Biofuel Bonanza

What exactly are biofuels, and can they replace fossil fuels? In this episode, we take a critical look at the issues surrounding our energy needs and why it's so darn complicated.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to text Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tex Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
I Heart Radio and I love all things tech, and
today I thought I would tackle a topic that I
think can get a little confusing at times. There's a

(00:25):
lot going on with it, and there are a ton
of different parties, all with their own agendas and points
of view that make it kind of tricky to understand
if you're trying to come at it from an objective,
unbiased perspective. The topic is, of course biofuels, which I
imagine is in the title of this episode somewhere, so
it shouldn't come as a surprise. Now, there are a

(00:47):
lot of topics that are either directly or tangentially related
to biofuels, and that makes this more complicated than just
saying X material represents why amounts of energy if you
put it through s Z right, if that's all it were,
If we could just say, let's take these two different
materials and say how much energy would you get after say,

(01:08):
burning them? Uh, and that was it, it would be
a lot easier. But as it turns out it's way
more complex than that. There are environmental concerns. There are
arguments about climate change. Really the only argument is how
can we alleviate it? Because climate change is undeniably a thing. Um,

(01:28):
I don't well, I guess people can deny it, but
they're wrong anyway. There are also national security considerations, and
there's a lot more to think about. Two. So we're
gonna break this down and we're gonna get a deeper
understanding about biofuels, what they are, what they aren't, and
you know, stuff like that. So this is one of
those topics where it really is important to think critically

(01:50):
about everything. I know. I stressed that a lot in
this show, and in this particular topic, I think it
it really comes to play. It's very easy to say
false fuels are bad and we should stop using them.
Now I happen to believe that that is true, that
fossil fuels are not great for us to use and
we should stop using them. But you also have to

(02:10):
acknowledge why we use fossil fuels in the first place
as opposed to other stuff. What is it about fossil
fuels that makes most of the world dependent upon them?
For energy consumption purposes. And the answer isn't as simple
as because big oil wants it that way. I mean, yeah,
big oil does want it that way, because any business

(02:30):
leader wants their business to be a thriving one. But
it's not as simple as conspiracy theories might make it seem.
A lot of conspiracy theories try to wrap up very
complicated issues and create a very simple message to deliver that,
and it turns out that reality gets a lot more
wibbly wobbly. Timey whiney. Now, my goal is to once

(02:52):
again encourage critical thinking and which we examine a problem
from many angles to determine what the best solution is,
and that solution might be fully dependent upon whatever your
specific goal happens to be. So, for example, if your
goal is to move dependency away from big oil companies
and countries with rich oil deposits that maybe aren't your

(03:13):
friendliest neighbors, that's one thing, right, if that's your goal.
If you say I have identified what my goal is,
I don't want to be dependent upon oil, well then
you can come up with lots of different potential solutions.
But let's say that your goal is different. Maybe your
goal is I want to make the smallest environmental impact possible. Well,
the solution may end up being a different one from

(03:36):
the solution to goal number one. And if you have
multiple goals, then you have to start weighing everything against
each other and say, well, how do I prioritize this.
How do I pick a solution that is not necessarily
going to be the best at all of these but
is the best option out of all the different options
I have? And like I said, it gets tough. So

(03:58):
we're gonna start off as simple as we possibly can,
which is asking the question what is fuel? Now? I
know it sounds silly for me to ask that question.
You probably all are very well aware of what it is,
but building our understanding on basic fundamentals will help later on. So,
a fuel is a substance that contains energy. More importantly,

(04:21):
it's energy that can be released and then harnessed to
do work of some kind, even if that work is
just as simple as releasing heat. So we can think
of fuel as stored energy that we must release in
some way, typically through a type of chemical reaction, such
as through the process of burning it. Now, ancient humans

(04:41):
figured out that wood works pretty great as a fuel
if you can figure out how to set the stuff
on fire. There were you know, there were plenty of
trees around. There's a lot of wood available, and it
contained enough energy to be practical. It could keep you warm,
it could provide light. So wood was a really good
fuel source for a very long time. Now, you might
remember from science class that fire needs three things to

(05:06):
exist the triangle, right. You need to have fuel, you
need to have an oxidizer such as you know, oxygen,
and you need heat. If you are missing one of
those three things, you don't get fire, which honestly is
a good thing, or else we wouldn't be here. I mean,
if if wood and oxygen we're all you needed, then

(05:27):
wood would catch fire immediately upon being exposed to oxygen.
If you didn't need oxygen, then once a fire started,
it would be really hard to put it out, since
nearly all of our methods of extinguishing a fire rely
upon removing oxygen from that triangle I just talked about. Now,
there's an actual chemical reaction that happens when you have
wood in an oxygen eated environment and it reaches its

(05:50):
ignition temperature. When wood reaches about a hundred fifty degrees
celsius or three hundred degrees fahrenheit. Some of the cellulose
material that makes up the wood begins to decompose into
three different types of stuff. You get volatile gases which
release from the wood and they that's what smoke is.
That's part of you know, the stuff we can see,

(06:12):
that's part of the voluable gas is released from wood
when it reaches that temperature, and volatile gases consist of
compounds of hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen. You also get a
substance of nearly pure carbon called char, and that's what
charcoal ends up being, and you end up with a
byproduct called ash, and ashes all the stuff in wood

