I'm not sure how well that would work or not, but in cities with a housing crisis, the issue is not really people having acreage, but that they have a single family home or some other low usage building on the land at all in a place where there is demand for a lot more housing than what there is.
The core underlying problem is that economic rents are extremely distorting. It is at the root of why we end up with hideous suburban sprawl with no affordable housing, and no walkable downtowns that nobody wants to live in. Taxing land value flips the incentives around and makes it more likely that we get nice, walkable, affordable cities. Because the ideal cost-minimizing strategy is to have clusters of nice high density housing near public transit and mixed-use urban markets, which is largely what people want.
But not if you offer exemptions. If you offer exemptions the winning strategy is to build tons of spread out, cramped, single- or two-story residences with most of their land value exempted.
But how will people pay their land value tax? Well for the most part, low income people will pay it the same way they currently do: rent. It's the landlord that pays the tax. (And preemptively: no, studies have shown that higher taxes aren't just passed back to the renter. So they'll pay the same rent even if the land value increases.)
For other small homeowners, (1) there is expected to be a lot of disparity in land value in an 85% LVT regime. People in desirable places pay high LVT. People on the outskirts pay close to $0 because their land is valued close to $0 (compared to today, at least). And (2) there could be other social welfare programs (e.g. basic income, or unemployment LVT forbearance) which help those in need.
Usually the explanation is that big high rises with cheap rent will magically appear, and landlords will be unable to raise rents, because LVT magic.
So the promise is a scenario like 1970s Bronx.
The real answer, which the GOP was able to test the waters on with the SALT cap, is for the federal government to slowly back away from supporting mortgages. 0% down mortgages with rates linked to T-Bills depend on the policy to back mortgages. As the country gets poorer, that is less relevant.
And if your land is in a highly desirable location and/or contains desirable resources, you end up paying ever increasing property tax to keep it that way.
You try do something good for the world (put a forest somewhere, do a bit of rewilding), then that area becomes desirable, then some LVT prick comes along and tries take what's yours so some property developer can flatten it to build magnolia shitboxes.
Edit: the LVT people on here remind me of the arseholes who want to replace most of the good public parks in Berlin with housing, lol.
LVT policies tend to end up with more dense urban areas and more wild landscapes, on the whole. It's the current landowner-favoring policies that have resulted in suburban sprawl and car-focused cities.
National parks and land trusts are a good thing, but such exemptions ought to be publicly managed since there are societal costs involved.
I am the angel investor of a small startup trying to scale insect larvae production. The idea is to use larvae as a more eco friendly animal feed. I am still collecting numbers, but I was wondering if planting biomass to grow insect protein for humans is a good idea or not, it should be multiples better than growing crops to feed animals as a source of protein. I am just saying, dedicated biomass can mean a lot of different things, no?
Chicken protein is quite cheap. Divided by the protein content, the price of chicken breast is only 2 to 2.5 times higher than that of beans or lentils.
To have any chance on the market, the price per protein content of the insect larvae must be at least twice lower than that of chicken meat. Therefore it must be about the same as for legumes like beans or lentils.
To be able to judge whether investing in such a thing is worthwhile, you need a very accurate prediction of the production costs, to determine whether it is possible to match the legumes in price per protein content.
I would be very wary about the risk that the estimation of the future production costs might be exceedingly optimistic.
Currently some cereals are the cheapest source of proteins suitable for human consumption, but they cannot provide much more than a half of the daily protein intake of a human, because they lack lysine, so they must be combined with a more expensive source of proteins, like meat, legumes, or perhaps insect larvae.
Some people object to eating insects. Some object to eating meat.
Nearly nobody has an objection to eating legumes (I am ignoring, among other things, people on ultra-low-carb diets, specific allergies, and Ashkenazi Jews during Pesach), so an improved yield of legumes, or a reduction in water usage, or a tolerance for greater temperature extremes, or... would be extremely valuable.
I would think there is plenty of people who objects to eating legumes based on culture and taste. Culture has always been the dominating factor in influencing people to eat different kind of food, and its fairly common for one country to have food that people from other countries wouldn't touch. As a person living in Sweden, we have candy that people from other countries find as torture to eat.
Chicken protein is not as cheap when farmed sustainably and even if farmed sustainably it is rife with problems and risks. Where I live "ethical" (less densely farmed) chicken is 12 euro/kg and "organic" (sustainably farmed) chicken is 24 euro/kg (both thigh fillet) so there's a factor 2 right there.
If they could come to be just the same price as "ethical" chicken that would be amazing. I think it's been shown that there's not much market for meat replacements at a premium (like impossible and beyond). But I can't imagine there's not an insane market at the parity. I know I would buy insect burgers for my family at least once or twice a week if they had comparable quality to chicken and similarly priced.
The thing you need to consider with biomass is the efficiency of photosynthesis, which is incredibly poor. The upper limit for most plants is like 2% efficiency, many are significantly worse than that. Whereas photovoltaic cells are much higher, ranging from 15-20% or even higher. And this continues to improve.
And that optimistic 2% efficiency for plants is just the energy conversion to grow the actual plants. Then to convert it into electricity requires it to go through a power plant which often have lower efficiencies of say 30%. If it is in a co-generation facility, it may have upwards of say 80%. Which sounds nice, but when you multiply those efficiencies and end up with in the best case, something like 1.6% efficiency which is terrible.
And that is to ignore the other major factor which is that burning biomass causes major pollution.
Fossil fuels are just convenient biomass that have been given the luxury of hundreds of millions of years to compress into dense hydrocarbons which make a convenient fuel source. We don't have this luxury when it comes to creating new biomass.
The best aspect of biomass is that it is freely available to everyone. Anyone can gather sticks to burn.
However, the parts of the world that still heavily rely on these methods for heating their homes and are used for cooking unfortunately suffer the consequences of breathing all of the smoke in over the years.
The article is aboit dedicated biomass for electricity production, which given the cheapness of solar and wind is a little like dunking on steam-powered cars. I'm not aware of anyone arguing for that as an approach. We did these sums a couple of decades ago.
