Renewable Energey: Biomass

Biomass energy is totally renewable and has huge environmental benefits. Biomass is organic materials made from plants and animals, like woods, crops, manure, and some garbage. With solar energy stored through the photosynthesis process, they can not only, as commonly known, burn to release heat, but also be converted to usable energy forms like methane gas (a main ingredient of natural gas) or be fermented to produce ethanol and biodiesel, the transportation fuels. The Billion-ton Vision, a study by DOE and USDA to explore the biomass land source, concluded the potential of 1.3 billion ton of biomass per year in the US, enough to produce biofuels to replace over 1/3 of the current transportation fuels, which comprise 70% of petroleum use in the US. It requires the erection of large-scale bioenergy and biorefinery factories and an entire new industry behind it.

Biofuels are difficult to distill (hence the “food-fuel debate,” or the “human-automobile debate”). In 2005, world ethanol production consumed 1292 mt (million ton) of sugar canes, 702 mt of corns, and 628 mt of wheat for a meager 36 mt of ethanol - a 36:1 ratio. The fuel efficiency for ethanol (often 25% below fossil fuel) being 20 mpg, that’s 24 lbs of food per mile. Biodiesels do even worse.

Brazil, considered the biofuel industry leader, produced 5 billion gallon ethanol (equals to 3.5% of US annual motor gasoline consumption) in 2007, accounting for 1/3 world production - only next to the US. The government started Programa Nacional do Álcool after the 73 oil crisis and now mandates 20-25% ethanol blend. 72% of cars manufactured in Brazil are flex fueled (ethanol enabled), and ethanol accounts for half of gasoline market.

Matter-of-factly, Brazil’s more efficient sugar cane based ethanol industry beats the US’s maize based in every measure including productivity, energy balance, greenhouse gas emission reduction, etc. Its production cost of $0.83/gallon beats US’s $1.14/gallon. The US, however, cleverly priced out Brazilian ethanol with $0.51 subsidy and 0.54 tariff per gallon.

The country engages 3.6 million hectares (36000 sqr km) or 1% of its arable land in ethanol production – suppose that ethanol’s energy intensity is 75% of conventional gasoline, this figure shows that 51% of arable land would be needed for ethanol to replace all gasoline consumption today in the US. Another report from DOE estimates that with algae fuel, the third generation biofuel, only 2% of arable land (and it doesn’t have to be arable) is needed to replaced all the petroleum fuel in the US. There must be some serious reason for not starting doing this.