(06:33):
that isn't actually burnable, it just as left behind, stuff
like calcium. When the volatile gases get up to around
two d sixty degrees celsius or five hundred fahrenheit, the
material in the wood breaks down and recombines with oxygen,
forming stuff like carbon dioxide and water vapor. And we
call the actual process burning. And this chemical reaction generates

(06:56):
a lot of heat. That heat is enough to sustain
the reaction as long as there's fuel and oxygen present,
so it will continue to burn. Until the fuel is gone.
If this didn't happen, then a fire would flare up
but then quickly die down because the heat would not
be sufficient to keep the reaction going. Not all fuels

(07:17):
burn the way wood does. Wood burns up and leaves
behind stuff like char and ash, and you can use
char as fuel as well, though that reaction is much
slower than it is with wood, but other fuels work
in a different way. Still. The basic idea is that
you've created a chemical reaction using a substance to produce heat,
and then you can harness that heat to do something useful. So,

(07:39):
for example, you could use that heat to boil water
to generate steam. You could channel that steam so that
it had to pass through a turbine and the force
of this escaping steam would be strong enough to rotate
the turbine, which could use magnets to induce electricity to
flow through a conductor, and bam, you've got yourself a
steam powered electrical generated than you can generate electricity that way. Now,

(08:02):
the entire world is largely dependent upon fossil fuels right now,
and this is where things are immediately tricky, because if
you trace back the source of fossil fuels, you get
to organic materials, so, in other words, biological material So
you could make a very technical argument that fossil fuels

(08:23):
are bio fuels, but that's kind of missing the point
and it's being super pedantic, and I'm told nobody likes
it when I do that, which is really big blow
to me and my personality, especially at parties. Now. See,
fossil fuels are called that because they've developed over the
course of millions of years under intense heat and pressure,

(08:44):
under layers and layers and layers of material, layers of rock, sand, sediments,
and soil. They all build up over decayed organic material.
Most of the fossil fuels that we end up getting
came out of algae that died millions of years ago,
uh seaweed analogy would be the two big ones, but

(09:04):
other stuff as well, and the pressure and time over
the course of these millions of years break down that
organic material and it transforms into stuff like coal and
oil and natural gas. But it takes millions of years
for that to happen. So that is why we call
this a non renewable resource, a non renewable source of energy.

(09:28):
It's not that they're truly non renewable, right, Not if
you were able to live forever in the super super
long term, over the course of millions and millions and
millions of years, you could renew those resources. But for
our purposes for humans, they're non renewable, I mean, for
all practical purposes. Because keep in mind that modern humans

(09:51):
have only been around a few thousand years, nowhere close
to a million, let alone hundreds of millions. So there's
no way we could wait hundreds of millions of years
more were for the Earth's supply of fossil fuels to replenish.
By the time stuff from the dawn of humanity has
transformed into fossil fuels, we may very well be extinct
as a species, so we can't really think of it

(10:12):
as renewable. It doesn't make any sense. Oh and when
we say organic material, we're chiefly talking about carbon. Carbon
is king here. Burning these fossil fuels unleashes that carbon
that had previously been locked away inside coal or gas
or oil and deep under the Earth's surface. Now mainly

(10:35):
it gets unlocked and released in the form of carbon dioxide.
Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and contributes to climate
change in a really big way. So when we talk
about fossil fuels from an environmental perspective, uh, we're really
talking about dumping an enormous amount of carbon dioxide along
with some other not so healthy gases into the environment.

(10:57):
And this is carbon that had previously been saying fulle
locked away, and moreover, it's into an environment that cannot
easily process this excess amount of carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide
is part of a natural cycle on Earth, but that
cycle is dependent upon the steady supply of carbon diox

(11:18):
are really a stable supply, not an increasing supply, But
we are unleashing yet more carbon dioxide that had previously
been locked away down underneath the Earth. Now, on top
of that, there are many other things that go into
the extraction, processing, refining, and distribution of fossil fuels, and
all of that also adds into the environmental impact overall,

(11:41):
as well as the cost of the fossil fuel industry.
Some extraction methods cause greater environmental damage than others, but
none of them are exactly eco friendly. They are just
levels of bad and to be fair, biofuels are not
magically immune to this. We will look at how bio
fuels can also have a negative environmental impact. They do

(12:03):
not get a free pass on this um. Again, critical
thinking is key here. We need to look at all
the different factors of all the different options. Now, despite
the fact that fossil fuels are non renewable and that
we're dumping tons of carbon into the atmosphere every day,
we depend heavily on these fossil fuels. According to the

(12:27):
World Bank, fossil fuels account for about eight of all
energy consumption around the world, so they represent the primary
energy consumption path we humans rely upon today. So why
is that? Why do we rely upon it so heavily
if we see these potential negative consequences to using them. Well,

(12:49):
for one, these fuels are dense with energy, which means
you get a lot of oomph when you burn the stuff. Plus,
we've built systems and infrastructures around the idea of harvesting, processing,
and burning these fuels. Now, some of the elements in
those systems we might be able to adapt so that
they can handle a change to a different fuel source. Right, So,