On the other hand, wwste food, sewage, manure, and various other things that would become methane are useful to capture as it can be GHG negative comparrd woth letting it rot. That is also "biomass".
I think it depends on your starting point from a principles perspective.
Nerdy people on message boards will adopt extreme positions. The argument against meat is that animal fodder is inefficient and everything would be better if we just ate soy, peas and beans. The same argument would be made against your idea.
I think it’s dumb to grow crops to stretch the viability of ICE engines in cars. But growing crops to produce upstream value, whether that’s steak or food for my steak isn’t an issue for me, and probably isn’t a problem for 98% of people once they get over the “yuck, bugs”.
Watch the waning success of plant-based meat substitutes like beyond meat. If they’re having problems selling passable meat simulations, imagine the problems you have convincing people to eat bugs.
On top of that, food margins aren’t huge and you’re aiming for the low budget market, not a lot of money to be made there. And the optics aren’t great, lots of people will find your product repulsive and at a low price it will look like you’re trying to feed bugs to the poor.
If insects as food ever becomes significant, it probably won’t be the first to market that will succeed but a later breakout learning how to be successful after somebody else tries and fails several times.
There is a lot of waste in our food supply chain. Use that for feeding the insects, instead of taking resource that humans could eat. For example the remains from beer brewing is good insect feed. There are many other resources that today become waste, compost or biogas instead.
I work with creating efficient closed loop food production systems.
For animal feed we will start with that, but I am finding hard to imagine that clean organic waste is not being used already in some other way? Meaning, probably we need to pay for it?
It depends on the waste handling in your region. In many places (EU for example) the disposal of organic waste is regulated and you have to pay for disposal. There is a lot of inefficiencies in the current linear system.
> For each energy source, we pulled out the figure for LUIE (land-use intensity of energy), i.e. the amount of land required to produce a given amount of electricity.
Turning bio-mass into electricity comes with a lot of losses.
If the desired product is fuel, the numbers for bio-mass are a lot better, and the numbers for all other sources that first produce electricity are a lot worse, because turning electricity into fuel comes with a lot of losses.
> turning electricity into fuel comes with a lot of losses.
This is true, but when generating fuel, the end goal is usually to move a vehicle X miles. Now that electric cars are nominally competitive with ICE vehicles, the metric should be something more like “land required to drive a truck X miles/year” - and assume the best of either electric vehicle efficiency or ICE efficiency, not force an arbitrary electrical->chemical conversion for the metric’s sake. Biofuels probably wouldn’t look like as much of an outlier as they do here, but I would still wager that they’re among the least efficient options.
Tran-oceanic shipping and long haul airplanes are the 2 places where biofuel theoretically has some merit, but it still has the problem that it is about 25% worse than just using fossil fuels.
> Biofuels probably wouldn’t look like as much of an outlier as they do here, but I would still wager that they’re among the least efficient options.
I wouldn't wager because it's not a simple yes or no type question. There's a lot of ambiguities even in the analysis behind the graph presented in the article, but when it comes to fuels vs. batteries, it gets even more insane. Fuels have a weight advantage over batteries that gets magnified as the weight and range of the vehicle increases... and there's a lot of variance within fuels too. So, while an electric bicycle is going to be a no-brainer over a motorcycle for pretty much any scenario, it can be quite the opposite for something like a commercial truck.
I keep coming back to the economist argument that if we just captured the externalities related to climate change, we avoid having these discussions and simply look at the price of things... but of course, that's the hard part in all these discussions.
But he address the fact that it's actually worse from a carbon standpoint than gasoline. That added to the other environmental impacts associated with agriculture makes it clear it's still a worse choice than straight gasoline. Not only does it not help, it actively makes the problem worse.
That was for ethanol from corn. Most of the carbon in the corn plants doesn't turn into fuel in that system. Even if cellulose could be converted, a great deal would still be lost in CO2.
A land-efficient biomass fuel system would convert all the carbon in the biomass into fuel. This would require adding extra hydrogen, particularly if you want hydrocarbon fuels, since the oxygen in the biomass has to be carried off somehow. The hydrogen could be sourced from solar or wind by electrolysis.
I am not a huge fan of ethanol fuel but the leftovers from fermentation aren’t waste, they’re sold as cattle feed. So the land utilization is split between products and it wouldn’t necessarily be better if the corn to fuel concession was higher.
In any biomass technology with a CO2 waste stream, the CO2 can be converted to hydrocarbon fuel by Fischer-Tropsch, if you have additional hydrogen.
In the post fossil fuel age, there will be an entire biochemical industry that converts biomass to chemicals now obtained from fossil fuels. Some of these processes will look a lot like things developed for the petrochemical industry. All the carbon going into landfills now will instead be fed into this industry.
Yeah, and ethanol from corn is arguably one of the worst options for biofuels. You're better off with biodiesel sources... even soybeans are better, and they're not great.
In the US, isn't the main lobbying on behalf of this coming from industrial agriculture that has become addicted to the renewable fuel standard, which mandates that ethanol be added to gasoline, providing welfare for the ethanol industry at the expense of petroleum refiners (and eventually the driving public)? A good first step to end this idea would be to drop the mandate the same way the subsidies and tariffs supporting ethanol production were dropped.
That will require a constitutional change, as the makeup of the Senate makes it impossible to make such a reform barring a significant economic change.
He's referring to the fact that a bunch of low population states in middle America are the ones that benefit from all those corn-based biofuel mandates, and the fact that every state gets two senators irregardless of population means that these middle states get an oversized influence on the annual farm bill. The constitutional change would be changing the makeup of the senate.
(This is what I infer his argument to be. There are a million other ways to solve this problem besides changing the senate.)
Why does this article focus primarily on the land cost of biofuels and ignore other costs?
