University of Aarhus Scientists Working on Converting Seaweed to Cellulosic Ethanol

Biopact is covering a program at the University of Aarhus which is considering a type of seaweed known as sea lettuce as a potential biomass source.  Sea lettuce would make an excellent candidate for a biomass source since it grows extremely quickly (it doubles in mass every 3 to 4 days), and it has a high natural sugar content.

Michael Bo Rasmussen, one of the scientists at the National Institute of Environmental Research at the University of Aarhus, believes that sea lettuce could theoretically yield 200 to 500 tons per hectare.  This is orders of magnitude higher than any current land candidates.

Unfortunately, harvesting and processing most seaweed is also expected to be orders of magnitude more expensive than harvesting more traditional biomass crops such as switch grass is expected to be.  If someone can come up with a good way to do this though it would likely be extremely lucrative for the discoverer.

Not very much research has been undertaken since the 70’s, the last time that oil prices sky-rocketed.  Modern researchers will be taking over where their predecessors left of 30 years ago.  The University of Aarhus research will be part of a 16 million dollar program by the Aarhus Research Foundation.

Denmark is a Nordic country, thus it is not expected to produce very much traditional biomass do to land limitations and it’s climate.  Sea lettuce would be a very good substitute for traditional biomass since one thing Denmark does have is a lot of coastline and Sea Lettuce is a salt-water plant.

Carbon Flux and YOU

The term Carbon Flux is one often used when discussing global warming. It can be a relatively confusing concept to those who are unfamiliar so I thought that today would be a good day learn and talk about what a carbon flux is exactly. To begin, lets take a look at wikipedia’s definition.

“Carbon flux is an abbreviated phrase used loosely to refer to the net difference between carbon sequestration and carbon respiration. In this usage, carbon (as CO2) is added to the atmosphere by processes such as respiration, burning of fossil fuels, and volcanic activity. From 3He/CO2 and 3He fluxes, the maximum CO2 flux resulting from magmatic processes is 10×1012 mol/year, and the preferred estimate is 6×1012 mol/year (Marty & Tolstikhin 1998). Carbon is removed from the atmosphere by such processes as plant growth, mineral formation, and dissolution into the oceans.

Given the accepted definition of what constitutes a flux, a more appropriate name for the annual difference between carbon sequestration and respiration would be “annual atmospheric carbon accumulation rate” or “annual global integrated surface flux of carbon” or “annual global net carbon flux” .”

This has to do mostly with a net carbon flux from the surface of the earth to the atmosphere.  Basically the carbon “sinks” which consists mostly of plants and oceans, take in carbon dioxide.  The carbon sources (cars, factories, and even breathing) produce carbon dioxide.  For a long time before humans became industrialized, the sinks and sources remained roughly equal so that there was very little net “carbon flux” to the atmosphere.  The atmosphere is currently acting as a gigantic carbon “sink” which will inevitably lead to global warming.  An excellent read regarding this whole process and what we know is available here.

A carbon flux can also be more localized. A more general definition of a flux would be (as wikipedia puts it): “In the study of transport phenomena (heat transfer, mass transfer and fluid dynamics), flux is defined as the amount that flows through a unit area per unit time, the volumetric flow rate.[1] Flux in this definition is a vector.”  In this case it would be measuring the rate of carbon dioxide flow through an area.  Areas with lower CO2 flux will be absorbing more of the CO2 (thus the lower flow rate).  Areas that have plants such as miscanthus which are very efficient at capturing CO2 and turning it into cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin via photosynthesis will have a lower CO2 flux since they are extremely effective at absorbing the CO2 (compared to most plants).

Also, generally when talking about CO2 flux one would use the units kg·m^-2·s^{-1 or} g/(m^2*s) depending on how you wish to write it and how large a mass is being used.  

Disproving “The great biofuel fraud”

Someone by the name of F William Engdahl has recently written an article for the Asia Times. This however is not just any article, it is probably THE IDEAL example of an article based on faulty data and misinformation about ethanol. Here I am going to go through a lot of his arguments against ethanol and disprove them one by one. I will quote his statements and then provide a rebuttal with a source (most of the sources can actually be found in previous articles that have been discussed on this site). Don’t get me wrong, there are some valid and descent reasons to be against the mass production of ethanol, Engdahl however seems to get almost everything wrong.

” The center of Bush’s program, announced in his January State of the Union address, is called “20 in 10″, cutting US gasoline use 20% by 2010. The official reason is to “reduce dependency on imported oil”, as well as cutting unwanted “greenhouse gas” emissions. That isn’t the case, but it makes good PR. Repeat it often enough and maybe most people will believe it. Maybe they won’t realize their taxpayer subsidies to grow ethanol corn instead of feed corn are also driving the price of their daily bread through the roof.”

The most often repeated and first major argument of Engdahl’s is that corn ethanol competing with food increases the price of food and that is why food prices have increased so much in the past 18 months. In fact the main reason that the cost of food has gone up so drastically as of late is because of the rising cost of oil. This is because the cost of the actual corn is only a tiny percentage of the total cost of the food that we consume. To confirm this assessment I would refer interested readers and Mr. Engdahl to this report.

“The late American satirist Mark Twain once quipped, “Buy land: They’ve stopped making it.” Today we can say almost the same about corn, or all grains worldwide. The world is in the early months of the greatest sustained rise in prices for all major grains, including maize, wheat and rice, that we have seen in three decades. Those three crops constitute almost 90% of all grains cultivated in the world.”

