Santini recently completed a research paper on a subject that has been mentioned before on this blog. It is very well done, and may be of interest to a number of you. Unfortunately, it’s far too long for a single post. So instead, I’m posting a link to a PDF version of it. Here’s an except to wet your apatite:

Due to the increased public attention on ethanol as a fuel alternative, there has been a lot of debate concerning the viability and impacts of switching to ethanol. The purpose of this paper is provide a cost and benefit analysis of ethanol and biodiesel. Additionally, this paper will discuss the environmental impacts of the use of ethanol and biodiesel and whether the impacts have an overall net benefit or cost. Third, the paper will touch on recent public policy concerning the production and use of ethanol as a fuel additive and alternative. Finally, the paper will briefly discuss other alternatives in both the production of fuel ethanol and also in place of ethanol.

The above image is created and licensed by afloresm.

Thanks to fears about global warming, renewable energy is on more people’s minds than ever. More importantly, it’s on the minds of a lot of business executives as well. The public and businesses want more carbon-free energy. I’ve written positively about the nuclear power, but had to admit that it has some drawbacks (though I still think the safety concern is far overblown). I’ve also blogged about the inefficacy of biofuels. One of the biggest downsides to biofuels is rearing it’s ugly head right now. Additionally, hype about a hydrogen economy is unfounded. Hydrogen technology ends up being a very expensive, inefficient, potentially explosive battery. Finally, photovoltaic (solar) and wind power have proved to be too expensive, too unreliable, and produce too little power.

So, I’ve abandoned hope on alternative fuels hyped by ‘environmentalists’ and I also championed nuclear power as a stop-gap measure until a better technology comes along. Have I abandoned my liberal ways and registered with the Republican party? No. I’m just a realist. However, I have just learned of a renewable, carbon-free alternative that is already in use that could meet the current demands of the developed world and the growing demands. It’s smoke and mirrors; more accurately steam and mirrors…

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Today, I found these two juxtapose articles in one of my news feeders. Basically, on the morning of April 1st, 4 of about 30 protesters chained themselves to the entrance to a Bank of America in Boston. They were protesting the bank’s funding of companies with large carbon footprints.

Their voices were heard! Later that same day, Ken Lewis, CEO of Bank of America announced that the company is signing onto the Carbon Principles. These principles add an additional risk to lines of credit for carbon emitters. In effect, this raises the cost of procuring funding for projects like building new, traditional-style coal power plants. This is in addition to the $20 billion already pledged by the bank to be invested in ‘green’ technologies.

Never, in the history of the environmental movement, has a single protest been so effective; causing same-day changes.

Or perhaps it was a coincidence, or an April Fools joke by Ken Lewis.

In the past, I have read that corn-based ethanol may have a net carbon-neutral effect at best. This was because the fossil fuel based fertilizers used to grown most all corn in the US offset any gains. Now, Scientific American has published an article about two new studies that show a major piece of the carbon equation has been neglected in previous research on biofuels. These show that the widespread use of all biofuels would definitely increase net carbon emissions.

It is true that when burned, biofuels represent a carbon-emissions savings over fossil fuels. So how is it that they increase overall carbon emissions? It is through plant-displacement. When an area is cleared to make way for growing biofuels, the plants that were being used are no longer sucking up and storing their share of carbon. In fact, they begin releasing their stored carbon as they decay.

This plant-displacement effect is amplified by free market forces. For the first time, space to grow fuel is competing with space to grow food. The upshot of this is that biofuels will increase food prices, especially soy bean prices. With high soy prices, people in places like Brazil start cutting down carbon-rich rain forest and planting lucrative soy. An acre of soy stores much less carbon than an acre of rain forest. As that rain forest foliage is burnt or left to decay, all their carbon is released into the atmosphere.

There are ways to make biofuels work, but none of them are economically efficient and thus won’t be pursued without government intervention. Combine this with the fact that “if we convert every corn kernel grown today in the U.S. to ethanol we offset just 12 percent of our gasoline use,” and one can see that biofuels are not a way out of the global warming problem.