Ethanol: an end to the reign of error?
—“You mean there was no steak, no cream pies, no deep fat, no hot fudge?”—“Those were thought to be unhealthy, exactly the opposite of what we now know to be true.”
Sleeper, 1973
The heyday of ethanol may be soon over, if anyone is willing to forgo the ample political benefits of pretending they didn’t read this:
Rapeseed and maize biodiesels were calculated to produce up to 70 per cent and 50 per cent more greenhouse gases respectively than fossil fuels. The concerns were raised over the levels of emissions of nitrous oxide, which is 296 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Scientists found that the use of biofuels released twice as much as nitrous oxide as previously realised.
So, the whole biofuel business appears to be worse than the disease, since most US biofuel is from corn, while most EU biofuel is from rapeseed.
Dr Dave Reay, of the University of Edinburgh, used the findings to calculate that with the US Senate aiming to increase maize ethanol production sevenfold by 2022, greenhouse gas emissions from transport will rise by 6 per cent.
This has led scientists to call for greater scrutiny of alternatives to fossil fuels. Might one also hope that it would lead to greater scrutiny of the convoluted computer models behind the global warming stampede itself? Don’t, so to speak, hold your breath.
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Bear in mind I’m as much a manmade global warming skeptic as they get. However, from a Bio100 TA perspective, biofuels would theoretically be carbon neutral because the CO2 that plants would emit are derived directly from the atmosphere in the photosynthetic process. This is contrary to fossil fuels which add carbon that has been out of the loop during recent history. Then again, I wouldn’t be able to predict the amount of carbon that would comparatively be emitted if the plants were used for other things.