(13:12):
in other words, the stuff we've already established we might
be able to repurpose. But some things we probably couldn't repurpose,
so that would mean that switching the to a different fuel.
It's not just as simple as saying, hey, this stuff
is pretty bad for our environment, because it may also
mean having to make really big systemic changes across the board,

(13:33):
which is difficult and it's expensive. Now, that's not to
say it wouldn't be worth the investment. When you look
at the alternatives, especially if you look at the consequences
of climate change over the long term, you could make
a very convincing argument that this is an investment we
have to make. But it's hard to get that ball
rolling because when you've already got another option that's easier,

(13:57):
the tendency is to go to the easier option, and
even if that option isn't you know better, it's just easier. Now.
Over time, the supply of these fossil fuels will dwindle,
particularly as we see our consumption trends globally on the rise,
and we'll see the price for them go up because

(14:18):
supply will go down, demand will be increasing. In order
to reflect that, you're going to see prices go up,
not even in order to reflect it. That's just the
way the world works of economics. So We've already seen
global conflicts that hinge at least in part on access
to fossil fuels. Those will likely escalate should our dependency
remain steady while supplies decline. So in other words, we

(14:39):
can see instability across the world as a result of
this dependence upon fossil fuels. Okay, but what are biofuels then, well,
these are fuels that come from biological materials organic material biomass.
In other words, they can be solid fuel uh wood
is an example of US solid biofuel or poop you know,

(15:03):
manure that can be a solid fuel. They can also
be liquid fuels, such as grain alcohol also known as ethanol.
They can be gases like various synthetic or sin gas products,
which in itself is sort of a shorthand for synthetic
natural gas. Now, like fossil fuels, these fuels also release

(15:23):
carbon when you burn them, though not necessarily as much
as fossil fuels might. But more importantly, you can replenish
these fuels much faster by growing new biomass new feedstock,
and changing to a reliance on biofuels would mean having
to plant the stuff, and while it's growing, it's essentially
a carbon storage unit. It's taking carbon into itself, so

(15:48):
it's taking it out of the environment, and so you're
actually locking it down for the duration of growing the stuff.
So rather than dumping new carbon into the environment by
unlocking stuff that had previously been stored the way in
petroleum racle, you've got a cycle of carbon in the
form of your fuel crop. At least ideally so. Prehistoric

(16:08):
humans relied on biofuels like woold, but even some early
inventors in the era of internal combustion experimented with biofuels.
Rudolph Diesel, for whom the diesel engine is named, built
his engine to run on peanut oil. He imagined a
future in which engines would run on various vegetable oils. Now,
when we come back, I'll talk about more about biofuels

(16:29):
and divide them up into two big categories and talk
about some of their pros and cons. But first I
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code tech during checkout. All right, let's get back into biofuels.

(19:23):
So the two main forms of biofuel are biodiesel and ethanol. Now,
as I just mentioned, bio diesel comes from stuff like
vegetable oils or fats or greases. You can run diesel
engines on this stuff without having to alter the engine
at all, which is pretty darn handy. Now, that's not
to say a gallon of vegetable oil has the same

(19:44):
energy density as a gallon of petroleum based diesel fuel,
but the fact that you can run diesel engines on
vegetable based fuels is a huge plus. You can take
used oil from stuff like a fryar and with a
minimum amount of processing, and use it as fuel for
something like a diesel engine. Now there's also work being
done on what's called third generation biodiesel, which would come

(20:05):
from stuff like algae and cyano bacteria. Now, these sources
could potentially yield an enormous amount of biodiesel with respect
to the amount of area they take up on Earth.
So in other words, you need to think about factors
like how much physical space is the uh production of
these biofuels going to take, because we have a limited

(20:27):
to that, right, we don't only have so much space
on the planet, and we have to dedicate it for
various things, so we have to reserve only a certain
portion of that for the production of fuel. Well, you
want your fuel to be dense, and you want to
be able to get a lot of it in as
little space as possible, so you can dedicate the rest
of that space for other things. That's one of the

(20:48):
potential benefits for using things like algae and sano bacteria.
You could grow a great deal of the stuff that
could yield a good amount of energy for the amount
of area it takes. But right now, the process to
convert that stuff into biodiesel is a little bit on
the expensive side, and that means it's not as attractive

(21:09):
so if that expense comes down, it could become an
economically viable option. But if it doesn't, then from a
financial standpoint, you could argue that makes more sense to
use a different source for biodiesel or using petroleum based diesel,
even though the alternative would make less use of space.
Biodiesel fuels do create pollutants on burning. They do not

(21:31):
burn totally clean. They aren't some sort of magic material,
but the amount of pollutants is significantly lower than you
would find with the petroleum based diesel. On top of that,
biodiesel is non toxic and it's also biodegradable, so the
fuel is safer to handle and dispose of than petroleum
based diesel is. There are other issues, but we'll get

(21:52):
into that. Let's look at the other type of biofuel, ethanol.
So ethanol is alcohol like it. It's the toff that
makes alcoholic drinks alcoholic. It's the same alcohol as you
would find in beer or wine or hard liquor. It
comes from fermented sugars and it's used as an additive
in fuels around the world. The three main types that

