"Biofuels in use, keep atmospheric carbon neutral."
No they do not. The accounting generally doesn't take into account the full emissions of agriculture, which for corn is particularly carbon intense. Not to mention the downstream pollution impacts of over fertilization, such as coastal dead zones
This is the salient point that is glossed over without so much as blinking.
To get 1J of biofuel-based fuel, how many J of fossil fuel is burned? If it’s like 0.9J then you really have to ask how much carbon is released when turning carbon sinks into farmland, because it will take many many crop cycles to recoup that from biofuels.
That is the implementation detail that makes the whole thing a scam, yes. None of that is fundamental to bio-fuels, but rather a property of it being cheaper to do it that way in our current fossil fuel economy, and people not being interested in looking all that closely because they don’t really care.
What is not factored into the above is how much is going to be grown anyway. Corn yield in particular can quickly surprise you. Even if you try to only grow enough for food, there will be years where you still have way more than you can handle.
That is why we started producing corn-based ethanol. It wasn't intended to see people grow corn for it, but rather clean up the unmanageable excesses realized in the due course of growing it for food-based reasons that otherwise would have been left out to rot. In that vein, J is insignificant as it is spent either way.
The problem is that humans aren't very good at moderation. A little ethanol production is quite sensible, but once humans get it into their head something might be sensible in small doses they have to take it to a ridiculous extreme... You see that in everything.
The other issue is people seeing corn for ethanol (especially subsidized) can be waaaay more profitable and deciding to switch crops. Not only do you lose a potentially valuable food crop. But it's replaced by one of the nutrient and GHG intensive crops around
As a corn grower myself, I wouldn't go that far. Ethanol production is really only profitable when corn isn't profitable to grow. In other words, when you have ethanol plants champing at the bit to buy your corn, you are wishing you hadn't grown it in the first place! It can be a profitable crop, but only on the backs of food buyers who are much less price sensitive.
Ethanol does serve as a helpful buffer to step in when corn would be otherwise worthless, where the alternative is to let you see it rot, minimizing the losses — But if you are counting on ethanol to make you rich... Good luck!
Granted, there was that strange period around the early 2010s, in reaction to the early-to-mid 2000s where corn was being left to rot, where the US government was paying ethanol producers to produce ethanol. If you are posting from a time machine from that time, I get what you are saying. But those days are long behind us now.
You're misinterpreting what was meant to be a humorous comparison for illustration purposes. If you mine the fossil fuels, you have to bury the corn to keep the atmospheric carbon neutral.
What I'm not saying is you need to bury the corn to use biofuels.
i think there may have been some confusion about the parent comment
you are both agreeing that where the fuels come from matters. If you want to burn fossil fuels in a manner to keep atmospheric carbon neutral using the approach specified in
> Why would growing corn for ethanol and burning it in an engine be any climate-friendlier than growing that same corn for food and burning an equivalent amount of gasoline in an engine?
then the correct approach would be
> Why would growing corn for ethanol and burning it in an engine be any climate-friendlier than growing that same corn for *burying in the ground* and burning an equivalent amount of gasoline in an engine?
unless i am misunderstanding these two comments? some clarity would be great!
If we could grow the same amount of corn (to offset the carbon in the gasoline) and bury it where it would not rot/decompose (turned that carbon into now fossil carbon), then turn around and burn fossil fuel gasoline, then from a carbon neutral perspective, yes that would ‘balance the scales’.
It also seems quite silly and a lot of work, doesn’t it? Especially if you can do the same thing by turning the corn into ethanol, and leave the fossil fuels out of it? (* of course current agriculture uses a lot of fossil fuels itself, so the math isn’t that simple. For it to actually work, we’d need to ensure the entire vertical was fossil fuel free)
Of course, it’s a lot more direct and effective to use electric vehicles, near as I can tell.
This is such an off-base critique that it seems like deliberate trolling. The biofuel renewable carbon cycle takes carbon from the air, and burns the carbon once it's in the form of ethanol. It stops taking carbon from the ground and putting it into the sky.
The problem in corn's case, the reason none of this works, is you need to burn lots of fuel to produce corn. LOTS of fuel. Enough that you could barely (in some studies) or not even (in others) produce more fuel than you burned.
If you electrify your farming you don't have this problem. A far-future use-case is that we have eliminated 95% of fossil fuel use, and use solar-battery-powered tractors, trucks, and combines to harvest biofuels in order to fuel long-haul aviation and certain other legacy hardware that proved difficult to electrify.
