Study: 100 million acres of farmland needed to produce 25 percent of nation's energy needs
About 100 million acres of cropland would have to be dedicated to biomass sources such as switchgrass to produce 25 percent of the country's energy in 2025. That comes from a University of Tennessee study that also said such a move would generate $700 billion in new economic activity. The study says the biomass farming would not interfere with the country's demand for food or feed. The report suggests using 105 million acres of the nation's 800 million acres of agriculture land. Much of the needed land would come from pastures. The potential yield, according to the study, could be 86 billion gallons of ethanol, 1.1 billion gallons of biodiesel and 925 billion kW hours of electricity. The reports says the technology to commercially convert switchgrass to ethanol could be ready by 2012.
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[Source: Duncan Mansfield/Associated Press via Florida Times-Union]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
George Krpan 5:34PM (11/18/2006)
An advertisement by Chevron in the latest issue of Scientific American says that one acre yields 60 gallons on biodiesel. That doesn't sound very good to me. Can you imagine the energy requirements to farm 100 million acres of land? And the enviornmental impact? How about the water needed to farm 100 million acres? I don't think we have it and with global warming water will only get scarcer.
There are vast areas in this country that get intense sunshine. It would seem to me that an acre of solar equipment in the desert would yield far more than the energy contained in 60 gallons of biodiesel. I'll bet an acre in the dessert gets better than that in one day or maybe even in one hour. And, the work to put in the solar equipment would only have to be done once verses replanting and harvesting a field once or twice a every year.
Also, it takes arable land to grow crops. The sort of land that is home to animal and plant species. There are animal and plant species in the dessert too but far less. If you're going to use up land, use up the land that results in the lowest envionmental impact and utilize it in ways that don't comsume water and require endless energy consumptive activity.
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Howard Lee Harkness 10:27PM (11/18/2006)
George, the 60g/y/acre figure is disinformation derived from studying the wrong feedstock. You can get much better yield (by more than an order of magnitude) from pondscum than from either peanuts or soybeans. And a pondscum 'farm' could be located next to a traditional coal-fired plan to use the CO2 to accelerate and enhance the yield even more. See http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html
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Jon 7:39AM (11/19/2006)
Thanks for the information!!
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jimmy 12:07AM (11/20/2006)
ummm george, global warming will increase precipitation, thus giving us more water...and the point of growing biofuels is to power our cars with a liquid energy source.
that is, unless we convert all that solar energy into hydrogen(which people seem to agree, is just a stopgap to EVs)
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Tim 9:49AM (11/20/2006)
George - you didn't r e a l l y believe an ad for alternative fuel from Chevron did you? Did it mention Solar-Electric or Bio-Diesel? Follow Howard's Algae link for your Bio-diesel. Bio-diesel from Algae really makes sense. The plants don’t waste time and energy building a cellulose support structure. There’s some great news on this blog regarding Algae. There is also some great info regarding solar concentrators here. Straight PV is inefficient because of the cost of the PV cell, however concentrating solar then focusing it onto PV cells is much more economical.
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DB 5:16PM (11/20/2006)
This is crazy. 25% is unnecessary. Ethanol and E85 is little more than a way to fork over money to farming communities and buy votes. Take an E85 auto that gets 18 mpg, make it into a diesel engined auto running on a biodiesel blend fuel and the same exact auto gets 40 mpg. The difference in the purchase price of the auto is less than $1000, an amount of money that will be made up for in months. Keep the car 5 years and you will have directly saved yourself thousands and thousands of dollars.
Plus, biodiesel can take up FAR less space. Biodiesel via soybeans is again, little more than wasteful subsidies going to farmers. Biodiesel via algae on a large scale is probably an inevitability. The cost of such production would be so much cheaper and less labor intensive than crop produced biodiesel and ethanol production.
Diesel autos are coming to the US in the next few years. With ULSD and advances some of the automakers are making (to scrub NOx), diesel popularity in the US will rival that of Europe within a decade or 2. Once the marketplace for diesel autos happens, you can bet that some of the Big Oil or other energy companies will get into large scale algae biodiesel production.
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