(22:13):
you tend to find in the United States are E ten,
which is ten percent ethanol and nine percent gasoline E
fifteen which no big surprise, fiftcent ethanol and eighty five
percent gasoline and e eighty five which is not eight
five percent ethanol. It's actually somewhere between fifty one and
eighty three percent depending upon the blend UH and the

(22:34):
rest of it is gasoline, so it's more than half
ethanol as opposed to gasoline. Now, unlike biodiesel, to use
ethanol and engine has to be designed to handle it
above a certain percentage, otherwise you're gonna get some problems
as you try to burn the fuel. You might get
damaged to the engine or various engine components, and at
lower percentages the performance issues are negligible, and so in

(22:57):
the United States all gasoline powered ins are rated to
run E ten ethanol without any real issue. Beyond that, though,
you would need a fuel flexible vehicle to take advantage
of higher percentages of ethanol without causing damage to the engine.
Ethanol comes from fermenting various plants. In the United States,
it's almost exclusively corn, so it makes up the vast

(23:20):
majority of all feedstocks used to create ethanol in the US,
but farmers have also tried other stuff like sugarcane, potato skins, beats,
yard clippings, rice, and switch grass. Now in Brazil, sugarcane
is far more common as a feedstock, and nearly all
the cars in Brazil can run on pure ethanol rather
than on a mixture, although mixtures of gasoline are also

(23:42):
still sold in Brazil, but you could run most Brazilian
vehicles on pure ethanol. Ethanol also traces its history as
a fuel for cars way back to the early days.
Henry Ford designed the Model T to run on a
mixture of gasoline and alcohol way back in night. Mixing
ethanol with gasoline reduces the amount of pollutants emitted when

(24:03):
burning the fuel. In the United States, in the nineteen seventies,
the oil crisis led to large investments in producing and
distributing ethanol, so that it became a standard type of fuel,
and it's pretty much stayed that way since. So, in
other words, they were looking at, well, we're gonna have
fuel shortages unless we can make up some of that
volume of fuel with another substance that we can produce.

(24:24):
Here in the United States, that substance was ethanol. Now,
as it turns out, it gets way more complicated than
all this, you can't really go apples to apples with
fossil fuels and bio fuels. So let's get down to
some of the sticking points that make this a tricky
debate right. One of those is the amount of energy
that's stored within these fuels, because not all fuels are

(24:47):
created equal. A gallon of gasoline and a gallon of ethanol,
for example, contain different amounts of energy. A unit we
used to measure the amount of energy within fuel when
it's you know, burning released when you burn it is
b t U or British thermal unit. This unit, in turn,
is based off the amount of heat needed to increase

(25:07):
the temperature of one pound of water by one degree
of fahrenheit. And I can hear all the folks in
other countries rolling their eyes right now. I hear you
rolling your eyes. I can't see you, but your eye
rolling is making noise. Because this is a very non
you know, metric way to go about things. So the
metric system would use units like the calorie, which describes

(25:30):
the amount of heat needed to heat one gram of
water by one degree celsius, and the unit to measure
energy would be the jewel one b t U is
equal to around one thousand, fifty five jewels more or less. Okay,
so you can really think of bt U s a
shorthand for how much energy is stored within this given fuel.

(25:52):
And so you want a bigger number, right, The bigger
the number, the more energy is in that fuel, the
more work you can do with that on the fuel.
And here's where we see one of the big differences
between fossil fuels and bio fuels. So a gallon of
gasoline contains approximately one four thousand, eight hundred b t U,
so nearly a hundred twenty five thousand b t U.

(26:13):
A gallon of ethanol would represent only eighty thousand BTU,
so eighty thousand, two hundred twenty five thousand. So the
amount of energy within a gallon of ethanol is less
than what you would get with a gallon of gasoline.
All right, So let's take a slightly bigger picture. Look,
we're using fuel to do something, right, Like, let's say
we're using it to power a car, and let's say

(26:34):
we're operating the car as steady demand for energy. There's
no point where the engine is going to require more power,
So we're just thinking of it as like a nice, smooth,
steady road. Now, granted, this isn't really how stuff works
in the real world, but simplifies things for the purposes
of our discussion. You'd be able to drive the car
further on a gallon of gasoline, then you would be

(26:58):
able if you were using a gallon of pure ethanol.
In fact, you would need one point five six gallons
of ethanol to get you as far as a single
gallon of gasoline could take you, assuming all other factors
remain the same. So this makes the discussion about greenhouse
gases also a little more complicated, because burning a gallon

(27:19):
of ethanol will release less carbon dioxide than burning a
gallon of gasoline. But remember the ethanol does less work,
so really you have to burn one point five six
gallons of ethanol to represent the same energy released as
one gallon of gasoline, and that starts to shave away
some of the advantage of releasing less c O two
because you're in fact burning more fuel to make up

(27:41):
for the shortfall in energy density. Even so, you're still
producing fewer pollutants in just that strictly the burning of
the fuel itself, so there's still benefit to using ethanol.
I just wanted to point out that doesn't quite make
sense to go gallon for gallon when you're talking about pollutants,
because you're gonna need to use or ethanol to do
the same amount of work you could with gasoline. Still,