I am not a fan of biofuels, but the article would be much more persuasive if biofuels were 25x more expensive than the alternatives, rather than just 25x worse in land usage
Dedicated biomass is indeed a terrible idea, but the usage of what would otherwise be waste products to produce biofuels still benefits from this research
On that same note, it's crazy to me how much energy and effort we spend on getting rid of what is potentially one of our most valuable resources: manure. Specifically humanure
In 18th century Japan for example, landlords often had rights to their tenants manure. "Night soil" became especially valuable as fertilizer prices grew. There have been fights over who is entitled to these biosolids. Even up into the 1980s much of Japan used special vacuum trucks to deliver night soil collections to treatment facilities
Contrast that with the West where we spend billions of dollars on sewage systems that often cause ecological harm
That would be a great idea in a world without pathogens. Consider what would happen if there's a nasty prion that survives sewage treatment and then gets absorbed into crops.
Why would this same prion not make its way in our ocean or soils with the current sewage system set up? If the treatment fails, I don't see why dumping it in the oceans is safer. The food chain there is much more complex and therefore the prion would be exposed to many more possible hosts. In fact, prion biology shows that exposure from fish is a much greater concern than foodplants
You're asking why the current sewage system wouldn't be safer than the nightsoil system, where raw waste is applied directly to cropland. Or why applying processed sewage to cropland might be less safe than NOT applying the bioprocessed sewage to cropland. I think you can understand why the latter there could be safer, by increasing the distance between waste and food.
Wow interesting. I've read a lot about this topic and I've never once heard of any people in history that have practiced what your describing. Would love some links to read more
The first step of making any compost-based fertilizer is always to mix the "greens" (high nitrogen material, in this case the poop) with browns (high carbon material such as hay, leaves, straw, etc). Cow manure and other manures based on pretty much any other animal will have had this done. Any composting toilet, any night soil transportation truck, etc will also do this. Compost toilets usually simply mix it with sawdust, peat moss, or coconut noir.
This very simple process was used in pretty much every culture the world over. It's simple and extremely effective at neutralizing odors and changing the microbiology to aerobic conditions which can make it safe to handle in as little as a few weeks
"Night soil is a historically used euphemism for human excreta collected from cesspools, privies, pail closets, pit latrines, privy middens, septic tanks, etc. This material was removed from the immediate area, usually at night, by workers employed in this trade. Sometimes it could be transported out of towns and sold on as a fertilizer.
Another definition is "untreated excreta transported without water (e.g. via containers or buckets)".[1] The term "night soil" is largely an outdated term, used in historical contexts. The modern term is "fecal sludge"; fecal sludge management is an ongoing challenge, particularly in developing countries.[2]
Night soil was produced as a result of a sanitation system in areas without sewer systems or septic tanks. In this system of waste management, the human feces are collected without dilution with water."
Note: UNTREATED.
One might also ask, when was human waste first subject to treatment?
"It was not until the late 19th century that it became possible to treat the sewage by biologically decomposing the organic components through the use of microorganisms and removing the pollutants."
It isn’t a concern to use human waste for non-food applications, and there are times that it actually is. With food or food that our food eats there is the risk of communicable disease.
The problem from there is twofold 1. Generally we grow things for food and beauty, both of which are kind of ruined by human manure. 2. Most needs for manure come from animal farms and they usually have an excess of the animal manure and don’t really need anymore.
I think you underestimate how easy it is to neutralize the risks of human manure. In fact it's something you can even do in your own backyard. Compost toilets are gaining in popularity. Even federal agencies like the NPS are exploring implementing them
In fact, I'd argue solutions like this would be an overall reduction in the risk of spreading communicable diseases. Sewers can still transfer diseases like this until the waste reaches treatment facilities. Treating it more locally reduces the overall amount of time available for diseases to grow and spread
> 1. Generally we grow things for food and beauty, both of which are kind of ruined by human manure
Cow manure is an excellent compost used all the time that you can even buy at a local gardening store. It's mostly a silly cultural "yucky" aversion that keeps us from utilizing safe, neutralized human manure in the same way
> 2. Most needs for manure come from animal farms and they usually have an excess of the animal manure and don’t really need anymore.
...cities and towns have an excess of human manure that they don't really need anymore too lol
A friend of mine works at a company that processes waste water. A few years ago he was telling me about how they were working on(or already have?) A way to extract nitrogen to sell.
Really beating up a strawman. No one's proposing or implementing "dedicated" biomass.
Corn ethanol utilizes the starch from corn, and leaves behind proteins, fats, minerals, and yeast cells which are used as animal feed, where its superior to plain corn.
Likewise woody biomass isn't coming from clear cutting forests, its from necessary thinning to keep forests healthy (thats otherwise burned in slash piles) and mill waste thats a byproduct of lumber production.
> ...the world’s largest supplier of wood pellets for power generation ... has long insisted that it doesn’t use big, whole trees, but only uses wood waste, “tops, limbs, thinnings, and/or low-value smaller trees.” It insists it only sources wood from areas where trees will be regrown, and that it doesn’t contribute to deforestation.
> As it turns out, Mongabay reporter Justin Catanoso found a management whistleblower who pointed him in the direction of clearcuts that the company was making: Catanoso watched as a feller-buncher machine grappled down a fifty-acre forest and fed the old oaks straight into a chipper, producing tons of wood to be turned into pellets. The whistleblower said that was par for the course: “We take giant, whole trees. We don’t care where they come from. The notion of sustainably managed forests is nonsense. We can’t get wood into the mills fast enough.”
> He continued: “The company says that we use mostly waste like branches, treetops and debris to make pellets. What a joke. We use 100% whole trees in our pellets. We hardly use any waste. Pellet density is critical. You get that from whole trees, not junk.”
> each box represents a source of electricity. The higher the box, the more land that source uses. [...] If you look carefully, you might notice that the vertical axis uses a log scale.
I think this graph wins the hotly contested "most misleading use of a log scale" award. Anyone glancing at it quickly would vastly underestimate the differences between energy sources.
Yeah, I was thinking a linear graph with a scrollbar would emphasize the point a lot better, and then add a toggle for the log scale so you could actually see the data without scrolling. But then you'd need to explain why you're seeing so little and that you need to scroll.
Based solely on my personal experience, this log scale graph is no more misleading than a typical log scale graph. What in your mind makes it unusually bad? Do you have examples of better log scale graphs?
