on 28) and Rumrebellious (on 29):
Good points. And then there are heaps of other unappreciated crops/plants like kenaf.
Danny (on 4):
Thanks for that info …. but
that’s a new one on me.
Some of them are feeling the love already:
http://www.townsvillebulletin.com.au/2010/8/31/166741_news.html
Oops. Link should be:
http://www.townsvillebulletin.com.au/article/2010/8/31/166741_news.html
Well that link seems not to work either.
Maybe this one will
http://www.townsvillebulletin.com.au/article/2010/08/31/166741_news.html
If not, be assured that the marijuana industry is prospering in the sunny North.
Heh, I was just making a shit-stirring point, but everyone seems to feeling the love tonight!
I’d leave the exact choice to the scientists/regulated market but it does sound like diversity is key. I think Hemp does have higher oil content kenaf if bio-diesel production is a factor.
But if it’s just biomass we’re looking, I don’t think we can first go past lantana.
*Ducks head and runs away*
Graham B@30: Average fuel consumption of cars has changed little since 1964. All the gains in car and road efficiency have gone onto supporting an increase in size rather than a reduction of average fuel consumption.
There are plenty of low cost 4 passenger cars that consume less than 5.5 litres/100 km. If the government were serious about reducing transport emissions it would introduce regulations now to ensure that the average fuel consumption of new cars was 5.5 litres/100 km starting now and ramping to something below one litre/100 km by 2020.
JohnD (on 38):
Indeed. Wondered why some of the HN Package (or stimulus package) didn’t go towards getting many poverty-stricken families out of their metal dinosaurs and into vehicles that wouldn’t keep them broke.
GregM said:
Sorry greg … I read the link. How is small business to prosper if the state keeps on over-regulating?