(28:04):
another thing to keep in mind is ethanol is carbon neutral,
which means that the amount of carbon released equals the
same amount of carbon that the organic material absorbed during
its full lifespan. And with ethanol in the US, like
I said, we're really talking about corn here, right. So
if we were to stop all fossil fuel generation right now,
like we we no longer harvest it, refine it. We're

(28:28):
done with fossil fuels. We're just using biofuels magically, somehow,
we would be working with a more or less closed cycle,
right because we wouldn't be dumping new carbon dioxide into
the atmosphere. We would be locking it away in whatever
fuel stock we were growing, and then we'd be releasing

(28:49):
it again when we burn the fuel stock. But then
we'd have a new generation of fuels of feedstock growing.
I keep saying fuel stop, I mean feed stock. We'd
have a new generation of feed stock growing that would
lock that carbon away again, and you would just have
the cycle, it's like the water cycle at all, stay
the same. You wouldn't have an increase in carbon dioxide

(29:10):
because you're not unlocking carbon that was previously locked away
deep under the earth. Now, according to the U. S.
Department of Energy, taking the full life cycle of ethanol
into account amounts to an average reduction in greenhouse gas
emissions of assuming you're using corn based ethanol, because that
factor matters a lot. If however, scientists can produce ethanol

(29:35):
efficiently using cellulose based feedstocks, meaning more woody parts of plants,
so you wouldn't have to grow corn, You could grow
lots of different stuff, and you wouldn't necessarily have to
use good farmland for it because the stuff is really
hardy and it can grow in lots of different conditions.
Then you could see a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions

(29:56):
go up as high as a hundred eight percent taking
in to account the full life cycle of ethanol. Now,
the reason I even bring this up is to point
out that this is a more complicated discussion than just
fossil fuels are bad. I didn't mention earlier. There are
other considerations too, like national security. So what do I
mean by that, Well, let's say you live in a

(30:17):
nation that is heavily dependent upon fossil fuels, and that
to meet the demand that your country has, you have
to import fuel from other parts of the world because
you don't produce enough of it at home to meet
your needs. Now, that means that the day to day
operations in your country are dependent upon the exports of
other countries. And should you have any, say, diplomatic issues

(30:40):
with those other countries, or if the oil industry in
those countries were to somehow be impacted by regional issues
like a war or something like that, you could be
in serious trouble. Your supply could be in jeopardy. So
imagine rolling power outages across an entire country because there
are fuel shortages and those were all brought around because
of some international dispute or a conflict. These things can

(31:04):
and do happen, and it's a big reason why the
United States began to use ethanol on a widespread basis
in the nineteen seventies. Or imagine that you're limited in
options as to where you get your oil from, and
the best source of oil, meaning the most plentiful or
least expensive, or however you wanted to find. Best. In
this particular scenario, it happens to be in a country

(31:25):
that either engages in or supports efforts that are in
opposition with your own. So in a drastic example, you
might be feeding money into a country that is using
that money to fund military operations that threaten your country
or your allies, or it might be a country that
helps fund terrorists cells that clearly you wouldn't want to
hand over cash to someone who wants to see you

(31:47):
brought down. But at the same time, you have needs
that have to be met. Now that's what I mean
by national security. Unless you are in a country with
plentiful fossil fuel reserves, you're gonna be at least partly
dependent on what other nations are able to produce, and
that is a security vulnerability. And if you have plentiful
fossil fuels in your country, then you might be attempting

(32:10):
target for other countries that do not have those fossil
fuel reserves. Biofuel advocates argue that biofuels can help migrate
a country into energy independence as long as the country
is capable of growing the right feedstocks, then it can
wean itself off of fossil fuels and depend more on
biofuels to meet its energy needs. It creates industry within

(32:31):
the country itself as farmers grow the feedstock for the
rest of the nation, producing the basic fuel needed and
freeing up the country from depending upon potentially unreliable partner nations.
But again, to do that, you have to take a
lot of other things into consideration. You have to consider
the actual needs of the public. How much energy is

(32:52):
the public consuming on a daily basis. How much biofuel
would you need to grow in order to meet the
demand of the public. Is there actually enough capacity within
your country to grow that feedstock while still dedicating sufficient
farmland for other purposes, you know, like growing food. If not,
then you're trading energy dependency for food dependency. Instead of

(33:15):
being in danger of blackouts, now you're in danger of starving,
or the very least, you're in danger of affecting the
economics of food prices, because if you have less land
for food production, you're going to have a smaller supply
of food. The demand for food is going to remain
high because people gotta eat, so you would this will
most likely be reflected in rising food costs. Beyond capacity,

(33:38):
you have to take into consideration the environmental impact of
growing feedstocks in the first place. So the actual process
of farming and harvesting and then refining the stuff into fuel.
So farming on its own just requires a lot of water,
and it also can create a lot of pollutants. Uh So,
while the process of burning the fuel could be cleaner

(33:59):
than fossil fuels are. Like if you put a gallon
of gasoline and a gallon of ethanol and a gallon
of biodiesel, and you measured all the polutants that came out,
you would say all the gasolines producing more pollutants. That
might be true, but you have to take into consideration
all the other contributing factors, and you have to consider
these factors as they grow to scale as well. It's

(34:19):
possible that at a smaller scale the environmental impact isn't
really that severe and biofuels come out as a clear
superior choice over fossil fuels. But then as you start
to scale up in order to meet all the energy
needs of a country, it's possible for that to actually change. Now,
for one thing, farming equipment still largely runs on fossil fuels,