When the cost of corn (the main ingredient in corn flakes) accounts for a mere 5% of the total cost of the box of cereal, even if the cost of corn doubles again next year it would still only increase the cost of your box of cornflakes by roughly $.20. This is not going to break anyone’s bank. The 90% figure is sensationalist and doesn’t matter even a little to basic supply/demand as anyone who has taken econ 101 can tell you.

“No advocate of the ethanol boondoggle addresses the huge social cost that is beginning to hit the dining-room tables across the US, Europe and the rest of the world. Food prices are exploding as corn, soybeans and all cereal-grain prices are going through the roof because of the astronomical – US Congress-driven – demand for corn to burn for biofuel.”

Correlation does not imply causation.

“Biofuel – gasoline or other fuel produced from refining food products – is being touted as a solution to the controversial global-warming problem. Leaving aside the faked science and the political interests behind the sudden hype about dangers of global warming, biofuels offer no net positive benefits over oil even under the best conditions.”

This is actually almost true, certain studies indicate that there is close to no net positive benefits from corn ethanol, others indicate slight benefits (generally no more than 30% however). Here is a study which likely is close to the truth. “For GHG emissions, E85 produced by dry milling achieves a 19% reduction, and E85 produced by wet milling achieves a 14% reduction.”

You also completely (and conveniently) neglect the expected carbon emission reductions associated with cellulosic ethanol:”Under the near-future case, for E85, woody cellulosic ethanol reduces petroleum use by
70%, GHG emissions by 102%, and fossil energy consumption by 79%.”

GHG = Green House Gas.

“Big Oil is also driving the biofuels bandwagon. Professor David Pimentel of Cornell University and other scientists claim that net energy output from bio-ethanol fuel is less than the fossil-fuel energy used to produce the ethanol. Measuring all energy inputs to produce ethanol, from production of nitrogen fertilizer to energy needed to clean the considerable waste from biofuel refineries, Pimintel’s research showed a net energy loss of 22% for biofuel – they use more energy than they produce. That translates into little threat to oil demand and huge profit for clever oil giants that re-profile themselves as “green energy” producers. “

Joke: What happens when you use crop yield and conversion efficiency data from the 70s when trying to do a life cycle analysis for today?

Punchline: You get data today that would have been a useful argument against ethanol during the 70s!

From the department of energy:

“The most official study of the issue, which also reviews other studies, concludes that the “net energy balance” of making fuel ethanol from corn grain is 1.34; that is, for every unit of energy that goes into growing corn and turning it into ethanol, we get back about one-third more energy as automotive fuel. That may not sound impressive, but bear in mind that while the gasoline that ethanol displaces is largely imported and a high-level pollution source, the mix of energy inputs for producing bioethanol includes much domestic and relatively cleaner energy. On the basis of liquid fuels alone, the net balance is 6.34 (USDA Office of Energy Policy and New Uses, The Energy Balance of Corn Ethanol: An Update).”

Also, the energy balance from sugar cane is between 8:1 and 10:1.

“The bio-ethanol architects did their homework, we can be assured. It’s increasingly clear that the same people who brought us oil-price inflation are now deliberately creating parallel food-price inflation. We have had a rise in average oil prices of some 300% since the end of 2000 when George W Bush and Dick “Halliburton” Cheney made oil the central preoccupation of US foreign policy. “

As I have already shown, the price of our food is far more dependant on the price of a barrel of oil than the price of a bushel of corn. Obviously as oil prices increase, food prices will increase (with a few year lag since the supply curve does not instantly correct itself).

“Environmental analyst Lester Brown recently noted, “We’re looking at competition in the global market between 800 million automobiles and the world’s 2 billion poorest people for the same commodity, the same grains. We are now in a new economic era where oil and food are interchangeable commodities because we can convert grain, sugarcane, soybeans – anything – into fuel for cars. In effect the price of oil is beginning to set the price of food.”"

The reason that people are starving isn’t because there is not enough food to feed the people of the world, it is because the people of the world can not afford to feed themselves due to lack of jobs. Yesterday I wrote about an article which highlights how a Chinese company is buying up millions of acres of Congo palm oil plantation with the intention of creating massive amounts of biofuel. The Congo people are absolutely thrilled about this as it will create jobs for those who are currently some of the poorest in the world and the money will trickle down throughout the rest of the economy so the people can actually buy some food. I would argue that biofuels are actually going to end up reducing world hunger, not increase it. The areas of the world with the largest starvation also tend to be areas where biofuel crops grow best.

” The green claims for biofuel as a friendly and better fuel than gasoline are at best dubious, if not outright fraudulent. Depending on who runs the tests, ethanol has little if any effect on exhaust-pipe emissions in current car models. It has significant emission, however, of some toxins, including formaldehyde and acetaldehyde, a suspected neurotoxin that has been banned as carcinogenic in California.”

You use hyperbole to the extreme: “Compared with gasoline, ethanol tends to produce less benzene and butadiene, but more acetaldehyde and formaldehyde, when burned.” Basically ethanol produces slightly less of some negative compounds and slightly more of other negative compounds. This isn’t even “dubious” and certainly not “outright fraudulent.”

Anyway, you ignored most of the valid arguments against ethanol usage and argued mostly for the bad ones which have already been invalidated on numerous occasions. For example, I would argue that the implementation by the administration has been relatively poor. The subsidies are depleting an already overreaching budget. A carbon tax and possible other taxes on gasoline and large vehicles would be far more effective.

In conclusion I would suggest that perhaps Mr. Engdahl spend more time researching facts and less attempting (and failing) to prove his slogan: “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.”

Engdahl, F William. “The great biofuel fraud” Asian Times Online, August 1 2007. <http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/IH01Dj02.html>