First, the use of a log-scale seems to serve no purpose. The point is to illustrate that biomass is vastly worse than the alternatives; a comparison between those alternatives is irrelevant. So the log scale obscures the point rather than elucidating it.
Do they not teach log scale graphs in math classes any more? The scale visually reading as 10000, 1000, 100, 10, 1 immediately clues readers in to its log-scale nature. I found the graph incredibly clear to read, and it told me what I needed to know about many of the alternative types of electricity generation: which ones are comparable in efficiency, which have larger variances, where those variances overlap and do not overlap, as well as where the differences are large or not.
I could see this as a critique of a log-scale graph appearing in a newspaper article or something where the reader is likely to be skimming, but in an persuasive essay readers would probably be more engaged and able to spend time synthesizing the arguments vs just storing information.
I think the biggest argument against biofuels is that if they achieved large scale use, it would encourage people to mine biomass from existing forests instead of growing it.
Existing forests aren't good biofuel sources. You'd be better off mining the oceans, tbh. Neochloris oleoabundans or even industrial rapeseed are just so much more dense sources of fuel...
Mining the oceans? How does that work? A forest should be a much denser source of carbon, particularly reduced carbon, than the ocean.
CO2 fixed per hectare per year should be much higher in lignocellulose than in seed oils. And if the forest is already there, you don't even have to wait for it to grow. The temptation to strip mine forests will be strong.
> Mining the oceans? How does that work? A forest should be a much denser source of carbon, particularly reduced carbon, than the ocean.
Algae tend to grow in large clumps, and you can very efficiently filter for them from water. I don't think it's a great strategy, but it's more practical than extracting from forests.
> CO2 fixed per hectare per year should be much higher in lignocellulose than in seed oils.
Forests are definitely way better for CO2 capture, but we're talking about producing fuel here. I'm speaking in terms of the net energy produced per hectare, so factoring in the energy consumed to extract fuel, industrial rapeseed oil beats the forest every day of the week.
I don't know of any algae, anywhere, that are more concentrated sources of carbon than existing trees. Even if we had to grow both sides, algae are still problematic, since separating them from water is apparently quite a difficult problem.
Yield of rapeseed in the US in 2020 was 2.16 tonnes/hectare/year. Yields of lignocellosic biomass (dry mass) in the US (miscanthus, eucalypt) is almost an order of magnitude higher.
Above ground forest biomass in Guyana: 499 tonnes/hectare.
> I don't know of any algae, anywhere, that are more concentrated sources of carbon than existing trees. Even if we had to grow both sides, algae are still problematic, since separating them from water is apparently quite a difficult problem.
Again, we're talking about land use for the energy you get, not the carbon it stores. Algae have a distinct advantage when it comes to metrics with land use in the denominator, since they don't use any land.
...and pulling algae from water is significantly easier than pulling biomass out of forests. I'm not sure what you're getting at there.
> Yield of rapeseed in the US in 2020 was 2.16 tonnes/hectare/year. Yields of lignocellosic biomass (dry mass) in the US (miscanthus, eucalypt) is almost an order of magnitude higher.
Yup, the other stuff is much heavier per hectare for sure. That doesn't make it a better source of fuel. Having more mass just means it takes more energy to move it. Step 2 is you extract fuel from it.
No, I was talking about the temptation of mining existing biomass. The focus on yield was a change of subject. But even then, algae is greatly overhyped, for a number of reasons. First, as I mentioned, separating it from water is something of a showstopper (and no, it's not easier than cutting down trees). Second, it rapidly reproduces, with a generation time much shorter than a growing season, so keeping out undesirable wild species is difficult. Third, high yields require a lot of CO2, to the extent that simply absorbing CO2 into a pond isn't enough; instead bioreactors with an external source of CO2 are needed. That vastly increases capital cost over a simple field (and if the CO2 is from combustion of fossil fuels, then that's a fraud not a zero CO2 source of fuel.) Evaporation of water will be a big negative.
Algae might work if one can get species that grown in extremely alkaline conditions, with water that can be sprayed into the air and recovered to scrub CO2 into the solution from the air. There are algae that grow in suck alkaline lakes. To get around the wild contamination problem would likely require engineering the algae to survive some kinds of poisons, then filling the water with those poisons as well to kill everything you don't want there. This wouldn't be very environmentally friendly. You still have the water separation problem, now made harder by the water being alkaline and toxic.
> Yup, the other stuff is much heavier per hectare for sure. That doesn't make it a better source of fuel. Having more mass just means it takes more energy to move it. Step 2 is you extract fuel from it.
The huge problem with biomass is the land requirement. That yield for rapeseed would be crippling for that crop as a fuel source for an economy.
> No, I was talking about the temptation of mining existing biomass.
I clearly missed a step then. So when you say:
"I think the biggest argument against biofuels is that if they achieved large scale use, it would encourage people to mine biomass from existing forests instead of growing it."
So, I drew from that a conclusion that if biofuels were prevalent, you believe there's an incentive to mine forests to create biofuels, rather than the grow new biofuels.
In my mind, that means going into wild forests, ripping trees and other biomass out of the ground, slicing it up and transporting it to some kind of a processing plant, where you'd separate out the useful bits and turn it in to biofuel. The incentive comes from the profits yielded from selling the biofuel after paying the costs of creating it.
I don't disagree that there are challenges growing and harvesting of algae, but it is something that is done, at an industrial scale, already (largely for the harvesting of pigments). They don't produce CO2, but they do pump in a lot of fresh CO2 (and pump out O2) to ensure good yields. It's just not done for purposes of creating biofuel, because there's no demand to justify the costs involved. In a world you're envisioning where there is much more of an incentive to produce biofuels, it seems eminently reasonable those incentives would apply to algae as much as anything else.
> Second, it rapidly reproduces, with a generation time much shorter than a growing season
While there are challenges related to this, this does largely mitigate the turn around time advantage that existing wild forests might have.
> The huge problem with biomass is the land requirement. That yield for rapeseed would be crippling for that crop as a fuel source for an economy.