(34:40):
so you still have to burn fossil fuels to create
the alternatives to those fossil fuels, which seems like that's
a problem. Means that maybe you need to start developing,
you know, farming equipment that runs on biofuel to help
alleviate that. But then you also stuff like fertilizer. You
need fertilizer to help grow things like corn, and fertilizer

(35:01):
requires fossil fuels in its manufacturing process. Then there's the
transportation of all this stuff, like the trucks that are
taking it to and from places, whether it's raw feedstocks
or refined fuel. All of this is part of that
infrastructure I was talking about earlier. Now that's one of
the big reasons that scientists are working to improve the
efficiency of cellulosic ethanol. Cellulosic ethanol comes from those more

(35:24):
woody parts of a plant, and it's more challenging to
get a big yield from that type of feedstock. But
on the other hand, it's way easier to grow that
stuff and it requires less of an investment in resources,
and it also produces fewer pollutants. Right because if you
don't have to use as much heavy equipment to farm
the stuff, then you're not burning as many fossil fuels.

(35:46):
So you can also use low quality land to grow
cellulosic feedstocks stuff like switch grass, for example. That allows
you to reserve the higher quality land for food production farming,
so you don't have that conflict between do you grow
food here or do you grow fuel here. But unless
you can get the conversion rate high enough, that is
the rate of fuel you get from the amount of

(36:09):
biomass you're growing and processing, then you're fighting a losing
battle because if it if it costs less and requires
less work to use something like corn or sugarcane, then
it may not make sense to switch over to cellulo
sick feedstock. Right. You have to look at all the
different pros and cons. Now that being said, a lot

(36:30):
of work is going into improving the conversion rates for
this stuff, and if it works out, it could be
a huge game changer. In fact, it will be a
big game changer if it works out, because the amount
of work would be low compared to stuff like corn,
and you would be looking at a big energy game,
meaning that the energy represented by the fuel would be
sufficiently higher than the amount of energy that was spent

(36:51):
creating the fuel in the first place. Like, if it
takes you x amount of energy to produce the fuel,
and the fuel represents plus one, you could argue, well,
that wasn't really enough of a gain. It was negligible,
and therefore we barely broke even. We just barely got ahead. Uh,
you want you want to have a sufficient gain of

(37:15):
energy based on you know, how much you've put in. Now,
when we come back, we'll go into a few more
considerations that we have to take into account when we
talk about biofuels. But first let's take a quick break.
So I've covered some of the big concerns that we

(37:35):
have to keep in mind with biofuels have a couple
more dimension But first I thought to be interesting to
talk about the actual methods used to create more advanced
biofuels from biomass. Uh, you know, beyond just fermentation, Like,
what are the processes we're talking about? Why is there
this block between uh, the harvesting of biofuels in the

(37:55):
processing it. So generally speaking, the first challenge is breaking
down the cellular walls and plants cells, which contains stuff
like cellulose and lignant, and this material is tough and
it represents sort of an energy barrier. Right. You want
to get at the sugars that are inside these plants
in order to ferment them, for example, for for the

(38:17):
purposes of ethanol. You want to ferment those sugars and
and produce ethanol, but you have to get this to
to the sugar first, and you've got these tough barriers
in your way, so you have to break those down.
There are a couple different ways of doing that. In fact,
they are too broad approaches to breaking down the material
high temperature deconstruction and low temperature deconstruction. So let's talk

(38:39):
about low temperature first. Actually, typically in this approach, you
would mix this biomass with some chemicals or some biological enzymes,
and their job is to break down this uh cellular
material so that you know, break down those barriers, the cellulos,
the lignant, that kind of stuff, so that you can

(39:00):
actually get to the sugars. Uh. It creates a new
kind of material that is typically called an intermediate because
it is in between the raw feedstock and the processed fuel.
It's kind of a stage in the middle. So the
chemicals or enzymes breakdown the exposed sugar polymers into simple

(39:20):
sugar building blocks, and that can then go into a
further fermentation process to produce ethanol. Then you have the
high temperature deconstruction method, which actually has a few different
ways of of working. All depends on your specific approach.
So one of those approaches is called pyrolysis, in which
you put the biomass into an oxygen free chamber and

(39:43):
you heat that chamber very quickly to a very high
temperature between like five hundred and seven hundred degrees celsius. Now,
remember earlier I mentioned if you want to have a fire,
you need three elements. Right, You've gotta have fuel, you
have to have heat, and you have to have an oxidizer. Well,
in this case, you only have two of those three.
You've got fuel and you have heat, but you don't

(40:05):
have an oxidizer. Now, that means the material heats up
but doesn't burn. It goes through pyrolysis. This process means
that the cell walls actually do break down, and then
you can take the material after you've gone through this
process and put it through fermentation to create sin gas.
You could take the biomass and heat it in the

(40:26):
presence of a small amount of oxygen, and you would
increase the temperatures beyond what you would use for pyroalysis.
You're going in excess of seven degrees celsius. This creates
a gas that's mainly a mixture of carbon monoxide and
hydrogen and can be used as sort of a synthetic
natural gas. Then, if you wanted to make biodiesel from algae,

