this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2024
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In the U.S. alone, we'd need about 200 million acres of farm land to go from 10% ethanol to 100% ethanol. That's using corn and accounts for about 25% of the total farmland the U.S. has. And that's just the U.S. and only counts retail gas with the 10% mandate, - not industrial fuel use of diesel fuel use, which would increase it dramatically. It's not feasible to run the country on biomass , especially as climate change is going to make farm land less viable overall. Given that agriculture is already roughly a third of all carbon emissions, massively ramping up agriculture to replace fossil fuels doesn't really help overall.
On top of that, we need to start sequestering CO2. Moving it from the biomass into the air, even temporarily, keeps it in the air where we do not want it! The only viable long term solution is to move net amounts of carbon out of the air by all means possible, as well as minimizing all the other greenhouse gas produced (like methane). ICE engines cannot be a significant part of this future without ramping up clean energy use elsewhere to sequester more carbon than those fuels are contributing - which leads right back to solar and fission. (and wind, waves, geothermal etc of course).
Okay, recalculate using switchgrass. Corn is not the end-all be-all of biofuels. Switchgrass is the next step. After all, yall are pretending that "fusion" is on the table, so I'm allowed to pretend in magic future tech for my arguments as well.
And if we both are pretending in today's technology, then we have to remember that most EVs are run on coal+natural gas today and account for significant emissions of CO2.
Switchgrass is not "farmland", its the natural prairie / natural state of the USA's original land usage. Its significantly more efficient than farmland and will be resistant to future climate issues. The switchgrass refineries have been proven btw, its just a matter of investment today to bring Switchgrass biofuels to the mainstream.
Ok, so convert 25% of all U.S. farmland at a minimum to a completely new crop. That's sure to be carbon neutral 🙄. What should the other 7.7 ish billion humans do?
Burning things was always a bad plan, and continues to be a bad plan!
Switchgrass is the natural prairie grass of the USA. It's already growing, no conversions needed.
Seriously, look up this shit before making dumbass assumptions.
In fact, converting unnatural farmland back into natural grasslands would likely improve USAs environment.
I always find it hilarious how bad EV fanbois are when it comes to environmental issues, or the state of nature, plants and biology. An actual environmentalist would love the opportunity to return USA's farmlands back into natural prairies.
An Ethanol crop that doesn't need fertilizer, that grows in natural conditions of the USA and returns our damaging farmlands back to a more natural state? This is win/win/win for the environment in every aspect.
there would be nothing natural about it if you're cutting it all down and fertilizing it on a cycle, that's just agriculture.
yes, it would probably be less impactful than corn, but at the scale you're talking about, were shifting all the ethanol corn + all that land times 10 from whatever it's doing over to industrial scale farm land. that means making it flat, building machines, securing water sources (yet another resource we don't exactly have an overabundance of), scaling out the logistics of shipping and processing by 10X for a distributed fuel making infrastructure.
There's only ~ 2 billion acres of area in the U.S. and you want to use 10% of it for making fuel, and that's just for people who drive cars, not Trucking, not Trains, not Planes, not anything that runs on diesel. That's about a third of what we use for cattle, and cattle use land that's not good for growing anything at agricultural scale.
That much land could produce 2560 terrawatts from solar alone, and we can spread that out over existing land, like roofs, deserts, parking lots and roads, which would account for half the power the U.S. uses annually. So using less land we could increase U.S. power production by 50% (and doing that only with solar would probably be the least efficient way to do it). Cheap, clean, distributed power is far more useful than expensive distributed not clean fuel.
Biomass as a fuel can't scale. It does ZERO to help with our carbon problem, and it perpetuates current infrastructure that is actively killing everyone.
There's probably a case for replacing gas power plants with biomass powerplants that grow and process locally, cutting out all the transport logistics to increase efficiency while reducing overall carbon footprint, but in general burning things is a bad plan. Using small inefficient engines to burn things on demand everywhere is an even worse plan.
@nxdefiant @dragontamer clearing forest land for agriculture to feed ever increasing population does seems the baseline solution but then the argument pops up ... isn't knowledge of agriculture by we humans responsible for climate change and all the misery the human race is in?
All the more reason we should convert land back to native Switchgrass. A native plant that grew from Nevada to Maine that the pioneers / pilgrims saw 500+ years ago. Converting our harmful farmlands back into more natural-looking grasslands is going to improve our environment and ecology.
That's what makes this entire discussion so hilarious. I'm advocating for native plant species of this continent, and yall environmentalists are shitting on the idea. Because modern environmentalists are braindead and don't even think about the natural state of our country, its plantlife or other effects.
That's fine. So I'm just pointing out: switchgrass is an incredibly eco-friendly way forward. Even if we don't use it for biofuel, its already being used to restore marshlands and other areas. Switchgrass also has a carbon-capture profile similar to trees (!!!!), outperforming many other plants in terms of CO2 capture. One way or the other, the people who know better are planting switchgrass and improving our ecology, even if yall can't get behind the idea.
Pretty much. We have scientists looking into high density, multi level automated hydroponic crop production in order to stop relying on having enough sky and land for food. Using more land for biomass to produce fuel feels willfully evil at this point.