Rapeseed is currently produced on an industrial basis in places where the HEAR derived from it already yields more profits than say, growing soybeans. It's not a popular crop, because the demand for edible canola products is much higher than the demand for biofuels, but if that demand were to shift...
Where we agree is that I don't see biofuels being a viable strategy, at least for the foreseeable future. I just don't see a future where they become viable, but the incentive to mine existing forests for biofuels becomes significantly more significant than extant incentives to mine forests.
There is one aspect of biomass generators I always thought was overlooked. The process is very similar to making charcoal.
If we used wood as a fuel source, heated it enough to release methane and other violitile gases to power a generator, but not enough to release the majority of carbon, that would leave us with charcoal.
Instead of trying to extract the remaining energy from the charcoal, we could bury it. Which would sequester the carbon, and be fertilizer. Growing clovers or legumes would add nitrogen.
I am sure I have something wrong, and maybe a better answer is to just not do it with dedicated crops as the article suggests. Maybe we could grow corn for food, but cram the stalks into the generator and sequester the remaining carbon?
> Maybe we could grow corn for food, but cram the stalks into the generator and sequester the remaining carbon?
This is a thing; it's called "BECCS". You can also sequester the carbon without trying to burn it first; see, for instance, https://charmindustrial.com/.
It's ignoring PAZ (which would give a similar Nuclear+ category about half of PV) and much more importantly is ignoring mining of the >90% of deposits that aren't like cigar lake or ranger which puts it somewhere around coal.
Look at how much space a mine like Inkai or Husab 2 takes up for what would be typical of expanding the indistry.
So unless there's a mistake somewhere, only a marginal fraction of land would be needed to cover all needs.
So what went wrong here? I think it's the MWh per square meter number. 500MWh in PV would be a 500kW solar installation in Germany. I am quite sure you cannot fit that into a square meter.
But even if we assume 580MWh per hectare per year, the output from 1billion hectares would be 580000TWh. So there's probably more wrong in that post.
> According to Google, the world’s total arable land is about 1.38 billion hectares. Using the biomass LUIE figure of 580 m²/MWh/y, we get a total potential electricity production of 23,793 TWh / year.
The LUIE figure we found for dedicated biomass is 580 m²/MWh/y: 580 square meters to generate one megawatt-hour per year. You multiplied this by hectares, meaning you multiplied area times area. If you want to determine the amount of energy you can produce from a given area (e.g. 1 billion hectares), you need to divide by 580, not multiply by 580.
>“24% more carbon-intensive than gasoline” is not a ringing endorsement for [ethanol fuel]. The US really ought to stop doing this.
Ethanol in the current US gasoline supply, as I understand it, is not really an energy source. Rather, the purpose is to increase the octane rating. Other octane additives were added in smaller amounts (tetraethyl lead, methyl tert-butyl ether) but they tended to be persistent pollutants, while 10% ethanol is foolproof and non-polluting. But it's bad for food prices: 40% of the US corn crop is used for ethanol.
I don't get it, Brazil has been using biofuels (sugarcane ethanol) successfully in large scale since the 70s or 80s. Like a third of the car fleet of the country was ethanol fuelled in the 90s, and all cars since the 00s are dual fuel "flex" motors. All petrol stations have pumps for ethanol and gasoline side by side. And Brazil is no micronation, that is a fleet of millions and millions and millions of cars. So how can something that has been working for so long be unworkable?
When they're being careful, they state "dedicated biomass for electricity production", which is... not something I'm aware of anyone doing? Seems more like trying to head off a future bad idea than criticizing something that happens today... again, when they're being careful with their phrasing.
Brazil has one of the lowest population densities on earth, less than half of the world average. Even so, sugar cane farming in Brazil is not exactly known for being sustainable. If anything, this example proves the author's point about dedicated biomass being unsustainable at large scale.
These numbers were compiled by a mathhead who knows nothing about renewable agriculture meets new technologies. To be clear I'm not saying growing crops to turn them into biofuels is a good idea, but there are plenty opportunities to render the calculations based on arable land and energy output irrelevant.
Trying to use biofuel to replace ALL sources of energy sounds pretty silly. Is anybody actually suggesting that?
What about how much land would be required to replace the _gasoline_ usage with ethanol?
"Each year, one acre of corn produces 551 gallons of ethanol, which is the equivalent of 386 gallons of gas."
"According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), Americans consumed 140.43 billion gallons of gasoline in 2015"
363.8 million acres to make enough corn to replace gasoline - not factoring in all the other negative externalities. A little more than 4x land area what the US uses now.
No one is claiming that 100% of our final energy should come from biomass.
In France, the research institute Negawatt has computed numbers when using biomass to fill the gaps when solar panel and wind turbines are not producing electricity. They show we could replace nuclear power only by using current farming wastes (no need to allocate more area to bio fuel). (But they also assume a serious reduction of our current electricity usage)
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] threadBut not if you offer exemptions. If you offer exemptions the winning strategy is to build tons of spread out, cramped, single- or two-story residences with most of their land value exempted.
But how will people pay their land value tax? Well for the most part, low income people will pay it the same way they currently do: rent. It's the landlord that pays the tax. (And preemptively: no, studies have shown that higher taxes aren't just passed back to the renter. So they'll pay the same rent even if the land value increases.)
For other small homeowners, (1) there is expected to be a lot of disparity in land value in an 85% LVT regime. People in desirable places pay high LVT. People on the outskirts pay close to $0 because their land is valued close to $0 (compared to today, at least). And (2) there could be other social welfare programs (e.g. basic income, or unemployment LVT forbearance) which help those in need.
So the promise is a scenario like 1970s Bronx.
The real answer, which the GOP was able to test the waters on with the SALT cap, is for the federal government to slowly back away from supporting mortgages. 0% down mortgages with rates linked to T-Bills depend on the policy to back mortgages. As the country gets poorer, that is less relevant.
If I accumulate some land, its becoming a forest. For at least as long as my direct descendants live.
You try do something good for the world (put a forest somewhere, do a bit of rewilding), then that area becomes desirable, then some LVT prick comes along and tries take what's yours so some property developer can flatten it to build magnolia shitboxes.