(40:47):
you could use a different high temperature method called hydrothermal liquefaction,
which I'm pretty sure the spa right down the road
offers as a luxury treatment, but maybe they just don't
understand what words mean. Anyway, What it actually means is
that you would be using the biomass with a little
bit of water, and you put it inside a pressurized chamber,
and you would heat that pressurized chamber up between two

(41:09):
hundred degrees celsius, and that would rapidly turn the biomass
into a sort of synthetic crude oil. You have a
bio oil. Now, typically after deconstruction, you have to take
this intermediary material and then put it through another process,
or maybe a two processes in order to get actual

(41:31):
usable biofuel. This is where we start running into not
just energy barriers, but cost barriers and also potential environmental impact. Right,
all of these processes require energy, they all have byproducts.
This is why you have to look at these systems
as a whole, as opposed to narrowing your focus down
on just the simple burning of fuel, because if you

(41:52):
do that, you might be ignoring other challenges. They have
real world impact, and you could be in a position
where you're no better off than where you started from,
or you might be better off in some ways but
worse off than others. That's why you have to take
this sort of big picture approach. I find the whole
process actually pretty fascinating for creating biofuels. Now, a few

(42:13):
other factors that play into the debate around biofuels are
that as farmers clear land to produce the feedstocks, you
start seeing a decrease in biodiversity, particularly in places like
the United States where you know they're clearing out enormous
amounts of land in order to grow corn. Cutting down
biodiversity is pretty bad for ecosystems. Just generally speaking, you

(42:36):
you want to have a lot of biodiversity, and you
want you don't want to decrease it if you can.
There's also the danger of cutting down rich, eco diverse
environments like the rainforest. You can see that in parts
of South America where there are areas of ancient rainforests
getting cleared away in order to create like an oil

(42:57):
palm production facility. That's not great either. H Then again,
if we are able to use stuff like algae for
biodiesel and more grasses like switch grass for ethanol production,
we reduced the need to clear forests and reduced biodiversity.
We could use land again that isn't quite as rich

(43:18):
in order to grow this stuff. But the breakthroughs have
to come first, and they have to be economically viable,
which can be helped significantly through stuff like government subsidies.
So brings a political element into this as well. In addition,
engineers and scientists are working on ways to capture carbon
dioxide from things like power plants. Now, the captured CEO

(43:39):
two could then be stored in some long term storage technique,
like pumping it into geological formations deep under the earth
or in sediments under the ocean floor, essentially locking the
carbon dioxide away inside the earth, kind of like how
it was locked away before we started digging up all
those fossil fuels to begin with, we'd essentially be returning

(44:01):
the carbon to underneath the surface of the planet. And
if we use biofuels to do all this, like instead
of fossil fuels, we're just using biofuels to run our
power plants and the equipment we use to generate electricity,
we could begin to see an overall reduction of c
O two in the atmosphere right because the feet stock
would pull CEO too out of the atmosphere as they

(44:23):
were growing. They would essentially be capturing and locking away
carbon dioxide. And then you could further capture c O
two as it was being produced when you're burning it
at the power plant. Then you could pump it down
beneath the earth and lock it away and see an
overall reduction in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. You would

(44:43):
actually be removing c O two, reversing that trend. Now,
that's a pretty darn good goal to strife for considering
the current trajectory we're on with regard to climate change
and greenhouse gas emissions. But it requires a whole lot
of stuff to fall into place properly, and a lot
of work done on our behalf uh in order for

(45:04):
this to all actually work out. It's not a technological
problem so much as it is a person problem, like
as social problem, political problem. There's a lot of complicated,
messy stuff beyond the technology. Now, there are plenty of
people who argue we should not be focusing on bio
fuels anyway, that really that's almost a lateral move off

(45:24):
of fossil fuels when you take the big picture into account,
I would argue that fossil fuels overall are more environmentally
harmful than bio fuels, but I also admit bio fuels
themselves are not perfect. They have a lot of of
contributing factors towards environmental damage as well. So there are
people who say we don't need to be thinking about

(45:45):
any of this at all. Instead of talking about feedstocks,
we should be relying on stuff like wind power, solar power,
thermal hydro power, that kind of stuff. Many of those
solutions would require that we use some sort of energy
storage technology, essentially batteries. We would have to have batteries
because we wouldn't always have access to the stuff that
was generating the electricity, and that's one of the big

(46:07):
drawbacks for those technologies because right now, we essentially produce
electricity when we need it. So when the demand is there,
we have power plants to produce the electricity and it
gets distributed throughout the power grid, and the power plant
goes into heavier production at times of higher demand, and
it can slack off a little bit when the demand
is lower. And many of the green energy solutions produce

(46:29):
electricity according to some external force. So for example, solar
panels obviously produce electricity when they're exposed to sunlight. When
it's night, they're not producing electricity, but people still need
electricity at night, so you have to have a storage system.
You have to have batteries to store the electricity that
you can use later on, and you would have to

(46:50):
make sure that you can produce enough electricity during the
day to meet everyone's needs, plus produce excess electricity that
could charge up batteries so that you would have a
supply whenever it's dark or overcast. Also, with these green
energy solutions, they obviously won't work equally well everywhere in
the world. Right if you live near the equator and