Edit: the LVT people on here remind me of the arseholes who want to replace most of the good public parks in Berlin with housing, lol.
National parks and land trusts are a good thing, but such exemptions ought to be publicly managed since there are societal costs involved.
To have any chance on the market, the price per protein content of the insect larvae must be at least twice lower than that of chicken meat. Therefore it must be about the same as for legumes like beans or lentils.
To be able to judge whether investing in such a thing is worthwhile, you need a very accurate prediction of the production costs, to determine whether it is possible to match the legumes in price per protein content.
I would be very wary about the risk that the estimation of the future production costs might be exceedingly optimistic.
Currently some cereals are the cheapest source of proteins suitable for human consumption, but they cannot provide much more than a half of the daily protein intake of a human, because they lack lysine, so they must be combined with a more expensive source of proteins, like meat, legumes, or perhaps insect larvae.
Nearly nobody has an objection to eating legumes (I am ignoring, among other things, people on ultra-low-carb diets, specific allergies, and Ashkenazi Jews during Pesach), so an improved yield of legumes, or a reduction in water usage, or a tolerance for greater temperature extremes, or... would be extremely valuable.
If they could come to be just the same price as "ethical" chicken that would be amazing. I think it's been shown that there's not much market for meat replacements at a premium (like impossible and beyond). But I can't imagine there's not an insane market at the parity. I know I would buy insect burgers for my family at least once or twice a week if they had comparable quality to chicken and similarly priced.
But biomass being converted into electricity is horribly inefficient.
Even in CHP?
And that optimistic 2% efficiency for plants is just the energy conversion to grow the actual plants. Then to convert it into electricity requires it to go through a power plant which often have lower efficiencies of say 30%. If it is in a co-generation facility, it may have upwards of say 80%. Which sounds nice, but when you multiply those efficiencies and end up with in the best case, something like 1.6% efficiency which is terrible.
And that is to ignore the other major factor which is that burning biomass causes major pollution.
Fossil fuels are just convenient biomass that have been given the luxury of hundreds of millions of years to compress into dense hydrocarbons which make a convenient fuel source. We don't have this luxury when it comes to creating new biomass.
The best aspect of biomass is that it is freely available to everyone. Anyone can gather sticks to burn.
However, the parts of the world that still heavily rely on these methods for heating their homes and are used for cooking unfortunately suffer the consequences of breathing all of the smoke in over the years.
The article is aboit dedicated biomass for electricity production, which given the cheapness of solar and wind is a little like dunking on steam-powered cars. I'm not aware of anyone arguing for that as an approach. We did these sums a couple of decades ago.
On the other hand, wwste food, sewage, manure, and various other things that would become methane are useful to capture as it can be GHG negative comparrd woth letting it rot. That is also "biomass".
Nerdy people on message boards will adopt extreme positions. The argument against meat is that animal fodder is inefficient and everything would be better if we just ate soy, peas and beans. The same argument would be made against your idea.
I think it’s dumb to grow crops to stretch the viability of ICE engines in cars. But growing crops to produce upstream value, whether that’s steak or food for my steak isn’t an issue for me, and probably isn’t a problem for 98% of people once they get over the “yuck, bugs”.
On top of that, food margins aren’t huge and you’re aiming for the low budget market, not a lot of money to be made there. And the optics aren’t great, lots of people will find your product repulsive and at a low price it will look like you’re trying to feed bugs to the poor.
If insects as food ever becomes significant, it probably won’t be the first to market that will succeed but a later breakout learning how to be successful after somebody else tries and fails several times.
I work with creating efficient closed loop food production systems.
Turning bio-mass into electricity comes with a lot of losses.
If the desired product is fuel, the numbers for bio-mass are a lot better, and the numbers for all other sources that first produce electricity are a lot worse, because turning electricity into fuel comes with a lot of losses.
This is true, but when generating fuel, the end goal is usually to move a vehicle X miles. Now that electric cars are nominally competitive with ICE vehicles, the metric should be something more like “land required to drive a truck X miles/year” - and assume the best of either electric vehicle efficiency or ICE efficiency, not force an arbitrary electrical->chemical conversion for the metric’s sake. Biofuels probably wouldn’t look like as much of an outlier as they do here, but I would still wager that they’re among the least efficient options.
I wouldn't wager because it's not a simple yes or no type question. There's a lot of ambiguities even in the analysis behind the graph presented in the article, but when it comes to fuels vs. batteries, it gets even more insane. Fuels have a weight advantage over batteries that gets magnified as the weight and range of the vehicle increases... and there's a lot of variance within fuels too. So, while an electric bicycle is going to be a no-brainer over a motorcycle for pretty much any scenario, it can be quite the opposite for something like a commercial truck.
I keep coming back to the economist argument that if we just captured the externalities related to climate change, we avoid having these discussions and simply look at the price of things... but of course, that's the hard part in all these discussions.
A land-efficient biomass fuel system would convert all the carbon in the biomass into fuel. This would require adding extra hydrogen, particularly if you want hydrocarbon fuels, since the oxygen in the biomass has to be carried off somehow. The hydrogen could be sourced from solar or wind by electrolysis.
In any biomass technology with a CO2 waste stream, the CO2 can be converted to hydrocarbon fuel by Fischer-Tropsch, if you have additional hydrogen.
In the post fossil fuel age, there will be an entire biochemical industry that converts biomass to chemicals now obtained from fossil fuels. Some of these processes will look a lot like things developed for the petrochemical industry. All the carbon going into landfills now will instead be fed into this industry.
It’s either that or the depletion of aquifers.
(This is what I infer his argument to be. There are a million other ways to solve this problem besides changing the senate.)
I am not a fan of biofuels, but the article would be much more persuasive if biofuels were 25x more expensive than the alternatives, rather than just 25x worse in land usage
In 18th century Japan for example, landlords often had rights to their tenants manure. "Night soil" became especially valuable as fertilizer prices grew. There have been fights over who is entitled to these biosolids. Even up into the 1980s much of Japan used special vacuum trucks to deliver night soil collections to treatment facilities
Contrast that with the West where we spend billions of dollars on sewage systems that often cause ecological harm
https://daily.jstor.org/a-history-of-human-waste-as-fertiliz...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092544391...
The first step of making any compost-based fertilizer is always to mix the "greens" (high nitrogen material, in this case the poop) with browns (high carbon material such as hay, leaves, straw, etc). Cow manure and other manures based on pretty much any other animal will have had this done. Any composting toilet, any night soil transportation truck, etc will also do this. Compost toilets usually simply mix it with sawdust, peat moss, or coconut noir.
This very simple process was used in pretty much every culture the world over. It's simple and extremely effective at neutralizing odors and changing the microbiology to aerobic conditions which can make it safe to handle in as little as a few weeks
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_soil
"Night soil is a historically used euphemism for human excreta collected from cesspools, privies, pail closets, pit latrines, privy middens, septic tanks, etc. This material was removed from the immediate area, usually at night, by workers employed in this trade. Sometimes it could be transported out of towns and sold on as a fertilizer.
Another definition is "untreated excreta transported without water (e.g. via containers or buckets)".[1] The term "night soil" is largely an outdated term, used in historical contexts. The modern term is "fecal sludge"; fecal sludge management is an ongoing challenge, particularly in developing countries.[2]
Night soil was produced as a result of a sanitation system in areas without sewer systems or septic tanks. In this system of waste management, the human feces are collected without dilution with water."
Note: UNTREATED.
One might also ask, when was human waste first subject to treatment?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sewage_treatment#History
"It was not until the late 19th century that it became possible to treat the sewage by biologically decomposing the organic components through the use of microorganisms and removing the pollutants."
The problem from there is twofold 1. Generally we grow things for food and beauty, both of which are kind of ruined by human manure. 2. Most needs for manure come from animal farms and they usually have an excess of the animal manure and don’t really need anymore.
https://www.nps.gov/articles/composting-toilets.htm
In fact, I'd argue solutions like this would be an overall reduction in the risk of spreading communicable diseases. Sewers can still transfer diseases like this until the waste reaches treatment facilities. Treating it more locally reduces the overall amount of time available for diseases to grow and spread
> 1. Generally we grow things for food and beauty, both of which are kind of ruined by human manure
Cow manure is an excellent compost used all the time that you can even buy at a local gardening store. It's mostly a silly cultural "yucky" aversion that keeps us from utilizing safe, neutralized human manure in the same way
> 2. Most needs for manure come from animal farms and they usually have an excess of the animal manure and don’t really need anymore.
...cities and towns have an excess of human manure that they don't really need anymore too lol
Corn ethanol utilizes the starch from corn, and leaves behind proteins, fats, minerals, and yeast cells which are used as animal feed, where its superior to plain corn.
Likewise woody biomass isn't coming from clear cutting forests, its from necessary thinning to keep forests healthy (thats otherwise burned in slash piles) and mill waste thats a byproduct of lumber production.
From what I've seen, claims to this effect often turn out to be false. For instance, from https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/a-little-xmas-cheer-for-...:
> ...the world’s largest supplier of wood pellets for power generation ... has long insisted that it doesn’t use big, whole trees, but only uses wood waste, “tops, limbs, thinnings, and/or low-value smaller trees.” It insists it only sources wood from areas where trees will be regrown, and that it doesn’t contribute to deforestation.
> As it turns out, Mongabay reporter Justin Catanoso found a management whistleblower who pointed him in the direction of clearcuts that the company was making: Catanoso watched as a feller-buncher machine grappled down a fifty-acre forest and fed the old oaks straight into a chipper, producing tons of wood to be turned into pellets. The whistleblower said that was par for the course: “We take giant, whole trees. We don’t care where they come from. The notion of sustainably managed forests is nonsense. We can’t get wood into the mills fast enough.”
> He continued: “The company says that we use mostly waste like branches, treetops and debris to make pellets. What a joke. We use 100% whole trees in our pellets. We hardly use any waste. Pellet density is critical. You get that from whole trees, not junk.”
I think this graph wins the hotly contested "most misleading use of a log scale" award. Anyone glancing at it quickly would vastly underestimate the differences between energy sources.
But secondly: some log scale graphs have unevenly-spaced lines along the Y axis to make the use of a log scale more obvious. This is an example of what I mean: https://www.geol.lsu.edu/jlorenzo/geophysics/graphing/semilo...
On this graph, though, the lines along the Y-axis are evenly-spaced, increasing the confusion.
Thirdly: the use of a log scale should be mentioned in the graph's caption, not buried in the text.
I could see this as a critique of a log-scale graph appearing in a newspaper article or something where the reader is likely to be skimming, but in an persuasive essay readers would probably be more engaged and able to spend time synthesizing the arguments vs just storing information.
CO2 fixed per hectare per year should be much higher in lignocellulose than in seed oils. And if the forest is already there, you don't even have to wait for it to grow. The temptation to strip mine forests will be strong.
Algae tend to grow in large clumps, and you can very efficiently filter for them from water. I don't think it's a great strategy, but it's more practical than extracting from forests.
> CO2 fixed per hectare per year should be much higher in lignocellulose than in seed oils.
Forests are definitely way better for CO2 capture, but we're talking about producing fuel here. I'm speaking in terms of the net energy produced per hectare, so factoring in the energy consumed to extract fuel, industrial rapeseed oil beats the forest every day of the week.
Yield of rapeseed in the US in 2020 was 2.16 tonnes/hectare/year. Yields of lignocellosic biomass (dry mass) in the US (miscanthus, eucalypt) is almost an order of magnitude higher.
Above ground forest biomass in Guyana: 499 tonnes/hectare.
Again, we're talking about land use for the energy you get, not the carbon it stores. Algae have a distinct advantage when it comes to metrics with land use in the denominator, since they don't use any land.
...and pulling algae from water is significantly easier than pulling biomass out of forests. I'm not sure what you're getting at there.