(47:10):
you typically are in an area that gets a lot
of sun exposure, solar panels make a ton of sense.
But if you're closer to the polls and you don't
get as many hours of sunlight during parts of the year,
or maybe you get more overcast days than sunny days
on average, solar power might not be a great solution.
And if you don't live near a river, hydropower becomes

(47:31):
less viable and so forth. Right, if you aren't in
an area that regularly gets steady winds, wind power is
an issue. All of these have drawbacks. There are other alternatives,
such as nuclear power, but nuclear plants that rely on
fission have their own set of problems, both practical and political.
They produce nuclear waste, some of it is extremely dangerous

(47:52):
and needs to be disposed of in a secure location
far from many people and kept sequestered from everybody else
for thousands of years. But as you can imagine, not
many folks are eager to have such a disposal facility
located nearby, So even if nearby is still a hundred
miles away, most people are like, I'd rather that goes
somewhere else, so that's become a big issue. Nuclear plants

(48:15):
are way more efficient, especially more efficient than they used
to be. They do not produce greenhouse gases the way
coal fired plants or natural gas plants do, but they're
still as there's still this big issue, right, there's still
this perception problem of them being unsafe, and there's a
practical problem with the nuclear waste, Like even the safest

(48:36):
how nuclear power plant is still going to be generating
waste that you have to deal with. Uh. That is
something you just can't get around now. If we ever
get around to making nuclear fusion work as an economically
viable means of generating electricity, we'd be all set for
a good long while. Nuclear fusion does not produce nuclear
waste the same way nuclear fission does. Uh, it's the

(49:00):
same nuclear process that we see in stars. Right, the
sun is a nuclear fusion power plant. Essentially, if we
could replicate that, and we could harness that sort of
energy economically, we'd be able to produce all the electricity
we would need for a really good long while. We'd
likely see a huge change, like we'd see a migration

(49:23):
to more electric vehicles, for example, because the energy source
would be plentiful compared to more traditional fuels. But the
big problem we face right now is that nuclear fusion
requires an awful lot of energy to start. It requires
a lot of energy just to get a fusion reaction
going in the first place. Sustaining a reaction, or being

(49:44):
able to do multiple reactions to generate electricity on a
regular basis remains a really big challenge. So while we
have had a few research fusion plants create reactions that
produced enormous amounts of energy, we haven't quite cracked the
problem of making it something practical that we can repeat
without costing as much or more energy to start as

(50:07):
we get out of it. So if you're having to
pour more energy in then you're getting out, that's a
losing proposition, right, You're you're at a net energy loss.
If you're getting more out than you put in, but
it's incredibly expensive. That's a different challenge, but still a challenge.
So we have a lot of hard decisions to make right.

(50:27):
We need to select one or more strategies for meeting
our energy needs, and we need to move away from
fossil fuels. That seems to be pretty darn clear from
multiple reasons, and we need to acknowledge that these challenges
each alternative has that they exist, we have to acknowledge
that we need to consider how to overcome or mitigate
those challenges in order to make the best choice for us.

(50:51):
And we have to commit toward the action of moving
away from fossil fuels instead of doing the sort of
wishy washy, well this area, this, this is maybe not
as good because of X, Y and Z, and this
one maybe not as good because of A, B and C.
Eventually we have to say, here, let's make a plan,
Let's identify and prioritize our approach, let's diversify it, Let's

(51:14):
not put all of our eggs in one basket, and
let's actually do this. We have to do that at
some point. The question is when do we do it now.
I don't bring up all the challenges or drawbacks in
an effort to persuade anyone from pursuing alternatives to fossil fuels.
I do it so we can move forward with our
eyes on a solution and not just rhetoric. Uh. That

(51:36):
is the biggest challenge I see is that we because
we're looking for the perfect solution, we're not moving at all,
and at least not as fast as we need to.
Particularly the United States but other parts of the world
also fall into that category. So that wraps up this
discussion of bio fuels. Like I said, it is complicated.

(51:59):
It's something. Ut if you think about all the ins
and outs, you realize, Okay, I can see why there's
been a lot of debate on the subject. Uh. You
can also see where there are potential arguments to be
made by interested parties. Let's say that you're, you know,
a representative of the oil industry. Well, you can see
plenty of opportunities to object to alternatives by pointing out

(52:23):
their shortcomings. Uh. And you don't even have to address
the problems of your own industry, right, You just hammer
home that these alternatives have their own drawbacks, and that
can be enough to halt progress. We have seen that
as well. I don't think it's so much a conspiracy
as it's just people trying to protect their own interests, um,

(52:46):
and not being terribly obtuse about that. It seems pretty
transparent to me, But we still have to get past
it somehow. UM. It's imperative. Really, I want to see
a world where my nieces when they're adults, aren't struggling
in an increasingly hostile environment. Due to environmental and fuel

(53:10):
related problems. That's the world I want to see, and
the only real way of making sure we get there
is to find this alternative to fossil fuels. All right, Well,
that wraps up this discussion. I hope you guys got
something out of it, and if you have suggestions for
future episodes, feel free to reach out to me. The
email address is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com,

(53:32):
or to get in touch on Facebook or Twitter, the
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(53:53):
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(54:16):
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