> Yield of rapeseed in the US in 2020 was 2.16 tonnes/hectare/year. Yields of lignocellosic biomass (dry mass) in the US (miscanthus, eucalypt) is almost an order of magnitude higher.
Yup, the other stuff is much heavier per hectare for sure. That doesn't make it a better source of fuel. Having more mass just means it takes more energy to move it. Step 2 is you extract fuel from it.
Algae might work if one can get species that grown in extremely alkaline conditions, with water that can be sprayed into the air and recovered to scrub CO2 into the solution from the air. There are algae that grow in suck alkaline lakes. To get around the wild contamination problem would likely require engineering the algae to survive some kinds of poisons, then filling the water with those poisons as well to kill everything you don't want there. This wouldn't be very environmentally friendly. You still have the water separation problem, now made harder by the water being alkaline and toxic.
> Yup, the other stuff is much heavier per hectare for sure. That doesn't make it a better source of fuel. Having more mass just means it takes more energy to move it. Step 2 is you extract fuel from it.
The huge problem with biomass is the land requirement. That yield for rapeseed would be crippling for that crop as a fuel source for an economy.
I clearly missed a step then. So when you say:
"I think the biggest argument against biofuels is that if they achieved large scale use, it would encourage people to mine biomass from existing forests instead of growing it."
So, I drew from that a conclusion that if biofuels were prevalent, you believe there's an incentive to mine forests to create biofuels, rather than the grow new biofuels.
In my mind, that means going into wild forests, ripping trees and other biomass out of the ground, slicing it up and transporting it to some kind of a processing plant, where you'd separate out the useful bits and turn it in to biofuel. The incentive comes from the profits yielded from selling the biofuel after paying the costs of creating it.
I don't disagree that there are challenges growing and harvesting of algae, but it is something that is done, at an industrial scale, already (largely for the harvesting of pigments). They don't produce CO2, but they do pump in a lot of fresh CO2 (and pump out O2) to ensure good yields. It's just not done for purposes of creating biofuel, because there's no demand to justify the costs involved. In a world you're envisioning where there is much more of an incentive to produce biofuels, it seems eminently reasonable those incentives would apply to algae as much as anything else.
> Second, it rapidly reproduces, with a generation time much shorter than a growing season
While there are challenges related to this, this does largely mitigate the turn around time advantage that existing wild forests might have.
> The huge problem with biomass is the land requirement. That yield for rapeseed would be crippling for that crop as a fuel source for an economy.
Rapeseed is currently produced on an industrial basis in places where the HEAR derived from it already yields more profits than say, growing soybeans. It's not a popular crop, because the demand for edible canola products is much higher than the demand for biofuels, but if that demand were to shift...
Where we agree is that I don't see biofuels being a viable strategy, at least for the foreseeable future. I just don't see a future where they become viable, but the incentive to mine existing forests for biofuels becomes significantly more significant than extant incentives to mine forests.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00005-8
As the article points out, growing crops to make biofuel is very space intensive.
If we used wood as a fuel source, heated it enough to release methane and other violitile gases to power a generator, but not enough to release the majority of carbon, that would leave us with charcoal.
Instead of trying to extract the remaining energy from the charcoal, we could bury it. Which would sequester the carbon, and be fertilizer. Growing clovers or legumes would add nitrogen.
I am sure I have something wrong, and maybe a better answer is to just not do it with dedicated crops as the article suggests. Maybe we could grow corn for food, but cram the stalks into the generator and sequester the remaining carbon?
A couple of questions I have:
How much carbon could be captured this way, vs other carbon capture methods?
How are cornstalks etc dealt with today by farms? Maybe they're already doing something efficient with it
This is a thing; it's called "BECCS". You can also sequester the carbon without trying to burn it first; see, for instance, https://charmindustrial.com/.
Look at how much space a mine like Inkai or Husab 2 takes up for what would be typical of expanding the indistry.
The number of required energy comes in at the order of 10^20 J or 90000TWh:
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=300+quadrillion+BTU+in+...
but if I multiply the energy return from biofuels with these alleged 1billion hectares of land, I get much, much more energy, billions of TWh:
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=582Mwh%2Fm%5E2+*+1billi...
So unless there's a mistake somewhere, only a marginal fraction of land would be needed to cover all needs.
So what went wrong here? I think it's the MWh per square meter number. 500MWh in PV would be a 500kW solar installation in Germany. I am quite sure you cannot fit that into a square meter.
But even if we assume 580MWh per hectare per year, the output from 1billion hectares would be 580000TWh. So there's probably more wrong in that post.
> According to Google, the world’s total arable land is about 1.38 billion hectares. Using the biomass LUIE figure of 580 m²/MWh/y, we get a total potential electricity production of 23,793 TWh / year.
This is correct:
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%281.38+billion+hectare...
The LUIE figure we found for dedicated biomass is 580 m²/MWh/y: 580 square meters to generate one megawatt-hour per year. You multiplied this by hectares, meaning you multiplied area times area. If you want to determine the amount of energy you can produce from a given area (e.g. 1 billion hectares), you need to divide by 580, not multiply by 580.
Ethanol in the current US gasoline supply, as I understand it, is not really an energy source. Rather, the purpose is to increase the octane rating. Other octane additives were added in smaller amounts (tetraethyl lead, methyl tert-butyl ether) but they tended to be persistent pollutants, while 10% ethanol is foolproof and non-polluting. But it's bad for food prices: 40% of the US corn crop is used for ethanol.
I could be way off, but that's what I heard.
What about how much land would be required to replace the _gasoline_ usage with ethanol?
"Each year, one acre of corn produces 551 gallons of ethanol, which is the equivalent of 386 gallons of gas."
"According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), Americans consumed 140.43 billion gallons of gasoline in 2015"
363.8 million acres to make enough corn to replace gasoline - not factoring in all the other negative externalities. A little more than 4x land area what the US uses now.
In France, the research institute Negawatt has computed numbers when using biomass to fill the gaps when solar panel and wind turbines are not producing electricity. They show we could replace nuclear power only by using current farming wastes (no need to allocate more area to bio fuel). (But they also assume a serious reduction of our current electricity usage)